Think Like a Teacher

I’ve always been fascinated by creativity. What makes it come so easily for some people and as such a struggle for others? Why do some teachers ooze creative ideas and respond to every student question with a different angle on the topic (flexibility) while others can only restate the concept over and over, perhaps in paraphrase? I really don’t think it is an issue of motivation, since many of the latter group of teachers truly admire those who generate new ideas so painlessly. Kids are the same way, especially after about third grade. Some of them go through school with a firehose full of fresh thoughts and project ideas while others follow patterns and templates very well, but — at best — elaborate  or “hitchhike” on their classmates fresh thoughts. It isn’t hard to be pushed by the force of a firehose, though one can only “ride” the stream very briefly.

I have always thought that school freeze-dried most student creativity, except perhaps in those who have veritable “firehoses.” Those with a garden hose or a drinking fountain of creative idea-flow seem to dry up once they have followed rules and procedures long enough to be successful in school.

Yesterday I ran across this article on the brain chemistry of creativity. Apparently neurobiologists have isolated something called  NAA, a chemical that correlates with divergent thinking when found in a certain part of the brain, the “anterior cingulate gyrus (ACG), which regulates the activity of the frontal cortex – implicated in higher mental functions.” So very intelligent people can also have this chemical and be highly creative, as well.

But it’s much more complicated than that. Apparently there is some interplay between intelligence, creativity, and NAA. As a fictitious friend of mine would say, “Holy Idaho!” The scientists have a lot more work to do to sort out this complex interaction.  And I now have even more questions:

Why are some engineers and scientists brilliant in solving things by scientific method (and able to think of alternative paths of scientific inquiry) but look awkwardly stunned when asked to imagine an alternative way to use a spoon (one of the basic creative brainstorming exercises I used to use with second graders).

Why can some people elaborate –adding many, many different and even beautiful versions of an idea, such as different designs and “twists” for using a spoon as a “dipper,” but never get outside of the “dippiness” of spoons to see them as mini-mirrors or vehicles or hair ornaments?

What implications does NAA have for teaching and learning? If we are to differentiate for different approaches to learning, how do we adjust for NAA?

I can’t help thinking that all the web 2.0 tools for creating products could help, especially since there are usually ways for  the spoons-as-dippers-only  types  to start from someone else’s dipper prototype and create a variation while the spoons-as-vehicles students can start from scratch to launch their spoon to the moon or under the sea.

Once again, creativity wins as the most powerful teaching tool. And we should never respond to a brainstorming suggestion by saying “NAAAAAA!”

That’s exactly what it is: NAA!

If you have ever eaten leftovers from a marvelous recipe for many days in a row, you know how it feels to cheer as you finally cram the empty Gladware into the dishwasher, the first serving lost in distant memory.  Those of us with empty nests, still learning to downsize the recipes we used with a household full of teenaged swimmers, know the meaning of “more of the same.” Even the best homemade ziti or sausage risotto does little more than fill a rumbling void the third or fourth time around. We cram it in, swallow, and do the dishes out of habit, but find nothing memorable in the overly soft pasta or rubbery sausage.

I worry that current efforts to extend the school day/school year for all U.S. students may be as mushy and meaningless as old risotto.  MoreOf TheSame, i.e. more hours of time with a numb backside in a plastic chair, does not equate to more learning, more challenge, or more competitiveness. If we are to extend the school day or school year, it should be with something different: different experiences in different places with different people. Imagine adding an entirely new dish to the menu in place of leftovers: spicy time (thyme?) creating meaningful projects from ANY chair, fragrant discussions with a professional or a mentor, savory stints arguing with classmates about real content — online, instead of on-schedule. If we are going to “extend” the school day or year, the extension should be anything but the same.

