Think Like a Teacher

I have so much I want to know about China. Two weeks from now I will be over the Pacific! So I have started to organize my W list of things I Want to know. If you have any you would like to add, please feel free to comment here. Students welcome, too.

Unfortunately, I can’t embed the KWL here interactively because we need to upgrade this version of WordPress. Here is a static version:

And here is a link to the interactive visual map of my KWL. And here are my lists so far, simply in verbal form:

K -What I know:

• Chinese students learn English and like to practice it.
• Chinese history is rich and very complex, much older than the U.S.- Students must have a LOT to study about history!!
• Reportedly, teachers are treated very respectfully.
• High stakes tests determine student opportunities for higher education. The highest scoring students have a chance to study science/math/medicine. The second highest tier study business. Teachers are from the third highest  scoring tier.

W – What I want to know:

• What is a teacher’s day like? A student’s?
• What do teachers and kids wear?
• Do  students ever use computers at school?
• How do schools view technology and the web?
• Would a Chinese class ever do project-based learning?
• Can I explain what TeachersFirst is so they can understand it?
• Will I talk too much for them?
• Can we set up a way for schools in China to communicate easily with U.S. and other classes?
• Do parents help with schoolwork or leave it up to the tutors and late evening school?
• Do parents have any input into what schools do? Do they want it?
• Will I have to eat things that I can’t identify or don’t WANT to know about?
• What web-based tools that I am used to will be unavailable in China?
• Is sense of humor valued/suppressed at school?
• What happens to divergent, gifted thinkers?

L – What I have learned: Watch here and see!

According to neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky’s fascinating piece in the New York Times, “This is Your Brain on Metaphors, “ the structure and sheer size of the human brain give us certain capacities that distinguish us from other animals, most notably:

• the ability to defer reward and engage in long term planning toward long term goals
• the ability to make connections through metaphor and enjoy the experience of mental metaphors as expressed in poetry, oxymoron, and other creative combinations. As Sapolsky explains the delight:

We know, and feel pleasure triggered by … unlikely juxtapositions….Symbols, metaphors, analogies, parables, synecdoche, figures of speech: we understand them. We understand that a captain wants more than just hands when he orders all of them on deck….And we even understand that June isn’t literally busting out all over.

It is precisely this latter capacity that Sapolsky probes further, including the neurobiology of the brain’s responses to analogous  experiences, both real and imagined.  Significantly, both real and imagined sensations are experienced in the same place in the brain. If  we feel disgust at an imagined experience, it triggers the same physiology as disgust at something real, touched or smelled.

What does this mean for our students (and us)  for learning? What about as producers of multimedia experiences (“class projects”)?  Students who do a good job creating an experiential metaphor for the senses — perhaps a glog, a video or an enhanced image — can trigger brain experiences that are as real as the real deal. The better we can trigger the analogies of experience for learning, the better they will “feel” and understand concepts. If we want students to know the Civil War, we should first let them immerse themselves in as many “experiences” of it as we can find. We should also challenge them to create such experiences for others. The mental poetry of both feeling and creating analogies for vital, invisible concepts such as citizenship or atoms can make the experience of learning real. Even the very young can understand simple analogy and experience if it is personal and familiar enough in their context.

Teachers, take the time to read this one. Although Sapolsky focuses more on the international, political implications of analogous brain experience, the analogy of extending such experience in our classrooms is important. We need not make virtual experience realistic. We need to help students trigger analogies, build analogies, and notice analogies. Think like a teacher.

I began this post last week and allowed it to “sit,” thereby defying any timeliness whatsoever.

I just read a thoughtful– and occasionally heated– exchange on the role of time zones in fragmenting the world and as barriers to “flat,” global learning. The comment thread is fascinating and well worth a read, even if it is “old” in your time zone!

It makes me wonder: what is the value of  real time interaction and, consequently, of  Twitter, feeds, and blog posts for writers/artists and those who model creative process for our students? Are tweets the carefully crafted mini-poems or snippets we collect in scrapbooks for someday inspiration? Are they advertisements for audience: “I am a writer– listen to me”? Do they need immediate response? How do tweets, feeds, and blogs mesh with the creative value we put on real time interaction  and what we get out of them?

