Think Like a Teacher

I am speechless. Those who know me are probably stunned that anything could silence this mouth. But the US DOE has done it to me and to millions of students, teachers, and minds with one stroke. They have eliminated funding for the National Writers Project (NWP) as part of the proposed Education budget. Carolyn Foote and Bud Hunt give the details, including Bud’s efforts to ascertain the rationale behind such a crazy decision. The story continues on their blogs, and I hope you will follow it as you scream via whatever medium works for you.

I am stunned at the notion that the NWP  might not have demonstrable impact on student achievement or might have to compete to prove its impact. The NWP’s impact is not only STUDENT achievement. It is discovery of adult voices for life. The NWP is the mental musical accompaniment that helps writers of all ages and stages find their voices, voices they will use to sing, speak, convince, debate, and contribute forever. Teachers who participate in the NWP go from classroom voices to real world voices. The NWP is not a school-specific approach to writing. The NWP makes writers.

The summer I spent in a NWP affiliate program drew me closer to articulating creative process and metacognition than anything I had ever experienced. I lived, survived, and thrived as I watched a kindergarten teacher next to me go from fear of writing to celebrating her voice among her peers and even in a wider world. The NWP makes writers who make writers who make writers. If there were ever a viral learning experience, the NWP is it.

Policy makers and education critics tout the strength of alternative teacher certification programs in bringing experienced practitioners from any given field into the classroom. The NWP makes those in the classroom into practitioners of writing, lifelong writers who continue to hone their craft as they live among other (younger) writers. The NWP allows teachers to learn among their students in a community of writers and to articulate the experience with more authority than a nuclear scientist who walks into a physics class. The NWP provides both the experience and the vocabulary to help each teacher start a writing garden. The NWP experience is viral. The NWP makes writers who make writers who make writers.

You are a blog reader. You are benefiting from the NWP.  Every student of every NWP teacher-participant benefits. And they go on to jobs where they can explain, argue, email, tweet — and perhaps stop to personally question word choice or paragraph substance as they live, survive, and thrive as writers in a world often bereft of deliberate word choice or thought about how we speak and write. Isn’t that the community of literate adults we want? The NWP makes writers who make writers who make writers.

Now it is your turn to write to someone about the NWP. If you never knew much about the NWP or are not sure if it has had an impact on you, ask. Ask your former English teacher, kindergarten teacher, or any adult whose writing you admire: did you ever have anything to do with anyone who had participated in the NWP? Did your teachers?  If we could trace the connections between writers we respect and contact with NWP, how many degrees of separation would there be? Maybe we should be asking that out loud. If I could reach out to the thousands of students I taught over the years, I would remind them: I was a fellow of a NWP affiliate. And they would conclude: The NWP makes writers who make writers who make writers. Pass it on.

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.

I recently came across this post about task analysis, an approach to helping many students master new concepts by carefully breaking them down into steps:

I believe that every new skill can be broken down into steps. We follow a certain procedure no matter what we do. Everything has its own recipe.

I fear that so much of education has swung in this behaviorist direction that we are losing touch with the countervailing trend in what our students do on their own, with their own time and self-directed learning. We have also created entire generations of teachers who learn — and therefore teach– via this step-by-step approach.

There is no question that for many learners, both young and not-so-young, staircases work. The risers are of equal size and measure out to arrive exactly at the landing after the prescribed number of upward swings of the legs. No single step is too taxing, and success is virtually guaranteed, provided we allow for differing rates of speed in going up the steps. Once a teacher masters the analytical skill of measuring out and calculating the amount of rise and number of steps, he/she is likely to guide most learners to the desired landing.

Now look at how our students learn when left to their own devices. Instead of staircases, some students’ learning takes place via giant, expanded Habitrail-like environments with wheels, chutes, interwoven tubes and shortcuts, and even a tube with an open-ended escape the big, wide world. The speed and rapid turns of these learners may not be suited to staircases, but they often have no other choice. They may see tasks a big pictures, with favored route that go by way of the big,wide world. They may even chose to climb three times farther and descend to the desired landing. They may never even cross that landing becuase they have built a direct chute to a whole different level. In a web 2.0 world, learning can be much more of a build-your-own Habitrail than a well-designed staircase.

