Think Like a Teacher

New York Times columnist Sara Mosle wrote an insightful column about the Common Core requirements that students read ever-increasing amounts of  “informational text” and far less fiction. I have been mulling this issue for months. Mosle’s arguments that reading expository texts and long form narrative nonfiction will build students’ writing skills are certainly valid. Students also will need basic informational text-writing (and reading) in the workplace. But my gut (and my undergraduate English major) nag at me on this giant swing, even as TeachersFirst published help for teachers (e.g. this article, and this one) on ways to integrate informational texts into all subject areas and improve students’ expertise at understanding and producing such works. I know many adults could stand to improve their writing skills. And I know that writing fiction — or “stories,” as most elementary kids would call them — may not develop skills in supporting a written argument. But I cannot go as far as Common Core does. There is too much that we learn from reading all varieties of texts.

When we read a poem…

• We learn economy of language and how to listen ever so carefully
• We learn to read with our senses, not just black and white text
• We learn to pay attention to subtlety — a skill few adults have anymore (certainly not our politicians)
• We learn to question and marvel at what lies beneath instead of what the media or a “spin master” tells us to believe

When we read a novel…

• We learn to follow a life or a thread for a long time, past the end of the class period or the end of the day, noticing patterns and threads that might not even emerge until twenty chapters later. This is reading life. As adults, we eventually start to notice such threads in our own lives. We call it perspective.
• We learn to read people. Given the frightening statistics on autism spectrum disorders, the more experience we can give kids with reading people, the better off our society will be. Given the need for voters to make choices about candidates whose  informational text “messages” all sound the same, we sometimes rely on reading people to make good choices. Employers read people every time they interview. Interpersonal intelligence makes a common society work. Fiction builds it. No, there is no dollar value on it, but there is serious loss without it.

To further flip my argument around, I wonder what would happen if kids never experienced fiction?

Movies would be our students’ only fiction. With special effects that are near-real, we risk losing the ability to imagine. School takes a large enough toll on creativity as it is. Erasing imagination frightens me. In a generation or so without fiction, we might have no more movies OR fiction. Just YouTube?!

We risk losing a sense of the world. In a global world where few of us will ever see distant people who make our shoes or invest in our government bonds, the importance of cultural detail (or “status detail” as fiction writers call it) is far more than simply a view of life from another place. As we read fiction or narrative nonfiction set in other places, we notice the diverse details that define what we value vs. what those in far off places value. We see how people spend time, fill their pockets,  eat, gather into households, prioritize their money, and interact with each other. Show me. Do not tell me. I need to notice it, to see and learn it. Fiction builds global understanding. Just as travelers notice cultural detail when we arrive in a foreign country, so do we experience it in fictional tales that take place there. When I write and rewrite this blog to craft cultural detail in my depictions of school, of China, of what I do, I am trying to draw you into understanding my ideas. Fiction writers spend months crafting such details– and do it much better than I. If our students never experience immersion in cultural detail, they may never notice, see, and learn global understanding.

I wish that Common Core requirements had dimensions for reading senses, subtlety, submerged messages, perspective, imagination, people, and cultural detail. In twenty years, we may find ourselves in a world that’s a different kind of flat.

If you have read my blog for long, you know that I am a former teacher of gifted students. One of the things we teachers of gifted quickly learn is that the teaching strategies and initiatives we use with gifted kids are often adopted several years later for all children, though altered in pace or depth. It is a source of pride to us, an “I told you so” that we knew what worked all along.  Many of the same philosophies behind creative teaching and learning for gifted can benefit all kids. The truly gifted, especially those my colleagues and I facetiously dubbed the “severely and profoundly gifted,”  need a hyperbolic version of these same strategies and rarely need any of the skill backfill that others do.

