Think Like a Teacher

When an Apple falls from the Cupertino tree, the world listens to the earthquake and reports each aftershock. In the ramp-up to an anticipated Apple “event,” the predicto-blogs and tech columnists crank out preshocks. Edtechers from every basket, including Apple core-owners, Apple picker-enviers, and rotten Apple sighters, all stop and pay attention. This week was no exception. Predictions of Apple’s Thursday  “event” at New York’s Guggenheim tallied over 4000 Google News results 20 hours before the event. By the time you read this, that number could easily exceed 10,000. Exciting but sad.

What if we and our students anticipated school as an “event” as widely discussed. What if the buzz about what we’d be learning were a topic for bloggers, consumers of learning, and every basket of self-proclaimed “expert”? Wouldn’t it be nice if just the kids in our classes generated as much excitement about what was going to happen Thursday at 10 am?

What if we asked our students: What will happen next Thursday at ten? What do you predict? What do you really wish it would be? Knowing what you know as a seasoned school-goer, what will you tell your audience to expect? Could you possibly shape the “event” simply through your predictions?

As teachers, how will we react to what they say, especially if they are brutally honest and predict something as unprecedented as peanut butter and jelly? Are we willing to allow some of their more unique or intriguing prophecies to come true? Are we willing to let our students make their own visions happen? Are we willing to act on their responses to, “What do YOU think?” It certainly is worth asking them to play the role of expert prognosticators. Try that as a writing/thinking prompt this week, if you dare.

Happy New Year! (See my Geogreeting* to you)

This time of year, everyone offers carefully studied retrospectives,  the “Top Ten” this or that from the past year. I see so many amazing sites every year that I could never choose a top ten. Instead, I offer this random, personal collection — just some of the many visual, interactive sites that intrigued me for more than a moment during 2011, at least long enough to say, “WOW!”

TeachersFirst reviews them — so I don’t need to explain them further. My job lead me to find these WOWs among the 714 Featured Sites on TeachersFirst during 2011.  [Actually, one was featudurian late 2010, but it remains a Tip Top Fav of mine.] On any given day, I could close my eyes and click on a dozen or more from among the Featured Sites archives and experience the same “WOW!”

How fortunate I am to have a job where I experience WOW every week.

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Random, personal  WOWs from 2011 - in alphabetical order. (The titles within reviews are links to WOW.)

60 sec recap (review) Definitely ad-heavy, but the concept is great. I once had a hilarious cassette tape of literature classics in two minutes, including Hamlet, but this is even better. Makes me want to create my own or do one with a group of gifted kiddos.

Exhibition Monet (review) Breathtaking. Steep in it.

Foldplay (review) Put anything in a visual container, even abstract concepts and experiences. This is the way I think.

Font de Music (review) Because music and words make poetry together.

Gettysburg Address (review) I live not far from Gettysburg and find this speech moves me more and more as I grow up. I think I finally am starting to get it.

Google Search stories (review) * actually from 2010, but an all time fav. I find myself imagining new stories while sitting in traffic or waiting rooms. This should be an app for my phone.

Information is beautiful (review) The title says it all.

Instagrok (review) I love learning new things, and Instagrok invites me in.

Newscred (review) Learn and read just what I want. To think I used to have to ride my bike two miles to experience this wave of knowledge in the stacks of the public library when I was a kid.

Spicy Nodes (review) As I have said many times, I am a visual person. Concepts = images. Cool.

TeacherWall (review) Morale booster! Not only do I see great teachers. I also feel our profession lifting up and taking me with it.

Virtualswim (review) OK. I like to swim. I think under water. This one is just for me. Aquaphobes, stay away.

Wondersay (review) Because message is about both words and visuals. See a poem.

Yulia Brodskaya (review) I love art, and visually rich sites lure me in for hours. This one is striking.

*The tool that made my greeting above is reviewed here.

If  our students are the digital natives, and policymaking powerful are the arriving settlers in the New Digital World,  what kind of feast are we celebrating this Thanksgiving?

