Think Like a Teacher

We’ve lost that lovin’ feelin’…

Remember how it feels to complete a project you are proud of? As teachers, the “projects” we complete are most often teaching tasks, such as getting our grades in on time or commenting on ALL our students’ drafts or completing rubrics for 20-150 projects.  Rarely do we celebrate something we have created. Our creative process — and a valuable one it is!– is most often applied to generating lesson ideas or coming up with a way to engage a struggling student. We just don’t have as many chances to proudly celebrate and share something we create.

Earlier this week, I found that feeling again. After a manic, messy, and thrilling creative push, TeachersFirst proudly announced Gettysburg by the Numbers, a way to learn about the watershed moment in the Civil War through infographics, data, and questions that are meaningful to us today– especially if you happen to be in middle school or early high school.

It feels good. It feels really good.  It feels good enough to make me wonder how many of our students get to experience that feeling. If we do our jobs well as teachers, they may experience it with authentic projects. But do we, as teachers, experience it enough to really know what kind of projects we should be designing and assigning? Do we know the experience of that lovin’ feelin about something we create? I don’t believe we can be effective as teachers unless we do. If we do not create things we are proud of –with some regularity–how can we really understand “authentic”?

I suggest that each of us should start by creating a me-portfolio where we can exhibit and share the lovin’ feelin’ moments we do have, however few and far between. Set up a simple web page using  Infinite.ly or Loose Leaves or Weebly and embed things you create elsewhere on the web (loads of tips here).  You could even house it on a simple wiki. What do you include? The sample projects you made to show kids how GoAnimate works or your Voki that explains meter in poetry. If you, like me, play with the tech toys and create samples as models of just to help you “figure it out,” save the samples as creative products of your own. There is a very good chance you will find yourself making better examples because you are collecting them– and getting that feeling. And you would be modeling a me-portfolio that you can show to kids. There is nothing wrong with letting your students know that you like that lovin’ feelin’,  and you hope you can all find it together.

All it takes is ONE. All it takes to tip the scales in a child’s life is One adult, just One adult who cares enough to listen, to guide, to help illuminate a path. That One forms a personal relationship of mutual respect with the child. That One has time for the child. That One celebrates the child’s honest (not inflated)  accomplishments. That One gently but firmly underscores the gap between what is and what should be. That One plays games and reads or just listens to what happened at recess or at home last night. That One helps imagine what might be and helps draw the dotted line for how to get there. All it takes is One.

How many kids never have that One? For so many reasons, we know that some parents and guardians struggle to be the One. They may not know how. They may never have had One in their own lives. They may not be emotionally or financially capable of escaping their own limits to be the One for someone else. Or they may simply not care.

These things just don’t come out evenly. Many kids have far more than One. You may be thinking, “One? What happened to ‘it takes a village?'” Yes, there are plenty of kids who are blessed with many, many Ones in their lives. They have loving, involved parents, grandparents, even neighbors. They may have a single parent, but that parent makes sure he/she is the One. They have more than one teacher who serves is the One for multiple students every year. Kids flock back years later to see these same teachers as the fan club for the One.

Rita Pierson’s Every Kid Needs a Champion TED Talk is about being the One. It brings tears to my eyes because I can hear and see (and even smell) the kids she talks about who need us, as teachers, to be the One for them.

Mother’s Day honors moms, and we moms certainly appreciate it! But Mother’s Day also underscores the gap between what is and what should be. If you are, have, or had a mom who was the One, consider yourself very lucky. But please don’t forget about the kids who still need just One. Watch Rita Pierson’s TED talk.

BE the ONE.

1993: a year that none of today’s K-12 or college students can remember. No one texted or tweeted,  only some people used email, AOL was brand new, and nobody had ever “googled” anything. Nothing but the flu went viral. Friends were just that. We got bank statements and bills in the mail (yes, paper), and news came from the TV, radio, newspaper, or playground. Bill and Monica hadn’t had an Oval Office encounter yet, and the Twin Towers still towered. Many of us used computers and tried to use the Internet, but there was really nothing there.

