Think Like a Teacher

The day after the State of the Union, in the midst of presidential primaries,  and at the height of school budget (cut) announcements for the coming school year, I find myself itching to mimic Judith Viorst’s classic poem. I even found a handy online form for students — and teachers(?) — to write their own versions modeled in the same format.  Here is my first crack at it. Try one yourself…and pass it on. Maybe even post yours on Facebook (!).

If I were in charge of the world
I’d make thinking something to brag about and write about.
Instead of “like” or “rate,”
The options would be to reason and respond.

If I were in charge of the world
There’d be art and poetry breaks in every office and warehouse,
live music playing in every Walmart,
and open ended questions during every newscast.

If I were in charge of the world
You wouldn’t call any class a “special” or an “elective.”
You wouldn’t make kids choose between chorus and sports.
You wouldn’t have budget cuts
so obviously done without thinking.

If I were in charge of the world.

Where do the best ideas come from? Chinese leaders want to know. U.S. voters  and leaders could benefit from thinking about it, too.

In his post “Teaching Creativity: The Answers Aren’t in the Back of the Book,” Brian Cohen makes an articulate case for arts education and the lessons any student can learn from open ended, achingly prolonged thought that does not lead to a definite answer:

Figuring things out for yourself has a high value. Thinking is the best way to learn. But it’s painful and a lot of work, and lengthy uncertainty is uncomfortable.

His analysis of what students gain from arts programs is dead on: tolerance for ambiguity, willingness to allow a thinking to run beyond the first answer, willingness to risk — then throw away that first answer, recognition that some thought resolutions may be “ugly.” Key to his analysis is a distinction between “knowledge” and “understanding.” (Do I hear Bloom whispering in his ear?). But these lessons need not be reserved just for the arts teachers. All of us should advocate for ambiguity:

As teachers, we imply there are definite answers and that we possess them. Sometimes teachers play a kind of game in which they encourage students to guess the answer in the teacher’s head. It might be better played the other way around.

How often do we encourage ourselves to guess what is inside our students’ heads? How often do we coax students to share the random or strange rumblings that may occur there as we teachers ramble and assign? How often do we ask:

 What do YOU think?

It’s tough to resist the urge to steer students’ answers like cattle drivers funneling the herd into the chutes. Cattle inside fences are easier to manage measure. Besides, we have deadlines, right? As one of the comments on Cohen’s post points out,

we no longer have the luxury of time and uncertainty and having kids think for themselves

Maybe we should “occupy” our schools with our own signs. One benefit: thinking doesn’t cost anything.

I came across this wonderful Sunni Brown video today about the power of doodling in formulating and refining ideas. As a perennial doodler, I feel validated. As a teacher, I feel challenged. How do I usually react to a student who is doodling in class? (How do you?) Do I ever celebrate the doodle or even ask about it? I tend to use the old favorite “ignore it if it is not disturbing anyone” tactic when I see elaborate scribbles where student notes are supposed to be.  A less doodle-tolerant teacher might say that doodle laissez-faire will allow the student to discover the logical consequences of his/her inattention. As a more visual/artistic person, I secretly delight in seeing original cartoon figures and 3D graffiti in notebook or handout margins. But I honestly have never celebrated them as visual representations of thinking related to what we are discussing in class.

I wonder whether the student who draws would be willing/able to share about what he was thinking, perhaps on an illustrated blog post or Voicethread. I wonder what would happen if we posted the images on a class wiki, or collected many on Wallwisher or a bulletin board and asked others  for their reactions. I also wonder whether seemingly UNrelated doodles actually would help the artist retell or explain a concept that was in his/her auditory space while he/she was drawing.

Fast forward to a faculty meeting (or dreaded, day-long inservice). My agenda pages are always filled with doodles. When I pull them from the file folder months later, I look at the doodles and their relationship to the text, and I remember what I was thinking. This video says we each progress through various developmental steps as doodlers,  though at different rates. Surely the doodle-to-reenact-thinking  level is a one we would like our students to achieve. But first we must allow and respect the doodle, and make it clear that we expect doodlaccountability. Leave a little more white space. Ask about doodle meaning. Respect and share the doodle. Maybe even frame a few. Oh, and start paying attention to what you do(odle). We all might learn something.

