Think Like a Teacher

Humphrey Jones, a teacher-blogger from Ireland, suggests that we relabel “teachers.” What would happen if we hired a Madison Avenue firm to “rebrand” our profession? (Now that the elections are over and the economy slow, they could probably use the business!) As Jones says, we need to “relabel the term ‘teacher’ and replace it with a word that more accurately describes the multi-faceted nature of our role.” Over the years, I have read facetious job descriptions of  teachers as a combination of parent, psychologist, cheerleader, health aide, trash collector, and much more. This one was quite popular via email. But these exercises do nothing more than cheer those in the faculty room drinking cold swigs of this morning’s coffee as they grade papers at 4:30 pm. We need a real branding effort.

A brand is much deeper than a label. It is

… what your company stands for and what it is known for. “Look at yourself in the mirror

and ask yourself what you stand for. Go around the room with your leadership and ask them what the company stands for. Settle on one or two brand pillars and build your brand around them.  (A Practical Guide to Branding, Business Week, June 9, 2008)

or, as this article says in a nutshell, your brand is:

The Promise You Make to the World

Interestingly, promise is exactly what teachers bring to the world. We seek it out, nourish it, praise it, polish it, revere it, stretch it, describe it, measure it, mold it, let it grow, prune it, savor it, sing it, respect it, help it recognize itself, and turn it loose to be responsible for itself. We are promisers of promise.  That could be the start of our brand as teachers.

Oh, rats. Somebody already named a margarine after us. I guess we need to keep working on this brand thing. Any MadMen volunteers out there want to take on several million teachers as clients?

Many well-meaning and caring adults outside of Educationland want to offer the benefits of their worldwide experiences to kids unable to have such firsthand knowledge.  An adult visits an African country and bemoans how little U.S. students know of the world beyond U.S. borders  (or even beyond own town/state). The adult generously offers to share his/her pictures  with a local school or to come into as a guest speaker. He/she may even organize a way of disseminating pictures and telling the stories of the trip online. I wholeheartedly echo the desire to help kids learn beyond borders and the invisible fences of  socio-economic backyards.

I am sure you can hear the “but…” coming.

Why don’t  worldly, caring adults take the one, most important step of involving Educationland insiders who have expertise in teaching and learning to join in their efforts to share and disseminate? I don’t mean that we educators need to pablumize the experience of the person who has been to Uganda or other world location so our kids can learn about.  We don’t need to dumb it down or “can” it a la filmstrip/tape of the 1980s. We do need to assist caring Educationland visitors in communicating their global experience in a context that students can share and take part in, given the students’ location, connectivity, prior knowledge, developmental stage … and, unfortunately,  time/curriculum restraints. Ask one of us to act as a friendly but flexible tour guide to Educationland, a learning sherpa

The Sherpa’s Role

The Educationland sherpa knows the lay of the land in Educationland. She knows where the crevasses of technology limitations will trap a well-meaning visitor: the filtering, the lack of plug ins, the potential attacks of armed AUPs ready to spear a visitor and toss him off a cliff.

The sherpa guides — but does not lead — the trip. The sherpa plans together with the worldly visitor and acts as a translator with the Educationland natives, making advanced connections with student-natives so the visitor encounters students ready and eager to converse. The sherpa is brutally honest about how the Educationland natives will probably act and how to win them over. The sherpa explains why they behave as they do, how much they probably know already and how to ensure a successful encounter.  The sherpa may even ask “what if” questions aloud during the visit. Then the sherpa steps back, letting the visit happen and new bonds form.

If the visit is an open one, such as an online sharing site, a 24/7 public basecamp for learning, the sherpa can help plan that site so it has the tools  students need to survive and thrive as learners. No one should expect a novice world traveler to know how to build a learning camp inside Educationland. The worldly visitor should realize the value of the Educationland sherpas in making the Educationland basecamp– a website or blog or online community — a community that provides the right sustenance for learning. (Here is an example I serendipitously found: a blog created by a teacher-sherpa from her visit to Uganda. Note the language and support that make the experience accessible to the students.)

The sherpa carries the extra weight of logistics, the backpack full of provisions and maps for alternate routes when some Educationland natives refuse to associate with the visitor or cannot understand him/her. The sherpa brings experience.

