Think Like a Teacher

I love teachers. We are so immersed that we do not recognize our own laser-like focus. (Notice that I use a positive term, not the pejorative one, “blinders.”) First grade teachers notice whether people wait patiently in line at the checkout and count their express line items. English teachers notice all the incorrect apostrophes on billboards and news headlines. Biology teachers see microbes when someone rests a hand on a railing. Geometry teachers grumble when the guy at Lowe’s cannot cut the lumber at the correct angle.

The same focus of passion grows greater among university professors and successful professionals:  If the world only realized how important it is for kids to learn X. Why aren’t the schools teaching X? Studies come out promoting the importance of X in the future of our country and the world. Many of these studies make valid points about our changing world and the need for schools — and kids — to continuously adapt and change.

One current focus of passion is the movement to teach code in schools. With all the news about cybersecurity and hacking, there are those crying out for code to be a high school requirement. I have written about it before. I see value in this initiative, too. But reading an Edsurge post by Shuchi Grover  — and the Jeannette Wing article Gover refers to about teaching computational thinking —  made me stop and think. First, I want to know exactly what computational thinking is in layman’s terms. Wing explains that, sort of.  Grover argues that we should be teaching the thinking, not so much the code.

I wonder how much of the basics of computational thinking IS going on in schools by another name or under a different curricular (or non-curricular) umbrella. More importantly, I wonder about the precursors that lead to the actual named “computational thinking” terms and skills. The examples Wing gives make me look for points where students have opportunity and challenge to develop these skills. Wing’s example of organizing a backpack as analogous to “prefetching and caching” are actually what we teachers call “organizational skills.” Though not part of mega-tested curriculum, organizational skills are part of every elementary student’s classroom experience. Many of the other concepts she mentions are there in middle or high school: modeling, analyzing, planning, hypothesis-testing, etc. The compthinking terms are definitely not used in high school, but the skills are. Through the lens of our passion as K-12 teachers, we see each with a different label from what the university prof might call it. I would have to sit down and talk at length with a computer science/computational thinking person to discover the learning experiences we call by different names. But I do believe many of them are there for at least some of our students. I  know they were in the classes I taught for gifted.

What was not always there was the conversation about how the challenges we did related to things people do in real life. As a teacher, I did not know that the “higher level thinking challenges” I wrote into GIEPs and shared in my classroom were the skills my students-turned-scientists might later call “parallel processing” or “recursive thinking.” Teachers cannot possibly know all the ways the learning from their classroom can be morphed, renamed, and combined into an evolving career and contribution to the world.  I wish I had known thirty years ago about all the ways that logic games can play into lives in engineering, computers, writing, art, and more. As a grown up, I keep learning about careers and fields I did not know about ten years ago. This does not devalue what happens in our classrooms. What we need is the conversations between practicing professionals from the real world and those in classrooms to connections in what we each do. Instead of telling us to teach X, help us see how what our students do actually leads to X. And help the proponents of X see and hear what happens in schools that they may not realize. We need first to translate and underscore what happens within our respective lens of passion so students, parents, and professionals might see how it all connects. Instead of another requirement, let’s find where the seeds are already planted. As a lifelong learner, I would really like to know where computational thinking is already happening in classrooms and to validate and highlight it so kids could be able to say, “I am good at X and want to know more about it. We may call it something different at school but this is something I want to do with my life.”

In the meantime, I will try not to judge billboards or people in the checkout line, at least not out loud.

There is another kind of digital divide: when kids go from a “connected” learning environment back to a traditional classroom. Yesterday I visited a sixth grade classroom filled with students about to make an uncertain (and possibly sad) transition. Their current class is connected. They know the experience of collaborating and learning with students from schools across the country. For the past year, they have lived their roles in MySciLife (more info here).  They know how to approach a question,  look for information both digitally and in print, learn, then reshape what they have learned into a creative and personal connection. They talk about the challenge of taking a set of knowledge and an unlikely prompt that forces them to look at things from within a different role: as a force of nature, an obscure animal, or a weather phenomenon. They talk about how these creative challenges, nestled into an online community, have helped them learn from what other students have said and by asking about or commenting on others’ ideas. They flow smoothly from online tool to tool with the help of self-taught student “experts” within their class or by “teching it out” on their own. They stop and think about which tool best suits the task. These kids are connected at so many levels.

One of the students began talking about next year (a favorite topic among kids about to graduate into a new building). He was talking about what he would do in MySciLife next year. I did not have the heart to tell him that he won’t be in MySciLife next year. Why? First, because MySciLife is a limited pilot for now. More disturbingly, who knows whether he will have a science teacher who is as comfortable with breaking out of the usual teaching patterns and putting students in charge of their learning (helped by technology, of course).  Teachers operate at such widely varying  levels of technology comfort and availability that — even within the same district — a student may move back and forth from connected to disconnected and back again during the same school day or from year to year. The digital faultlines could cause a learning earthquake for anyone.

I wonder how long it will be before kids can expect a minimal level of “connectednesss” no matter where they are learning. I wonder how long it will take the slowly moving plates to stop dangerously rubbing against each other and settle to support learning without the divides. Kids are resilient and adjust to many teaching and learning approaches, but we owe them greater consistency. Think about the kids who suffer when we pull the plug. Then ask yourself how you can help a tech-timid colleague.

We’ve lost that lovin’ feelin’…

Remember how it feels to complete a project you are proud of? As teachers, the “projects” we complete are most often teaching tasks, such as getting our grades in on time or commenting on ALL our students’ drafts or completing rubrics for 20-150 projects.  Rarely do we celebrate something we have created. Our creative process — and a valuable one it is!– is most often applied to generating lesson ideas or coming up with a way to engage a struggling student. We just don’t have as many chances to proudly celebrate and share something we create.

