Think Like a Teacher

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.

I can’t see 3D movies. I mean actually, physically will never be able to make the neuro-messages from my two eyes converge into a three-dimensional experience. As far as I know from talking to ophthalmologists for decades, there is nothing in current medicine that will change this.

As I read all the hype about Avatar in 3D and the possibility of 3D television and more and more 3D movies in theaters, I am downright resentful. How dare they leave me behind as someone who will not be able to see any movie or show projected or broadcast in this fuzzy new medium? Don’t they know there are people like me who will be abandoned as lost?

My reaction bears a strong resemblance to some we as teachers and/or technology “leaders” may have  passed by as we jog ahead. Learning support students have always felt abandoned and resentful during lessons taught through means they cannot “see.” When the faddish, highly patterned posters with hidden images first came out over a decade ago, some of us could not force our eyes to decipher the hidden images. My most empathetic teaching colleagues finally understood how their LD students felt and changed their lessons to include multiple approaches to concepts. Just as those posters were not the only things available to hang on the wall, however, finding other options for teaching was similarly easy.

Now , with people marveling at Avatar  and promoting the prospect of ubiquitous 3D, I  am experiencing my first near-terror at technology “progress.” For the first time in my tech-loving life, I am not an early adopter. I am negative and angry that I could be considered “challenged.” I do not know of a way to “fix” it and am secretly afraid that NOT welcoming 3D will make me less of a an innovator-teacher-communicator. I don’t want to be the old person who doesn’t try the new thing. This is not my role, and I resent being pushed aside.

pause for Aha moment

THIS must be the way some teachers feel as technovations beyond their vision whizz through their worlds like hummingbirds on steroids.

I have the luxury of time to play and commitment to make the effort with every new technology, always excited to figure out how it could fit into learning. Like many edtech leaders and willing educators, I continue to add, adopt, adapt, and build my PLN with new tools. In two years, Twitter has cycled from a curiosity to a regular part of my day/week. The difference between my initial Twitter reaction and my 3D reaction is that I can’t see 3D.

If teachers truly believe that they are similarly hampered, organically or logistically, they must be feeling the same resentment and embarrassment.   Can’t See It empathy must be part of  planning for all of us who lead and teach our fellow educators, even those who simply teach alongside a peer in a similar panic.

I know I have written about the issues of  technology adoption, fear, and teachers’ professional obligation to grow and change before. But now I am living Can’t See it, and the intensity of my reaction is the perfect fuel to do my job better.

Hindsight knocks us over each New Year’s Eve. Television, radio, RSS feeds, and tweets bombard us with “top ten most important” lists to summarize the closing year or decade. And older we get, the more tempting it is to build retrospective castles of glistening memories, assuming that an Antiques Roadshow of the Mind will somehow locate unexpected value amid our mental junk. Yes, time generates perspective, but it is rarely unique or profound. Our New Year’s reflection is no more powerful than what occurs on a daily or monthly basis in classrooms of sixth graders. For us, the realizations may be new and the insights fascinating, but to others they are old hat.

What moves a glimmer of reflective thought from ho-hum to the Roadshow of the Mind Highlights Edition is one of three things: timing, audience, or true uniqueness. The same three make the difference between ho-hum classroom learning and moments that can change a kid’s life of learning. So humor me by considering my comparison of Roadshow reflections with what learning can be.

Timing

Sometimes we just happen to think the right thing at the right time when the supply is low, the commodity desirable, or the interest “in vogue.” Any New Year’s reflection or decade summary that includes a perspective about globalization, green technologies, or diversity will sell well today. The “auction value” of these thoughts and concepts is very high right now. For a student who masters new classroom concepts and relates it to any of these (or other) timely topics, the learning is more important. It may even help him/her seek a new path in life. Timing can take a personal reflection beyond a simple New Years or classroom experience to a new plain.

