I came across this wonderful Sunni Brown video today about the power of doodling in formulating and refining ideas. As a perennial doodler, I feel validated. As a teacher, I feel challenged. How do I usually react to a student who is doodling in class? (How do you?) Do I ever celebrate the doodle or even ask about it? I tend to use the old favorite “ignore it if it is not disturbing anyone” tactic when I see elaborate scribbles where student notes are supposed to be.  A less doodle-tolerant teacher might say that doodle laissez-faire will allow the student to discover the logical consequences of his/her inattention. As a more visual/artistic person, I secretly delight in seeing original cartoon figures and 3D graffiti in notebook or handout margins. But I honestly have never celebrated them as visual representations of thinking related to what we are discussing in class.

I wonder whether the student who draws would be willing/able to share about what he was thinking, perhaps on an illustrated blog post or Voicethread. I wonder what would happen if we posted the images on a class wiki, or collected many on Wallwisher or a bulletin board and asked others  for their reactions. I also wonder whether seemingly UNrelated doodles actually would help the artist retell or explain a concept that was in his/her auditory space while he/she was drawing.

Fast forward to a faculty meeting (or dreaded, day-long inservice). My agenda pages are always filled with doodles. When I pull them from the file folder months later, I look at the doodles and their relationship to the text, and I remember what I was thinking. This video says we each progress through various developmental steps as doodlers,  though at different rates. Surely the doodle-to-reenact-thinking  level is a one we would like our students to achieve. But first we must allow and respect the doodle, and make it clear that we expect doodlaccountability. Leave a little more white space. Ask about doodle meaning. Respect and share the doodle. Maybe even frame a few. Oh, and start paying attention to what you do(odle). We all might learn something.

I admit it; I was  “jock” in high school.  Actually, I went to an all girls school before Title IX (don’t start doing the math now…). It was OK to be athletic when there were no boys around. I was a good student, too– lots of academic accolades and all that– but my classmates remember me most for being captain of this or that and for getting out of the scary Algebra II teacher’s classes as many afternoons as possible to leave early for games. I did a lot of other activities, from glee club to yearbook, but 3 varsity sports a year really defined my reputation.  As a college freshman, I continued on to the first women’s field hockey and lacrosse teams at a formerly all-male college. I was not afraid to try anything, from sports to being a T.A. for a revered prof. Those who know me now would say that all of this “fits” with what they know of me today. My high school extracurriculars did help define who I became and how I approach adult life.

So I read with great interest on Education Next about the Academic Value of Non-Academics. Unlike many articles that correlate extracurriculars to student/life success, this analysis does a great job of critically analyzing whether either is a cause or effect. It probes into what makes a student decide to participate in an afterschool activity. What makes him/her stick with it? The research about the impact of extracurriculars intrigues me. As budgets shave away at students’ opportunities to participate, I worry. If I had been asked to pay for my activities, would I have chosen to try almost anything? Probably not. There was no extra money in my two-teacher family. My scholarship to the all-girls school was as a “professional courtesy,” and I attended school with many whose families had a hundred times more money. But I had confidence and an identity among them, in part because of being a “jock.” We played on the same team. We lost together (a lot).

EdNext’s article is on the right track in suggesting that the extra adult contact of extracurriculars could be a major factor in why participating students are more successful. But so is the extra contact and social parity of simply being in the same activity with other students you might not otherwise socialize with. We talk a lot now about how social learning really is. Employers want collaborators. Extracurriculars are often a much better suited environment to learn collaboration than a forced “group” project. Being a jock is not a frill. It is part of the same broadbased, personal, and ubiquitous learning that we advocate as “21st century.” I hope the kids who attend schools where “jocks” and bandmembers are being asked to pay up (or even lose the chance to have a team or band altogether) can find another way to play.

For most of my 27 years in the classroom, I taught gifted students. I was the “gifted program specialist” whom these children trusted to provide their weekly respite from ordinary school. It was a privilege to learn from them and later to see what became of them. They did not all become doctors or lawyers or college professors. Few became rich. Some have suffered and wandered and have not yet found a happy medium between functioning around other people and the intellectual play they so enjoy. There are few I do not remember in detail from my time knowing them as elementary and middle school students. Among the hundreds (maybe a couple thousand?), there were perhaps a score who brought me up short with their vision. I looked forward to the days when they would bound (or shuffle) through the door of my borrowed, “itinerant” classroom space.

As Steve Jobs passed away this week, I wondered where his teachers are. Surely there are some still alive who watched this adopted son of a working class couple through elementary and middle school. I wonder: how did he articulate his vision as a young man? I am guessing he had some tough times on the playground and in the cafeteria. I am guessing he irritated more than one  straight-arrow teacher who found his opinions inappropriate coming from a young mouth. I wonder whether he was the one who read and absorbed quietly, then tinkered in the garage, or whether he blurted out unthinkable mental connections to peers (and adults) who did not understand. Surely, Steve Jobs was what I call “severely and profoundly gifted.”

