Think Like a Teacher

How do you explain what you know and do every day as a teacher? Would anyone other than another teacher understand you?

I gave a tour of MySciLife to some non-educators this week. After decades as an educator, it is hard to explain anything about teaching or learning without slipping into the language I use among teachers. I use terms like differentiate, ESL/ELL, prompt, scaffold, and digital citizenship. Like most teachers, I do not even realize when my audience is thinking:

Hmmm….

Differentiate… means to delineate the differences between two things. What is she telling the differences between?

ESL… or did she say easel? Is this for Art?

prompt… what does this have to do with being on time?

scaffold… are they painting her classroom?

digital citizenship … is that something about online voting?

When I use an education-specific term in a parent conference,  I make sure to circle back and define it in context. I do the same with unfamiliar terms I use with students:

Today you are going to work in small groups on an issue related to digital citizenship. When we talk about citizenship in social studies class, we are talking about the way we read, listen, and evaluate what our government does. We especially focus on how citizens participate in that government. Learning to do this responsibly is what makes us good citizens. So talking about digital citizenship…

This is easy when I am in teacher mode with kids. Sharing the intricacies of teaching and learning, especially  a form of learning unfamiliar to most adults over 30, however, is a real challenge. There is such richness in student-centered, social-media based learning that giving an introduction to MySciLife requires circling back over and over — risking listener dizziness.  The intelligent adults who are listening would never expect me to understand the intricacies of what they do every day in their professional roles. But any adult touring MySciLife carries along their own school experience. It is hard for them to understand MySciLife without comparing/contrasting with that experience.

Teacher to teacher, I would say that MySciLife is:

• a safe, online learning space where your students can learn local science curriculum through student-driven learning and interaction with peers across the U.S.
• a social learning community where students take on and maintain a role of a science identity, such as Mighty Mitochondria or Gregarious Gravity (they choose the name but concepts are determined by curriculum)
• student-centered, meeting today’s digital learners in a familiar digital space while respecting and directing their use of the digital tools they know so well for productive purposes in social-media based science learning (now that is a mouthful!)
• a learning community designed in accordance with specifications and experiences of our teacher-ambassadors throughout over 2 years of research pilot
• designed to offer scaffolding and opportunities for differentiation for ESL/ELL, gifted, and learning support students
• well-suited to the needs, strengths, and interests of emerging adolescents
• a whole new experience in teaching… that gets easier and better with each unit
• engaging to ALL students, promoting participation and interaction among peers. No passive learners here!
• aligned to best practices in process writing (drafting, feedback, response, publishing, response…) and centered on experiences with digital writing and informational texts a la Common Core
• infused with models of good digital citizenship
• creative, open-ended, and focused on deeper learning
• in short… amazing. It changes your whole view of what science learning can be.

I can talk to teachers about MySciLife for hours. I have not, however,  perfected an introduction to MySciLife that connects with non-teaching adults’ prior knowledge of school, redefining what it means to teach and learn using safe social media. I can give them a gallery of mental pictures, but captions for those pictures rely on my educator-specific language. I ‘ll keep working on ways to make the captions circle back.

Almost nine years ago, I allowed myself to consider the unthinkable. I allowed someone to “pitch” the idea of my taking a new job. I had left teaching once — years before when I moved across a state line and thought I would never go back. Within a few months, I was organizing all the kids’ activities at the neighborhood pool. It was silly not to get paid for what I was drawn to do. So I dove into another state’s bureaucracy and conquered the certification dragon. For nearly 20 years thereafter, I thrived, moving onto new and different teaching challenges every 8 years or so, but ALWAYS a teacher.

One of the things we teachers don’t do so well is to consider change as a real possibility. The cycles, routines, and pendulums of August to June, new kids to old kids, new school goals to forgotten buzzwords, and on and on hypnotizes us into gravy-like sameness. We pour on the gravy and never consider a whole new menu.

In 2006 I made a move that changed my life as a teacher. Yes, I am still a teacher, but I am also a teacher of teachers and a voice for many who never speak up. As the person who directs the Thinking Teachers of TeachersFirst, I advocate for what teachers need, listen to them, and most of all SHARE with them. I have met more people in the last eight and a half years than I ever imagined, many of them only virtually — but genuinely. I have grown, learned, learned, and grown. I learn something new EVERY day. I have been able to spread my creative teaching wings farther than the bald eagles who fly past my house each winter morning.

Now I share with you an opportunity to grow and learn. I hope you will read it, consider it carefully, and pass it on to every adventurous Thinking Teacher you know.