After a long year (or decade) of trying to understand each other and make peace about what learning really is, are we finally sitting around the same table to celebrate a bountiful harvest? As some spokespeople from the Old World seem to be wavering about  using exclusively test-driven methods, we see signs that some have come to appreciate alternate ways of harvesting learning. The corn of this New Digital World is the creating/sharing web. Look at the bountiful spread on the table this Thanksgiving. We truly have much to give thanks for:

• Free tools for teachers and students. Beyond the freemium munchies, we actually have heaping servings of wikispaces and Edmodo and so many dishes we cannot fit them on the table, some without advertising garnish.
• Mashed up potatoes of every kind. The Goo(d)gle Earth has brought forth quite a harvest.
• The centerpiece: A turkey we all agree IS a turkey and need not weigh and measure to tell that is ready. At least for today we can call it learning without measuring its precise statistics. Breathe in the aroma of learning.

Oh yes, the cranberry sauce: the teachers. Without cranberries, the feast lacks color and the catalyst to so many tastes.

May this feast continue and become a tradition. We would have reason to give thanks for a long time.

iPad, laptop, or paper? The decision is worse than choosing between carry-on only and baggage fee.

Do I do my pre-meeting prep based on the others who will be there, the weight and portability of my various devices, my profound paper hatred, the great Flash/iOS divide, the weather forecast, or what’s  digitally “in” ?

I am traveling 2500+ miles next week to meet some folks I have never spoken with face to face. I am accustomed to having everything at my electronic fingertips all the time: wifi connection, synched iPhone and iPad, and so many accounts “remembered” on my MacBook Pro that I would struggle to name the most important. (At least I have a consistent personal password policy so I can usually log in once I know I have an account on a given web tool.)  I will be traveling with two colleagues: a pure paper person and a willing, Blackberry-toting office person. I am a teacher turned teachertechiewritercreativeperson. We are a diverse trio.
In a dream world, I’d tote along nothing but the iPhone and iPad, and my shoulder would be happy for the lighter weight. If it rains, I can simply zip the bag. But I don’t know what I will encounter at our meetings or in the car/airport/hotel on the way. Will we need to connect to a projector? Will there be free wifi — or would 3G be better? Will I need to demo something that requires Flash? Will I need my Diigo links (OK, I know that PW and can get to it from anything). How quickly can I pull up whatever I might be asked to share…and how much does speed matter? Will I be judged by the way I store and retrieve? If I carry paper (yuck) to help out my one colleague, will it make me less credible in the eyes of the techies I am meeting for the first time?

How much does my digital tote bag matter in my professional credibility?

Is there digital oneupmanship in today’s business environment? I feel like a teenager preparing for a dance. I just have to guess what everyone else will be wearing.

For most of my 27 years in the classroom, I taught gifted students. I was the “gifted program specialist” whom these children trusted to provide their weekly respite from ordinary school. It was a privilege to learn from them and later to see what became of them. They did not all become doctors or lawyers or college professors. Few became rich. Some have suffered and wandered and have not yet found a happy medium between functioning around other people and the intellectual play they so enjoy. There are few I do not remember in detail from my time knowing them as elementary and middle school students. Among the hundreds (maybe a couple thousand?), there were perhaps a score who brought me up short with their vision. I looked forward to the days when they would bound (or shuffle) through the door of my borrowed, “itinerant” classroom space.

As Steve Jobs passed away this week, I wondered where his teachers are. Surely there are some still alive who watched this adopted son of a working class couple through elementary and middle school. I wonder: how did he articulate his vision as a young man? I am guessing he had some tough times on the playground and in the cafeteria. I am guessing he irritated more than one  straight-arrow teacher who found his opinions inappropriate coming from a young mouth. I wonder whether he was the one who read and absorbed quietly, then tinkered in the garage, or whether he blurted out unthinkable mental connections to peers (and adults) who did not understand. Surely, Steve Jobs was what I call “severely and profoundly gifted.”

As a teacher, I love to mentally rewind adults into what I hypothesize they might have been like as a child.  I never really research or verify my musings. I do enjoy thinking about little people I have known and unrelated adults, playing a mental matching game with no correct answers. I just enjoy flipping over the two cards: one child, one adult, and questioning in my mind whether this could be the precursor to that.

