Think Like a Teacher

If all goes well, I will be moving this blog to a new “home” over the coming weekend.  The blog will disappear for a while, but hopefully I will be able to use more up to date blog tools after the transition. Like most people who live comfortably in an old house, I have been lazy about packing up and moving. I hope you will help with a “housewarming” for my new blog home after the weekend!

I have never protected my privacy so fiercely that no one could learn about me. On the contrary, I value my professional digital footprint. When I Google myself, I see thousands of results, and I am OK with that. It’s even OK that the ads on Facebook seem to know I frequent certain online vendors or like to swim.  Seems harmless enough.

Recently, however, the OK2Ask®  team at TeachersFirst has been developing a new professional development offering, Web Worries: What teachers should know about online behavior. That got me thinking about what advice I would give to teachers trying to separate personal and professional personnas online. About the same time, Google announced upcoming changes to its Terms of Use. These two related events spurred me to think further about the tradeoffs teachers make when using online tools, establishing memberships, and generally “sharing” our thoughts, bookmarks, creations, and lives online.

The real tradeoff is not about giving up privacy in order to be social. It is about trading  privacy for time. Each steals from the other, in a nasty currency exchange. If we, as teachers, choose to use the timesaving tools that help us learn, teach, or communicate with parents, students,  and colleagues, we pay with our privacy. If we use iGoogle, Google Reader, Google Docs, Blogger, YouTube, or Gmail accounts, the data about what we say and do there is open to cross-pollination about us in an aggregate form that Google does not fully explain.  It may not be personal, but it is based on the personal. If we work diligently to protect our privacy, we spend extra time — not only to cloak our identities, but possibly in using inefficient means to accomplish the same necessary tasks. Having tools that talk to each other, posting information on one tool and allowing access for use of that info by another tool, saves us a lot of time.  But the web of our information means that we are more easily traceable, searchable, and less private. It becomes more and more difficult to check to be sure we have not slipped up and allowed our personal lives to ooze into our professional personnas or vice versa. Simply monitoring the cross-pollination of our data by swarms of technology bees takes time. Aggravating the privacy trade-off is the fact that time is a teacher’s most precious commodity — beyond her family’s love and her paycheck.

I present this not as a problem-solution scenario, but as food for thought.  We need  not “solve” the privacy/time tradeoff. Rather, we should be aware of it.  As who we are becomes a gestalt in a virtual cloud, the one thing we still hold as our own is the ability to think, question, and decide. Decide how much privacy you are willing to pay to save time. Decide which times of your life are too precious to relinquish to the screen. It is no coincidence that the expression says we “spend” time.  The exchange rate for privacy is still up in the air cloud.

Right about now, it feels as though your students are mired in semi-frozen slush. You worry that they will never master all that they need to know before The Big Test or The End of the Year. They seem to make the same mistakes over and over again, no matter how many times you write a constructive comment or offer extra help. The same students who have been turning in outstanding projects all year continue to do so, while others seem to set their brains to seven hour snooze as they walk through the doors at 7:30 am.

In short, it is February.

I have been talking to a high school bio teacher who has the same worries. She has been using infographics creation as a formative assessment during several of her units this year, and she questions whether the kids are “getting it” at all. She invited me to take a look at what her students have done so far, to visit the class wiki and see the progression of infographics on each student’s page from October until now. She wanted to know whether I could see progress and whether I thought this idea was working or not.

I looked. I was so instantly impressed that I called others to my computer. These kids show what they know by building creative, meaningful infographics.

I learn from what I see. Yes, there are a few students who throw a few text boxes onto a computer screen like fill-in-the-blanks on a worksheet and call it an infographic. But so many more have made steady progress from a few images on a rectangle (their first attempt) to a carefully color coordinated arrangement of words, images, and lines/arrows that explain photosynthesis or DNA replication (attempts 2 and 3). As a set of fresh eyes, looking from a distance instead of from the teacher’s desk in the bio lab, I see understanding. I see science concepts I had long forgotten, now freshly explained to me by a 9th grader. I make comments on their wiki because they need to know that their work makes sense. I also make suggestions (no teacher can ever resist a chance!).

I email their teacher to ask– does she have any idea how GOOD her students’ work really is? Can she reflect from afar to gain perspective? Or does February have her so earthbound that she cannot see the big picture from above?

In a flash of optimism, she suggests surveying the kids on the challenges and positives of using infographics to build understanding and show what they know.  Although the data is still rolling in, it is obvious that they see progress, too. Ask a ninth grader to reflect anonymously via a survey, and you will get an honest answer. Another 30,000 ft view.

