Developing wonder

I was recently having a conversation with a teacher. We were talking about her efforts to integrate more creative, outside the box style of learning activities in her class. She knows that for future success, her students don’t need to simply be able to regurgitate facts – Google can do that for anyone. It’s about what students can do with that knowledge, and she’s struggling with how to get there. You see, some of her students just don’t seem to be able to “think” in a creative way. They seem to prefer to have an activity with direct questions and correct answers. If given a choice between a creative activity that forces thinking in depth of knowledge level 3 or 4 or a worksheet with depth of knowledge level 1, her students would choose the worksheet.

This teacher however, understands that things that are depth of knowledge level 1 may not be what students ultimately need to be successful in the future. Check out this short video that will show why:

If you search for Siri, Alexa, or Google Home homework help, you will find videos of students going down their worksheet and asking their “smart speaker” the problems they have to solve, and then copying down the answer. If there are other kids who have figured this out, you can guess that your students have too. Personally, I don’t have any problem with students using the tools around them to help them with their homework – I mean, what do most of us do with a question we don’t immediately know the answer to? But I recently read a quote from Yong Zhao, a Foundation Distinguished Professor in the School of Education at the University of Kansas gave me pause and made me think about the types of questions we’re asking students:

If all children are asked to master the same knowledge and skills, those whose time costs less will be much more competitive than those with higher costs. There are many more poor and hungry people in the developing world willing to work for a fraction of what workers in developed countries need. To be globally competitive, developed countries must offer something qualitatively different, that is, something that cannot be obtained at a lower cost in developing countries.

In this quote, Zhao was talking about the standardization of curriculum and teaching methods, and the fact that our standardization fails our students in the long term. You see, when our students from a developed country move into the workforce, they will be too expensive for the jobs that take a low level of thinking. The students from developed nations need to be able to do things with their knowledge, and developing those skills can’t be done from DOK 1 questions on a worksheet. Worksheets If a student can turn to Google, Siri, Alexa, or whatever smart tool comes out next to find the answer to your question, then maybe we aren’t asking the right questions.

So here’s the challenge for this teacher. She knows that students will get more out of learning opportunities that push into higher level thinking. She knows that activities that require more creativity are inherently more “sticky” when it comes to student learning. But her students are have not been successful in doing this so far this year. Does that mean we give up? My answer would be no – just as with anything else, we have to keep trying.

Compliance-Pink The students in our school in general are very compliant. Compliant students sometimes struggle with creative tasks because they want specific directions to follow. They may not remember what it feels like to be creative or curious. Years of compliance in the school setting seems to suck creativity and curiosity out of our students. I think that sometimes students lose that ability to be creative and curious because they have grown accustomed to the amount of scaffolding that we provide for learning activities. That scaffolding can begin to feel a bit like a cage, and students forget how to get out.

I’m not sure how many of you have had the opportunity to be around a kindergarten classroom. I get to visit one on occasion because my wife is a kindergarten teacher. When I walk into the room and listen to what’s going on, all the students have questions, and comments, and wonders. All those students feel creative and love to color, draw, paint, write, tell stories, and so much more! When I talk to the fifth and sixth grade students in my own building, many of them have a hard time identifying their own curiosities, their own interests, their own what ifs.

So how do we bring a little bit of that creativity and curiosity back to our students? One suggestion that seems promising is the idea of a Wonder Day. In a recent blog post by John Spencer (you can access it here) he talks about the idea of a Wonder Day where students spend the day immersed in research on something they are curious about, with an end goal of a multimedia presentation – it could be a blog post, podcast, video, or whatever other multimedia format that the students choose.

If you’d like to see a short intro of what a wonder day project might look like, here’s a 2 minute intro from John Spencer.

And if you’re not sure when you’d have the time for something like this, I love the suggestion that I’ve seen elsewhere that one of the best times to try something new and innovative is when the schedule is a little wacky. In my school, next week is the week of ISTEP, our annual state assessment. Because of the test, we run on a different schedule on each of the test days. I would encourage teachers to think about a time like this as the ideal time to try something new. If it doesn’t work for you to try during your testing window, then maybe you try it right before or after an upcoming break, or on the day of a school assembly, or just because it’s a Tuesday!