If you are planning to visit Educationland or even to invite natives from Educationland to join in your global journey, seek out the sherpa who can make the encounter a success for the students.  And sherpas, think carefully about ways you can add to your global backpack and continue to allow the visits to play out successfully once you have provided wise guidance.

A blog post I encountered today inspired this idea for a culminating activity in a world cultures class. (Apologies for the post title’s inappropriate language in a classroom, but it could be worse, I suppose.) This idea could easily be the final assessment for the year. Or it could BE the course:  the one and only ongoing project for a world cultures class, with tastes of math, consumer science, and business/economics tossed in. A dream scenario would be for the best projects to be awarded actual funding for their round the world tickets.  Even if used as a final assessment but not as a replacement for usual classroom activities, it would be much better if students knew about it from the beginning and could collect, muse, investigate, and create throughout the semester or year concurrently with “regular” classroom activities about different cultures.

Here is what it could look like:

RTW Ticket: A study in World Cultures

Subject/Grade: middle school or high school world cultures

Rationale: Students rarely see their study of world cultures as anything except facts about far off, near-imaginary places they will never see or care about. What if they had the opportunity to plan a detailed round-the-world itinerary to hypothetically live and learn in person? The project requirements will build understanding of culture, customs, geography, history, and economics of lands and people around the world as student plan a RTW itinerary to visit and experience world cultures first hand.

Duration: full semester or full year

Objectives: (tailor these to meet your curriculum standards, but be sure to include demonstrated  understanding of at least ten different cultures: their economy, geography, etc.)

Project requirements: (adapt for the level of complexity expected in your classes)

1. Start from the inspiration blog post to learn the basics of planning a RTW ticket itinerary.
2. The itinerary should be presented using any web-based tool(s) or media platform(s) and submitted as a single URL.
3. RTW ticket itinerary must meet the specifications of your chosen airline and be accomplished within a budget of $5000 for air travel during a 365 day period. Travel may start and end at any location worldwide.
4. Itinerary must include rationale for each stop, including links and your own written explanation for this location choice.
5. At least ten different cultures must be included.
6. Experiences with all types of climates must be included.
7. Visits/experiences with at least 10 landforms or geographic features not found in the U.S. must be included.
8. At least 50% of the locations included may NOT be capital cities.
9. At least one third of the locations must not use English as a primary or readily-available language.
10. At least four different types of governments must be visited —  accompanied by explanations of how they differ from the others and how they are similar.
11. At least half the locations must include specific, detailed suggestions for local activities representative the chief economic and natural resources of that culture. You must explain HOW it is representative and how it differs from other cultures.
12. At least half the locations must include specific, detailed suggestions for local activities representative of the rich cultural heritage of that location. You must explain HOW it is representative and how it differs from other cultures.
13. At least three developing nations must be included, along with explanations of how they are developing and changing.
14. At least three countries not “U.S. friendly” must be included. along with explanations of their views of the U.S. and suggestions for activities Americans might do to build better understanding with those they meet.
15. Full credits for all sources must be included in the final product.
16. A completed self-assessment rubric must be embedded or linked in the final product.
17. A RTW ticket budget, documented using resources of the inspiration blog post and subsequent research, must be included in the final product.

Project timeline: (add more detail and intermediate benchmarks for younger students or those who need more direction)

Preliminary tool choices and “wireframe” (empty product pages/spaces/script headings/etc.) for the project due _____.

Tentative location choices (up to 25 possible) and requirement check/match list due _______.

Final location choices, location order, and requirement check/match list due ________.

Full location information for three locations completed by ________.

I could go on and on. The whole point: how well would an American adult do at planning such a RTW experience?  Where would YOU go? How much could YOU learn from doing this project? I know I would work hard to accomplish these requirements.

Darren Draper wrote a thoughtful post about the elements of effective edtech teacher professional development. As someone who has been there as both participant and leader in hundreds of profdev sessions, I find his list verifiable, both through my anecdotal experience and my reading. Every researcher has slightly different names for the elements, but they really describe the same must-haves that Darren summarizes.