So I was not surprised to read a passionate post on Stephanie S. Tolan’s blog The Deep End about the politics within the National Association for Gifted Children and the irony that the children themselves were not invited to the NAGC conversation. This is the same discussion that is occurring among education reformers who seek to change education from “schools” to “learning.” Follow the Twitter hashtag #edchat for a few days to see the passion among educators seeking to rethink what learning is all about and to include students as key players and decision makers in their own learning. Ms. Tolan describes the gifted with powerful voice:

One of their major differences (at least until we squash it out of them with work sheets and grades and gold stars and tests, grade point averages, boundaries and limitations) is their rage to learn and understand, and to do something with meaning. [my boldface, her italics]

I absolutely agree that this describes the gifted kids I know.  I think it can also describe most kids. Gifted kids feel the rage in heightened fashion and seek meaning at greater depth, but all kids feel the rage to learn until we stuff the school experience into boxes that lack any personal meaning. The gifted often find meaning via their own odd connections or perceptions. Other learners may need some help discovering meaning and personal connection.

The many, many good teachers I know try to forge connections of meaning for students who do not seek them on their own or need help doing so.  The very best teachers are able to kindle the rage to learn despite institutional requirements that muffle it. I hope our current moves to build rigor in our schools will stop to allow students to join the conversation and find meaning just as Ms.Tolan asks. It’s not just good for the gifted.

Installment#2 of this Thanksgiving series shares my favorite tools to save me time digging, hunting, or forgetting things. As a teacher and a parent, I know how easy it is to lose things, especially among pyramids of paper. As a “teacher to go,” i.e. one who works from many locations, I especially value things that help me avoid shoulder injuries from hauling heavy bags. (Too bad the cloud didn’t exist when I taught itinerant gifted and changed schools at noon each day! ) Here are my favorite FREE helpers:

November has five Fridays this year. In the tradition of Thanksgiving, my weekly posts will share things for which I am thankful. I begin by sharing how grateful I am for inspiration sites. These five  thought-provokers offer visual and verbal sparks. If  my brain starves for the stimulation of a quirky question or a glorious graphic, I can inhale bracing breezes for the brain. I am grateful for:

1. Good. The name says it all. I click to find things tagged creativity or DIY or design, and I marvel at cleverness and surprise. I am thankful to see so many examples of people “doing different” as they “do Good.” They explain:

GOOD is learning, doing, improving–together

These are the people who– a few years ago– brought us the Wanderlust interactive reviewed here. Thank you for inspiring me to learn, wonder, and share.

2.  Places that put vastness of scale (and the meaninglessness of minutiae) into perspective: Scale of the Universe 2 (review and teaching ideas here) and Magnifying the Universe (review and teaching ideas here). I am especially thankful to be able to put stressors and annoyances into perspective  and to draw upon the vastness these interactive spaces provide. The very words space and  size melt into a chance to rise above or delve below whatever preoccupies me. I am thankful for the change of perspective.

3. The Art of Science (complete review here). This find from Princeton offers visual proof that science is art and art is science. I would never call myself a scientist, but I am fascinated by the visuals science offers (see #2). I am even more thankful that the scientists  who share images on this site are prove that not all scientists are about data,data, nothing but data. I am grateful for images about seeing and wondering.

4. 101 Questions (complete review here). OK, this one is a little odd, but it does get my creative juices flowing. There is nothing like a visual prompt to get ideas (or questions) moving. If the prompts are good, the questions move from factual and surface level to pretty deep stuff. I am grateful for questions.

5. Co.Create is even better than Good. Why? I keep finding more articles. Just when I am hooked by one title, there is another one. I find myself wishing I could read in two places at once. I honestly have not spent time figuring out who the writers are or where the content actually comes from, but there seems to be an endless stream of things to intrigue and inspire. I am thankful for their “You might also like.”

Why do these matter to a teacher/ website editor/ed tech person? Because I know I need a broader stream of inspiration than simply #edtech and #edchat on Twitter. This morning I ran across a quote from Steve Jobs:

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.

– Steve Jobs, Wired, February 1996

Doing my job well — being creative — means I need to continuously expand my repertoire of experiences, and this inspirational five offers endless avenues to creative questions, questions, and images.  I hope every teacher has sites like this and is thankful for the role they play in making you a Thinking Teacher.

Next week: Five things that keep me organized — and I am SO grateful!

