Think Like a Teacher

1993: a year that none of today’s K-12 or college students can remember. No one texted or tweeted,  only some people used email, AOL was brand new, and nobody had ever “googled” anything. Nothing but the flu went viral. Friends were just that. We got bank statements and bills in the mail (yes, paper), and news came from the TV, radio, newspaper, or playground. Bill and Monica hadn’t had an Oval Office encounter yet, and the Twin Towers still towered. Many of us used computers and tried to use the Internet, but there was really nothing there.

At school, we had shifted from hand writing to typing IEPs on Apple IIe  keyboards and saving them on 5 1/4 inch floppies. The library was still the magic place to find out, and my students and I were pleased to find a single source that answered our question. My  interlibrary loan article requests for grad school research came back as Xerox copies from bound, printed periodicals via U.S. mail. I considered myself lucky not to have to pay for articles I needed for my research.

Yesterday was the official 20th birthday of the world wide web. The people at CERN — who originated this re-vision of what the then-obscure Internet could be  — posted their original page again to remind us of just how far we have come. What began as a way for researchers to share files and data had the most marvelous unintended consequences: Learning became both free and a matter of personal responsibility.

Twenty years later, we have so many sources we must sort them for value and reliability. We can find out from anywhere. We can waste more time than mankind ever knew we had, and every year a billionaire-creating innovation rides into our lives thanks to the www. Wwwe are bewwwwilderingly dependent upon it and occasionally wwwistful for the days wwwhen wwwe wwwere free of it.

It is impossible to explain what life was like before the www. Only by talking about the cultural details of life before www can we help our students understand. Is it important for them to knowww? Yes, because learning is free and a matter of personal responsibility. They need to know the difference between having to ask for a chance to learn and having the tools available to anyone. They need to know why the www made it important to find out instead of waiting to be told. In a broader cultural/historical context, they need to know how a seemingly minor innovation can, in just a few years, change so much. They need to ask questions about impact and change.

If you have any time remaining in your end-of-year plans, give a small assignment. It can fit in any subject. Ask your students to interview an adult who was “grown up” by 1993. If you teach science, have students ask about how people learned science before the www. If you teach history, ask about how people learned history or tracked current events. If you teach English, ask how people found books to read or places to share their writing. Most importantly, have them ask when their “adult” realized that the web was changing things.  Then have them share their findings on the web: blog, tweet, Faceboook post, whatever.  Back in class, make sure they read what their classmates found out — and ask them wwwhy it matters. By borrowing twenty years of perspective, maybe they will realize that learning is free and a matter of personal responsibility.

This is the first in a series of editor reflections during April, 15th birthday month for TeachersFirst.

As a technology “coach” who works with my fellow teachers– albeit at a distance– I struggle with how to encourage, evangelize, and develop a healthy mutual trust while also nudging myself and my colleagues forward to better teaching decisions. Fifteen years ago this month, when TeachersFirst first went online as a service to help teachers understand what the Internet could do and how to use it to inform and support teaching and learning, the goals were pretty easy: help teachers find the best of the web and understand some basic ways to use these resources. Convincing teachers may not have always been easy in the first couple of years, but obviously this Internet thing has stuck. (Duh moment as of the turn of the millennium,  for all but the most hesitant teachers). Long ago, TeschersFirst’s mission moved far beyond a simple Web 101.

As coaches, we are obligated to ask the tough questions, the ones that require both bluntness and tactful support. I share some of them here:

Coach to teacher-colleague (or teacher to self or COACH to self):

Why are you using this (technology-based) teaching strategy?

Are you simply replicating an old way of  teaching, done with clicks instead of pencils? (Is it an effective way, or just a familiar one?)

If you are replacing drill sheets with drill and kill practice web sites, is it any better? (Do you and our students get data, tracking, instant feedback, etc)?

Do you ever go beyond drill and practice?

 Are you treating technology as simply a way to ENGAGE students… and nothing further? What then?

 How have you changed the way you use technology as a tool for learning in your classes this year (or in the last five years)?

