Think Like a Teacher

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.

Many years ago while completing certification as an English teacher — post B.A. in English — I took a course on linguistics. Probably one the thing that stuck most from that class was an awareness of how we change both what we say and how we say it, depending on the others in the room. Flip a switch and your vocabulary adjusts, the level of sarcasm changes, and  “filters” for prohibited topics kick in.

Now fast forward to today’s rapidly evolving technology world. I find myself adding another layer of techno-contextual adjustment to nearly every conversation I have. Is the person I am talking with techno-familiar, techno-phobe, techno-braggart? Is she an iPhone user? Have I heard him mention Facebook? Is her face buried in her Blackberry? Do I hear a txt msg notification buzzing in her pocket? Did he contact me by email? Are we having this actual conversation on Twitter? Does she print out her email? Did he just say something about AOL? Where did I see her look up that phone number? Does he have a landline? When the conversation ventured into the unknown, did we wonder aloud or Google it?

We collect these techno-portrait bits in every face to face and digital interaction, and we adjust accordingly. I sit in a meeting in my community and realize that sharing a newsletter by pdf or on a web site will eliminate 50% of the people in the room from ever seeking it, much less finding it. Ten minutes later, I mention having seen an article on my feed reader, and I get odd looks from many and one knowing nod among a group of ten. When the subject of travel comes up, I do not mention the fact that I will blog my China trip since I know (from a Twitter contact) that my blog is accessible there. How would I even explain that?

Linguistics experts say we learn the skills of situational language adjustment over time. Young children do not have these skills yet. Teens and young adults develop adjustment skills more quickly, and seasoned, sensitive adults can establish phyllo–like layers of subtlety in their vocabulary and speech. Our students have less experience and motivation for adjusting the what and how of what they say for the techno-levels around them. They may also have widely varying techno-levels among their classroom peers. But we expect them to function well at a techno-level unlike their own in our schools and in dialog with adults around them. No wonder they lose patience or simply do not want to bother.

What a conversation you could have today with your middle and high schools students, as well as with your adult work colleagues: How do you “read” the technology experience/expertise of those around you? How do you change the what and the how of your conversation because of it? Do you think you should have to adjust your language for others’ technology expertise/experience? Why or why not? How is such adjustment different from or comparable to other adjustments you make to your language all the time?

Creative Fluency is a flow of ideas– more of tributary, really– but Originality is the full volume and force of the creative river. It has a mind of its own, and you can’t decide to simply “build” a river any more than you can force originality from your students (or yourself). Originality rises and falls on its own. You can try to bound it with dams and levees, but it eventually laughs at such efforts. And if there is no rain, you can’t force it to flow. It can dry up due to climate conditions or slow to a trickle. In fact, it often does dry up as the sediment of school and the sweltering heat of standardized expectations sear the very headwaters into vapor.

Originality is the one of the FFOE skills that can only be cheered and rewarded but can never be “produced.”  We can recognize it, talk about how it might have happened, and even try to NOTICE the conditions that caused it so we might predict it at least as well as NOAA predicts flooding. Yup, that’s a river. It must have come up from last night’s thunderstorm. Do you suppose we’ll have more today?

Originality is risky, too.  Some of the most original thinkers I have ever known suffer daily in their isolation out on the river. Think of news images of a lone soul stranded amid a river’s fury, clutching debris as they become part of the current.

Why do we need original thinkers? Please tell me you do not even ask this. No human-made object, invention, or artwork around us would be there if someone had not taken the risk to consider it as a possibility. Yet somehow we relegate originality to creative writing or art class. Most academic classes (and most jobs) secure dry land far from the river’s risks, then wonder why life dries up.

We can take students to the river’s edge by posing questions and juxtapositions to force flexibility and possibly enjoy results that are actually original. Place a curriculum concept or event into a different context and ask what would happen. Put a concept to a test by asking questions, using analogies, and making juxtapositions.

• What kind of adaptation could you imagine for a new animal living in the New York subways?
• What kind of invention could we use to make subways safer for human beings?