We all need to look at our students’ travels from high elevation to trace the paths they have taken in the last six months. Take a February leap — with a colleague or your students — to enjoy the view from 30,000 feet.

TeachersFirst is blessed with a wonderful team of reviewers. The challenge we face is maintaining a consistent voice among so many teacher-writers. This same challenge rises in any collaborative student project where each student writes a portion of the content. How do we maintain a voice and writing style that does not scream, “Listen to how different I am”? Of course, in the “real world,” there are editors handle this challenge, shifting sentences and wrangling words to conduct a song in unison without erasing the beautiful tone of each writer.

As I work with our team, I realize that the lessons I learn from these lifelong learners, our teacher/reviewer/writers, are similar to those any teacher learns from students. My lesson this week was on feedback. The editorial team decided to share screencasts of the editorial process with each reviewer. The screencasts follow the mouse as the editor reads, mulls things over, makes changes, moves things, and –in effect–thinks “on screen.”  It is stream of consciousness editing in real time. (That element of time matters.)

You could do the same: have a student “editor” (or you) use a tool like Screencastomatic (reviewed here) to record the process of revising a piece of writing. Another possible tool is Primary Pad (reviewed here) which plays changes back like a tape recorder. Keep it simple. Focus in on changing one to three things that writer needs most. Let him/her watch as you combine sentences to eliminate redundancy or add active verbs. Don’t TELL him,  SHOW him.  Don’t talk about it, just share the link and see what happens. Perhaps have a slightly more talented writer make a recording for one who is having trouble with a specific aspect of writing. As a precaution, retain a copy of the original, in case the writer feels robbed of his work.

In the case of our reviewers, the response was as authentic as the situation. The process has taught me a lot about how we learn as writers. My fear going into this was that we would violate the very personal ownership that writers feel. Instead, we are hearing excited feedback on the screencasts. Specifically, if the release of ownership is motivated and justified by a purpose (such as making a group project sound consistent or making our site more consistent),  most writers will respond, analyzing what they observe about the changes at a level of metacognition any teacher would thrill to see:

As I looked at the screencast last night, I do see more what you mean in past feedback and what you are looking for…. I am making a list of the words, phrases to stay away from as well as use as examples to be a better writer. The screencast was actually much better feedback than just…comments. I really appreciated having that.

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I LOVE this, thank you for doing it! It is so helpful for me to get a better idea …. Based on what I see, more of my sentences should start with verbs – making them have more of an active voice and I’ll definitely try to combine sentences more effectively.

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The screencast is a lot more effective than the mark up on a word doc, I think!  It’s like, real time, or something.

This feedback on our feedback is enough to put screencasting high on my list as a powerful tool. Whether we respond to professional work, student lab reports, stories, or essays, we can offer an authentic, real-time window into revision and writing. And it takes a LOT less time than writing up all those comments … or reading this lengthy post!

Favorite question of teachers and parents of Bubba/Bubbette the teenager:

What WAS he/she thinking?

Answer:

He/she doesn’t know how to think.

Recent research explains teen brain development, specifically underscoring the teen’s underdeveloped prefrontal lobe as the culprit. Alison Gopnik’s WSJ column makes the research meaningful for teachers by sharing ideas about what the research means for policy makers, teachers, even parents. How do we help Bubba/Bubbette become better thinkers? Practice, practice, practice. Fortunately,  smartphones and the web make to easy to put the practice in our teen’s hands. With a few nudges toward a favorite gadget and some real world prompts, we just might be able to shape that brain a little sooner.

You get to be a good planner by making plans, implementing them and seeing the results again and again….

Need a way for Bubba/Bubbette to practice this? Try Strike, reviewed here.

The experience of trying to achieve a real goal in real time in the real world [today] is increasingly delayed, and the growth of the control system depends on just those experiences.

Need a way for Bubba/Bubbette to practice this? Try Accompl.sh, reviewed here.

[The prefrontal lobe] is the system that inhibits impulses and guides decision-making

Need a way for Bubba/Bubbette to practice good decision-making? Try Decico, reviewed here.

As Ms. Gopnik points out, the key to learning — the key to creating patterns in our dynamic brains –is apprenticeship of repeated, hands-on experience. I wonder whether repeated clicked-on experience can help. It’s certainly worth a try the next time Bubba is clocked going 85 in a 35 mph zone:

Bubba, make a list of the things you will do to pay off that ticket and get your license back.

Now there’s a long term goal to practice with.