Think Like a Teacher

Teachers are careful about the things we do and say. We cringe when remarks accidentally slip out and  wish we had a verbal “undo” button. We beat ourselves up when words intended as neutral feedback somehow echo back sounding negative. When commenting on writing or anything student-created, I deliberately “sandwich” what a student needs to improve between two positive observations.

This blog post makes me pause to wonder if my praise has been reinforcing the “wrong” things — or the right ones — both with my students and my own children. More importantly, I wonder how small changes in comments on student posts in MySciLife  or on student blogs and online projects might build creative confidence far beyond the hollow “great job” or “interesting idea.”

Maybe it is better to comment before kids publish. Or to comment on the struggles we see them go through before the finished product.  Or maybe we should emphasize ongoing process by asking where they will go next:

I love your video, especially because I know you had to redo it three times to get it right. Your extra efforts were worth it, and  your outtakes show how much you improved! I salute the changes you made! Where do you want to take it next ?

Katrina Schwartz’s post about praise, girls, and process made sense of two experiences I had as a student that have always stood in higher relief, though I never analyzed exactly why  until now:

In sixth or seventh grade art class, we were assigned to build a Rube Goldberg type invention out of found materials. I don’t recall the details. I do recall that I spent three art classes coaxing a windmill-like contraption, precariously taped and glued together before the era of Superglue, to work. It had several rubber bands and used plastic spoons for blades, and I was trying to make it pick up and throw a ping pong ball. The best it got was one lucky throw amid scores of attempts, and I never replicated that “success.” But I remember it,  not much more except the trials and trials. I also remember that Art class in general was one of the places where I felt especially successful.

Many years later, as a grad student, I wrote a paper on creativity — a topic near and dear to me. As he handed it back to me emblazoned with an “A,” the prof asked. “Now what are you going to do with it?” I rattled my head slightly and asked, “What do you mean?” No one had ever asked me about going further than the “final grade” to consider publishing or sending it anywhere other than the trunk-of-finished-papers in my basement. That question twisted around me then and squirms inside me with every product I have made since: from fabric projects and writing pieces to an entire graduate exhibit of art quilts.

Schwartz’s post is right. The nature of praise does matter. Process and open-endedness matter. I am sure you have personal experiences that rise as evidence from your own memory.

I wonder if we would we be better teachers and continue to improve if we were praised for PROCESS, for trying again after “failures” (lesson flops) more than if praised for what we have at the finish (like test scores)? Yes, the results matter, but we will get better ones if we are resilient learners, too.

I get lost in web resources that intrigue me, and I love the feeling. If there were one thing I could wish upon every child, it would be the experience of losing all track of time and place,  teleporting into an alternate era or experience where curiosity takes complete control. The time-travel hole that forms the central premise of Stephen King’s novel, November 22, 1963, is a perfect parallel to the timeless-learning experience I have when whirled into certain sites.

My current learning vortex is the JFK Library’s interactive, The President’s Desk. (How appropriate to time-travel just as Stephen King imagines, landing the oval office during JFK’s presidency.) As a big fan of West Wing and The American President  and a child of the 1960s, I am powerless to resist. I click and experience sounds and artifacts of the era. JFK makes a phone call in my ear. His diary shows where he was and when, and I follow him along. I am gone for hours. Every click makes me curious about the next one. I regret not having someone alongside me, since my impulse is to share, “Look at this! Remember phones like this? Listen to him talk about the sea from this scrimshaw thing. He’s here.”

Is it the lure of the Camelot fantasy that holds me at this desk? I think not. It is the layering of experience: a school child stunned to hear that the president has been shot, the touch of artifacts made real by sound and voice, the connections between what I knew, what I know, and what I want to know. Just weeks from now, we will pause to observe and struggle to explain that day 50 years ago to many who have no connection or recollection. But this virtual desk tips up like a floorboard, dropping us into a time and place where we wonder and touch and learn. If there were one thing I could wish upon every child, it would be this feeling, this experience — as often as possible and on whatever topic draws him/her as Kennedy was drawn to the sea (click on the scrimshaw to hear it).

Teaching is personal, and so is this post.

This week is the anniversary of MLK’s I Have a Dream speech, the moment that gave impetus to so much good (and so much good left to be done). Yes, I am old enough to remember that time period. But no, this post is not about civil rights. It is about having a dream and what that dream can become.

As a brand new teacher several years after King’s speech, I had a dream to bring new ideas about learning and creativity into my classroom.  I was sure I’d be the perfect teacher. I had a dream to make all kids like to write. I dreamed that kids would write and create not just “papers” (so thin a substance!),  but media: television shows or radio shows or photoessays with accompanying writings, anything that could express themselves clearly. I had a dream to change kids’ view of school and get them excited, even amid hard work.

I was sure I could do better than the “dead wood” teachers I read about and occasionally saw in classrooms around me. Most new teachers have a similar dream. For sure, I would never be like the “old” teachers who — to my young view — had decided that change was not worth their effort. I remember looking at those teachers who had not only children, but grandchildren and thinking they would never try my new ideas.

