Think Like a Teacher

David Brooks recent column, “Why They Fought,” describes a bygone era of bloodborn patriotism and passion for a cause, a time when men (and women) faced unthinkable circumstances at Gettysburg, firm in “a belief that they were born in a state of indebtedness to an ongoing project” [the noble Union called the United States]. It is certainly hard for us to imagine this pervasive sense of mission in a day when YouTube talking puppy videos garner more attention than hard news.

We rarely witness such shared sense of mission among today’s citizens. I do, however, witness a safer but parallel passion among educators whose ongoing project is re-visioning education. These teachers converse, blog, and adamantly promote reframing education into 24/7, global, student-centered learning enabled by today’s technologies. I do not see any teachers willing to die for the cause (thank goodness), but I do hear more and more articulate voices joining in to explain the vision, punctuated with viable examples and thoughtful questions. They converse and retweet in #edchat on Twitter. They convene at EdubloggerCon, Hackeducation, EduCon, or the many unconference venues where they can find like souls.  They host discussions like Deeper Thinking w/ EdTech: Do we know it when we see it?  They inhabit endless blogs and social networks. They proffer articulate spokespeople whose posts and interviews occasionally find their way into mainstream media (whatever that means). Some of these spokespeople build second careers offering keynotes and inspirational talks to paying school districts. Some are passionate enough to stand alone offering TED Talks. They can be heard in nearly every session at ISTE, and certainly in the Blogger’s Cafe. But most of them (us) are simply teachers who enter the fray every day, willing to continue the passionate construction of true learning communities where our students can find their voices and become self-directed, motivated learners for life.  Though the unthinkable circumstances of our “battlefield” do not  include anything like Gettysburg, the circumstances of teaching grind and disable many.

Thinking Teachers simply don’t give up. They/we have a sense of  “indebtedness to an ongoing project,” the metamorphosis of education from an industrial era model to an information era model of thinking, questioning, and learning anywhere, any time — for life. Given the pace of change in public policy and in education’s institutions, this sounds like a pipedream. But I don’t hear anyone giving up. If you have not heard the voices and you care about the future of education, you owe it to yourself to listen more carefully. Start at #edchat and build your network to learn about this ongoing project. What history will say in 150 years, who knows.

Happy Independence Day.

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.

This is the  second in a series of reflections as TeachersFirst celebrates its fifteen birthday this month.

TeachersFirst’s non-profit parent company, The Source for Learning, has as its mission:

… to create and deliver high-quality, technology-based content and services that enhance learning for all children, and to empower teachers, child care providers, and parents to support that learning. An important part of the mission is to increase access to our services for underserved children and adults.

Just as all teachers have days when we question our effectiveness, we at TeachersFirst have worrisome days about accomplishing our mission. What haunts me is not whether TeachersFirat empowers teachers.  Thank goodness for the many, many teachers who tell their stories, assuring us that we do have an impact. The monthly traffic and Twitter followers add stats to support the teacher anecdotes. What specifically haunts me is whether TeachersFirst can:

increase access to our services for underserved children and adults

The frustration? If teachers do not have reliable technology, readily available and supported by an administration that understands how technology empowers learning, how can the they access TeachersFirst  — or any other web-based tool for teaching and learning? Each time circumstances build a barrier, whether it is limiting teacher decision making about lessons or having unreliable Internet connections (or computers), teachers lose access. For every real barrier that exists, downtrodden or “underserved” teachers perceive the barrier as four times hugher. Each time we hit our heads against another wall, we decide to delay trying again. Barriers breed excuses.

The barrier I hear about over and over is that students lack access to Internet-connected devices both in and out of school. While some schools have well-planned BYOD/BYOT programs where students can bring tablets or laptops to class, many other schools lack the network capacity or their students lack the financial means to own a device. The gap between technology haves and have-nots gets bigger and bigger. Underserved means unsupported and disconnected.

Gutsy teachers keep on trying, even after they hit repeated barriers. They beg, borrow, or grab computer time for their students anywhere they can. They come in early, skip lunch, or rotate kids through one available machine. Meanwhile, other schools have iPad carts and 1:1 programs.

My birthday wish for TeachersFirst is a wish for all schools: 

increase access to TECHNOLOGY for underserved children and adults.

If I blow out the candles, will it come true?

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.