So I share an enigmatic analogy of the way I envision tweets, feeds, and blogs:

Tweets are a quick walk past the shop windows of a thriving shopping district. It may be in daylight and during store hours, or it may be at night when the lights are lower and the “SALE” signs obscured by shadow. But I walk by and stop only to look at those that intrigue me. I could go back and enter the shop another time if I retrace my steps in this vast downtown, and if I want to come during store hours. As I pass by during store hours, I may stop in and speak to a shopkeeper. I may even buy something.  There is no predicting. I send a message of my own to others on the sidewalks by adjusting my scarf or changing my pace, but my message is quick and without depth: surface statement for surface judgment among a busy crowd. If I do fashion a message during off hours, no one sees it.

Checking my feed reader is my extra cup of medium ultra bold coffee-of-the-day, a stop on my walk for a mental cup of coffee, take-out. I enjoy it for a few minutes (perhaps I walk back past more Tweet offerings at the same time). I savor the flavor, but I may not remember to finish the cup if I am too busy with other distractions. I may decide not to stop at all for that take-out cup today.

Writing a post is deliberate coffee-and-conversation with someone else at the cafe table. This is not take-out. This is sit-down. There is a friend or new acquaintance there with me. We may talk about what we saw in the shop windows or not. But the words of the conversation matter. A post is deliberate, though conversational. A blog post is not a full meal– like writing an article or something for “print,” but it is careful and responsive. I may linger. I may even lose track of time because the conversation is so good. If I sit down for coffee alone, I still imagine the other person across the table and word my ideas so he can hear me best.

This analogy of tweets, feeds, and blogs tells the value of how I experience each, rather than the place of each in real time. The enigma is that the timeliness value is the inverse of the relationship value.  If blog posts — the experiences I value most– are cafe conversations,  they should become cold, abandoned cups of coffee when another person cannot hear them at the same time. The feed reader “take out” coffee should yield stale, gray flavor when it is not fresh. And store windows should lure me most because they are there for me any time in real time.  How I  experience each determines its value to me, and “real time” matters the least. Real time does not matter as much as deliberate, lingering time. Time does not matter as much as attention and craft. Maybe real time and time zones do not matter when we take the time to factor full creative process into the exchange. Don’t you do a much better job of saying things when you give the process time?

I began this post last week and allowed it to “sit,” thereby defying any timeliness whatsoever. 

For twelve days in December, 2010, I will be traveling in China with a group of educational technology professionals. We will be meeting educators there and –I hope– seeing schools along with the usual tourist fascinations. I would LOVE to meet some kids, but am not sure if that will happen. I will be blogging the trip here. Please plan to follow the trip and ask questions or make comments at will. As a teacher, I am sure I will not be able to resist asking a few questions myself. Maybe you and your class would like to stop by once a day to learn something new about China through the eyes of an American teacher!

Humphrey Jones, a teacher-blogger from Ireland, suggests that we relabel “teachers.” What would happen if we hired a Madison Avenue firm to “rebrand” our profession? (Now that the elections are over and the economy slow, they could probably use the business!) As Jones says, we need to “relabel the term ‘teacher’ and replace it with a word that more accurately describes the multi-faceted nature of our role.” Over the years, I have read facetious job descriptions of  teachers as a combination of parent, psychologist, cheerleader, health aide, trash collector, and much more. This one was quite popular via email. But these exercises do nothing more than cheer those in the faculty room drinking cold swigs of this morning’s coffee as they grade papers at 4:30 pm. We need a real branding effort.

A brand is much deeper than a label. It is

… what your company stands for and what it is known for. “Look at yourself in the mirror

and ask yourself what you stand for. Go around the room with your leadership and ask them what the company stands for. Settle on one or two brand pillars and build your brand around them.  (A Practical Guide to Branding, Business Week, June 9, 2008)

or, as this article says in a nutshell, your brand is:

The Promise You Make to the World

Interestingly, promise is exactly what teachers bring to the world. We seek it out, nourish it, praise it, polish it, revere it, stretch it, describe it, measure it, mold it, let it grow, prune it, savor it, sing it, respect it, help it recognize itself, and turn it loose to be responsible for itself. We are promisers of promise.  That could be the start of our brand as teachers.

Oh, rats. Somebody already named a margarine after us. I guess we need to keep working on this brand thing. Any MadMen volunteers out there want to take on several million teachers as clients?