Effective technology-related professional development:

• Is generally longer in duration (contact hours plus follow-up, not just drive-by)
• Provides access to new technologies for teaching and learning
• Actively engages teachers in meaningful and relevant activities for their individual contexts
• Promotes peer collaboration and community building
• Has a clearly articulated and a common vision for student achievement
• Helps in establishing a culture of technology integration
• Provides for the modeling of technology use
• Creates teacher leaders
• Culminates with the establishment of a teacher-led community of practice
• Is initiated by teacher-led groups with “strong ties” to design their own professional development and create their own PLCs

Looking back into the research Darren includes before this final list, I zero in on two elements he mentions before the final list. (One made the final list, while the other did not.) Both are deeply related to an individual teacher’s intrinsic motivation to try something new. I have seen each of these play out with huge impact, enough to elevate them high on my “list” :

the critical importance of prior “strong ties” among teachers that propelled their activism (cited by Draper from  Jones-Chris-2006 via Larry Cuban)

a mentor can negotiate the interplay of multiple barriers (time, beliefs, access, professional development, culture) on teachers who are learning to integrate technology (cited by Draper from Kopcha 2010)

There is no question that profdev for a group of teachers held together by “strong ties” and a mission, e.g. a successful elementary grade level team, an Art department team grateful to finally have Art-specific inservice, or a middle school teaching team accustomed to collaborating, is exciting for the facilitator and the participants. The group already has established patterns of working together and established respect for each other. They know who will care about what, so they can delegate tasks and share laughs as they learn together. They also feel comfortable saying what they think out loud and questioning suggestions made by an outsider that might not fit their context. “Strong ties” also make teachers more likely to prevent each other from slipping into negativism if they believe the profdev offering has potential for their “mission.” When one slips, the others pull him/her along. They are social learners of the highest order. Profdev planners assume that the strong ties exist due to circumstance, however, will see their efforts backfire. Just because a dozen teachers work in the same department, that does not give them a “strong ties.” So we need to ask questions and seek out the “strong ties” before we plan profdev. In some school culture, there is little beyond individual survival, and no strong ties exist except the negative ones.  And strong ties to negativity will propel negative “activism” every time.

The second descriptor conjures an image of Fred Astaire carefully tap-dancing through a room filled with barriers, hopping atop chairs and tables and off walls as he “recognizes” them, yet using each as a launch point for marvelous leaps and stylish moves. That’s what we profdev folks do when we listen to (and ASK about) what teachers perceive as barriers and then address them creatively.  As the dance floor group watches — and even positions new barriers in Fred’s way to test his steps– Fred lightly leaps to a new clear space, spinning a member of the group to join him. The group members grab others, in turn,  into the dance.  Fred must quickly relinquish the spotlight so all dance. He teaches the steps; they mimic, then spin off on their own as the music rises.  I dream of being an edtech Fred Astaire. I have had brief moments when I have heard the music rise, and it is exhilarating.

Darren gives us a good list. Each point deserves serious reflection and comparison to our own practice in profdev. For now, I will dream of Fred Astaire for the weekend, perhaps an edtech profdev dance marathon?

The convergence of two articles about developmental stages inspires me to an interesting mashup. A few weeks ago, I read the New York Time Magazine article on twenty-somethings. The article proposes that perhaps there is an new life stage for those ages 18 to 30 who “take longer to reach adulthood”:

The traditional cycle seems to have gone off course, as young people remain un­tethered to romantic partners or to permanent homes, going back to school for lack of better options, traveling, avoiding commitments, competing ferociously for unpaid internships or temporary (and often grueling) Teach for America jobs, forestalling the beginning of adult life.

The implications of such a stage for the development, recruitment, and mentoring of new teachers is frightening, indeed. If the younger role models in our classrooms are not “grown ups,”  are we perpetuating Peter Pan instead of learning? But this article, while fascinating, is only half the mash.

Today I read about the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE)’s  release of a study  concluding that “too few [teachers] enter the profession with an understanding of the developmental sciences, which research says have a critical impact on students’ ability to learn.” I draw from a press release; the full study is available for a fee. Excerpts from the study’s recommendations include (with my emphasis):

• Revamp educator preparation programs to improve teachers’ knowledge of child and adolescent development.
• Include child and adolescent developmental strategies in standards and evaluation systems…development science should be incorporated into accreditation and new academic content standards and into assessment practices….measures of teacher effectiveness should include measures of an educator’s knowledge and application of child and adolescent development strategies.
• Acknowledge the need to address developmental issues in turning around low performing schools.

