Think Like a Teacher

This is the final episode in a long fable, and perhaps the start of another. Unravel the previous chapters here.

The town of Forwardthink has completely changed. At the stroke of midnight  (about 1 pm Pacific Time) on May 12, the doors of the Town Hall opened, and an arm tacked one final message on the door. From inside, the sounds of music and dancing and jingling keys of gold echoed across the near-empty square. Outside, the few remaining Innovators rushed to read the message.

It was a vaguely familiar sheet of paper with a scrap pasted at the end– pasted onto the same message that had been posted for others in mid-March. The scrap bore a few new words explaining that the winners were already inside the Town Hall, apparently ushered in by a secret passageway several days before.  As the handful of remaining, bedraggled and tired Innovators huddled to read and re-read, a small voice from among them sighed,

“The Elders did not even take the time to cross out the old version of the “go away” message and start a fresh piece of paper to tell us they did not want us. They have simply pasted a scrap of a sentence at the end of an old message. I guess we were not worthy enough to see the Elders or hear their actual words.”

“But look! We can see the Winners through the windows!” cried another as he jumped up and down to see over the high sill and beyond the newly opened blinds.

They took turns for a minute or two, boosting one another by the foot so each could see the party of Winning Innovators. But their energy for jumping drained quickly. The MySciLife Innovators drew away from the window and stepped to the sidewalk together.

“I was SURE you would be among the winners,” came a voice from a passerby. Others who passed hummed in agreement.

Epilogue

Although the Elders of Forwardthink have not invited the MySciLife Innovators  to join the Winners inside the Town Hall, these Innovators did not simply pack their knapsacks. As the small gathering around the Town Hall dispersed, careful ears caught the MySciLifers words, “I heard there may be a different kind of Elders in other villages who may be willing to help. Let’s look at our maps, then set out for the unknown territories. If we stick together, we will find our own key of gold somewhere.”

Moral:

In a tug of war between the wisdom of the crowd and competition, who wins?

[In the spirit of crowdly wisdom, insert your moral here]

There is a stir  in Forwardthink.  MySciLife, our finalist entry in the Digital Media and Learning Competition, is complete, including this video.  One of these days I’ll upgrade our version of WordPress so we can simply embed it here. But for now…go take a look.

The town of Forwardthink is abuzz during these final days before the deadline for videos and proposed budgets.  Who will “win”? Who knows!?  But the process of imagining, thinking through, and visually explaining a whole new way of learning using digital media has Innovators twisting every digital knob, mashing together different types of files,  converting, combining, and clickety-clacking mice or smooth, glassy touchpads in their excitement. And we are the”old people” who are trying to give the real students a chance to learn this way. What a wonderful, nesting Matryoshka doll/box of learning: we learn how to show our ideas so real students can say it even better outside our carefully crafted box. Their box of learning is actually the larger one that envelopes our vision and grows yet another and another layer.  We “innovators” have carved a small but beautiful vision, the smallest inner seedling of a doll/box. The best thing that can happen is for students to encase it in their own, more artful ideas.

Back in Forwardthink, we Innovators are busy marveling at how pretty our starter Matryoshka doll/boxes are. We hover about the Town Hall doors. The Elders have not even told us when to expcet The Announcement. The Wise Crowds are still busy sharing their insights. And we wait to learn:

In a tug of war between the wisdom of the crowd and competition, who wins?

 I think it’s the  Matryoshka dolls of learning who ultimately win. We are just part of the process.

In a tug of war between the wisdom of the crowd and competition, who wins?

Our narrator has been scurrying about in the land of Forwardthink . The story continues! You may want to refresh your memory of the first two chapters here and here.

On the day scheduled for the Big Announcement, it came to pass that the clocks in Forwardthink froze. For nearly four days, the Innovators hovering about outside the town hall grumbled and wondered as time stood still. Although an occasional Tweetboat arrived on the nearby river carrying possible news, the Innovators knew not whom they should trust. The few who remained close by the Town Hall doors multitasked silently as they waited to hear who would have the final opportunity to compete for the Keys of Gold.

