Think Like a Teacher

Snapsnack: (I made this up) n. a quick impression, much like a handful of M&Ms or crackers to give you a small taste but nowhere near a “meal.”  Snapsnacks also make your brain work

There are still so many things I have not written about the China trip, so–just for teachers and kids– I am sharing some quick “snapsnacks” from China. My disclaimer: As with any short trip (11 days), my impressions may not be fair representations of China as a whole. Think about a visitor to your town. If he came on a certain snowy day, he would have one set of experiences, perhaps thinking that everyone always wears boots. If he stayed for a year, he would have a much truer sense of what your town/city/country is all about. For fun, try people-watching at your local grocery store and imagine what a one day visitor would say about your community!

Snapsnack 1: Students in China do not work in groups much. They do things all together as a class, often reciting things out loud as a whole group. When one student is called on, he/she stands, hands behind the back, and looks at the front wall as he/she answers. We never saw a student raise his/her hand. I don’t know if this means they do not ever raise hands to ask questions/volunteer or if our visits just did not happen to see it. The students sit two-across or four-across with long aisles from the front to the back of the classroom. The only schools where we saw other seating arrangements were the international schools– where desks and tables were arranged many different ways. Do you think the way the seats are arranged in your classroom affects the way you learn and behave?

Snapsnack 2:  Did you know that high quality jade changes color over many years of being worn against human skin? I guess it is the warmth that changes it. The hardest jade comes from a mountain that is only partially in China. It is called jadeite. People in China give jade, not diamonds, when they get engaged. What natural resources from your area are rare? How rare are they? How do people use them? What affects their value?

Snapsnack 3:  The terracotta warriors were not always brown. When they were first excavated, they had brightly painted colors, but the colors faded very quickly once exposed to air. When the Chinese officials figured out that even the experts could not stop the fading, they stopped excavating the warriors. They are waiting to dig up the many thousands more (that they know are still underground) until they have found a technology to prevent the fading. They have consulted experts from around the world. What ideas do you have that might prevent the warriors’ colors from fading? How would you test your ideas?

Snapsnack 4: Most people in the Chinese villages have never had  “land line” telephones. Your grandparents probably still have one, even if your family does not. The people in the villages do have cell phones.  Knowing what it takes to put “land line” telephones into homes vs. making cell phones work in the countryside, why do you suppose most villagers never had landlines? What do you know about the economic level of people in the Chinese countryside villages? What happened in China during the years since cell phones were invented? Can you think of reasons why the villagers’ phones are mostly cell phones?

The picture below shows a village home. What can you tell about what jobs people have in villages?

Snapsnack 5: There are web sites that do not work in China because of censorship, but people still “see” them. YouTube does not work on computers, but it does work on smart phones that have web browsers. Some sites do not work, but people pay to “get around” the censorship using a proxy server service. The cost is about $50/year. Teachers even pay it so they can use some sites with their students. Do you know of censorship that people “get around” or rules that people ignore? What is your definition of a rule that is “made to be broken” vs. one that should be respected and followed?

I hope to share more soon. For now, stay warm — those of you in the northern hemisphere.

I am no longer spending day to day life in a classroom with kids, but I continue to learn from my job. My connection with kids may be more vicarious than it was before, but I continue to learn as part of education world. So for the New year, I stop to share my top learning moments of 2010.

Things I learned this year:

It’s worth asking.
In the spring I received a letter inviting me to join a group of professionals involved with technology in education on a trip to China. If I had not formulated a plan delineating how TeachersFirst could benefit from my participation in this trip and then had the nerve to ask whether The Source for Learning would share in the cost, I would have assumed that such a trip was simply not possible. Many months and many thousand miles of travel to China later, I am very glad I took the risk to ask.