What can I do to beat this, break this, or make people laugh?

When I taught gifted kids, their first approach when faced with a new technology tool, game, or toy was to beat it, break it, or make people laugh. I saw this reaction back in the day of early computer games we loaded from a 5 1/4 inch floppy disks. In the pre-PC days, my students — gifted or not –had the same reaction when faced with a special effects generator in the school’s black and white TV studio. (OK, now you can guess my age.) They wanted to make special effects that cut off heads or caused the TV monitors to go crazy.

Kids, especially middle school kids and older, will want to break, outsmart, or use any tech tool to make their friends laugh. We are missing a bet by not using this impulse to help them learn. There is a misconception, well debunked by Bill Ferriter, that technology itself is motivating. Ferriter is right. It isn’t motivating to ask kids to do what a tool is intended to do. It is motivating for kids to show their prowess in defeating it or molding it to their own purposes, preferably for an audience. The same social impulse makes them want to share on Facebook or YouTube. There may be some gender differences, but the stereotypes say what the boys break the girls will secretly redirect to their own purposes — giggling.

The makers movement challenges kids to MAKE things to fit a challenge. The gamification movement invites kids to create games to construct learning. I think we miss a bet by not asking kids to break things to meet a challenge. How can you use a tool of your choice to do something new and productive that it was NOT intended to do? What tool can you break to solve this unrelated problem? Give students the web full of  “tools,” and they will want to combine them or use them every way except as intended, especially middle and high schoolers. So let them.

Instead of  assigning kids tech tools to make a project using a specific tool, maybe we should simply allow them to break or “redirect” tools at will. The final rubric should certainly include curriculum accountability:  the result must show what they know about the prescribed curriculum. In the interest of teaching life skills and preserving our own jobs, we must include a requirement that the products have no more than a PG-13 rating (at least not in the version they submit for a grade). Share the rubric and any relevant acceptable use policy, but let students do it any way they want. Humor, even deviousness, can be a far greater motivator.  The teacher pleasers will ask for tools to be assigned, and that’s fine. The most able, most motivated,  and most creative will break something to make something. Isn’t that the innovation we want to build in our students?  The examples of “broken” or redirected  tools can serve to lure the timid into trying something a bit more adventurous themselves the next time.

One practical concern of this idea is that kids will take a long time to figure out the gimmicks and potential humor of the tools they choose. Let them do this on their own time. Schools have no walls, right?

Many years ago, I learned that comedy is far more difficult to write than drama. Parody, satire, and humor challenge the greatest minds. (I know how long it took to write a barely-adequate spoof of  “The Raven” last week!) If we can motivate kids to go above and beyond in their learning by following their impulse to break, trick, or make others laugh, we  have gone above and beyond our own curriculum. We have “mashed up” the student behaviors we can barely control with the curriculum we want students to master.  We have encouraged innovation. And we might even get a chance to laugh together.

A Class Portrait from Germain's collection. Click for full collection.

We all have them: faded, posed pictures of ourselves as elementary students in a class picture. Neat lines, tall kids standing in the back, shorter ones seated in front holding the sign with the grade, teacher’s name, and school year. These class pictures sterilize what school is all about, replacing a portrait of learning with a portrait of students as furniture. The picture strips the culture and details that provide context and priorities for what happens in school. What does the classroom look like? What is on the board and on the floor? What is the visual routine of day to day learning in this place?

Julian Germain has an ongoing photo project taking classroom portraits around the world. Photos taken 2004-2011 are published in book form, but selected photos are also available online. The images are familiar, strange, haunting, and encouraging. I could spend an hour looking at each one and hypothesizing what the children’s lives are like,  how the teacher conducts class, and what they might be thinking as this portrait is being taken. I imagine the moment after the shutter goes off and the pose disintegrates into talk, motion, chaos. I hear the teacher (invisible in most pictures) calling for attention and redirecting kids to the lesson at hand.

I also hear what other kids (and teachers) would say when they see the portraits of unfamiliar classrooms. We can learn so much by observing small cultural details and the questions they raise.

“Look! There’s a dog in their room!”

