Balancing Levels of Concern

Teaching has always been synonymous with caring, and I see this personified at all levels. Whether I am at an elementary school, like I was yesterday, or dodging careening students at a high school like today, the teachers manifest their "caring" in different ways. Chris Lehman at Practical Theory posted yesterday about his definition of caring as it relates to teaching and professionalism, and I think it was, as is usual with Chris, a timely post. We have all been engaged in conversation at some point while explaining our choice to become educators to either parents or friends, when the idea that you have "passion" or that you "love kids" comes forth, either from you or as a suggestion from the other conversants. What does this really mean for us as educators? Many people in various professions love kids too, even ones that aren't there own. Christian Long says that we should be in love not necessarily with the children, but with the collisions we create with ideas, learning, and the students we teach. I dig that, but there has to be room for the idea of caring, or genuinely having a concern over their future, and the future of those that love them.

To continue a recent them on this blog (which might be long in the tooth), I read Chris' post with an eye on Ashley Merryman's almost simultaneous post on the responses to her an Po Bronson's article on Praise. They say similar things, whether Chris is talking about parents and choices being difficult, but necessary, or Ashley commenting that teachers should feel more comfortable about accountability at all costs. Take a look at a short sample:

Chris Lehman:

The best parents aren’t the ones who smoke pot with their kids because, ‘Well, they were going to try it anyway.’ And they aren’t the ones who let kids think that it’s o.k. to break rules, etc… they are the ones who teach kids the lessons they need to succeed in life, even when those lessons are really hard to learn. Same is true for teaching.

Ashley Merryman:

Since we began our research on praise and self-esteem, Po and I both heard many stories from parents and teachers about self-esteem issues. My favorite was from an English teacher. She'd recently given one of her students a "C," and the mother came down to complain, saying "You're ruining my child's self-esteem." The teacher shot back, "I'm not here to make him feel better; I'm here to make him do better."

For two years before I become a technology coordinator for this
district, I was a history teacher on a middle school "team." Our
philosophy, though strangely unspoken at first, was heavy on caring.
The lengthy list of issues that our students ran into, most
non-academic, were handled with a quasi-medical approach of "first-do
no harm." We genuinely cared for our students and we did everything we
could to make that known to them. Did this produce a major change in
test scores? Not that it matters, but probably not. Did it directly
impact learning? Again, I don't have that answer. What I do know is
that we all left those two years, teachers and students alike, with a
deeper level of respect for one another. What I now want to ask myself, however, is whether or not I was too focused on keeping kids feeling good rather than doing them the service of being honest.

This is the "art" of teaching, the intangible aspects of being a teacher that no length or depth of teacher training will prepare you for. These types of conversations bring us deeper into introspection, which I believe will lead us towards a higher level of empathy, one that does not involve just self-esteem for our students, but will allow us to make the difficult teaching decisions that we should.

School 2.0: Where I am

In response to David Warlick's post on School 2.0 (which deserves a reading), I left this comment more in response to some of the responses he generated. Specifically, two responders who pointed out that David was speaking to an already converted crowd, one that had already begun implementing School 2.0. But what about teachers who are in the classrooms who do not have the luxury of mining the internet in search of not only the tools, but also implementation strategies. As one of the lucky "miners," I take the responsibility of bringing these tools and strategies to my staff very seriously. Here are the responses (comments shortened): .

From Em:

I’m doing a seven-part series with my staff this year on Web 2.0 tools. Trust me, they are stunned and amazed at blogs, have never heard of wikis, assume that podcasts are the same as iTunes, and were blown away yesterday by my discussion of RSS and social bookmarking as tools for organizing. We are barely into the second wave of adopters. We’ve got quite a ways to go before these tools are familiar and comfortable with the majority of educators.

From Candace:

Em is right. They do NOT know what wikis are. They have heard the word “blog” but have no idea why it has anything to do with school, and have not heard the term “web 2.0.” Even attorneys and professors I meet professionally say, “what’s that.” ...I am not criticizing you, just pointing out the inevitable social nature of web 2.0 proponents– that you (we) do converse among ourselves so well that we forget about others who are not even in the room. We all need to be more aware of the LARGE group of teachers/general public who are not “there yet.”

My response:

Your post, I see has resonated in two ways: those who have adopted and are applying, and those who are adopting and trying to convert. I fall into the convert category, but let me just describe briefly my experience with Web 2.0 tools in the classroom, more specificially, wikispaces.

