Think Like a Teacher

This is a fable — of sorts.

After sharing the joy of figuring out a new tech toy for online professional development sessions, the tech geek (TG) and the edtech coach (ETC) stopped for a quick chat.

TG: Looks perfectly simple. Shouldn’t be any problems.

ETC: I wonder if the iOS app version looks the same.

TG: I’m sure it’s close enough.

ETC: Did we test to be sure the links in chat were clickable? We do send teachers off to explore things then come back to share a lot during these sessions. That gets them involved as learners.

TG: Who can’t figure out how to use a link?

ETC: IF the links are clickable, that’s great.

TG: They can copy/paste, can’t they?

ETC: I’ll have to test to be sure that the iOS copy handles are available inside the app chat box.

TG: I don’t have time to load an app just to check that.

ETC: I’d rather check now than start a session with people saying things don’t work. Do you know if the Android app looks like the web interface? Or the iOS version?

TG: You’ve gotta be kidding me.

ETC: I know some people have trouble using the little text selection handles to copy in iOS. And that’s if  the copy tool works at all in this app.

TG: Just show them how when they get to the session.

ETC: We aren’t screensharing from a tablet…. Wait, do you know how they enter a session if they are on the app version?

TG: No idea. They’ll figure it out.

ETC: Yeah, except for the ones who need professional development the MOST. This gives them an excuse not to try.

TG: They’ll get some kid to help.

ETC: I hope so. But this is after school.

TG: You’ve gotta be kidding me.

ETC: I’ll check both apps and give the hesitant teachers a few screenshots on our wiki — or email to them.

TG: You’ve gotta be kidding me.

ETC: I can see why they get frustrated when they didn’t even have the tablets to play with until the first week of school. I wish they’d take one home… Maybe I can host an online play session one evening and give them prizes for coming.

TG:  You’ve gotta be kidding me. You coddle them.

ETC: No, I respect them. I expect them to learn, but I know where they’re coming from. And every one of them is different. Like the kids in their classrooms.

TG: Kids aren’t that different. They’ll figure it out.

ETC: Glad you weren’t my teacher.

TG: Be a teacher?  You’ve gotta be kidding me.

————

Moral: Effective edtech coaching means constantly imagining yourself in someone else’s shoes. 

If you frequent this blog, you know that writing matters to me. As a teacher, I helped many a student improve his/her writing skills, even when the subject was not “English” or “Language Arts.” As a college prof helping educate teachers-to-be, I emphasized the importance of writing for a teacher’s professional presence, even in the short notes scribbled to go home in a backpack or in the short paragraph of directions at the start of an assignment. Today’s Common Core underscores writing across the curriculum as part of college and career readiness. If you cannot write, you are very limited in what you can accomplish. Even the carpenter who left notes during my basement  renovation had to write understandably so I knew what he was asking. So, yes, writing is a passion of mine. In this post I share two recent Featured Sites from TeachersFirst that sing out to me.

One focuses on poetry. Poetry, while not a life skill, certainly celebrates the power of a single, carefully selected word. Like the scarf that picks up the blue in your eyes or the bright orange sweat socks that define your persona as a tennis player, a single word can relate far more than its own meaning. A tool like Tranquillity  lets us play with poetry. Poems are infinite jigsaw puzzles of ideas: the piece with a green edge and one with a curly, jagged side fitting together after you flip them around until they make sense. Tranquility lets you play with words and shows the value of one word to fulfill a rhyme and hit the final note of your thought melody. Play with some words in Tranquillity. (This really should be an iPhone app to de-stress people waiting in lines!) Share it in a science class, and challenge students to write poems to explain Newton’s Laws or to tell the tale of oxidation/reduction in chemistry. Even self-described “tech nerds”  like those who created Tranquillity enjoy poetry.

The second, Slick Write, is my dream tool. I have been looking for this tool since I was fellow in the Capital Area Writing Project in the early 1990’s. I tested a simple piece of software back then that could tell a writer about such things as the number of prepositional phrases in a passage. Why bother?  A surfeit of prepositional phrases means you have weak or imprecise word choice. As a statistician would put it, conciseness of writing varies inversely with the number of prepositional phrases. (Take that, data mongers!). Slick Write also targets other writing foibles: passive voice, cliches, and much more. You can configure it to focus your writing self-analysis on one area at a time. (Sports coaches know the importance of focused correction in skill building.)

