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The “K” Playbook: Professional Learning for a Lifetime*

April 5th, 2011

dancing-house-prague(google image)

A mentor once said to me that he had never seen a kindergartner arrive at school with the idea that he or she was not a learner. During my professional years spent as an elementary principal, I cherished the opportunity to “kid-watch” kindergartners on a daily basis.  The block area served as a favorite space of the kindergartners- and me. Here the fantastical imaginations and risky behaviors of five-year olds led them to design and construct post-modern expressionist structures reminiscent of Frank Gehry’s most interesting work.

I learned kindergartners aren’t afraid to explore the intersection of disparate materials that leads them to create whimsical, sometimes even absurd architectural spaces – towers, homes, castles, even whole cities- combining Legos, wooden blocks, aluminum foil, cardboard- whatever they could find in the kindergarten co-laboratory.  Turned loose, kindergartners epitomize the dispositions of lifelong learning. They are adaptable, flexible thinkers who will play in the sandbox for hours, despite their short attention span in circle time. They love math and science and writing and painting and music and mythical stories and non-fiction information and chasing each other and dancing- all in the name of learning.

Tower Building

Taking a page from the kindergarten playbook, I wrestle with how we can grow the passion for learning inherent in kindergartners in our own work as educators. What it means to educate and be educated takes on new meaning in today’s technology-driven world. The task of educating young people who will graduate from our high schools with the capability to add value to our communities and workforce presents a challenge unique to these times. Our country’s very economic survival depends upon our educational community doing its best work ever in the history of public education.

We educators have watched Shift Happens (Mcleod and Fisch) on YouTube, read Tom Friedman’s the World is Flat, and listened to Tony Wagner push us to not just focus upon the national achievement gap but also the global one. Yet, the momentum necessary to make necessary changes never quite gets us off the ground.  In fact, as Larry Cuban noted in 1992 in the article, “Computers Meet Classroom. Classroom Wins”, reforms do not change schools, but rather schools change reforms and, in such a way that little change ever occurs in schools.

A lifelong quest as an educator has been to figure out why we educators are less likely to change, indeed to incorporate new learning into our work, than almost any other field. I have come to believe that the potential for“deep change” in which knowledge, practices and processes shift is a function of the availability of substantial time for our own adult learning- something that is in little supply in America’s Pk-12 schools.

We educators have little time to play in the sandbox; to explore the intersections of disparate ideas, disciplines, and cultures that would lead us to create, design, and invent the curricula, assessments and instruction necessary to provide learning sustenance to contemporary learners. Instead, teachers work long hours during a 200 day school year, using what daily planning time is available to accomplish clerical and administrative tasks related to operational details of the job. Little to no time exists for a typical Pk-12 educator to read, think, reflect, collaborate, write, study, listen, converse, create, problem-solve; indeed, simply learn. This situation is inconsistent with other professions in this country and with the professional life of educators who work in high performing educational communities around the world.

I have come to the distinctly simplistic perspective that our educators need more unencumbered professional time dedicated to learning and that if they had access to such time, education would be transformative for learners and learning. However, expecting educators to acquire and use skills and then assimilate rapidly shifting technologies into their work with students, means coming to terms with the fact that integration of new technologies, new pedagogies, and new content demands far more time than our teaching educators are obligated to work in traditional contracts and on traditional calendars which do not serve us well in the twenty-first century.

Time to work together

On the other hand, some aspects of educating young people well in today’s world aren’t a lot different than 10,000 years ago. I suspect the best tribal teachers knew the value of team learning, hands-on approaches, practice, coaching and high levels of Bloom’s. For early Homo sapiens, teaching well surely meant the difference between the life and death of a tribe’s young people. Our earliest teachers knew that neither they nor their pupils could afford to rest as learners, but rather that they all had to constantly adapt and flex as they acquired new knowledge and skills essential to survival. Tony Wagner describes the skills that teenagers need in this century’s colleges, workforce, and communities as survival skills, too. These skills include Critical Thinking and Problem Solving, Collaboration Across Networks and Leading by Influence, Agility and Adaptability, Initiative and Entrepreneurship, Effective Oral and Written Communication, Accessing and Analyzing Information, and Curiosity and Imagination.

Opportunities to develop and use Wagner’s skills don’t typically emerge as a result of traditional curricula, instruction or assessments used in most of America’s public schools. If Tyack and Cuban are correct, not much will change as a result of any of our ghosts of reform – past, present or future. So what will it take to drive home the deep change needed so that our digital learners get the learning spaces they need today? And, if educators have little opportunity to engage in and assimilate new professional learning, why would they not remain closed and resistant to change?

Lifelong learning is essential to practitioners in the field of education. We must provide time for our teachers to continue learning if we expect them to embrace meaningful and necessary changes to transform schools of our past into schools for the future. This means providing significant time to try out new strategies and tools, to build relationships with each other as learners, and find the value inherent in participating in both virtual and face-to-face learning communities.