As a teacher, I love to mentally rewind adults into what I hypothesize they might have been like as a child.  I never really research or verify my musings. I do enjoy thinking about little people I have known and unrelated adults, playing a mental matching game with no correct answers. I just enjoy flipping over the two cards: one child, one adult, and questioning in my mind whether this could be the precursor to that.

I have no matching child card for Steve Jobs, though I think I have some partial matches in my Former Student deck. But somewhere there is an aged teacher or two who knew this man as a boy. I envy them.

Every once in a while, I have an amazing conversation with another teacher. Yesterday was one of the best ever. I have a colleague who teaches science and is dedicated, reflective, and far too self-critical. She is not a visual person. Listen to her talk, and you hear words like “data” and “application.”  Listen to me, and you hear “vivid” or “visually rich” or some sort of metaphor you can picture. We both love seeing kids learn, but we see it so differently.

We are both intrigued by infographics, she as the scientist and I as the artist. She calls them “data visualizations.”   I find that a mouthful. (Today I ran across this blog post on this very topic and chuckled aloud at how fitting it is to the two of us.)  Both of us want to help kids discover ways to critique and create infographics. We don’t just want kids to throw a quick copy/paste or slap a downloaded image together with a too much text or endless numbers in  large serif font, however. We want to see kids create meaning out of what they are learning.

As we conferred about how she might use infographics to scaffold learning in her biology classes and not simply as a culminating assessment, we talked for over an hour about the infographics, but we never approached it from the same orientation. We think as scientist and artist. Fortunately, each of us has great respect for the other approach, sometimes verging on awe. As we bounced ideas around for helping her kids get started and for a presentation proposal we are working on about this, I wondered why more teachers don’t try such a collaboration. Imagine if the artists (and I include writers) among us were to partner with the data people, the scientists. I can help her figure out an approach that will work with her artist students and help draw out (BAD pun!) visual analogies from her scientist students. She can help me see what my scientist/data loving students are looking for. Not only that, we can learn from each other to the benefit of our students. I even mused aloud that it would be very cool if schools facilitated such partnerships between teachers.  But we both paused, cringing to imagine if teachers were “forced” to talk to those on the other side of the worldview fence.

A few hours later, my colleague emailed me with a link from the National Writers Project, a project I know well as a fellow in a local affiliate. It was about helping kids visualize vocabulary.  My scientist colleague gets it. She knows that she is not a visual person, so she seeks out the advice of those with a visual approach either in person or via an online resource. Thus, I have the privilege of  enjoying eye-opening conversations with the scientist as we seek to fill the voids we know we have.

I have to wonder how much more effective we all would be as teachers if we ventured to form friendships or professional partnerships with other teachers who see the world differently. What can a physics teacher and a Spanish teacher learn from each other? Should the math teachers all eat lunch together without ever speaking to the art teacher? Even elementary teachers have very different preferred angles of view,  though they teach every subject. How can we encourage teachers to appreciate, celebrate, and learn from our different world views? I know our students would benefit.

There’s nothing like a trip through U.S. Customs to make you stop and think about what it means to be a citizen.  I wish every U.S. middle school student could experience it. If you pay attention, you cannot help but think very seriously about what your citizenship means.

First, you notice all the people in the “non-citizen” line, clutching passports of different colors and  packets of paperwork. No one acts like this is fun. All want to be sure to give the “right” answers to cross the magic line and pass through the security zone.

Then you look at the others in the “U.S. Citizens and Green Card Holders” line. We don’t look as if we’re having fun, either, but we bring certain assumptions to the line with us. We know we have a right to be there. We know we can (respectfully) ask questions about the process. We know that there is a process. We may feel ignorant that we aren’t really sure what that process is. But there is probably a web site where we could have read about it if we had taken the time.

We have the right to know, and we may or may not choose to exercise that right. We also have the responsibility to know.

As often happens, a related experience within 24 hours made me stop and think. I came across this post about a recent report on the need for civics education in the U.S. The recommendations include, of course, a suggestion that the schools be responsible for delivering standards-aligned civics curriculum with assessments. Specifically,  they recommend that we “hold schools and districts accountable for student civic learning achievement.” Hmm. Who is ultimately accountable? The school or the citizen?

A quote from the report’s accompanying message by Justice O’Connor and  former U.S. Representative Lee Hamilton of Indiana really made me question the who and the what of citizenship:

“Each generation of Americans must be taught these basics [of our rights and responsibilities as citizens]. Families and parents have a key role to play, yet our schools remain the one universal experience we all have to gain civic knowledge and skills.”

