Think Like a Teacher

Every once in a while, I have an amazing conversation with another teacher. Yesterday was one of the best ever. I have a colleague who teaches science and is dedicated, reflective, and far too self-critical. She is not a visual person. Listen to her talk, and you hear words like “data” and “application.”  Listen to me, and you hear “vivid” or “visually rich” or some sort of metaphor you can picture. We both love seeing kids learn, but we see it so differently.

We are both intrigued by infographics, she as the scientist and I as the artist. She calls them “data visualizations.”   I find that a mouthful. (Today I ran across this blog post on this very topic and chuckled aloud at how fitting it is to the two of us.)  Both of us want to help kids discover ways to critique and create infographics. We don’t just want kids to throw a quick copy/paste or slap a downloaded image together with a too much text or endless numbers in  large serif font, however. We want to see kids create meaning out of what they are learning.

As we conferred about how she might use infographics to scaffold learning in her biology classes and not simply as a culminating assessment, we talked for over an hour about the infographics, but we never approached it from the same orientation. We think as scientist and artist. Fortunately, each of us has great respect for the other approach, sometimes verging on awe. As we bounced ideas around for helping her kids get started and for a presentation proposal we are working on about this, I wondered why more teachers don’t try such a collaboration. Imagine if the artists (and I include writers) among us were to partner with the data people, the scientists. I can help her figure out an approach that will work with her artist students and help draw out (BAD pun!) visual analogies from her scientist students. She can help me see what my scientist/data loving students are looking for. Not only that, we can learn from each other to the benefit of our students. I even mused aloud that it would be very cool if schools facilitated such partnerships between teachers.  But we both paused, cringing to imagine if teachers were “forced” to talk to those on the other side of the worldview fence.

A few hours later, my colleague emailed me with a link from the National Writers Project, a project I know well as a fellow in a local affiliate. It was about helping kids visualize vocabulary.  My scientist colleague gets it. She knows that she is not a visual person, so she seeks out the advice of those with a visual approach either in person or via an online resource. Thus, I have the privilege of  enjoying eye-opening conversations with the scientist as we seek to fill the voids we know we have.

I have to wonder how much more effective we all would be as teachers if we ventured to form friendships or professional partnerships with other teachers who see the world differently. What can a physics teacher and a Spanish teacher learn from each other? Should the math teachers all eat lunch together without ever speaking to the art teacher? Even elementary teachers have very different preferred angles of view,  though they teach every subject. How can we encourage teachers to appreciate, celebrate, and learn from our different world views? I know our students would benefit.