Since January 1st, I have helped 8 teachers begin their own wikis for class projects, and each of them, to the person, has responded with a gasp after the first night that their students were active on the site. One of the teachers termed it an “explosion” of student activity.

For Em and Candace from above: get the teachers on and let them play, then unleash the students. When your staff sees how much these technologies extend the classroom, they will want more of it. My advice is to publicize your successes as well. As a former teacher, I know that when I saw other teachers doing cool things, I wanted in as well. To be so bold, check out our district tech blog at http://techdossier.blogspot.com. You will find our teacher’s wikis there too.

As with many of the technology that we’ve brought into the classroom in the last 20 years, it will all become cliched, but what I like about David’s diagram’s are the ways in which they reflect “real” learning. Social learning, connectivism, and multiple intelligences all fit very well into the model of school 2.0 that David suggests here.

Praise study resurfaces in Wichita

An addendum to the Bronson post from Saturday. Wenzl's article points to public opinion and practice mirroring the study.

Buck, the East High history teacher, sees slackers at East. "Some boys most prone to quit are the gifted boys. They don't want to appear like they are trying. It's not cool to try.

"I gave a test with multiple choice, and an essay question," he said. "One of the boys finished the multiple choice, and said, 'Let's see how I did.'

"So I graded it. He got eight out of ten right.

"So then he said, 'That's good. Will I pass if I just blow off doing the essay question?' "'You'll pass,' " I told him. "'With, like, a 61 percent.' "

"'Then let's leave it at that,' " he said.

"'You sure?' " I asked him. "'Sixty-one isn't very good.' "

"'No,' " he said. "I'm cool."

Alarmist, most likely, but after reading the Bronson article and being pointed in some relevant directions, I can see there is a connection between the culture of self-esteem and inability to pursue the messier side of learning.

Unplugged

How do keep students from turning us off as they arrive in school? If you have walked through an American high school recently, you have seen the clandestine use of mobile devices and you have probably seen your share of disaffected students. If you spoken in front of a group of them, chances are, unless you were 100% compelling, you saw at least one set of eyes roll in the ubiquitous sign of adolescent lassitude: "whatever."

I should rephrase that--that scene could have been any time within in the last twenty years, but after reading Roy Wenzl's article "Are We Losing our Boys?" from the Wichita Eagle, a confluence of recent ideas began to identify itself as a pattern within my head.

Thanks to Scott McLeod at Dangerously Irrelevant for pointing me towards this article in the first place, and his final thoughts on the post set off this chain for me:

As educators, we are in a battle for eyes, ears, and brainwaves. So far many of us are losing (and, as a result, so are our students).

This has been the trend for several years, and I can easily recall scores of conversations from either graduate school or in new-teacher meetings in districts I have worked in, where the complaint was that we were expected to "perform" in order to compete with everything grabbing the students attention. I may even have been guilty of uttering those words as well. The idea was that we had to sing and dance to keep the attention of the student. George Siemens points out that the idea of sitting through a lecture is not an evil one, and I think that in the whole scheme of a curriculum, it will always have a place. But if that is all you are offering, you have the wrong mindset, and I think that is obvious. That competition is long since over.

If it's a battleground we're looking for, Ron Matson, chairman of the department of sociology at Wichita State University, when speaking about reasons for the "checking out" of adolescent men, had this to offer:

"They are playing video games," he said. "Or withdrawing from society, and with computers and television, you can do a lot of withdrawing."I look at my kids and grandkids and think, holy smoke, what kind of world will they inherit?"

That's entirely up to us, isn't it? If we choose to persist with the lecture, the "drill and kill" so many of the students in Wenzl's article talked about as par for the course (and as so many students across the U.S. can attest to), and fail to use the same "distractive" technologies that Matson earmarks as contributors to student malaise, then, yes, our future is bleak. But what about flipping the script and using the mentality of the group over at Epistemic Games? The very same technologies that are forcing kids to power down when they enter school will be our avenue to power them up and keep them charged long enough to become the lifelong learners they will have to be.

Passion is the key to all of this. Will Richardson is noted for telling educators to jump into the read/write web by finding something they are passionate about and immersing yourself in the resources available through Web 2.0. Identifying those within students has long provided educators with portals into tough to reach students, and now is no different. Our passions will direct our learning, both teacher and student, in School 2.0 (and life, for that matter); rarely is a student, male or female, passionate about worksheets, lectures, or passive learning. Students today and tomorrow need to interact with, remix, and create content.