I agree that schools are our one universal (though wildly diverse) experience.  I agree that civics, or citizenship as I prefer to call it, has been abandoned from curriculum during the NCLB era. We do need to bring it back into our schools. We do need to model it, talk about it, and show that it matters.

But isn’t the whole point that the individual has responsibility to continue to educate him/herself on issues long after leaving school, to question, to look at the other line at Customs, to ask our own children questions and watch the news together as we think aloud so children learn to think themselves? If we simply say.”Let the schools do it,” we will not have any better citizens. We should be saying, “Let every adult model citizenship, at school, at home, and in the line at Customs.” We should be demanding citizenship from our fellow adults, our coworkers, and the people in line with us at Customs or the grocery store. Declare that.

This morning NPR did a story on the Tribute Center Museum opened by 9/11 families across the street from Ground Zero and the thousands of artifacts shared there, found or donated to commemorate and make real the experience of that gut-wrenching day ten years ago. My hand involuntarily slaps over my mouth each time I hear stories of personal details: where were you and what did you see or hear on September 11, 2001?  Those of us who lived through it as adults, whether from 100 feet or 1000 miles away, still taste the cloud of ash in our minds and feel the urge to run or do something now. Somehow television images lined our nostrils with smoke as we watched. 9/11 went into the heart and lungs of every American.

The survivor-father in charge of the Tribute Center talks about a menu from Windows on the World restaurant and a boarding pass from one of the doomed flights that fluttered from the sky in the ash cloud and now are part of the museum. I stop my car to pry my hand from my mouth — again. There is such wisdom in this cloud.

This year’s first year teachers were in middle school. Today’s high school seniors were in second grade and likely were sheltered from the news until they got off the bus to find an adult glued to the tube, breathing distant ash. What are we doing to help today’s students touch the painful wisdom of this cloud?

We have a week until the tenth anniversary of Sept 11. If there were ever a time to stop following a curriculum map or forget about “eligible content,” this is it. [*Note to non-teachers: “eligible content” is the stuff The Tests are about.] Share the wisdom of this cloud. Share artifacts, share stories, tell your students to ask questions about 9/11 to everyone they know over age 25. Let them smell the smoke a bit.

What will you do with your class this week?

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To my regular readers: I will not be able to post as regularly for a couple of weeks, but I will resume soon. I hope  I can return with some new wisdom, as well.

Thanks to my friend Ollie Dreon, a former teaching colleague turned teacher ed prof, for sharing a video from the Chronicle of Higher Ed on his blog a couple of weeks ago. We K-12 people don’t often read what the grown ups in higher ed are doing, but this one definitely translates to K-12 land. Ollie spans these two worlds well and models what teaching and learning should be for all of us.

The video in the Chronicle for Higher Ed post shares a Google Plus “hangout” of college students  talking about the ways their profs use technology well (and not so well). At the higher ed level, students can articulate what works for learning and what doesn’t. My question for K-12 teachers is this: Would you try this with your students? If you asked them to tell about the highs and lows of  technology use in your classroom, what would they say? Even kindergarteners remember seeing adults who are stressed. If the web site you wanted to share did not work, they remember that day — perhaps better than the concept they were supposed to be learning. Would you risk asking them to retell the tech highs and lows of Room 12?  My former middle schoolers reveled in the tech disasters I invited by trying to outsmart a brand new network by “sharing” files or having too many kids “sucking the bandwidth” in the fledgling days of classroom Internet connections. But I never asked them about the highs and lows of learning with technology in my classes. I wonder what they would have said about learning because of — or in spite of — the technology.

Certainly, today’s high school students could make a video much like this one. They are intellectually able to describe how they learn best or “when gadgets feel gimmicky or class time is wasted as instructors fumble with gear.” Would you take the risk to ask? The safest time would be to ask now, at the start of the school year, since they would be talking about some “other” teachers they had in the past and not about you–yet. What an amazing “getting to know you” revelation this would be in early September. Would you repeat it in May to find out how well you did?

It certainly would be a learning experience. If you do try it, please share what you discover.

My husband inherited his great grandfather’s wooden tool chest from pre-1900, filled with beautiful hand tools. The wooden surfaces of the brace and bit shine from hours of rubbing against carpenter’s palms as he built shelves and homes for doctors, businesses, and scores of names. Each of the jobs is carefully penciled into small notebooks tucked into the tool chest tray, seasoned with sawdust. When we pull out a tool, we never say, “It does this.” Instead, we imagine the places it has built, feel how it fits in our hands, and assume it can do anything we are brave enough to envision.

