Think Like a Teacher

According to Daniel Coyle, talent is a myth.  Coyle recently synthesized results from years observing “centers of excellence” into a list of conditions that breed talent in “hotbeds” with

the combination of intensive practice and motivation that produces brain growth

Sounds like what we want our classrooms to be, right?

Although Coyle is focused largely on adult success and centers of excellence in sports or arts, his descriptions are very much what we hope our classrooms will be: places where our students maximize their potential. Coyle’s rules for adult success could work along the way for kids in a classroom, with some adaptation.

1. Staring: “fill your windshield with vivid images of your future self, and … stare at them every day.”

Encourage kids to develop the image and to keep it in front of themselves. Give them places to keep it: a journal where they can paste pictures, a locker wall, an electronic MePortfolio with a “dreaming of me” page. Have them stop to look at what makes an idol so special. What can he/she do that I want to do? Young ones have fleeting notions of what their future selves look like: fireman, snowman, roller coaster designer, cake boss… so maybe we need to ask what it is about that fleeting image that they like: Circle it. Write about it. Add more images of it. Keep refining the montage.

2. Stealing: “All improvement is about absorbing and applying new information, and the best source of information is top performers. So steal it….focus on specifics”

Kids call it copying, and they are very good at it. They watch how the pitcher spits, and they spit the same way. They listen to language at the bus stop, and …. But if we stare enough at the models from #1, we may come to notice things we’d like to copy. The trick is figuring out what to notice. That is where teachers can offer direction. We can help kids learn what to notice. We can talk as a class about what we observe, investigating which traits really matter. When they are young, kids need to develop the “eye” for what might be worth stealing. If you do one thing the same way Thomas Jefferson (or Copernicus or Shakespeare) did, what would it be? Show me.

3. Be stupid. (This is my favorite.) We rarely allow this. Humans spend a lot of time making fun of “stupid.” We post videos of it on YouTube and laugh at it on the playground. Coyle says talent hotbeds “encourage ‘productive mistakes’ by establishing rules that encourage people to take risks.” Guess we’ll have to toss out some of the testing culture. Darn.

I especially like this example: “once a week, make a decision at work that scares you.” How do we do this in class? Ask questions that have no answer. Put them on the test. Give credit for ANY attempt. Give students a weekly freebie to get credit for a WRONG answer backed by substantiated effort. Circling a guess one on multiple choice tests does not count. Even better: allow a one minute off the wall “be stupid” time for sharing what ifs and far fetched errors at the end of class.

The social dangers of being “stupid” at school can be avoided if systematically incorporated as part a creative teaching approach. David Markus notes that “Even Too-Cool-for-School Kids Can’t Resist” doing crazy, risky things if everyone can laugh about them together, such as in an arts-integrated math class.

5. Coyle’s observations about centers of excellence each warrant discussion, but I’ll skip to #5, his distinction between hard and soft skills, a place where most classrooms are seriously off target.

Hard, high-precision skills are actions that are performed as correctly and consistently as possible, every time.

Soft, high-flexibility skills, on the other hand, are those that have many paths to a good result, not just one. These skills aren’t about doing the same thing perfectly every time, but rather about being agile and interactive;

We do a pretty good job with hard skills. I will resist the urge to criticize our zealousness for careful delineation of the “right” way to do things.

Soft skills are all about process. In a test-driven world, we rarely have time to celebrate  or focus on these “soft” skills, yet they are vital to talent hotbeds. Coyle tells us that “hard skills and soft skills are different (literally, they use different structures of circuits in your brain), and thus are developed through different methods of deep practice.”  Our students need to routine, deep practice at looking for patterns, changing course, flipping to a different approach. No templates, no prescribed step by step method to recite and reuse. We so rarely ask questions where kids must experiment and analyze. Can you find one such question in your weekly lesson plans? How long will you let them suffer before you reveal the answer? Have you ever left a question unanswered yet scored it as part of a grade?  How many parent calls did you get?  To many people (including many teachers), open endedness is evil (see #3 above).

Teachers make students put things away. If we did not, our classrooms would look like revenge of the two year olds. But how do we help students “put away”  and save valuable ideas that do not fit the format of the current assignment or discussion? We all need idea bins. I have written and spoken about idea bins as an important element in promoting creative process, but idea bins are also places to snag snippets of personal curricular connections. Idea bins hold many things.