What an opportunity we have to open new kitchens. Imagine having school be a “reality” show: real experiences with real people (though not contrived a la Hollywood, please). Throw the kids into a Hell’s Kitchen of learning where they must cook up their own recipes and answer to the judges. The prize: your own “restaurant,” i.e. lifelong opportunities to keep on learning. What a magnificent alternative to MOTS.

Now if we can just listen to the true gourmets in education’s kitchens, and avoid short-order cooks with timers…

David Brooks column on genius leaves me gesticulating and arguing aloud at my computer screen. Once again someone has attempted to quantify a magnificent phenomenon into something measurable and, in the process, created a well-organized data set that, at best, partially describes the topic at hand. Just as “Advanced” and “Proficient” on state tests define academic success, so does  Brooks’ description of “genius” as a function of repeated and highly-focused practice.  There are enough points unplotted on his graph to generate an entirely separate curve.

My argument draws on years of  learning as the “teacher” of gifted kids. While many of my students had very talented minds and exactly the drive and perfectionism  Brooks describes to “develop a deliberate, strenuous and boring practice routine,” a series of intriguing others showed entirely different patterns of genius. Some vaulted over practice routine to perfection on the first attempt. Others dove into disconnected ventures inside diverse idea-caves. Brooks’ description (with all due credit to his sources,  Colvin and Coyle) ignores both the Intuiting Vaulter and an Intellectual Spelunker model of genius. Yet both have sat in my classroom, dropped by my house after college, or emailed me a generation later to tell me what they have wrought. Their genius moves like spring white-water, making it far more difficult to describe or quantify. The only point on which I can agree with Brooks about their genius is that it was only remotely measured by I.Q.

The Intuiting Vaulter just KNOWS how things work without hearing it, seeing it, or watching YouTube explain it. She does not need practice. After only slight exposure to the venue and powered by a run-up of her own ideas and the grace of exceptional understanding, her vault takes her high over the bar in a parabolic leap past those practicing hard to achieve lower measurements of genius. Her ideas simply hit the mark the first time, though she cannot tell you why. She rarely boasts of the heights she reaches.

The Intellectual Spelunker  explores and tries out too many ideas, including those far from the main stream. She hears about and explores a never-ending series of new idea caves with no apparent pattern or map. She practices within none for more than a moment before she moves on to another twisted passage into murky, wet thinking. Occasionally she plays in the mud at the bottom of the cave, then leaves her finger marks for the water to wash away. One day she emerges with a book of poems or a concert that only hints at  connections between the caves  at some level far below the ground. But before she finishes reading the poems or singing the songs, she leaves at  intermission, lured by another cave. We stay behind, marveling at the words and music she leaves. The only things  she “practices” are changing direction and asking questions.

Brooks, Colvin, and Coyle, your vision of genius robs the world of  immeasurable wonders. In today’s connected world of user-generated information and understanding, the Intuiting Vaulter can land in soft cushions after a soaring blog post that stuns the rest of us. The Intellectual Spelunker has many more caves to explore, places to “play,”  and tools to express unmapped connections beyond our understanding, thanks to the web. This is an age to unleash and appreciate genius, not quantify it.

I talked this morning with a representative from a university where I earned a graduate degree, and he asked me to describe my dream scenario for an event I would like to see happen on their campus, something that would follow my passion. Always willing to brainstorm and dream on a moment’s notice, I spun a scenario on the spot, and I continue to allow the idea to incubate. So here is how it looks so far (incubation time: 2 hours, ten minutes). Feel free to add to the dream. Of course, this might someday become a reality, so please don’t rip off my ideas without at least talking to me first. Think of this as Creative Commons with attribution and limited distribution for ideas (I know…you can’t copyright an idea, anyway…).