“What’s that written on the board?”

“They have jeans like mine.”

“How many kids are in that class?”

“It’s all girls!”

“Why do they look so serious?”

The seriousness, I believe, is imposed by the photographer  as part of the photo session (how else could “structured play” look so unhappy?). Indeed, the ability of the photographer to influence the message through pose, composition, lighting, and more could spark a sophisticated media literacy discussion.

The other questions are open to observation, discussion, and discovery. These classroom portraits of learning are an invitation for the viewers themselves to learn. What better way to entice our students to dig into cross-cultural understanding than to share unfamiliar images of a very familiar place: the classroom. I’d love to set up a sharing project for classroom portraits. Here are some lesson ideas for using these images and/or extending the idea in creating your own portraits.

World cultures/Social Studies/World Languages: Use as an intro into cultural differences and awareness. Project an image and have students note what they see and what they think it could mean about life as a youth in that culture/location. Take it beyond just school. What else can they tell about society there? How could they research to find out whether their hypotheses are true? If this portrait shows what it is like to be a child/youth in ___, what would be important details to include in an image depicting life in our classroom? Consider actually TAKING that picture and sharing it on your class wiki or web page, possibly with annotations to explain why the class included  the items it did.

With younger students: how would you feel if this were your classroom? How might the children seen here feel if they came to our classroom? List ten things that are the same as our classroom and ten that appear different. How is different NOT “better” or “worse”?

Science (yes, science): Entice kids into scientific observation and the difference between observing , hypothesizing, and concluding by sharing an image as whole class practice. Extend it by having kids (groups?)  “report” observations and hypotheses based on another photo in the series.

A picture is worth a thousand lessons.

The annual announcement of the MacArthur Fellows this week generated the usual media blitz about a fresh batch of surprising, creative, and potentially influential people stashed in little-known pockets and corners. Dubbed, “genius” awards by the media, these grants recognize “individuals who show exceptional creativity in their work and the prospect for still more in the future” and offer generous funds so recipients can continue their work with the greatest freedom and  flexibility.

The process by which MacArthur Fellows  are nominated and selected, contrary to what the media, guidance counselors, and tiger parents may say,  proves that accomplishment and recognition can happen to those who do not actively campaign for it or plan a deliberate path to a perfect pinnacle. These people are creative because it is their passion and their life, not their career goal. MacArthur is remarkably successful in keeping both nominators and nominees completely confidential. The rotating pool of nominators assures a never ending stream of potential candidates from an ever expanding (U.S.) world of possibilities. As nominators come and go, the process nears perfection like a mathematical function approaching its asymptote. There are no winners or losers because no one even knows who is in the game. The fellows are unaware of scrutiny until recognized, and that is an important part of the process. These are people who are chosen because they are likely to spread and share the brilliance of their light. And light can come from any angle and in any color or wavelength. The pool is blindingly large, but somehow MacArthur finds a prism to separate out the light of these individuals. Will they find them all? Not likely, but they will continue the quest with a process that mimics the “genius” of the winners.

It is time for MacArthur Teaching Fellowships. Grassroots efforts to change teaching today proffer exemplary new ways for students to grow and learn in this era of education reform. Most programs must struggle for funding or meet bureaucratic requirements to gain recognition and  continue their success. These efforts are institutional, however, and they at least have a process to try. They may be magnet schools or charters or university pilot programs. Yet we miss the isolated light of an individual teacher who shares surprising, creative light in unexpected classroom corners or even outside school walls. He/She may not be the principal’s shining star, suitable to be nominated as “teacher of the year.” He/She does not self-advocate and may actually be a thorn in the side of colleagues, an “odd duck” or a manic and disorganized genius. This is the teacher whose unusual ways or odd approach “show[s] exceptional creativity… and the prospect for still more in the future.”  A single, intuitive “genius” of a teacher may have discovered something that could spread a new light, perhaps engaging would-be drop-outs or highly gifted social outcasts. Or maybe he/she is a middle school math teacher whose students make poetry of Pythagorus or an English teacher whose students sculpt sentences at the town hall.