Our students need to be able to think. They need to identify their curiosity because, as Ken Robinson shares in his book Creative Schools, “Human achievement in every field is driven by people’s desire to explore, to test and prod, to see what happens, to question how things work, and to wonder why and ask, what if?” If we have the goal of students who are college and career ready, we have to help them develop that wonder.

Less curious

What do you think? Have you seen similar issues to the teacher above? What’s worked for you to spark that curiosity in your students? Share your thoughts in the comments below. Or, if you decide to try a Wonder Day – or something like it – share you experience with us! We’d love to hear about it!

Why are we teaching the stuff we’re teaching?

I recently saw a quote from Will Richardson. It’s kind of long, but I think it’s worth sharing the full quote for context:

More than, what, 90% of what we currently teach and talk about … is quickly forgotten once the next topic in the pacing guide comes up. Climate change, literacy, fake news, #metoo, what it means to be a citizen in a democracy, racism, income gaps, privacy, future jobs, AI, cryptocurrency… We can make a list of things that really matter today (or probably will in the future) a mile long.

And after we do, we have to own up to the fact that, by and large, even though we know that’s the stuff of modern life, we in schools say to kids “Good luck with all of that. Hope you figure it all out. We can’t really deal with that stuff because we have to teach you Geometry, which, btw, we know most of you will NEVER use, but hey, it’s in the curriculum and we’ve been teaching it forever.”

This is one of the many existential questions we need to be grappling with: Why are we teaching the stuff we’re teaching?

Now… before you get all up in arms at me, remember that this is not my quote, but the sentiment behind it got me fired up. I know that when I was in the classroom as a teacher, I spent a lot of time concerned with whether or not my students met the standard, whether or not we covered what needed to be covered. I also know that every year I had at least a handful of students who visibly and very apparently checked out. They didn’t do work (classwork or homework). I got frustrated. I called their parents. Nothing changed. As I reflect now, I wonder how many other students in my class were simply too compliant – too good at playing the game of school – to take that path of not doing anything, and in actuality were completely bored by whatever we were doing because they didn’t care. I wonder what kind of disservice I did for those students. They were trying to tell me something, but I was too caught up in what I “had to do” to be able to hear what they were saying.

Now, I’m not saying there’s no place for traditional learning in our schools. I use geometry from time to time (I love woodworking, and often use those skills when creating a new design), and I know many of the topics our kids complain about do have real world value, they just don’t see it.

Here’s a quick quiz of some things that we all probably learned while we were in school (I have to admit, I saw this on the Modern Learners blog in a different post by Will Richardson). See how many of these things you can get correct – and NO CHEATING!

What’s the circumference of a circle with a radius of 4?
What Scottish scientist discovered penicillin in 1928?
What geologic era are we in right now?
In the sentence “The swimming pool is closed today,” is the word swimming the gerund or the participle?
What’s the most abundant element in the universe?

I’m going to be honest… I thought I had three, then I checked. I only had 2. Way back in the day, I’m sure that I passed the test with these questions. I was a compliant kid who did just enough to keep the teachers off my back. But did I truly learn? No way!

A term that I’ve heard before that gets at what Richardson is talking about above is the idea of the relevancy gap. We have this list of standards that our students are expected to learn. We have our preferred methods of teaching those standards. We go through the motions of covering the material, hoping the students do well enough on the test, and then we go on to the next topic.

Think about what you are getting prepared to teach next. We spend a lot of time thinking about “Did our students achieve X?” or “How do we make sure they learned X?” What the relevancy gap asks us to think about “Is X going to matter in the lives our learners are likely to live?”

That question is much more challenging to think about, because it messes up that list of standards, those preferred methods for teaching those standards, the curriculum maps, the pacing guide, and those worksheets and packets that we’ve lovingly created, not to mention the general model of school as we know it. And here’s the issue with the relevancy gap – if the students don’t see the relevance, you’ll continue to have students who are checked out, and there will continue to be students who are compliantly doing the work while they are bored out of their minds.

Relevance So how do we add relevancy to the things that we are teaching our students? I’ve had this conversation with several people recently, and my best suggestion is that we need to help our students see how the thing that they are learning about in class actually applies to their life. Recently in my school, many of the science classes have been learning about outer space. Can we tie last week’s amazing launch of Falcon Heavy into their studies of our solar system? What research could be done on the potential and kinetic energy of a rocket launch? Or what about the fact that there is research on the angle of release of a basketball shot being related to it’s likelihood of going in the hoop? Or maybe there are amazing connections that our students can make to our content that we would never even think of – we just have to get out of the way and let them share!