When/where: one week, summer — sometime (indefinite year), on the university campus but simultaneously via virtual experience from anywhere on the web

Who: a combination of classroom teachers (K-12), teachers-to-be, articulate high school and middle school kids, maybe some kids involved in on-campus summer programs for K-12 kids, people from TeachersFirst, people (ANY level) who infuse technology well in their teaching and learning, anyone who wants to join in online

What: A replicable “Infusion Project.” Modeled loosely after the National Writer’s Project, teachers come to learn together. The special feature of this project: they collaborate and learn alongside kids who could be their students, other teachers, and quasi-experts: people who are excited, experienced, articulate, and supportive about effective use of technology as a tool for learning. In a non-threatening environment, teachers can learn about tools and learning from students who are comfortable with the tools and eager to use them. The experienced “experts” can share and support other teachers who are just feeling out new ways to teach (and learn). In small groups of mixed expertise, the project can use good theory and practical knowledge and experience to let new ideas explode into the curriculum of local teachers and those at a distance. Groups would include: a K-12 student (or two), a teacher who wants to learn, an “expert” (teacher who has had some success), a teacher-to-be,  and one or more other teachers who join in virtually. That’s as far as I have gotten, but I am thinking about how we could structure the tasks and exchanges so the whole  experienced in each group is greater than the parts and how the same experience could be replicated all over the world.

How: I need to think more about this part… money, stakeholders, politics, all that fun stuff.

Why: Here is a start on a bulleted stream-of consciousness (is that an oxymoron or what?) of reasons so far…

• Kids are comfortable with the tools but can benefit from hearing how teachers make decisions about teaching….and they can contribute their “side” of these decisions.
• Putting different points of view on ways to learn together can force all to talk about the “why” as well as the “how”
• Teachers uncomfortable with “looking stupid” might be willing to learn from students who are not in their own classes
• Including people from other locations allows the spread of ideas and injectsideas outside the local experience
• Creating a model that blends F2F and virtual collaboration will let teachers experience it wihtout being forced to plan it themselves

and more…

But I need to get back to today’s Tasks. I will let this one incubate a bit more (total incubation time now a little over three hours). Feel free to add to the dream.

Parents enjoy seeing their kids grow up and then reacquainting with them as adults. What about teachers? After 27 years of teaching, I can honestly say that I still enjoy reading what former students are doing and what became of them as adults. I don’t know if this is true for all teachers, but it is an important part of me and how I view my worth on this earth.

I suspect that my interest is in proportion to the number of years I shared learning with a student. In my case, I had students for multiple years as their teacher of gifted or as a middle school media center teacher during that magical(?!) span through puberty and growing taller than my five foot three. In other words, I witnessed them as they grew up — for more than the usual nine or ten months. In some cases, I witnessed and participated for as many as seven years from grades 2-8. As many continued in high school, I had continued contact as a technology person team-teaching with their teachers.

As a child of two teachers in boarding schools, I grew up believing that students become lifelong members of a teacher’s extended family. I am sure that this assumption cements my feeling of connection to former students. My network of “siblings” came back to our house at the oddest times, and my parents welcomed them just as they did me when I arrived unannounced from college with a carload of hungry friends and laundry.

Enter Facebook into the world of former teachers, and an interesting phenomenon occurs. If  I see former students among friends of friends, do I “friend” them? Is this unprofessional on my part, an invasion of their world by someone from childhood, or a sign of respect for them as an intriguing adult? As I click “add as friend,” I worry that they will think it odd to hear from this lady who made them build inventions or peristently asked them, “what to YOU think?” I am a blur from life before high school, a name that sounds familiar, gummy with old sticker-adhesive on a “log book” they threw away years ago. I am cursed and blessed by an exceedingly good memory for their projects, panics, and even parents. Now I simply would like to meet them again as adults. Should I risk the click to “add as friend”?

I am probably taking this decision far too seriously. Facebook sticks people together with as much adhesive as old stickers. Not a big deal. Except to the former teacher who saw them grow up.