Audience

The appraisers will tell you that if no one comes to the auction, even your greatest mental treasure will not have any value.  If you share your thoughts on the closing decade with no one but your best friend, these thoughts have little worth beyond the mundane. You may find yourself yelling at the television when some highly-paid commentator says the same thing, but YOUR auction did not even draw any bids for those treasured thoughts.  If a sixth grader tells the teacher what he learned by making a cool multimedia comparison of the 1960s and the 1920s, it is just another gen without bidders. (My New Year’s reflection in this post is another reflection with limited audience and bidders.)

True (or likely) Uniqueness

You and I and our sixth grader buddies have little control over whether our thoughts are unique. To us, they are. My reflections here comparing New Year’s retrospectives to classroom experiences or Roadshows of the Mind seem unique to me, but more than likely, they are just a remix or coincidental restatement of what others are tweeting otr telling their best friend as I type. We’d all like to think we are unique, but uniqueness depends on circumstances well beyond our view. The Internet allows us to throw things out there to the wise crowd to assess uniqueness by user-generated “research.” Positive comments, such as a Roadshow appraiser stating he has never heard anything like it in this color or size, can add value to my reflections by increasing their likely uniqueness. But “true” uniqueness cannot be proven. Only a wide net of appraisers can generate some sort of standard of uniqueness. Wonderfully this decade, that network now includes more “us” than it ever has. Here you and I and our sixth graders work together.

So, as you add to “top ten most important ideas” list of the closing decade, don’t forget to add the sixth graders who include timely topics within their new realizations, share their ideas with audiences beyond their teacher, and even take the time to rate the uniqueness of blog posts like mine and yours  along with their own.

If there were one thing I would like to model to the teachers I work with and students I teach, it is risk taking. Yes, I know that many teens need no encouragement to take foolish risks. (I raised two kids and taught hundreds, maybe thousands.) Those risks, the physical kind, are not the ones I am advocating. To be real thinkers, we need to be willing to share ideas out loud which might otherwise stagnate in silence inside our skulls — or insolently kick up a lasting intellectual headache.

A day or two ago, I was fortunate enough to hear that one of my presentation proposals was accepted for ISTE 2010 (the conference formerly known as NECC). It should not surprise me that, of my three proposals, this was the one that was the greatest risk: an idea I had never really shared out loud but had held for some time. I don’t know if I have ever even heard or read anyone on the topic. It is just an idea that had been kicking the dirt inside my head for quite a while.

The rush of validation I feel that others thought this idea was “worthy” is a rare occurrence. I can point to times in my life when I have felt the same way, always because I took the risk to step off a creative cliff. I want all teachers to feel that rush, to model it, and to help their students find it.

This may sound as though I am advocating for wholesale disruptive behavior or challenge to authority. Actually, I am simply saying that we, as teachers, need to say those things that we wonder inside. We need to say them to kindergarteners and to high school seniors. Such opportunities should not be reserved for professorial types or op-ed writers. We need to be honest when we question, muse, or mentally hum:

Sometimes I wonder why we teach this…

Was this really the cause of the civil war? The way out of the Depression? The Founding Fathers’ greatest hope?

What would Martin Luther King, Jr. say if he saw me teaching about him this way?

Why is this story the one they chose to put in this anthology?

Why is this work considered a masterpiece? It’s hideous.

I know we cannot confuse students by barraging them with risk-taking ideas when they have no solid ground, but dropping a few into the conversation once in a while is the most honest way we can help them find lifelong curiosity and innovative thinking of their own. Maybe you could raise a flag with a question mark and cliff icon as a signal when you ask them, but you must ask these things aloud.

You never know. You might be asked to speak at a conference among your peers and those you admire. Oh, the presentation topic that was accepted, you ask? “Dimensions of Creativity: A Model to Analyze Student Projects.” Guess I am kind of hooked on this creativity thing.

What teacher is not in favor of making sure our students graduate with these skills?