Whenever I write about these grand ideas, I always try to leave you with some strategies to move forward. Here are 4 ways that come to mind as ways we can add relevancy for our students:

Discuss how learning can be applied in practice – what is a real world use for your students?
Make a link to local cases – how does this knowledge tie in to something happening in your students’ community?
Relating the subject matter to everyday applications – where might students see this in use in their lives?
Discussing or finding applications in current newsworthy issues and events – what’s happening in our world or in pop culture that can be tied into your content?

What are some of the ways that you add relevancy for your students? Share some of your best ideas in the comments below. We can all appreciate a great idea!

And… because we all want to be able to assess our own work, the answers to the quiz above are: 1. ≈ 25.13; 2. Sir Alexander Fleming; 3. Cenozoic; 4. Participle; 5. Hydrogen. How did you do?

The teacher from the movies

When you think of teacher movies, what comes to mind? Do you think of someone like Mr. Rooney in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off or Mr. Strickland in Back to the Future? Or do you go the way of someone more like Miss Riley in October Sky or Mr. Holland in Mr. Holland’s Opus? I’m sure that for all of you, there is a connection (and maybe even a feeling) that goes with each of those characters. You might even be able to think back on one of your own teachers who is a little like one of them.

I’m guessing that we would all agree that some of these teachers are a little stronger than others. But what is it that makes the “good” movie teachers? There are a few things that these great teachers have in common – they build connections with their students, the students and teachers have respect for each other, and the students are empowered. The “mean” teachers were focused on control and compliance, while the “good” teachers were focused on community and empowerment.

In creating the environments of the teachers that they make movies about, you build a relationship with your students where there is an understanding between the teacher and the students that we’re two people here. What those movie teachers understand is that classroom management has much more to do with the environment, and much less to do with the rules that are put in place.

One of my all-time favorite teacher movies is Dead Poets Society. Mr. Keating does some amazing things with his group of students. Many people think of the Oh Captain, My Captain! scene when they think of that movie, and trust me, it’s a great scene. But one of the more overlooked scenes is the soccer scene. Take just a moment to watch the scene:

The reason I love this scene so much is that it reminds me of the value of movement in learning – especially for students that are in the age group I work most directly with. Most of us know intrinsically that a fifth or sixth grader cannot sit still for much more than 10 minutes, and yet we consistently have classroom situations where students have to sit for double that – sometimes even more! One of the things that will make you a movie star teacher to your students is to allow them opportunities for movement consistently.

I always like to provide some kind of new idea, and here’s one that you could try tomorrow to add some movement in your class. Many people use the turn and talk consistently to get students to share their thinking. What if you take that a little bit further and do something new called musical chairs. Explain to students that you are going to play about 10 seconds of music, during that time they should move around the room and find a partner. When the music stops, they start talking about your question. After enough time for both students to respond, start the music again and let them find a new partner. It’s kind of like musical chairs for a turn and talk. Students get to share their thinking, and get their movement and wiggles out! The best of both worlds! After a couple of rounds, have them move back to their seats and continue.

Or you might try a walk and talk – take your class for a walk on our campus. Talk about your points while you walk. Occasionally stop and allow students to partner up for a pair share, then continue the walk.

With each of these strategies, you have to build to structure in advance. That’s what the movie star teacher would do. Set your expectations high, and then hold your students to them. Don’t let those 2 knuckleheads pull your expectations down to the mean. Let them know that you trust them to do the right thing, and then lay out what needs to happen. Most kids will not want to ruin something fun, even if they are a knucklehead!

Screen Shot 2018-01-18 at 8.44.13 PM — Just a few of the things that happen in the classrooms of the movie teacher!

So what movie teacher do you think of? What made that teacher great? Of not so great? What elements of the movie teacher do you try to bring to your classroom? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

The best time to innovate

Earlier this month, I was looking at a blog by John Spencer, one of the authors of Launch, which is all about design thinking and integrating creative thinking into classroom activities. The gist of the post was to give some ideas for a creative way to spend the last few days before winter break instead of showing a movie. You can check that post out here: Ten Creative Alternatives to Showing Movies Before the Break.