Two articles, two concerns about recognizing developmental stages. Some interesting questions arise: if new teachers, presumably — though not always — young, are not “ready to launch” in their twenties, should we be incorporating consciousness of  THAT into teacher ed programs, too? And what about policies on high stakes tests, etc. ? Finally someone verifies what first grade teachers have been screaming about: current testing is not developmentally the best way to assess student growth. And what if the first grade teacher is a twenty-something? Is he/she ready to be assessing or assessed?

I really don’t know what should be done with this confluence, this developmental mash. Yes, it is only through coincidence that I pull them together.  But isn’t it interesting that people are looking at what constitutes adulthood, what prepares a teacher, and how we should be trying to understand the younger ones, both teacher and student, along the way? Sometimes odd juxtapositions can inspire some intriguing questions.

Authentic Task 1

Assignment Title: Design a Media-based Education Summit

Grade level/subject: any subject, grades 6+

Objectives: 

Students will design and plan an Education Summit to promote new thinking and consider new strategies to effectively educate American K-12 students in the 21st century.

Students will effectively evaluate, select, and balance agendas of multiple “voices”  in American Education.

Students will state specific reasons for selection of their program “voices.”

Students will create a visual/multimedia “activator” for the summit, including media clips, text explanations, and both visual and verbal content to inspire dialog across all constituencies involved in American education.

(Lesser/optional objective):  Students will brand their summit to attract sufficient advertising income and social media presence to combat competition from such stalwarts as Mad Men, The Onion,  or various YouTube channels.

Task requirements:

• At least thirty diverse voices related to American Education must be selected and included in the summit agenda
• “Voices” must be diverse in all aspects: geographic, socio-economic, political, profession/job/role, life stage, overt and covert agenda, etc.
• All research sources must be cited in an annotated bibliography explaining why they were selected
• Summit agenda/activities must be designed to elicit more than predictable stump speeches of the selected “voices”
• A self-designed rubric to EVALUATE the summit design must be included, along with self-evaluation using this same rubric
• Selection process for  “voices” must include social networking response opportunities

• Additional requirements as determined by the students

Due Date: Friday, September 24, 2010.

Alternate assignment: You may opt for an easier solution and simply post comments on multiple venues discussing and/or critiquing NBC’s  upcoming Education Nation programming/Facebook page/branding effort.  One option: Edutopia. You must present a cohesive “message” replicable as a stump speech on an ongoing basis. In other words, you must convincingly play the role of a potential “voice” for an education summit. Documentation/RSS feed/aggregation of all your comments must be your “deliverable.”

Turn in this assignment by tagging #edunatalternative wherever you wish and tweeting it with this tag.

Ready….set… GO!

First thing on a Monday, and the first tweet I see is Larry Ferlazzo’s response to today’s New York Times column on Scientifically Tested Tests. Even though my first magna-cup of killer coffee is still just steaming next to me, this one is worth a response. Larry is right that some of the suggestions from Williams College prof Susan Engel are “decent.” I would go so far as saying they are both logical and (sadly) innovative. Using a student’s own writing and using a flexible topic to draw on his/her own expertise in that piece is a terrific way to see student thinking skills, writing skills, and core achievement in language.  Larry is also right that one or two of the suggestions are a bit odd. If we were to “test” reading knowledge through a name-it-and-claim it author contest, the same teachers who teach to the test would make kids memorize lists of authors.

The column suggests two aspects of testing that can make it meaningful (my own emphasis and analogies added):

1.) Writing is a powerful and high-def way to see the details of a student’s accomplishments and understanding. As anyone involved with writing knows, writing is thinking. Writing about reading adds another layer of complexity by using one brain-rich process (writing) to discuss and reveal what is occurring in another (reading). Writing is thinking, and reading is a miracle of the human brain. Put the two together, whether in print, in electronic form, or in some mediated version, and you have a 1080p window into student learning and thinking.