I met a great group of motivated, creative teachers in our OK2Ask ™ Guided Wiki Walk sessions this week. (OK2Ask ™ is a series of free, online professional development “snack sessions” for teachers offered by TeachersFirst. We use an online classroom space from Blackboard/Collaborate, formerly Elluminate.) The teachers were creating their first wikis or improving on ones they had recently begun.  This two meeting offering included time between for the teachers to work on their wikis, then return in 48 hours to learn more, share, and ask a million questions.

One group was so quick to learn and so gregarious, they quickly had their own backchannel running in the chat space, helping answer each other’s questions during demonstrations. They even asked if they could critique each others’ work on the second day. So we diverted widely from our original plans  and let them go. Their enthusiasm was EXCITING. Their critique was insightful and discriminating. They talked about pedagogy and practicality. They fed each other ideas. They did everything we want our students to do. These teachers who had never met– a probably never will — scored an #eduwin. Their students are getting the best of the best.

One of the conversations I especially enjoyed was about using templates in wikispaces to differentiate for different learners.  You can create a “template” wiki page, such as the skeleton for a student project, but you could also create several templates or options for different levels of project challenge. Students click to create a new page, select the template and – ta-da — their wiki project  is started. Right away, the chat buzzed about how to do this without appearing to single out one student over another. Should we perhaps offer all the various templates as options? Or perhaps name them with evens/odds that do not show a clear “level,” so it is easy to simply say, “Sam why don’t you try one of the even numbered templates.” We also talked about using a past student project as a sample or use it to create a template. You can click to create a new template “from” any page that already exists in that wiki, then edit the template as you wish. So if past students have generated unprecedented project options, you can add them to the bank of templates, perhaps stripping out the finished work to reveal the skeleton of a new project format.

As a teacher, I always fear offering a “sample”project. The teacher-pleasers make theirs identical. The perfectionists think they can ONLY do theirs the same way. The minimalists will never go further, and even creative kids often squelch the urge to do something different to conform to the model of school success. The helicopter parents compare their child’s work against the example and tweak it, thinking no one is looking.

Just as our OK2Ask™ session diverted from its original template thanks to participant input, I love the flexibility of any tool that allows projects and products to become springboards to unexpected, broader options. Thanks wikispaces and thanks to the teachers who continue to make OK2Ask™ a load of collaborative fun. #eduwin.

I spent most of the weekend prepping for one of my #ISTE11 presentations, “Cycles vs. Checklists: Fostering Creative Process in an Accountability World,”  In the process, I learned a few things that actually became part of the presentation:

1. one place is better than multiple places
2. color coding works
3. I never have to throw anything away

One the the best things about submitting ISTE proposals a eight or nine months before you actually give the presentation is the delightfully long incubation time to pull the presentation together in your head, make it better,  let it evolve to a higher plain. During the time from acceptance (December) to delivery (June), you collect, refine, do more research, talk to colleagues, read, read, read — and eventually create. At some point, it seems that everything you run across in your browsing and tweet-reading relates to what your upcoming presentation topic.

Along the way, you grab ideas and toss them into storage. In my case, Diigo seemed great at first because I could tag and add notes on the angle that particular image or article or video provides on creativity and creative process. But I also had my own ideas popping into my head: pithy things to say, questions to ask, things I wonder about, etc.– all related to the preso topic.  So I jotted some of them in a word doc on my cluttered desktop. About three months out, I also began a linoit wall– they call it a “canvas”–* which I dubbed my “idea bin.” I filled it with stickies and video clips and links, all related to the preso topic.  [*I chose linoit.com over Wallwisher because it has an app version for iOS users. Wallwisher uses Flash so would prevent the iPad folks from “seeing” and participating in the space. I considered Evernote, but I like the ease of lino.it for newbies. I also wanted to try something new to learn it.] Unfortunately, my own lack of consistency meant my idea collections were in three places. The lesson I learned: when it comes time to cull, arrange, and construct the actual presentation,  three attics filled with ideas are unmanageable. I had duplicates, lost things between the cracks, and wasted a lot of time.