Time should not be either a luxury or an excuse for educators to do the hard work and play essential to their own learning. Just as in kindergarten, creative and inventive ideas in the block area or sandbox come with the time to think, to collaborate, to try out different construction materials and strategies, to analyze, and decide what to do next. Expert kindergarten teachers purposefully schedule the time needed for young children to do the messy work of learning. School calendars and contracts that reflect the time needed for educators to engage in their own learning work are a must. The biggest challenge is finding the funding, and, even more important and scarce, the will to make the necessary changes in structures leftover from the agrarian and industrial ages of public education.  Perhaps, if our communities and educators believed our survival depended upon it, change would happen tomorrow.

*I first composed this piece 12/09 and never posted it until #edchat reminded of it tonight.

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Posted in assessment, Authentic learning, Big Idea, Bloom's Taxonomy, Coaching, Collaboration, Creativity, critical thinking, cross-disciplinary thinking, Curriculum, disruption, educational reform, Harvard Graduate School of Education, imagination, Innovation, interdisciplinary thinking, Pam Moran, Pedagogy, Relevance, School Community, teaching, Tony Wagner, Uncategorized

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The Environment of Achievement, Part 3

March 23rd, 2011

Hope. Humility. Determination. How do these characteristics contribute to an atmosphere of achievement?

The dictionary describes determination as a “firmness of purpose,” “perseverance,” “intentness,” “a state of indefatigableness.”

As with most tone-related aspects of the classroom, an atmosphere of determination begins with the teacher. I believe every great—and bygreat I mean not just instructive, but inspiring—teacher is him or herself a determined learner. An excellent professor I had in college beat this drum in almost every class: “The true professional never stops growing. He or she is always learning, always growing.” As Karen Cushman puts it, “…expertise is a process, not a product…”1

 

Why? Because being a determined learner keeps learning an ever-recent experience. And when we are engaged in learning, we experience failure. We experience the need for feedback. We experience the need to adopt and maintain a learning mindset. We engage in targeted practice. We maintain a passion for learning and a fresh awareness of how it benefits the learner. These experiences translate in two ways. First, as a learner ourselves, we better understand the needs of our students. Second, as we work to meet the needs of students, we are more likely to engage in methods and practices that we know to be effective, such as increasing instructive feedback during learning. By  consistently engaging in learning, we become more mindful of ways we can optimize student learning.

We can also help establish a classroom environment where determination can flourish. Here are a few ways I see this happening:

  1. The teacher targets practice according to individual needs. No one likes doing the same thing over and over just to complete a task. Certainly there are things in life that must be done according to a system just so they are accomplished (e.g., mowing the lawn). However, learning does not progress if activity is only directed toward what is already understood. In fact, if such activity deepens anything it’s a student’s resentment for “busy work.” Masterful teachers direct students to activity that will sufficiently challenge each individual while also keeping success in each one’s sight. Targeted practice helps students recognize a purpose in their activity, and that fosters motivation for completing it. When combined with instructive feedback, such activity taps into the brain’s perception of movement:

    Professor of biology James E. Zull suggests that providing teacher feedback triggers the learner’s sense of progress. This sensation ignites activity in the brain’s basal structures, neural regions associated with pleasure and reward. Such “active learning,” claims Zull, makes learning “pleasurable and effective for developing concepts and applications.”2

    Blanket activity, often the norm in many classes, does little to foster student determination in students. Determination is more likely to flourish when a learner can see purpose in activity and witness progress toward a goal. Since not all learners begin at the same point in learning, what they need to progress will vary.
    With her team of student researchers, Karen Cushman3 identified characteristics of “practice that gets the desired result of increasing mastery”:

    • It has an express purpose. Knowing why they are engaging in practice helps students direct their attention and actions.
    • It demands attention and focus. Without attention to what they are doing and the results, students will fail to process the data that will actually strengthen their learning. In other words, mindless practice is worthless practice.
    • It involves conscious repetition or rehearsal. Repetition is not the enemy unless repeating the actions does nothing but keep a student busy. Mindful repetition, in which the student frequently analyzes and adjusts his practice, leads to mastery.
    • It is geared to the individual. Helping a student attack a weakness prompts improvement.
    • It is not inherently enjoyable. However, feedback during practice helps students recognize its value. To summarize Daniel Pink4, authentic learning = meaning + feedback.
    • It develops new skills and knowledge. It is challenging enough to require true effort.
    • It applies to new endeavors. There is a recognition that meeting the challenge will enable the student to accomplish something more than is currently within reach.
  2. Relatedly, the teacher helps students notice their learning. Little feeds determination like recognizing results from effort. I once observed a middle school math teacher who understood the motivation and determination such recognition can generate. Each student had a file folder with a graphic representation of the various skills in the current unit of study. The skills built on one another until students would be able to solve complex problems that would require the combined use of the individual skills. As she observed evidence of mastery, the teacher would have the student pull out the file folder and fill in the next section of the graphic. As the students did this, they became aware of their progress, both of how far they’d “moved” from the start and how much closer they were to the goal. This simple tool helped each student become aware of progress without the burden of comparing with classmates’ achievements. With a goal clearly in sight and a way to track progress, these students were doggedly determined learners.
    This shouldn’t be surprising. As adults, we grow more determined when we’re given such awareness and feedback. For example, I’m a runner. I use a gizmo that tracks details of all my runs, such as my distance, pace, and total time. When I upload this data, I can compare it to all my previous runs and note my progress. No matter the results, noting my progress (and even lack of it sometimes) delivers a dose of determination—to run faster, farther, more faithfully, etc.