Reading has definitely changed. Trent Batson and Nicholas Carr both know it, and so do all of us who pass through places like Think Like a Teacher.  Batson’s response and the original Carr piece, ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’ have me ready to click “write a post” before I finish bouncing between them. As soon as one piece has my attention (I found it on a trusted RSS feed),  I mentally highlight favorite quotes a la English major  and look for juicy bits to read and re-read. Carr is right that I am “power browsing,” but Batson is also right that the “loss” of books is actually a gain for critical thinking. I would go even further and say that reading has become an invitation to DO something.

When I taught elementary gifted kids, there were two distinct groups that emerged during independent project season each year: the Tell-alls  and the Sponges. The Tell-alls wanted to tell everyone everything they read and could not enjoy learning without the telling. During quiet research time in class, they called out, narrating each new discovery as they read or browsed the web. It wasn’t new knowledge until they shared it. The Sponges worked alone, never speaking a word, often so absorbed that they lost all their notes and personal belongings as if transported to an entirely separate location, living among the subjects of their research. When called back to our world and asked to prepare their choice of presentation to “show what you know,” the Sponges were at a loss and uttered malformed bits and pieces until I squeezed the sponge of their awkwardness with many prompts. The Sponges saw no need to DO anything with what they learned. The pleasure was purely personal.

I see the new way we read– thanks to technology — as a cure to both. The Tell-alls are web 1.0. They get their pleasure from the suck-in-and-spit-out of info, but the rest of us gain little from their pleasure. The Sponges are stand-alone processors without a network. Only with the evolution of multiple-tabs (I still have Carr and Batson open right now), feeds, blogs, and doo-dads can I have the very real pleasure of reading until I feel I must DO something. I once had a prof who always asked, “Now what will you DO with it?” as he handed back a good paper. The web (and email and RSS feeds and Facebook and cell phones…) ask that every time we READ.

Now what will you DO with this?

Last week, the folks in the international space station had to duck and cover as space junk came dangerously close to their orbiting haven. It seems that debris from various objects humans once shot into orbit continues to plague any active space mission. This danger clouds each advancing endeavor while, as NPR puts it, “experts continue to debate what can be done about all the trash that’s orbiting our planet.”

I sit at a traffic light, listening to this story, wondering…

…as experts continue to debate what can be done about all the (trash?) that has been shot into the orbit of education?

Is outdated school curriculum the space junk of  learning? Sometimes we see kids excited about what they are learning as they orbit the earth at 20,000 miles per intellectual hour. They experiment, discover, communicate and enjoy learning. Add the power of sharing this experience with others at a distance, and the process becomes even richer. But the shards of old, broken curriculum are a  constant threat. Just as young writers create their own interactive online books or narrate and annotate the uploaded images they have created, an alert sounds:

Warning: Incoming Space Junk. Change course to avoid collision! The curriculum says you need to be able to diagram a sentence and identify parts of speech. Course correction requires that you immediately stop and demonstrate these skills in regulation format to avoid catastrophe. Fire one number two pencil –oops, retrorocket — with bearing 1A 2E 3C in precisely 60 seconds.

Can you think of an instance where space junk nearly took out a viable learning mission? Have you ever taken refuge in an escape module as the debris whizzed by? What can be done about all the trash that’s orbiting?

OK, so my ego bounced this week at being named a “DABA” (Deserves A Bigger Audience) blogger. As I thought about it, my mind rolled over to all the kids I taught and the ways they reacted to unexpected feedback. They were changed people. And so I muse:

Doesn’t everybody deserve a bigger audience?

I started rewinding the reactions I saw when students absorbed just one little bit of extra recognition– even just from a quiet teacher comment. But when they approached projects with a broader audience, they REALLY became porous sponges to the flowing reactions, in turn creating better products than I ever imagined. There were kids who sweated for weeks, perfecting scripts for student-made TV shows worthy of a “Televiddy Award,” our middle school’s equivalent to the Emmys. There were kids who spent hours creating bald eagle, turkey, and vulture costumes and the accompanying “National Bird Pageant” script for a Bicentennial Minute that actually DID win a local Emmy once televised. Simply seeing it aired on TV was what they cared about. There were little second graders who, when they found out their inventions would be judged by an actual patent attorney and several high school “judges,” suddenly cared about whether their gadget truly worked (not required, but it sure mattered to them).

