Think Like a Teacher

I love the open letter that Library Media teacher Angela Estrella wrote to Edtech Entrepreneurs and shared via the EdSurge blog. I am sure every edtech coach out there would applaud it, retweet it,  or tack it up somewhere electronically — or even on precious paper. We who try to lure teachers into trying new tools have witnessed the rapid decline from enthusiasm to frustration when start up time on a new tool devolves into endless settings, checkboxes, and menu options named by a geek using vocabulary no teacher would ever use.  We who “coach” take the brunt of reasonable teacher skepticism about the latest and greatest new tool. Unlike those of us who enjoy edtech tinker toys, teachers have the patience of a flea when faced with the latest new gadget: “Get me to the red blood, or I jump… now!”

Teacher skepticism is a healthy thing. It is what makes us question a report that seems too well-written to be a student’s own work. It is what makes us wonder whether our own assessment (test, rubric) is perhaps measuring the wrong thing. It is what helps us survive the slings and arrows of politically-driven policies. Yet, it can easily morph into jaded negativism. [Insert your mental image of a burned out colleague here.]

So I add a followup note to Estrella’s letter.

Dear Edtech Entrepreneurs,

I hope you read my previous letter —  shared by Angela — more carefully than my kids read their assignments. I forgot a couple of things:

I am a skeptic by nature. You can help me focus my critical thinking skills on choosing appropriate technology for my class. Choose your words wisely and tell the truth. That will keep me from becoming jaded and negative toward all technology.

You have a responsibility beyond selling what you make. You are responsible for selling me on learning something new. I know how to do that with my students. Do you?

Skeptically,

Your customer/critic, the healthy teacher-skeptic

 

I love writing. I love helping others love writing, especially their OWN writing. I love watching people as they hear their own writing voice, perhaps for the first time. So I share a few writing favs in hopes that your might play and be lured into hearing yourself as a writer.

Play with words using this Google Docs demo (reviewed by TeachersFirst) that allows you to “collaborate” with master writers such as Shakespeare, Nietzsche, or Emily Dickinson. See what Poe would do to the words you type or watch your simplest phrase transformed by Dickens. This demo is limited, of course, but it draws attention to word choice and the many ways English can say similar things. Single words often become phrases extracted from a literary masterpiece. I do not commend the crazy concoctions that combine on the demo page, but I do relish the questions this demo raises. I wonder what it would look like if Hemingway were one of the collaborators? Instead of adding words, the demo might subtract them!

Who do you write like? Try I Write Like (reviewed by TeachersFirst) to find out. In a near-reversal of the Docs demo, this tool prompts you paste in your words and analyzes your writing to see which well-known author’s work is most similar to your writing. (The analysis of this post says I am like H. P. Lovecraft. I am intrigued  and want to learn more about Lovecraft, since I do not know his work.)

I love word clouds. I love creating them, and I love using them to see my own writing from another point of view. Here is last week’s post transformed into a word cloud by TagCrowd (reviewed by TeachersFirst):

There are loads of word cloud makers, each with its own variations: Tagxedo, Worditout, Wordle,  and more. Alas, they also disappear often, as did Wordsift and Tagul

Of course, writing is sometimes excruciating, especially for those who decide they cannot be poets without rhyme. Enter the many online rhyming dictionaries. This result offers rhymes for writing itself, though you must ignore annoying ads and distractions. (See TF’s review for ideas.) Writing may be more like biting or fighting, but it can also be igniting. A cleaner tool, Write Rhymes (reviewed here) gives a different look, but you have to know how to Option+click (not tough at all!). Here is what you get for the word write:

So play today with words to say and maybe you will find a way to hear your voice and make a choice of words to tell your thoughts so well you’ll want to write.

Write to be… or not to be, to find a voice that says, “That’s ME!”

I often hear NPR underwriting messages about The Carnegie Foundation and their mission to do “real and permanent good.” Isn’t that why we became teachers, to do real and permanent good? How do we know whether we are accomplishing our mission? How do we assess real and permanent good?

Surveys ask businesses what they seek in their employees, and policy makers try to respond with accountability measures such as NCLB and Common Core. Every teaching professional organization has standards of its own, from the NSTA to ISTE. These standards are all efforts to define what comprises success in educating our students.

The frustration that I hear from many teaching colleagues comes when an individual teacher tries to assess success, to feel that he/she is doing real and permanent good. Evidence of real and permanent is elusive. A test score might show real progress, but test score improvements can easily feel impermanent or even unreal. Teachers feel we know real and permanent good when we see it, but often we do not have time to watch for it. And we certainly have trouble defining it. So I offer one example of real and permanent good  in teaching and learning.

MySciLife® offers learning that is real and, our research shows, permanent. MySciLife uses a social media platform for students to live science roles as they learn science. Watch the student/parent video to see how MySciLife works (and it’s free, I might add). We have just completed the first semester pilot of MySciLife with six middle school teachers in four states, and the research results show real and permanent good. Our first semester research asked both an outcome and a process question:

Outcome Question:  What effect does social media-based learning have on middle level science performance?

Process Question:  How does social media-based learning affect student attitudes and perceptions about learning science?

Roughly speaking, I see the outcome question as the real, and the process question question is the permanent.  The real knowledge is something middle level students take with them from MySciLife and apply to their understanding of the world around them. The two classes in the research study showed 20 to 40% greater understanding of the science compared to what they knew before “living” a MySciLife identity. We are researching further during the current semester to compare real learning using a larger sample and controlled study.

The permanent question about attitudes toward science is the one I find most exciting. Fully 86% of the students responded that they agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “MySciLife was more interesting as compared to how I typically learn science.” Science is INTERESTING to them when they learn this way(!) That’s permanent good.

There are further results from the pilot, and we are busy formatting the downloadable version of the first semester research to share. I will also be sharing the results along with MySciLife participant panel at the ISTE conference in San Antonio in June. I have to admit, though, that the words real and permanent good resound differently inside my head these days thanks to MySciLife. 

What buoys your sense that you are doing real and permanent good as a teacher?