Having learned that lesson, I tossed almost everything into my linoit “idea bin,” with the intention of sharing it during the preso as a model.  The result is a very cluttered space, especially it you are an outline-style person, which I am not. To help myself out, I found that color coding was huge! I sorted by making the “thinking question” stickies one color, the “MUST include” quotes another color, and so forth. If I had been really organized, I would have used tags on each sticky to sort, but I am visual, so I went for color. I even played with fonts and shrinking the relative size of less important ideas. Note that I intentionally did not “finish” color coding/sorting so people could see an idea-bin-in-progress. I LOVE this process and will use it again. It fits me.

An added benefit: That idea bin isn’t going anywhere.  I don’t have to throw anything out! I still have all the unused ideas as fodder for blog posts, future presentations, articles, maybe even a book. I am an idea hoarder, and having an omni-present, accessible place to throw things is right up my alley. Another lesson learned.

I have learned more than I could ever share about my topic, something about a tool, and something about myself in the process of preparing this presentation. And isn’t that what we want our kids to do?

If you are going to ISTE, I hope you will join me Wednesday, 6/29/2011, 10:15am–11:15am PACC 204B. If not, You will be able to see loads of related materials and resources — the equivalent of “handouts”– on the presentation support pages after June 29.

ISTE 2011 is just three weeks away, and I am as bad as the kids who procrastinate on projects. Circumstances have made it tough to wrap up my presentations, work I would normally have pretty much completed by now. Typically, I’d be adding extras at this point. Maybe this is a good experience for me. Now I know how the kids feel when they have no control over circumstances and end up working down to the wire. Yes, there are such things as personal accountability (I am a big proponent of pointing it out) and planning. Then there are occurrences and convergences you simply could not anticipate. For the kids, it may be the parent who simply does not share enough computer time or who does not have the money to buy a new printer cartridge. It may be the family trip your student did not realize was that weekend– the same one she had set for doing the project. Or it may be the younger siblings she is supposed to babysit. Even the most responsible student can become entangled in circumstances that force a rushed project.

How can we tell whether this is a controllable situation or not?  How do we know which speech to give to that student: the you-should-have-planned-ahead  speech or the how-can-you-reprioritize-to-make-the-best-of-the-time-that’s-left speech or the it’s-not-the-only-grade-you-will-get speech? Or is a speech really going to make a difference, anyway?

The important thing is the learning experience. I am going to select my own “speech” for my ISTE presentations: the how-can-you-reprioritize-to-make-the-best-of-the-time-that’s-left speech. I suggest that we need to ask our students to select the speech they should be hearing, too. Even better, as we promote creativity and more project-based learning, we need to make this discussion part of the experience. Just as we ask kids to develop intrapersonal awareness of their ideal creative surroundings, we must help them become aware of how they handle roadblocks and obstacles, self-made and external.

These skills do not show on tests or state standards, but they matter. A lot. In life. Which speech do you give yourself? How do you handle the detours?

It’s late on a Friday before a long weekend. I have been thinking off and on all day about John T Spencer’s post about Why We Paint Murals (thanks @ShellTerrell and Tweetdeck). Now those thoughts have turned a little surreal– or maybe not. If you are looking for a straightforward opinion piece, stop now. If willing, breathe deeply and dive into my mental swim.

Spencer got me thinking about the space where we learn and our drive to make that space our own. I, too, have shared butcher paper walls and seen students seize the space as finally theirs.  I love what they write and ask and draw when the paper goes up. I have also seen ideas in other classrooms: atypical ways of moving the furniture around a hub for learning, rooms where vertical space suddenly becomes part of the landscape, classrooms as environmental art pieces.  While it might be nice — at times — to remove classroom walls, there are positive aspects of walls, too. Walls are our surroundings and partially define who we are as a group of learners. Spencer’s video shows students making the space their own with brushes of paint and personality. If we could have it, what would a class Dream Space for learning and thinking look like?  Here is my stream of Dream Space ideas.

