Think Like a Teacher

Once again I find myself (as TeachersFirst editor) and our entire web site playing the role of a utensil, in this case a sifter. We just completed a “chunk” of new content for the site on Internet filtering in schools: Sifting Through the Filters. Why? because we see a need to help “sift” the information about filtering into a teacher’s context and experience, perhaps providing ways for teachers to open dialog about it “within the system” they deal with daily. I especially like the section on “Key Issues About Filtering” for providing a variety of perspectives. I hope it will help some folks who are trying to make changes to the way their students learn.

I don’t think any topic was more vehemently discussed by frustrated educators at the Princeton conference, NECC, and TF’s most recent advisory board meeting than filtering. But I rarely hear any “average” teacher do more than express frustration and  occasional confusion about web filters and why they seem to do everything except HELP students learn wise use of the web. Some teachers erroneously believe that the filters will prevent any “bad” stuff from entering their classrooms. Others simply have no idea what the tech magicians behind the curtains do or think in setting up this “filter” and how it blocks certain content. Just about every savvy teacher has encountered the dowsing of fired-up lesson plans that comes from finding a terrific site at home on Sunday night, then discovering (in front of 30 itchy sixth graders) that it is inaccessible in school. Shame on them for not checking, but come on…sometimes we get so busy we forget.

I hope TeachersFirst’s role as a utensil is exactly that: useful, practical, and accessible. We know our audience pretty well: willing teachers who may or may not be “cooks” with technology on their own but who constantly seek new recipes and who learn from each time they cook up a new way to use technology as a learning tool. We do not seek to inspire the most chic technology chef, but we know our utensils well. And we know good technology cooking. Eventually anyone can create a master recipe with the right utensils and some practice.

Bon appetit! I’d love to hear your reviews of this new utensil.

Pearson and CoSN published a video on YouTube and elsewhere: “Learning to Change/Changing to Learn,” all about 21st Century learning and reimaging what education is.  I always have my suspicions about any commercial entity (especially one as HUGE as Pearson) publishing such a a video — and the inevitable product launch likely to follow).  I have to say, however,  that I love the words Stephen Heppel of the UK uses to describe students who use the tools of collaboration, synthesis, problem-solving, validation, etc. to LEARN, not memorize or capture a stream of facts. He calls them “ingenious, collaborative, gregarious, brave children”[my emphasis].

When I think about the willingness to accept uncertainty, to manipulate information that slips through the fingers like glycerin, to be wrong and keep on going, to proffer shared ownership in ideas, all of these ARE brave characteristics. Perhaps the new character education is about being learning-brave. This would make all the adults who “figure stuff out” using the web as  much brave students as the younger ones who do so in a formal setting or at home at night when “school” is over. What we need as more “brave” learners and more hero-worship of  that bravery instead of building fortifications of certainty and standards.

True learning IS brave. So eat your intellectual wheaties and build some bravery. This “land of the brave” is world-wide and moving fast. I know I need to keep up my strength, too, but I am very excited to see where we go — in even another year.

Last Friday I spent the day at a conference in Princeton on Children and Electronic Media: Teaching in the Technological Age. There were presentations on current research concerning the impact of electronic media on children and youth, innovative uses of technology in classrooms, and professional development using electronic media (synchronous and asynchronous). The presenters were all recognized voices; many in the auditorium were also recognized “eyes and ears,” as well as practitioners. Kevin Jarrett, one of the presenters and “Mr.  Second Life” of education [my nickname], blogged the event today, and his reverence for the minds in the room is quite appropriate. It was an energizing gathering — one that seems destined to echo in orange.

I spent a good part of the weekend letting the conference incubate in my head. The issues of implementing teacher professional development in rigorous, differentiated, yet supportive and respectful formats are so critical to the future success of our students, and there is simply SO much for so many to learn, and never “be done.” The ProfDev concerns I have been mulling:

1. Time. How can we streamline the start-up and personalization of PD in a one-size-fits-all mindset? So many administrations simply want “all staff” to “complete” this or that Prof Dev “training,” whether it is on special ed procedures, a new language arts program, or –oh yeah– we have to do the technology stuff (Why so many do technology “training” in isolation is a major issue, as well!)

2. Respect and expect. How do we shift to a  model that allows differentiation hand in hand with rigor: respect where teachers say they are (“I need to learn more about teaching xxx in a project-based approach but am also nervous about doing anything with technology”) yet expect them to step outside of their comfort zones with respectful support and encouragement. Without both, you waste your money and their time. With both, change can actually happen.