• Information and media literacy, communication
• Critical thinking, problem identification, formulation, and solution
• Creativity and intellectual curiosity
• Interpersonal and self-direction skills
• Global awareness
• Financial, economic, and business literacy
• Civic literacy

I think you would be hard-pressed to find any educator who is not hoping for these results for each student’s formal education and personal learning. These skills are not new to the 21st century, but they are the skills that we in the 21st century still struggle to build in all students. I read with great disappointment today about a food-fight occurring between the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21) and other groups who question P21’s motivations. At the risk of sounding like a seventh grader: Who cares?

As a teacher, I care about what happens when the rubber meets the road (or the index finger meets the mouse): What happens when I try to incorporate these skills into the discipline(s) I teach? Is there one and only one way to align them with existing curriculum? Does current curriculum go away, to be replaced completely (some of it probably could!)? And most important: how can any organization OWN such ideas? These ideas belong to those who grasp them as they learn, not those who describe them, prescribe them, or trademark special names for them.

I think of the old computer simulation game, Civilization, where you had to design a society and set its priorities. Would the poets and artists survive or die off? What happened if you had no thinkers or philosophers? The solution was always balance. You had to have some of everything to help a society endure.

Today’s Civilization is worldwide, and we need all of it. We do not need people fighting over semantics and who owns the important concepts of creativity, global awareness, etc. We certainly don’t need to know which organization is winning the race for the ear of policymakers. Out here in the classrooms of the world, we need to apply OUR 21st century skills of interpersonal and self-direction,  critical thinking, problem identification, formulation, and solution to continue evolving as teacher-learners and continue to challenge, inspire, and lure our students to self-directed, meaningful learning that lasts. It would certainly be nice to have the food fight end and the sharing begin. Do you ever wish you could just shake a few business people and politicians?

As a teacher, I am thankful for:

An orphaned pack of construction paper discovered at the back of the cupboard — unfaded!

A parent who asks, “What can I do to help?”

Free online tools without a “what’s popular” button,

Friday nights,

Going home on empty-tote-bag days,

Drive-through anything,

Other parents of my child’s soccer team or Sunday School class who volunteer instead of me,

A box of Kleenex donated anonymously on my desk,

Neon colored paper,

Free anything,

Each successful program, concert, field trip, performance, science fair, etc. that went off without a crisis,

Email when I need to contact someone,

An empty email box when I have no time to read email,

Each time I use laptops with my students and they all connect to the Internet on the first try,

My fellow teacher who shows me how it fix it when something doesn’t work,

The polite student who fixes it for me,

Being able to save interactive whiteboard files so we can continue tomorrow or email it home to a sick student,

Students who stay home when they are sick,

Being able to try a lesson a second time to fix what I messed up the first time,

My fellow teachers who help me laugh at myself after a disastrous lesson,

Finding a web resource before I need it for a unit, not after,

Students who said “Thank you” today,

Students who say “Thank you” years later.

What are you thankful for?

For the past 18 months or so, I have been a big fan of a certain web 2.0 tool that allowed students to create online books that could be viewed interactively and shared by URL. In a big email push this past week, they revised their user agreement. I read it carefuly, but even my skeptical eye did not catch the fact that they had removed the capability to see the book interactively unless you are actually logged into that “personal” account. No longer can teachers have students create books and share them electronically with family and friends at no cost. No longer can teachers create interactive ways for students to understand new content. No longer can all the teachers to whom we have “plugged” this tool use it with their classes in any functional way.

Some of the other changes related to content ownership are even more disturbing, but this one is the deal breaker right up front. If it is not free, TeachersFirst cannot review and recommend it. The sad thing is that I thought their business model MIGHT actually work: provide the tool for free, but ask parents and teachers to pay if they wanted a printed copy of the book. In an ordinary economy, it should have worked. Seeing your child’s (or grandchild’s) clever writing would be enough for parents to shell out the bucks. The school library or a teacher  might select the very best books created by a class for actual printing and permanent display on school shelves. Even in an era where reading has become more and more electronic and less tactile, people can be overcome by the urge to make a moment in a child’s life “permanent.” It should have worked.

