Think Like a Teacher

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.

Pencils can do anything: draw, shade, outline, write words or paragraphs, erase, design, tap, point, invite, compose, ask, reply, annotate, doodle, poke, or be an improvisational flag pole for a make believe fort. Pencils can be whatever you want them to be and help you accomplish just about anything, even filling in those dreaded bubble sheets.

Yesterday I watched this video:

My conclusion: Computer code is the new pencil. Yes, there are lots of big names here and lots of money behind this video, but the video accomplishes what it sets out to do. It makes me WANT one of these pencils!

I rewind decades and wonder what might have happened if I had been exposed to the possibilities of computer code as a middle schooler or even in elementary school. I was good at math and logic. I was good at writing. I chose writing over math because there just didn’t seem to be any social interaction among the people in the math building or any creative way to use it. I joked that they were all covered with chalk dust. Besides, I like creating, writing, and making things out of all kinds of stuff. So I became a teacher.

Along comes this video that says code can do anything: create arts programs, solve problems, figure stuff out, communicate or entertain. In short, code would let me make things that pull together all the stuff that I love.

So why aren’t kids — including those with a passion for things verbal-linguistic, visual-spatial, or musical-rhythmic– flocking to learn code? If code is the new pencil, why don’t we have big, chunky starter pencils and finger-friendly pencil grippers to ease us into using this new pencil? Code.org is trying to get computer code into our schools, but are they going to do it with a well-produced video?

I hate to say it out loud (for fear of offending the exceptions), but few of the code-jockeys I know can talk and write are adept in the language of kids. They don’t make this pencil something that a mom or dad could pick up and help a five year old to grip. We don’t experience it in someone’s lap or during a story hour. Elementary school teachers don’t see code as part of essential learning. They probably never even thought about code as anything other than something their geekiest teen neighbor does. Code is hidden and scary. Teachers and parents, in turn, probably don’t suggest code as something kids might want to learn to have fun and be creative. Even the adventurous among us need pencil grippers. And no, an online code academy is not going to provide the kind of friendly experience that helps us hold and use this new pencil. Until we have face to face, human sharing the same way we share words and books, code will remain an enticing mystery at best.

Ladies and gentlemen of Codeland, sharpen your pencils.  You have a new tool for us to learn, and we need some human help.

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 love writing. I love helping others love writing, especially their OWN writing. I love watching people as they hear their own writing voice, perhaps for the first time. So I share a few writing favs in hopes that your might play and be lured into hearing yourself as a writer.

Play with words using this Google Docs demo (reviewed by TeachersFirst) that allows you to “collaborate” with master writers such as Shakespeare, Nietzsche, or Emily Dickinson. See what Poe would do to the words you type or watch your simplest phrase transformed by Dickens. This demo is limited, of course, but it draws attention to word choice and the many ways English can say similar things. Single words often become phrases extracted from a literary masterpiece. I do not commend the crazy concoctions that combine on the demo page, but I do relish the questions this demo raises. I wonder what it would look like if Hemingway were one of the collaborators? Instead of adding words, the demo might subtract them!

Who do you write like? Try I Write Like (reviewed by TeachersFirst) to find out. In a near-reversal of the Docs demo, this tool prompts you paste in your words and analyzes your writing to see which well-known author’s work is most similar to your writing. (The analysis of this post says I am like H. P. Lovecraft. I am intrigued  and want to learn more about Lovecraft, since I do not know his work.)

I love word clouds. I love creating them, and I love using them to see my own writing from another point of view. Here is last week’s post transformed into a word cloud by TagCrowd (reviewed by TeachersFirst):

There are loads of word cloud makers, each with its own variations: Tagxedo, Worditout, Wordle,  and more. Alas, they also disappear often, as did Wordsift and Tagul

Of course, writing is sometimes excruciating, especially for those who decide they cannot be poets without rhyme. Enter the many online rhyming dictionaries. This result offers rhymes for writing itself, though you must ignore annoying ads and distractions. (See TF’s review for ideas.) Writing may be more like biting or fighting, but it can also be igniting. A cleaner tool, Write Rhymes (reviewed here) gives a different look, but you have to know how to Option+click (not tough at all!). Here is what you get for the word write:

So play today with words to say and maybe you will find a way to hear your voice and make a choice of words to tell your thoughts so well you’ll want to write.

Write to be… or not to be, to find a voice that says, “That’s ME!”

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.

The other day I posted about the analogy of good coaching in sports to effective EdTech coaching. The new ISTE SIGETC already has some very effective coaches as members, so I am sure they will have something to say about this analogy. I toss it out and hope I don’t have to duck rotten tomatoes from anti-sports folks.

My previous post listed fan approval, wins/losses, building learnership, and noticing/nourishing individual strengths as important characteristics for the effective EdTech coach. Here are some further ingredients to add flavor and assure success:

5. A balance of team and individual. With the excitement of molding individual talents comes the responsibility to build teamwork. A strong team of tech savvy teachers is far better than individual stars. A great EdTech coach finds ways for both stars bench warmers to work as part of TEAM. ONe great thing about EdTech is that you don’t have to limit the number of players (teachers) on the field. Everyone gets full time playing time. The effective coach finds ways for all teacher sto be engaged and contributing to the schoolwide goals of Thinking Teachers Teaching Thinkers.

6. The ability to communicate skills beyond your own. A short basketball coach could never demonstrate a slam-dunk. An English major EdTech coach knows nothing about chemistry and does not talk in chemspeak. But a good coach can find a way to talk about the skills even if he/she cannot personally DO them.  A coach may understand a lot about manipulating data using technology, but have no recollection of the formulas a math or science teacher knows and challenges students to use in creating infographics. But if the coach can talk it through and communicate about the skill, the “players” who have the right skill set will pick it up and refine it as the coach suggests. A real advantage of NOT being able to “just do it” is that you will never be tempted to grab the mouse!

7. Inspiring the next generation of coaches. We see this in every sport: the kids who loved the sport come back to coach it, maybe as volunteers in a youth program or even as pro coaches. If they receive good coaching, they pay it forward. The best EdTech coaches inspire their teaching peers to do the same: volunteer to demonstrate at a staff meeting, sit side by side and help the tech-timid colleague work through a tech challenge, or simply volunteer for “pick up” tech sessions in the planning center. The best way to help teachers stay abreast of the pace of change in both teaching and technology is for all coaches to see next generation inspiration as priority one. We need many minds to keep this team in action.

Hope you’ll join the EdTech Coaches of #SIGETC in our chat January 15 at 1pm Eastern. We have future chats planned for March 19 and May 21. Start cooking up that secret sauce for #SIGETC!

As part of the leadership team of a new ISTE SIG (special interest group) for EdTech Coaches, I have been mulling what makes a good coach. This time of year, NFL and NCAA college football programs are tossing, grabbing, and exchanging coaches like kids with Halloween candy. The media and the fans love to chime in. As a former three-sports-a-year student, I have had experience with many coaches. As a parent, I have witnessed the strengths and weaknesses of my children’s coaches. Along the way, I formed a solid list of what I think makes a good coach. The same traits that inspire kids to swim harder, dig deeper, and learn more as athletes also work when technology integration specialists (or EdTech coaches by any other name) coach our teaching peers. The sports analogies really do make sense, even if you were never a “jock.”

Secret Sauce: Seven Must-Have Characteristics of a Good Coach

1. Fan approval. If the ultimate audience — the fans/students/parents– do not appreciate the results of what the coach does, it’s all over. They may not even notice how the coach does it, but they do notice the effects on the players/teachers. If the EdTech coach helps a teacher score lessons that fascinate, challenge, and/or hook the fans (students), the coach is brilliant. EdTech coaches are perhaps more like the next tier “coordinators” on the football sidelines, removed from the media hype given head coaches and in more direct relationship with the teachers/players. But fan approval still matters.

2.Wins and losses. Coaches are judged by the final score. Did the teacher improve student achievement? Did the coach help him/her make a touchdown, or did they have to settle for a field goal? No matter how much yardage a team gains, the management/administration wants the wins that justify the costs. It’s brutal, but it’s true. Savvy EdTech coaches know how to track results to prove that they are having an impact. If you can’t “score,” at least show that you are improving yards per carry. That will buy some time until you can help your players build confidence and skills enough to #eduwin and until management priorities begin to include more than just one score.

3. Building sportsmanship, or in this case learnership. Good athletic teams do more than score. They model the behavior we call sportsmanship: caring, ethical attitudes that transcend the playing field or classroom. As EdTech coaches, we nurture learnership by being learners ourselves. We admit when we are wrong and try to help those around us gain skills side by side with us. Fan approval can actually go up without wins if a good coach builds learnership. In athletic programs that rely less on making $$ from The Team, coaches can put learnership first. May we all be blessed to be in such a program/school!

4. Noticing and nourishing individual strengths. This is a delicate balance for any coach. Unless you are in an elite NFL program or an EdTech magnet school, you probably have some players/teachers with natural talent and some who simply have to work hard. You want to help the hard workers but also keep the high-talents moving ahead. As an EdTech coach, you may want to arrange some extra exposure to elite “camps” such as ISTE workshops or invite a teacher to submit for a conference. A good coach develops all players without making any of them jealous. And a good coach finds some strength even in the bench warmers. Those good-hearted teachers who just keep trying need every pat on the back they can get. The corollary is that a good coach notices the faces in the crowd who did not even come to tryouts. Some may hide from technology, perhaps out of fear or simply because they did not grow up in the right neighborhood where all the kids got to join in sports/technology. Result: they don’t want to embarrass themselves. Have EdTech play days or “camps” where everyone is welcome. And give out snacks. Everyone loves snacks. This is where the “everyone gets a trophy” philosophy actually fits.

I have three more, but it’s time for “practice.” I’ll share the rest of the thoughts from my playbook in a few days. To be continued….

Meanwhile, I hope you will plan to join the #SIGETC chat at 1 pm Eastern on Tuesday, January 15!

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.