Think Like a Teacher

This Earth Day I am struck by two very different  instances of the power among youthful survivors. While adults all over the globe bemoan the frightening state of our planet (our schools, our nation, our economy…), I watched a team of elementary kids in Portland Oregon who clearly know the power  to survive and thrive. Their webcast from their school garden, both the more formal presentations and the informal Q/A at the end, bears witness to their ASSUMPTION that they will make positive changes in the world around them. They are experts at composting, water conservation, organic vegetables, and native plants of their area. More importantly, they are experts at being in charge of something. They know they –and their garden– will survive because they feel empowered and knowledgeable. They are not afraid to ask questions when they don’t know something because they trust the adults around them to help them look for themselves, not tell them what to see.

At the same time, a tiny newborn at the opposite end of the country continues to defy the odds, surprising the doctors as she wards off infection, remains stallwart through major heart surgery at birth, and lies completely unable to talk to us except with the very wise eyes of a three-week-old. Her parents’ blog tells her story and shares photos of those eyes. She knows that she will survive, and SHE is in charge, in spite of all the brilliant medical assistance the adults give her.

Somewhere around puberty we learn doubt. As survivors come of age, our power lessens. We hear more and more of others’ power and increasingly subvert ourselves to others’ judgments. This Earth Day– and in our schools — let the message be about the young survivors. Their hands cradle any new growth they can nurture. They are simply excited to have the chance to share the experience with us, through those very wise eyes.

I talked this morning with a representative from a university where I earned a graduate degree, and he asked me to describe my dream scenario for an event I would like to see happen on their campus, something that would follow my passion. Always willing to brainstorm and dream on a moment’s notice, I spun a scenario on the spot, and I continue to allow the idea to incubate. So here is how it looks so far (incubation time: 2 hours, ten minutes). Feel free to add to the dream. Of course, this might someday become a reality, so please don’t rip off my ideas without at least talking to me first. Think of this as Creative Commons with attribution and limited distribution for ideas (I know…you can’t copyright an idea, anyway…).

When/where: one week, summer — sometime (indefinite year), on the university campus but simultaneously via virtual experience from anywhere on the web

Who: a combination of classroom teachers (K-12), teachers-to-be, articulate high school and middle school kids, maybe some kids involved in on-campus summer programs for K-12 kids, people from TeachersFirst, people (ANY level) who infuse technology well in their teaching and learning, anyone who wants to join in online

What: A replicable “Infusion Project.” Modeled loosely after the National Writer’s Project, teachers come to learn together. The special feature of this project: they collaborate and learn alongside kids who could be their students, other teachers, and quasi-experts: people who are excited, experienced, articulate, and supportive about effective use of technology as a tool for learning. In a non-threatening environment, teachers can learn about tools and learning from students who are comfortable with the tools and eager to use them. The experienced “experts” can share and support other teachers who are just feeling out new ways to teach (and learn). In small groups of mixed expertise, the project can use good theory and practical knowledge and experience to let new ideas explode into the curriculum of local teachers and those at a distance. Groups would include: a K-12 student (or two), a teacher who wants to learn, an “expert” (teacher who has had some success), a teacher-to-be,  and one or more other teachers who join in virtually. That’s as far as I have gotten, but I am thinking about how we could structure the tasks and exchanges so the whole  experienced in each group is greater than the parts and how the same experience could be replicated all over the world.

How: I need to think more about this part… money, stakeholders, politics, all that fun stuff.

Why: Here is a start on a bulleted stream-of consciousness (is that an oxymoron or what?) of reasons so far…

• Kids are comfortable with the tools but can benefit from hearing how teachers make decisions about teaching….and they can contribute their “side” of these decisions.
• Putting different points of view on ways to learn together can force all to talk about the “why” as well as the “how”
• Teachers uncomfortable with “looking stupid” might be willing to learn from students who are not in their own classes
• Including people from other locations allows the spread of ideas and injectsideas outside the local experience
• Creating a model that blends F2F and virtual collaboration will let teachers experience it wihtout being forced to plan it themselves

and more…

But I need to get back to today’s Tasks. I will let this one incubate a bit more (total incubation time now a little over three hours). Feel free to add to the dream.