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I’m sure you have noticed, when kids are given the opportunity to truly get immersed in an activity that they are interested in and motivated by, they get into this flow state where time just seems to fly. Once in that flow state, they don’t want to do anything else.

As we continue to move towards more innovative practices in the classroom, it is my hope that we are truly giving students the agency and choice in what and how they learn so that those flow states happen more and more often. At the same time, I know that there may be some among us that hesitate to dive into highly creative projects. Maybe you don’t feel like your that creative yourself, maybe you worry about how to motivate the kids, maybe you worry that you don’t have enough time.

Today I’m going to look at one of those factors – time. There have been many times when I have talked to teachers about some type of creative project that they are considering, and the response that I hear is “I just don’t think I have the time for this.” Oftentimes those hesitations come from the fear that we might not be able to meet all our standards if we go outside of the box, other times it seems overwhelming to think about a day, or a few days, doing something other than the typical classwork.

Here’s my list of 4 times when it’s a really great time to try something innovative:

Right before a break – Let’s be real, right before a break, no matter when it falls in the school year, whether it’s the three day weekend for Labor Day or President’s Day, a week for fall break or spring break, or a longer break right before winter break or summer break, we are all a little worn out. Students, teachers, parents, administrators – we’re all looking forward to the chance to take some time away from school to recharge. Often around breaks when I walk the halls, it’s a question of who is not showing a movie. If we say we don’t have time to innovate, but we do have time to show a movie, I would like to challenge that thinking. Before the next break, try something new and innovative with your class and just see how it goes. If you’re looking for suggestions, the post from John Spencer above contains some really great activities that could be done in any classroom.
The end of a unit – What happens when you wrap up a unit on a Wednesday or Thursday. Do you dive right into the next unit, or do you do some sort of activity as a pallet cleanser? That day or two after a unit could be a great opportunity to try out something innovative. It gets you and your students out of the routine, which is a great way to increase thinking or learning. Since I’m a runner, I think about it from the perspective of a training plan. When I’m working up to my next half marathon, there are days where I will go for long, steady state runs to increase strength. More often than not though, my pace is slower on those days. A couple times a week I may work in a shorter session where I am doing interval training (moments where I mix some sprints in with some regular or low speed running). While I generally run more miles on the long run days, I’m more tired after an interval training session. I’ve taxed my muscles in a different way. After a few weeks of the interval runs, I find that my pace on my longer runs starts getting faster. Our brain can act like a muscle at times. When you teach in a different way, you create new pathways in the brains of your students, which allows new learning to happen, and new ideas to stick!
The first day back from a break – So often on that first day back, your students are pumped to be back. They are excited to see you, to see their classmates, and to get into the learning. Instead of coming back and going right into the typical routine, switch it up. Try some form of creative learning. The fun that goes with these types of creative activities will have the kids begging for more!
Any old time… Just because! – A while back I was reading a post – I honestly can’t remember who it was by – and the author said that the best time to try something innovative is right now. When we get the desire to try something new, we are often tempted to wait for the better time – the end of the grading period, the start of the next semester, or next year. The main point of the post though, was that if you believe that an activity would benefit your students, don’t you owe it to them to do it right now? It was an idea that made sense to me. The next time you see something that would be new and better for your students, go for it. Don’t wait for later, just dive in. What’s the worst that happens? If it doesn’t go well, you’ve got a great way to model growth mindset. And if it does, you’ve just created an amazing learning opportunity for your students!

So, what are your thoughts? Do you have any additional ideas of when it’s a good time to do something innovative for your class? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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The value of communication and collaboration

Lombardi - Work Together

About a month ago, one of my posts (What are you learning?) made reference to the National Association of Colleges and Employers Job Outlook report. I want to come back to that report today and look at the top 6 items on the report. As I look over the list it keeps bringing me back to one of my favorite questions when thinking about learning in our classrooms: What do our kids need in order to be successful in the future? This list can help serve as a guide.

NACE Attributes Employers Seek

Think about some of the most successful companies in our world today. Whatever the company is, if they are trying to be innovative in their field, they are focused on creating the best products possible for their customers. What does work look like for those innovative companies? I’m guessing that they are concerned about their teams of employees working together to create innovation.

