Think Like a Teacher

break:
verb. to smash, split, or divide into parts violently; reduce to pieces or fragments
noun. a brief rest, as from work [Break definitions from Dictionary.com]

Maker Dad tells of the strategies he and his son used in building a complex 3D printer, a task that spanned over 30 hours. I thoroughly enjoyed his account of persistence and challenge, tackled together with his 12 year old son. Why? Because he celebrates the importance of breaks. Breaks are time for incubation, refreshment, regeneration, reflection. Planned breaks are also times to savor the anticipation of returning to the successful portions. Breaks punctuate and act as expansion joints, flexing with the stresses of the task, while allowing it to fit together.

The marvelous irony/oxymoron of the word break is that it also means to smash, split, and essentially wreck things. Sometimes when we build something, we gain most from that kind of break: the moment when the Legos snap into pieces or the experiment doesn’t work.  Making things, even successful lessons or hands-on learning opportunities, requires that we savor the things that do not work, drawing from our failures to rise to better successes.

As we approach (or conclude) spring break, I hope that our breaks will be both opportunities to re-create  something new from broken pieces and opportunities to gain a brief rest, reflection, or incubation time for what is to come.

Spend some time looking at the definitions of break. It really is a marvelous word to hold so many contrasts in just five letters. Will your spring break make or break you?

I saw a reference to this YouTube video about Training Fleas in a tweet, questioning the actual source of the information (thanks to Stephen Ransom, @ransomtech). The video itself bears no identifying information about the speaker.  Nor does the YouTube poster’s profile say much. There are no references to support the information presented as fact. It is not discussed on Snopes, either.

As a former teacher (and lifelong advocate) of gifted students, my antennae went up. Of course, I love the message of the video as an analogy about the plight of students held in a “jar.” That analogy has apparently been widely used among members of NAGC and  in various presentations on gifted. I also enjoy the irony that adults — even those who should be critical consumers — seem to accept this source.

My question: Could gifted kids (or any kids) do a better job of digging up the source(s) and validating or refuting the information? Unable to immediately toss the challenge to students of my own (since I no longer have any – sigh) , I emailed two colleagues who have gifted kids in class every day. (At least I could enjoy “watching” the results vicariously.)  The first round of results  from a HS group during a “club period” (with thanks and full credit to teacher PJ for sharing with me):

A great group of four kids who are incredibly creative thinkers, as well as being smart. They jumped in head first and had a great time with this, although in the 40 minutes they had to work on it, they didn’t find anything conclusive.

They researched:

Could fleas live in the jar for 3 days with no air and no food? What percentage of the fleas’ lifespan is 3 days, and how would spending those 3 days in the jar affect their ability to reproduce?

They looked critically at the video itself and wondered why they couldn’t see any flea eggs in the jar at the end? Or any dead fleas?

They did get distracted (as they often do) with trying to research whether fleas are subject to peer pressure, whether fleas have families or gender roles, and a number of other things…

It was great fun watching them churn through the possibilities and ideas for researching, but also very frustrating to watch how our District’s poor tech support (we could barely get the video to run because of buffering issues–and it’s only a minute long) and the fact that they kept bumping up against blocked websites.

• A challenge based on “debunking” an issue of interest may be the best motivator for students to think critically and  collaborate to develop research strategies. It might be even better if it’s on YouTube?
• Students can generate some really interesting questions very quickly.
• Students do not look first for the “scholarly” issues, such as the credentials of the author, to support online information.
• Students may get distracted, but the tangential questions they generate could be valid learning experiences in themselves.
• Students will persist — at least for 40 minutes– despite the annoying roadblocks imposed by web filtering and bandwidth throttling (sigh).

What do I do next? I am thinking of pulling together some of the web sources that even we adults typically accept and offer them as fodder for students to debunk, thus building information literacy skills while possibly showing us, the “educator” adults, how gullible we are. Yes, loads of sites do this already, but I think mining YouTube could be especially fun.

Have any similar informational videos to nominate for student review/debunking? If you try this with your students. please post about it (and give me the link) or comment here to share!