    Researchers often refer to this as something like the “gamer effect,” gamer being the player of video games. When you play a video game and reach the end of a challenge, you move on to the next level. You always know where you are in relation to the game’s ultimate challenge and conclusion. You can “see” progress. Seeing progress deepens determination.

Determination combines focus and intentional action. It is a willingness, even an eagerness, to engage in “practice that gets the desired result of increasing mastery.” A classroom where mastery increases can certainly be considered an atmosphere of achievement.
Hope. Humility. Determination. Are these the characteristics of my classroom and school?

Sources

  1. Cushman, K., Fires in the Mind (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010), 87.
  2. Washburn, K.D., The Architecture of Learning: Designing Instruction for the Learning Brain (Pelham, AL: Clerestory Press, 2010) 163.
  3. Cushman (2010), 71-85.
  4. Pink, D.H., Drive: The Surprising Truth Behind What Motivates Us (New York: Riverhead Books, 2009).

Image

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Posted in Education, Kevin Washburn, teaching

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Using Groups Effectively: 10 Principles

January 4th, 2011

Confession: as a student, I usually hate group work. I know, I know. Having students work in groups reaps a bounty of benefits, including boosting students’ social skills and upping the number of “happy campers” in the classroom. Such findings filter through my thinking when I’m preparing to teach, so I do use group interaction, hoping that the promises from its advocates will be realized. Occasionally they are; often they are not.

I recently attended a conference session featuring Keith Sawyer. In addition to being a jazz pianist (a musical collaborator), Sawyer is an expert on the effectiveness of group efforts. His presentation focused on what has been and potentially can be accomplished through collaboration, but he hinted that just getting people into groups is not the answer.

This piqued my curiosity, so I bought his book Group Genius. In it I’ve begun to find some answers to my questions: When are groups effective as means of learning? What tasks are better accomplished collaboratively than individually? How do you structure groups for optimal effectiveness and results?

Though his focus is on creativity, I think Sawyer’s insights apply to our use of groups to foster learning. Here are ten principles I’ve picked up:

  1. Flow matters. Flow is a term used to describe a state of high engagement in which thoughts run freely and progress occurs, often without group members being conscious of it. However, flow is like intrinsic motivation; it can’t be created on demand. The best we can do as teachers is provide a classroom environment that fosters flow.
  2. Conversation is key. Sawyer succinctly explains this principle: “Conversation leads to flow, and flow leads to creativity.” When having students work in groups, consider what will spark rich conversation. The original researcher on flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, found that rich conversation precedes and ignites flow more than any other activity.1 Tasks that require (or force) interaction lead to richer collaborative conceptualization.
  3. Set a clear but open-ended goal. Groups produce the richest ideas when they have a goal that will focus their interaction but also has fluid enough boundaries to allow for creativity. This is a challenge we often overlook. As teachers, we often have an idea of what a group’s final product should look like (or sound like, or…). If we put students into groups to produce a predetermined outcome, we prevent creative thinking from finding an entry point.
  4. Try not announcing time limits. As teachers we often use a time limit as a “motivator” that we hope will keep group work focused. In reality, this may be a major detractor from quality group work. Deadlines, according to Sawyer, tend to impede flow and produce lower quality results. Groups produce their best work in low-pressure situations. Without a need to “keep one eye on the clock,” the group’s focus can be fully given to the task.
  5. Do not appoint a group “leader.” In research studies, supervisors, or group leaders, tend to subvert flow unless they participate as an equal, listening and allowing the group’s thoughts and decisions to guide the interaction.
  6. Keep it small. Groups with the minimum number of members that are needed to accomplish a task are more efficient and effective.
  7. Consider weaving together individual and group work. For additive tasks—tasks in whicha group is expectedtoproduce a list, adding one idea to another—research suggests that better results develop when individual thinking precedes the pooling of ideas in a group setting. Researchers also suggest that alternating between individual and group work helps keep the work focused but not fixated—i.e., not limited to one aspect or detail of an idea or issue. (By the way, this weaving of individual and group interaction may be reason why technological or “electronic brainstorming” is often effective.)
  8. “Divide and conquer” ≠ collaboration. When groups assign members to specificresponsibilities for completing a task they undermine the thinking that collaboration can produce. Sawyer talks about creativity via collaboration as being “exponential,” meaning that it is constructed via conversation. One individual’s thought may inspire another group member’s insight, which in turn sparks new concepts for another. It is this emergent thinking that enables collaboration to accomplish what individual effort cannot.
  9. Think threefold. Group tasks that produce the best results often have three defining characteristics: 1) they are novel, something students have not done before, 2) they feature a visual component, something that can be represented in nonverbal forms, and 3) they are relational, meaning they require the combining of ideas or components to be accomplished.
  10. Be complementary. The best groups are composed of members who have enough familiarity with one another to be comfortable but who possess varied backgrounds and experiences. Again, because of how we typically use groups in classrooms, we tend to form groups around ability—if there is at least one “good student” in the group, we think something will get done. However, Sawyer suggests ability should be less of a consideration than diversity in experience. This can be challenging to accomplish but it’s worth considering when groupingstudents for collaborative tasks.

