Think Like a Teacher

A twenty-something former student of mine recently shared with incredulous delight that she “gets paid to think.” Her obvious enjoyment of going to work every day and reading, writing, and talking about ideas is what made her a teacher’s dream. But her words reveal more than personal attributes or wise career choice. She describes a world where thinking is important enough to pay for.  In our supply and demand world, what better foundation for a new vision of education?

Some education visionaries — like Will Richardson — hold out hope that education reform will lead to a time when

…the emphasis will turn back to the learning process, not the knowing process. And while I don’t think schools go away in the interaction, the “new normal” will be a focus on personalization not standardization, where we focus more on developing learners, not knowers…

I wonder whether using the market driven model where people “get paid to think,” could sway the media, the public, and policy makers to push the pendulum in a direction where students are drivers of learning. It is an interesting “what if” to play with.

I wonder how many people would tell you they get paid to think. Do we even look at our roles in terms of thinking? I think not. I suspect if you polled Americans about whether they get paid to think, most would say no. Thinking gets a bad rap in our society. It is seen as the antithesis of doing or as something painful to be avoided. We are not an intellectual society, but we are swayed by money. Perhaps the first campaign to reform education is one where we get the word out. Maybe it should be a Facebook gadget:

I get paid to think.

Why is it that some people can articulately describe and actually facilitate their personal creative process while others have no idea how they go about “making” things? You might think just “letting ideas happen,” sparks the highest level of creativity:  serendipitous fireworks that splash across our mental and aesthetic skyline. I would propose that those who pause to notice, name, and massage their personal creative process — a seemingly UNcreative thing to do– are the most prolific artists, writers, and thinkers.

Analyzing how a successful project evolves requires a very sophisticated level of metacognition, a true intrapersonal intelligence. Taking note of the circumstances that help you generate ideas or pluck the best from a messy pile of possibilities will help you “set up” similar circumstances the next time you seek to complete a project.It seems counterintuitive that those we call “creative” people actually do this. We think of artists and writers as somewhat random — or a little crazy. Artists, writers, and deep thinkers may not call it metacognition, but they pay attention, tuned in with a powerful intrapersonal awareness, to how they work. Their studios or workspaces may seem disorganized, but there is method to their madness, and they KNOW that method. Those less aware among us may founder when asked to “be creative,”  not because we lack ideas, but because we don’t know enough about how our own creative process works to move from inspiration to fruition.

In about two months, I have a presentation about creative process at ISTE2011. Right now, I am struggling with exactly the process I propose to speak about. I need to manage my own creative process, putting this presentation together on a deadline and subject to the accountability of my own presentation proposal.  I know that allowing subliminal incubation time with a looming deadline has always worked for me. Mulling questions in the background as I swim, walk, work, drive, and do other things has always helped me reach an AHA! moment when ideas explode to the forefront. At that moment, I know how to put the presentation or quilt or blog post or article together. But it is frightening to manage this need for a looming deadline and time for incubation when I have so many other tasks at hand, not the least of which involves relaunching a huge web site on exactly the same timeline as the presentation! And I wonder: Is it better to work up against pressure and a looming deadline or force ahead now to be overprepared and possibly stale? Which makes for the most creative, vital product? How much should my own messy creative process be shared as part of a preso on creative process? Obviously, I am still at the messy stage right now.  So I will step back to look for the learning that can come from this moment.

I think creative process matters for all of us, even those who call themselves “just teachers.” Teaching is a blessedly creative process, if we allow it to be. We sculpt a product — a plan for learning. We try it, revise it, tear it apart, remix its pieces, and try it again.  I wonder how many teachers experience teaching this way? I can’t imagine teaching any other way, but it is all I have ever known.

I recently combed through thousands of pages on TeachersFirst‘s servers in preparation for the launch of TeachersFirst 3.0. I whirled as thirteen years of teaching with technology rewound in a few clicks. Yes, we have revised our site several times since 1998, but we have never cleaned out the attic of unused items. As points of perspective, 1998 was the year TeachersFirst launched. It was also the year of Titanic (the movie) and the introduction of Viagra. Today’s younger teachers were still in elementary school. If you were a teacher then, you likely had to walk to the school library or designated classrooms to even find a computer. Fortunate schools had one projection device that sat atop an overhead projector to “show” the computer on a screen. Do you remember?

As I clicked through TeachersFirst’s digital attic, I laughed aloud at a 1998 TeachersFirst tutorial on Netscape, complete with images and explanations of what a “Back” button does.  I unearthed a page that explained “plug ins” (not the kind that deliver air freshener). I blew digital dust off technology tips about “floppies” and  warnings from the days before school web filtering, recalling the humble roots of the iPad and IWB.  A very thorough 2001 TeachersFirst professional module explained a new concept in teaching: the webquest. Of course, there were no user-friendly, web-based tools to create or share a webquest online, so teachers placed the instructions and links in Word documents or learned to write html code and host it on their Tripod or AOL member web page. Only the adventurous teacher-geeks survived that trial by ftp.

Then there were TeachersFirst traffic statistic pages. Like a box of old snapshots,  these pages showed how many teachers accessed how many “page views” on TeachersFirst during September, 2003: a mere 143,000 per month in those days, and zero percent of them were from countries outside the U.S. What about today, you ask? Try millions of pages viewed per month from over 70 countries with users and members visiting TeachersFirst. Everyone is a web adventurer now. Indeed, the web itself ceased being an adventure many years ago.

Where were you thirteen years ago this month? Did you use the Internet? My classroom was the first in my school to hijack one of the extra office phone lines and connect to the Internet via a dial-up modem– I believe in 1995 or so. The cable ran all the way down the hall, strung behind the panels of the dropped ceiling during a weekend visit by my geeky friend, the computer teacher, with his handy roll of telephone wire. If the office picked up Line 4 during our online session, we were unceremoniously thrown off. I would leap to the computer before the kids could hear what the principal was saying to the person on the other end of the call.