Earlier this week, I found that feeling again. After a manic, messy, and thrilling creative push, TeachersFirst proudly announced Gettysburg by the Numbers, a way to learn about the watershed moment in the Civil War through infographics, data, and questions that are meaningful to us today– especially if you happen to be in middle school or early high school.

It feels good. It feels really good.  It feels good enough to make me wonder how many of our students get to experience that feeling. If we do our jobs well as teachers, they may experience it with authentic projects. But do we, as teachers, experience it enough to really know what kind of projects we should be designing and assigning? Do we know the experience of that lovin’ feelin about something we create? I don’t believe we can be effective as teachers unless we do. If we do not create things we are proud of –with some regularity–how can we really understand “authentic”?

I suggest that each of us should start by creating a me-portfolio where we can exhibit and share the lovin’ feelin’ moments we do have, however few and far between. Set up a simple web page using  Infinite.ly or Loose Leaves or Weebly and embed things you create elsewhere on the web (loads of tips here).  You could even house it on a simple wiki. What do you include? The sample projects you made to show kids how GoAnimate works or your Voki that explains meter in poetry. If you, like me, play with the tech toys and create samples as models of just to help you “figure it out,” save the samples as creative products of your own. There is a very good chance you will find yourself making better examples because you are collecting them– and getting that feeling. And you would be modeling a me-portfolio that you can show to kids. There is nothing wrong with letting your students know that you like that lovin’ feelin’,  and you hope you can all find it together.

All it takes is ONE. All it takes to tip the scales in a child’s life is One adult, just One adult who cares enough to listen, to guide, to help illuminate a path. That One forms a personal relationship of mutual respect with the child. That One has time for the child. That One celebrates the child’s honest (not inflated)  accomplishments. That One gently but firmly underscores the gap between what is and what should be. That One plays games and reads or just listens to what happened at recess or at home last night. That One helps imagine what might be and helps draw the dotted line for how to get there. All it takes is One.

How many kids never have that One? For so many reasons, we know that some parents and guardians struggle to be the One. They may not know how. They may never have had One in their own lives. They may not be emotionally or financially capable of escaping their own limits to be the One for someone else. Or they may simply not care.

These things just don’t come out evenly. Many kids have far more than One. You may be thinking, “One? What happened to ‘it takes a village?'” Yes, there are plenty of kids who are blessed with many, many Ones in their lives. They have loving, involved parents, grandparents, even neighbors. They may have a single parent, but that parent makes sure he/she is the One. They have more than one teacher who serves is the One for multiple students every year. Kids flock back years later to see these same teachers as the fan club for the One.

Rita Pierson’s Every Kid Needs a Champion TED Talk is about being the One. It brings tears to my eyes because I can hear and see (and even smell) the kids she talks about who need us, as teachers, to be the One for them.

Mother’s Day honors moms, and we moms certainly appreciate it! But Mother’s Day also underscores the gap between what is and what should be. If you are, have, or had a mom who was the One, consider yourself very lucky. But please don’t forget about the kids who still need just One. Watch Rita Pierson’s TED talk.

BE the ONE.

1993: a year that none of today’s K-12 or college students can remember. No one texted or tweeted,  only some people used email, AOL was brand new, and nobody had ever “googled” anything. Nothing but the flu went viral. Friends were just that. We got bank statements and bills in the mail (yes, paper), and news came from the TV, radio, newspaper, or playground. Bill and Monica hadn’t had an Oval Office encounter yet, and the Twin Towers still towered. Many of us used computers and tried to use the Internet, but there was really nothing there.

At school, we had shifted from hand writing to typing IEPs on Apple IIe  keyboards and saving them on 5 1/4 inch floppies. The library was still the magic place to find out, and my students and I were pleased to find a single source that answered our question. My  interlibrary loan article requests for grad school research came back as Xerox copies from bound, printed periodicals via U.S. mail. I considered myself lucky not to have to pay for articles I needed for my research.

Yesterday was the official 20th birthday of the world wide web. The people at CERN — who originated this re-vision of what the then-obscure Internet could be  — posted their original page again to remind us of just how far we have come. What began as a way for researchers to share files and data had the most marvelous unintended consequences: Learning became both free and a matter of personal responsibility.

Twenty years later, we have so many sources we must sort them for value and reliability. We can find out from anywhere. We can waste more time than mankind ever knew we had, and every year a billionaire-creating innovation rides into our lives thanks to the www. Wwwe are bewwwwilderingly dependent upon it and occasionally wwwistful for the days wwwhen wwwe wwwere free of it.

It is impossible to explain what life was like before the www. Only by talking about the cultural details of life before www can we help our students understand. Is it important for them to knowww? Yes, because learning is free and a matter of personal responsibility. They need to know the difference between having to ask for a chance to learn and having the tools available to anyone. They need to know why the www made it important to find out instead of waiting to be told. In a broader cultural/historical context, they need to know how a seemingly minor innovation can, in just a few years, change so much. They need to ask questions about impact and change.

If you have any time remaining in your end-of-year plans, give a small assignment. It can fit in any subject. Ask your students to interview an adult who was “grown up” by 1993. If you teach science, have students ask about how people learned science before the www. If you teach history, ask about how people learned history or tracked current events. If you teach English, ask how people found books to read or places to share their writing. Most importantly, have them ask when their “adult” realized that the web was changing things.  Then have them share their findings on the web: blog, tweet, Faceboook post, whatever.  Back in class, make sure they read what their classmates found out — and ask them wwwhy it matters. By borrowing twenty years of perspective, maybe they will realize that learning is free and a matter of personal responsibility.