When I see a new tool on the web, even one so simple and “old fashioned” that it lingers from a previous millenium, I do not label its place or task. I  wonder about it just as I do the tools in that chest. Somehow, I always come up with more ideas than it offers for itself. Last week I looked at a review of Box Templates. This simple site offers printable patterns for folded boxes. Like a brace and bit, it has obvious uses. But what if… they could be templates for mystery boxes that students make about themselves as a “getting to know you” activity the first week of school? The outside could be decorated with words or images of significance to the student, the inside filled with small objects or symbols or slips of paper with favorite quotes or song lyrics or… What if we challenged students to make their own box templates for other box shapes? What if we invited students to create a 3D container representing a concept we are studying: government by the people or cells or energy or biodiversity? Some might even render it virtually in SketchUp. Others will need to touch it and crease the folds with their fingernails.

Box Templates is my brace and bit this week. The palms that smooth this brace and bit each bring new materials and new products. This tool does what? Anything.

As today’s budgets make us ponder each available tool a little longer,  we can enjoy the smell of sawdust and inscribe a few notes in our own idea notebooks. It’s just a matter of vision.

In “reading” through a fitful string of blog posts sparked by a tweet, I ran across this post about the changes to our reading habits due to technology. It actually struck such a chord of guilt — as I was about to skim and run — that I stopped to read the entire post. I am living what Patrick Kingsley describes:

our hyperactive online habits are damaging the mental faculties we need to process and understand lengthy textual information. Round-the-clock news feeds leave us hyperlinking from one article to the next – without necessarily engaging fully with any of the content; our reading is frequently interrupted by the ping of the latest email; and we are now absorbing short bursts of words on Twitter and Facebook more regularly than longer texts.

We know our students are even more likely to skim and run, since their standards for full web site attention are more demandingly fickle and their reading skills more spotty. As Jakob Nielsen points out:

Teens’ poor performance [at web site “success“]  is caused by three factors: insufficient reading skills, less sophisticated research strategies, and a dramatically lower patience level.

So what does all this rather intriguing research tell me, aside from the fact that I am a true edtech readerwritergeek?  It makes me wonder:

How can we create incentives for Slow Reading?

An iPad zone with comfortable chairs might be the 21st century equivalent of the bean bags in the 1980s middle school media center where I once worked: comfy, inviting, and reading ready. But the physical space and gadgets do not make Slow Readers. The desire to stick with one article, post, or thread of thought long enough to see it through to a conclusion is what we are all missing.

What could make a teen stick with a thread of thought throughout an entire article and related discussions? It is much easier to toss the links into a class wiki or Diigo group after skimming two sentences, perhaps with a pithy comment.  Done. Next assignment, please.

I would like to try confronting some students with Nielsen’s analysis of teen site navigation. I would like to ask them whether his findings of 2005 are still true or more exaggerated today. I would like to share Kingsley’s post with the same group and ask them what they think. Of course, they’d have to READ both to be able to respond, and the only initial incentive might be a grade.  I really wonder what would happen if we confronted teens with these two posts to form framing questions for an entire semester in almost any course: social studies, English, even science:

What are your incentives for Slow Reading in today’s world? Where/how can it happen? Does it matter any more?

We might be surprised to hear what our kids have to say about all this.  Instead of telling them why they must Slow Read (for a test), ask them why they might want to. They might even create Slow Reading places and incentives of their own. How would that be for 21st century learning?

Teachers everywhere are decorating bulletin boards. That cheesy scalloped edging unrolls again, fencing in neatly printed names pinned into bus lists and birthdays. Posters with wise sayings come out of the closets, their corners perforated into patterns of tiny holes from staples and pushpins of years gone by. Shar Peis with mournful eyes tell us they hate Mondays, and maps depict pastel lands where foreign tongues are spoken. Back to School is here.

I wonder what students would put on a life bulletin board, one that they would actually pause to think about instead of staring out the window at teasing days better suited for swimming pools than desks. Perhaps an infographic of the top ten activities in the day of an American teen. Or the chief environmental damage caused by Americans… or my favorite, the hierarchy of digital distractions:

(I love the informationisbeautiful site!) If we’re going to make bulletin boards invitations to learning something, why not invite kids to contribute some questions? Let’s make information not only beautiful but meaningful. What infographic would best intrigue YOUR students, if you could have one made to order? Maybe you should have students make it on the first day. Give them the raw materials and see what happens.

Have an interactive whiteboard? Build an infographic together there on day 1,  something that shows how life connects to learning in your classroom.  It may be the one thing your students recall about your class ten years from now.

P.S. If you need something to fill some spaces in the meantime, try some quotes from TeachersFirst’s Hang Ups series.