Some kids prefer running up and down stairs over and over. As adults, we assume that everyone wants to go up. Some learners want to start at the top then appreciate the steps by exploring them (or striding briefly past a few at a time) on the way down.

I sincerely hope that those who teach do not forget that staircases, no matter how admirably engineered, may not be the way their students learn. Trying to navigate even a well-designed staircase can be a bruising experience for the leapers and learners who choose another way.

The thing I enjoy most about teaching is the chance to dream. I have been lucky during my entire adult life that my jobs have allowed me to create and implement new ideas with kids, not locked into a script or fixed curriculum sequence with specific required materials or approach. I have always been encouraged to dream blue sky “what if” scenarios for new ways to inspire and experience learning together with my students or teaching colleagues.

Today that blue sky grew wider as I collaborated together with three top-notch educators, Jim Dachos of GlogsterEDU, Ollie Dreon of Millersville University, and Louise Maine of Punxsutawney Area High School (PA) , to submit an application for a Learning Labs grant from the MacArthur/HASTAC Digital Media and Learning Competition. What a rush of excitement it has been to brainstorm, dream, and distill our ideas into 300 words or less. The excitement of the ideas keeps growing in inverse to the number of words we have available to explain it. This project, like the learning environment it envisions, is as wide as the sky and has taken on a life of its own.

(Ed. Jan 27): MacArthur/HASTAC have released the entries for public comment on the DML competition site. Please stop by, read our entry, and comment. We value your input as we prepare for the resubmission phase where we incorporate new ideas garnered from the greater public.  This competition has VERY quick turnaround, so please do it NOW. This phase ends in less than 2 weeks. Be a part of our blue sky: http://www.dmlcompetition.net/pligg/story.php?title=543

Our sky is expanding, and I cannot wait to see where the horizon may move as comments on the application expand the blue sky of our dreams.

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

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

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

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

pause for Aha moment

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

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

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

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

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

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

Timing

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

Audience

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

True (or likely) Uniqueness

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes I wonder why we teach this…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have you ever found pieces from two different jigsaw puzzles that actually fit together, one a blue piece of a geometric design and one a scrap of sky from an entirely different puzzle box, yet surprisingly an appropriate “match”?  Two posts from separate feeds in my Google Reader today interlock for me into a new idea. One was from the New York Times, a post about today’s young parents and the need for them to turn off their cell phones, iPods,  and Blackberries and just talk to the stroller set. Nothing in that post was new to me, but it got me thinking about thinking out loud and its importance for learning. The other post was elementary teacher Brian Crosby’s post about allowing students time to process what they have done and learned, even (especially?) when the learning is project-based. Whether toddlers, elementary kids, or even adults,  we need time to think out loud about what we have done. Those around us understand us better and learn from us when we do. Young ones grasp our language to build their own language of understanding. Peers and elders appreciate what we have done when we can stop and explain it.We find our own meaning better when we do it out loud.

But the world does not like to grant time for thinking aloud. Brian Crosby bemoans the fact that  end-of-day recap time has slipped away in his classroom. Most of us who take the world with us via iPhone or Blackberry use that once-precious think-back time to check email now.

Maybe we need an app for that. I’d like a “thinking aloud allowed” app that lets me record my thoughts aloud at the same time that it blocks email with autoreplies telling others that this is my time for thinking, so go away.  The same app would turn OFF young parents’ iPhones, etc. until they had conversed about red stop signs, sidewalk cracks, and at least twenty-five other topics with their stroller-bound munchkins. How could the app help Brian’s students? Maybe it could ask them to record their reflections, prompting and saving their comments so they could store them up like Bandaid box treasures (do you remember metal Band-Aid boxes and their treasure-holding capacity?).

No one would make money on this app, but they would make learners and thinkers. Thinking aloud allowed. There’s an app for that.