2.)  That there exists a mutually agreed-upon “standard” for what defines  “well-educated children.”  Professor Engel assumes that everyone agrees on the standard she describes. I wonder whether they do. I read standards from states, professional organizations, and Common Core, and most of the time I say, ” Of course we want our kids to be able to do that.” But in the translation to assessing them, we risk either analyzing each standard down to the micron and thus trivializing it or losing the very global nature of thinking (and writing) through subdivision. The whole is greater than its parts, and perhaps this focus is what we have lost.

Larry wonders aloud how such high-altitude assessment can help inform teaching, and that is a good question. Having taught very, very bright kids for many years, I found one of the most stimulating and intellectually challenging parts of my job was analyzing what was going on in each child, his “strengths and needs,” when writing Gifted IEPs. Essentially, I was using global analysis–and a lot of writing, selected portfolio pieces, and regular observations in both my journals and students’ own journals to help describe where this child was now and needed to go next. The decisions were never solely mine. There was input from parents and from the students themselves, too. They were daunted by a 6 by 6 foot banner in my classroom that simply asked, “What do YOU think?,”and they took it very seriously.

But here is the rub: How do you take such a process of analyzing writing, selected student work, anecdotal input, and more, and make it consistent from student to student, teacher to teacher, school to school? How do you make it “scientific”? How do you enter it into a relational database for comparative analysis? How do you find TIME for such difficult depth? And in practical terms, how do you teach teachers and administrators to do it in  way that is meaningful to others beyond your classroom door? Such work requires analytical writing by the adults, a skill that, alas, they may not have learned well in school, either.

I keep coming back to writing as the 1080p view of accomplishment. Now, if we could start asking inspiring kids to write every day instead of once a marking period, perhaps we’d have taken a first step.

What does it look like to teach and learn globally? I have been thinking about this as I follow tweets from those in Shanghai for a ed conference this week, as TeachersFirst has joined as a partner in the free, online Global Education Conference in November, and even as I talk with friends who are planning or returning from travel to various overseas destinations. I am no world traveler, though I have been to the UK, Switzerland, and — foreign country within the U.S.– Alaska. But I don’t think the teaching globally thing requires world travel experience.

What teaching globally does require — at a minimum — is posing another layer of questions on top of everything that has become routine in our classrooms.  As we discuss the weather in elementary science and talk about changing seasons, how many of us  stop to ask about the opposite hemisphere where the seasons are reversed from ours? How do you suppose the approach of spring feels to those down under as we all talk about pumpkins and raking leaves? What would Halloween feel like in spring? Wait…do they even celebrate Halloween with costumes and gluttonous bags of candy? This might be the global layer of questions in first grade.

In middle school, we teachers are so aware of students’ perceptions of  “cool” and “lame” that we may forget to add the layer of questioning that neutralizes both cool and lame into global. It was cool that suffragettes fought for the right to vote (You mean they didn’t always have it? Lame and stupid.) Where do women live today without the right to vote? That question is not in the tested content, but it is in the global layer of questions for middle school.

In high school, who should pose the global layer of questions? If students heard them in elementary and middle school, could they take over?

Physics class has problems related to motion: calculate ways to make this object land precisely at this point. Launch the water balloon to hit the teacher-caricature squarely and demonstrate using formulas why your catapult had the right design to work. Ask something about this project to give it global dimension. Would this water balloon behave the same way in Tibet? What impact might altitude have? If you were trying to design a physics problem for kids in Iceland, what might you have to change? Would they think it was cool to try to splat the teacher? Does teen sense of humor vary between different cultures?

Now Hamlet. Does it matter that he is a Dane? Do you suppose Danes would have written a tragedy about an English prince? How did Shakespeare know about this prince, anyway? Did he make it up? Did Brits know about stuff on the continent then? What would people know now if they followed Lady Macbeth on Twitter– while she was washing her hands??  How would Shakespeare have used Tweets in his plays? 

Now History. Everybody knows about the Declaration of Independence, right? How much of China’s history do we know? Why do we expect them to know what the 4th of July is? Don’t they manufacture many of the things we use to celebrate it? Are Chinese kids upset that they can’t get at the same stuff on the Internet we can? Isn’t that freedom of speech? Wait–do they have it? Do they WANT it? When I don’t like something my parents say, I tell them. Do they? They say the Chinese want to be like us. Do they? Why would they? What part of us would they hate to be?