Surround:  verb to noun

The walls of the Dream Space hold nothing in. They surround us with experiences. The dreaded (and much reviled) IWB, if one has been put here,  can be part of this “surround” as a place for students to create and collaborate. Unlike butcher paper, this electronic surround can be saved, erased, sent, “finger painted” and edited, text-recognized, and used as a collection point for leaking ideas. What else should surround us? Walls of sound, perhaps? Walls of light or dark? Walls of images. I would love an IP addressable imagespace– floor to ceiling — to which we could “send” images any time, simply by knowing the address. The people we know could send us their back yard or their llama. The scientist we know could send us an amoeba. We could send things to ourselves from our phones or our weekends. We could bring in our worlds to wrap us in visual mind graffiti. The Dream Space for thinking is our surround.

Flip the walls

Just as we grow accustomed to the walls we create, take a day in our Dream Space to  Flip the Walls again. What is on the back of this wall? Erase it all and ask us to show the back of our thoughts, like the back of a web page.

Bring it ‘Round

For some reason, my mental images of the Dream Space persistently appear more like the stand-up omnimax theater spaces that have no corners. The Dream Space does not have places for learning to hide or get lost in an angular trap. Ideas in this Space can bounce freely and endlessly because they continue to deflect off the circular hug of thinking.

Then the door clunks open on sturdy school hinges, and the spell breaks.  A skeptical voice inquires, “Why is this teacher lady dreaming about a classroom that doesn’t exist? What is the point here?” In my Dream Space, even one that has suddenly morphed back to a regular classroom with rows of desks, a chorus of voices simply calls out, “Come on in!”

I spent some time exploring the Webby Award winners this week. Put away your iPad or iPhone (must have Flash) and open this on the biggest screen you can find. Turn up the speakers and turn off everyone and everything else around you.

Then tell me how any school anywhere can question the importance of having Art in every child’s life.

See the miracles of light and color.

Play the world through Monet’s eyes and your hand on the mouse/trackpad. Touch Art.

Whisper your amazement as you live Art, and tell us how the ripples in the water are not “necessary” to being  “productive citizen” or a thinking member of society.

Share this with a child of five or fifty. Then ask how we can cut the Arts from schools. They are no more frivolous or “extra” than light itself. Just ask Monet.

[I cannot include an image with this post. This experience is my image.]

I have enjoyed reading Shelly Blake-Plock’s 2009 predictions of 21 things that will be obsolete by 2020 and subsequent response to his naysayers (March, 2011). Although I have some doubts about the optimism of some of the predictions, I find myself singing along with several of the  ideas. Certainly most of us — even those who advocate for leveraging the power of technology for new ways of teaching and learning– have our doubts about whether education can change that much that fast, but the rhythm beating inside these predictions is that today’s technological change is not just gadgets:

we’re not talking about computers anymore. We’re talking about the way that we connect to one another as human beings.

We’re also talking about how we connect to our own creative, thoughtful selves. I recall a day in the early 1990s when one of our local school board members refused to enter the brand new computer lab at one of the elementary schools where I taught.  His boastfully stated reason: “I will not enter that room because no learning takes place there.” While I know there were many poor uses of that lab, it happened to be the place where I witnessed a remarkable transformation just weeks later. I watched a fourth grader (call him Randy) discover Hyperstudio (v.1 or 2, I think) and simply go crazy. For the next four months until school got out, Randy spent every moment he could weasel to sit at that computer ad create a Hyperstudio stack about … well, honestly, I don’t remember which animal it was. That stack lead to another and another. Teachers had to require Randy to go out for recess. The principal would stop by to suggest that sunshine was important. By the end of fifth grade, fed by a brand new, dial-up Internet connection at his home, Randy had taught himself HTML and was teaching others. By the end of ninth grade, he had taken all the cast-off, painfully slow PCs he could gather from trash cans and built his own supercomputer in a high school storage closet. The custodians rolled their carts down the hall past Randy in that warm, unventilated closet, stringing cat-5 cable he had snagged from who-knows-where. By the time he finished two years of undergrad, Randy was spending the summer at Los Alamos doing research.  All of this started from being able to create. I saw it happen.My favorite verse from Blake-Plock’s song, however, is this powerful charge to all of us. I want to sing this from electronic rooftops:

Teachers: you are the most amazing people on the planet. You are gifted with a fine mind and great compassion. You handle adversity and trauma and you inspire the future. You are going to have to be the ones to figure this out. You can’t rely on your administrators to do this for you. They are busy. They don’t always see what’s going on or what’s available. So you’ve got to make it happen.