Trent Watta, one of the students profiled in the article, states:

"When you find something you're passionate about, it no longer becomes work. You don't even realize you're working."

And that's one to grow on.

Praising Mediocrity

Just when I thought I had really gotten this parenting thing down in regards to how to talk to my 2-year old, out comes Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman's New York Magazine article "How Not to Talk to Your Kids: The Inverse Power of Praise" to force me to reevaluate what it will mean to be a good parent. He's only two, but even still, lavishing him with praise over the coloring job he did, or the fact that he is a "good boy," will now be yet another thing I will ask myself at the end of the day "was that the right thing to do?"



If you haven't seen it yet, the article is built primarily around research from a psychologist named Dr. Carol Dweck, who performed a ten-year study in the New York schools based on the way children responded to praise. In short, those students praised for their intelligence, the "smart" kids, performed poorly on a series of tests aimed at evaluating the types of praise given to students. Inversely, "regular" kids were given the same tests and praised for their effort, what Dweck calls "process praise," and did better on successive tests and in the overall study.

“Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control,”
she explains. “They come to see themselves as in control of their
success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s
control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”

As I read it, I kept thinking back to all the students I have taught over the years and wondered how many of them I called "smart" or praised for being "intelligent." Did I damage them?



Probably not, but I do like this information for several reasons. The first is that it begins to make sense, especially when I remember it in terms of sports. The best coaches I ever had in the various sports that I played were ones who, through their direction, forced me to work hard, and did not ever reward me for dumb luck or athletic skill. Thinking about this in light of Dweck's research, they were indeed using "process praise," rather than praising an innate ability. Furthermore, the anti-self-esteem backlash I have been hearing in faculty rooms since I began teaching now seems to have merit. Teachers that I have been in contact with for the most part have the child's best interest in mind, and it makes sense that showering a student with praise for mediocre results did not make sense to them. Praise them for accomplishments, but know when to stop. We have become too wrapped up in the fact that our children need to feel good about themselves, maybe we are championing mediocrity, to quote Mr. Incredible.



Bronson's last few paragraphs speak about how he is coming off of his addiction to praise, not for him, but for his 5-year old son. I can see how we, as parents and teachers, become stuck in the overpraising rut, and it is something that Dweck and others have described as a means of controlling behavior. Children do something we like, for example cleaning up their toys when they finish playing, and we heap praise on them because we want to see that behavior repeated. It's effective, but what effect does that have on our children? Are we causing them to be praise-addicted? There is some science to that, and Bronson references that in the article, but I don't know how you would tell parents or teachers to stop doing that. I am going to watch this one for a while. His blog has been fairly active over the last few days regarding that.



Periodic updates to come as my son and I work through this change in philosophy.


Image Credit: Dark Horse Comics/Pixar, Brad Bird

Mashing Up your Camp

It seems that I have been getting beaten to the punch by so many people lately regarding issues that I have been pondering lately. I can take solace in the fact that some fairly incredible minds are the ones one-upping me, so I am not losing sleep over this. However, when it comes to things that I see daily and try to find my own solutions to, it helps to read about a similar issue on many different levels.



I am coming to believe that our future lies in the idea of a mashup. That's a dichotomous statement; the students of today and tomorrow, also the consumers of today and tomorrow, are going to rely heavily on the ability to customize their web by taking the best parts of the apps they like and combining them into the services they need. The step taken by Yahoo Pipes is but the tip of the iceberg. Yahoo has made it increasingly easy to mash up your feeds into a multi-level search for highly specific information. The mashup for moms" cannot be too much further behind. The other side of the statement reflects something that George Siemens pointed to recently in his blog: the idea that teaching and technology can not be mutually exclusive any longer. Further, that allegiance to one over the other leads to a dangerous conclusion, regardless of the camp you are in.

For too many, technology is seen as a means to replace lectures. So, we have traditionalists standing up and saying "technology removes engagement...what we need is charismatic lecturers". This same myopic view is seen by technologists - eliminate all lectures, make everything self-exploratory - give the learner complete control, let them choose their own learning. The inability to think holistically is the key fault of both camps. News flash: to traditionalists: technology isn't going away - the toothpaste is out of the tube...to technologists: technology tools won't be adopted without critical reflection...your attempts at conversion are as narrow in focus as those you are criticizing. And, the part that sucks, is that at various times, I have been in both camps.