How would we ever find them? The same way MacArthur finds Fellows. A rotating pool of nominators adds letters of nomination on an ongoing basis. The process is silent and secretive, but finds them. We know “genius” creative teachers are out there, and they may never receive a pat on the back any other way.  But we could learn so much from them. With the generous, flexible fellowship funds to pursue their passions, who knows how many students could benefit.

Forget the Hollywood “inspired teacher” movies. I want to be inspired by the genius teachers. They are perhaps the ones who never intended to teach — or who could never imagine doing anything else. It does not matter to me what kind of prep they had or what happy meteor landing put them among our children. They are the light  that Departments of Education cannot see, the infrared to our “professional” eyes.

It’s a thought, anyway. Anybody want to fund it?

I began a series of overlays to Blogger Alison Anderson’s ten great ideas for opening our classrooms to parents without making it a time-consuming teacher task. As I have allowed the ideas to steep, I find more overlays, extensions and implications of the easy, tech-leveraged sharing that can emanate from our classrooms to involve parents. So here is Part Two:

6. Open sharing for parent involvement and learning reinforcement immediately begs the question: will your school allow Bring You Own Device (BYOD) sharing? If the kids have their phones and we can have them send the tweets or images to share with parents, why not? Perhaps some carefully conducted experiments in pro-active sharing can support  your efforts to promote a BYOD initiative. Kids share, Parents ask. Parents understand. Kids learn and remember. Repeat. [Yes, I know there are all sorts of monitoring and management issues, but if we survived open classrooms in the 1970s and 80s, we can figure this out. Other schools have done it, so we can learn from their policies and mistakes!]

7. The ultimate open sharing would be a live webcam. Would you, as a teacher,  you want a live webcam in your classroom? Legalities aside, this raises interesting issues, to say the least. Even if you password protect the webcam so only logged in parents can see it, how does a parent understand when tuning in for a few moments here or there? What about snippets viewed out of context? You could have a pretty good class discussion about individual rights and constitutionality by asking your middle or high school students what they would think of sharing via webcam. It might be interesting to hang a dummy camera for one day during your Constitution unit!

8. Teaching about context and purpose. As media consumers, we are all subject to manipulation. What a great way to flip this around by asking students their purpose in sharing a particular item from class. Did they offer enough context so others can understand it? Did they imply that it was something different by removing it from context? How can “innocent” social media sharing manipulate a message? If you ask any middle schooler how to push his/her parent’s buttons by selecting one thing to share from today’s class, I guarantee he/she will know which thing is certain to fire up mom or dad.

9. What did you learn from YOUR kid’s school today? It is important to show our kids that parents are learners just as we should show teachers are learners. This is where some positive spin from businesses or local media could help by asking/posting the question: What did you learn from YOUR kid’s school today? Wouldn’t that be a great app on Facebook, sponsored by Walmart or  Staples? Simply sharing the message that we can learn from our kids is a powerful way to validate learning across our society and support schools with more than money. I think a lot about ways we could bring businesses and others into more effective, grassroots partnerships with education, and this one seems easy.

10. Employers who value education should value their employees’ involvement as parents. If you allow employees to spend five minutes of their break checking out what is happening at their child’s school, you are saying that school matters and that parenthood matters. Celebrate the sharing. It will pay off with more involved parents, higher achieving kids, and better future employees.

There’s a lot more to social media than selling products. We can involve parents and sell learning.

In the 1970s and 80s, “open” classrooms were vast expanses of space with free-flowing, flexible arrangements of furniture and students around a curriculum in constant flux. I know. I taught in an open classroom school that attracted VIP fact-finding tours from far and wide. Today we “open” our classrooms with technology, allowing people to visit, observe, and participate. Parents are today’s VIP invitees, and today’s technologies make opening the classroom easier and easier. Blogger Alison Anderson shares ten great ideas for opening your classroom to parents without making it a time-consuming teacher task. Her tech-savvy suggestions are just one layer among the advantages, means, and results of involving parents in today’s “open” classrooms. I agree that having students manage the sharing is ideal.  The tools are plentiful. To make the student sharing and parent involvement/home discussion even better, there is some deliberate thinking we may want to do as teachers. So I offer some overlays on the subject. I can tell this will be on my mind for a while, but here is part one:

1. Parents may need help knowing what to ask. When their question is “What did you do in school today?” the answer is doomed from the start. What was that thing you were laughing at in the science class video? Who decided which picture to post today?  Why did you share that picture? By sharing media that prompts questions, we and our students can make the home conversations more informative, more supportive of learning, and just plain fun for both parents and kids. We might even make parents lives a little easier. It never hurts to make  busy parents happy.