Think for a second about your best lessons. How many of you can claim that every aspect of your best lesson for your students was imagined, planned, created, and developed completely by you? I know when I was still in the classroom, I was constantly collaborating with other teachers to improve my lessons, to add cool new ideas, or to make the learning experience even better for the learners in my classroom. I’m guessing that most (if not all) of you will say the same thing.

If we know that innovative companies seek communication and collaboration, and we know that we achieve our own best work through communication and collaboration, and the data from the most recent NACE Jobs Outlook report shows that employers value communication and collaboration, what are we doing in our classroom to explicitly teach our students how to communicate and collaborate? Paul Solarz, the author of Learn Like a Pirate has an entire chapter on peer collaboration. He shared lots of great ideas of how he creates a collaborative environment for his students.

Early in the chapter he talks about the importance of establishing classroom expectations and norms as a group, where all members of the class have their input in those norms. As you build in and truly teach collaboration skills, students will take ownership of those skills and will help one another to be better collaborators, letting each other know what they need from one another so that all can be successful.

Even with the opportunity to teach collaboration, the only way students will be able to learn and grow in this skill is through the opportunity to practice. Be looking for as many ways as possible to integrate collaboration and communication into your lessons.

And something has to be said about the classroom environment in order to create an environment that is conducive to communication and collaboration. Think about when you are working with colleagues, how do you choose to sit? Based on my informal observations visiting team PLC time in our building, generally we sit in a group in such a way that everyone can see everyone else. Students need to be able to do the same when they have time to collaborate. Rows aren’t conducive to communication and collaboration. Seats where students are far away from their nearest neighbor don’t facilitate collaboration either.

Many of the classrooms in our school have created opportunities and spaces for students to be able to sit together and collaborate, whether it’s a small spot on the floor, a rug area, creative seating options, a couch, or high tables and chairs, there are places where students can sit together and collaborate in the classroom. To take it a step further, how many of you have considered not having a seating chart in your classroom? A true flexible seating environment can be created where there are norms about students choosing the space that they are able to do their best space. And as a safety net for you, you can always set the norm that poor choices by students may result in the teacher asking the student to make a different choice. Think about the way you would empower the learners in your room to be able to select their own seat each and every day in order to meet their learning needs!

I want to conclude this post sharing some pictures from offices for Google and Apple, two of the most innovative companies around today, as well as one of my favorite shared working space, Starbucks. I’m not saying that our classrooms need to necessarily look like these (they’re a bit extreme), but we might want to think about how spaces like this create environments where employees are able to put out amazing and innovative products. We also should realize that some of the students will be doing work in environments like this in their future. What can we do in our classrooms today to help them be successful in their future?

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So what are your thoughts? Have you had success teaching students communication and collaboration explicitly? What has worked for you? What concerns do you have about integrating more collaboration and communication into your classroom? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

What are you learning?

“What are you learning?” It’s one of my favorite questions to ask kids when I am visiting a classroom, or when I see them working in the hallway. More often than not, their answers will relate to the specific content they are working on in that moment. The reality is though that they are learning so much more than the math, social studies, science, or whatever the content area may be.

We ask so much of our students when we put them to work. We expect them to pay attention in class, to be engaged, to think critically, to work collaboratively. Just think about how much work we are expecting our students to do. All in the service of learning and growing.

Your role in the learning process of our students is so important. They need us every day in order to learn, grow, and find success. It’s such an important job!

But stop for a minute to think – when someone asks you what you teach, what is your answer? Do you respond with your content area? Do you respond with your grade level?

I’m going to share something with you that you may not like to hear though – the content is irrelevant. That may be an uncomfortable thing to think about, but let me share with you why I believe this. In my role, I get to walk into a lot of classrooms, I get to see a lot of lessons, and I get to see a LOT of GREAT TEACHING! But in my role, I also get to notice some things that as a classroom teacher you might not get to see.

This year I saw a 6^th grade science class doing a lab activity that was identical to something my daughter did as a 2^nd grader. Even the paper that went with the lab looked the same. The teacher who was leading the lesson was teaching as though the students had never seen anything like this before. I asked one of the students about the lab, and he shared that he did the same activity when he was in elementary school. I can’t imagine the depth of knowledge on this activity was as great as the teacher might have believed since the student had already done it. Another time I was visiting a junior high classroom and I saw a lesson on scientific method being taught in an 8^th grade classroom as though the students had never seen anything like it before – it was identical to one I had just seen in a 5^th grade classroom. I know that when I taught 6^th grade, my scientific method lesson was very similar as well. Where’s the rigor in a lesson that is being taught to our students so many different times in basically the same way? Where’s the depth of knowledge?

