Think Like a Teacher

The last 24 hours in my email/RSS/real people world has brought reminders of difficult realities:

1. Web 2.0 tools die (or are left to suffer a slow death by weeds) as rapidly as the seasonal harvests of farmers.

2. Teachers are in a hot kitchen with far to many required recipes these days.

Compounding  this situation:

3. The most imaginative minds are generating exciting scenarios and fabulous examples of an entirely new way to cook up learning. Call it School 2.0: Nouvelle Cuisine for the Minds.

So how is the teacher (in #2) supposed to reconcile all this? Let me elaborate…

1. TeachersFirst Edge reviews web2.0 tools and suggests ways to use them safely and effectively in the classroom. We are, essentially, offering  the 20-minute recipes for the Nouvelle Cuisine for the Minds.  We visit the Farmer’s Market of web2.0, select the current cheap (free) ingredients available, and give teachers ideas for a quick family meal that brings new taste to their classroom and lets the kids get involved in the actual cooking.  The ongoing problem is that a farmer simply won’t appear one week. No one knows what happened to his produce. It simply went out of season or was left to die on the vine. Free web2.0 tools die. Fact of life. And the teachers and kids have no clue where to look for a substitute ingredient. Can you make a timeline out of another kind of fruit?

2. Meanwhile, the same teachers, and their 10,000 other colleagues who never even VISIT the Framers Market, are being told what to cook, how many minutes it should take, how to measure it (at least 3 times), conduct a scientific taste-test, and still turn out at least three dozen new dishes a day. The directions are explicit and the consequences of one dropped cupcake are dire.

3. The same teachers that were involved in #1 (and #2, since ALL must do the required recipes) read about those in #3 and simply want to cry. They long to approach Nouvelle Cuisine, but they do not have the time to look for replacement ingredients or even learn to read French.  They don’t Twitter, might blog, and have not found the store where they can buy the TechCrunch they have read about. Their market is local, so they must shop accordingly.

 What is a teacher to do? Some say, “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.” If all who are frustrated (all those in #2) do so, our kids may starve. Certainly, there are some cooks in #2 who won’t even read about Nouvelle Cuisine, but how can we reconcile the desire of the better ones to reach #3 with the requirements of #2 (and the transience of the ingredients in #1?).

What we need to do is throw out the recipes. We need to be sharing loads of ingredients, maintaining awareness of what is available at the web2.0 Farmers Market (and perhaps asking some farmers to grow a little more of this or that), sharing what we know about tasty substitutions for missing ingredients,  granting permission to generate unique concoctions, and encouraging  kitchen-sharing with anyone who walks in. The Nouvelle Cuisine folks would welcome the collaboration and gladly relinquish the haute in favor of rich potluck. The Cookbook Writers in #2 MIGHT be convinced to permit change, as long as, ultimately, there is a taste test to assure that what we cook up is “good food” (most likely a regional or even personal taste).  Ultimately, what we want is food that satisfies: “cognitive nutrition” (term adapted from Tom O’Brien and Christine Wallach. And perhaps a new ventilation system for that kitchen heat would be a good idea.

Am I lucky, or did I earn this? I work from a rural setting, enjoying a bald eagle who lands outside my window, on the tree where my hammock hangs (really!). During the day I “visit” and talk with people all over the world. I pry into their brains through their blogs and watch over their students’ shoulders through their online projects. I wonder sometimes how this happened. Scott McLeod writes of Dr. Richard Florida’s view of the world as “spiky,” not flat. The spikes are the few global, creative centers that suck in great minds of innovation and productivity. If that is the case (and I’ll have to read Florida’s book to decide what I think), I am not sure how I ended up being networked into a spike from my rural location, but I am. I hope I qualify as one of the creative ones, anyway.

