Think Like a Teacher

“..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?

I love this idea.
You’ve got to be kidding.
But, what about…

I just spent over an hour looking at RSS feeds from blogs I enjoy reading, and I’m fired up. My “personal learning network” includes blogs from teachers, a powerful new blog from the people we “teach” (HA!- they teach us), blogs from people who would probably consider everything I do or write to be trivial, blogs that intrigue me, blogs of well-organized people who write with the authority of an op-ed columnist, and blogs intended as outgoing information-providers not much interested in response. My Google Reader also has feeds from REALLY techie places whose content I add to my “I really should/want to learn about this” list  and feeds from traditional pubs that rework the same content multiple times each week into at least five versions to make their feeds look more prolific. But you don’t care who is on my reader, anyway.

But what a great way to start a birthday: finding things I am excited about, feel strongly about, must argue with, or am simply fascinated by: things I want to do, think about, learn, comment on, and more. This is my “bucket list” of things I want to do–not before I die, but before the bucket overflows. If I keep drawing things from the bucket, I can keep adding.  My bucket is latex and expands like a swim cap under a faucet (try that experiment sometime, if your children are not swimmers— you can make it large enough to HOLD a swimmer). The first addition this year is the idea of a Birthday Bucket.

The Birthday Bucket idea is a hitch-hike on the “Annual Report” contest (deadline tomorrow…I probably won’t make it this year). What better idea on your birthday than to reflect and build a visual representation-in-four of the past year’s accomplishments/events/questions/thoughts/travels, etc. ?

Of course, Think-Like-a-Teacher me says this is something we could ask students to share in lieu of unhealthy birthday treats on their own birthdays. Imagine a fresh 8-year old’s visual version of being 7-going-on-8. We say kids are not reflective at this age, but wouldn’t that be a terrific skill to start building at a young age? Imagine how it would blossom when adolescence injects new questioning…and how great the retrospective of Birthday Buckets would be when trying to decide about life after high school or (in a dream world) what to STUDY in high school. Here are the instructions:

Birthday Bucket
Create a way to SHOW (not tell) what you are learning, wondering, fired up about, simply MUST say something about, have accomplished, or just think is special about you right now and over the past year. Put the items in some sort of “Birthday Bucket” of at least four elements that others can ask about, explore, see, feel, hear, or even taste. The bucket must be preserved in some way so you can look at it in months/years to come. Use any tools you enjoy and at least one tool you have never tried before. 

Stir. Share freely. Welcome comments.

This blog entry is my Birthday Bucket for this year:

So many impassioned, experienced teachers bring powerful vision to what they do. I am humbled to have spent time with them as colleagues and as members/users of TeachersFirst. No, not every teacher collecting a check is amazing. Some are “adequate.” But we need to notice the Artist’s Eye that many, many fine and experienced teachers bring to their studio: the classroom.

I worry about losing the power of good teachers’ vision.  I speak of the Artist’s Eye teachers use to view what happens when a child learns. There is a keen vision that sees the “ground” behind a student’s thinking as much as the “figure” of his achievement itself, the eye that sees the image of learning as a whole or the landscape of a classroom as a rich interplay of elements. Often we do not appreciate what a fine teacher’s eye actually sees. If we quantify or oversimplify what a teacher sees and notices, we risk losing the subtle differences between measuring or diagramming a student’s learning and actually building on it with nuance and sensitivity. We need the nuances of such vision to enable the “21st century learning” so much discussed today.

 We teach new teachers to measure and diagram, but somewhere after a few years– or many years– some of them develop an Artist’s Eye. No one masters the Artist’s Eye at first crack. It takes years of practice. Look at the “studies” an artist such as Van Gogh or Picasso does in early years and how the works evolve later. Vision takes time.

As we tacitly allow costly, experienced teachers to retire — even a little early — in the interest of saving money, I worry about losing the powerful Artist’s Eye that a creative, experienced teacher brings to every interaction with a student.  We can search for passion and dedication among those to enter the profession, but they will not replace that Artist’s Eye on entry.

So what do I propose? First, stop the premature loss of the masters who have the Artist’s Eye. Give them the “studio space” to continue learning themselves. Then allow the novice artists, those with an immature eye, to steep in the perception of the masters. Make sure that every newbie has a chance to spend time watching how an Artist “sees” and listening to him/her talk about it. Make sure that no newbie is left alone with frustrated, undervalued, sarcastic, uncaring  folks who have lost their Artist’s Eye (or perhaps never had it).

We need to appreciate the Artists we have: teachers who perceive the differences in light between the eyes of two students, who see the differences and use just the right hues in their works to carry others beyond a straightforward image of “content” to a lifelong desire to learn more. True art takes on a life of its own.