Here are also some quotes I have heard from teachers in my building lately:

• "Sometimes they (students) just want to sit there and listen to you lecture."
• "Any chance to get out of there seats and move around, they take it and you've lost them for the day."
• "This kid here would never answer a question in class, let alone get into the book we are reading, but put him on the wiki, and he won't stop."
• "I haven't seen this girl talk about her work in any way this year, until we let her design buildings using Sketchup."

After reading George's post, the connection to his thoughts was immediate. You can't sit in one camp and criticize the other for same faults. Pots and kettles here. Connecting students to relevant material that alters forces teachers to alter their perceptions of who the students are, makes both sides "mashup;" lecturers who seek participation are going to see less and less of it as time goes on, regardless of how charismatic they are, unless in the follow-up they have allowed the students to continue the discussion asynchronously outside of the classroom. No amount of showmanship will make up for the need to connect with like-minded learners (see Princeton). The first quote is correct: sometimes students don't need to be flying about your classroom working collaboratively, but we are mistaken if we don't give them that opportunity outside of the 40 minutes we might see them that day. Reflection is something that new technology allows students, and especially reflection with collaboration. Check out our AP Language wiki if you want to see that in action.



Jeff Utecht remarked not so long ago, that "it's just hardware," and I have made mention of this several times over the last month or so. Perhaps it is a not so subtle reminder to myself to see it from the classroom teacher's perspective, whose sole purpose in that room is to find and use tools to help the students learn. But more importantly, we need to see technology in classrooms, or lecture halls for that matter, for what it is: an avenue to reach our learners in an engaging way. Nothing more, nothing less. If it takes technology to get your students to conceptualize, to collaborate, and to network, then we shouldn't hesitate out of fear--we should become the learners ourselves.

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Finding Places for People

I play basketball once or twice a week with a group of guys--some teachers, some from outside of the profession in the financial and accounting professions. Amid a conversation with one of them today, the "infection" that this article from Dan Pink has spread within me surfaced. I like these guys; some of them have families. Where do they fit in this new economy?

There was one gentleman that I just met there tonight who was a financial advisor. Pink talks about the changing nature of the finance industry in this paragraph:

Consider jobs in financial services. Stockbrokers who merely execute transactions are history. Online trading services and market makers do such work far more efficiently. The brokers who survived have morphed from routine order-takers to less easily replicated advisers, who can understand a client's broader financial objectives and even the client's emotions and dreams.

Could this guy do that? Does he have it within him, enough talent in his left brain, to transform what he is currently doing into what he will need to do for the future? Or the question that has really bugged me since this article has been stuck in my craw, will his children adapt because their school system prepared them for this change?

I spent some time in some sophomore history classes today explaining how to create digital stories. Some of them are former students of mine, so it was nice to see them in a different light, but most I did not know. As I explained the premise behind why their teacher and I had changed their project from a standard storyboard to a digital story, I looked around the room listened to my internal monologue begin to script itself: are they truly ready? will they be by the time they leave these doors, because certainly not all of them will move on to a university, and even then that might not be sufficient preparation? The two kids in one class who sat directly in front of me and spent more time staring at their shoes, do they have the "ability to create artistic and emotional beauty, to detect patterns and opportunities, to craft a satisfying narrative, and to come up with inventions the world didn't know it was missing?" It's discomforting, but I can't honestly say yes. Not until we embrace a new model for schools.

To flourish in this age, we'll need to supplement our well-developed high tech abilities with aptitudes that are "high concept" and "high touch." ... High touch involves the capacity to empathize, to understand the subtleties of human interaction, to find joy in one's self and to elicit it in others, and to stretch beyond the quotidian in pursuit of purpose and meaning.

These abilities that Pink talks about, the high-touch aptitudes, are they present in your school? in my school? From my perspective, I would say they are in certain areas. Those staff members who routinely involve students in the planning of their classes, in the gathering of information and resources, and acknowledge that they too are learners, their adaptation and process to "School 2.0" won't be a huge shift. It's the rest of us who need to alter our philosophies. I include myself in this category because I, too, have to radically change the way I run my workshops for staff. The most promising part of all of this, and I remind myself of this all of the time, is that I am asking the right questions, and seeking answers from every source I can find.