Assignment:  Create a one pager on trends, terms, and  tensions surrounding teachers today for an audience of lay people not involved with schools. (This might also be a worthwhile assignment for teacher ed candidates.)

Background: I have been working on a project with a group of non-educators. Our purpose is related to serving teachers, but the exact mission does not matter here. I find myself pausing often, realizing that these highly intelligent, well-meaning people have no exposure to life as a teacher or to the education trends and currents that slap our faces like salty, unexpected waves. My group members know only what they read or see in the media. Imagine if you were trying to help teachers but knew only what you saw on Education Nation, an occasional PBS show, or in various columns and op-eds. Naively, I offered to create a one pager, not to comprehensively explain all the terms and trends, but at least to list them and indicate  where tensions exist (trying to maintain neutrality!).

So far my list includes many edtech trends, terms, and challenges along with others involving policy, pedagogy, and philosophy. The more I add, the more I realize should be there. I share my list-in-progress and hope that others might suggest things I forgot. What do you think?

Terms and trends: Emerging  technologies (already hatched, actually) and uses of technology

• BYOD/T (Bring your own device/technology):  Students provide the hardware; done for cost-saving, concerns re equity/inequity?
• One to one: Every student has a device (laptop/tablet)
• Mobile devices/apps vs computers/software
• eBooks: electronic textbooks, electronic books of all sorts, e-Readers (Kindle, iPad, etc)
• Social media in education: learning together using tech-enabled community spaces
• Gaming in education: simulations and intelligent games far beyond “edutainment,” many student-created
• “Responsible use” policies: school policies that expect kids to use technology well and make wise choices instead of deciding for them by blocking sites, etc.
• Digital Citizenship: a combination of skills and knowledge, including ethical use of digital media (awareness of copyright and other rights), netiquette, positive online behavior, cybersafety, anti-cyberbullying, etc.
• Digital Literacy: a combination of skills including digital citizenship AND locating/evaluating/curating sources, etc.
• “Blended learning”:  learning via combination of online and face to face delivery methods or combo of tech-guided and teacher-guided learning or synchronous and asynchronous or variations on any of the above. Ask for a definition when someone uses this term

Terms, trends, tensions: Curriculum and Accountability

• Common Core (CCSS): elevated, nation-wide curriculum rigor vs lock-step test prep?
• Student test scores as measures for teacher evaluation and teacher quality vs multiple criteria vs ?
• Data-informed instruction: customizing teaching by using continuous snapshots of student understanding (by what measure?)
• Schools without Walls: school as an experience defined by learning rather than location; may include contact with the “real world,” experts, mentors, and global connections with other students
• Financial literacy initiatives/standards: helping kids understand saving, money, credit, and other financial skills (perhaps to head off another Wall Street meltdown?)
• STEM initiatives (or is this already a bandwagon gone by?): science, technology, engineering, and math seen as an interrelated set of skills and competencies

Broader issues and tensions

• Creativity/innovation vs specific, standards-based skills
• 21^st century skills: According to the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, this means 3Rs plus 4Cs: critical thinking, collaboration, communication, creativity. Other definitions also exist based on what businesses predict students will need to thrive and contribute in their careers
• Education “reform” — whose definition? Ask.
• School improvement (takeovers or action measures toward underperforming schools as determined by test scores) vs “Rethinking” school (imagining entirely new ways to configure education)
• Industrial model of education vs. newer, student-centered models

After starting this list, my head is spinning, and I need legal sized paper to fit on one page. As teachers, we toss these terms in heated discussions with our non-educator friends and contacts, but how can we expect non-educators to understand ever-changing, multi-directional waves that break over schools and teachers? If we cannot even explain them all, no wonder even the brightest, most sympathetic people shake their heads. The good thing about all this? At least there is agreement  among laypeople and educators that school is important. Let’s start building from there.

News Corp’s education division, Amplify, has announced a new tablet designed specifically for education.  According to the story on NPR today, they are touting this new device as the tool to bring schools into the 21st century. Amplify’s CEO, Joel Klein, claims they are launching this device for the love of learning. The skeptical teacher in me says it is for the love of earning. To start, News Corp’s infamous leader, Rupert Murdoch, insults teachers by saying

Today’s classroom looks almost exactly the same as it did in the Victorian age: a teacher standing in front of a roomful of kids with only a textbook, a blackboard, and a piece of chalk [Really? When were you last in a school?]