One of the most frustrating times for any teacher is when the technology breaks down just as you finally got your students prepped and ready to accomplish a task. You were finally able to sign out the laptop cart or ipad cluster. You finally had the kids ready to roll, and  –boom– the site went down, the Internet crashed, the batteries died, or your chosen tool changed to pay-for service in the last 48 hours!

Then we go through five phases of technology loss:

1. Chaos: The time between the first student calling out, “It doesn’t work!” or “File not found!” or “I’m getting a spinny wheel!” or “It’s asking me for my credit card!” and when we regain enough class attention to ask what happened — and hear only one answer at a time.

2. Realization: The moment when we realize that this is not a temporary glitch or human error. The task at hand is dead, gone, notgunnahappentoday.

3. Improv: What we do/say to maintain some sort of facade of meaningful activity, usually getting out a book or handout. We may have enough improv experience and lesson plan recall to come up with a think-pair-share on the fly, “Talk to your neighbor and generate a list of the most important ideas you were going to include in your (fill in the name of the project here).”

4. Venting: What we do in the teachers’ room over lunch as we retell the nightmare story and vow never to try that activity again— at least not until we can get the laptops for another day.

5. Shuffling: What we do in our lesson plans to try to jam the activity in again before it becomes meaningless.

In a dream world, we could simply flipflop tomorrow’s plan with today’s at phase 3 (with no loss of time to phases 1 and 2), sign up for the laptops/ipads for tomorrow, and do the activity then. We would find an alternative for the no-longer-free tool (check on TeachersFirst!), rewrite any directions accordingly, and miraculously accomplish both tomorrow’s and today’s objectives (HA!).

But wait. There are school pictures during this period tomorrow. Start over at phase 4.

The one phase we never reach is Payback Time. This is the phase of technology loss where we somehow regain the time that has disappeared.

As an edtech coach, Payback Time is the one goodie I wish I could give out. I do my darnedest to ease the pain, but I cannot add minutes back into your class time after the day goes awry. The best I can do is to show you ways to steal a few minutes here and there over the next week  by leveraging tools well and letting the kids solve some of the problems themselves.  But I know that time will never add up to what was lost. Maybe some chocolate will help?

I had a short exhange with a mom this week about her school district’s major technology initiative. I pointed out that by the time her young son is in kindergarten, there will be class sets of Android tablets available for use in every K-2 classroom in her suburban district. Her response:

Don’t they get to play in dirt anymore?

 Reflexively, I responded that I hoped the teachers were going to have significant professional development to make effective use of the devices and not simply use them as the electronic equivalent to “seatwork,” aka “drill and kill.” But I had to stop and reflect about why I automatically respond to technology initiatives as a positive sign of a forward-thinking (and well funded) school district.

In a serendipitously related meeting with middle school MySciLife teachers, we were discussing how to integrate the online, social learning of MySciLife with hands-on science labs:

Where do labs fit? Which should come first? How do we balance the available time?

These questions are really the same, and they distill down to one omnipresent issue as technology pushes its way into classrooms, with or without the welcome of the adult stakeholders:

How can teachers and parents envision the interplay of technology-facilitated learning, hands-on experiences, and other types of learning? 

or, flipping to a skeptical voice…

Do kids really need this technology stuff in (insert grade or subject here)?

As we hear over and over, it’s not about the technology. It’s about learning, and learning happens in many, many ways. Our kiddos need multimodal approaches. Even the young parents of today remember singing out poems about prepositions, standing up and moving to remember a sequence of algebra steps, touching spelling words in the sand, drawing a mind map, and learning in many, many ways. Kids need lots of ways to learn, including dirt.

The tablets just happen to be one type of hands-on dirt. With them, kids can take a picture and write about it. Why not draw a picture with crayons and write about that? I agree. Do both. With the tablets, kids can share with a broader audience, such as posting on a blog or sharing a comic they create. Can’t they do that on paper and post it in the hallway? Sure, but Great Grandma in Vermont won’t see it. They can be real “authors” who connect and collaborate with others in classrooms far away. OK, I get it, but do they NEED that kind of connection? I believe today’s kids need to be digital authors. It is as much an everyday medium as the mud they splash in at the bus stop.

I believe they need digital mud, too.  Go back to the young mom I spoke with. Her phone is in her hand all the time. Anytime she is curious, she Googles. Needs a recipe… Google. Wants an idea for a rainy Saturday with her son… online story hour schedule at the library. We all know the cliches…. this is a “digital native,” blah blah blah.

So where does the dirt come in? Digital learning is another kind of hands-on, messy learning.  It is our job to balance it so every child — our children, our students — experiences the mess and mud of learning in the science lab, in the outdoors, on our tablets, with crayons and paper (gasp!), and in collaboration with those we can connect to only digitally. Think of it as connected mud.