My optimistic prediction by 2020: Creative School. Creative in the same three ways Randy modeled:

1. Creative for students. The impulse to create is closely followed by the impulse to share. With technology changing “the way that we connect to one another as human beings” and facilitating creative process, school becomes a place where learning IS creating. Randy wanted to share via Hyperstudio, and share he did!
2. Creative in making do with whatever you can find. If you don’t have a lot of technology, use what you do have. Kids are very good at that, if given permission to put things together, problem-solve, and experiment. My one caveat is that there needs to be an Internet connection in there somewhere. If they have to schedule ways to share it or find ways to network it, they will, especially if teachers band together to do the same (we did it in the early days of Internet). As Blake-Plock says, “You are going to have to be the ones to figure this out.” Luckily, kids like Randy are on the team.
3. Creative in looking at things another way. If we think we have delineated the “replicable model” for “21st century learning,”  anyone who really gets it laugh at us. The whole point is that things change too fast. The dream model needs to be built upon creative flexibility. Randy saw throw-away computers as new opportunities. If kids don’t learn one way or the learning they need to survive changes, we immediately change routes. All of us need to be nimble thinkers.

I am often accused of being idealistic. I figure after 27 years in classrooms, I can be as idealistic as I want to be. I have earned it through years of seeing it all. I hope I am seeing clearly as I look to 2020: the era of Creative School.

Creating is very personal — close to the soul and perilously self-revealing. Those who are moderately successful at creating, people like published writers, performance musicians, and visual artists who are not starving, are generally articulate when asked how they go about their work. I have found some marvelous videos and interviews where people talk about how they go about painting or writing. Artist Kimberly Brooks spells out 8 stages to her painting process, concluding with:

(8) Resolution. Very elusive. The composer Aaron Copland said he didn’t finish compositions so much as abandon them. When it’s finally over, it feels like a whole relationship has ended. And then the anticipated rush of doing it all over begins again. [I love the concept of “abandoning” works at the end. Though cruel, it also implies that the work has a separate life of its own by this time.]

My bookshelves and Diigo account house an ever-growing collection of writers’ and artists’ discussions on how they create. I even have a few scientific analyses from adventurous experimenters explaining how innovations occurred in their lab.  What I notice is that those who are willing to bare their process are already successful and therefore can talk about creating from behind a safe curtain  labeled “success.”

If I were to ask, say — a teacher– how he/she creates things, I  wouldn’t expect to hear as much. Most adults will pooh-pooh the idea that they are ever creative, much less open up about how it happens (if it happens). Having lived for decades in a culture where someone else defines creative success, usually by some sort of juried process, we adults assume the jury knows what they are talking about. So we only talk about our own creativity after receiving the jury’s blessing.

Enter the world of YouTube, web 2.0 tools, and public commenting. Enter a generation (or two or three) willing to spill their guts and show their mental underwear on Facebook. Will this generation be more willing to talk about their own creative process after the “success” of publishing/performing/exhibiting wherever and whenever they want?  Do they even view their electronically facilitated play as creative process? Are they/we driven to carry creative work through the stages that Kimberly Brooks and others describe? Or is a dropping left on the surface of the web just that:  an abandoned, stillborn product? Are those who create with the toys of the web driven to return again and again, refining, remixing, even storehousing their discarded scraps for use another time? Can these tools be as powerful as any paint, word, or engineering lab? I think so.  But I believe we need the creators to be aware of and talk about their process to reach a higher level, a sort of creative self-actualization (ugh, another old theory, you say…)

I would love to work with some teachers and their students to find out more about creative process among today’s middle and high school kids. But first we need the teachers to recognize creative process in themselves. As I said in a recent post,

Teaching is a blessedly creative process, if we allow it to be. We sculpt a product — a plan for learning. We try it, revise it, tear it apart, remix its pieces, and try it again.

Talk about it. I dare you to ask your colleagues in the faculty room about their latest creative accomplishment.