But the economy strikes again. So we will be removing mention of this once-amazing tool for scaffolded or open writing experiences from over 80 reviews on TeachersFirst. Instead of recommending that students create online books, we will recommend another content-authoring tool…until that one dies, too. Let’s hope the economy improves before it sucks all creativity out of learning. There are enough forces at work trying to do just that. Economics should not be one of them.

I am far behind at checking out all the good things in my Google Reader. This one is weeks old, but as I read it I hear myself let out a satisfied “Mmmmm” as if I were eating a chocolate truffle:  “Schools Adopt Art as a Building Block of Education.” I especially like picturing a little girl explaining that her class is outside learning about lines from the artworks built into their school: ““We’re looking for a slanted or diagonal line.” Life does not imitate art, nor art imitate life. Art is life.

Wait. Adopt it? Isn’t art a building block of learning already?

I think visually. I make visual analogies in my head for any new concept. I have secretly done this as long as I can remember. I just never told my third grade friends how I “pictured” things. A new idea is visual art to me. So sad that the verbal world of school forgets this. I have a decent mastery of words, but chose to use them — whenever possible — to create pictures to help others see what I “see.”  It frightens me that we must ask for extra funds or special initiatives or “differentiate our curriculum for visual learners” just to keep visual stimuli, the chocolate truffles of the eye, in our learning environments.  We would never think to have schools without words everywhere…and a lot of numbers, too. How, then, is it necessary to “adopt” art into schools?

One thing the web has done is spread visual ways of seeing new ideas. YouTube, Flash, Flickr, all the Flickr toys, even  comic creators have made the visual a preferred vocabulary for so many. But we seem to forget that when we go to school. Art is a “special,” a frill, a poor, distant cousin who comes to visit during holidays.

Not everyone needs to be able to speak or study art (though I hope they will). Art is not a foreign language with its own grammar. Images and texture and lines should just be there at every turn like the neatly printed signs for “door” and “Mrs. Smithson” in a first grade classroom.

Please, don’t forget to share the art, even if you do not like it or understand it. Your students will.

Relationships. Chad Sansing writes a great post about the value of relationships in the classroom. Even the links are a good read. Isn’t that the point: the links are as important as what is said. The links are person to person, person to thoughts, person to words. Chad underscores the importance of relationships with some great articles — connecting in my mind to what I was trying to say about  teachers “worrying deep,”  i.e. CARING deeply and at an intuitive level: forming relationships. His words link to my thoughts and my words as I read. That is what good readers do,  they say. But more importantly, that is what good thinkers do. They keep on linking. Chad has links about linking, too:

relevant content fits right into comforting and enjoyable patterns and connections of prior knowledge

But, Chad asks, how do we define the role of “teacher” in this fully-linked, relationship-oriented, new classroom?  He draws an analogy to a learning republic. I gravitate to something that removes the hint of bureaucracy entirely. My analogy:  microwaving hot marshmallows.

Hot marshmallows, fresh from the microwave, stretch and stretch. They are enticingly sweet and smell of vaguely of cotton candy. The stickiness is the connection, the linking, that we experience during those warm moments of connection and understanding. The sweetness is the taste of  “aha” moments. It may be cliche, but it does feel good to “get it,”  to form a new connection. As saliva floods into your surprised mouth when it senses the sweetness, so do you savor moments when you taste a connection of your own: person to thoughts.  The smell lingers even after the taste, and the smell of other hot marshmallows lures you back, looking for more.

The “teacher” is simply a microwave to the molecules of lumpy, white marshmallow blobs, stirring them into hot stickiness.  And the teacher is not the only microwave. Everyone in (or connected to) the room is capable of pushing “Start. ” The “teacher” simply pushes it over and over, then steps out of the way to be sure everyone has access to the microwave.

Yes, it’s messy. Once you touch a hot marshmallow, your fingers stay sticky. You cannot resist the urge to lick your fingers and repeat the rush. And 25-30 stretching, hot marshmallows quickly spread stickiness on the desks and every surface in the room. Faces get sticky. Hair gets sticky. Minds get sticky.

And just think: With enough hot marshmallows, we could go for s’more…