Suddenly, and without notice, there was once a new,announcement tacked to the doors, and E-owl messengers were sent far and wide to all Innovators, as well.  The Finalists’ names appeared on a list, along withthe declaration that the Wise Crowd would be invited in for commenting again “soon.”  There was a small map instructing the Finalists to meet at the Peak in 27 days where they must present the mandatory Magic Picture and a lined purse prepared for Keys of Gold.

Among the Innovators still huddled at the portal to the Town Hall, cheers rang out while some slinked quietly away, trudging off on another unmarked trail toward innovation, seeking a different wise crowd.  Those whose names were on The List soon muffled their cheers as they saw the map to the peak and realized both the distance and the treacherous path ahead. They knew that the task of creating a Magic Picture and sewing the perfect lined purse would take many days before their first footfall along the path to the Peak. It was also rumored that unknown trolls and demons might line the trail. Something called the Wicked WebGlitch of the West had been eating Innovator’s ideas and making them disappear. Surely the journey would be fraught with stress and peril.

One very special team of Innovators is elated to be among The Finalists and has been working through many long nights creating their Magic Picture. They hope have begun sewing their lined purse, as well. As they stir every Innovator Potion they have to help in the tasks, they continue to marvel at the thoughts of the crowd who visit their MySciLife web display and share wisdom with  Innovators and Elders alike. They hope your wisdom will give them  strength to scale  up to the Digital Media and Learning Competition peak, earning the Golden Keys.  Soon they will hand the Elders their Magic Picture and lined purse. Then all will wait once again for many days as we hope to learn:

In a tug of war between the wisdom of the crowd and competition, who wins?

Won’t you share your wisdom with this special team of Innovators before April 19?

I am speechless. Those who know me are probably stunned that anything could silence this mouth. But the US DOE has done it to me and to millions of students, teachers, and minds with one stroke. They have eliminated funding for the National Writers Project (NWP) as part of the proposed Education budget. Carolyn Foote and Bud Hunt give the details, including Bud’s efforts to ascertain the rationale behind such a crazy decision. The story continues on their blogs, and I hope you will follow it as you scream via whatever medium works for you.

I am stunned at the notion that the NWP  might not have demonstrable impact on student achievement or might have to compete to prove its impact. The NWP’s impact is not only STUDENT achievement. It is discovery of adult voices for life. The NWP is the mental musical accompaniment that helps writers of all ages and stages find their voices, voices they will use to sing, speak, convince, debate, and contribute forever. Teachers who participate in the NWP go from classroom voices to real world voices. The NWP is not a school-specific approach to writing. The NWP makes writers.

The summer I spent in a NWP affiliate program drew me closer to articulating creative process and metacognition than anything I had ever experienced. I lived, survived, and thrived as I watched a kindergarten teacher next to me go from fear of writing to celebrating her voice among her peers and even in a wider world. The NWP makes writers who make writers who make writers. If there were ever a viral learning experience, the NWP is it.

Policy makers and education critics tout the strength of alternative teacher certification programs in bringing experienced practitioners from any given field into the classroom. The NWP makes those in the classroom into practitioners of writing, lifelong writers who continue to hone their craft as they live among other (younger) writers. The NWP allows teachers to learn among their students in a community of writers and to articulate the experience with more authority than a nuclear scientist who walks into a physics class. The NWP provides both the experience and the vocabulary to help each teacher start a writing garden. The NWP experience is viral. The NWP makes writers who make writers who make writers.

You are a blog reader. You are benefiting from the NWP.  Every student of every NWP teacher-participant benefits. And they go on to jobs where they can explain, argue, email, tweet — and perhaps stop to personally question word choice or paragraph substance as they live, survive, and thrive as writers in a world often bereft of deliberate word choice or thought about how we speak and write. Isn’t that the community of literate adults we want? The NWP makes writers who make writers who make writers.