Laryngitis does not mean the absence of a voice.
In June, I gave my first full hour “lecture” format presentation at ISTE in Denver. Twenty-four hours beforehand, laryngitis completely erased my ability to speak. Over the next day, I communicated silently with pencil and paper, pantomime, nod, and smile. I discovered the kindness of many complete strangers and the willingness of others to do anything they could to help promote healing of my voice. You can read more about the experience in my post. The bottom line: my “voice” came through in far more ways than simply from that presentation. Not only did the sound re-emerge from my mouth amid the presentation; my passionate interest in creativity and facilitating it as essential to learning (and often with technology tools) echoes in upcoming articles and presentations — and my desire to refine the voice of creativity together with other articulate professionals.

Comparison can hinder vision.
The China trip showed me so much about how people on the other side of the Pacific view learning, how they “teach,” and how Chinese parents and society expect education to look. The easy way to talk about everything I saw in China is to explain it in comparison to what we know in the U.S. The skies are more polluted than ours. The level of laws concerning health and safety is far less than in our litigious society, etc. But I find myself stopping mid-paragraph as I continue this comparison. What is important is not the side by side comparison of “them” and “us.” In fact, the very comparison to us blinds me to nuance and sounds, thoughts, philosophies too different for comparison. There is no one-to-one, force-fit, side-by-side way to understand China. If we focus on competition and comparison, we will never hear the intellectual phonemes the Chinese articulate that simply are not part of our thinking language. We will learn far more from dialog.

Watching learning is learning, too.
I am lucky enough to have two grandsons, one born in 2010. Watching them learn reminds me of what classroom teachers do every day. We watch learning, and in the process we learn, too. That experience never stops. At the end of every day, each of us– even those in no way involved in education– should ask, “What did you see someone learn today?”  If everyone pondered this, society might find a whole new approach to what education is and should be.

Zero technology days are a good idea.
Although I had perhaps 3 of these during 2010, the days when I do not touch my iPhone, listen to MP3s or Pandora, check in on Facebook, watch the news, connect to the Internet, or answer email are precious indeed.  Not only do I focus entirely on people and places. I also return to the  grid with new perspective and energy. Lithium ion is not the only kind of recharge.

To all who care to stop by and read here, Happy New Year. What did you see someone learn this year?

Humphrey Jones, a teacher-blogger from Ireland, suggests that we relabel “teachers.” What would happen if we hired a Madison Avenue firm to “rebrand” our profession? (Now that the elections are over and the economy slow, they could probably use the business!) As Jones says, we need to “relabel the term ‘teacher’ and replace it with a word that more accurately describes the multi-faceted nature of our role.” Over the years, I have read facetious job descriptions of  teachers as a combination of parent, psychologist, cheerleader, health aide, trash collector, and much more. This one was quite popular via email. But these exercises do nothing more than cheer those in the faculty room drinking cold swigs of this morning’s coffee as they grade papers at 4:30 pm. We need a real branding effort.

A brand is much deeper than a label. It is

… what your company stands for and what it is known for. “Look at yourself in the mirror

and ask yourself what you stand for. Go around the room with your leadership and ask them what the company stands for. Settle on one or two brand pillars and build your brand around them.  (A Practical Guide to Branding, Business Week, June 9, 2008)

or, as this article says in a nutshell, your brand is:

The Promise You Make to the World

Interestingly, promise is exactly what teachers bring to the world. We seek it out, nourish it, praise it, polish it, revere it, stretch it, describe it, measure it, mold it, let it grow, prune it, savor it, sing it, respect it, help it recognize itself, and turn it loose to be responsible for itself. We are promisers of promise.  That could be the start of our brand as teachers.

Oh, rats. Somebody already named a margarine after us. I guess we need to keep working on this brand thing. Any MadMen volunteers out there want to take on several million teachers as clients?

A blog post I encountered today inspired this idea for a culminating activity in a world cultures class. (Apologies for the post title’s inappropriate language in a classroom, but it could be worse, I suppose.) This idea could easily be the final assessment for the year. Or it could BE the course:  the one and only ongoing project for a world cultures class, with tastes of math, consumer science, and business/economics tossed in. A dream scenario would be for the best projects to be awarded actual funding for their round the world tickets.  Even if used as a final assessment but not as a replacement for usual classroom activities, it would be much better if students knew about it from the beginning and could collect, muse, investigate, and create throughout the semester or year concurrently with “regular” classroom activities about different cultures.

