Think Like a Teacher

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?

Teachers have a skewed view of motherhood. Teacher-moms know when their kids have homework, read the comments on the report cards (even memorize what the comment letters stand for), and remove red pens from their own kids’ school supply pack  so the kids won’t disguise the markings on their papers. With their first kid,  a teacher-mom even looks over EVERY sheet of paper that erupts from her child’s backpack. A teacher-mom sets aside time unloading backpacks on the evening of the first day of school to fill out all the forms, cards, and permissions to go back to school the NEXT day. Mind you, that was her first day with students, too, but she finds the time — perhaps wine in hand.

A teacher-mom dies of embarrassment and avoids the faculty room when her son is the one who at 16 organizes the speed races  in front of the high school or the drafts a team of twenty to cleverly decorate the HS front lawn with plastic forks, spelling out an inappropriate message.

As professionals, we know how important parent involvement is for our students, but we need to know that what we do is skewed from what most moms do. We need to stop and ask: What is it that we bring to our children’s lives (both good and bad) that the other moms do not? This is not to pat ourselves on the back, but to help us realize where our students are not coming from. It is not to make a list of “must-dos” for our student’s moms. It is simply to build an awareness of how their lives may differ from what we see at home each night.

Teacher-moms:

• Live and breathe school. We have talked about it every day of our child’s life. School is an exaggerated slice of the life-pie for our own kids.
• Overtly value education. ‘Nuf said.
• Talk about school taxes, budget priorities, and the importance of the kids. By the time a child is two, he/she has overheard it repeatedly from the grocery cart seat or the swimming pool deck.
• Use words for everything.
• See life in ten month blocks.
• Think New Year’s Day is the same as Labor Day.
• Plan ahead — for this week, next summer, next child, college…
• Change the channel when the show makes a teacher look stupid.

My list could continue, but I know there are many bright, busy teacher-moms who may have something to add. So I salute all of us this Mother’s Day weekend and ask you to add your thoughts. Maybe even ask your kids. It could make for an interesting conversation over burnt pancakes or a lovely dinner.

Happy Teacher-Mom’s Day to us.

I read a lot. Most of it appears on my computer screen: web pages, pdfs, reports, and email. And, of course,  the occasional Facebook status updates. Everything in digital form, for the most part. When a new printed catalog comes in the mail, I go to my computer to “really see” the wares. I am a digital junky. So today’s pleasant surprise was reading a book while upgrading my computer to Snow Leopard. Such a beautiful irony for a sunny gorgeous day: I get to stop answering email and sit in a  chair with a book while my trusty MacBook Pro says ” 45 minutes remaining” then “37 minutes remaining” then “Install four updates” then “restart,” etc.

I stalled on doing the upgrade because I knew it would take me out of communication for at least 3 hours while my computer gnawed through a lengthy to-do list. Embarrassingly, it took me about 6 months to “get around to it.” While the laptop churned, I read half of a new book on Security vs Access in schools, all about the challenges of balancing real “threats” of the Internet with open opportunities for student learning. Thus, another layer of irony: while my digital life was in limbo, I was reading about protecting and promoting the digital lives of kids – via the oldest known fixed form of  mass communication: the printed page. Do you ever stop and think about such ironies?

Watching a television commercial about streaming Netflix?
Reading a sugary cereal box about healthy eating?
Running inside to catch the weather forecast on TV– on a  beautiful, sunny day?
Telling your computer what you are doing instead of just DOING it?

Enough for today. It has stopped snowing leopards, and I am going outside to play

There is a stir  in Forwardthink.  MySciLife, our finalist entry in the Digital Media and Learning Competition, is complete, including this video.  One of these days I’ll upgrade our version of WordPress so we can simply embed it here. But for now…go take a look.

The town of Forwardthink is abuzz during these final days before the deadline for videos and proposed budgets.  Who will “win”? Who knows!?  But the process of imagining, thinking through, and visually explaining a whole new way of learning using digital media has Innovators twisting every digital knob, mashing together different types of files,  converting, combining, and clickety-clacking mice or smooth, glassy touchpads in their excitement. And we are the”old people” who are trying to give the real students a chance to learn this way. What a wonderful, nesting Matryoshka doll/box of learning: we learn how to show our ideas so real students can say it even better outside our carefully crafted box. Their box of learning is actually the larger one that envelopes our vision and grows yet another and another layer.  We “innovators” have carved a small but beautiful vision, the smallest inner seedling of a doll/box. The best thing that can happen is for students to encase it in their own, more artful ideas.