2. As teachers, we take the time to encourage higher level thinking and questioning from our students.  How do we encourage parents to think and question deeply? We should be deliberate about which images. words, or multimedia we encourage students to share. Ask the kids what would make their parents curious. Ask them which two images would best represent the day. Two will invite comparison, contrast, or analysis to explain why they go together.

3. Ideas invite questions. Assuming you have a class Twitter account, use the brief format for text-only ideas. Tweet students’ what-ifs. Tweet the oddest question asked in class today. Tweet an alliteration about today’s topic. Have a contest for the best end of class summary tweet in a clever format. (Your gifted students will spend most of the class period trying to think of the best one — and actually stay connected to the topic at hand for a change). If there are bonus point attached to authoring a good tweet, you may have more than you need. Or let the class vote for Today’s Tweet.

4. Kids WANT to share (or we can nudge them a bit). Kids are social beings and braggers. Elementary kids will share anything(!), any time. Middle schoolers may not select the things you would want parents to see (the smartphone shot of the kid picking his nose with the lab equipment), but they definitely want to share something. Give them incentives to brag a little. Teens in secondary classrooms are more reticent and dare not be uncool by sounding enthusiastic. But if we teach multiple sections of the same thing, why not spark a little competition between classes to share the most thought provoking or clever or insightful tweet, image, etc. on the same topic.

5. Learning about what is appropriate to share from your open classroom is an easy way to teach digital citizenship in context. Adults offer long lists of social network do’s and don’ts, but our students need practice. The reports that come back the next day: “What did your parents ask last night  after we shared that Instagram from class?” may be exactly the life lessons we need so students learn ramifications of sharing.  The lessons are ongoing, self-reinforcing, and authentic.

Are you seeing different overlays on this simple topic? Stay tuned for Part two…

Eleven years ago, the day began with a sky as blue as today’s, the air as crisp as a back-to-school outfit. An hour and a half into my morning email routine as a technology integration specialist, my supervisor’s voice exploded from the conference room down the hall, “Candy, come quick! It’s a catastrophe!” The rest of the day unraveled in glimpses of TV sets through classroom doors as I tried to maintain normalcy inside a high school filled with gasps and to respond to email requests for news updates from elementary teachers behind news blackouts designed to protect the very young. The slide show of that day replays every time I watch or hear the tales again. As Americans, we tell our versions over and over.  As a teacher, I want our children and teens to hear them. I teach 9/11.

I have a son who has flown his jet in Afghanistan on missions I will never know about. He began the path to those missions on 9/12. I have numerous former students who have followed similar paths. Those who were old enough to remember 9/11 tell their stories in their own ways just as my parents, teenagers during Pearl Harbor, told theirs. I remember realizing as a child that the lesson in my history class  was my parents’ high school reality. Many times since then, especially as they aged, I asked for more detail. Teachers themselves, they willingly told me what they could recall, tinted by their perspectives of a World War and all the decades since. I don’t recall them ever being the ones to bring it up, though. But if I asked… they taught Pearl Harbor.

Now I have grandsons too young to know 9/11.  I know college students, teens, and tweens  who have no solid recollection of that blue sky, calamitous day. As  teachers, we must tell the stories. We must point our students to read and listen and understand what is beyond today’s clear sky and memorial bells. I know this day will always make me stop and think and want to tell the story. I utter a quiet “YES!” when I see sites like Moment Tracker.  I want to be sure that someone is telling the story so our children will continue to ask for it. I teach 9/11.