Category Archives: learning

Create, Connect, Commit in 2013

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Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach described her New Year’s commitments and challenged the rest of us to do the same. As always, she makes a powerful statement and I found myself nodding my head in agreement as I read. Dealing productively with digital and emotional distractions, finding a work/life balance, and pursuing excellent in everything…these are all worthy goals. She sums it up beautifully: “I am determined to influence the world this year rather than be  influenced by it.”

I have three goals for the new year: create, connect and commit.

Make Art Dammit!

This is the mantra from The Daily Create, an offshoot of ds106, a MOOC that originated at the University of Mary Washington. Each day, they post an assignment designed to inspire “spontaneous creativity.” Today’s assignment is to illustrate a decision. Mine is a screenshot of my Kindle app and wondering what to read next…

First Read of 2013?

As part of ds106 GIFfest, I had fun making my first animated gif in a very long time. It reminded me that I enjoy creating:  from crocheted doilies to homemade bread to flower gardens to digital media. And, I have lots of opportunities to be creative, as long as I make the time. Along with Sheryl, I’m going to stop thinking there isn’t enough time…I value creativity so making it part of my daily life is important. In a larger sense, by creating these things, I am creating a life.

Create Connections

One of the great things about doing The Daily Create is that you do so as part of a community. It was a real kick to get positive comments on my animated gif along with suggestions for how to extend the creativity. Creating is fun but being part of a creative community is even more fun. Writing this blog post is part of this goal: a way to connect with others at the start of the new year, a year in which I want to do more connecting. More blog writing, more twitter sharing, more community creating. I have recently started exploring Google+ as well. I do a lot of connecting as part of my work, bringing people together in courses and webinars and conferences, but I want to do it more personally, including getting more involved in the crochet group I joined last year.

Increasingly, our farm is becoming a place to make connections. We have gotten to know many members of our local community when they come by to get vegetables. We have also made connections with other local farmers, and the first thing I did this morning was sign up for beekeeping classes so I can get my hives up and running this year. This past summer, we donated our excess harvest to the food bank in town. I want to strengthen those local community ties, perhaps as part of a local anti-poverty or literacy initiative. Moving to the country has opened my eyes to rural issues. I’m not sure of the details yet but am committed to finding my niche in our new place.

Forge Commitment

When I look back at my reading list for 2012, it is filled with great books. But most of them are fiction. Meanwhile, there is a whole host of writing calling for my attention: get back to Kozol, dig further into the banned book list, spend time with contemporary writers about education and change, and work on the shelf of Wendell Berry’s books. I feel a deep connection to Berry as both a writer and a farmer.

This reading will help fuel my writing. I committed to a daily blogging practice this fall and then life and work got in the way. I am re-committing to that practice as I move into the new year. Writing is a way to both create and connect so offers a foundation for my other goals.

So, a public declaration of my goals for the new year…what about you? Want to join me in any of these endeavors?

 

 

 

 

 

 

On My Own

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My current iPad game is My kingdom For a Princess. Typical building/time management game. Like many of these games, you can move forward without achieving expert level, but I prefer to play that way.  Well, I got stumped. So, I did what I always do: cheat. Or I should say I tried to cheat.

But I couldn’t find a walkthrough of this level anywhere. It was something of an outlier as it appeared after I completed a level. And no one seemed to be offering suggestions. I was only losing by a few seconds but nothing I tried made the difference. Until…

I remembered a tip I had read when I first started playing. You don’t always have to collect all the resources. Taking that advice along with my own observations, I tried something completely different, working down a different path and ignoring a few caches of materials that I had simply assumed I needed. And low and behold, it worked. I had been seduced by riches and taken my focus off the ultimate goal.

Life lesson? Probably but it is Friday and I am not in a reflective mood so for now it is just a gaming lesson and one I will continue to apply as I move into the next level.

Of Sweeping Passions and Grand Challenges

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Attending the TedXAshburn event on Saturday was an uplifting experience.  I was able to hear fascinating people talk with great passion about their lives and their work.  They were teachers and administrators and mission workers and musicians who all live very different lives yet shared one thing in common: passion.  Most of them had a single sweeping passion that drove them but they also had a passion for life and a determination to live a life that mattered, a life that made a difference to others.

yin yang graphicI found myself asking the question: what am I passionate about?  What drives me?  The simple answer is teaching.  I do lots of things as part of my work from organizing conferences to balancing budgets to leading book groups. But as I look across the landscape that is the life of a consultant, it is teaching that inspires me. So, I was glad to hear George Wolfe declare that we are all teachers.  I miss spending time with middle schoolers and having the feeling of influencing a young mind, but I know I am making a difference in the ways my pre-service teachers think about their classrooms and in the ways my graduate students approach the use of technology in their schools.

I have a second passion: learning. This summer, I had the privilege of working with groups of practicing teachers in schools across the country as they try to figure out the best ways to use emerging technologies to meet the needs of their students. I was the teacher as I had the responsibility of organizing our work together but, as with any teaching experience, I also learned so much from the participants just as I learn from the students in my courses. Now, as we continue our work together, I am taking on a different kind of teaching role, that of mentor, as I guide and support them as they work on implementation.

Hence the graphic I was inspired to create as I drafted this entry: we teach, we learn, all in the same time and space. I want to make sure my students know that I am learning from them and with them despite my label as teacher.

In addition to the live speakers, we were treated to two TED videos.  The organizers of Saturday’s event chose Google engineer Matt Cutts’ talk about the 30-day challenge.  Cutts suggests that you think of something you’ve always wanted to add to your life and try it for 30 days:

While Cutts talks about doing something “new,” I’ve decided I just want to do something I already do but would like to do more regularly: write.  Specifically, write blog entries. It is something I think about a lot, even going so far as to draft entries in my head, but I never seem to get them written and published.  Life intervenes by way of emails and phone calls and other distractions.  So, starting today, I am challenging myself to write in this blog every day for the next 30 days. I make this personal challenge public as an added incentive for keeping with it.

The Present of Work

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Tim Stahmer at Assorted Stuff points to an article in Forbes about WordPress and Matt Mullenweg.  The company has employees all over the world who work from home. They do have a big travel budget and are able to meet with their team at spots all over the world. And their work lives along with that of the lives of workers like me suggest that this is rapidly becoming the present nature of work so it becomes all the more pressing to help our students figure out where they fit in this world.

Tim asks the question I asked several years ago when I was describing my own “work” life: what skills and mindsets do we need in order to work in this kind of world?  In 2008, I focused on the need to find a balance between work and play when what passed for work often seemed like play.  For me, that continues to be the biggest issue: when you don’t have a particular start and end time to your day and you really love what you do, there is the potential to simply work all the time.  Additionally, since you don’t have the promise of a regular paycheck, you are always hesitant to turn down offers so you end up working on multiple projects at a time, which requires the ability to juggle activities even as it can create a varied and interesting to do list.

In 2008, my attempt at an answer to Tim’s question got at that second issue: the ability to plan and implement projects. I felt then and still do that we need to give kids more opportunity to not just work independently but to take charge of that work.  I have taught with colleagues who, when assigning individual projects, provided a packet with very prescriptive steps for how to accomplish the work. I know why they did it: they had long experience of students waiting until the last minute (the night before) to tackle what was meant to take a month of ongoing work.  My simple suggestion would be that rather than the teacher developing the schedule, make developing the schedule and interim due dates part of the project. So, learning how to work becomes part of the work itself. That’s how it goes in the real world: a client provides an overview and a due date and then it is left up to the worker to determine how and when the work gets done with check ins along the way to confer and collaborate with the client.

As for finding the balance, I think that’s a tougher problem and one I am wrestling with right now. I have a copy of this article by Tony Schwartz–The Magic of Doing One Thing At a Time–in Evernote, and I find myself reviewing it at odd moments. When I first read it, I bristled a bit, particularly over the third behavior of disconnecting completely.  In that 2008 blog post, I talked about how I almost never disconnect even when I’m on vacation and I had some perfect rationalizations for it.  But is it healthy to always be connected.  The article would suggest that it is not and I find myself annoyed to be answering work-related emails on Saturday or Sunday and then realize it is my fault for checking my email in the first place.

The lessons in the article might be good ones to introduce in some way to students.  We’ve always done it, even in the pre-digital era when we told students to turn off the TV when they did their homework. And we can integrate the three behaviors in our own lives and our classrooms in appropriate ways as well.

This blog post represents my attempt to work on the second behavior: Establish regular, scheduled times to think more long term, creatively, or strategically. I am hoping to work writing into my daily practice so rather than immediately opening email today, I perused some of my favorite bloggers to find a topic for my own thinking.  (Thanks, Tim, for being the spark.)

 

 

Art or Science?

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Robert Pondiscio at The Core Knowledge Blog highlighted a video from University of Virginia cognitive scientist Dan Willingham that poses the age-old question: Is teaching an art or a science?  Not surprisingly, Willingham suggest that it is neither:

I’m arguing that teaching is somewhere in between.  Like an architect, a good teacher knows some fundamental findings from science but then also uses creativity and ingenuity to go beyond any strictures science can offer to create something wholly original, functional and enduring.

Pondiscio uses the video to lament the lack of science in education, pointing to what he sees as flawed ideas such as whole language and learning styles as examples of places where educators run off the rails. He focuses on the ideas that Willingham presents in the second half of the video about where science can help educators: by recommending boundary conditions, the “must haves” that are essential to learning (ie, practicing a skill), and suggesting “could dos,” ideas for how educators might teach certain ideas.  Pondiscio concludes, “The larger problem, to put it bluntly, is that education  pays insufficient evidence to science.”

That may be true, but the important part of the video for me was the first half in which Willingham shows how difficult it is to actually study teaching and learning in scientific ways.  He points out that the kinds of controlled studies that scientists like are done outside of the classroom environment, eliminating all the messiness that happens in a real classroom where you can control for distractions or motivation levels of students.  And, trying to do scientifically based studies in classroom is almost impossible for a whole host of reasons.  Even if you can do such research, according to Willingham, classrooms vary so much that findings from one 3rd grade class may not be applicable to any other 3rd grade class anywhere.  For me, to paraphrase Pondiscio, the larger problem is, to put it bluntly, that learning is complicated, kids and teachers aren’t robots, and even paying sufficient evidence to science doesn’t solve the host of problems that confront any given teacher on any given day.

I don’t disagree that we should equip teachers with whatever is known about the “boundary conditions.” And Pondiscio is right to suggest, “This creates an enormous opportunity for the cognitive scientists like Willingham to frame the discussion and offer evidence-based guidance on those ‘must haves.'”  But I worry that those who push us towards scientifically based best practices want to gloss over the conclusions from the first half of the video about the complex messiness of classrooms.  As Willingham points out, knowing a boundary condition doesn’t help with how to teach it and that’s where the creativity and ingenuity comes in.  And, as a teacher of teachers, helping them learn to be creative is a much more difficult task.

The Middle Way, Another Look

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Yesterday, I considered how we might find a middle path as we figure out how to integrate digital media into our lives.  Two more stories today bring me to continue to consider the notion of the middle way as it applies to education.

Eduwonk Andrew Rotherham, in his take on the movie Bully, worries that educators often respond to problems with knee-jerk reactions that lead to zero-tolerance policies that end up making “eye rolling” a bullying offense.  And Tim Stahmer pointed to a Bitstrip about the Kahn Academy videos that helps put them in context: useful tools but certainly not revolutionary.

Why is it that we always want THE answer in education?  The magic bullet, the shortcut to success, the perfect policy?

When I was a young educator, I remember spending much time crafting my class rules each year in the hopes that if I got it right, I wouldn’t have any discipline problems.  I finally discovered that despite the snappy acronym or musical accompaniment (one year I made Aretha Franklin’s Respect the class song), the real way to avoid classroom management problems for me was to engage the students in learning as quickly as possible.  So, on the first day of class, while the other teachers were busy going over rules and expectations, I just dove into the work of learning. After all, by seventh grade, my students were pretty much aware that they weren’t supposed to talk while I was talking or poke their neighbors with their pencils.  While this approach worked well for me and I suggest it to my student teachers, I also let them know that they will discover their own methods.

It was those same student teachers who taught me a lesson of the perils of painting with a broad brush: we were talking about the Kahn Academy, and I was prepared to be negative when one of my students mentioned how helpful it had been to her in math.  While we agreed that it was not revolutionary, it was a great example of the way the Internet could provide students with extra support in their own learning. It was the student’s ability to access knowledge outside the classroom that was the revolutionary idea.

With some 5.5 million students enrolled in nearly 100,000 schools across the country, the idea that any one policy or intervention will work for all of them is just silly.  If there is going to be a revolution in education, perhaps it will come when we stop trying to make blanket policies and let schools and their stakeholders determine what works best for them and their learners.

 

Are We Superficial?

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This is the question that Robert Talbert asks over at Casting Out Nines. The post itself is mostly a quote from Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, one of the only self-help books I have ever found to be really challenging in terms of doing more than just giving you one long pep talk.

The quote deals with Covey’s distinction between Character Ethic and Personality Ethic and reminds me of the old debate about sincerity: can you “try” to be sincere or is it just something that comes from within. Any attempt to fake it ends in a lack of sincerity. For Covey, the Character Ethic arises when we internalize our values while the Personality Ethic is practiced by those who make no fundamental changes in the way they relate to others, but simply play the game in an artificial kind of way. I would encourage you to read the quote before you continue reading this post…

Talbert ends his blog post with this observation and question:

It seems like this quote is pretty dense in implications for educational systems, student approaches to learning, faculty approaches to teaching… what do you think?

I agree with Talbert.  I teach educational technology and qualitative research courses to undergraduates and graduates.  So many of the big questions with which we deal–digital divide, digital natives, social media, Internet privacy, copyright and creative commons, using technology in the classroom–do not have final, fill in the blank, multiple choice kinds of answers.  Instead, they offer up all sorts of murky waters where students can muck around.   I have my own ideas about many of them but rather than imposing my world view, I prefer to take a more constructivist approach, challenging students to find their own way through the content and then creating projects that help others do the same.

What I have discovered is that while some students really thrive in this environment, others do not, and it is my perception that it was the “good” students who often struggled because the very things that made them good had been taken away.  What was that thing?  The ability to give the teacher what she wanted whether it was the right answer, the neat outline, or  the correct number of words.  Covey’s distinction, which I had forgotten over time, provides a perfect metaphor for this phenomenon: the students who thrive in my environment do so because they care about learning, more specifically, they care about their own learning and creativity, something I like to think I give them a chance to demonstrate.  The “good” students, however, often turn in less than stellar work since they don’t have the personal tools available to them to really create something on their own without precise directions from me.

I’ll never forget the grad student who apologized for using his musical knowledge as a basis for a project he did:  it wasn’t “educational” he thought but he had taken me at my word that I wanted the students to find their own path.  So, he trusted me, but only to a point as I suspect he had been told that same thing in the past only to be dinged when he actually tried it.  I offered reassurance that he had done exactly what I had hoped all my students would do.

This semester, I am struggling with having my undergraduates join the world of Twitter.  I want to give them an experience of a professional learning network that can fit into one semester and Twitter just makes sense.  But, the open ended nature of the assignment makes it difficult for many of them: they want to know how many tweets, when they have to be posted and so forth.  I, on the other hand, am asking them to make themselves part of that world and do what seems right.  Already, the lines are being drawn.  I have had a few great conversations with one or two students and others are starting to come on board, but I can tell those who really want me to impose some order.  I am resisting even as I am offering support: ideas for things to tweet, suggestions for people to follow, and replying and retweeting the things they do post.  I am asking them to pay the price, which is Covey’s distinction between character and personality:

To focus on technique is like cramming your way through school. You sometimes get by, perhaps even get good grades, but if you don’t pay the price day in and day out, you never achieve true mastery of the subjects you study or develop an educated mind.

Just An Old Curmudgeon

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Lately, as I’ve followed the conversations about teaching and learning in the 21st century, I find myself increasingly taking a negative stance. It may just be my natural need to be the devil’s advocate, but I think it’s also a frustration with black and white rhetoric in which old is bad, new is good, ALL teachers are luddites who are stuck in their ways, EVERYONE should have an online professional learning network, and the ONLY way to teach is through project-based, student-centered learning. I could go on but I think you get the picture.

The irony, of course, is that I am a denizen of the digital world with an extensive online PLN, and I have adopted project-base learning methods in the courses I teach believing it is the best way for my students to engage with the content in my course.

So, what’s the problem? Why won’t I jump on the 21st century bandwagon? I think the main reason is that, as I complete my 5th decade on this planet, the biggest lesson I have learned is that the words “always,” “never,” “all,” and “none” are simply not useful. Our propensity towards polls and statistics and nice, neat charts tends to blind us to the infinite variety of experiences that exist in the world. We want to be able to make our case for the best way to live, work, teach and learn, and gray is not the appropriate color to use when we paint that picture.

It’s summed up simply in that old saying, “There’s an exception to every rule.” So, while I don’t lecture, I have known some wonderful lecturers in my day whose words have stuck with me over decades. And while I find it comfortable to engage with community online, I understand that others prefer to be in the same room. In my own realm, I was an early adopter of electronic books but I am also, even as I write this post, surrounded by thousands of books and have no intention of abandoning that habit. I guess my preference is to focus on the exception rather than the rule.

Or maybe I’m just an old curmudgeon.

Respecting Teachers As Learners

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In his blog post, Do Teachers Need to Relearn How to Learn, Mr. Salsich wonders why teachers seem so dependent on professional development and are unable to transfer knowledge of one technology tool to another. He wonders why schools have to have organized professional development at all since you can pretty learn anything you want on the Internet. He concludes, “I’m beginning to wonder if teachers really know how to learn new skills independently.”

That conclusion seems a stretch and also something of a contradiction since Mr. Salsich admitted up front that he hasn’t learned things independently but rather took advantage of folks on the Internet to learn. So, the real question he seems to be asking is, “I’m beginning to wonder if teachers really know how to learn new skills independently by using web-based resources the way I do?” And that’s a question that shows the blind spot of many web-using educators: I found my network/learning/salvation on the Internet so you should, too. Is is just possible that some people prefer to learn by taking a face to face class? Or reading a book? Or sitting with a more experienced friend?

Another question nagged me as well…why are we blaming the teachers for lousy professional development? Maybe, just maybe, it isn’t teachers who are necessarily demanding professional development (I know of at least a few who would be happy to use the three-hour workshop time to work independently)? Could it be that that the school leadership doesn’t trust them to learn on their own and so creates one-size-fits-all professional development that functions as an accountability rather than a learning tool?

The biggest stumbling block for me, however, was the continued focus on tools. Certainly, teachers have had professional development related to wikis and blogs and other web-based tools. And if the goal of professional development is just to learn how to use a tool then showing teachers web-based tutorials and giving them time to view them and then apply their learning in relevant ways to their teaching would be very useful to them. But, I would hope at this point in the 21st century, we are focusing our professional development on pedagogical uses of these tools and tailoring our professional development to teachers’ styles and needs. When was the last time we even asked teachers what they might want to learn or what might be useful to them?

Let’s redirect the questions we use when we plan professional development: Are you a teacher who does a lot of collaborative projects? Then, a wiki might be a great place for your students to share their research and learning. Are you a teacher who has students doing independent reading? Then, LibraryThing would be a great place for them to keep track of their reading and write reviews for other students. Are you a teacher who has students keep math journals? Then, a blog would be a great tool for you to use for that kind of writing. Are you a teacher who would like a website where you can communicate with your students and parents more effectively and efficiently? Google Sites and Edmodo are great possibilities for setting up a home on the web. Once we’ve found a relevant tool, then we can certainly show teachers how to find others, either on the web or just down the hall, who are using these tools.

One of the things they might talk about would be classroom management, one of the things that is often left out of professional development. If the math teacher embraces the idea of blogging the math journals, what does she need to know about incorporating available devices into the routine of her probably already packed day? One of the things we know about teachers is that they have routines for just about everything as a way of reducing complexity and making efficient use of time. Adding technology can be a huge disruption to those routines so helping teachers develop new ones around the tools will go a long way to supporting their use. And, while they can probably find people on the web to help them, sometimes a face to face conversation with a colleague in another grade or department about what they did may be a better solution.

I applaud Mr. Salsich’s efforts at questioning our current professional development practices but would humbly suggest that one of the first steps in encouraging teachers to integrate technology is to do what we do with the kids: make it meaningful and differentiate for different learning styles. We might also spend some time learning more about the research into adult learning, which interestingly enough shows that adult learners prefer to be self-directed, something that is often not a part of typical professional development. We don’t have to teach teachers to be self-directed, instead we need to respect them and provide them the space, time and reason to do so.

Why Not Be Great?

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That’s the question Seth Godin asks in his blog post today.  His whole post is a celebration of innovation and revolution.

Before you finish this paragraph, you have the power to change everything that’s to come. And you can do that by asking yourself (and your colleagues) the one question that every organization and every individual needs to ask today: Why not be great?

The first step is to define what it means to be “great” in whatever you do.  For my purposes, I’m going to start small: with the course I teach for pre-service undergraduates.  I think a great course would help students see how technology can support student learning in powerful ways by modeling that belief.  I think a great course would introduce students to a professional learning network that would live beyond the course.  Bring them into my world and hope they find it welcoming enough to want to stay even after May.

Each semester, the course gets more and more student-centered as I try to model the kind of pedagogy I would like them to adopt.  I haven’t created the course for the spring but am considering a complete project-based approach in which small groups become experts in the use of technology to support instruction in a content area.  For each area of focus (writing & publishing, data visualization, gaming & interaction, collaboration), they will research and share the resources and information they find with their classmates and create a guidebook for their particular area.  My role will be to guide them in their exploration, providing foundations in educational theory and practice such as TPACK.

In addition, I want them to see how social media including Diigo and Twitter can provide them access to a larger network of teachers.  Lani Ritter-Hall highlights research showing that Professionally Engaged teachers are more likely to adopt the kinds of pedagogy that I support and technology is one way to support that engagement.

I have a few weeks before the semester begins to organize my ideas a bit better and put together a course site. I think I’ll start from scratch rather than trying to build on past courses as a way to challenge my own thinking about topics and activities.  I invite your ideas as well…I have a chance to mold the minds of impressionable new teachers, what should I be doing that will help make them great?