 Which did you think about first: the big ideas and goals for your lessons or the technology you wanted to use?

 When is “fun” not just fun? When does it have meaning?

 Are you checking the box: Technology used this week? Check.

How often do you ask about a lesson strategy: Is there a way that is quicker, more flexible, a better differentiator? Does it happen to use technology?

These are just a few of  the sticky starters for the conversation between teacher and self, teacher and coach, or coach and self. A little warmth can soften the stickiness of the conversation and possibly even make it flow more smoothly. Ask these questions with a cup of coffee, the best accompaniment for something sticky, and see where the conversation goes. The nice thing for coaches is that we don’t have to judge our teaching peers. We help you judge (and change) yourself. TeachersFirst will continue to subtly ask the questions. It’s part of our birthday cake’s “sticky” frosting.

It’s poetry month. Take time for a poetry break. Why does poetry matter? Poetry is the literary equivalent of a microcosm and a sound bite all rolled into one. You can find tiny representations of huge ideas and short snippets that resonate and “stick” in your mind like the smell of your favorite cookie baking or the horror of watching Kevin Ware’s basketball injury last weekend. Poetry is distilled insights and sensations not designed to meet a standard or a bottom line. Poetry is the greatest freedom words will ever have.

If you teach math, poetry is the equivalent to the equation you extract from an elaborate word problem.

If you are a scientist, poetry is the DNA that tells a full-blown experience of life how to grow and thrive.

If you are an artist, poetry is the three primary colors we use to express endless pictures through words.

If you are a musician, poetry is your lyrics, your melody, and your counterpoint. Poetry conducts the orchestra of our minds.

If you are an engineer, poetry is the perfect schematic with projections from every angle, forming a three dimensional reality much greater than the sum of its succinct pieces.

If you are a child, poetry is curiosity and music bouncing together.

If you are a pragmatist, poetry is a frivolous moment that suddenly strikes you with meaning.

If you are a gym teacher, poetry is the fluid combination of the word skills that move beyond drill to a slam dunk.

If you are a historian, poetry is the  artifact that tells the story of a lost civilization.

When did you last share a poem with your class? You have 17 school days left.

break:
verb. to smash, split, or divide into parts violently; reduce to pieces or fragments
noun. a brief rest, as from work [Break definitions from Dictionary.com]

Maker Dad tells of the strategies he and his son used in building a complex 3D printer, a task that spanned over 30 hours. I thoroughly enjoyed his account of persistence and challenge, tackled together with his 12 year old son. Why? Because he celebrates the importance of breaks. Breaks are time for incubation, refreshment, regeneration, reflection. Planned breaks are also times to savor the anticipation of returning to the successful portions. Breaks punctuate and act as expansion joints, flexing with the stresses of the task, while allowing it to fit together.

The marvelous irony/oxymoron of the word break is that it also means to smash, split, and essentially wreck things. Sometimes when we build something, we gain most from that kind of break: the moment when the Legos snap into pieces or the experiment doesn’t work.  Making things, even successful lessons or hands-on learning opportunities, requires that we savor the things that do not work, drawing from our failures to rise to better successes.

As we approach (or conclude) spring break, I hope that our breaks will be both opportunities to re-create  something new from broken pieces and opportunities to gain a brief rest, reflection, or incubation time for what is to come.

Spend some time looking at the definitions of break. It really is a marvelous word to hold so many contrasts in just five letters. Will your spring break make or break you?

I saw a reference to this YouTube video about Training Fleas in a tweet, questioning the actual source of the information (thanks to Stephen Ransom, @ransomtech). The video itself bears no identifying information about the speaker.  Nor does the YouTube poster’s profile say much. There are no references to support the information presented as fact. It is not discussed on Snopes, either.

As a former teacher (and lifelong advocate) of gifted students, my antennae went up. Of course, I love the message of the video as an analogy about the plight of students held in a “jar.” That analogy has apparently been widely used among members of NAGC and  in various presentations on gifted. I also enjoy the irony that adults — even those who should be critical consumers — seem to accept this source.