These insights have me rethinking groups, not whether or not to use them, but when and how to use them effectively. As with every aspect of teaching, using groups effectively requires mindful

planning and attention to more than who works with whom. As Sawyer summarizes, “Putting people into groups isn’t a magical dust that makes everyone more creative. It has to be the right kind of group, and the group has to match the task.”2

References

  1. Sawyer, K., Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 43.
  2. Ibid., 73.

Images

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Posted in Collaboration, Education, teaching, Uncategorized

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What Administrators Need: Part II (Pam Moran and Matt Haas)

October 8th, 2010

Cross-posted from Dangerously Irrelevant

My cell phone rang from the passenger seat of my car as I crossed the last intersection before a two-mile stretch of Hydraulic Road leading to Albemarle High School, my high school. A clear blue May sky stretched out above the Blue Ridge Mountains. The time was 7:40 a.m., and I had just dropped off my seven-year-old at school; my thoughts were on the AP and Virginia Standards of Learning testing schedule ahead of us for the day. I reached for the phone, flipped it open, and lifted it to my ear. On the other line was a parent of one of our juniors and a friend of the family. Her voice was anxious.

“Matt, there’s been an accident where Ashland Drive crosses Route 29 North!” she said.“I think it’s a student. I think it’s all right. The traffic is backed up, though.”

I thanked her for the information and dialed our school resource officer to see if he had any information on the accident. The word forlorn comes to mind.

“Hi, Matt. I was just about to call you. There’s been a bad accident up here. A panel truck ran a red light and just – well – just t-boned her car.”

I pulled over to the side of the road, “Whose car?”

One of our students, on her way to take an AP exam that morning, was killed. It has been three years since that day, and I still haven’t reconciled. As any principal can tell us, losing a student is heartbreak, devastation with no reprieve.

Before calling in the crisis response team, I called my wife for strength. In the wake of our student’s death that morning, I followed all the steps we take in a crisis situation: notified central office, called an emergency staff meeting, and then waited for the AP testing session to finish before informing all the students in the session what had happened. They were her friends; they had to know first. Just prior to that, I found her brother and walked him to our school resource officer to be driven home. Her parents wanted to be the first to tell him what happened, but the fear in his eyes told me he was guessing hard. He must have read my face.

The day culminated with a live broadcast from our in-house TV production studio to the student body. I shared the story with them, simply confirming for some what happened. That evening the athletic director and I visited her parents at home. She was the third of our 1,700 student family to die tragically in the past four years. I know and feel that any child’s passing is a tragedy; some grip a whole school community.

When I arrived early at school the next morning I was greeted at my office door by the school psychologist. Before he really had a chance to say anything, I started to rattle off actions for the day to take care of students, staff, and parents.

Patiently, he waited for me to finish. We found seats across from one another. Sunlight settled on us through the office windows. He gave pause, looked me in the eye to get my attention, and asked me what I needed. The guilt I felt for his asking me this was overwhelming.

“Well, I think I need to rewind about 24 hours and be up there at the intersection to stop that truck. Otherwise, I don’t need anything.”

He waited for what I said to sink into me and then let me know he was there to help me too, but I’ve never been very good at expressing my own needs. I have never met an educator who really can. We almost always express our needs in terms of student needs.

I challenge any teacher to ask and answer this question without naming something that is meant to help a child: “What do I need?” A teacher is a parent in every sense of the word. When passengers on an airliner, we are all trained to don the dropped, clear-plastic oxygen mask before putting it on our child, but we are all revolted by that thought.

Using a pyramid to represent hierarchy, we have long structured human needs from basic to the most profound as defined by Abraham Maslow. I think there is no coincidence that we have also structured school leadership as a hierarchy as well. I offer a Venn diagram and propose that three communities or sets of needs merge in a school: those of students, teachers (including support staff), and administrators. At the point of merger is the set containing our most vital need, the need to actualize. Each of us needs to become everything we are meant to become, and we need each other to do it.

In a school, needs become communal, and I believe, less hierarchical and more situational. People tend to rely on one another in order to realize their needs. I hesitate to say that we need from one another; rather, we need one another.

As these merging sets of needs grow and distend from lack of satisfaction and clarity of moral purpose, they can tend to squeeze and shrink our central merger of actualization. I think that many teachers today feel the pain of this state. I also think that students have felt this pain for a long time: the pain of deferred needs and dreams. Often, as I illustrated above, administrators are the last to even express a need, let alone a need from someone else at school.