I like Slick Write I so much I’d like to politely share it with my adult friends and colleagues, especially those who… well, don’t get me started on the amount of passive voice I read. Try it secretly and see if it makes a difference in how you write.

—————Stop reading here if you don’t care about the example——————-

Slick Write analysis of the above: (I have bolded the things I wish to improve)

Words: 508
Function words: 217 (42.72%)
Adverbs: 22 (4.33%)
Pronouns: 66 (12.99%)
Uncommon words: 69 (13.58%)
Filter words: 9 (1.77%)

Teachers don’t brag. In fact, most teachers usually minimize their accomplishments by pointing out the shortcomings. When complimented on a really cool lesson or activity, the first thing they usually tell you is what went wrong or took too long or didn’t come out exactly as planned. After that, they tell you about the one student who didn’t finish or the parent who complained. If none of these problems occurred, the teacher will surely tell you what he/she needs to do to make it better next time or that it wasn’t really his/her idea in the first place. He/she saw it on… (TeachersFirst… or Pinterest?)

Declare victory! Share your student’s successes, however small they might seem to an outsider, via “What is your #eduwin?”  I have written about #eduwin before, but it bears repeating. And now there is even more reason to report an #eduwin.

If you have seen an #eduwin occur in a colleague’s (or your own child’s) classroom, now you have a chance to highlight that success and send that teacher where he/she belongs. You can nominate someone for an #eduwin award — a chance for that teacher to share the #eduwin at the Annual CUE conference in March, 2014 in Palm Springs, CA. (CUE is the California group of Computer-Using Educators, a strong and creative edtech bunch made up of teachers and edtech users/coaches like you.) You can declare the learning victory of students who “get it,” of a culminating or motivator project that sings, or of a small win over confusion… even something as small as kids who finally use there, their, and they’re correctly!

As October spins headlong toward Thanksgiving, help the rest of the world know,”There are amazing things happening in education every minute.” As the #eduwin site asks, “What did you see?”

You could be sending a very deserving (and self-effacing) teacher on a professional trip that will be his/her personal learning #eduwin! At the very least, you tried.

Teachers deal with the unexpected every day in every class. Somebody throws up, the fire alarm goes off, or the Internet goes down. If not something that obvious, perhaps half the students did not understand yesterday’s lesson or the copy machine broke down before you could run off the quiz. (Hope you aren’t using paper if you have 1:1 or BYOD computer access…) Maybe the entire cheerleading squad is released from class for pictures, and seven of them are in this class… so why start something new?

Those of us who work with teachers as edtech coaches deal with the unexpected compounded by glitchiness, personalities, and — in some cases — fear.  So whether we are planning for a rollout of new technology or collaborating on a lesson idea, we must plan for OOPS. As an edtech coach, we should plan for different kinds of OOPS:

1. Teacher changes mind about priorities, objective, or date of tech event we plan to support (possibly due to aforementioned fire alarm the day before).

2. Students show up without devices or without their materials to do the tech project you and the teacher so carefully planned.

3. Kids outsmart the school-supplied device and prevent it from functioning as expected.

4. Teacher gets nervous or backs down because he/she has not fully “mastered” tech tool/device.

5. Tech support forgets to unblock the web tool you requested 6 weeks ago for access from student log-ins.

6. Principal announces this is his/her day to observe, and teacher drops back to a traditional, safer lesson plan.

…and the list goes on. Generally speaking, the larger the project and the higher the stakes, the greater the chance of OOPS. Take the case of Los Angeles roll out of iPads for every student. Kids see a new device as a challenge to their intelligence and deviousness. More than any academic benchmark or inspirational teacher, a new device is  motivation to really think through the possibilities and to problem solve until you can break it and take control over that which the authorities have tried to block from your control.

A savvy tech coach or planner will therefore start with two essential test cases: a very savvy kid and a very skeptical teacher. Ask them to describe and simulate the worst possible case of OOPS with the project you have planned. What could break? Can you beat this? Then ask BOTH of them to tell you how they would prevent that scenario from happening. What can the student suggest to defeat his/her clever peers? What can that same student suggest to the teacher to avoid his/her feared pitfall? Think of the POWER that student will feel while actually aiding the “other side.” It’s like using a double agent to defeat the OOPS. Having taught the gifted kids, I can picture the pleasure they would take as double agents.  Maybe you can start an OOPS Team of student double agents dedicated to creating and defeating scenarios in a team-like competition. Make it a new student club?

It’s worth a shot. What’s the worst that can happen? Another OOPS?

So ends another week with me musing — and being somewhat serious.