Is it any wonder that their achievement soared? Is it surprising that I find myself carefully revising my words in this post-DABA post?

We read the research about authentic learning, but how often do we remember that every kid is a DABA in some way. And most of us still perk up and suck in feedback from respected sources as adults. We just forget to give it as often as we should.

Whom will you dub a DABA today?

Twenty or thirty years from now, electronic libraries will be full of cyber-volumes about the opening decade of the 21st century and the confluence of events that turned the world sideways like an iPhone display: the flood of web 2.0, September 11, wars, and unprecedented economic distress. We certainly have no satellite view today. We cannot even feel the tilt well enough to know which end is up. We have all this information, and we can find out nothing.

I just finished editing another set of small tidbits to throw into the Web of information and ideas about the economy: some pages for parents on how to help children and teens cope during tough economic times and some for teachers on how to help all of us learn more about these complex systems. But even collecting and synthesizing good information from reliable sources is a slippery reality. When it comes down to it, nothing we write is any better than the reliable sources we trust — trust just because someone else we trust already trusted them. Even a savvy web user can only use the tests of reputation, references, credentials, and (gulp) Google ranking to decide who to believe. If my network says it’s reliable, I guess I can trust it.

As educators we know that we must help our students learn to compare information, assess it, compile it,  and convey it, but there are days like today when I wonder if we are simply helping them build a false sense of reality. I watch the news and I wonder which “authority” or “expert”  will fall tomorrow, which economic scheme will prove false, which report on the stateus of Afghanistan will be mistaken. I especially wonder what the state of the economy really is. No one knows. And this time Google does not help. There does not seem to be an algorithm for ranking such a total abstraction.

I am afraid I am left simply wondering what they will say in twenty or thirty years about all of us who are driven by the shepherds of the news media and the Internet. Reality is slippery, and we are supposed to help our students navigate it when we do not understand it ourselves. But someone trusts us because someone else they trust trusted us.

Scary.

Apologies for no new posts recently. Family-member health and wellness trumped everything for a bit, but things are back on track for now…and so I have time to post.

I did something new and risky last week and the week before. I ran the first few sessions of TeachersFirst’s OK2Ask: free, online, self-directed professional development sessions for teachers. I learned at least as much as the attendees did. And I am left with more questions.

The questions:

How bad is it not to be perfect when sharing in an online venue with total strangers? Does it make TeachersFirst “look bad” if I admit that the tools (in this case Elluminate) are new to me as a presenter? Is this any different from what teachers do every day  when they risk trying a new way of teaching or a new tool to make learning more personal and all-encompassing for the LEARNERS?  Isn’t it good that I model a willingness to make mistakes publicly? Granted, I did practice a lot and play with the tools over and over. But the second session was ALWAYS better than the first. Was it wrong to allow myself to do less than “nail it” the first time?

Geez I hope not.

What I learned:

Teachers are supportive, eager learners and cheerleaders, even to total strangers whom they cannot see. I knew this. I have seen it over and over for years. But to see teachers willing to get excited about small discoveries and to tell total strangers about them via text chat in a virtual “room” is very cool. Most of those involved had never done  a session like this, and they dove right in. And some came back the next week.

Nothing I did was that unusual. People have been trying out online teaching and learning for several years. There is loads of how-to wisdom out there on “best practices” in online learning. I read a lot of it. I play with the tools and imagine scenarios as I swim laps at 6 am (or lie awake at 4 am). The bottom line, IMHO,  is that the learning, online or other, goes best when we do it together. This is just as much fun as the first few classes I taught as a brand new teacher decades ago. Yes, I said FUN. I just hope my fellow learners keep on coming.