News Corp’s education division, Amplify, has announced a new tablet designed specifically for education.  According to the story on NPR today, they are touting this new device as the tool to bring schools into the 21st century. Amplify’s CEO, Joel Klein, claims they are launching this device for the love of learning. The skeptical teacher in me says it is for the love of earning. To start, News Corp’s infamous leader, Rupert Murdoch, insults teachers by saying

Today’s classroom looks almost exactly the same as it did in the Victorian age: a teacher standing in front of a roomful of kids with only a textbook, a blackboard, and a piece of chalk [Really? When were you last in a school?]

Then Klein continues

It’s not about hardware, it’s not about devices, it’s really about learning.

Is it? What does NewsCorp/Amplify know about today’s teaching and learning? If they think it looks like the 1890’s, they have not been in the schools I know. They have not seen teachers who work hard to take advantage of any technology they can to connect their classroom to the world beyond. They have not seen efforts like MySciLife® . They have not met the teachers who come to OK2Ask® to learn how to use the technology they have — and use it well. They have not read the comments of teachers describing the pedagogy behind their decisions to make their interactive whiteboard (IWB) into a student-controlled learning space. (They should have been there with us last night.) They have not heard teachers critiquing colleagues who fail to leverage the devices and materials they DO have for learning “to the max.” They have not met the teachers who are driven to learn themselves and take their discoveries to their classrooms the next morning.

According to NPR, “Murdoch has described education as a market worth hundreds of billions of dollars.” The education market is both a tasty lure for entrepreneurs confident they will make big bucks and a carnival of quick-fix claims. The education marketplace is far too much about earning than learning. Efforts like Edsurge try to bridge the gap between techpreneurs and educators, but the urge to make money still seeps in among the education reform/rethink efforts.

Money is a harsh reality of life, for sure. We all make difficult decisions about it. I just wish that those making the decisions about educational technology money would listen a bit more to the voices of learning. Just sit, watch, and listen for a while. Talk to teachers. Talk to students. Erase what you remember about school and try to imagine being a kid now. Then try to put your money into making sure every kid is connected, both at home and at school… and on the walk between. If you can’t shift the priority from earning to real learning,  please go away. Teachers and kids are busy enough without another Big Fix. Let us use what we have well and, please, let us tell you what else we really need.

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.

New York Times columnist Sara Mosle wrote an insightful column about the Common Core requirements that students read ever-increasing amounts of  “informational text” and far less fiction. I have been mulling this issue for months. Mosle’s arguments that reading expository texts and long form narrative nonfiction will build students’ writing skills are certainly valid. Students also will need basic informational text-writing (and reading) in the workplace. But my gut (and my undergraduate English major) nag at me on this giant swing, even as TeachersFirst published help for teachers (e.g. this article, and this one) on ways to integrate informational texts into all subject areas and improve students’ expertise at understanding and producing such works. I know many adults could stand to improve their writing skills. And I know that writing fiction — or “stories,” as most elementary kids would call them — may not develop skills in supporting a written argument. But I cannot go as far as Common Core does. There is too much that we learn from reading all varieties of texts.

When we read a poem…

• We learn economy of language and how to listen ever so carefully
• We learn to read with our senses, not just black and white text
• We learn to pay attention to subtlety — a skill few adults have anymore (certainly not our politicians)
• We learn to question and marvel at what lies beneath instead of what the media or a “spin master” tells us to believe

When we read a novel…

• We learn to follow a life or a thread for a long time, past the end of the class period or the end of the day, noticing patterns and threads that might not even emerge until twenty chapters later. This is reading life. As adults, we eventually start to notice such threads in our own lives. We call it perspective.
• We learn to read people. Given the frightening statistics on autism spectrum disorders, the more experience we can give kids with reading people, the better off our society will be. Given the need for voters to make choices about candidates whose  informational text “messages” all sound the same, we sometimes rely on reading people to make good choices. Employers read people every time they interview. Interpersonal intelligence makes a common society work. Fiction builds it. No, there is no dollar value on it, but there is serious loss without it.

To further flip my argument around, I wonder what would happen if kids never experienced fiction?

Movies would be our students’ only fiction. With special effects that are near-real, we risk losing the ability to imagine. School takes a large enough toll on creativity as it is. Erasing imagination frightens me. In a generation or so without fiction, we might have no more movies OR fiction. Just YouTube?!