Here is what it could look like:

RTW Ticket: A study in World Cultures

Subject/Grade: middle school or high school world cultures

Rationale: Students rarely see their study of world cultures as anything except facts about far off, near-imaginary places they will never see or care about. What if they had the opportunity to plan a detailed round-the-world itinerary to hypothetically live and learn in person? The project requirements will build understanding of culture, customs, geography, history, and economics of lands and people around the world as student plan a RTW itinerary to visit and experience world cultures first hand.

Duration: full semester or full year

Objectives: (tailor these to meet your curriculum standards, but be sure to include demonstrated  understanding of at least ten different cultures: their economy, geography, etc.)

Project requirements: (adapt for the level of complexity expected in your classes)

1. Start from the inspiration blog post to learn the basics of planning a RTW ticket itinerary.
2. The itinerary should be presented using any web-based tool(s) or media platform(s) and submitted as a single URL.
3. RTW ticket itinerary must meet the specifications of your chosen airline and be accomplished within a budget of $5000 for air travel during a 365 day period. Travel may start and end at any location worldwide.
4. Itinerary must include rationale for each stop, including links and your own written explanation for this location choice.
5. At least ten different cultures must be included.
6. Experiences with all types of climates must be included.
7. Visits/experiences with at least 10 landforms or geographic features not found in the U.S. must be included.
8. At least 50% of the locations included may NOT be capital cities.
9. At least one third of the locations must not use English as a primary or readily-available language.
10. At least four different types of governments must be visited –  accompanied by explanations of how they differ from the others and how they are similar.
11. At least half the locations must include specific, detailed suggestions for local activities representative the chief economic and natural resources of that culture. You must explain HOW it is representative and how it differs from other cultures.
12. At least half the locations must include specific, detailed suggestions for local activities representative of the rich cultural heritage of that location. You must explain HOW it is representative and how it differs from other cultures.
13. At least three developing nations must be included, along with explanations of how they are developing and changing.
14. At least three countries not “U.S. friendly” must be included. along with explanations of their views of the U.S. and suggestions for activities Americans might do to build better understanding with those they meet.
15. Full credits for all sources must be included in the final product.
16. A completed self-assessment rubric must be embedded or linked in the final product.
17. A RTW ticket budget, documented using resources of the inspiration blog post and subsequent research, must be included in the final product.

Project timeline: (add more detail and intermediate benchmarks for younger students or those who need more direction)

Preliminary tool choices and “wireframe” (empty product pages/spaces/script headings/etc.) for the project due _____.

Tentative location choices (up to 25 possible) and requirement check/match list due _______.

Final location choices, location order, and requirement check/match list due ________.

Full location information for three locations completed by ________.

I could go on and on. The whole point: how well would an American adult do at planning such a RTW experience?  Where would YOU go? How much could YOU learn from doing this project? I know I would work hard to accomplish these requirements.

The convergence of two articles about developmental stages inspires me to an interesting mashup. A few weeks ago, I read the New York Time Magazine article on twenty-somethings. The article proposes that perhaps there is an new life stage for those ages 18 to 30 who “take longer to reach adulthood”:

The traditional cycle seems to have gone off course, as young people remain un­tethered to romantic partners or to permanent homes, going back to school for lack of better options, traveling, avoiding commitments, competing ferociously for unpaid internships or temporary (and often grueling) Teach for America jobs, forestalling the beginning of adult life.

The implications of such a stage for the development, recruitment, and mentoring of new teachers is frightening, indeed. If the younger role models in our classrooms are not “grown ups,”  are we perpetuating Peter Pan instead of learning? But this article, while fascinating, is only half the mash.