At school, we had shifted from hand writing to typing IEPs on Apple IIe  keyboards and saving them on 5 1/4 inch floppies. The library was still the magic place to find out, and my students and I were pleased to find a single source that answered our question. My  interlibrary loan article requests for grad school research came back as Xerox copies from bound, printed periodicals via U.S. mail. I considered myself lucky not to have to pay for articles I needed for my research.

Yesterday was the official 20th birthday of the world wide web. The people at CERN — who originated this re-vision of what the then-obscure Internet could be  — posted their original page again to remind us of just how far we have come. What began as a way for researchers to share files and data had the most marvelous unintended consequences: Learning became both free and a matter of personal responsibility.

Twenty years later, we have so many sources we must sort them for value and reliability. We can find out from anywhere. We can waste more time than mankind ever knew we had, and every year a billionaire-creating innovation rides into our lives thanks to the www. Wwwe are bewwwwilderingly dependent upon it and occasionally wwwistful for the days wwwhen wwwe wwwere free of it.

It is impossible to explain what life was like before the www. Only by talking about the cultural details of life before www can we help our students understand. Is it important for them to knowww? Yes, because learning is free and a matter of personal responsibility. They need to know the difference between having to ask for a chance to learn and having the tools available to anyone. They need to know why the www made it important to find out instead of waiting to be told. In a broader cultural/historical context, they need to know how a seemingly minor innovation can, in just a few years, change so much. They need to ask questions about impact and change.

If you have any time remaining in your end-of-year plans, give a small assignment. It can fit in any subject. Ask your students to interview an adult who was “grown up” by 1993. If you teach science, have students ask about how people learned science before the www. If you teach history, ask about how people learned history or tracked current events. If you teach English, ask how people found books to read or places to share their writing. Most importantly, have them ask when their “adult” realized that the web was changing things.  Then have them share their findings on the web: blog, tweet, Faceboook post, whatever.  Back in class, make sure they read what their classmates found out — and ask them wwwhy it matters. By borrowing twenty years of perspective, maybe they will realize that learning is free and a matter of personal responsibility.

I love verbal challenges, so what better way to round out this series of “Happy 15th Birthday, TeachersFirst” posts than to use a six word story? Thanks to Jonathan Olsen’s Edutopia post for reminded me of this minimalist challenge for masterful messaging. Reflecting on how TeachersFirst began, what we have done in fifteen years, and what we strive to do into the future would seem to explode the six word limit. But I will brainstorm a few possibilities:

Thinking Teachers Teaching Thinkers- trench tactics!

Teachers learn, thinkers grow, technology helps.

Internet mysteries evolve to teaching masteries.

(Continuing my brainstorm, I stop to wonder: Is punctuation is allowed? Do six word stories often end up having meter or some sort of rhythm, as mine often do?)

Web-filled minds imagine limitless learning.

By teachers for teachers for years.

Just in time  — for fifteen years.

Learning imagined by friendly, tech-savvy teachers.

Imagine teaching that makes you think.

I could go on for hours, but instead conclude with this personal birthday thank you:

Happy Birthday to TeachersFirst,  the best “workplace” any teacher could ever hope for.  I love all the Thinking Teachers I “meet” in this job  and love imagining those  “out there” whom I will never know. 

(In case you are wondering, you can create your own images from letters on Flickr with this tool.)

This is the  second in a series of reflections as TeachersFirst celebrates its fifteen birthday this month.

TeachersFirst’s non-profit parent company, The Source for Learning, has as its mission:

… to create and deliver high-quality, technology-based content and services that enhance learning for all children, and to empower teachers, child care providers, and parents to support that learning. An important part of the mission is to increase access to our services for underserved children and adults.

Just as all teachers have days when we question our effectiveness, we at TeachersFirst have worrisome days about accomplishing our mission. What haunts me is not whether TeachersFirat empowers teachers.  Thank goodness for the many, many teachers who tell their stories, assuring us that we do have an impact. The monthly traffic and Twitter followers add stats to support the teacher anecdotes. What specifically haunts me is whether TeachersFirst can:

increase access to our services for underserved children and adults

The frustration? If teachers do not have reliable technology, readily available and supported by an administration that understands how technology empowers learning, how can the they access TeachersFirst  — or any other web-based tool for teaching and learning? Each time circumstances build a barrier, whether it is limiting teacher decision making about lessons or having unreliable Internet connections (or computers), teachers lose access. For every real barrier that exists, downtrodden or “underserved” teachers perceive the barrier as four times hugher. Each time we hit our heads against another wall, we decide to delay trying again. Barriers breed excuses.