Reading has definitely changed. Trent Batson and Nicholas Carr both know it, and so do all of us who pass through places like Think Like a Teacher.  Batson’s response and the original Carr piece, ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’ have me ready to click “write a post” before I finish bouncing between them. As soon as one piece has my attention (I found it on a trusted RSS feed),  I mentally highlight favorite quotes a la English major  and look for juicy bits to read and re-read. Carr is right that I am “power browsing,” but Batson is also right that the “loss” of books is actually a gain for critical thinking. I would go even further and say that reading has become an invitation to DO something.

When I taught elementary gifted kids, there were two distinct groups that emerged during independent project season each year: the Tell-alls  and the Sponges. The Tell-alls wanted to tell everyone everything they read and could not enjoy learning without the telling. During quiet research time in class, they called out, narrating each new discovery as they read or browsed the web. It wasn’t new knowledge until they shared it. The Sponges worked alone, never speaking a word, often so absorbed that they lost all their notes and personal belongings as if transported to an entirely separate location, living among the subjects of their research. When called back to our world and asked to prepare their choice of presentation to “show what you know,” the Sponges were at a loss and uttered malformed bits and pieces until I squeezed the sponge of their awkwardness with many prompts. The Sponges saw no need to DO anything with what they learned. The pleasure was purely personal.

I see the new way we read– thanks to technology — as a cure to both. The Tell-alls are web 1.0. They get their pleasure from the suck-in-and-spit-out of info, but the rest of us gain little from their pleasure. The Sponges are stand-alone processors without a network. Only with the evolution of multiple-tabs (I still have Carr and Batson open right now), feeds, blogs, and doo-dads can I have the very real pleasure of reading until I feel I must DO something. I once had a prof who always asked, “Now what will you DO with it?” as he handed back a good paper. The web (and email and RSS feeds and Facebook and cell phones…) ask that every time we READ.

Now what will you DO with this?

Last week, the folks in the international space station had to duck and cover as space junk came dangerously close to their orbiting haven. It seems that debris from various objects humans once shot into orbit continues to plague any active space mission. This danger clouds each advancing endeavor while, as NPR puts it, “experts continue to debate what can be done about all the trash that’s orbiting our planet.”

I sit at a traffic light, listening to this story, wondering…

…as experts continue to debate what can be done about all the (trash?) that has been shot into the orbit of education?

Is outdated school curriculum the space junk of  learning? Sometimes we see kids excited about what they are learning as they orbit the earth at 20,000 miles per intellectual hour. They experiment, discover, communicate and enjoy learning. Add the power of sharing this experience with others at a distance, and the process becomes even richer. But the shards of old, broken curriculum are a  constant threat. Just as young writers create their own interactive online books or narrate and annotate the uploaded images they have created, an alert sounds:

Warning: Incoming Space Junk. Change course to avoid collision! The curriculum says you need to be able to diagram a sentence and identify parts of speech. Course correction requires that you immediately stop and demonstrate these skills in regulation format to avoid catastrophe. Fire one number two pencil –oops, retrorocket — with bearing 1A 2E 3C in precisely 60 seconds.

Can you think of an instance where space junk nearly took out a viable learning mission? Have you ever taken refuge in an escape module as the debris whizzed by? What can be done about all the trash that’s orbiting?

OK, so my ego bounced this week at being named a “DABA” (Deserves A Bigger Audience) blogger. As I thought about it, my mind rolled over to all the kids I taught and the ways they reacted to unexpected feedback. They were changed people. And so I muse:

Doesn’t everybody deserve a bigger audience?

I started rewinding the reactions I saw when students absorbed just one little bit of extra recognition– even just from a quiet teacher comment. But when they approached projects with a broader audience, they REALLY became porous sponges to the flowing reactions, in turn creating better products than I ever imagined. There were kids who sweated for weeks, perfecting scripts for student-made TV shows worthy of a “Televiddy Award,” our middle school’s equivalent to the Emmys. There were kids who spent hours creating bald eagle, turkey, and vulture costumes and the accompanying “National Bird Pageant” script for a Bicentennial Minute that actually DID win a local Emmy once televised. Simply seeing it aired on TV was what they cared about. There were little second graders who, when they found out their inventions would be judged by an actual patent attorney and several high school “judges,” suddenly cared about whether their gadget truly worked (not required, but it sure mattered to them).

Is it any wonder that their achievement soared? Is it surprising that I find myself carefully revising my words in this post-DABA post?

We read the research about authentic learning, but how often do we remember that every kid is a DABA in some way. And most of us still perk up and suck in feedback from respected sources as adults. We just forget to give it as often as we should.

Whom will you dub a DABA today?