My question: Could gifted kids (or any kids) do a better job of digging up the source(s) and validating or refuting the information? Unable to immediately toss the challenge to students of my own (since I no longer have any – sigh) , I emailed two colleagues who have gifted kids in class every day. (At least I could enjoy “watching” the results vicariously.)  The first round of results  from a HS group during a “club period” (with thanks and full credit to teacher PJ for sharing with me):

A great group of four kids who are incredibly creative thinkers, as well as being smart. They jumped in head first and had a great time with this, although in the 40 minutes they had to work on it, they didn’t find anything conclusive.

They researched:

Could fleas live in the jar for 3 days with no air and no food? What percentage of the fleas’ lifespan is 3 days, and how would spending those 3 days in the jar affect their ability to reproduce?

They looked critically at the video itself and wondered why they couldn’t see any flea eggs in the jar at the end? Or any dead fleas?

They did get distracted (as they often do) with trying to research whether fleas are subject to peer pressure, whether fleas have families or gender roles, and a number of other things…

It was great fun watching them churn through the possibilities and ideas for researching, but also very frustrating to watch how our District’s poor tech support (we could barely get the video to run because of buffering issues–and it’s only a minute long) and the fact that they kept bumping up against blocked websites.

• A challenge based on “debunking” an issue of interest may be the best motivator for students to think critically and  collaborate to develop research strategies. It might be even better if it’s on YouTube?
• Students can generate some really interesting questions very quickly.
• Students do not look first for the “scholarly” issues, such as the credentials of the author, to support online information.
• Students may get distracted, but the tangential questions they generate could be valid learning experiences in themselves.
• Students will persist — at least for 40 minutes– despite the annoying roadblocks imposed by web filtering and bandwidth throttling (sigh).

What do I do next? I am thinking of pulling together some of the web sources that even we adults typically accept and offer them as fodder for students to debunk, thus building information literacy skills while possibly showing us, the “educator” adults, how gullible we are. Yes, loads of sites do this already, but I think mining YouTube could be especially fun.

Have any similar informational videos to nominate for student review/debunking? If you try this with your students. please post about it (and give me the link) or comment here to share!

News Corp’s education division, Amplify, has announced a new tablet designed specifically for education.  According to the story on NPR today, they are touting this new device as the tool to bring schools into the 21st century. Amplify’s CEO, Joel Klein, claims they are launching this device for the love of learning. The skeptical teacher in me says it is for the love of earning. To start, News Corp’s infamous leader, Rupert Murdoch, insults teachers by saying

Today’s classroom looks almost exactly the same as it did in the Victorian age: a teacher standing in front of a roomful of kids with only a textbook, a blackboard, and a piece of chalk [Really? When were you last in a school?]

Then Klein continues

It’s not about hardware, it’s not about devices, it’s really about learning.

Is it? What does NewsCorp/Amplify know about today’s teaching and learning? If they think it looks like the 1890’s, they have not been in the schools I know. They have not seen teachers who work hard to take advantage of any technology they can to connect their classroom to the world beyond. They have not seen efforts like MySciLife® . They have not met the teachers who come to OK2Ask® to learn how to use the technology they have — and use it well. They have not read the comments of teachers describing the pedagogy behind their decisions to make their interactive whiteboard (IWB) into a student-controlled learning space. (They should have been there with us last night.) They have not heard teachers critiquing colleagues who fail to leverage the devices and materials they DO have for learning “to the max.” They have not met the teachers who are driven to learn themselves and take their discoveries to their classrooms the next morning.

According to NPR, “Murdoch has described education as a market worth hundreds of billions of dollars.” The education market is both a tasty lure for entrepreneurs confident they will make big bucks and a carnival of quick-fix claims. The education marketplace is far too much about earning than learning. Efforts like Edsurge try to bridge the gap between techpreneurs and educators, but the urge to make money still seeps in among the education reform/rethink efforts.