So I should not have been surprised to find several generations of digital treasures in TeachersFirst’s attic. But we should all be impressed at how far teachers — and the world– have come in 13 years.  I gleefully tossed many, many old and unused pages to the “permanently delete” list as we decided what was worth revising and keeping. I can only hope that the next few years will see at least as much change in the power of teaching and learning thanks to the web.

In just a few weeks, we will be unveiling TeachersFirst 3.0. I hope you will find it as fresh and exciting as the Internet was back in 1998, but without the challenges!

I watched Deputy United States Trade Representative John Verneau speak this week at the Lou Frey Institute on the subject of U.S./China relations. His analysis of the interdependent economics of the two countries was well articulated and directed, in part, at the role of schools. We all hear about the need to prepare our students for a global economy, fostering broad awareness and the ability to function competitively among their peers worldwide. Mr. Verneau made one point in particular that could help all — teachers, parents, and students — to better focus this vision. He pointed out that the innovation we need to nourish can be boiled down to problem solving. Every career in this interdependent world is problem solving. The differences between career choices simply depend upon the kind of problems you like to solve.

What kind of problems do you like to solve?

I am certain no one ever asked me that question when I was in school, and I don’t think I have ever asked my students or my own children a career question in that way. I would venture a guess that few of us, as teachers, ever ask kids what kinds of problems they like to solve. We just hand out the problems.  Yes, we try to make the problems “real” or meaningful by connecting them to something authentic, and we have an obligation to present problems related to our assigned curriculum. But it would not take much to go a step further and ask students, “What kinds of problems intrigue you?” “What do you like figuring out?” “Name a problem you felt good about fixing.”

Most kids don’t know their strengths. Some may have overinflated self-concepts because exuberant adults around them praise everything they do. Others never hear any positive comments. We all know a student or two who has come back to say that one long-forgotten comment we made had a huge impact on what that student did with his/her life. Asking “What’s YOUR problem (of choice)” could be the pivotal comment for every student.

The child who enjoys solving problems among friends may have great interpersonal intelligence and be well suited to a career solving mysteries of human relationship. The girl who figures out how to use waxed paper to make her bike stop squeaking may be destined to work with materials engineering. The boy who takes hours to pick out the song he likes on the piano solves problems with pitch and rhythm and may be a musician — or a designer of sound equipment.  But we may never have asked them what problems they like to solve or what problems they voluntarily spend hours on when they are not at school solving OUR problems. Adults rarely stop to analyze the types of problems posed by our own careers or the careers/problems we know less about. Since our kids will inevitably change careers over and over, the most important question we want them to answer- loud and strong — is:

What kinds of problems do you like to solve?

We never have enough time to “teach” about careers (an old-fashioned concept, when you consider how many times people change careers, anyway).  Typically, career discussions are relegated to a very 20th century aptitude test or a ninth grade guidance class. As teachers, we could do more for our students’ long term preparedness than most curriculum does simply by asking them:

What’s YOUR problem (of choice)?

I have been thinking a lot lately about why teachers become teachers. I know the media and the teacher-bashers have it all wrong. It’s not all about wanting summers off or a cushy job. Three posts/articles got my attention this week on the related topics of teacher respect and recruitment. An April Fool’s “memo” from a school administrator mentioned Finland’s teacher education programs that skim la creme de la creme to enter teacher preparation after two years of college performance. This would imply that Finns choose teaching because it is a place to work among very smart, well-prepared people. A New York Times Op Ed described a writer’s personal experience with teachers, describing an experience and appreciation similar to my own. Perhaps that writer’s teachers chose teaching because they could encourage and challenge students beyond where they went themselves. A series of suggestions from “debaters” also in the Times tout different strategies for raising the status of teachers. These various suggestions imply that money, autonomy, professional growth, supply and demand, and various other factors drive the choices of 18 to 22 year olds to consider teaching.

We should be asking good teachers the question: Why did you choose teaching?  To reach a consensus of what a good teacher is for this exercise,  I would propose using teacher-leaders respected by a broad spectrum of their peers and/or credited by former students as having had profound impact — in both public and private teaching settings. I have some ideas of what they might say, though we know the responses would vary each decade since the 1960s and 1970s, when opportunities for women changed dramatically. Some responses I suspect we would hear:

• I did well in school, so I like being around schools.
• My teachers were nice to me, and I liked the idea of paying it forward.
• I liked the idea of doing something a little different every day.
• I grew up in a family of teachers.
• A teacher changed my life.
• I thought that was what a smart girl was supposed to do.
• Teaching was the only thing I knew you could do if you loved (fill in the subject here).
• I was more comfortable around kids than adults.
• I love learning new things.
• Teachers get to be creative.
• I couldn’t afford to be a writer/artist, so I decided to teach.
• I always wanted to be a coach, and you have to teach to coach.
• I love to read.
• It feels good to teach people things.
• I like words and can explain anything.
• I like the way a kid looks at me when he “gets it.”
• Teachers get to laugh and make kids laugh.
• add your teacher story starter here

What is probably not on the list:

• I like measuring learning by tests.
• I like using cold, hard data to describe my work.
• I like following someone else’s script.
• I like going to meetings.
• I like having people write letters to the editor about how lazy I am.
• I like being lazy.
• I like being in the middle of domestic disputes.
• I like the thrill of violence.
• add your own unlikely response here

If you are a good teacher or know one, please ask him/her this question and share the responses — and NOT responses — here. You can put “anonymous” as your name. Or just pass the question along on Twitter or Facebook or any other way, tagging it #whyteach. Maybe someone will notice that it’s not all about summer vacations.