3. Hanging together. In a standard, hierarchical arrangement of admin and teachers, there may well be administrators placed in the position of evaluating and approving personalized Prof Dev plans who know the topics no better than the novice participants. Shouldn’t they simply do it together as part of the cohort,  just as we would like students and teacher to be able to work together as learners? What better way to model a new way of “building learners”?

4. Real life. Different teachers have varying degrees of “free” time. There are stages of life when doing anything after 4 or 5 pm is extremely difficult for a teacher: infant at home, aging or dying parents, carpools and coaching for their own kids, moonlighting jobs to pay kids’ tuition, and innumerable other pressures spread and stress so many teachers. This is where the asynchronous options actually make a difference, assuming the 3 concerns above have been resolved wisely. Kevin says

Who has time for PD? We all do. It’s a matter of deciding what’s important. When you’re personally vested in the process, somehow, it gets done!

It’s the “personally vested” part that is tough to achieve in stressed people. We need to respect the limits of real life and expect progress without expecting the same level of expertise from all in the same time frame (NTLB?). If  life’s pressures are unreasonable, teachers will never be “vested.” Humans protect their own survival by fighting.

5. Making it meaningful. We are supposed to do this with our students and should expect that our own learning should be the same way. It is our own responsibility to be sure that our OWN prof dev is meaningful. If it isn’t, speak up and ask if you can adjust it (respectfully of course).

6. Vastness. We will never be “done.” We can’t even stay even. We can sift, sort, listen, and ask questions. David Brooks wrote Saturday about The Cognitive Age:

The central process driving this is not globalization. It’s the skills revolution. We’re moving into a more demanding cognitive age. In order to thrive, people are compelled to become better at absorbing, processing and combining information. [my italics]

Teachers need to not only do this absorbing, processing, and combining and with their own skills; they must do it well enough to teach it to tomorrow’s adults. The vastness of this task is huge.

Bright orange is the color of fire, of lively energy and hope, and of sunsets. I hope the fire from this conference will burn brightly as we who were there light some flames in others,  and avoid sunset.

I was away at a conference for several days over last weekend and early this week(LONG hours in the exhibit hall). But for the last two days I have been mulling over my plans for a pre-conference workshop for teachers at Pennsylvania Association for Gifted Education’s (PAGE) annual conference. Back in the days when I taught gifted (for over a dozen years), our group of teachers often talked about our role as “guide on the side” and on gifted ed’s propensity to try out new ideas before general ed and teacher ed picked them up. We were, many  times, a proving ground, and we pretty much exclusively taught using constructivist, project-based models. I was a “general contractor” on site as my classes built learning. The students did the heavy lifting, crafting everything from the actual foundations to the cabinetry trim of learning. I planned the schedule, made sure the materials were there, and gently but firmly redirected the process when it appeared that the structures might fail.

This week brings me a new chance to promote the model of teachers as general contractors: both at the PAGE workshop and in the announcement of a FREE cooperative pilot project from TeachersFirst and TRIntuition’s workBench: The Building Learners Project. (Actually, the logo image for this project was what got me started on the contractor analogy.) I could not be more pleased to see such opportunities for teachers to act as general contractors for the learning in their classrooms– even some learning of their own. Learning new tech toys/tools is part of being a good contractor, and it’s OK to figure them out along with the craftspeople on the job site. I am looking forward to getting my hands a little dirty, as well.

We’ve been pretty busy planning a new project at TeachersFirst called Building Learners. We’re working together with a new web2.0 tool developer to offer an amazing project. The announcement is scheduled for about ten days from now, and I am actually pretty excited. It’s free, it’s creative, and it’s open-ended. I would love nothing more than to have it grow beyond what we have imagined (or are capable of “managing.”) It really is intended as a launch more like a solar-powered passenger balloon: theoretically self-sustaining and destined to go where the wind takes it and the passengers steer it. We’ll stay on the ground, ready to radio up help and tracking via every means possible. But the kids and the teachers will be driving this puppy. In a very real sense, they ARE the pilot(s). Can’t wait!

The last 24 hours in my email/RSS/real people world has brought reminders of difficult realities:

1. Web 2.0 tools die (or are left to suffer a slow death by weeds) as rapidly as the seasonal harvests of farmers.

2. Teachers are in a hot kitchen with far to many required recipes these days.

Compounding  this situation:

3. The most imaginative minds are generating exciting scenarios and fabulous examples of an entirely new way to cook up learning. Call it School 2.0: Nouvelle Cuisine for the Minds.

So how is the teacher (in #2) supposed to reconcile all this? Let me elaborate…

1. TeachersFirst Edge reviews web2.0 tools and suggests ways to use them safely and effectively in the classroom. We are, essentially, offering  the 20-minute recipes for the Nouvelle Cuisine for the Minds.  We visit the Farmer’s Market of web2.0, select the current cheap (free) ingredients available, and give teachers ideas for a quick family meal that brings new taste to their classroom and lets the kids get involved in the actual cooking.  The ongoing problem is that a farmer simply won’t appear one week. No one knows what happened to his produce. It simply went out of season or was left to die on the vine. Free web2.0 tools die. Fact of life. And the teachers and kids have no clue where to look for a substitute ingredient. Can you make a timeline out of another kind of fruit?

2. Meanwhile, the same teachers, and their 10,000 other colleagues who never even VISIT the Framers Market, are being told what to cook, how many minutes it should take, how to measure it (at least 3 times), conduct a scientific taste-test, and still turn out at least three dozen new dishes a day. The directions are explicit and the consequences of one dropped cupcake are dire.

3. The same teachers that were involved in #1 (and #2, since ALL must do the required recipes) read about those in #3 and simply want to cry. They long to approach Nouvelle Cuisine, but they do not have the time to look for replacement ingredients or even learn to read French.  They don’t Twitter, might blog, and have not found the store where they can buy the TechCrunch they have read about. Their market is local, so they must shop accordingly.

 What is a teacher to do? Some say, “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.” If all who are frustrated (all those in #2) do so, our kids may starve. Certainly, there are some cooks in #2 who won’t even read about Nouvelle Cuisine, but how can we reconcile the desire of the better ones to reach #3 with the requirements of #2 (and the transience of the ingredients in #1?).

What we need to do is throw out the recipes. We need to be sharing loads of ingredients, maintaining awareness of what is available at the web2.0 Farmers Market (and perhaps asking some farmers to grow a little more of this or that), sharing what we know about tasty substitutions for missing ingredients,  granting permission to generate unique concoctions, and encouraging  kitchen-sharing with anyone who walks in. The Nouvelle Cuisine folks would welcome the collaboration and gladly relinquish the haute in favor of rich potluck. The Cookbook Writers in #2 MIGHT be convinced to permit change, as long as, ultimately, there is a taste test to assure that what we cook up is “good food” (most likely a regional or even personal taste).  Ultimately, what we want is food that satisfies: “cognitive nutrition” (term adapted from Tom O’Brien and Christine Wallach. And perhaps a new ventilation system for that kitchen heat would be a good idea.

“However, it is important to realize that we also need to spend time away from the grid in order to remain focused on areas that interest us. By focusing on specific ideas and using other people as sources for our learning, we don’t have to do all the work ourselves.”

So says Kelly Christopherson (KC) in a wonderful post about prioritizing the overwhelming “informational tsunami” for educators on technology, web 2.0, and change. I feel overloaded every day. When events like a family crisis or days at a conference keep me (blessedly) away from my computer–well, except for emergencies– for days at a time, my RSS reader becomes a Horrendous Heap to read, and I often resort to fast-scan-then-give-up-and-mark-all-as-read. But curiosity still nags at me. What treats did I just throw out?

So how do I balance my selfish curiosity (“I just wanna read about it so I know what it is and how it works– in case I am missing something”) with the focus that KC suggests to keep myself sane? With a web site such as TeachersFirst to orchestrate, I am very aware of the wide range of teacher needs we try to meet– for free, without bias, and with respect for our users. We can never be everything to everybody. We are generalists, seeking to deliver from our bakery variety pack a selected, deliciously-frosted cupcake for each teacher-user. We cannot possibly deliver an entire cake to each, but we hope that our cupcake variety is diverse enough for everyone to find just the taste they need now and to return for another cupcake soon. For some teachers, TeachersFirst may entice them to get involved in baking themselves, taking a course or researching “recipes” for techno-treats independently. Others will always opt for our delicious bakery, simply as a trusted time saver.

Personally, I want to know how to bake every type of edtech cake, fill it, frost it, and even list its nutritional content. I know I will never meet that goal. But I will try to take KC’s advice about “taking time away from the grid” (or the bakery). I feel as though he has given me permission to hit the “mark all as read” button when I am feeling overwhelmed.

Perhaps the most important permission I can give myself when confronted with so many edtech treats is permission to follow the bakery scents that intrigue me most and write with passion about those. I may never learn to make every cake, but those I do pursue will taste genuine, indeed. Those who read TeachersFirst and choose us as their favorite bakery will, I hope,  appreciate our authenticity.

The Washington Post describes a palatial new school where technolust has run amok, dragging teachers down into negativity and frustration instead of engaging them and building learners. “Technolust,”  or technology for technology’s sake, does more damage per incident than any initiative (or lack of it) in education today. Technology attracts attention by its sheer luminescence, and the attention turns negative when the money spent carries no planning for the implementation and collaboration that would scaffold successful impetus for learning and change. Taxpayers smell waste instead of seeing success.

Or, to put it bluntly: Shove technology at a faculty without thinking like a teacher and involving the teachers, and you might as well turn on the fan next to your stack of bills.

Sadly, what I am saying is NOT new. Research backs it, and the research on successful implementation is readily available. You don’t throw hardware at people and expect them to use it or use it well. More broadly, you don’t throw ANY concept at a learner and expect them to seize it and integrate it into their understanding without some context, some involvement, some sort of connection to their own “reality.” We KNOW this.

Conversely, you could make Universal Mr. Potatohead (U.M.P.) into a successful initiative if you did it right: let teachers experience a workshop using Mr.P.  Challenge them to think of ways Mr. P. could provide connections and allow students to engage in the subjects they teach. Involve some teacher-leaders in Pilot Potatoheads. Brainstorm. Challenge creativity and reward teachers for using it: Mr. P. can provide cells for the microscope in bio, write stories from his own point of view in English, discuss natural resources in social studies, plan an ideal potato city in civics class, observe food chains in potato land, read stories aloud, make friends with fellow potatoheads on the other side of the world, calculate fractions of potatoes in math, and so on. Let teachers collaborate on their successes and problems with the new U.M.P. approach. Share the Mr. Potatohead successes with the taxpayers and invite them to participate. Do we NEED Mr. P.  to be able to teach? No. If we stop and think about ways he could become part of our toolbox, however, he might actually make some concepts “stick” (he’s starchy, after all). Mr. P. MIGHT even make us rethink ways to look at our curriculum and learning through creative eyes in general.

Those folks in Alexandria bear more resemblance to potatoheads than effective planners. And now their story will spread like melting butter, preventing deserving schools from getting anything but small potatoes in their technology budgets.

I just found this amazing, inactive blog , and I want to read all day. It’s got such good ideas (with graphical represantations !), ideas that you wish every teacher, student, and creator-of-product could see.

Show your students the graphs about passionate users. Let them talk about them and tell you about their own personal experiences with interactive sites as examples of the concepts they see…(you want higher level thinking?!). THEN assign them to create a presentation on whatever your current curriculum topic is. You’ll (hopefully) never sleep through project presentation day again!

If we could get all who “teach” – whatever the venue- to absorb some of this, too…just imagine a world full of creative people who spark passion, not just adequate yearly progress.

I have a dream, too.

“..not enough time on process, or collective human judgment”

These two ideas ring in my head  from Nancy Flanagan’s pointed (and sad) account of attending the National Academy of Sciences “Committee on Incentives and Test-Based Accountability.” She set me thinking about parallels between elusive definitions of “proficiency” and the struggles my schools had defining “gifted” during my many years teaching gifted students. The challenge was for the team that “identified” gifted kids — under a forced application of special ed laws applied to gifted (good idea to mandate gifted services, though). The irony was that an experienced TOG (teacher of gifted) could “sniff out” these kids by simply spending some time in their presence. But we sought the elusive perfect screening and identification procedure, the numerical formula, constantly swinging between IDing every high achiever and IDing no one, often missing desperate, unabomber-type  geniuses. What were we discounting? Collective human judgment (in this case judgment by those acquainted with the array of ways true giftedness presents itself). Everyone was so afraid to use a human definition that we missed some really needy kids.

…not enough time on process..

Process is what our gifted classroom was all about. Listen and watch it to “sniff out” gifted kids. The gifted kids just “intuit” what they can do and develop their own process. Gifted kids thrive on forward process (intentional hitchhike on the football term). Other students may need more help seeing and feeling process.  It’s like “feeling the water” for very talented swimmers. Some need help to feel it, at first. Some teachers will certainly need to learn the feeling, too. But ultimately, that is where all learners need to be: making forward process. So can we please use our collective human judgment to measure proficiency and just get on with building forward process?