The barrier I hear about over and over is that students lack access to Internet-connected devices both in and out of school. While some schools have well-planned BYOD/BYOT programs where students can bring tablets or laptops to class, many other schools lack the network capacity or their students lack the financial means to own a device. The gap between technology haves and have-nots gets bigger and bigger. Underserved means unsupported and disconnected.

Gutsy teachers keep on trying, even after they hit repeated barriers. They beg, borrow, or grab computer time for their students anywhere they can. They come in early, skip lunch, or rotate kids through one available machine. Meanwhile, other schools have iPad carts and 1:1 programs.

My birthday wish for TeachersFirst is a wish for all schools: 

increase access to TECHNOLOGY for underserved children and adults.

If I blow out the candles, will it come true?

This is the first in a series of editor reflections during April, 15th birthday month for TeachersFirst.

As a technology “coach” who works with my fellow teachers– albeit at a distance– I struggle with how to encourage, evangelize, and develop a healthy mutual trust while also nudging myself and my colleagues forward to better teaching decisions. Fifteen years ago this month, when TeachersFirst first went online as a service to help teachers understand what the Internet could do and how to use it to inform and support teaching and learning, the goals were pretty easy: help teachers find the best of the web and understand some basic ways to use these resources. Convincing teachers may not have always been easy in the first couple of years, but obviously this Internet thing has stuck. (Duh moment as of the turn of the millennium,  for all but the most hesitant teachers). Long ago, TeschersFirst’s mission moved far beyond a simple Web 101.

As coaches, we are obligated to ask the tough questions, the ones that require both bluntness and tactful support. I share some of them here:

Coach to teacher-colleague (or teacher to self or COACH to self):

Why are you using this (technology-based) teaching strategy?

Are you simply replicating an old way of  teaching, done with clicks instead of pencils? (Is it an effective way, or just a familiar one?)

If you are replacing drill sheets with drill and kill practice web sites, is it any better? (Do you and our students get data, tracking, instant feedback, etc)?

Do you ever go beyond drill and practice?

 Are you treating technology as simply a way to ENGAGE students… and nothing further? What then?

 How have you changed the way you use technology as a tool for learning in your classes this year (or in the last five years)?

 Which did you think about first: the big ideas and goals for your lessons or the technology you wanted to use?

 When is “fun” not just fun? When does it have meaning?

 Are you checking the box: Technology used this week? Check.

How often do you ask about a lesson strategy: Is there a way that is quicker, more flexible, a better differentiator? Does it happen to use technology?

These are just a few of  the sticky starters for the conversation between teacher and self, teacher and coach, or coach and self. A little warmth can soften the stickiness of the conversation and possibly even make it flow more smoothly. Ask these questions with a cup of coffee, the best accompaniment for something sticky, and see where the conversation goes. The nice thing for coaches is that we don’t have to judge our teaching peers. We help you judge (and change) yourself. TeachersFirst will continue to subtly ask the questions. It’s part of our birthday cake’s “sticky” frosting.

It’s poetry month. Take time for a poetry break. Why does poetry matter? Poetry is the literary equivalent of a microcosm and a sound bite all rolled into one. You can find tiny representations of huge ideas and short snippets that resonate and “stick” in your mind like the smell of your favorite cookie baking or the horror of watching Kevin Ware’s basketball injury last weekend. Poetry is distilled insights and sensations not designed to meet a standard or a bottom line. Poetry is the greatest freedom words will ever have.

If you teach math, poetry is the equivalent to the equation you extract from an elaborate word problem.

If you are a scientist, poetry is the DNA that tells a full-blown experience of life how to grow and thrive.

If you are an artist, poetry is the three primary colors we use to express endless pictures through words.

If you are a musician, poetry is your lyrics, your melody, and your counterpoint. Poetry conducts the orchestra of our minds.