Money is a harsh reality of life, for sure. We all make difficult decisions about it. I just wish that those making the decisions about educational technology money would listen a bit more to the voices of learning. Just sit, watch, and listen for a while. Talk to teachers. Talk to students. Erase what you remember about school and try to imagine being a kid now. Then try to put your money into making sure every kid is connected, both at home and at school… and on the walk between. If you can’t shift the priority from earning to real learning,  please go away. Teachers and kids are busy enough without another Big Fix. Let us use what we have well and, please, let us tell you what else we really need.

I love the open letter that Library Media teacher Angela Estrella wrote to Edtech Entrepreneurs and shared via the EdSurge blog. I am sure every edtech coach out there would applaud it, retweet it,  or tack it up somewhere electronically — or even on precious paper. We who try to lure teachers into trying new tools have witnessed the rapid decline from enthusiasm to frustration when start up time on a new tool devolves into endless settings, checkboxes, and menu options named by a geek using vocabulary no teacher would ever use.  We who “coach” take the brunt of reasonable teacher skepticism about the latest and greatest new tool. Unlike those of us who enjoy edtech tinker toys, teachers have the patience of a flea when faced with the latest new gadget: “Get me to the red blood, or I jump… now!”

Teacher skepticism is a healthy thing. It is what makes us question a report that seems too well-written to be a student’s own work. It is what makes us wonder whether our own assessment (test, rubric) is perhaps measuring the wrong thing. It is what helps us survive the slings and arrows of politically-driven policies. Yet, it can easily morph into jaded negativism. [Insert your mental image of a burned out colleague here.]

So I add a followup note to Estrella’s letter.

Dear Edtech Entrepreneurs,

I hope you read my previous letter —  shared by Angela — more carefully than my kids read their assignments. I forgot a couple of things:

I am a skeptic by nature. You can help me focus my critical thinking skills on choosing appropriate technology for my class. Choose your words wisely and tell the truth. That will keep me from becoming jaded and negative toward all technology.

You have a responsibility beyond selling what you make. You are responsible for selling me on learning something new. I know how to do that with my students. Do you?

Skeptically,

Your customer/critic, the healthy teacher-skeptic

 

I often hear NPR underwriting messages about The Carnegie Foundation and their mission to do “real and permanent good.” Isn’t that why we became teachers, to do real and permanent good? How do we know whether we are accomplishing our mission? How do we assess real and permanent good?

Surveys ask businesses what they seek in their employees, and policy makers try to respond with accountability measures such as NCLB and Common Core. Every teaching professional organization has standards of its own, from the NSTA to ISTE. These standards are all efforts to define what comprises success in educating our students.

The frustration that I hear from many teaching colleagues comes when an individual teacher tries to assess success, to feel that he/she is doing real and permanent good. Evidence of real and permanent is elusive. A test score might show real progress, but test score improvements can easily feel impermanent or even unreal. Teachers feel we know real and permanent good when we see it, but often we do not have time to watch for it. And we certainly have trouble defining it. So I offer one example of real and permanent good  in teaching and learning.

MySciLife® offers learning that is real and, our research shows, permanent. MySciLife uses a social media platform for students to live science roles as they learn science. Watch the student/parent video to see how MySciLife works (and it’s free, I might add). We have just completed the first semester pilot of MySciLife with six middle school teachers in four states, and the research results show real and permanent good. Our first semester research asked both an outcome and a process question:

Outcome Question:  What effect does social media-based learning have on middle level science performance?

Process Question:  How does social media-based learning affect student attitudes and perceptions about learning science?

Roughly speaking, I see the outcome question as the real, and the process question question is the permanent.  The real knowledge is something middle level students take with them from MySciLife and apply to their understanding of the world around them. The two classes in the research study showed 20 to 40% greater understanding of the science compared to what they knew before “living” a MySciLife identity. We are researching further during the current semester to compare real learning using a larger sample and controlled study.

The permanent question about attitudes toward science is the one I find most exciting. Fully 86% of the students responded that they agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “MySciLife was more interesting as compared to how I typically learn science.” Science is INTERESTING to them when they learn this way(!) That’s permanent good.

