Think Like a Teacher

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.

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.