I remember trying to find places to “put away” ideas that occurred to me during class. The teacher was talking or asking questions, and my mind wandered, often to intriguing thoughts or magnificent doodles.  I once snipped a particularly good doodle from the margins of a spiral notebook and actually framed it. Those wanderings were not necessarily bad. Many were my own personal connections to something in the discussion. Perhaps I simply loved the sound of a phrase or analogy shared by a peer or an oxymoron that stung me with its irony — a jalapeño in my mind’s eye. Sometimes the light coming through the window played on the classroom floor, creating a pattern I wanted to remember. Interestingly, every time I later saw that pattern, I also recalled the concurrent discussion. For me, visual snippets prompt memories like smells from a kitchen. Years later, I was told how to collect my visual ideas in artist notebooks required in various art classes, but I believe we each need to discover our preferred tool for idea bins.

I spent some time yesterday collecting idea bin options we could encourage kids to try as we start a new school year. Here are essential characteristics of an “idea bin” tool, arranged to create an easy acronym: the secret SAUCE for idea bins:

Semi-transparent: must allow you to share or show others ideas you are excited about (and keep other ideas to yourself)

Annotated: must let you make personal notes on items you collect

Ubiquitous: must be readily available where/when you need it (a real argument for bring your own device to class)

Cozy: must feel comfortable for you (fit your style)

Expansive: must allow endless additions and changes — without losing things

For some, an idea bin is a paper sketchbook, notebook, or journal. SAUCE score? S- yes; A- for sure; U- maybe not. These get lost easily! C- yes, for those who like the tactile feel of paper and pencil; E- not really. Linear and it runs out of room.

Here are a few digital idea bin possibilities in no particular order — all FREE for the versions I looked at — with SAUCE scores:

1. Evernote S-Yes, you can share notes and notebooks; A- for sure; U-yes, syncs from mobile app to computer and back in real time; C-OK, though I wish it were more drag n drop  and a little less “organized” into boxes/notebooks. E-Yes! Tagging helps. (Full TF review).

2. Linoit: S-share the full board by url, so maybe not so private unless you make separate boards for private stuff; A-Yes!; U-Yes, and it is iOS friendly. Play without joining, but sign up to save and share; C- yes, for me. Orderly folks might not like the drag and drop randomness; E- Yes, to the limits of the larger, draggable board. Can overlap stuff, too. Make additional boards and link them from your main one, maybe? (Full TF review). Here is a sample I used to prepare for a presentation on creative process.

3. Wallwisher: S-yes, but all or nothing. Make separate boards for private things; A-Yup; U-Yes, on the web and iOS friendly; C- yes, for those who like random, draggable elements. Certain backgrounds look more “organized;”  E- only as far as the board goes. Add more boards for more stuff. Here is a sample where you can play. (Full TF review).

4. Google docs/drive: S-yes, but all or nothing. Make separate docs for private things; A-yes, though primarily a word processing interface. U-Marginal. Yes on the web. Not sure how easy it is on smartphones. Must navigate to it by a long url or through GDrive log in and file management area. C- Not to me. E-yes. (Full TF review).

5. Pinterest: S- Yes, settings for each board; A-yes, comment on each “pin.” U- sort of — annoyingly connected to Facebook and less user friendly on mobile devices; C- Depends. Males tell me it is a female tool!  Very popular right now; E- YES! (Full TF review). Here is a sample board where I was simply playing.

Here are some TF reviews for others to consider. How would you score the SAUCE for each?
Edistorm
Wridea
Scribblar
Magnoto…though the embeds don’t work!
Canvasdropr
Scrumblr
Letspocket
Squareleaf
Corkboard
Protopage
 

We are social beings, so why not use that to frame digital citizenship in the context of community?

This time of year, teachers are establishing the ground rules for their classrooms: what is expected, how students should behave during activities and transitions, and even what kind of language we use to interact. This is when we establish the standards for our classroom community. We tell, they listen — and we hope they do it.

I have noticed different kinds of communities lately and how each has a set of community standards
that develops and is shared with new members. One  such community is Facebook. Each member chooses the boundaries of our Facebook community by connecting to certain friends and adjusting settings for what shows in our newsfeed. Two of my own friends have recently cut others out of their feed (or blocked or unfriended them) because the offending “friend” did not adhere to unstated community standards. One complained about racist remarks a “friend” had shared (bye, bye!) while another bristled at a “friend’s” annoying political campaigning (see you after November!). As adults, we know that we both infer and establish community standards wherever we participate.