Florida reportedly maintains that choosing one’s location is key to success. Scott wonders aloud about the role of rural schools in this scenario.  I guess I may have been lucky, or perhaps somewhat deliberate and definitely timely, in landing where I have. I am living proof that

Anyone, anywhere can be a “resident” of such a creative megalopolis[a spike], though making the initial contact may be the biggest challenge. If the rural schools can share the vision of an extended “reach” of these “centers,” the local economy can still survive. (from my comment to Scott)

I do believe that any school can help students build a vision and a sensitivity to opportunity so he/she may be able to live in a vast “valley” but have connection to and gain benefits from physically-distant “spikes.” I don’t think we need to live in the spikes to be able to draw the economic benefits of them back into our geographic communities.

I still don’t know exactly how I came to be so fortunate. Mostly it was a confluence of circumstance. But whatever the cause of my situation, I think it is a scenario that is more and more possible for rural kids, assuming someone shares the vision.

Will Richardson’s post (rant) on 21st century skills and getting educators onboard has drawn copious comments. He is so right in describing the conference venue as  frighteningly dull and disconnected. The sheer commercial nature of how conferences happen is study in slime. Exhibit halls are filled with the latest buzz-word wrappers on the same old products, and EVERYONE is “for sale.” The conference organizers, logistics companies, and convention center management each take a cut of the commercial pie, and Internet access is just another costly “add-on” in Edu-make-a-buck Land.  Been there, done that. As an exhibitor from a non-profit, I have enjoyed marvelous reactions (”Wow, you’re like Robin Hood!”)…but that is another post.

I disagree with Will, however, on the “network.” While he is fortunate to have the network (and respect) of reform-minded and creative people, many teachers do not have that network. Many teachers do not even have the facilitators or coaches or general support that is being offered by the “in network” commenters on his post. Yes, the process of changing teachers and administrators is glacial, but without some very basic barrier-removal, they have too many good reasons for not being a part of the “network.” Blogs are blocked. Anything that requires a log-in or “sucks bandwidth” is suspect or prohibited. How would you expect them to know a world that is truly invisible from inside those walls?  Yes, they should at least have enough GUILT to ask about these “new-fangled things” and to ask the non-educator people who control the filtering/network to at least explain why Google Earth  and blogs are “bad.”

The best thing our “network” (and I don’t know if I’d be considered “in network” or not) can do is to simultaneously support those teachers by shoveling the paths they CAN take, applauding them for building learning networks in their classrooms, and realizing that they do not have time to toot their own horns. We may not even know about some of the finest teachers who have engaged in connections outside their classrooms with little fanfare and even less awareness by higher-ups so busy with test scores.

I knew a teacher who facilitated a virtual classroom created by HS kids for over 3000 kids from gr 3-12  over 5 years ago — when wikis and most web2.0 tools were not even in existence. They interviewed, shot pictures, answered and asked questions, connected to concepts from gr 12 calculus to gr 3 reading. A HS sophomore wrote all the code (Cold Fusion), and the team uploaded images and video until 2 a.m. from a “borrowed” hotel connection in Alaska. No acclaim, no network, just great stuff. I truly believe there are others out there doing terrific, Constructivist projects. It is not their job to announce themselves. Let’s continue to support and highlight those who ARE doing it, and realize that their peers will learn from being nearby, as well.

At the same time, we need to continue to share visions of what it “looks like” to do education in other ways. That is what the network is for, not establishing “cred.” (end  of my rant)

I love RSS feeds, even though I rant about not having time to read them. Today I ran across Clay Burell’s discussion of schooliness. I smile as I muse.

Is it like girliness? — a term meant to demean , but occasionally value at the same time?

I can sense schooliness, even in myself. Like girliness, I try to avoid it yet do not want to push it away entirely. It has its place. On certain days for certain occasions, in certain moods, girliness is OK. Never my goal, just OK.

Now, schooliness…?

