EdTechSwami

Are You a Teacher Or a Person Who Teaches

Chris — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 18:08:04 +0000

When I was much younger and had more hair I would go to a little establishment in Saratoga Springs called Cafe Lena. This was one of those special places where the true artists and truer wannabes would gather for folk songs or poetry readings or student written one-act plays. After putting on a torn flannel shirt and snatching up my obligatory copy of On the Road I would head up the narrow stairs to the tiny stage. I frequented this establishment quite often, especially when there were poetry reading, considering myself to be quite a scholar and scribe of verse myself. On one of these occasions I witnessed something so simple and profound that it stayed with me all of these years. Near the end of one of the poetry readings an older gentleman with a beard the color of grey clouds got out of his seat and took the stage. He was carrying a dulcimer. He sang some songs that he had written, which I’m sure were remarkable but it was what he said at the end of his set that stuck. He said something like: “I know a lot of you in here like to write poetry, but how many of you are poets?” I glanced around quickly, a pang of guilt, and anger rushing through me. He continued: “A poet sees the world in a particular way, and it is not only when he holds a pen. He sees the world this way all the time, because this is the only way he can see it. He is always a poet.” And then he grabbed his dulcimer and left the cafe without saying another word.

I’m certain what the old man said was not novel, and he was probably paraphrasing something he had heard somewhere else. But for me it was like a bell had been rung in my brain that would not be silenced. I think of this story every now and again, and I try to retell it to my students in a way that makes sense to them. I thought of this story again yesterday when I went into my classroom for the first time to begin preparing for the new school year. I ran into a number of my colleagues who were swarming around the office of our network manager, to receive their new Macbooks. Many of them offered me excuses for not attending the Reform Symposium, for which I had invited each one. Some of them told me that they must have missed the email I sent because they never open their email in the summer. I snickered a little to see their mouths gape when I told them that I had done all of the work for the conference without a scrap of monetary compensation, and they quickly retorted that they would never attend professional development for free.

It is here that the positive energy of my PLN breaks down. They are not with me in my school. In my school a teacher who attends free professional development during the summer is either crazy or has too much free time. But this is not how I view it. I am a teacher. A teacher sees the world in a particular way, and it is not only when he is in a school. I am a teacher all the time. This is different from a person who teaches. A person who teaches puches an inner clock, even if that clock counts time outside of the classroom, all the while thinking what will I get for this time rather than what will my students get. I realize now that I can never help those who only teach, and I will continue to be frustrated if I try. But I am going to do my best to find all of the teachers in my district. So which one are you? Are you a teacher or a person who teaches?

Photograph: Hugh Morton via http://www.lib.unc.edu/blogs/morton/

Invite a Skeptic to the Reform Symposium

Chris — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 15:00:34 +0000

All of this social networking is starting to pay off for everyone! For the past month I have been working with some really amazing educators to put together a free summer conference. I have never met any of these amazing people (Shelly Terrell, Jason Bedell, & Kelly Tenkely), yet this was one of the most successful collaborations I have ever been a part of. None of use have received any reward for the time we have put into planning the event, monetary reward that is, but somehow this has been an incredibly rewarding experience. This seeming paradox lends credence to the argument Daniel Pink makes in Drive, that money isn’t a very good motivator when it comes to intellectual endeavors.

Working on the Symposium has been an empowering experience. It is empowering because by harvesting the power of connections, and everyone’s desire to improve education we can all get together for summer professional development. No one is paying anyone, no one is getting paid. Many educational conferences have costs that are so high that we cannot attend, and what do we see when we get there.…great educators talking about what they are doing in the classroom.

So in the words of The Monkees, I’m a believer. PLNs work! Making connections works! I suspect many of you are nodding your heads right now, that’s because most of you believe too. So here is your charge: invite a skeptic to the Reform Symposium. Not just a doubter, a skeptic. Offer to have them attend a session with you. Sit right next to them, help them click the right links. Make bargains to get them to agree. When it is over tell them about PLNs and help them sign up for Twitter and follow up with them over the year. Do all this because if you can convince a skeptic about the power of connections that is powerful, and that skeptic will talk to other skeptics, and this movement will grow. That is how reform will happen.