I have no matching child card for Steve Jobs, though I think I have some partial matches in my Former Student deck. But somewhere there is an aged teacher or two who knew this man as a boy. I envy them.

My husband inherited his great grandfather’s wooden tool chest from pre-1900, filled with beautiful hand tools. The wooden surfaces of the brace and bit shine from hours of rubbing against carpenter’s palms as he built shelves and homes for doctors, businesses, and scores of names. Each of the jobs is carefully penciled into small notebooks tucked into the tool chest tray, seasoned with sawdust. When we pull out a tool, we never say, “It does this.” Instead, we imagine the places it has built, feel how it fits in our hands, and assume it can do anything we are brave enough to envision.

When I see a new tool on the web, even one so simple and “old fashioned” that it lingers from a previous millenium, I do not label its place or task. I  wonder about it just as I do the tools in that chest. Somehow, I always come up with more ideas than it offers for itself. Last week I looked at a review of Box Templates. This simple site offers printable patterns for folded boxes. Like a brace and bit, it has obvious uses. But what if… they could be templates for mystery boxes that students make about themselves as a “getting to know you” activity the first week of school? The outside could be decorated with words or images of significance to the student, the inside filled with small objects or symbols or slips of paper with favorite quotes or song lyrics or… What if we challenged students to make their own box templates for other box shapes? What if we invited students to create a 3D container representing a concept we are studying: government by the people or cells or energy or biodiversity? Some might even render it virtually in SketchUp. Others will need to touch it and crease the folds with their fingernails.

Box Templates is my brace and bit this week. The palms that smooth this brace and bit each bring new materials and new products. This tool does what? Anything.

As today’s budgets make us ponder each available tool a little longer,  we can enjoy the smell of sawdust and inscribe a few notes in our own idea notebooks. It’s just a matter of vision.

It’s late on a Friday before a long weekend. I have been thinking off and on all day about John T Spencer’s post about Why We Paint Murals (thanks @ShellTerrell and Tweetdeck). Now those thoughts have turned a little surreal– or maybe not. If you are looking for a straightforward opinion piece, stop now. If willing, breathe deeply and dive into my mental swim.

Spencer got me thinking about the space where we learn and our drive to make that space our own. I, too, have shared butcher paper walls and seen students seize the space as finally theirs.  I love what they write and ask and draw when the paper goes up. I have also seen ideas in other classrooms: atypical ways of moving the furniture around a hub for learning, rooms where vertical space suddenly becomes part of the landscape, classrooms as environmental art pieces.  While it might be nice — at times — to remove classroom walls, there are positive aspects of walls, too. Walls are our surroundings and partially define who we are as a group of learners. Spencer’s video shows students making the space their own with brushes of paint and personality. If we could have it, what would a class Dream Space for learning and thinking look like?  Here is my stream of Dream Space ideas.

Surround:  verb to noun

The walls of the Dream Space hold nothing in. They surround us with experiences. The dreaded (and much reviled) IWB, if one has been put here,  can be part of this “surround” as a place for students to create and collaborate. Unlike butcher paper, this electronic surround can be saved, erased, sent, “finger painted” and edited, text-recognized, and used as a collection point for leaking ideas. What else should surround us? Walls of sound, perhaps? Walls of light or dark? Walls of images. I would love an IP addressable imagespace– floor to ceiling — to which we could “send” images any time, simply by knowing the address. The people we know could send us their back yard or their llama. The scientist we know could send us an amoeba. We could send things to ourselves from our phones or our weekends. We could bring in our worlds to wrap us in visual mind graffiti. The Dream Space for thinking is our surround.

Flip the walls

Just as we grow accustomed to the walls we create, take a day in our Dream Space to  Flip the Walls again. What is on the back of this wall? Erase it all and ask us to show the back of our thoughts, like the back of a web page.

Bring it ‘Round

For some reason, my mental images of the Dream Space persistently appear more like the stand-up omnimax theater spaces that have no corners. The Dream Space does not have places for learning to hide or get lost in an angular trap. Ideas in this Space can bounce freely and endlessly because they continue to deflect off the circular hug of thinking.