There are further results from the pilot, and we are busy formatting the downloadable version of the first semester research to share. I will also be sharing the results along with MySciLife participant panel at the ISTE conference in San Antonio in June. I have to admit, though, that the words real and permanent good resound differently inside my head these days thanks to MySciLife. 

What buoys your sense that you are doing real and permanent good as a teacher?

I posted about flipping the way we, as teachers, focus our thinking through our subdivided subjects and need to consider a more connected view of learning for our students’ sake. I admit that Swap Week may be a pipe dream,  but I thought of a couple more possibilities to connect our own teaching expertise with what is happening down the locker-lined hall and out there in the real world where people never think in “subjects.”

Just ask. In an elementary classroom where kids are more likely to have the same teacher for social studies that they have for math, it could be fairly easy. But how often do we stop and ask,” What could you say about the explorers we just read about that might fit in our math class?” Silence. “Is there anything we learned in math recently that the explorers might have used?”  “Yeah… adding up the miles.” Bingo. When the concepts are relatively simple, the connections are simpler. Just ask.

A middle school teacher may not know what kids are studying in other subjects. Just ask. Now that kids are accustomed to points for grades, offer extra credit for any connection they can explain between what you are discussing in class and something else they learned in another class. If a student can explain a connection out loud, 5 points. If he/she writes about it, 10 points. Who knows who will learn more: the students or the teacher.  We know time is sacred, so once the kids get in the habit of sharing their own connections, make a Connections graffiti wall so you don’t always have to stop class. Add a connections section to your class wiki. 5 points, 10 points… isn’t it worth it to reward student-made flips? Just ask.

In high school, it gets trickier. The concepts seem so distant. How can we possibly connect Hamlet and oxidation/reduction reactions? Analogies. If a student can explain her idea using an analogy from another subject, 10 points. If he can make you, the English teacher, understand the concept from chemistry class to you via Hamlet, 15 points! At the end of every test, just ask: What character (concept/function/process) from this unit connects in your mind to something you  recently learned in another class? Explain.

The greatest challenge: the faculty room. It might take a happy hour at the local pub to start this, but just ask. What connection to my subject can you find in your subject? An adult beverage bonus for the best suggestion from the group. Just ask. You might even learn from that science (or art or math) teacher. Imagine that.

Maybe we should be trying a different kind of “flipped” learning.

My excitement over an beautiful art-and-science web resource that TeachersFirst  just reviewed makes me smile — and wrinkle my forehead. We so readily accept the fact that teachers of different subjects have trouble seeing the world through any other lens but their own. The greater the subject matter expertise (e.g. high school  vs. middle or elementary), the more focused good teachers are on their own subject — to the exclusion of all else.

While passion is great, the slicing of experience and knowledge into academic disciplines is a real disservice to our students. As teachers, we need to try out other lenses and allow our students to do the same. If you have ever had your eyes checked for glasses, you have looked  at an eye chart through a funny machine (called a phoropter) while a technician or doctor flips the lenses and asks, “Which is better, A or B?…C or D?…” We need to flip our lenses.

One idea for flipping would be a one week job swap. (I have always wanted to try this.) For one week, maybe during
the doldrums of winter, let teachers trade places. A math teacher could trade with the English teacher. The physics and music teachers could reverse places. The eighth grade history teacher could trade with biology.

Of course we would have to leave lesson plans for our swap-teacher, but also leave him/her some flexibility. A math teacher, accustomed to looking at numbers and patterns, might see patterns in English class: average number of words per sentence of Hemingway vs. Dickens, the proportion of adjectives that a student uses in his writing. The history teacher might notice that the way cells work is not unlike the way colonists did.  If we ‘notice” things out loud in front of our students, we would be connecting the disciplines instead of dividing them. Our “Wow, I never saw that before” could be a model for the kind of learning we want our students to experience. With a little flexibility in the lesson plans, the students could come out of Swap Week with more connections than usual from a week of school.

If nothing else happened during Swap Week, we would at least gain an appreciation for how our students feel in the artificially subdivided world of school. That might be better than any subject lens we might try on.