If you are an engineer, poetry is the perfect schematic with projections from every angle, forming a three dimensional reality much greater than the sum of its succinct pieces.

If you are a child, poetry is curiosity and music bouncing together.

If you are a pragmatist, poetry is a frivolous moment that suddenly strikes you with meaning.

If you are a gym teacher, poetry is the fluid combination of the word skills that move beyond drill to a slam dunk.

If you are a historian, poetry is the  artifact that tells the story of a lost civilization.

When did you last share a poem with your class? You have 17 school days left.

break:
verb. to smash, split, or divide into parts violently; reduce to pieces or fragments
noun. a brief rest, as from work [Break definitions from Dictionary.com]

Maker Dad tells of the strategies he and his son used in building a complex 3D printer, a task that spanned over 30 hours. I thoroughly enjoyed his account of persistence and challenge, tackled together with his 12 year old son. Why? Because he celebrates the importance of breaks. Breaks are time for incubation, refreshment, regeneration, reflection. Planned breaks are also times to savor the anticipation of returning to the successful portions. Breaks punctuate and act as expansion joints, flexing with the stresses of the task, while allowing it to fit together.

The marvelous irony/oxymoron of the word break is that it also means to smash, split, and essentially wreck things. Sometimes when we build something, we gain most from that kind of break: the moment when the Legos snap into pieces or the experiment doesn’t work.  Making things, even successful lessons or hands-on learning opportunities, requires that we savor the things that do not work, drawing from our failures to rise to better successes.

As we approach (or conclude) spring break, I hope that our breaks will be both opportunities to re-create  something new from broken pieces and opportunities to gain a brief rest, reflection, or incubation time for what is to come.

Spend some time looking at the definitions of break. It really is a marvelous word to hold so many contrasts in just five letters. Will your spring break make or break you?

I saw a reference to this YouTube video about Training Fleas in a tweet, questioning the actual source of the information (thanks to Stephen Ransom, @ransomtech). The video itself bears no identifying information about the speaker.  Nor does the YouTube poster’s profile say much. There are no references to support the information presented as fact. It is not discussed on Snopes, either.

As a former teacher (and lifelong advocate) of gifted students, my antennae went up. Of course, I love the message of the video as an analogy about the plight of students held in a “jar.” That analogy has apparently been widely used among members of NAGC and  in various presentations on gifted. I also enjoy the irony that adults — even those who should be critical consumers — seem to accept this source.

My question: Could gifted kids (or any kids) do a better job of digging up the source(s) and validating or refuting the information? Unable to immediately toss the challenge to students of my own (since I no longer have any – sigh) , I emailed two colleagues who have gifted kids in class every day. (At least I could enjoy “watching” the results vicariously.)  The first round of results  from a HS group during a “club period” (with thanks and full credit to teacher PJ for sharing with me):

A great group of four kids who are incredibly creative thinkers, as well as being smart. They jumped in head first and had a great time with this, although in the 40 minutes they had to work on it, they didn’t find anything conclusive.

They researched:

Could fleas live in the jar for 3 days with no air and no food? What percentage of the fleas’ lifespan is 3 days, and how would spending those 3 days in the jar affect their ability to reproduce?

They looked critically at the video itself and wondered why they couldn’t see any flea eggs in the jar at the end? Or any dead fleas?

They did get distracted (as they often do) with trying to research whether fleas are subject to peer pressure, whether fleas have families or gender roles, and a number of other things…

It was great fun watching them churn through the possibilities and ideas for researching, but also very frustrating to watch how our District’s poor tech support (we could barely get the video to run because of buffering issues–and it’s only a minute long) and the fact that they kept bumping up against blocked websites.

• A challenge based on “debunking” an issue of interest may be the best motivator for students to think critically and  collaborate to develop research strategies. It might be even better if it’s on YouTube?
• Students can generate some really interesting questions very quickly.
• Students do not look first for the “scholarly” issues, such as the credentials of the author, to support online information.
• Students may get distracted, but the tangential questions they generate could be valid learning experiences in themselves.
• Students will persist — at least for 40 minutes– despite the annoying roadblocks imposed by web filtering and bandwidth throttling (sigh).

