Think Like a Teacher

It’s not about digital immigrants vs digital natives. It’s about willingness to taste something new.

Five year olds don’t like to try new foods. Some are unwilling to touch a food simply because it is green or “looks funny.” If it does not look like macaroni and/or cheese, the five year old mouth clamps closed. Fortunately, with a little coaxing, that stubborn little macaroni man will grow out of this phase.

Adults who are taste-averse about new applications of technology are worse than five year old macaroni mavens. Yesterday I heard a tale of unwilling technology “taste testers” in a highly respected university setting. This university was asked to evaluate various curricula for use in a certain type of early childhood program. As professionals, their taste testing is more than personal preference. It is a formal assessment of the quality of the curriculum “meals” being offered.

This group of curriculum food critics notified the creator of one curriculum that they simply will not “taste” that curriculum because it is not available entirely in a print format.  The curriculum, in fact, is much more than a print document. It is an interactive tool that uses ongoing formative assessments of student progress to recommend the next curriculum objectives for EACH child and simultaneously offers several possible activities that can be used to help that child (or a class) achieve the next developmentally appropriate objective. Why isn’t it in print? Because it is interactive, data driven, and dynamic. You simply can’t make a print curriculum “book” that flips to the correct page based on what  a child did today in class. This curriculum is steeped in technology to make learning work. Imagine that.

But the highly respected five year olds won’t taste it because it looks funny and is not printed macaroni and cheese.

I have no idea who has given the five year olds permission to run the university evaluation project, but I hope someone will eventually help them outgrow their five-year-old, finnicky attitude. At this rate, they would have us teaching our children to do nothing but string macaroni bracelets well into the 21st century.

Please pardon this bit of a rant. Some weeks end on a sticky note.

I read a great post from Rian van der Merwe, a tech designer/dad in South Africa. He shares four essential guidelines for folks designing iPad apps for his young daughter. His requests make perfect sense, not only for young children on iPads, but for our students using both apps and web resources. I especially like  this one:

If You Try To Trick My Kid Into Buying Stuff, You’re Dead To Me.…The screen is a landmine of carefully placed icons that lead to accidental purchases — not to mention the random animated banner ads that are designed to draw attention away from the app itself….if you try to use persuasive design on my young daughter, all bets are off. Your app will be deleted, and we’ll never do business again.

Does that remind you of experiences you have had with web sites in your classroom? How many have you declared “Dead to Me”?

Rounding out  Mr. van der Merwe’s top four usability guidelines for little fingers and young minds using iPads are these points (paraphrased):

• use visual cues to indicate which things are interactive
• make pagination using arrows: obvious and easy to navigate (even for little fingers)
• make menus secondary: something we seek out and will not open accidentally

While some teachers may not be fortunate to own an iPad or even use them at school, we have parallel expertise on what drives us crazy about web sites OR apps we use with students in our classrooms. I offer my top four guidelines for web resources AND apps to avoid a “Dead to Me” sentence:

1. Bikinis are islands, nothing else.

If you must have ads to keep your app/site free, at least moderate them so there are no scantily clad women. My students are not here for human anatomy visuals or lessons on eating disorders. The same goes for guys with sixpacks in Speedos. Puberty begins earlier and earlier these days, even without your help.

2. Your energetic music is my insanity.

Engaging, perhaps. But your “engaging” music means I have to hand out headphones (lice?) or give the same directions for muting speakers and/or finding the “sound off” icon at least three times EVERY time we open the app/site. Set your music default to OFF.

3. I am not a student, so don’t force me to act like one.

I like to sample every activity/game/app, but I don’t have time to navigate through the whole thing just to know which terms are used or what we will learn. Give me Teacher Information. If your site/app is not intended for school, you can still tell us a bit about it. Call this area  “behind the scenes” if you don’t want to doom your app/site as “educational.” I’ll find the site/app anyway, if it is good. While you are at it, please tell me how long it typically takes to navigate a game and other practical tips. I promise not to send kids into your app/site without previewing and deciding how it fits our curriculum, but I need your help.

4. Remember Josh and Julie in the back row.

I love Josh and Julie. Josh is so bright he makes me laugh when I shouldn’t. He also knows how to break any game or web activity. He shows Julie (or she shows him), as they set their own “learning objectives” for the day. For Josh, the objective usually involves showing the game that he knows more or sleuthing out incorrect information or exceptions he can argue about. Josh needs a way to skip ahead by demonstrating competence and something open ended to intrigue him into productive and extended thinking. Julie has a learning disability. It does not prevent her recalling how to escape learning the terms or avoid thinking about anything that was “too hard” or open ended. Give more than a fleeting thought to Josh and Julie, and be honest in sharing what I may need to do to adapt for them … in the Teacher Info (see #3).

I personally thank any app/web developer who can adhere to at least these four. You’ll be alive and well with me. I am certain every teacher has at least two or three or ten death sentence avoidance guidelines to add. Each Thinking Teacher who writes for TeachersFirst has his/her own. We carry these with us as we write reviews for TeachersFirst, and we always welcome the thoughts and “guidelines” of others. Comment here or on any TeachersFirst resource review.

Once a teacher…

My favorite item on a popular list of “you know you’re a teacher when” lines is that you correct strangers’ children’s behavior in the grocery checkout line.  We take teaching with us into the community every day, whether we intend to or not. We find ourselves paying attention to how people learn (or don’t) everywhere we go. We even analyze the pedagogy of our puppies. There is more to this than grounds for a giggle. We have expertise that extends beyond our schools and classrooms.

I am an officer in our property owners association. We find that our members often do not understand the role of the POA or how/why their money is collected and spent. The teacher in me realizes that handing people a bunch of rules and regs is no different with adults than it is with our students.  They have no motivation to read them. As teachers, we can contribute far more to our communities than our taxes and occasional volunteer days. We can share about how people learn. No lectures, no insidious agendas, just use what we know about learning to help our communities. We are ambassadors for and about learning.

As I have mentioned, I have been working a lot with infographics lately — especially as I get ready for ISTE 2012. I love the way an infographic can SHOW instead of TELL. So my latest experiment is to try using infographics to SHOW my community how our POA works and what it does. In today’s manic, visual world,  our neighbors might stop long enough to look and learn. And infographics are a lot more interesting than a packets of rules and regs.

As I share these graphics with my fellow board members, I realize that they have never thought about how people learn. Most have never thought about how they learn themselves. I am sharing an expertise that is so much a part of me I do not realize everyone else does not have it. I am an inadvertent ambassador for learning. I guess that’s not a bad role. It’s certainly less intrusive than talking to misbehaving tots in the checkout line.

I have never protected my privacy so fiercely that no one could learn about me. On the contrary, I value my professional digital footprint. When I Google myself, I see thousands of results, and I am OK with that. It’s even OK that the ads on Facebook seem to know I frequent certain online vendors or like to swim.  Seems harmless enough.

Recently, however, the OK2Ask®  team at TeachersFirst has been developing a new professional development offering, Web Worries: What teachers should know about online behavior. That got me thinking about what advice I would give to teachers trying to separate personal and professional personnas online. About the same time, Google announced upcoming changes to its Terms of Use. These two related events spurred me to think further about the tradeoffs teachers make when using online tools, establishing memberships, and generally “sharing” our thoughts, bookmarks, creations, and lives online.

The real tradeoff is not about giving up privacy in order to be social. It is about trading  privacy for time. Each steals from the other, in a nasty currency exchange. If we, as teachers, choose to use the timesaving tools that help us learn, teach, or communicate with parents, students,  and colleagues, we pay with our privacy. If we use iGoogle, Google Reader, Google Docs, Blogger, YouTube, or Gmail accounts, the data about what we say and do there is open to cross-pollination about us in an aggregate form that Google does not fully explain.  It may not be personal, but it is based on the personal. If we work diligently to protect our privacy, we spend extra time — not only to cloak our identities, but possibly in using inefficient means to accomplish the same necessary tasks. Having tools that talk to each other, posting information on one tool and allowing access for use of that info by another tool, saves us a lot of time.  But the web of our information means that we are more easily traceable, searchable, and less private. It becomes more and more difficult to check to be sure we have not slipped up and allowed our personal lives to ooze into our professional personnas or vice versa. Simply monitoring the cross-pollination of our data by swarms of technology bees takes time. Aggravating the privacy trade-off is the fact that time is a teacher’s most precious commodity — beyond her family’s love and her paycheck.

I present this not as a problem-solution scenario, but as food for thought.  We need  not “solve” the privacy/time tradeoff. Rather, we should be aware of it.  As who we are becomes a gestalt in a virtual cloud, the one thing we still hold as our own is the ability to think, question, and decide. Decide how much privacy you are willing to pay to save time. Decide which times of your life are too precious to relinquish to the screen. It is no coincidence that the expression says we “spend” time.  The exchange rate for privacy is still up in the air cloud.

Right about now, it feels as though your students are mired in semi-frozen slush. You worry that they will never master all that they need to know before The Big Test or The End of the Year. They seem to make the same mistakes over and over again, no matter how many times you write a constructive comment or offer extra help. The same students who have been turning in outstanding projects all year continue to do so, while others seem to set their brains to seven hour snooze as they walk through the doors at 7:30 am.

In short, it is February.

I have been talking to a high school bio teacher who has the same worries. She has been using infographics creation as a formative assessment during several of her units this year, and she questions whether the kids are “getting it” at all. She invited me to take a look at what her students have done so far, to visit the class wiki and see the progression of infographics on each student’s page from October until now. She wanted to know whether I could see progress and whether I thought this idea was working or not.

I looked. I was so instantly impressed that I called others to my computer. These kids show what they know by building creative, meaningful infographics.

I learn from what I see. Yes, there are a few students who throw a few text boxes onto a computer screen like fill-in-the-blanks on a worksheet and call it an infographic. But so many more have made steady progress from a few images on a rectangle (their first attempt) to a carefully color coordinated arrangement of words, images, and lines/arrows that explain photosynthesis or DNA replication (attempts 2 and 3). As a set of fresh eyes, looking from a distance instead of from the teacher’s desk in the bio lab, I see understanding. I see science concepts I had long forgotten, now freshly explained to me by a 9th grader. I make comments on their wiki because they need to know that their work makes sense. I also make suggestions (no teacher can ever resist a chance!).

I email their teacher to ask– does she have any idea how GOOD her students’ work really is? Can she reflect from afar to gain perspective? Or does February have her so earthbound that she cannot see the big picture from above?

In a flash of optimism, she suggests surveying the kids on the challenges and positives of using infographics to build understanding and show what they know.  Although the data is still rolling in, it is obvious that they see progress, too. Ask a ninth grader to reflect anonymously via a survey, and you will get an honest answer. Another 30,000 ft view.

We all need to look at our students’ travels from high elevation to trace the paths they have taken in the last six months. Take a February leap — with a colleague or your students — to enjoy the view from 30,000 feet.

TeachersFirst is blessed with a wonderful team of reviewers. The challenge we face is maintaining a consistent voice among so many teacher-writers. This same challenge rises in any collaborative student project where each student writes a portion of the content. How do we maintain a voice and writing style that does not scream, “Listen to how different I am”? Of course, in the “real world,” there are editors handle this challenge, shifting sentences and wrangling words to conduct a song in unison without erasing the beautiful tone of each writer.

As I work with our team, I realize that the lessons I learn from these lifelong learners, our teacher/reviewer/writers, are similar to those any teacher learns from students. My lesson this week was on feedback. The editorial team decided to share screencasts of the editorial process with each reviewer. The screencasts follow the mouse as the editor reads, mulls things over, makes changes, moves things, and –in effect–thinks “on screen.”  It is stream of consciousness editing in real time. (That element of time matters.)

You could do the same: have a student “editor” (or you) use a tool like Screencastomatic (reviewed here) to record the process of revising a piece of writing. Another possible tool is Primary Pad (reviewed here) which plays changes back like a tape recorder. Keep it simple. Focus in on changing one to three things that writer needs most. Let him/her watch as you combine sentences to eliminate redundancy or add active verbs. Don’t TELL him,  SHOW him.  Don’t talk about it, just share the link and see what happens. Perhaps have a slightly more talented writer make a recording for one who is having trouble with a specific aspect of writing. As a precaution, retain a copy of the original, in case the writer feels robbed of his work.

In the case of our reviewers, the response was as authentic as the situation. The process has taught me a lot about how we learn as writers. My fear going into this was that we would violate the very personal ownership that writers feel. Instead, we are hearing excited feedback on the screencasts. Specifically, if the release of ownership is motivated and justified by a purpose (such as making a group project sound consistent or making our site more consistent),  most writers will respond, analyzing what they observe about the changes at a level of metacognition any teacher would thrill to see:

As I looked at the screencast last night, I do see more what you mean in past feedback and what you are looking for…. I am making a list of the words, phrases to stay away from as well as use as examples to be a better writer. The screencast was actually much better feedback than just…comments. I really appreciated having that.

—–

I LOVE this, thank you for doing it! It is so helpful for me to get a better idea …. Based on what I see, more of my sentences should start with verbs – making them have more of an active voice and I’ll definitely try to combine sentences more effectively.

—–

The screencast is a lot more effective than the mark up on a word doc, I think!  It’s like, real time, or something.

This feedback on our feedback is enough to put screencasting high on my list as a powerful tool. Whether we respond to professional work, student lab reports, stories, or essays, we can offer an authentic, real-time window into revision and writing. And it takes a LOT less time than writing up all those comments … or reading this lengthy post!

Favorite question of teachers and parents of Bubba/Bubbette the teenager:

What WAS he/she thinking?

Answer:

He/she doesn’t know how to think.

Recent research explains teen brain development, specifically underscoring the teen’s underdeveloped prefrontal lobe as the culprit. Alison Gopnik’s WSJ column makes the research meaningful for teachers by sharing ideas about what the research means for policy makers, teachers, even parents. How do we help Bubba/Bubbette become better thinkers? Practice, practice, practice. Fortunately,  smartphones and the web make to easy to put the practice in our teen’s hands. With a few nudges toward a favorite gadget and some real world prompts, we just might be able to shape that brain a little sooner.

You get to be a good planner by making plans, implementing them and seeing the results again and again….

Need a way for Bubba/Bubbette to practice this? Try Strike, reviewed here.

The experience of trying to achieve a real goal in real time in the real world [today] is increasingly delayed, and the growth of the control system depends on just those experiences.

Need a way for Bubba/Bubbette to practice this? Try Accompl.sh, reviewed here.

[The prefrontal lobe] is the system that inhibits impulses and guides decision-making

Need a way for Bubba/Bubbette to practice good decision-making? Try Decico, reviewed here.

As Ms. Gopnik points out, the key to learning — the key to creating patterns in our dynamic brains –is apprenticeship of repeated, hands-on experience. I wonder whether repeated clicked-on experience can help. It’s certainly worth a try the next time Bubba is clocked going 85 in a 35 mph zone:

Bubba, make a list of the things you will do to pay off that ticket and get your license back.

Now there’s a long term goal to practice with.

When an Apple falls from the Cupertino tree, the world listens to the earthquake and reports each aftershock. In the ramp-up to an anticipated Apple “event,” the predicto-blogs and tech columnists crank out preshocks. Edtechers from every basket, including Apple core-owners, Apple picker-enviers, and rotten Apple sighters, all stop and pay attention. This week was no exception. Predictions of Apple’s Thursday  “event” at New York’s Guggenheim tallied over 4000 Google News results 20 hours before the event. By the time you read this, that number could easily exceed 10,000. Exciting but sad.

What if we and our students anticipated school as an “event” as widely discussed. What if the buzz about what we’d be learning were a topic for bloggers, consumers of learning, and every basket of self-proclaimed “expert”? Wouldn’t it be nice if just the kids in our classes generated as much excitement about what was going to happen Thursday at 10 am?

What if we asked our students: What will happen next Thursday at ten? What do you predict? What do you really wish it would be? Knowing what you know as a seasoned school-goer, what will you tell your audience to expect? Could you possibly shape the “event” simply through your predictions?

As teachers, how will we react to what they say, especially if they are brutally honest and predict something as unprecedented as peanut butter and jelly? Are we willing to allow some of their more unique or intriguing prophecies to come true? Are we willing to let our students make their own visions happen? Are we willing to act on their responses to, “What do YOU think?” It certainly is worth asking them to play the role of expert prognosticators. Try that as a writing/thinking prompt this week, if you dare.

Are you a teaching Twinkie?

Twinkies are comfort food. There is something about the greasy slip from the cellophane wrapper, the burst of “creamy” filling (likely absolutely nothing related to cream), and the rush of sugar from that first bite. Twinkie aficionados have many approaches: squirting the cream out with your tongue — then eating the spongy cake, freezing the Twinkie and eating it as it thaws, or deep frying it for more grease than a 1960 Dodge pickup after a lube job. Even the post-Twinkie sheen on your fingers says “yum.”

The media are bemoaning the possible impending loss of this junk food jewel.  Twinkies are a rare, secret weakness held in common by nostalgic adults of almost any age, politics, or philosophical persuasion. But does the common experience of Twinkies make them worthy of preservation?

School is familiar. All adults remember the pattern: lesson/lecture, practice, homework. We may have found our personally preferred ways of squirting out the homework first and eating the lesson last, but school is a Twinkie experience, especially if we –as teachers –are Twinkies.  We may be so familiar with our wrappers and slippery sugar that we never stop to question the nutritional value of Twinkies. Nostalgic adults assure us that our Twinkie lessons yield solid basics that everyone should know — and solid test scores. Taxpayers like familiar Twinkie teaching. Everyone knows and understands Twinkies. Twinkies are easy to count, stack, and understand. Besides, our grandparents ate them.

What would happen if Twinkie teaching disappeared from our schools? Greater nutritional value? Healthier minds? New recipes for learning?  There are certainly plenty of Twinkie replacements ready for our menu. Invite the demise of the teaching Twinkie.

“The only way to do justice to our onscreen lives is by summoning exactly the emotional and moral clarity that can’t be found on any screen.”

-Pico Iyer, “The Joy of Quiet” in the New York Times, Dec. 29, 2011

 Amen.

I think a lot about what it means to be in touch, connected, and able to synthesize all that bombards my mind and  screen daily, nightly, weekly, constantly.  I love being able to see and read and listen to so many more voices and images than I could even a decade ago. But I  yearn for the disconnected days Iyer prescribes. As teachers and model learners, we have an extra responsibility to excavate the issue of finding clarity, digging deeply in front of our students (and our own children).

For a moment I indulge in public excavation:

Should being “in touch” occasionally mean something tactile?

Why do some blogs make me long for time to just look at and wonder about things?

How can I seam all the pieces together better?

Do our kids ever have a chance to seam things together or dig deeply to form clarity? Should we artificially require them to do so  or wait for them to feel an intrinsic drive to do so on their own?

School rarely offers the Joy of Quiet. Frenetic School — where most students live a double life, publicly doing what they should while secretly doing what they want below the desk — erases any time for the Joy of Quiet.

Sometimes the lyrics of a song validate my thoughts and provide the seams, stitching clarity. Sometimes it is the words of a character in a novel. More often today, it is a someone’s blog post that starts the sewing machine of my mind. But I know to look for and relish these moments as Joys amid the din. I know to walk away from the screen and take a walk with the sounds of the lake or perhaps an iPod.

Our schools need to facilitate the Joy of Quiet, too. And I don’t mean an old lady whispering “hush” in the library.