What if we asked each high school student to pose a global question in every subject every day, somehow connected to what happened in class that day but also to other places and people? What if they aggregated them where others could see – and generate their own? Is that what one layer of global learning might look like? What a marvelously purposeful digression.

I have been observing a three year old grandson play over the last couple of weeks. By far his biggest thrill are the oldest toys in the house: his father’s old Matchbox ® cars from decades ago. They are beaten up, some lack wheels, and all are woefully out of date. So how do old toys take on new tricks? They combine with 2010 On-Demand video and current songs or ride piggy back on top of an electronic airplane that generates its own sound effects (not as well as that little boy mouth does, though!). This three year old creates the equivalent of a toy mash-up. When I ask him it, he has a perfectly logical explanation.This three year old doesn’t know that play is learning, and learning play. He has figured out, however, how to combine any and all tools to create the perfect combo for his (imaginary) situation.

Isn’t this what we really hope teacher and students will do with the available “toys” in their classrooms? There is no need to throw out the old when the newest toys arrive, especially not as budgets make it less and less likely that schools will have the latest and greatest– or anything close to it. But we do want imaginative minds to mash up what works in our class scenarios, even in unlikely or incongruous combinations. Formulas and teacher manuals simply don’t work all the time. Who would have envisioned digital cameras, Matchbox® cars and an iPhone together? If they are in the same room, together they can be tools for learning. I don’t know how we “teach”  teachers what a three year old does naturally: to play with what is available and help students to do the same. Maybe we could try leaving some of the toys out and observing for a couple of weeks, then asking the students to explain it. Yes, I know this is idealistic, but a three year old made me think of it.

This summer, I have been following a BBC TV series, The Choir. Amid the cacophony of cable TV, this gem showed up during a search for buried On Demand treasure.  The reality series centers on Gareth Malone, a young choral director who wants to bring singing into the lives of schools and students as it was in his own life: a focal point of community and a transcendent experience in teamwork amid challenge. Having grown up in a school where music was such a central nervous system, I can understand Malone’s mission and passion. I had never stopped and thought much about the fact that music does not hold such a place in most schools nor in the out-of-school lives of most kids.

The series aired so far has shared two school immersions for Malone, one in a coed “comprehensive” (high school) and another in an all-boys’ sports-oriented secondary school roughly equivalent to U.S. combined middle and high school. Neither school is in an elite community or  culture where music is revered as part of  the “heritage.” A visit to King’s College, Cambridge to sing together with the fabled men and boys’ choir was the closest these school choirs came to the traditional world of Choral music with a capital C. More typically, the school settings show boys chasing each other on a playground, avoiding Malone, or sharing raps as they declare formal music  “gay.” One of my favorite scenes involved Malone trying to cajole the all male PhysEd staff into singing in a staff choir. Picture the chorus teacher in your school making such a foray into the world of smelly sweat socks!

As a teacher, I see so many messages in The Choir, but the loudest is one of raising student voices. Malone does it by popping his boy-face into places where no sane person would tread and finally winning over a group by recognizing reasonable goals for them and persistently exuding his own passion until the reticent are willing to take similar risks. But how often do we do either: publicly persist in our own passions despite ridicule or help students take risks with their own?

Too often,  curriculum is not centered on risks or passions. It is centered on sameness and uniformity of path. Malone is quick to point out the confidence that comes from finding an individual singing voice and sharing it. But he is not developing soloists. He is raising passionate voices together, voices that grow from within as they risk sucking in air and letting it out with gusto. The sameness of “chorus” is less about being alike and more about blending together. But it cannot work until each individual singer/student risks raising his own voice and hearing it among the others, eventually tuning in to how the sounds blend together. So should curriculum reach resonance. A teacher models the passion, even in a vacuum at times. The students find voice and hear themselves, and the choirmaster/teacher helps in seeing challenges that can work but will take work. The final performance is a recognizable accomplishment — for each raising his own voice.

Watch the choral boywonder-choirmaster on BBC America. As a teacher, you may find inspiration for a new voice of your own.