We risk losing a sense of the world. In a global world where few of us will ever see distant people who make our shoes or invest in our government bonds, the importance of cultural detail (or “status detail” as fiction writers call it) is far more than simply a view of life from another place. As we read fiction or narrative nonfiction set in other places, we notice the diverse details that define what we value vs. what those in far off places value. We see how people spend time, fill their pockets,  eat, gather into households, prioritize their money, and interact with each other. Show me. Do not tell me. I need to notice it, to see and learn it. Fiction builds global understanding. Just as travelers notice cultural detail when we arrive in a foreign country, so do we experience it in fictional tales that take place there. When I write and rewrite this blog to craft cultural detail in my depictions of school, of China, of what I do, I am trying to draw you into understanding my ideas. Fiction writers spend months crafting such details– and do it much better than I. If our students never experience immersion in cultural detail, they may never notice, see, and learn global understanding.

I wish that Common Core requirements had dimensions for reading senses, subtlety, submerged messages, perspective, imagination, people, and cultural detail. In twenty years, we may find ourselves in a world that’s a different kind of flat.

If you have read my blog for long, you know that I am a former teacher of gifted students. One of the things we teachers of gifted quickly learn is that the teaching strategies and initiatives we use with gifted kids are often adopted several years later for all children, though altered in pace or depth. It is a source of pride to us, an “I told you so” that we knew what worked all along.  Many of the same philosophies behind creative teaching and learning for gifted can benefit all kids. The truly gifted, especially those my colleagues and I facetiously dubbed the “severely and profoundly gifted,”  need a hyperbolic version of these same strategies and rarely need any of the skill backfill that others do.

So I was not surprised to read a passionate post on Stephanie S. Tolan’s blog The Deep End about the politics within the National Association for Gifted Children and the irony that the children themselves were not invited to the NAGC conversation. This is the same discussion that is occurring among education reformers who seek to change education from “schools” to “learning.” Follow the Twitter hashtag #edchat for a few days to see the passion among educators seeking to rethink what learning is all about and to include students as key players and decision makers in their own learning. Ms. Tolan describes the gifted with powerful voice:

One of their major differences (at least until we squash it out of them with work sheets and grades and gold stars and tests, grade point averages, boundaries and limitations) is their rage to learn and understand, and to do something with meaning. [my boldface, her italics]

I absolutely agree that this describes the gifted kids I know.  I think it can also describe most kids. Gifted kids feel the rage in heightened fashion and seek meaning at greater depth, but all kids feel the rage to learn until we stuff the school experience into boxes that lack any personal meaning. The gifted often find meaning via their own odd connections or perceptions. Other learners may need some help discovering meaning and personal connection.

The many, many good teachers I know try to forge connections of meaning for students who do not seek them on their own or need help doing so.  The very best teachers are able to kindle the rage to learn despite institutional requirements that muffle it. I hope our current moves to build rigor in our schools will stop to allow students to join the conversation and find meaning just as Ms.Tolan asks. It’s not just good for the gifted.

According to Daniel Coyle, talent is a myth.  Coyle recently synthesized results from years observing “centers of excellence” into a list of conditions that breed talent in “hotbeds” with

the combination of intensive practice and motivation that produces brain growth

Sounds like what we want our classrooms to be, right?

Although Coyle is focused largely on adult success and centers of excellence in sports or arts, his descriptions are very much what we hope our classrooms will be: places where our students maximize their potential. Coyle’s rules for adult success could work along the way for kids in a classroom, with some adaptation.

1. Staring: “fill your windshield with vivid images of your future self, and … stare at them every day.”

Encourage kids to develop the image and to keep it in front of themselves. Give them places to keep it: a journal where they can paste pictures, a locker wall, an electronic MePortfolio with a “dreaming of me” page. Have them stop to look at what makes an idol so special. What can he/she do that I want to do? Young ones have fleeting notions of what their future selves look like: fireman, snowman, roller coaster designer, cake boss… so maybe we need to ask what it is about that fleeting image that they like: Circle it. Write about it. Add more images of it. Keep refining the montage.

2. Stealing: “All improvement is about absorbing and applying new information, and the best source of information is top performers. So steal it….focus on specifics”

Kids call it copying, and they are very good at it. They watch how the pitcher spits, and they spit the same way. They listen to language at the bus stop, and …. But if we stare enough at the models from #1, we may come to notice things we’d like to copy. The trick is figuring out what to notice. That is where teachers can offer direction. We can help kids learn what to notice. We can talk as a class about what we observe, investigating which traits really matter. When they are young, kids need to develop the “eye” for what might be worth stealing. If you do one thing the same way Thomas Jefferson (or Copernicus or Shakespeare) did, what would it be? Show me.

3. Be stupid. (This is my favorite.) We rarely allow this. Humans spend a lot of time making fun of “stupid.” We post videos of it on YouTube and laugh at it on the playground. Coyle says talent hotbeds “encourage ‘productive mistakes’ by establishing rules that encourage people to take risks.” Guess we’ll have to toss out some of the testing culture. Darn.