Back in Forwardthink, we Innovators are busy marveling at how pretty our starter Matryoshka doll/boxes are. We hover about the Town Hall doors. The Elders have not even told us when to expcet The Announcement. The Wise Crowds are still busy sharing their insights. And we wait to learn:

In a tug of war between the wisdom of the crowd and competition, who wins?

 I think it’s the  Matryoshka dolls of learning who ultimately win. We are just part of the process.

Technology takes us too seriously.

April Fools Day takes us beyond comic relief to some interesting observations on technology and life. It all  started when I went to write an upcoming weekly Update for TeachersFirst and was not sure how to spell whoopee cushion. So… I Googled it. First, Google’s suggested offerings gave me a good laugh:

What is a whoopy cat, anyway? Alas, despite the lure of whoopie pie recipes, I stuck with my initial whoopy hypothesis. Lo and behold, Google again corrected me:

Showing results for whoopee cushion. Search instead for whoopy cushion

But the richness of whoopy cushions could not be greater! Not only can I only find  the ubiquitous wikipedia explanation; I also find Google Ad results galore. Did you know:

That whoopee cushions (the correct spelling) are apparently oriental?

That you can apparently get any size online?

That they have been around for over 50 years?

That there is something called PottyPutty (ewwww…).

That there is a best value whoopee cushion?

That Amazon places them under sports?

Wow, the things you learn about whoopee cushions from Google.

I look further:

There are images of whoopee cushions, videos of whoopee cushions, and — the ultimate in technology — a whoopee cushion widget!

As my husband chimes in:

No matter how sophisticated we get with technology, someone will teach it to make fart noises.

So, as April Fools’ Day approaches,  fear not. Google can help you find humor in the serious and take even the most frivolous gag seriously. There must be a lesson in 21st century literacy buried in here somewhere, but I think I just heard a fart noise from the back of a classroom.

Ok, my title is a bit of a stretch and certainly a distortion of logic. But Scientific American published a 60 second science podcast today about how puberty makes kids stupid. A study of brains in pubescent mice shows that puberty triggers a sort of interference by something called a GABA receptor that gets into the brain at puberty (in mice), preventing neurons from forming connections as they did when the mouse was not experiencing hormone rage. A slightly more elaborate explanation of the mouse study in the Science Magazine podcast (March 19) explains further that stress may actually improve learning during these dumbed-down days by overriding the GABA interference. So I muse:

If puberty inhibits brain function enough to prevent learning, do zits possibly prevent learning?

If we can interfere with the pubescent brainstall simply by adding a little stress, should we be stressing our teenagers more?

If puberty causes zits, will learning — which implies conquering puberty — cure them?

But isn’t stress supposed to CAUSE zits?

Or does stress cause puberty?

You have 60 seconds to generate the logic diagram for these arguments, separate fact from fiction, and report it with APA documentation…or simply get a zit. How’s that for stress-induced learning?

It must be Friday.

I admire someone who is willing to change his/her mind. I don’t mean fickleness. I mean changing one’s mind as in thinking deeply, allowing ideas to steep and evolve, finally realizing that thoughtful deliberation has changed one’s intellectual travel plan. The New York Times today documents just such a “U-turn” by Diane Ravitch, educational historian and scholar. If I were giving a project-based learning grade to Dr. Ravitch, she would earn maximum points for process and extra credit for risk-taking. For a professional “scholar” to change her mind is the most risky and admirable way to model true learning we could ever hope to witness.

Whether or not you agree with Dr. Ravitch’s current positions, her intellectual process of intellectual evolution is exactly what we need in our young people and leaders both now and into the future. Perhaps it is the willingness to change one’s mind that has been most lacking in recent years as ed reform has heated up and we have worried about the very future of learning in a new century. If teachers, schools, parents, communities, and policy makers are not willing to change their minds through carefully deliberate process, we are mired.

I have no idea how we make mind-changing an accredited process, component of adequate yearly progress, or a measurable datapoint, but it must somehow be part of the process of 21st century learning. Forget the trendy century label. A mind is a wonderful thing to change, no matter what the century.