If the content was truly relevant for our learners, we wouldn’t be wasting our student’s time teaching them things that they already know as if they have never seen it. I know what some of you are probably thinking though – maybe some of the students forgot! Maybe there are students that weren’t in our district who have never done this before! I’m going to push back on those ideas – what about the students who didn’t forget? What about the students who were here, did this exact activity, and are bored out of their mind? Even if the lesson is fun or one of our favorites, how are we serving the learning of our students? A good formative assessment at the beginning of the unit may lead you to realize that what you were planning to teach isn’t valuable because the students already know it.

And that’s the thing, the most valuable commodity we have is time. In education we are always asking for more of it. One of the biggest complaints I hear from teachers about innovation and change is we don’t have enough time to do new things. If we can gain some of our time back by not teaching a lesson of material that our students already know as if they have never heard it before, we might be able to do something new and innovative. Instead of continuing on that lab that a student did in elementary school, what could we have our students do that would develop creativity? How could we let our students communicate the knowledge they already have? Is there some way they could work collaboratively? The image below is one that I have seen shared on Twitter by so many people, I can’t even begin to guess exactly where it came from, but it’s an important reminder of the things that our students need to know for their future.

6 Cs of Learning

If the image above isn’t enough for you, what about some research? According to the National Association of Colleges and Employees in a recent job outlook survey, reported in 2016, these are the top 5 attributes that employers are looking for: 1) Leadership; 2) Ability to work in a team; 3) Communication skills (written); 4) Problem-solving skills; 5) Communication skills (verbal).

As I was researching this post, one of the other topics that kept coming up is the ability to apply knowledge and skills in real-world settings.

Hopefully, like me, you notice that none of the things listed in any of this research is specific to content knowledge. That should challenge us to think a little differently about the question what do you teach. I think the answer to what do you teach should probably be something like this: “I am teaching my students to have strong dispositions of learning.”

Our students don’t need to be able to recite back the scientific method. They need to be able to use the process to solve problems they encounter in the world. Our students don’t need to be able to solve stand-alone multiplication or division problems. They need to be able to apply those math skills in real world situations. If this is what our students need, what does that do to the way you might plan a lesson? Assess your students? Create a project?

I would love to hear your thoughts. How do you get your students to have the dispositions for learning? What would you do if you found that several of the kids in your class had already done the activity you had planned for today? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

#IMMOOC Week 2 – The networked learner/leader

Recently I wrote a post about my takeaways from the book The Innovators by Walter Isaacson. One of the big takeaways that I had from that book was the fact that the innovations that led to a digital revolution did not happen in several giant leaps. Instead, innovation takes place through little steps that are layered on top of each other. In addition, most of those tiny steps did not occur because of one person. When you think of the iPhone, who do you think of? For me the first name to come to mind is Steve Jobs. And while he was an important part of the process that made the smartphone a marketable thing for consumers, that idea would never have been possible without the work of so many other innovators in the digital revolution. Names like Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing, Robert Noyce, Grace Hopper, and Bill Gates (along with many other innovators) all made it possible for the iPhone to be the powerful tool that I carry around in my pocket every day.

Not too long ago, I was at #DitchCon2017, put on by Matt Miller. During his keynote, Matt put a picture of the Twitter logo on the screen and said “This little bird saved my teaching career.” As educators, we all get into our own little silos and forget that there are lots of other people doing the same work as us. If we forget to lift our heads up and look around, we may miss someone else’s awesome idea that could make learning for our students new AND better.

I have been on Twitter since January of 2010. Initially I joined in order to follow athletes, pop-culture icons, politicians, and people of that nature. One day while I was driving to school, I was listening to Morning Edition on NPR and I heard a story about #Satchat, and I saw a totally new purpose for Twitter (in fact, the first 3 educators that I followed were Brad Currie, Scott Rocco, and Billy Krakower, the co-founders of #Satchat). Suddenly I realized that Twitter wasn’t just a way to absorb information from pop-culture, instead it was a way for me to learn and grow.