Now it is your turn to write to someone about the NWP. If you never knew much about the NWP or are not sure if it has had an impact on you, ask. Ask your former English teacher, kindergarten teacher, or any adult whose writing you admire: did you ever have anything to do with anyone who had participated in the NWP? Did your teachers?  If we could trace the connections between writers we respect and contact with NWP, how many degrees of separation would there be? Maybe we should be asking that out loud. If I could reach out to the thousands of students I taught over the years, I would remind them: I was a fellow of a NWP affiliate. And they would conclude: The NWP makes writers who make writers who make writers. Pass it on.

I admire someone who is willing to change his/her mind. I don’t mean fickleness. I mean changing one’s mind as in thinking deeply, allowing ideas to steep and evolve, finally realizing that thoughtful deliberation has changed one’s intellectual travel plan. The New York Times today documents just such a “U-turn” by Diane Ravitch, educational historian and scholar. If I were giving a project-based learning grade to Dr. Ravitch, she would earn maximum points for process and extra credit for risk-taking. For a professional “scholar” to change her mind is the most risky and admirable way to model true learning we could ever hope to witness.

Whether or not you agree with Dr. Ravitch’s current positions, her intellectual process of intellectual evolution is exactly what we need in our young people and leaders both now and into the future. Perhaps it is the willingness to change one’s mind that has been most lacking in recent years as ed reform has heated up and we have worried about the very future of learning in a new century. If teachers, schools, parents, communities, and policy makers are not willing to change their minds through carefully deliberate process, we are mired.

I have no idea how we make mind-changing an accredited process, component of adequate yearly progress, or a measurable datapoint, but it must somehow be part of the process of 21st century learning. Forget the trendy century label. A mind is a wonderful thing to change, no matter what the century.

(previously, in the town of Forwardthink…)

The elders of the town of Forwardthink have surprised the Innovators once again.  A mere week after they invited Innovators from far and wide to re-display their latest ideas (even those that entered after the first deadline), they have locked the doors of the town hall. The doors have a generic notice explaining that the elders will be back in March to announce the decree of the magical judges about who will enter the finals in the tug-of-war between the Wisdom of Crowds and Outright Competition. The windows are covered, though a definite glow passes ’round the edges of the room-darkening shades. There is life moving about inside the hall of Innovative Ideas. Moving figures and glimmers cast small slivers onto the ground outside as the Innovators wait, separated from their ideas left behind in the display hall. No one can see their precious Innovations any longer. The Wise crowd can no longer comment. Occasionally a tweet flies out via a small trap door high up on the oaken doors, much as the pronouncements of the guard at the Emerald City: come back soon to see what we’re doing behind these Doors of Mystery.

Outside, Innovators huddle and occasionally intermingle as they speculate or flatter each other about the likely results. Some wander off in search of the next town’s competition. Separated from their orphaned Innovations, the Innovators find less to talk about and share. The creative juices chill as each innovator seeks rudimentary shelter and a strategy for waiting and wondering.

Perhaps the Innovators will band together to find other routes and other locations. But for now, Innovation has been stymied. And the question remains:

In a tug of war between the wisdom of the crowd and competition, who wins? 

I recently came across this post about task analysis, an approach to helping many students master new concepts by carefully breaking them down into steps:

I believe that every new skill can be broken down into steps. We follow a certain procedure no matter what we do. Everything has its own recipe.

I fear that so much of education has swung in this behaviorist direction that we are losing touch with the countervailing trend in what our students do on their own, with their own time and self-directed learning. We have also created entire generations of teachers who learn — and therefore teach– via this step-by-step approach.