What do I do next? I am thinking of pulling together some of the web sources that even we adults typically accept and offer them as fodder for students to debunk, thus building information literacy skills while possibly showing us, the “educator” adults, how gullible we are. Yes, loads of sites do this already, but I think mining YouTube could be especially fun.

Have any similar informational videos to nominate for student review/debunking? If you try this with your students. please post about it (and give me the link) or comment here to share!

Assignment:  Create a one pager on trends, terms, and  tensions surrounding teachers today for an audience of lay people not involved with schools. (This might also be a worthwhile assignment for teacher ed candidates.)

Background: I have been working on a project with a group of non-educators. Our purpose is related to serving teachers, but the exact mission does not matter here. I find myself pausing often, realizing that these highly intelligent, well-meaning people have no exposure to life as a teacher or to the education trends and currents that slap our faces like salty, unexpected waves. My group members know only what they read or see in the media. Imagine if you were trying to help teachers but knew only what you saw on Education Nation, an occasional PBS show, or in various columns and op-eds. Naively, I offered to create a one pager, not to comprehensively explain all the terms and trends, but at least to list them and indicate  where tensions exist (trying to maintain neutrality!).

So far my list includes many edtech trends, terms, and challenges along with others involving policy, pedagogy, and philosophy. The more I add, the more I realize should be there. I share my list-in-progress and hope that others might suggest things I forgot. What do you think?

Terms and trends: Emerging  technologies (already hatched, actually) and uses of technology

• BYOD/T (Bring your own device/technology):  Students provide the hardware; done for cost-saving, concerns re equity/inequity?
• One to one: Every student has a device (laptop/tablet)
• Mobile devices/apps vs computers/software
• eBooks: electronic textbooks, electronic books of all sorts, e-Readers (Kindle, iPad, etc)
• Social media in education: learning together using tech-enabled community spaces
• Gaming in education: simulations and intelligent games far beyond “edutainment,” many student-created
• “Responsible use” policies: school policies that expect kids to use technology well and make wise choices instead of deciding for them by blocking sites, etc.
• Digital Citizenship: a combination of skills and knowledge, including ethical use of digital media (awareness of copyright and other rights), netiquette, positive online behavior, cybersafety, anti-cyberbullying, etc.
• Digital Literacy: a combination of skills including digital citizenship AND locating/evaluating/curating sources, etc.
• “Blended learning”:  learning via combination of online and face to face delivery methods or combo of tech-guided and teacher-guided learning or synchronous and asynchronous or variations on any of the above. Ask for a definition when someone uses this term

Terms, trends, tensions: Curriculum and Accountability

• Common Core (CCSS): elevated, nation-wide curriculum rigor vs lock-step test prep?
• Student test scores as measures for teacher evaluation and teacher quality vs multiple criteria vs ?
• Data-informed instruction: customizing teaching by using continuous snapshots of student understanding (by what measure?)
• Schools without Walls: school as an experience defined by learning rather than location; may include contact with the “real world,” experts, mentors, and global connections with other students
• Financial literacy initiatives/standards: helping kids understand saving, money, credit, and other financial skills (perhaps to head off another Wall Street meltdown?)
• STEM initiatives (or is this already a bandwagon gone by?): science, technology, engineering, and math seen as an interrelated set of skills and competencies

Broader issues and tensions

• Creativity/innovation vs specific, standards-based skills
• 21^st century skills: According to the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, this means 3Rs plus 4Cs: critical thinking, collaboration, communication, creativity. Other definitions also exist based on what businesses predict students will need to thrive and contribute in their careers
• Education “reform” — whose definition? Ask.
• School improvement (takeovers or action measures toward underperforming schools as determined by test scores) vs “Rethinking” school (imagining entirely new ways to configure education)
• Industrial model of education vs. newer, student-centered models

After starting this list, my head is spinning, and I need legal sized paper to fit on one page. As teachers, we toss these terms in heated discussions with our non-educator friends and contacts, but how can we expect non-educators to understand ever-changing, multi-directional waves that break over schools and teachers? If we cannot even explain them all, no wonder even the brightest, most sympathetic people shake their heads. The good thing about all this? At least there is agreement  among laypeople and educators that school is important. Let’s start building from there.