Then the door clunks open on sturdy school hinges, and the spell breaks.  A skeptical voice inquires, “Why is this teacher lady dreaming about a classroom that doesn’t exist? What is the point here?” In my Dream Space, even one that has suddenly morphed back to a regular classroom with rows of desks, a chorus of voices simply calls out, “Come on in!”

I have enjoyed reading Shelly Blake-Plock’s 2009 predictions of 21 things that will be obsolete by 2020 and subsequent response to his naysayers (March, 2011). Although I have some doubts about the optimism of some of the predictions, I find myself singing along with several of the  ideas. Certainly most of us — even those who advocate for leveraging the power of technology for new ways of teaching and learning– have our doubts about whether education can change that much that fast, but the rhythm beating inside these predictions is that today’s technological change is not just gadgets:

we’re not talking about computers anymore. We’re talking about the way that we connect to one another as human beings.

We’re also talking about how we connect to our own creative, thoughtful selves. I recall a day in the early 1990s when one of our local school board members refused to enter the brand new computer lab at one of the elementary schools where I taught.  His boastfully stated reason: “I will not enter that room because no learning takes place there.” While I know there were many poor uses of that lab, it happened to be the place where I witnessed a remarkable transformation just weeks later. I watched a fourth grader (call him Randy) discover Hyperstudio (v.1 or 2, I think) and simply go crazy. For the next four months until school got out, Randy spent every moment he could weasel to sit at that computer ad create a Hyperstudio stack about … well, honestly, I don’t remember which animal it was. That stack lead to another and another. Teachers had to require Randy to go out for recess. The principal would stop by to suggest that sunshine was important. By the end of fifth grade, fed by a brand new, dial-up Internet connection at his home, Randy had taught himself HTML and was teaching others. By the end of ninth grade, he had taken all the cast-off, painfully slow PCs he could gather from trash cans and built his own supercomputer in a high school storage closet. The custodians rolled their carts down the hall past Randy in that warm, unventilated closet, stringing cat-5 cable he had snagged from who-knows-where. By the time he finished two years of undergrad, Randy was spending the summer at Los Alamos doing research.  All of this started from being able to create. I saw it happen.My favorite verse from Blake-Plock’s song, however, is this powerful charge to all of us. I want to sing this from electronic rooftops:

Teachers: you are the most amazing people on the planet. You are gifted with a fine mind and great compassion. You handle adversity and trauma and you inspire the future. You are going to have to be the ones to figure this out. You can’t rely on your administrators to do this for you. They are busy. They don’t always see what’s going on or what’s available. So you’ve got to make it happen.

My optimistic prediction by 2020: Creative School. Creative in the same three ways Randy modeled:

1. Creative for students. The impulse to create is closely followed by the impulse to share. With technology changing “the way that we connect to one another as human beings” and facilitating creative process, school becomes a place where learning IS creating. Randy wanted to share via Hyperstudio, and share he did!
2. Creative in making do with whatever you can find. If you don’t have a lot of technology, use what you do have. Kids are very good at that, if given permission to put things together, problem-solve, and experiment. My one caveat is that there needs to be an Internet connection in there somewhere. If they have to schedule ways to share it or find ways to network it, they will, especially if teachers band together to do the same (we did it in the early days of Internet). As Blake-Plock says, “You are going to have to be the ones to figure this out.” Luckily, kids like Randy are on the team.
3. Creative in looking at things another way. If we think we have delineated the “replicable model” for “21st century learning,”  anyone who really gets it laugh at us. The whole point is that things change too fast. The dream model needs to be built upon creative flexibility. Randy saw throw-away computers as new opportunities. If kids don’t learn one way or the learning they need to survive changes, we immediately change routes. All of us need to be nimble thinkers.

I am often accused of being idealistic. I figure after 27 years in classrooms, I can be as idealistic as I want to be. I have earned it through years of seeing it all. I hope I am seeing clearly as I look to 2020: the era of Creative School.

This week I watched an Oscar ceremony including Natalie Portman, followed livebloggers through the unveiling of iPad 2, and read a blog post at ASCD. They all had something in common: the confluence of technology and the humanities.

I had never known that Natalie Portman was a brilliant scientist in her own right until I read the NY Times article about her multifaceted talents. Instantly, I thought of A.M., S.R. and a handful of my other highly gifted former students  who also crossed over the perceived science/humanities “divide” as if it were a laughable piece of yellow, plastic police tape. Natalie Angier, who writes about Portman, focuses on Portman’s drive and on the odd contrast between the isolation of serious scientific researchers vs the public exhibitionism of the entertainment industry. Angier misses out, however, on the place of acting as artistic and personal expression, on film as a place where layered interpretation,visual imagery, and rich language can intrigue the mind and invite as much analysis and questioning as any science– perhaps with a bit more opportunity for ironic twist. I suspect that Portman could talk about the line between science and arts and dance along it quite well. I don’t know her work well enough to be sure, and I certainly have never talked to her. But I can envision my exceptionally gifted former students dancing the line with her, laughing.

Enter Steven Jobs.  His road sign icon for the role of Apple’s “DNA” (and its forward thinking people) marks the meeting point of liberal arts and technology. That meeting place “yields us the result that makes our hearts sing.” I know “Liberal Arts” is a dirty word (well– two) these days, and those of us who actually expended tuition dollars on them are ridiculed for our irrelevance in an era of competitiveness and the hard-driving skills needed in the 21st century. But I firmly believe that Jobs is right about technology’s place. Technology is not simply the test tube or tool we use for data, data, data. If you watch what people do with it, you quickly see today’s technology as a place to play, express, evaluate, compare, collage, question, write, answer, re-question, and enter into an iterative process of exploration and expression. Technologically-assisted exploration IS creative process if we allow it to be. Throw away User Manuals.

David J. Ferraro’s post on the ASCD blog, “Humanizing STEM: A Different Kind of Relevance,” says he “privately fret[s] over the way STEM advocacy, and current reform efforts in general, inadvertently devalue the humanistic and civic dimensions of a basic education.” He goes on to delineate the vital role that the humanities can play as a lens for viewing the intrinsic beauty of science and…

that math is beautiful, true, and good in its own way; that the development of the physical and natural sciences over the centuries has been motivated in part by a universal human desire to make sense of the world; and that technological innovations throughout history have been fueled not only by economic necessities but also by a basic human restlessness and the quest for mastery over nature.

Exploration, whether it is the how and why of science and technology or the what-if of changing a musical key or  shifting the composition of a photograph, is the common ground of the techmanities. Jobs gets it. I think Portman gets it. I know the people who dance across the yellow tape get it. I just hope that people who plan for education get it soon, before we lose the next Jobs or Portman or Ferraro… or your neighbor’s kid.

As I explained my methods for keeping a (relatively) paperless office to an incredulous coworker yesterday, I started musing about the fate of paper. Paper is dying in many venues, thank goodness. I am not a rabid environmentalist, but I have always hated the space that paper requires. It weighs a lot, gets soggy, covers up workspace, and is often more trouble than it is worth. In my days as a gifted program specialist writing IEPs, I tried to calculate the number of trees it took to place a child in the gifted program but could never find precise data on sheets of 20 lb. paper per tree. It took over 100 sheets of paper — on average — before I even MET the child. In appropriate celebration, I planned a unit on Paper, including making our own recycled paper decorated with calligraphy of original student poems for parental holiday gifts one year.

Children born today are blessed that they may see the death of paper. They may never suffer the horrid aftertaste of envelope glue. They may not ever know what a postage stamp is.  They may never have to carry reams of worksheets home in backpacks already laden with textbooks. Their e-book readers will allow them to scribble in the margins and ask questions back at the text. They will never receive report “cards.” We may lose the word “triplicate” from the dictionary. Words themselves will be freed from the tyrannical permanence of ink.

What paper do I want to keep?

• The first time a child writes his name
• Valuable doodles
• Framable  and meaningful works of art
• Origami
• Scherenschnitte - or however you spell it
• paper patterns for quilt blocks

What will we lose?

• Paper valentines
• checkbooks
• paper football
• shredders
• Hallmark
• spitballs

… oh, and paper cuts.

What a tragedy.