Call to Arms on School Reform

Chris — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 22:55:36 +0000

I felt so strongly about the topic of this week’s (7/6/10) #edchat that I needed two days to collect my thoughts. This week’s #edchat centered around what we as educators can do to move from discussion of educational reform to action. I have been participating in #edchat since November and this is unequivocally the most important topic that has ever been covered. Many participants in the chat answered the question of what we can do to enact substantive change by saying that they were already doing it in their classrooms, meaning that they are taking the things discussed on #edchat and other social forums and applying them to their teaching. This tactic employs a trickle down strategy and hypothesizes that simply by doing it in their classrooms others will eventually take note and decide to change themselves. This strategy does not work and we know it. You don’t have to look any further than certain classrooms in your own building. There are teachers who will NEVER change their teaching styles no matter how big the smiles are on the students exiting our rooms. To employ this strategy to reform is to put your head in the sand as that student exits your room and enters the other room down the hall. This illustration needs to be multiplied by ten thousand to get the picture around the country. There are some schools where there are no teachers attempting to change the system by example. What happens to the students that happen to reside in that district? On a building level really reform has absolutely no prayer of succeeding if the administration is not on board. Only administrators can force wholesale, building level change. Take what some of the things administrators who particpate in #edchat are doing, Patrick Larkin (@bhsprincipal), Eric Sheninger (@NMHS_Principal), Deron Durflinger (@DeronDurflinger) for example. Reform is happening at their schools. But what if the administrators are content with the status quo, what then? Will they be influenced by the teacher in room 115 who’s students are totally engaged? Maybe. But maybe simply isn’t good enough anymore. There are students getting a simply terrible education in this country waiting for bad teachers to take notice of the good ones, and we can’t wait any more.

Another tweet that kept popping up was that we needed to have specific reforms in mind, not just some abstract pipe dream of the perfect school. This idea seems to fly in the face of the other idea. It suggest that there is in fact a power higher than the teacher out there that needs to be convinced that reform is needed, and that it is happening. Never the less here is my list of essential education reforms:

Deemphasize so-called teacher accountability. Teachers are accountable. They know it. Rather than having teachers afraid for their lives they could focus on innovation.
Deemphasize standardized testing in favor of more authentic measures of learning, which of course, we know are different not standardized.
Give students more autonomy over their own learning.
Emphasize skills like critical thinking, communication, and problem solving. So that students will be able to deal with problems that don’t exist.

A critique often leveled at the #edchat group is that it is simply an echo chamber where everyone involved is simply voicing the same opinion in a different way, preaching to the choir if you will. Although there is an element of truth to this I don’t think this is such a criticism. All of us discovered #edchat in the same way, we were hungry to be in control of our own learning, just as our students are and we went looking. Since we are like minded we can speak with a collective, deafening voice. If we truly want to have an influence on education reform and not simply talk about it on Tuesdays we need to think beyond the walls of our own classrooms. Start following your state government, who is making the right votes that benefit students, help them. Find out who is making the wrong choices for students and vote them out, or support their opponents. I have decided to attempt to form a political action committee with the purpose of influencing legislation to reform education. I have to try to do something to help the students who are not lucky enough to have a reformer in the room.

Are Teachers Wasting Their Time Teaching Styles?

Chris — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 14:08:55 +0000

As I grade a seemingly never ending pile of essays a question continues to pop into my mind. How much time am I wasting teaching students to use the proper formatting style? How much time are they wasting trying to make sure that their essay adheres to this style. How many points are taken off if the style is incorrect even if the content is good? Shouldn’t we be redirecting this energy into teaching students how to make a good argument in their papers? Don’t online tools such as Citation Machine or BibMe make the memorization of formatting obsolete? I look forward to other teachers’ opinions on this.

What Educators Can Learn From John Wooden

Chris — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 15:27:41 +0000

coachwooden.com/

Following up on my post about Steve Jobs, and given the death of the great John Wooden I thought it was timely to write another post about what we can learn by listening to great thinkers. I never knew a lot about John Wooden when I was young. My dad was always a football guy so that was what we watched. But when I moved to Syracuse about twelve years ago to begin my career I became quite a big college basketball fan, and began through conversations about the game to learn about the great coaches including John Wooden. Take a look at this TED talk he gave in 2001 (when he was 91 years old).

Here are some of the important lessons I pull from this speech:

“And that’s not right. The good lord in his infinite wisdom didn’t create us all equal as far as intelligence is concerned, any more than we’re equal for size, appearance. Not everybody could earn an A or a B, and I didn’t like that way of judging it.” — This seemingly simple statement has profound implications for me as a teacher and as a person who is interested in education reform. How would the educational landscape change if this philosophy were adopted everywhere?
“Never try to be better than someone else, always learn from others.” - More than anything this is a character lesson that we have the responsibility of conveying to our students and it seems to be a perfect companion to the point above. It is also absolutely essential in this era we are living in. It is a lesson I have learned this year through the interactions with my PLN, we should encourage all of our students to form their own PLNs. Students need to learn who they can learn from.
“Never cease trying to be the best you can be — that’s under your control. If you get too engrossed and involved and concerned in regard to the things over which you have no control, it will adversely affect the things over which you have control.” — This is one that is easily forgotten. Nothing causes us more stress than spending valuable and finite energy worrying about things over which we have no control. This energy can be redirected to things that we actually can control.
Peace of mind attained only through self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to do the best of which you’re capable. -This is his famous definition of success. There is an image of his pyramid of success above.
I think it’s like character and reputation. Your reputation is what you are perceived to be; your character is what you really are. And I think that character is much more important than what you are perceived to be. You’d hope they’d both be good. But they won’t necessarily be the same. — This is simply one of the most profound things I have ever heard. Of course it is something we have always known but rarely considered. In the age of digital literacy this lesson is as important as ever. As students build online reputations are they losing sight of who they truly are?