Today I read about the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE)’s  release of a study  concluding that “too few [teachers] enter the profession with an understanding of the developmental sciences, which research says have a critical impact on students’ ability to learn.” I draw from a press release; the full study is available for a fee. Excerpts from the study’s recommendations include (with my emphasis):

• Revamp educator preparation programs to improve teachers’ knowledge of child and adolescent development.
• Include child and adolescent developmental strategies in standards and evaluation systems…development science should be incorporated into accreditation and new academic content standards and into assessment practices….measures of teacher effectiveness should include measures of an educator’s knowledge and application of child and adolescent development strategies.
• Acknowledge the need to address developmental issues in turning around low performing schools.

Two articles, two concerns about recognizing developmental stages. Some interesting questions arise: if new teachers, presumably — though not always — young, are not “ready to launch” in their twenties, should we be incorporating consciousness of  THAT into teacher ed programs, too? And what about policies on high stakes tests, etc. ? Finally someone verifies what first grade teachers have been screaming about: current testing is not developmentally the best way to assess student growth. And what if the first grade teacher is a twenty-something? Is he/she ready to be assessing or assessed?

I really don’t know what should be done with this confluence, this developmental mash. Yes, it is only through coincidence that I pull them together.  But isn’t it interesting that people are looking at what constitutes adulthood, what prepares a teacher, and how we should be trying to understand the younger ones, both teacher and student, along the way? Sometimes odd juxtapositions can inspire some intriguing questions.

This summer, I have been following a BBC TV series, The Choir. Amid the cacophony of cable TV, this gem showed up during a search for buried On Demand treasure.  The reality series centers on Gareth Malone, a young choral director who wants to bring singing into the lives of schools and students as it was in his own life: a focal point of community and a transcendent experience in teamwork amid challenge. Having grown up in a school where music was such a central nervous system, I can understand Malone’s mission and passion. I had never stopped and thought much about the fact that music does not hold such a place in most schools nor in the out-of-school lives of most kids.

The series aired so far has shared two school immersions for Malone, one in a coed “comprehensive” (high school) and another in an all-boys’ sports-oriented secondary school roughly equivalent to U.S. combined middle and high school. Neither school is in an elite community or  culture where music is revered as part of  the “heritage.” A visit to King’s College, Cambridge to sing together with the fabled men and boys’ choir was the closest these school choirs came to the traditional world of Choral music with a capital C. More typically, the school settings show boys chasing each other on a playground, avoiding Malone, or sharing raps as they declare formal music  “gay.” One of my favorite scenes involved Malone trying to cajole the all male PhysEd staff into singing in a staff choir. Picture the chorus teacher in your school making such a foray into the world of smelly sweat socks!

As a teacher, I see so many messages in The Choir, but the loudest is one of raising student voices. Malone does it by popping his boy-face into places where no sane person would tread and finally winning over a group by recognizing reasonable goals for them and persistently exuding his own passion until the reticent are willing to take similar risks. But how often do we do either: publicly persist in our own passions despite ridicule or help students take risks with their own?

Too often,  curriculum is not centered on risks or passions. It is centered on sameness and uniformity of path. Malone is quick to point out the confidence that comes from finding an individual singing voice and sharing it. But he is not developing soloists. He is raising passionate voices together, voices that grow from within as they risk sucking in air and letting it out with gusto. The sameness of “chorus” is less about being alike and more about blending together. But it cannot work until each individual singer/student risks raising his own voice and hearing it among the others, eventually tuning in to how the sounds blend together. So should curriculum reach resonance. A teacher models the passion, even in a vacuum at times. The students find voice and hear themselves, and the choirmaster/teacher helps in seeing challenges that can work but will take work. The final performance is a recognizable accomplishment — for each raising his own voice.

Watch the choral boywonder-choirmaster on BBC America. As a teacher, you may find inspiration for a new voice of your own.

Many years ago while completing certification as an English teacher — post B.A. in English — I took a course on linguistics. Probably one the thing that stuck most from that class was an awareness of how we change both what we say and how we say it, depending on the others in the room. Flip a switch and your vocabulary adjusts, the level of sarcasm changes, and  “filters” for prohibited topics kick in.

Now fast forward to today’s rapidly evolving technology world. I find myself adding another layer of techno-contextual adjustment to nearly every conversation I have. Is the person I am talking with techno-familiar, techno-phobe, techno-braggart? Is she an iPhone user? Have I heard him mention Facebook? Is her face buried in her Blackberry? Do I hear a txt msg notification buzzing in her pocket? Did he contact me by email? Are we having this actual conversation on Twitter? Does she print out her email? Did he just say something about AOL? Where did I see her look up that phone number? Does he have a landline? When the conversation ventured into the unknown, did we wonder aloud or Google it?

We collect these techno-portrait bits in every face to face and digital interaction, and we adjust accordingly. I sit in a meeting in my community and realize that sharing a newsletter by pdf or on a web site will eliminate 50% of the people in the room from ever seeking it, much less finding it. Ten minutes later, I mention having seen an article on my feed reader, and I get odd looks from many and one knowing nod among a group of ten. When the subject of travel comes up, I do not mention the fact that I will blog my China trip since I know (from a Twitter contact) that my blog is accessible there. How would I even explain that?

Linguistics experts say we learn the skills of situational language adjustment over time. Young children do not have these skills yet. Teens and young adults develop adjustment skills more quickly, and seasoned, sensitive adults can establish phyllo–like layers of subtlety in their vocabulary and speech. Our students have less experience and motivation for adjusting the what and how of what they say for the techno-levels around them. They may also have widely varying techno-levels among their classroom peers. But we expect them to function well at a techno-level unlike their own in our schools and in dialog with adults around them. No wonder they lose patience or simply do not want to bother.

What a conversation you could have today with your middle and high schools students, as well as with your adult work colleagues: How do you “read” the technology experience/expertise of those around you? How do you change the what and the how of your conversation because of it? Do you think you should have to adjust your language for others’ technology expertise/experience? Why or why not? How is such adjustment different from or comparable to other adjustments you make to your language all the time?

Why do we need fluent creative thinkers?

If we only need the original ideas, who cares if someone can think of loads of ideas that follow the same patterns that we have come to expect? Need ways to prevent sound from waking the baby? Pad the door, pad the walls, pad the crib, pad the television, pad the phone (or put it on a pillow). We get the idea, so why bother being fluent with all these ways of padding things to solve the noise problem? What we need is the original, different idea, right? Besides, the researchers say that group brainstorming has NOT proven effective at loosening adult creativity.

Stop right there. That research was on adults and groups.  What generates loads of ideas and possibilities is an environment that encourages fluency–or flow– of ideas openly and in quantity. No yeah, buts.

What are some reasons for fluency?

Generating more options to choose from, more options to research/test, more ways of saying things, more ways of drawing things, more colors, more lines or tones, more ways of hearing things, more notes, sounds, harmonies, counterpoints, more tastes, smells, associations, more textures and touches, and getting others caught in the benevolent flood of ideas.

How do we release the fluency flood? (uh-oh, does it need to be controlled?)

Establish places where everyone–young, old, quiet, or bossy– can talk, draw, write, scribble, hum, color, ask, think out loud, tilt their heads, graffiti, offer asides, hitchhike on an idea, paste thoughts, pile up images, collect snippets, value brain scraps, and hoard mental mutterings. Since a classroom usually has far more mouths than attentive ears, give everyone space, virtual or tactile, to gather their tidbits. If the very flood/quantity of ideas is valued, the treasures that float in and on the flood are precious indeed. And be sure that everyone respects the collections of others. Make spaces for shared collections nd personal ones. Some possible collection spaces:

Fluency walls: public places to jot an idea or piece of one. Everything you/we associate with waves during a science unit. Everything you/we know or think about survival stories during a literature unit. Everything you/we think of when we think of weather, or the environment, or the Revolutionary War or triangles or percents or… what do you teach about?

Idea scrapbooks: re-used paper with scribbles, held inside a very important-looking cover What a wonderful way to REUSE and renew! A special place for the turns-of-phrase that intrigue me as a writer. Electronic scrapbooks: Glogs or Scrapblogs or Blogs or Google Docs folders or Evernote “notebooks” [my personal favorite] where I/we can stash the thoughts that float in, even if I/we have no idea what I/we will do with them.