Schooliness actually cares whether the line is quiet in the hallway. Schooliness is made of  the film and chicken wire they put inside the safety glass insert in my classroom door to prevent shattering (of ideas, customs, or quiet). It blocks the view of what is REALLY going on inside (inside heads, especially those who can entertain themselves while “education” goes on around them). Schooliness is the translator we apply to technology tools so they are “safe” and comply with AUPs. Schooliness  is the substitute we LOVED to see as students because she was so much fun to fool. Schooliness  is why they invented NCR paper, then changed it to Acrobat files you have to TYPE into. Schooliness  is what prevented me from turning in what I really thought in most essays…until I trusted the anti-schooliness  of the teacher. Schooliness  is what my liberal arts degree ridiculed. Schooliness  is what Congress would use to define Highly Qualified Teachers. Schooliness  is the make-up that thinking human beings “touch up” as they leave the faculty room. Schooliness  is what makes us wear a watch. Schooliness  is what my brightest gifted students so aptly parodied as I chuckled and pretended not to hear. Schooliness  is “May I have your attention please,” which should warn, “Turn the speaker off NOW!”

I will enjoy thinking about schooliness for days …especially as I look out a non-school window, across my unfiltered computer, watching a lake with no buses or concrete in sight.

There is a definite exhilaration to leaving schooliness  behind.

How do we find the teachers and students who just “don’t know” about using technology in a classroom? If they never have it available and never see a workshop and never have access to read blogs (or know what they are), will we even know they are “out there”? Don’t tell me they don’t exist. We all know they do.

I need some help from the statmasters and storytellers among you. If you can steer me to some numbers, I will be very grateful, and you may be helping students you will never know.

I know that there are teachers and classrooms where there is no Internet access, where the only connected computers are in the school library or office. The official report they submit to a government survey may say otherwise — out of pride or embarrassment, but the students know it isn’t true. Perhaps the school network (or dial up) is so unreliable that teachers never even consider sharing the Web with students in class. Perhaps there is a connected computer but no projector of any kind to allow more than a huddle of students to see the screen. Perhaps the teacher has no Internet access at home, either. Or if he/she does, it is an exercise in frustration to find terrific visuals and interactives and opportunities for world collaboration when none is accessible from the actual place where the students are. Perhaps the setting is rural. Perhaps the infrastructure is poorly maintained. Perhaps the budget funds machine-scorable answer sheets  and review workbooks instead of improving Internet access. Perhaps he/she teaches in a portable classroom placed “temporarily” ten years ago and “not worth connecting” to the network.

If you were teaching in that classroom, how would you feel? A student asks what a “mesa” is as you read a story. Can you show him/her? You have amazing digital pictures from your cousin’s science lab…but can you share them? You find a site where students can see visual representations of body systems or interactive maps of natural resources. Can you involve your class?

I might have a way to bring this issue to the attention of someone who MIGHT have a way to help. But I need some statistics and stories– FAST. If you have a source for information on how many classrooms and teachers do NOT have a way to share the Internet IN the room where they teach, please comment back to me. If you know someone who might have some stats, please send them my way.  Some teachers in these situations write to TeachersFirst. But how many more don’t even use teacher resource sites? But I need stats and stories….as much as I can get. We who read this and write to blogs are fortunate to have the connections that we have. Rewind your world to the early 1990s. Don’t you think we should help the teachers stuck  back in classroom .75?

The Washington Post describes a palatial new school where technolust has run amok, dragging teachers down into negativity and frustration instead of engaging them and building learners. “Technolust,”  or technology for technology’s sake, does more damage per incident than any initiative (or lack of it) in education today. Technology attracts attention by its sheer luminescence, and the attention turns negative when the money spent carries no planning for the implementation and collaboration that would scaffold successful impetus for learning and change. Taxpayers smell waste instead of seeing success.

Or, to put it bluntly: Shove technology at a faculty without thinking like a teacher and involving the teachers, and you might as well turn on the fan next to your stack of bills.

Sadly, what I am saying is NOT new. Research backs it, and the research on successful implementation is readily available. You don’t throw hardware at people and expect them to use it or use it well. More broadly, you don’t throw ANY concept at a learner and expect them to seize it and integrate it into their understanding without some context, some involvement, some sort of connection to their own “reality.” We KNOW this.