So the question is, “What do administrators need from teachers?” The answer is that administrators need teachers and students. I have never felt that we need something from them. We need them. We need their relationships, their friendships, their dreams and achievements, and their acceptance. There is really no hierarchy with leadership; people construct a hierarchy to manage.

In turn and in merger, we all need each other as we work toward the moral purpose of learning. When we realize our overlapping needs, we lean toward problem solving rather than evils; we merge around creativity rather than fear; and we actualize individually and as a community. We can put ourselves first to save children, and we can put them first to save us. We synergize.

When I think in these terms, I can frame the relationship I had with my departed student: the child I watched running – long red hair trailing her like a comet’s tail – across the soccer field two weeks before her passing. I needed to be the one who shouldered her passing for the school, to console her parents, to honor her, and to be someone on whom the teachers and students could depend. I would give anything to change what happened; I was needed.

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Posted in administration, Pam Moran, teaching, Uncategorized

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The Teaching Story: August 2010

August 22nd, 2010

We educators teach learners that stories have a beginning, middle and end. We also know that each annual cycle of our career takes the form of a story, too. Many of us look forward to writing a new story each year-creating fresh learning plans, developing new relationships, redesigning our learning spaces to gain different perspective upon learning. On the flip side, some of us change so little over the course of our careers that we seem to simply repeat the same story over and over; almost as if stuck in the movie Groundhog Day. What leads teachers to choose one or the other of these two career pathways? Years ago, I worked on a little writing project to ask and answer the question: what motivates some teachers to continue evolving practice over the course of their career? After hours of listening to and transcribing audio tapes, a few specific themes emerged from these teachers’ reflections on their practice- or artwork- as one teacher labeled it.

2 generations of teachers; Ashley's retiree mom helping her set up kindergarten

Each year, just before school refreshes its cycle, I hear those teachers’ voices reminding me of their perspectives on the importance of the first day of school. These teachers, all recognized master teachers with years of teaching under their belts and with no intention of ever doing anything else, believed that the power of their successes was grounded in the relationships they began to build with young people in the first moment of the first day. One teacher said to me something akin to this, “When I began teaching, one of the old-timers advised me to not smile ‘til December.. I ignored that advice and think it was one of the best decisions of my career. How can you begin a positive relationship without smiling?” Another said in thinking about a mentor who helped her survive her very first day of school, “A teacher in the math department stepped in to help me with discipline early on. She became a mentor and critical friend for life. Every time I was failing to reach a student, we would talk. She would ask questions. I would think about different approaches. Eventually, I began to realize I owned the change that’s needed, not the learner. Sometime it’s about the relationship. Other times it’s about their needing a different learning strategy from me. Sometimes, they just need more time and – more of my time.”

These teachers engaged in professional careers grounded in efficacy. They believed they were capable of making a difference in every learner’s life and they never gave up on a young person, especially those who challenged them the most. Importantly, they all shared a professional power gained from finding and connecting to one or more critical friends with whom they bonded because of a commonly held belief in their own self-efficacy. They supported each other, listened to each other, pushed each other, and shared with each other. Often, they considered themselves to be part of an underground group of educators who stayed out of the fray of others’ criticizing conversations; not because there isn’t always something to criticize in a school but because they saw those discussions as debilitating to their work with young people. They held a viewpoint about their students and their work that could be labeled as “glass almost always full.”

Paragons of teaching? I don’t think so. Teachers aren’t perfect but I believe teachers who care and work hard are more the norm than the exception. As I walk schools and chat with teachers, step into their rooms, listen to their dreams for the first day and every day afterward with the learners they serve, I think the media, the politicians, and our communities often sell short the many professionals who teach their heart out, day in and out; living their careers inside and outside of work. These teachers know what’s worthy to learn and they put their energy into realizing that work to the greatest degree possible, even if means being a bit of a Neil Postman-like“subversive activity” teacher. They understand the importance of staying current and working to learn new skills. Despite being beleaguered professionally by back-to-school stories such as the recent teacher evaluation coverage of the LA Times, they work on new ideas for learning projects while on unpaid summer leave, rearrange their learning spaces over and over again before pre-service week, put a smile on their faces, and reach out to find the good in each learner who crosses the threshold into class on that first day of school. Our schools, our learners, and our teachers represent a different century of learning than the one Norman Rockwell captured when he painted Happy Birthday, Miss Jones, an image of what once was America’s quintessential teacher. However, today’s teachers still represent the best of what teachers have always been and always will be; educators who make a difference in the lives of the young people they serve.

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Posted in 21st century skills, narrative, Pam Moran, Sphere of Influence, Teacher Efficacy, teaching, voice

Peyton Manning Can Call Audibles, Can You?

February 1st, 2010

By Jason Flom, Ecology of Education


I’m not afraid to admit it. Standardization — it scares me.

It’s the monster under the bed, lurking in the closet, rumbling around in the attic of my mind. Its the haunting moans in the walls of the profession, a harbinger of doom. In fact at times, in states of sleep deprived overly-dramatic hyperbolization, it is the end of days. At least in my head.

Its not common concepts, core values, or normalized skill sets that go bump in my night. No, the zombie lurking in my room is mandated standardized teaching, the cranking out of factory built sameness. The terror is this: If educators are bitten by standardization will they cease to think for themselves? If they must all teach “X” during the __th week and then assess that content on Friday, will they churn out little stardardized zombie students?

Ultimately, my fear is the dichotomous relationship between what we want (teachers as professionals) and what we may be moving toward (teachers as laborers).

(Warning, Mixed Metaphors Ahead!)

The teacher as professional is still a long way off. That’s not to say there are not a number of very professional teachers in the field. There are. However, there is a difference between “teachers who are professionals” and “teachers as professionals”. In the former, some teachers act as polished experts, while in the latter, the field of teaching is respected for its (eek, eek) standard of excellence.

In many ways, teachers are quarterbacks in the football game of schooling. They try to move the ball of learning and knowledge down the field despite the numerous linebackers that attempt to halt forward progress. The talented quarterback, much like judo experts, use the oncoming obstacles as opportunities. (Technology is a good example of this. Teachers who embrace students’ immersion in it can move their team closer to touchdowns than those who try to keep it off the line of scrimmage.)

Teachers able (meaning possessing both the ability and autonomy) to “read the field” and make adjustments fair better than those who cannot (either do to ineptitude or restriction).

I’m not suggesting that teachers go on the field without a game plan or without consulting regularly with their coach (administrator, team, mentor, or planbook). Professionals work in collaboration on a number of fronts and approach each task with established goals and objectives. Teachers are no different. The well prepared teacher can manage a wider assortment of obstacles than can an unprepared one.

The great topography of the US, both in terms of geography and demography, is a boon to our future possibilities. Myriad communities, resources, and experiences present schools with a rich diversity of ideas, cultures, and personalities. The adaptable and engaging teacher culls from this a unique blend of opportunities, tailored specifically to the students under his/her leadership. Innovation is born of imagination, discovery, research, knowledge, and exploration. Creativity and flexibility are necessary components of growth and development, and schools can be allies in this far beyond the 3 r’s.

Because of the dynamic nature of classrooms, teachers able to tailor curriculum to the reality on the ground — essentially to adapt to the configuration of the defense — can “score more touchdowns” and provide students with more skill depth than teachers who stick to the texts.

The ability to take advantage of learning opportunities depends on three interrelated components:

  1. Teachers trained to “read the field” and adapt or construct curriculum to meet the reality of the field. Colleges of ed need to prepare teachers who know how to learn. For working with interns in my classroom, I use this sheet. We can’t simply give teachers autonomy. It must be worked into the system, to capitalize on diverse ideas, talents, and visions. Students thrive under inspired teachers.
  2. Administrators who have (and can use) more effective methods for providing teachers with feedback and support. (I’m a big fan of this rubric.)
  3. The support and respect of the policy making establishment and, by proxy, the public. (A pay grade that attracts top flight candidates might help.)

I wonder, can we standardize creativity, individualism, differentiation, learning opportunities, innovation, and a sense of community in our learning environments? I think we can, but it’ll take a different effort than “simply” standardizing for scoring high on standardized tests. We need to standardize teachers’ ability (skill as well as autonomy) to follow the lead of the students, and fully capitalize on the gifts students bring with them.

Teachers need to be able to call audibles without fear of reprimand. Its not going to happen over night (nor should it), but with concerted effort, it can happen. And the team — the kids –will only benefit, if we do it right.

Zombie Image: Wiki Commons
Peyton Image: UPI.com

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Posted in Education Reform, Peyton Manning, Service Learning, Teacher Efficacy, teaching

A Teacher’s Lessons from Writing, Part 2

January 19th, 2010

My cell phone rang when we were deciding which package of paper towels to buy.

“Kevin, this is John Paine. Do you have a few moments to talk?”

I had both anticipated and dreaded this call, and the paper goods lane of Publix was not my ideal setting for the conversation. My wife, sensing it was the call I’d been waiting for, dug through her purse to find a beat-up memo pad, found a page with about an inch of clean space, and thrust it into my hands along with a pen. I think she waved as she headed for the frozen foods section.

“Um, sure Mr. Paine, this is fine.” I found some clearance between a package of paper towels and the shelf above it. Voila! an impromptu desk.

“I’ve read your manuscript in its entirety and will send you specifics, but I wanted to discuss a few general things with you by phone first.”

“Okay.” (Note the high intelligence of my response. I was a bundle of nerves.)

I found Mr. Paine, no lie, via an internet search, and I never expected him to take on my manuscript. A professional editor, he’d worked on books I recognized by authors I recognized. He’s on the speed dial of several major publishers and is called for emergencies, such as a book still needing editing on the eve of its print run. When he requested the rest of my manuscript after reading the first hundred pages, I thought it might be so he could have a non-example to share with colleagues for a few profession-related laughs.

“I think you’ve don a good job to this point,” he said. “In fact, I wish my teachers had taught this way.” Even though it was my writing he was editing, his comment on teaching caught my ear.

“Really?” I asked. (Again, note the deep intellect represented in my response.)

“Yes, I would have learned much more and it all would have seemed far more interesting and relevant.”

This was a gift. Even if he then said that the writing should never accost a reader’s eyes, I would have floated out of the paper goods aisle.

“There are some things you can do that I think will make your message even clearer,” he continued. “One thing that editors help writers do is see a manuscript from a reader’s perspective. That’s my job, so here are a few general suggestions.”

Like a good paper towel, I absorbed all I could from Mr. Paine’s comments. I won’t bore you with the details, but this conversation launched one of the greatest periods of learning I’ve experienced. I needed to step away from my investment in the project and view it from a different perspective. As I worked with Mr. Paine through the following weeks, I grew in my understanding of seeing from a reader’s perspective. I needed more examples. I needed to use fewer technical terms. I was at my best when I allowed my examples to become short stories that entertained and informed. I was at my worst when my writing failed to touch the ground, when its theory remained theory without practical applications. I needed an editor, a teacher, someone to say, “I know your intent. Here’s a better way to communicate it.”

As a teacher, I know that letting others see our work in the classroom can be intimidating. Many of us have experienced the administrator and clipboard fly-by described by Alan Sitomer, which was most likely followed by a brief discussion in the administrator’s office with the ceremonial placement of the evaluation in our personnel files. But, as I learned, there is value in having someone else redirect our perspective—not with a clipboard and brief observation. Instead, we need “editors,” coaches who come along side us and help us do what we do better, perhaps with more of the learner’s perspective in mind. We need professional relationships like those described by Derek Keenan in his excellent blog post.

Though I’ve written about coaching before, the value of such a relationship became clearer to me through my experience with a professional editor. This, I thought, is what I need in my teaching. Someone who respects my work, who sees its value, and yet sees how I could make it even better, how I could make it more effective. Someone who can guide me to see and think like my learners, not check a box or circle a number on a form. Someone who wants my work to be its best because of its potential influence, not someone who’s crossing a task off of their to-do list.

I need a professional editor for my teaching.

Image: ‘Happy Buggy Wednesday’ http://www.flickr.com/photos/10687935@N04/3946962619

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Posted in Coaching, editing, paper towels, Professional Development, teaching, writing

A Teacher’s Lessons from Writing, Part 1

January 15th, 2010

I feel like a kid on Christmas Eve. My first book is about to be published, but the printing/binding process is taking longer than I’d like. (Don’t worry, this isn’t really about the book.) This period between final revisions and publication has given me time to reflect on the journey, and, as usual, my thoughts have been exploring connections to teaching. Surprisingly, many principles seem relevant, such as…

Audience matters. Yes, I know this seems obvious, but it wasn’t at first. I started writing shortly after my last stint in graduate school, and I could out APA style the APA itself. I adhered to the style boundaries with such fealty that I was surprised not to be appointed to the committee determining proper citation forms for tweets and wall postings.

So, I anticipated great responses when I distributed early copies of the initial chapters to colleagues. With as much kindness as one can express such sentiment, they basically suggested that unless I intended to submit the work to the Journal of Sky-High Instructional Theory, I had work to do. Constantly reading “the teacher,” who never became a real person with a name, and frequently being interrupted by date and page number citations made reading my early writing laborious.

When it became clear that I was hunting in the wrong forest, I changed from writing to reading. I became a voracious gatherer of books about writing. I’ll save the extensive influence of this self-education for a later post. For now, I’ll just point out that I was of two minds in my writing. I wanted to write for teachers, my colleagues. Publishers would suggest I wanted to write for a “general audience.” However, my actual writing targeted university professors—the individuals who had been my audience and had held my fate in their hands for the past several years. How could I change direction? Several books offered suggestions that are nicely summarized in this passage from Mark Tredinnick:

Good writing is not mannered and stilted—it’s not inflected with overanxious politeness, nor false with bonhomie, nor false with confidence, nor anything faux or excessive…Good writing is calm and cool, and it remembers its manners. Everyone likes to be treated with a relaxed mix of dignity, grace, and respect by someone who knows what he’s talking about but isn’t trying to show it off. That’s the kind of attitude writers want toward their readers.1

After I somewhat ironically checked a dictionary for bonhomie (cheerful friendliness), I realized I needed to find my voice—a way of writing that sounded like me in real-life, not me as a grad student.

This prompted me to reflect on the writing I required of my students. Did I ever allow them to explore and find their voices? Was I offering them only an audience of one—me, their teacher—that would so stilt their writing that it would be of no interest to a “general audience”? If so, was I truly preparing them to influence their world?

Over the last few years, I’ve gotten to lead a course called “Writer’s Stylus” for teachers. The five days of professional development provide a metamorphic experience. Teachers from all disciplines start the week writing like students—that is, they write with “overanxious politeness” and false “bonhomie.” As the week progresses, they begin to find their voices and write with such dignity and grace that they deserve to be read, many for the first time in their lives. If you write regularly, this may not seem that transformational, but trust me, it literally changes lives. While I get excited about what these teachers will do instructionally, I grow even more excited by their personal growth. Finding your voice can truly change an individual’s outlook, confidence, and, yes, life.

So what am I doing with my students? Sure, you can argue that they need to learn to write for the academic world, and I’ll agree. But if that’s all I emphasize, have I equipped them to write for the larger world? Have I enabled them to make history more than a dry recounting of facts? Have I encouraged them to take readers to a volcanic eruption and care about the people affected by it? Have I empowered them to present the structure of mathematics as a dynamic window on the world? Have I helped them write literature and not just write about it?

Audience matters, but it is the writer who must change, must grow, must discover how to communicate as himself. Authenticity is what draws an audience.

Did I master this aspect? I’d never claim that I did. I have hope, but more than that, I have a renewed focus in my teaching: help learners find their voices and equip them to “speak” with “calm and cool,” with “dignity, grace, and respect,” not to show-off, but to confidently impact their world.

1. Tredinnick, M., Writing Well: The Essential Guide (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2008), 184.
Image: ‘in Concert’ http://www.flickr.com/photos/45409431@N00/2459533929

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Posted in audience, Mark Tredinnick, teaching, voice, writer's stylus

Why Instructional Time Matters

November 30th, 2009

But time keeps flowing like a river (on and on)
To the sea, to the sea
’til it’s gone forever…

At least that’s what the Alan Parsons Project suggested in their hit song. But poets and songwriters aren’t the only ones seemingly consumed by the passage of time. Educators frequently talk about the concept, discussing “time-on-task,” school start and end times, and the length of the school year. What’s behind this preoccupation with instructional time? Does it matter if the school day is interrupted for pep rallies, award assemblies, announcements from the office, and the like? Isn’t the school calendar that revolves around the needs of an agrarian culture adequate for today’s students? Why does nearly every conversation with teachers end up being a discussion of time and the lack of it in classrooms?

Teachers have sound reasons for being concerned about time. More than 100 years of research suggests a significant correlation between time spent learning and the amount of learning that results. As memory expert Alan Baddeley describes it, “In short, as far as learning is concerned, you get what you pay for.”1 The relationship between this research finding and teaching may seem obvious, but let’s dive deeper into the research and its implications.Researchers originally connected expertise in playing the violin with the amount of time spent in individual practice. They found that experts spent more than 10,000 hours practicing, while lesser experts spent about 7500 hours practicing, accomplished experts spent around 5000 hours practicing, and committed amateurs spent around 1500 hours practicing. While the numbers fluctuate slightly, the general range has remained surprisingly consistent as researchers examined expertise levels in other disciplines.2

What does this have to do with teaching? Probably more than we realize. For example, every school system I’ve encountered has significant literacy goals for students. Most schools would like to produce expert, or at least lesser expert or accomplished, readers. According to the research, developing such readers requires at least 5000 hours of practice—5000+ hours that students focus on applying and developing their reading capacity. With that in mind, let’s examine a possible scenario. If a child spends one hour each day for 175 days of the school year from grades one through eight, she will have invested approximately 1400 hours in developing reading expertise—not even enough for “committed amateur” levels! What if we add kindergarten and high school? The student still comes up woefully short at 2275 hours—not even halfway to accomplished levels.

No, this doesn’t include the time a child may spend reading at home, but it would be a rare child who actually actually spend the extra 2300+ hours needed to achieve “accomplished expert” levels. And to make the situation more challenging, recent research on the amount of time students actually spend reading in school classrooms ranges from a low of seven minutes to a high of 23 minutes.3 (Note that the research focuses on time spent practicing—recalling and applying skills—not on the amount of time the teacher presents information.)

Admittedly, we are not attempting to produce readers for the stage at Carnegie Hall, but this research on time and learning should not be dismissed. Time spent learning does matter for a student’s achievement. We’ve only explored this connection to developing literacy capacity, but the same would be true if applied to other disciplines. Want to develop expert mathematicians (or at least “committed amateur” mathematicians)? Time matters. Want to develop accomplished scientists (or, again, at least “committed amateur” scientists)? Time matters. The time a child spends recalling and applying learning correlates with the child’s level of expertise. When it comes to learning, time invested in recalling and applying relates to ability and achievement.

In conclusion, here are some questions to consider:

  • What are our priorities? In what areas of the curriculum are we attempting to develop more than amateur capacity? In what areas of the curriculum are we striving for more than amateur achievement?
  • How does our time (both given and devoted) reflect those priorities?
  • What is needed to increase the time students choose to spend in recall and application of new learning?
  • What are the implications of this research for our own professional development?

Share your thoughts and insights!

References

  1. Baddeley, A., Eysenck, M. W., & Anderson, M. C. Memory (New York: Psychology Press, 2009), p. 70-78.
  2. Ibid.
  3. In-School Independent Reading. http://www.eduplace.com/rdg/res/literacy/in_read3.html

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Posted in application, expertise, instructional time, learning, recall, teaching

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