More is better. No tagging, judging, deciding; just collecting.

And definitely no laughing, ridicule, naysaying, or “yeah, but…” The benevolent flood.

Could your classroom have fluency spaces? Could your lessons/units have fluency space/time? Could your student projects begin with fluency stretchers? Are YOU trying to be more fluent? What other spaces can you think of to collect thoughts, images, words, numbers, drawings, and bits of mental music? Are you finding fluency?

 Next: Flexibility is more than toe-touching

All my life, I have been aware that teachers volunteer for everything. Having grown up as the child (and grandchild) of teachers, I saw it in my family and those of  fellow faculty-brat friends. Teachers do church school, coach their kids’ teams, are choir moms, help out with scouts, run neighborhood food drives, and so much more. During summer, we may have a few moments free to fantasize about what else we would do if we weren’t working so hard all through the school year (and most of the summer). If teachers were suddenly independently wealthy and could quit our jobs, what volunteer efforts would we be likely to do? How would all those fantasy volunteers change the world?

I would start an after school program at my neighborhood community center. We have tons of kids and tons of retirees. We could have fun and have a time for kids to get homework done in a cheerful place, maybe with healthy, donated snacks. The cooler kids could use computers to edit digital pictures or show other kids how to make glogs or the like. I would hope I’d be wise enough to help steer the computers on a positive path with cool, creative tools.  (After years in middle school, I can usually sense the inappropriate giggles and actions before they happen). In a couple of hours, all the frenzied parents could come home to find kids who did more that afternoon than watch 25 year old re-runs or defeat yet another level of a video game.  Do I think parents should be responsible for their kids? Yes. Do I know it just doesn’t happen? Yes, again. Besides, the relationships of community would do more than foster parental convenience. It might make the kids less likely to smash a mailbox or defiantly skateboard across the road in front of the “old lady” who read Harry Potter with them a couple of years ago. It might decrease the number of retirees who complain about “those kids.” And it might just let us share some laughter. We might even play music or dance or play basketball together. That’s my fantasy volunteer job.

As the economy makes each of us question whether we will ever be able to retire, I worry that the world will be robbed of all the fantasy volunteers who might otherwise have moved from teaching into important roles as enthusiastic, younger retirees. In my more idealistic moments, I wonder what impact it would have on society happen if we rotated 5% of all teachers into fantasy volunteer roles (subsidized as some sort of sabbatical) once every 20 years or so. What would your community look like?

A few days ago, we had an earthquake. At the time, I thought it was the concussion of a distant explosion or possibly  a serious malfunction in one of the systems located beneath my feet in the basement of a house I still do not entirely trust. When I talked with neighbors and others who felt it, each had a different description, but none of us knew at the time that it was an earthquake. Having lived in the San Francisco Bay area as a child, I recalled the rolling tremors that had shaken my toys and books. By comparison,  this was not an earthquake to me.

A short while later, the text messages and phone calls began to roll in. “You just had an earthquake, you idiot!”  pointed out my well-connected but distant offspring. They had the data and coordinates to prove it. The NGS confirmed it. Google Earth measured it: 2.9, centered 6.8 miles from here and 5 miles deep. Cold, hard data. There’s an app for that

Next came the questions: what should we be doing about this? What does the data tell us to do? Are there things we should check? Did it damage anything I/we are responsible for?  What about the dam that holds in the lake we live on? Is there a contingency plan to go with this data?

Shortly after that, a final question: did this earthquake even matter?  We have all sorts of accounts, impressions, and hard data. We have post-surveys, inspections, and discussions. And, when it comes down to it, it really does not matter. But at the time, it did. For a brief period, we needed the data to answer our questions and confirm/deny our worries. Without a more distant perspective, we did not even realize the truth about something potentially major. (BP certainly knows about lacking  perspective from up-close at the time of an event.)

I still wonder which experience is more real: feeling it or measuring it..or combining the feeling with the data after the fact? In a classroom, how do a teacher and a student feel  and measure the earthquakes of learning and know whether they matter?