Like many dreamers, I was surprised. I discovered that some of the grandparent-teachers were the most willing to get excited about something new. When I suggested making a six week minicourse in the TV studio part of sixth grade language arts curriculum, the teacher said, “Great! How can I help?” When the kids suggested an Emmy-type awards ceremony (we called them Televiddy awards) at the end of the year, entire teams of teachers jumped in to help pull it off. The dream was alive, and the second year the kids’ writing got even better because they wanted to win a Televiddy. The best part was that it wasn’t my dream anymore. It was our dream.

Fast forward through a long teaching career, and I ask myself whether my dream is accomplished. Never. But I think I have given impetus to some good — and so much good left to be done. I look at the challenges facing enthusiastic, green teachers today and hope they have permission to engage in their dreams. Our kids need the dreams of teachers. They need the chance to feel it, see it, and join in the dream together. I can only hope that those who drive educational change today can see the value of dreams over minutiae and uniformity.

Everybody loves a summer beach book. We all need time to sit, draw with our toes in the sand,  and enjoy a paperback (or ebook) with an engaging plot, transparent characters, and a marketable title. We need to linger and muse.

My role as a Thinking Teacher splashes hundreds of web resources and apps onto my various screens. At this time of year, I am drawn to those resources that are the technology equivalent of a “beach book,”  those that may have valuable learning potential but — above all — are engaging to me personally. They make me want to linger and muse. So I share a few of my favs from TeachersFirst’s recent Featured Sites.

Question Generator  is a powerful tool for teaching at higher levels of thinking. It can be the technology equivalent of a visiting three year old grandson. Imagine the questions you can make — and debate. We could even make this an evening beach party game! Close your eyes and point to a word in your beach book, then spin the question generator to turn it into a question. I enjoy musing about the many ways to spin this thinking game.

The Literacy Shed brings the movies into learning, using the power of visual media oh so intentionally. I love the way the ideas are sorted into “sheds.” I have a feeling I will be building “sheds” in my head as I watch movies from now on. I want to just hang out and explore the sheds.

OhLife is the antithesis of this blog. You are reading where I “blog” professionally, playing my professional role and trying not roam outside that role or reveal too much “personal stuff.”  Oh Life is a like blog BFF. It asks you about your day and keeps the answers to itself. In today’s post-and-tweet world, that’s as refreshing as a beach book, for sure!

Quotesome is a shell collection of quotes for beach days. I love to collect quotes. I have always used colorful, electronic sticky notes to collect quotes as I come upon them. Quotesome lets you do that in their online space.  I can now take them  home in my Quotesome shell-bucket, rinse them off, and arrange them into any containers I wish.

I’ll share a few more beach books as the summer goes on. For now, I wish everyone a great start to summer as I head off to ISTE 2013 (#iste13). Hope to see you there.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!”

During the holiday season we seek ways to give, not only to our friends and family but also to those less fortunate than we. Teachers give of themselves all year, whether it’s giving extra time to help a struggling student or volunteering as a coach, church helper, or scout leader. The one gift that is most difficult for us to give — for many teachers even harder  to come by than money — is time. I often wonder what teachers would give if they had the time. Here are my top three if-only gifts I would like to give if I had the time.

1. An afterschool club for kids in my community. I know many of the kids who get off the bus on my street go home to an empty home, the TV, and a snack. This is a solid, middle class community, and most of the parents get home well after dark this time of year. I would love to invite the kids to get off the bus at our community center multi-purpose room for a short game of (you name the game), a chance to eat their snacks together with other kids and some adults, and a chance to get the homework done in a friendly, cheerful place. After they were done, maybe we could go outside and play some more or invent silly games. A few adults could go a long way in making homework a positive thing that happens among friends and making a little physical activity more fun than the remote. Alas, I am still working when the buses roll down these streets, so I cannot give this gift– at least not right now.

2. Computer help for seniors (or not so seniors) who are embarrassed to say they need it. I know so many adults who do not know how to find great vacation places or share a link to a Google Map or write a blog post. They have so many stories to tell, but are afraid to start. If I were free at 10 am, I’d love to share Tuesday Tech Fun at Ten for an hour or so. I have a feeling we would discover many hidden talents and interests among folks who have no idea how much technology could open their worlds. But on Tuesdays at ten, I am otherwise occupied.

3. Family tech fun nights. It would be great to help elementary kids surprise their parents with the thought provoking things they can do using online tools like the ones we have feature TeachersFirst’s Special Occasion Ideas for the Classroom. This collection shares a selection from the hundreds of creative tools kids and adults can find on TeachersFirst to collect and montage writing, images, and sound into clever personal projects. I would enjoy organizing the kids as the experts to teach the adults how to  lessons without touching the mouse as the grownups make their own projects side by side with a mini Geek Squad.

It seems quite self centered to say, “I would like to, but  can’t.” Maybe in 2013 I can find the gift of just a little more time to give away. I would love to hear what other teachers’ dream giveaways might be.