This is a story through a teacher’s eyes. This teacher was a veteran of many years and many trends over more than three decades. She was the kind of teacher who embraced each new trend as an opportunity and loved trying new things. She had discovered computers and the Internet early on and had become a techno-evangelist among teachers. More recently she had crossed over to join The Suits, the people who meet in the principal’s office wearing visitor badges, catching only glimpses of “Evan” or “Jamal” being hushed and scurried along at the end of the line and into the classroom door across from the office by a woman in a colorful sweater and “teacher shoes.” She had left the trenches to travel as an “expert.” But she savored the quick glimpses she could steal on her way into the principal’s office meetings.

On this particular day she visited two schools: one an elementary school, and one an elementary school building turned into district offices. The schools were in neighboring districts. There the similarities end.

As the kindergarten line skidded into the room across the hall from school office #1, our teacher signed herself in and printed a visitor badge from a laptop just inside the office, then settled into a wooden fifth-grader-sized chair around a table in the principal’s cluttered office. The principal pushed aside a few papers and a handmade book about a principal superhero, neatly handwritten on purple construction paper.

The small group talked about the upcoming Earth Day and a chance to use a new technology from a garden lab a mile from the school so students could stream video directly to the Web and tell about their applications of environmental science in the garden. The laptops and webcams would share the event with parents, other classrooms, and anyone who wanted to watch on the Web. When our teacher asked about any district policies that might limit streaming video, student-created content on the web, or use of web-based tools that require memberships and profiles, the principal smiled knowingly and suggested that he could get a parent release for the students involved and take care of it. Our teacher saw the knowing look as he went on to tell how he deployed new technologies among his teachers by modeling them in a staff meeting and then “letting them play for a while to see what ideas they come up with for their curriculum.”

The meeting ended and emails exchanged, our teacher signed herself and the others out and brushed past the hand-made tiles of the hallway mosaic and out into the sunshine.

Later in the day and 10 miles away, the group stopped in a parking lot and rang the doorbell as the desk buzzed them into school #2, the former elementary school. They signed in on the sheet and clipped their visitor badges into their suit lapels as they were ushered through aisles of horizontal files and name plates, finally arriving at a windowless conference room. Everyone exchanged business cards across the empty laminate table and began the conversation about that same new technology. The Gatekeepers of the Network pronounced the need for streaming video to be unproven and, yes—theoretically possible, but only available if someone could show that it was needed. The Gatekeepers declared that even wifi had not been installed in their schools because no one had shown that it was needed. But perhaps this technology could be used to track the school busses or help with emergency evacuation plans. The Gatekeepers had a Robust and Secure Network and –by the way—far better tax support than their neighboring district whom they declared to be “broke.”

On the way out, walking in the single file line of Suits back toward the security entrance, our teacher composed this blog post in her head and cried as invisibly as the ghosts of children in this former school building.

Where I am today, the wind is howling in a classic nor’easter, with snow swirling into near white-outs. As always happens to me when the natural world is doing something noteworthy, I find myself drawing analogies connected to what I witness in nature. Today’s musing: Is education the response to intellectual “whiteout,” a way to prevent students from  blowing and drifting?

A recent New York Times article underscored the pragmatic trends in education during tough economic times. Specifically they cite the priority of technological, scientific, and employment needs that have pushed aside the liberal arts into pockets within “elitist” colleges. The Times further points out that the proponents of the humanities have not successfully marketed their field as essential to the future of the U.S. and the world.

Marketing the humanities?  Hmmm.

To prevent minds for blowing and drifting, do we steer students to science and technology where their efforts can be measured and their products fill practical needs in society? If we do so to the exclusion of the study of history, literature, writing, the arts, and even philosophy, will the winds abate and the snows settle into sparkling mounds of freshness?

You can tell by my questioning where I stand. I am an unabashed proponent of the liberal arts.  Without the ability to bounce new ideas off each other, to question, muse, and say the unexpected using an unexpected turn of phrase, we cannot stop the blowing and drifting of young minds and press ahead to a sparkling world. Indeed, we NEED some blowing and drifting of thought or we risk hardened, stale, brown-grey piles of crusty snow formed by plowing those once-sparkly flakes too quickly into the places where they are “supposed” to go.  I have no problem with the value of pragmatism. I believe it is in the process of questioning and making connections and oxymorons out of the scientific and measurable that we turn blowing and drifting into the striking patterns we see on the hillsides of thought. This is blowing and drifting allowed to follow and create new patterns. And I would maintain that without the liberal arts, without people seeing analogies and wondering aloud, the scientists would be stuck in crusty snow mounds that age and melt from the underside into cinder-filled storm sewers long after the rest of the winter has thawed.

