Category Archives: teaching

Grand Challenges are Hard!

Education, professional development, teaching

It is 11 PM.  I drove all day, had an online meeting, caught up on email and provided some feedback to my students. I turned off the laptop, turned on the news and then remembered my 30-day challenge: a blog entry every day! So, here I sit, laptop on lap, writing about how easy it is to not write and thinking that if I’m really going to make this change, it needs to be the first thing I do each day rather than the last.

But I do have a quick comment before heading to bed.  My online meeting was with a group of teachers who are implementing a 1:1 iPad project.  They are leaders in their schools and trying to bring the rest of the faculty online after running a pilot program last year.  We spent some time talking about how they could encourage their colleagues to meet deadlines so they could move forward.  While they were a bit frustrated at experiencing reluctance, they also understood the problems: they had not had a salary increase for the past four years and yet they were being constantly asked to do more with less. Professional development often happens after work hours without any compensation and what little planning is included during the day is often taken up with administrivia.

Then I saw one of those Exxon “let’s fix this” videos, the ones that point out how the US is lagging in international test scores and how we can fix it.  They emphasize having knowledgeable teachers in the classroom and breezily suggest we should support our teachers:

As with much of this type of rhetoric, they don’t offer any specifics, leaving it up to the viewer to decide what it means.  Since we live in a pretty toxic environment related to teachers, many probably assume it means getting new teachers.

What it really means is that we should look at how those successful countries treat their teachers: how many hours they teach versus how much time they have to plan or learn.  This article from Stanford is a good starting point.  It focuses on professional development.  Since it’s late, I’ll just quote one example and let you read the article:

In Singapore, the government pays for 100 hours of professional development each year for all teachers. This is in addition to the 20 hours a week teachers have to work with their colleagues and visit each others’ classrooms to study teaching.

I’m wondering if this is what Exxon has in mind?

Scratch Day!

programming, teaching

One of my favorite days each semester is Scratch Day.  Integrating Scratch allows me to give my students the chance to do some basic programming. Most of them have had not experience in this area. In a two-credit class, I can only devote an hour, but it’s amazing what my students can accomplish in that hour.  I give a basic overview of how the program works, show them how they can download and investigate projects and then set them loose to work on their own projects as I work on my own.

In addition to an introduction to programming, they get to see a vibrant professional learning community at work.  When we have questions, we head to the forums where we find answers along with sample code.  They turn into a learning community as well as they share discoveries and help each other.

At the end of the class, I know there are students who are relieved that it is over. They feel a bit inferior, I suppose, because they are generally used to being good at something right off the bat. I try to reassure them that programming is not always intuitive and creating something complicated takes time. Others are exhilarated and can’t wait to get home to work on their projects some more, knowing that they still have lots to learn but confident that they can learn it.

I always learn more about Scratch myself and promise that I will do more…maybe I’ll make it my next 30-day challenge.

 

Of Sweeping Passions and Grand Challenges

blogging, learning, teaching

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.

Art or Science?

Education, learning, teaching

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 QR Code Game

teaching, technical skills, technology

I spend two precious weeks on gaming with my students: I introduce them to Scratch one week and then have them play games the following week.  Inspired by Matt Dunleavy’s augmented reality games, I decided to create my own game using QR codes.  While I do not believe they are going to revolutionize education, I do think they have the potential to quickly create interactive experiences for students to promote learning with a dose of critical thinking that comes from playing the game itself.

I tweeted that we were doing this activity and a few folks expressed interest along with the opinion that I was corrupting my pre-service teachers, so I will take a moment to share the pretty simple “rules” for the game.  The goal of the game was to learn a bit about gaming and education, be introduced to a few people I think are interesting or important plus just some fun stuff. Remember, my content is technology so showing them how to create and use QR codes is itself part of the objective of the game.

QR Code Game:

1. Students gathered in class and formed teams.  Each team received the first sheet in the game.  It included three QR Codes: one for the directions, one for the first clue, and one for the next location.  We used the directions code to test their scanners and do some troubleshooting. Then, they scanned for the first clue, used the Internet to locate the information requested and tweeted it to my attention. Finally, they scanned the next location which was somewhat cryptic (ie, the snack machines were billed as “cookies on a hook”).

2. There were five clue sheets in all.  When the completed the last clue, they turned the sheets over.  Each had a letter and they used the five letters to spell a word which was where I was located with the prizes.

Pretty simple.  It got them up and moving and even outside on a nice day.  And it showed these digital natives another use for their phones, something none of them had ever tried before. I didn’t give a quiz to see if they learned but I think they saw a particular activity that had lots of possible applications and did not require every kid to have a device.  One iPad that would scan and had internet access would be sufficient. You could find a work around for the tweeting part if that wasn’t available in the classroom. But I’ve been trying to get them to give Twitter a chance and this was another way to show them its potential educational application.  We tweet everything we create from Voice Threads to Scratch projects so they are shared with the group and the world and it makes it easy for us to display them.