There is no question that for many learners, both young and not-so-young, staircases work. The risers are of equal size and measure out to arrive exactly at the landing after the prescribed number of upward swings of the legs. No single step is too taxing, and success is virtually guaranteed, provided we allow for differing rates of speed in going up the steps. Once a teacher masters the analytical skill of measuring out and calculating the amount of rise and number of steps, he/she is likely to guide most learners to the desired landing.

Now look at how our students learn when left to their own devices. Instead of staircases, some students’ learning takes place via giant, expanded Habitrail-like environments with wheels, chutes, interwoven tubes and shortcuts, and even a tube with an open-ended escape the big, wide world. The speed and rapid turns of these learners may not be suited to staircases, but they often have no other choice. They may see tasks a big pictures, with favored route that go by way of the big,wide world. They may even chose to climb three times farther and descend to the desired landing. They may never even cross that landing becuase they have built a direct chute to a whole different level. In a web 2.0 world, learning can be much more of a build-your-own Habitrail than a well-designed staircase.

Some kids prefer running up and down stairs over and over. As adults, we assume that everyone wants to go up. Some learners want to start at the top then appreciate the steps by exploring them (or striding briefly past a few at a time) on the way down.

I sincerely hope that those who teach do not forget that staircases, no matter how admirably engineered, may not be the way their students learn. Trying to navigate even a well-designed staircase can be a bruising experience for the leapers and learners who choose another way.

In a tug of war between the wisdom of the crowd and competition, who wins?

The elders of the small town of Forwardthink, nestled at the delta of Hereandnow River, declared that they wanted the very best Innovators to move to their town. They had heard that many innovative thinkers and other wise people lived beyond the Hereandnow watershed and could help the town of Forwardthink live up to its name. To find the Innovators and lure them in, they decided to award the Forwardthink Keys of Gold to the best Innovators. So the elders planned a competition and announced it far and wide, sending messengers out by Tweetboats and The RSSFeeder ships:

Innovators welcome. Earn Forwardthink Keys of Gold for the most innovative ideas.

They carefully posted the rules of the Forwardthink competition on the doors to the Town Hall and sent copies along on the Tweetboats and RSSFeeder ships. The deadline came, and the First Fortnight of competition began.

Each innovator displayed the very best of ideas in the Forwardthink Town Hall for all to see. Once the displays are erected, visitors from far and wide traveled to see them. The elders grinned as they watched the visitors mingling among the displays. They encouraged visitors to comment. The rules on the Town Hall doors explained that during the First Fortnight the Wise Crowd would help the Innovators improve their ideas. The elders planned to close the doors after the First Fortnight so the Innovators could clean up the scribed comments and straighten their displays, perhaps even combining with another Innovator’s display.   The doors of the Town Hall remained open 24/7 as visitors appeared and scribed their thoughts on each exhibit.  The Innovators even talked among themselves, commenting on each other’s ideas and pondering ways to learn from them. For they knew that sharing their ideas aloud and listening to others would truly breed the best Innovations — and possibly Keys of Gold!

The elders stood by with arms folded. listening to the Wisdom of the Crowd and talking with the occasional visitors, as well. But none of the Innovators heard the conversations with the elders.

On the evening of the 14th day, as the Innovators prepared to rework their displays, the elders held a special meeting. They quietly took down the rules from the Town Hall doors and used an enchanted spider’s web-eraser to changed one paragraph:

Please plan to learn from the Wisdom of Crowds and rework your display after the First Fortnight. Only those who shared a display in time for the First Fortnight and stood with it throughout the First Fortnight will be allowed to share a display during the Second Fortnight.

became:

Please plan to learn from the Wisdom of Crowds and rework your display after the First Fortnight. All who wish to create a display during the Second Fortnight are welcome to compete for the Keys of Gold, including newcomers from the Wise Crowd.

The Innovators were stunned as they watched new displays appear. The elders clapped their hands to see such innovation and quickly forgot the old rules from the First Fortnight. They forgot the copies that had traveled far and wide via Tweetboats and RSSFeeder ships. In their greed for Innovative ideas, they forgot the Innovators of the First Fortnight, for the ideas were the most important thing.