I hope we can allow education to appreciate some blowing and drifting, veering entirely neither to white-out nor plow-hedges. We need everyone’s ideas — stirred by a little blowing and drifting.

Twenty or thirty years from now, electronic libraries will be full of cyber-volumes about the opening decade of the 21st century and the confluence of events that turned the world sideways like an iPhone display: the flood of web 2.0, September 11, wars, and unprecedented economic distress. We certainly have no satellite view today. We cannot even feel the tilt well enough to know which end is up. We have all this information, and we can find out nothing.

I just finished editing another set of small tidbits to throw into the Web of information and ideas about the economy: some pages for parents on how to help children and teens cope during tough economic times and some for teachers on how to help all of us learn more about these complex systems. But even collecting and synthesizing good information from reliable sources is a slippery reality. When it comes down to it, nothing we write is any better than the reliable sources we trust — trust just because someone else we trust already trusted them. Even a savvy web user can only use the tests of reputation, references, credentials, and (gulp) Google ranking to decide who to believe. If my network says it’s reliable, I guess I can trust it.

As educators we know that we must help our students learn to compare information, assess it, compile it,  and convey it, but there are days like today when I wonder if we are simply helping them build a false sense of reality. I watch the news and I wonder which “authority” or “expert”  will fall tomorrow, which economic scheme will prove false, which report on the stateus of Afghanistan will be mistaken. I especially wonder what the state of the economy really is. No one knows. And this time Google does not help. There does not seem to be an algorithm for ranking such a total abstraction.

I am afraid I am left simply wondering what they will say in twenty or thirty years about all of us who are driven by the shepherds of the news media and the Internet. Reality is slippery, and we are supposed to help our students navigate it when we do not understand it ourselves. But someone trusts us because someone else they trust trusted us.

Scary.

In the 1940s, a young woman with a college education was often the first in her family. If she became a teacher, she worked until marriage and was then asked to leave. In some very enlightened schools, she might have finished the school year with a ring on her finger or even worked until she became pregnant. Then it ended. After she had children, she did not return to work for many, many years, if ever.

But a few women returned to the classroom sooner. This was the adventurous generation of bright, energetic women who had much to share. These were women who shared brilliance and flexed remarkable power in the lives of both their own children and the futures of thousands of “kids” before any breath of women’s rights or feminism was heard. These were working women before the term “daycare” was even coined.

Last week I attended a memorial service for one such woman and listened to her grandchildren and children tell of the school “kids” who came to the house, even on Christmas Day, to show their affection and respect, singing Christmas carols. Many of these respectful visitors were in the congregation at the memorial service, now grandparents themselves.

Now our nation has a new leader who has declared a call to service, and I stop to think about the adventurous generation of women who heard that call not long after their soon-to-be-husbands returned from WWII. Their service went unnoticed by most, except the young beneficiaries of that gentle power and willing, brilliant spirit. These women shared not only within their own families but with year after year of their “kids” at school. They were considered strange to be working full time — probably even regarded as “bad” mothers for doing so.  But the service they paid to the next generation and the next should not be forgotten.

It is so much easier to become a teacher now. Yes, the “kids,” the testing, and the political pressures are tougher. But no one kicks them out for marriage, pays them less for being female, or criticizes them for being working moms. In fact, becoming a teacher is considered “easy” (HA!), at least compared to becoming a rocket scientist or investment banker.

So I salute the adventurous generation of teacher/moms who spawned the next generation of women who broke the glass ceilings and said things out loud. So few of them are left, but those who are around are probably still befriending teenagers at church and organizing something.

I just have to give a blog-cheer from this life-long teacher to a sixth grader in California whose science fair project discovered something real world scientists and agricultural experts did not know. Science fairs are often maligned as a chance for parents to do projects for their children and gain bragging rights, but in this case it appears that a student had an idea and was lucky enough to have a parent who allowed him to pursue it. (Of course the student also had a parent who could connect him with a real world facility in which to DO the research…). The fact that the student was the son of a professor tells me that modeling is key. If students see and hear scientists thinking aloud, they will act like scientists.  What power all adults have as teachers.

So I cheer for an eleven year old who asked a question and went after the answer. Isn’t this what we want education to be all about?

And Gabriel,  I personally prefer pistachios, too.