Twitter became my new go to for learning. I began seeking out ways to leverage hashtags to find ideas that could impact the learning in my classroom. I participated in Twitter chats and learned from educators who were just as passionate as me. Sometimes I just lurked and listened, other times I dove in and shared my ideas.

Today, I talk to everyone I know about how we can use Twitter (or Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Voxer, etc.) to learn and grow in our own ways. Once I started to participate more in Twitter chats, I began to grow followers. The more followers I had, the more I had to think about what was really valuable information to share with them. I became very intentional in the types of things I post (not that I’d never post a silly gif or my thoughts on the Cubs or Colts). This has led me to seek out high quality information to share, and causes me to be constantly reading, learning, and getting better at what I do.

We all would agree that collaboration helps us all grow. Sometimes it’s great to collaborate with that colleague down the hall, but sometimes it’s awesome to be able to collaborate with someone on the other side of the world. As Couros says in The Innovator’s Mindset, “Isolation is often the enemy of innovation.”

Going back to my lessons from Isaacson’s The Innovators, the best innovations that we will make as educators are not going to happen in giant leaps and bounds. They’re going to happen when we continue to layer our own ideas on top of the other innovators that we are learning from, and we can create truly mind-blowing, amazing, awesome learning experiences from our students! Networking is one of the best ways that I know of that we can do that!

A cool new app (for me)

I recently came across a hashtag on Twitter that I found pretty interesting: #PersonalizedPD. As I was going through some of the tweets with this hashtag, I saw this tweet:

I have my first #PersonalizedPD badge of the year! Can't wait to get more 😄 #AMCMS #BeTheSpark #csisdchat pic.twitter.com/K8MGElBqZ6

— Jeff Mann (@Mann4Edu) August 29, 2017

It caught my attention for a couple of different reasons – first there was the #PersonalizedPD idea that I was interested in. Second, there was some gamification to the learning that was happening which sounds cool and potentially highly motivating. I decided to send Jeff Mann a reply to the tweet saying that I had a few questions. Later in the afternoon I got a response from him asking if I was on Voxer. I had heard of it, but never set up an account, but I really wanted to learn more about the Superheroes of AMCMS.

Twitter is great for learning in a lot of ways, but if you want to be able to have a real conversation with someone, it’s not ideal. Just like a text chat, you can only type so fast, and you lack the tone of voice that goes with a true conversation. Plus you’re limited to 140 characters in a tweet. So, I downloaded Voxer, set up an account, and told Jeff I was in business.

Basically, Voxer works like a walkie talkie, but also has the ability to send text, photos, and videos within the app. After setting up my account, I was sitting on my deck while Jeff was driving home from school in Texas, and we had a conversation about the Superheroes of AMCMS. At the end of the conversation, he asked me to send him my email address, and he was going to email me some additional resources for continued learning.

While this chance encounter was cool, I could see Voxer being used within a school building for a group chat with members of a PLC team, or having the account of your teammate to be able to chat. I know we’re all comfortable and used to texting, but I noticed that the back and forth that Jeff and I were able to have happened much faster than trying to text back and forth with one another.

Do you have any ideas for additional ways that you could use Voxer within your classroom? What about with your colleagues? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

The innovators

I’ve recently been reading a book called The Innovators by Walter Isaacson. If you don’t know anything about Isaacson, he’s written biographies about Ben Franklin, Henry Kissinger, Albert Einstein, and Leonardo Da Vinci, but several of his other books are more about groups of people who have played a role in some way – one book, titled American Sketches, is about some of the great leaders and creative thinkers of our society.

The Innovators has the subtitle “How a group of hackers, geniuses, and geeks created the digital revolution.” This book caught my attention for a couple of reasons – first, I’ve always been something of an early adopter of technology. I love to check out new and exciting innovations. A second reason that this caught my attention is that I’m always curious about how people made the leaps to take us from the earliest computers (devices that took up entire rooms in the basement of college buildings or at military bases), to the technology that I can hold in my hand every time I pick up my iPhone.

Innovation is something that we often think of in terms of those big leaps. When I was in sixth grade, my elementary school was renovated, and one of the classrooms was converted into a computer lab. The first time we walked into the computer lab as a class, we saw a room with about 30 IBM computers. The only thing that I remember being able to do on those computers was a keyboarding program that began the process of teaching me to type. For me, this felt like a HUGE innovation. Little did I know how much more our students would be able to do in the future.