Then Klein continues

It’s not about hardware, it’s not about devices, it’s really about learning.

Is it? What does NewsCorp/Amplify know about today’s teaching and learning? If they think it looks like the 1890’s, they have not been in the schools I know. They have not seen teachers who work hard to take advantage of any technology they can to connect their classroom to the world beyond. They have not seen efforts like MySciLife® . They have not met the teachers who come to OK2Ask® to learn how to use the technology they have — and use it well. They have not read the comments of teachers describing the pedagogy behind their decisions to make their interactive whiteboard (IWB) into a student-controlled learning space. (They should have been there with us last night.) They have not heard teachers critiquing colleagues who fail to leverage the devices and materials they DO have for learning “to the max.” They have not met the teachers who are driven to learn themselves and take their discoveries to their classrooms the next morning.

According to NPR, “Murdoch has described education as a market worth hundreds of billions of dollars.” The education market is both a tasty lure for entrepreneurs confident they will make big bucks and a carnival of quick-fix claims. The education marketplace is far too much about earning than learning. Efforts like Edsurge try to bridge the gap between techpreneurs and educators, but the urge to make money still seeps in among the education reform/rethink efforts.

Money is a harsh reality of life, for sure. We all make difficult decisions about it. I just wish that those making the decisions about educational technology money would listen a bit more to the voices of learning. Just sit, watch, and listen for a while. Talk to teachers. Talk to students. Erase what you remember about school and try to imagine being a kid now. Then try to put your money into making sure every kid is connected, both at home and at school… and on the walk between. If you can’t shift the priority from earning to real learning,  please go away. Teachers and kids are busy enough without another Big Fix. Let us use what we have well and, please, let us tell you what else we really need.

Pencils can do anything: draw, shade, outline, write words or paragraphs, erase, design, tap, point, invite, compose, ask, reply, annotate, doodle, poke, or be an improvisational flag pole for a make believe fort. Pencils can be whatever you want them to be and help you accomplish just about anything, even filling in those dreaded bubble sheets.

Yesterday I watched this video:

My conclusion: Computer code is the new pencil. Yes, there are lots of big names here and lots of money behind this video, but the video accomplishes what it sets out to do. It makes me WANT one of these pencils!

I rewind decades and wonder what might have happened if I had been exposed to the possibilities of computer code as a middle schooler or even in elementary school. I was good at math and logic. I was good at writing. I chose writing over math because there just didn’t seem to be any social interaction among the people in the math building or any creative way to use it. I joked that they were all covered with chalk dust. Besides, I like creating, writing, and making things out of all kinds of stuff. So I became a teacher.

Along comes this video that says code can do anything: create arts programs, solve problems, figure stuff out, communicate or entertain. In short, code would let me make things that pull together all the stuff that I love.

So why aren’t kids — including those with a passion for things verbal-linguistic, visual-spatial, or musical-rhythmic– flocking to learn code? If code is the new pencil, why don’t we have big, chunky starter pencils and finger-friendly pencil grippers to ease us into using this new pencil? Code.org is trying to get computer code into our schools, but are they going to do it with a well-produced video?

I hate to say it out loud (for fear of offending the exceptions), but few of the code-jockeys I know can talk and write are adept in the language of kids. They don’t make this pencil something that a mom or dad could pick up and help a five year old to grip. We don’t experience it in someone’s lap or during a story hour. Elementary school teachers don’t see code as part of essential learning. They probably never even thought about code as anything other than something their geekiest teen neighbor does. Code is hidden and scary. Teachers and parents, in turn, probably don’t suggest code as something kids might want to learn to have fun and be creative. Even the adventurous among us need pencil grippers. And no, an online code academy is not going to provide the kind of friendly experience that helps us hold and use this new pencil. Until we have face to face, human sharing the same way we share words and books, code will remain an enticing mystery at best.

Ladies and gentlemen of Codeland, sharpen your pencils.  You have a new tool for us to learn, and we need some human help.