But back to our classrooms… Shouldn’t we be talking with our kids about community awareness and how to develop the skills to both read inferences of a community and to guide that community by our contributions? In elementary grades, typical social studies curriculum includes the concept of community in the very concrete sense: the place with a fire house, shops and roads, a town hall, a police department, local government, and our school, of course. Separately we teach about staying safe online, avoiding cyberbullying, and perhaps how to write comments on a blog or compose an email. Instead of treating digital citizenship as a separate entity, we need to help our students see the online world as just another community (or collection of communities) they belong to. They need to read the unstated rules of any community they enter, whether it is a workplace, a classroom, or an online social network.

Last week, I had the pleasure of working with students from across the U.S. in the pilot Boot Camp for MySciLife. This small group of students and teachers came from six different schools with six very different student bodies, six sets of school rules and policies, and surrounded by six varied, real communities. But in MySciLife, we formed a new virtual community. As the community grew rapidly (over 800 posts in 5 days!), students developed de facto community standards of behavior. Yes, we teachers nudged them a bit on digital citizenship in citing images, but they did what kids do. They watched the way their peers spoke (or wrote) and adjusted their language and the thoughtfulness of their posts accordingly.

Before we add yet another mandated chunk to K-12 curriculum, teaching digital citizenship, we should look at how easily this concept fits into our social nature and take advantage of that social impulse. Talk about how we figure out a group. Talk about the role of “citizen” in real and virtual communities. Talk about how the choices we make by voting, friending, commenting, and participating. Communities flow continually between real and virtual today. Citizenship is one extended discussion and lesson, not  separate curricula in technology or social studies. And we all teach it every day.

Bringing science to life.

If you’d like to see what happens when middle level students are turned loose to learn in a social learning environment for science,  peek into MySciLife.

Finally, after two years of work, scheming, and dreaming, we have launched the MySciLife science learning experience that began as a brainstorm between Ollie Dreon, Louise Maine, and me one snowy day in early 2010.  Our  proposal became a finalist in the MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competition 2010 but unfortunately was not funded. You can see the full description of our dream here. (Since the original proposal, we have shifted away from the online tool we thought might work and have instead adopted Edmodo as our platform — at least for our pilot.)

Enough history.

This week has been amazing. The kids in our pilot “Boot Camp” went crazy with MySciLife. Browse through the public stream (scroll down to the bottom via “see more”  to see the beginning of the modules as students introduce themselves) of all their identities throughout the week. Here are some intriguing or creative excerpts of their work/play as they take on and “live” science identities in a safe social learning environment:

A “Rock Band” video from one of our California groups.

A rock tour from the kids in Wisconsin.

We have seen metacognition, curiosity, student-generated learning activities, constructive and constructionist suggestions, humor, creativity, deep thinking, and some marvelous social interactions between students in 5 locations throughout the U.S. To paraphrase a popular Tshirt, MySciLife is good.

PS: One of many learning moments for all the teachers:

Even though we TOLD students to give image credits, it was not until we demonstrated it and made them go back to add the credits that they grasped what we meant. We therefore were not able to share some of their posts in the “public” stream because they have not completed the citations yet.

I admit it. I am an Olympics junkie. As a former “swim mom” and avid lap swimmer, I enjoy seeing even the prelim heats with swimmers whose chance to “medal” is remote. I watch to share in their passion and the incredible accomplishment of simply being there.  I listen to interviews with the medal winners,  hanging on what they say about passion for the sport and about the parents and coaches who helped them get there. I even eat up those “Thanks, Mom” commercials.

As teachers we want our students to have the same passion for academic learning that Olympians have for learning to be the best swimmer or gymnast or runner. One of the parents of  the U.S. gold medal women’s gymnastics team responded beautifully to a question this morning. When asked what advice he would give to parents of  young athletes who show promise, he said something like, “Let them go after their dream if it is their dream and not yours. Make sure they have the tools and opportunities to pursue that dream and just let them go where they dream to go.”

Missy Franklin, this Olympics’ U.S. swim phenom, lives her passion. She has stayed with the same coach since she was very young, eschewing opportunities to move to elite programs with renowned coaches. Why? I assume it is because her coach knows her and knows her passion. She loves to swim. She also loves being a teenager and hanging out with her high school swim team and friends. As a coach, he gives her tools and steps out of her way. Both he and Missy are very lucky people to have each other and especially to have the relationship they do.

Not every student we teach can articulate a passion. It is our job to thrust our heads forward to listen for it, facilitate it, and step out of its way. With our responsibilities to curriculum, we must often seek ways to connect curriculum to our students’ unspoken passions. It is naive to think that everything we must “teach” will miraculously connect with Lego-like snap into our students’ passions. But we need to listen. There may come a moment where we can hear the passion coming through. As coaches, we must then find ways to let them go. They might have fun, and they may even “medal” in learning.