I especially like this example: “once a week, make a decision at work that scares you.” How do we do this in class? Ask questions that have no answer. Put them on the test. Give credit for ANY attempt. Give students a weekly freebie to get credit for a WRONG answer backed by substantiated effort. Circling a guess one on multiple choice tests does not count. Even better: allow a one minute off the wall “be stupid” time for sharing what ifs and far fetched errors at the end of class.

The social dangers of being “stupid” at school can be avoided if systematically incorporated as part a creative teaching approach. David Markus notes that “Even Too-Cool-for-School Kids Can’t Resist” doing crazy, risky things if everyone can laugh about them together, such as in an arts-integrated math class.

5. Coyle’s observations about centers of excellence each warrant discussion, but I’ll skip to #5, his distinction between hard and soft skills, a place where most classrooms are seriously off target.

Hard, high-precision skills are actions that are performed as correctly and consistently as possible, every time.

Soft, high-flexibility skills, on the other hand, are those that have many paths to a good result, not just one. These skills aren’t about doing the same thing perfectly every time, but rather about being agile and interactive;

We do a pretty good job with hard skills. I will resist the urge to criticize our zealousness for careful delineation of the “right” way to do things.

Soft skills are all about process. In a test-driven world, we rarely have time to celebrate  or focus on these “soft” skills, yet they are vital to talent hotbeds. Coyle tells us that “hard skills and soft skills are different (literally, they use different structures of circuits in your brain), and thus are developed through different methods of deep practice.”  Our students need to routine, deep practice at looking for patterns, changing course, flipping to a different approach. No templates, no prescribed step by step method to recite and reuse. We so rarely ask questions where kids must experiment and analyze. Can you find one such question in your weekly lesson plans? How long will you let them suffer before you reveal the answer? Have you ever left a question unanswered yet scored it as part of a grade?  How many parent calls did you get?  To many people (including many teachers), open endedness is evil (see #3 above).

We are social beings, so why not use that to frame digital citizenship in the context of community?

This time of year, teachers are establishing the ground rules for their classrooms: what is expected, how students should behave during activities and transitions, and even what kind of language we use to interact. This is when we establish the standards for our classroom community. We tell, they listen — and we hope they do it.

I have noticed different kinds of communities lately and how each has a set of community standards
that develops and is shared with new members. One  such community is Facebook. Each member chooses the boundaries of our Facebook community by connecting to certain friends and adjusting settings for what shows in our newsfeed. Two of my own friends have recently cut others out of their feed (or blocked or unfriended them) because the offending “friend” did not adhere to unstated community standards. One complained about racist remarks a “friend” had shared (bye, bye!) while another bristled at a “friend’s” annoying political campaigning (see you after November!). As adults, we know that we both infer and establish community standards wherever we participate.

But back to our classrooms… Shouldn’t we be talking with our kids about community awareness and how to develop the skills to both read inferences of a community and to guide that community by our contributions? In elementary grades, typical social studies curriculum includes the concept of community in the very concrete sense: the place with a fire house, shops and roads, a town hall, a police department, local government, and our school, of course. Separately we teach about staying safe online, avoiding cyberbullying, and perhaps how to write comments on a blog or compose an email. Instead of treating digital citizenship as a separate entity, we need to help our students see the online world as just another community (or collection of communities) they belong to. They need to read the unstated rules of any community they enter, whether it is a workplace, a classroom, or an online social network.

Last week, I had the pleasure of working with students from across the U.S. in the pilot Boot Camp for MySciLife. This small group of students and teachers came from six different schools with six very different student bodies, six sets of school rules and policies, and surrounded by six varied, real communities. But in MySciLife, we formed a new virtual community. As the community grew rapidly (over 800 posts in 5 days!), students developed de facto community standards of behavior. Yes, we teachers nudged them a bit on digital citizenship in citing images, but they did what kids do. They watched the way their peers spoke (or wrote) and adjusted their language and the thoughtfulness of their posts accordingly.

Before we add yet another mandated chunk to K-12 curriculum, teaching digital citizenship, we should look at how easily this concept fits into our social nature and take advantage of that social impulse. Talk about how we figure out a group. Talk about the role of “citizen” in real and virtual communities. Talk about how the choices we make by voting, friending, commenting, and participating. Communities flow continually between real and virtual today. Citizenship is one extended discussion and lesson, not  separate curricula in technology or social studies. And we all teach it every day.