The chapter that I am reading right now is all about software, and one of the big names in the development of computer software was Bill Gates. Early in the chapter is a quote from him about what an innovator is:

An innovator is probably a fanatic, somebody who loves what they do, works day and night, may ignore normal things to some degree and therefore can be viewed as a bit unbalanced.

Reading about Gates, and many of the others who appear in the book, I can see how this definition certainly applies to innovators. Here’s the thing though – I think there are times that you could substitute the word teachers for innovators and that definition would still work (I know my friends think I’m a little unbalanced to spend so much of my time with 10, 11, and 12 year olds!). We are all something of a fanatic about what we do – we’re fanatics for our kids. We love them, we want to help them learn and grow, and we want them to be successful. I know that our efforts to get there make us all feel a little unbalanced at times.

One of the things that I have taken away from the book The Innovators is that the transition to the digital revolution was NOT made up of several giant leaps. Instead, the innovations that have led to the amazing technology that I am able to carry in my pocket has happened because of little steps layered on top of one another. And more often than not, those innovations were not made by any one person. People such as Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing, Robert Noyce, Grace Hopper, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Larry Page (along with so many others) all played important roles in the digital revolution, but the steps of each of these people built on the ideas of others.

We as teachers need to remember that as fanatics, it may not always be easy to get our students to learn and grow as quickly as we want them to. They may not be immediately successful, but if we continue to innovate in our teaching, if we continue to try to reach kids in new and exciting ways, we are going to be able to reach more of them. We also need to remember the value in teamwork for our students to learn. Just as so many of the innovators mentioned above found success by building on the ideas of others, you may find success with a student through strategies others share with you. Whether it be a teammate, your PLC team, someone down the hall, or any one of the multitude of other people in the building, there are others who might have an idea that helps you get that kid to move forward.

What are some of the things that you are fanatical about? Have you ever tried something new that seemed to be the key to reaching that kid? Share you experiences in the comments below!

What is school for?

Put yourself back in one of your childhood classrooms – at the beginning of the day what was it that your teacher always said? If it’s anything like my childhood experience, it was something like “Good morning class.” Then what would happen? The whole class would respond “Good morning…” And what happened if you weren’t loud enough, or respectful enough?

I think we all have lived that situation – and I may even have been guilty of fulfilling the teacher role (as recently as the first day of school… THIS YEAR!!!). But here’s the question, what are we teaching with that call and response open to the day? It’s mostly about teaching obedience. Traditionally, the common school was built to prepare children to become the factory workers of the future. Implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, schools taught students to be obedient, to hold a little back, to do the work assigned and nothing more.

Our job is not to prepare students for something. Our job is to help students prepare themselves for anything. So that brings us to the bigger question: What is school for? While some of our students may consider a role in manufacturing, the factories of today are way different than the ones of the early to mid 1900s that led to this factory model of education. Many of our students will not be heading down the path of manufacturing, so that factory model of school definitely doesn’t apply. If you believe that innovation is going to keep happening (and why wouldn’t it?), then we’re preparing our students for an ever changing world! That is so different from the traditional model of school as a factory. In an excellent TED Talk by Seth Godin, he gives 8 examples of things school should be doing:

Homework during the day, lectures at night – flipped learning
Open note and open book all the time – if it’s important enough to memorize, it’s also ok to have to look it up
Access – any course at any time – programs like Kahn or MOOCs can achieve this
Precise focused education – not a one size fits all model
No multiple choice – life isn’t multiple choice
Experiences instead of test scores – learning is focused on the experiences that take place inside (and outside) of our classroom
End of compliance as an outcome – while compliance may be needed at times, it shouldn’t be our end goal
Cooperation instead of isolation – the ability to work with others

I could go into more detail on each of these, but I can’t do any better than what Godin did in his talk, so if you’d like to know more about any of these things, check out that TED Talk here.

So here’s my answer to the question “What is school for?”: I want our students to be equipped to go out into the world and make something that has an impact on their lives and the lives of others. And I want them to know that if they get stuck, to ask for help and support. While we might not always have all the answers, hopefully we can help our student to find the answers.

I’m curious to hear your answers – for you, what is school for? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

The View from 518

Category: Engagement