Even better, encourage students to ask these and better questions. And when you observe something original, celebrate it and ask how it happened. (Often it is the response that made the entire class laugh and may not have been entirely “appropriate.”) Where were you when you thought of that? Do you have great ideas like that a lot when you are [insert the place they mentioned]? What were you doing right before that? If you wanted to design a perfect place to think original thoughts, what would it be like? Does it have chocolate? Water? Music? What kind of light? Laughter? What time of day is it? Who else is there?

Originality is a river.

Modeling: I thought of this analogy while swimming, my best place for creative thinking, preferably before mid-day and outdoors. Original? Maybe, maybe not. But it sure feels good to think this way. I want others to feel this, too.

Where are the headwaters of your originality river?

Creative flexibility is undoubtedly my favorite of the FFOE skills. Nudging people to take a different angle, approach, or point of view always seems to prompt some discomfort (“cognitive dissonance”?) and some marvelous surprises. The best outcome of the discomfort of forcing flexibility is that it is so closely related to originality. More on that later…

Why do we need flexible thinkers?

Flexible thinkers can communicate better with others because being able to put yourself into someone else’s shoes makes you productively empathetic. Not only  can you “see” as they do, but as a flexible thinker, you can engage the brain and produce new ideas from that same place. Imagine if the Taliban could actually see the world as a westerner/Christian or if Americans could plan for Afghanistan’s future through the lens of native Afghanis. What if we looked at humans’ carbon footprints from the point of view of trees or squirrels? What if, instead of making laws prohibiting texting while driving, we could find incentives so people would want to stop on their own? Imagine students who said aloud, “I can’t solve this equation this way. Maybe I should try working it backwards.” Imagine drug manufacturers who asked, “What else could be causing this reaction?” or “How can I sell this more cheaply?”

Think holograms. Those dancing figures in Disney’s Haunted Mansion are a vision of creative flexibility. They project an image in three dimensions because they can “see” it from multiple angles. What would the world be like if we raised a generation who could project conceptual holograms?

How do we stretch for fluency?

Meanwhile, back in our classrooms, we have tests to take and benchmarks to meet.  So who has time for flexibility stretching?

Magic Moments:
In any lesson, there is a moment when you think they “get it,” at least most of them. That is the flexibility moment:

• You just finished demonstrating with manipulatives to show the process of simplifying a fraction. The students then did it themselves successfully. Now is the moment to ask, “What do you think the denominator would say to the numerator if they could talk?”
• You’ve studied the Industrial Revolution, and every group has presented about a major invention of the time period. Now is the moment to ask, “If Bill Gates were alive then, which invention would he have grabbed and promoted?” What about YouTube inventors Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim?
• Your English students have managed to decipher a Shakespeare sonnet. Let them ask a question that the recipient of the sonnet might have sent back to Shakespeare.

Conversations:
In science, we study inanimate or nonverbal forces, things, and creatures. Give them the power of speech by permitting and rewarding your students’ flexibility questions. Let them ask, what would the bottom of the food chain say to the top? What would an electron say to a quark? Let the students ask and speak. Maybe have them record their own versions of the conversations using Podomatic or Voicethread.

Drawings:
As  you assess prior knowledge about gravity or life cycles or verbs, ask students to draw a picture of what they know about it. Maybe have gravity draw a self-portrait? Keep the drawings for students to revisit as they learn. If you save them digitally, students can narrate them on Voicethread or visually annotate them on an interactive whiteboard (and SAVE, of course!).

Head, shoulders, knees, and toes:
As you learn new terms, ask students to physically “shape” what they might look like in the air with their hands. Maybe some concepts are so large that they stretch from above the head to your toes. Others may fit in the palm of the hand. Do some concepts have a specific texture? Yes, middle school and up would laugh at you for this one, but elementary might find new ways to “envision” a concept through physical “flexibility.” What a great thing to catch on video!

Could your classroom have flexibility stretches? 
Are there magic moments in your teaching pattern? (Do you ever break your teaching pattern?) What would a student say about the way new concepts are “explained” in your classes? Ask a middle schooler or high schooler to role-play the way you would explain gravity (or any basic concept). You will learn a lot about what you always do and say. Can you role-play the way your students react to new units and lessons? Does  it bother you that both you and they are so predictable? What would happen if you tried one of the possibilities above?

Next up: Originality’s river