And how does this fable end? The tale has yet to be told. Perhaps the Wise Crowd will know.

In a tug of war between the wisdom of the crowd and competition, who wins?

[To those who are mystified by this post and wonder what it has to do with educational technology, thinking and learning, or teaching, I suggest that you can find hints to this open-ended fable in some of my previous posts. I certainly do not know what the moral of the story will be.]

So Apple has come out with the iPad. Not news. We knew it was coming. Everyone is venturing their predictions about this, the latest in a successful series of innovations from a company we expect to roll out new things at least once a year. Ed tech people tweet about where the iPad might fit into (or “revolutionize”?) education. David Pogue critiques, the ATT network-busters scoff, and we all read every word of it, secretly wishing someone handed us a free iPad to test and review.

The same week, 721 collaborative groups of creative folks  share their latest innovations for digital media and learning. With far less fanfare than Apple — but equal passion and hope– they toss carefully crafted 300 word catalysts for change into a web-based competition for thousands of dollars and a chance to alter the face of learning. [Full disclosure: I am one of them.]

The same week, hundreds of thousands of teachers wrap up their mid-year grades, probably entering them into an online or electronic grade book program designed ten years ago.  They dig out the materials for next week and check the plans to see what they want to change this time around. They add a new web site, change the requirements, or find an alternate way to have students explore the topic that comes up next in the curriculum.

The cycles of change and sameness rarely allow any of us much time to pause and reflect.  On a Friday afternoon I can become skeptical that those who always plan for change will be the instigators while others who rarely plan for it will only stumble into it. But then I recall last night.

Approximately twenty teachers from Toronto to Florida to Michigan joined in the second session of an OK2Ask offering, excited to create and use wikis in their classrooms. Are wikis new? Maybe not new the way iPads are or DML entries could be, but these teachers welcome fresh ideas: new ways to  draw students into their own learning, and new ways to invigorate their own professional lives. Their pace may not be the same as Apple’s, organizing strategic “rollouts” months in advance. The changes they propose are not newsworthy. But neither will be the accomplishments of an individual third grader or a high school health class.

We need to keep some perspective on  the relative value of change. Maybe everyone needs a little Friday afternoon skeptical pause to trace the ripples emanating out from the innovations we observe in progress. I am not willing to discount the small ponds. Fluid mechanics sometimes have a funny way of making ripples go a long way with less splash.

The thing I enjoy most about teaching is the chance to dream. I have been lucky during my entire adult life that my jobs have allowed me to create and implement new ideas with kids, not locked into a script or fixed curriculum sequence with specific required materials or approach. I have always been encouraged to dream blue sky “what if” scenarios for new ways to inspire and experience learning together with my students or teaching colleagues.

Today that blue sky grew wider as I collaborated together with three top-notch educators, Jim Dachos of GlogsterEDU, Ollie Dreon of Millersville University, and Louise Maine of Punxsutawney Area High School (PA) , to submit an application for a Learning Labs grant from the MacArthur/HASTAC Digital Media and Learning Competition. What a rush of excitement it has been to brainstorm, dream, and distill our ideas into 300 words or less. The excitement of the ideas keeps growing in inverse to the number of words we have available to explain it. This project, like the learning environment it envisions, is as wide as the sky and has taken on a life of its own.

(Ed. Jan 27): MacArthur/HASTAC have released the entries for public comment on the DML competition site. Please stop by, read our entry, and comment. We value your input as we prepare for the resubmission phase where we incorporate new ideas garnered from the greater public.  This competition has VERY quick turnaround, so please do it NOW. This phase ends in less than 2 weeks. Be a part of our blue sky: http://www.dmlcompetition.net/pligg/story.php?title=543

Our sky is expanding, and I cannot wait to see where the horizon may move as comments on the application expand the blue sky of our dreams.