What Educators Can Learn From Steve Jobs

Chris — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 12:16:44 +0000

Apple has been in the news a lot lately. They recently surpassed Microsoft in terms of market cap and became the largest American technology company, they sold two million iPads in two months, they lost a valuable prototype and then kicked in the door of the blogger who reported about it. They’ve declared Flash a dead technology and entered into a acquisition duel with Google. They’ve been busy. At the head of the tumult is the unflappable Steve Jobs who simply responds to nearly every critique of the company with some infuriatingly short email.

I have been an Apple fan since my friend Mike got an Apple IIe when I was 8 years old. I continued to be an Apple fan despite the additional pinch their products gave to my wallet. I always enjoyed the user experience that Apple provided, it somehow always seemed intuitive, as if it were anticipating my needs. Lately I have had the knee jerk reaction of feeling somewhat put off and maybe even a little angered by Apple’s very public moves. The English teacher in me feels frightened by the walled-garden of an app store that admits some applicants while dismissing others with no clear criteria for either other than Steve’s assurance that he is delivering the best user experience.

As I was reading a transcript of Steve Jobs’ latest interview at the D8 conference it became clear that there was a lot educational reformers could learn from the CEO. The part that I find particularly applicable begins at about 1:02 in the video below.

6:25PM Walt: We wanted to talk about your future mostly… but there have been controversies. I want to talk about them. I want to talk about Flash. You published this letter — even if everything you say in that letter is true, is it really fair or the best thing for consumers to just be abrupt?

6:26PM Steve: Well two things — I’ll come back to what you said. Apple is a company that doesn’t have the resources that everyone else has. We choose what tech horses to ride, we look for tech that has a future and is headed up. Different pieces of tech go in cycles… they have summer and then they go to the grave.

6:27PM Steve: If you choose wisely, you save yourself an enormous amount of work.

6:34PM Steve: Well things are packages. Some things are good in a product, some things are bad. If the market tells us we’re making bad choices, we’ll make changes. We’re just trying to make great products. We don’t think this is great and we’re going to leave it out. We’re going to take the heat because we want to make the best product in the world for customers!

6:35PM Steve: If we succeed, they’ll buy them! If we don’t, we won’t sell any. And I have to say, people seem to be liking the iPad! (huge laughs and applause)

(via Engadget)

The thing I admire about this interview and about Steve is what he says about having the courage of convictions when it comes to innovations. Apple continually pushes the envelope when it comes to introducing new technology. Not all of these technologies have been successful (Newton, Cube, Air) yet the company is willing to take risks because they believe what they are doing is progressive and lasting. I have a very vivid memory of the first time I saw OS X. I had just purchased an iMac and was totally stoked, the instruction manual said something about the new operating system but I paid it little attention. The I booted the machine up, the OS was slow, it was buggy and nothing worked with it. Where was the finder I knew and loved, where was the extension manager (remember extension manager)? I thought to myself: this is the worse idea Apple has ever had. Why would they move away from a mature operating system that worked well and that everyone knew? The answer is that Apple (Steve) was thinking of the future, and now Google will only use OS X & Linux. When it comes to Apple not supporting Flash, Apple believes that HTML5 is the future and they are willing to stick to their guns about it, despite some withering criticism. It might be easier for them in the short term just to back down and allow the plugin on their platform but they firmly hold to the belief they stated when the original iPhone was released in 2007.

What does any of this have to do with education? I was inspired by Steve’s statements and realized that applying this type of thinking to education reform is the only chance the movement has to be effective. Here’s how I summarize Steve’s philosophy and how I think it should be applied to education.

Be courageous. If you believe that something is right then do it, despite opposition. I feel this is especially important for administrators since the majority of real power in a district lies with them.
Do what you think is best for your customers. In this case our customers are the students.
Think ahead. And as Apple does, think way ahead. Do something that hasn’t been done yet because it will benefit our students in the long term.
Trust yourself and have the courage of your convictions. ‘Nuff said.