Conversely, you could make Universal Mr. Potatohead (U.M.P.) into a successful initiative if you did it right: let teachers experience a workshop using Mr.P.  Challenge them to think of ways Mr. P. could provide connections and allow students to engage in the subjects they teach. Involve some teacher-leaders in Pilot Potatoheads. Brainstorm. Challenge creativity and reward teachers for using it: Mr. P. can provide cells for the microscope in bio, write stories from his own point of view in English, discuss natural resources in social studies, plan an ideal potato city in civics class, observe food chains in potato land, read stories aloud, make friends with fellow potatoheads on the other side of the world, calculate fractions of potatoes in math, and so on. Let teachers collaborate on their successes and problems with the new U.M.P. approach. Share the Mr. Potatohead successes with the taxpayers and invite them to participate. Do we NEED Mr. P.  to be able to teach? No. If we stop and think about ways he could become part of our toolbox, however, he might actually make some concepts “stick” (he’s starchy, after all). Mr. P. MIGHT even make us rethink ways to look at our curriculum and learning through creative eyes in general.

Those folks in Alexandria bear more resemblance to potatoheads than effective planners. And now their story will spread like melting butter, preventing deserving schools from getting anything but small potatoes in their technology budgets.

Imagine a flexible triangle, three sides made of grudgingly stretchy material, with pivot points at the vertices, so the triangle can change from right to scalene to equilateral, extending and contracting its sides in the process. For a couple of years, I have stood inside  such a triangle between teachers, web2.0 developers, and policy makers. The sides of the triangle and the degrees of the angles constantly change, the elastic sides never staying the same for long.

The clearest side for me, of course, is that defined by teacherworld: seeking positive learning, managing logistics and hours in the day, attending to parent concerns, etc. I know this world well and can paint it for anyone. I also know that teachers can stretch their side when motivated.

I act as liaison between teacher-world and another side: web2.0 tool developers. I explain the culture of schools to developers, especially the barriers to free and open use of their tools in schools. The toolbuilders are rarely aware of the protective policies and logistical limits a teacher faces in facilitating student-created content online.  The most common response from developers on issues teachers face: “I never thought of that.” They know their own side of the triangle. Fortunately, most developers offer a degree of “stretch” in making the tools more useful or less convoluted for teachers to use. There is no such thing as a totally philanthropic developer, however,  seeking to do good for the benefit of students everywhere. Their elasticity conforms to the practical limits of business.

The third side is the group I broadly name “policy makers.” This includes everyone from the local principal and tech coordinator to Congress. Their priority has little to do with looking for the best new tools for learning. A litigious society and thirsty media assure that technology innovation, for them,  is a dragon to be slain — or at least safely contained.

As I pass along web2.0 tools to the TeachersFirst Edge review team, I wonder, Who do we push hardest> Teachers to learn and try new things? Developers to remove barriers? Or policy makers who do not realize the implications of their fearful approach to technology policies? Should we push at all?

I’d like to think that we are better off pulling at all the angles of the triangle than pushing on its sides: luring teachers to try, luring developers to tweak, and luring policy makers to actually LOOK at what kids do with the tools.

I just found this amazing, inactive blog , and I want to read all day. It’s got such good ideas (with graphical represantations !), ideas that you wish every teacher, student, and creator-of-product could see.

Show your students the graphs about passionate users. Let them talk about them and tell you about their own personal experiences with interactive sites as examples of the concepts they see…(you want higher level thinking?!). THEN assign them to create a presentation on whatever your current curriculum topic is. You’ll (hopefully) never sleep through project presentation day again!

If we could get all who “teach” - whatever the venue- to absorb some of this, too…just imagine a world full of creative people who spark passion, not just adequate yearly progress.

I have a dream, too.

“..not enough time on process, or collective human judgment”

These two ideas ring in my head  from Nancy Flanagan’s pointed (and sad) account of attending the National Academy of Sciences “Committee on Incentives and Test-Based Accountability.” She set me thinking about parallels between elusive definitions of “proficiency” and the struggles my schools had defining “gifted” during my many years teaching gifted students. The challenge was for the team that “identified” gifted kids – under a forced application of special ed laws applied to gifted (good idea to mandate gifted services, though). The irony was that an experienced TOG (teacher of gifted) could “sniff out” these kids by simply spending some time in their presence. But we sought the elusive perfect screening and identification procedure, the numerical formula, constantly swinging between IDing every high achiever and IDing no one, often missing desperate, unabomber-type  geniuses. What were we discounting? Collective human judgment (in this case judgment by those acquainted with the array of ways true giftedness presents itself). Everyone was so afraid to use a human definition that we missed some really needy kids.

…not enough time on process..

Process is what our gifted classroom was all about. Listen and watch it to “sniff out” gifted kids. The gifted kids just “intuit” what they can do and develop their own process. Gifted kids thrive on forward process (intentional hitchhike on the football term). Other students may need more help seeing and feeling process.  It’s like “feeling the water” for very talented swimmers. Some need help to feel it, at first. Some teachers will certainly need to learn the feeling, too. But ultimately, that is where all learners need to be: making forward process. So can we please use our collective human judgment to measure proficiency and just get on with building forward process?

I love this idea.
You’ve got to be kidding.
But, what about…

I just spent over an hour looking at RSS feeds from blogs I enjoy reading, and I’m fired up. My “personal learning network” includes blogs from teachers, a powerful new blog from the people we “teach” (HA!- they teach us), blogs from people who would probably consider everything I do or write to be trivial, blogs that intrigue me, blogs of well-organized people who write with the authority of an op-ed columnist, and blogs intended as outgoing information-providers not much interested in response. My Google Reader also has feeds from REALLY techie places whose content I add to my “I really should/want to learn about this” list  and feeds from traditional pubs that rework the same content multiple times each week into at least five versions to make their feeds look more prolific. But you don’t care who is on my reader, anyway.

But what a great way to start a birthday: finding things I am excited about, feel strongly about, must argue with, or am simply fascinated by: things I want to do, think about, learn, comment on, and more. This is my “bucket list” of things I want to do–not before I die, but before the bucket overflows. If I keep drawing things from the bucket, I can keep adding.  My bucket is latex and expands like a swim cap under a faucet (try that experiment sometime, if your children are not swimmers— you can make it large enough to HOLD a swimmer). The first addition this year is the idea of a Birthday Bucket.

The Birthday Bucket idea is a hitch-hike on the “Annual Report” contest (deadline tomorrow…I probably won’t make it this year). What better idea on your birthday than to reflect and build a visual representation-in-four of the past year’s accomplishments/events/questions/thoughts/travels, etc. ?

Of course, Think-Like-a-Teacher me says this is something we could ask students to share in lieu of unhealthy birthday treats on their own birthdays. Imagine a fresh 8-year old’s visual version of being 7-going-on-8. We say kids are not reflective at this age, but wouldn’t that be a terrific skill to start building at a young age? Imagine how it would blossom when adolescence injects new questioning…and how great the retrospective of Birthday Buckets would be when trying to decide about life after high school or (in a dream world) what to STUDY in high school. Here are the instructions:

Birthday Bucket
Create a way to SHOW (not tell) what you are learning, wondering, fired up about, simply MUST say something about, have accomplished, or just think is special about you right now and over the past year. Put the items in some sort of “Birthday Bucket” of at least four elements that others can ask about, explore, see, feel, hear, or even taste. The bucket must be preserved in some way so you can look at it in months/years to come. Use any tools you enjoy and at least one tool you have never tried before. 

Stir. Share freely. Welcome comments.

This blog entry is my Birthday Bucket for this year: