Teaching | Betchablog

7Feb/1215

Be Better

I want our schools to be better.

I believe that the biggest improvement we can make to our schools is to be fussier about who we allow to teach in them.

I look forward to the day where the teaching profession is non-unionised, and underperforming teachers who have lost the passion and spark that our students so deserve are able to be relieved of their duty.

I hope we find ways to identify those teachers who cannot teach, or have lost interest in doing it well, or who see what they do as a paycheck rather than a calling, and find ways to respectfully but firmly move them on, as they have no place in today's classrooms.

I want to be a part of a teaching profession where you need to reinvent yourself every year, where having interests and skills outside "the system" make you better at what you do, and where we don't confuse "20 years of experience" with "1 year of experience, repeated 20 times".

I want an educational system where students experience the joy of learning from teachers who are still themselves joyful about learning.

I want my own children to be taught by passionate, caring teachers who lose sleep at night wondering how to be better at what they do. And I want to be one of those teachers for other people's children.

I think we owe these things to the next generation.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Tagged as: qualityteaching, rant, teaching 15 Comments

16Sep/117

Push Me, Pull Me

It’s an interesting sign of how this connected world we live in actually works when I see people coming back to revisit an idea that was floated months earlier, still mulling it over and willing to come back and re-clarify things again in their own head, which in turn helps others (like me) to re-clarify things in mine. I'm referring to a post called Unlearning, Relearning, Learning by Graham Wegner, who was in turn responding to an earlier post written on this blog back in May this year.

The conversation had basically turned to the idea of how people learn. Graham referred to another post from Dean Groom, where Dean talked about the idea of people being able to learn on demand, when they need it, by accessing the wealth of available online resources that are scattered across the Internet, produced by the millions of members of the online community. This mass-sharing has produced what Dean referred to as "the scattered manual", where the instructions for doing pretty much anything can be found and reassembled in order to learn, if only you have the skills to do so. I hadn’t heard that idea of the “scattered manual” before, but I really like it because that’s pretty much exactly what it is… a collective knowledge of many people scattered right across the network. When one has the skills and ability to decode, reassemble, aggregate the parts of the “manual”, then that elusive “independent learning” becomes a real possibility for anyone who wants (and knows how) to get it.

I think there are two very different and distinct aspects of learning something… one is obviously the learning, and that seems to be a “pull” activity initiated by the learner. Learners need to assume responsibility to pull information to themselves when they feel they need it.

The other aspect is teaching, and that seems more like a “push” activity, where information is pushed towards the learner, usually by a “teacher”, or someone who already has the knowledge, skills or understandings that the learner does not yet have.

As much as we talk about reinventing education by doing away with “teaching” in favour of “learning” (usually as a reaction against the industrial model of education where teachers taught and students were supposed to just absorb it, and in doing so restore learning to its rightful place) I think we need to be careful that we don’t push the pendulum too far the other way and marginalise the act of teaching altogether.

My feeling is that good teachers know when to actively teach, and when to allow students to independently learn. Good teachers know when to push and when to allow pull. They know when to say to a student “this is how you do it”, versus saying “you need to go away and think about this for yourself”. It’s not that Teaching should take precedence over Learning, or that Learning is somehow less tainted with the stink of the 20th Century than Teaching, but rather, we need to know where the balance point is, in various situations, for different students, and apply that balance dynamically so that every student is always right there on the edge of their Zone of Proximal Development. A learner's reach should always exceed their grasp, but only by the appropriate amount, and perhaps the teacher's role is to keep that gap at the appropriate amount.

As a teacher, I want to have the wisdom to know when to say to my learners (including when these learners happen to be other adults), “You seem to be struggling, let me help you”, and conversely when to say “I will not do this for you, as it only deprives you of the opportunity to learn it for yourself.”

I don’t think you should ever do for someone what they can and should be able to do for themselves. The “scattered manual” exists so readily that to deprive learners from the opportunity, and in doing so absolve them from the responsibility, to learn for themselves just shortchanges everybody in the long run.

Popularity: 19% [?]

Tagged as: learning, pd, teaching, wegner 7 Comments

24Mar/112

The Right Direction

As a technology integration specialist my job is to help other teachers learn more about technology, but the real spillover is that I get to help other teachers to learn more about all sorts of stuff. Because of this I've come to a much better understanding of what it means to be a lifelong learner, to find true joy in learning for learning's sake, and to be curious about pretty much everything. I love learning, and I find it difficult to understand why others sometimes appear not to.

Many schools espouse the values of lifelong learning, but not all have teachers who live those values on a daily basis. We have a new principal in our school this year, and like all management changes it often comes with a great deal of conjecture about what might change, what new ideas will be put in place. Over the last few weeks I've been able to get an insight into our new boss and what's important to him, and to get a feel for where our school might be heading over the next few years. And for many reasons, I'm excited about it.

In particular, I was pleased to discover that I'm working for a guy who openly states that...

‎Learning to be a teacher is like all learning: it doesn’t occur in an easy linear fashion. All of us ‎are in the business of continual improvement.

Teachers are responsible to take charge of their professional learning.‎

You'd think that such statements are obvious, but so few leaders will actually say it. What a breath of fresh air.

Popularity: 13% [?]

Tagged as: pd, teacherpd, teaching 2 Comments

9Jan/112

Beautiful Growth

Pat's Cactus I was pottering about in the garden tonight and thought about a little story that I wanted to share.

If you teach long enough you eventually collect a whole lot of really lovely stories about the kids you teach. Every teacher can probably tell you about those lovely moments where a student has said or done something that makes everything worthwhile. A little note at the end of the year, a quiet word about how you've made a difference to them, or just doing something that reminds you of why you became a teacher.

Quite a few years ago I worked in a catholic boys school in Sydney where I was the head of IT. I happened to have my own office (in the same room as the servers of course) but I tried to make it a bit homely by bringing in a few plants to brighten it up. Not being the greenest of thumbs, I killed most of them. I'd replace them, but then kill the replacements as well. As a gardener, I really don't have the knack of it.

Like many teachers, I had a group of kids who liked to hang around me. Because of my role as the geeky IT guy, the kids that liked to hang around always seemed to be the slightly geeky, slightly eccentric kids that have lots of personality, and I really enjoyed their company. Many of them would just come to my office at lunchtimes and hang out. One of them, a boy named Patrick, often remarked on my appallingly bad gardening skills and noted how I seemed to kill every plant I had. I had to agree and we had a good laugh about it.

One day, Pat came to my office and presented me with an unexpected gift. It was a small plastic punnet of baby cactus plants, small enough to fit in my hand. He jokingly told me that he wanted to give me a cactus because they require almost no attention and they were probably the only thing I wouldn't kill. We had a laugh about it and it sat on my desk in pride of place, right next to my computer monitor.

Well, time marches on, and Pat eventually graduated and left the school. I eventually left the school too and moved on to other jobs, other schools. I took my cactus with me though, and put it in the garden at home where it actually started to flourish and do ok.

That was many years ago. Here I am, 10 years, 4 schools, 3 houses and 1 divorce later, and I still have my little "Pat Cactus". Except it's not so little anymore. It's grown. Like we all do. I've grown. I'm sure Pat's grown. The "little cactus" has grown and split and been repotted many times now. It now fills several large pots and a few small ones. It gets stronger and greener and every time I look at it I think about how special it was to be given something like that by a student and how special it is that it still grows stonger every day. I hope that's symbolic of many things.

In what I think is a rather nice twist to the story, I discovered recently that Pat lives in the same area as me, in fact only a few streets away. So, a little while ago, I took some of the smaller offshoots of the now-large cactus, planted them in a small pot and took them down to Pat's house as a gift for him, along with a note that said "I told you I wouldn't kill it!". It was my way of closing the loop, and, symbolically at least, keeping that wonderful circle of life going.

The story means a lot to me, because as teachers we start lots of ripples that we might never get to see build to waves and break on distant shores. As the cactus continues to flourish, I think about the hundreds of kids I've had the great joy to teach over the years and hope that they are flourishing just as well. Even if I've only ever had one student give me the gift of a plant that has grown and flourished, I'd like to think that the many students I've taught over the years have all given me the gift of knowing they've grown and flourished.

Thanks kids.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Tagged as: cactus, gifts, teaching 2 Comments

25Jun/104

Finding the Right Model for ICT PD

I guess many readers of this blog would know that I work as an ICT Integrator at a large independent girls' school in Sydney. Large chunks of my day are spent working with our teachers and our students to help them understand a little more about technology and how it might be used to make teaching and learning more engaging and effective. Of course, teachers always seem to be very busy, and one of the difficulties in trying to deliver some form of ongoing PD is simply getting them to find the time to do so. I've tried a number of different models for delivering PD; some work quite well, others not so much. It usually comes down to finding time, and making it meaningful.

In case it's of any use to you, I thought I'd share an email that I sent to all the teachers in our junior school (R-6) yesterday. It's an outline of how I plan to be delivering ICT professional development to them next term. I've found that this model seems to work best for our staff, and it seems to give the most effective results. I think this is because it's delivered in a real situation that is authentic to them and also places a good deal of responsibility onto the staff to embrace the use of ICTs for themselves. (one of my beliefs is that you should never do for somebody what they can, and should, be able to do for themselves) Perhaps most importantly, our teachers seem to like this PD model and they seem quite enthusiastic about what we're doing together... so this is what I said to them...

Dear teachers,

Although the focus of what I do here at PLC is technology integration, it has always worked so much better when you allow me to help you link this technology integration directly into the things you plan to teach as part of your day to day activities... in this way, the use of technology can richly support and extend the learning for the students. Over the past couple of years I feel that we have all worked together to make technology less of an “add-on” to the curriculum, and it has become more of an embedded tool for helping engage and enrich our students. Together, some of the techniques and strategies we have tried in the Junior School over the past few years includes podcasting, blogging, live webcasting, digital mapping, digital storytelling, web 2.0 tools, video news reports, social networking, manipulating digital images, and so on. In the process, your students have come into contact with a wide range of technology tools that are an increasingly important part of the world in which they live.

In working with the Junior School staff, I have tried a number of different models for providing professional development in these tools, from offering before and after school workshops, holding lunchtime sharing sessions, shared planning time, and so on. With the incredibly hectic schedules that most of you have, some of these PD models have been more successful than others.

Starting in Semester 2, all staff will be required to undertake specific ICT professional development each semester. In the Junior School, we all agree that the best way to deliver this PD to you is in your actual classroom situation.

The most successful PD model for our teachers seems to be when we create time for collaborative planning time with the ICT Integrator. Under this PD model, I meet with each year group three times per term in order to plan and facilitate the integration of ICT into a classroom project. We meet early in the term to plan a unit of work together, meet again midterm to monitor the progress of that work, and again at the end to evaluate and assess the work. Of course, if you need extra assistance with delivering an ICT project then I am more than happy to come into your classes and assist, or to help out with computer class time, but I feel that the core of my ICT integration support is best done by assisting you to develop the skills and knowledge you need to deliver your own classwork with a rich ICT component. The recent Year 2 “Great Inventions” project is a good example of how I see this working.

Starting in Term 3, we will resume this PD planning model that we’ve used before as it seems to prove the most successful with Junior School teachers. After looking at the Junior School timetable, I’ve listed some suggested dates below that we could use for meetings in weeks 2B, 5A and 8B of next term. These all take advantage of times when specialist teachers have your students. Please take a look and let me know ASAP if there are problems with any of these dates and offer some alternate dates that are more suitable for you in these weeks.

(I've removed the actual dates listed here, as they aren't relevant to anyone reading this post...)

Ideally, in our first meeting (Week 2B) we will look at a task or theme or topic you plan to teach that ICT might lend itself to, and then we can come up with a plan for how we might integrate ICT into that unit. We will look at modifying or creating activities for the students that leverage ICT skills, and if necessary learn those skills ourselves. I would encourage you to think about how we can make the tasks we design highly student centric, providing your students with higher order thinking skills and open ended opportunities for creative thinking.

Our second meeting (Week 5A) will be to follow through on how the project is going, what can be improved, what can be tweaked, and also to ensure that any ICT skills are being delivered to both you and the students.

Our final meeting (Week 8B) will be used to evaluate and wrap up the project. We can evaluate it, look at what worked well, and work out how we might modify it to use (or not use) next year.

Hope these dates suit you. Looking forward to working closely with you all next term.

We've used this PD delivery model in the past and it seems to work quite well. I start by checking out the teachers' timetables and working out when they are free (mostly when their students are with specialist teachers for Music/PE/Languages/etc) and then I propose a list of times to meet, asking them to check and confirm that these times work for them.

Anyway, just thought I'd share that in case you can make use of it. My next few posts will be sharing some examples of how we have made this work in various classes.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Tagged as: ictpd, pd, teacherpd, teaching 4 Comments

26Mar/1011

Breaking the Cycle

I often ponder why systemic change is so hard to make happen in education. Systemic change (and by that I mean not just change from a handful of scattered individuals but an all-in buy-in to create change right across a school system) is never easy, but it seems to happen with far less resistance in fields outside of education. Schools just seem extra hard to shift.

I'm pretty optimistic about the positive effects that technology can bring to education. I really do believe that the school experience for both teachers and students can be made richer and more meaningful with the wise use of technology. Not just technology for technology's sake, but by making intelligent decisions about what and how our students learn and supporting that learning with appropriate technologies. I've never seen technology as an add-on, or just another thing that teachers need to somehow squeeze into their day, but rather as a deeply embedded set of tools, methodologies and skillsets that students should acquire in order to help them deal with the ongoing process of learning.

Students are, or at least should be, seen as "knowledge workers" in the truest sense of the term. They spend 13 years at school essentially learning, manipulating, constructing and deconstructing knowledge. Their "job" as a student is to create information products, and that could mean anything from conducting research and writing essays, through to creating sophisticated information products like multimedia presentations, collaborative group projects and persuasive written work. Unlike students in the past, today's students need to develop fluency in not just textual literacy, but also in the multiliteracies of new media, multimedia and social media. They need to develop the skills of taking information from multiple sources and turning it into usable knowledge. In the process of doing this they need to learn important things like how to express ideas clearly, how to influence an audience, how to work in teams, how to learn on demand, how to communicate, and so on.

In essence, none of this is all that new, and good teachers have always done these sorts of things with their students. But pervasive digital technology has an important role to play in how it happens. Take the research process for example. Asking students to research a topic is fundamental to what happens in most classrooms and most teachers have always included the requirement for research in the learning tasks they set. But digital technology opens up many new possibilities for how a student might tackle the research process. Use of live streams, real-time information, geotagged data, RSS feeds, socialgraph feeds, even advanced Googling, may all just be new ways to perform the age-old process of research, but if a teacher lacks basic fluency in these new tools themselves then how on earth can they help their students develop those skills. In my experience, most teachers have very little idea about most of these things, but don't take my word for it. Do your own poll... pick a random group of 20 teachers and ask them what they know about these things. I suspect the answer will be very few.

It worries me that so many teachers seems so woefully ill-equipped to provide these understandings for their students, but they simply can't provide what they don't have. I know a lot of wonderful, dedicated, well-meaning teachers who care deeply for their students, but the gap, technologically speaking, between what those students need and what their teachers are actually able to provide seems to be widening.

Before you flame me for making such a comment, can I make clear what I'm not saying. I'm not saying that these people are bad teachers. But I do think that the landscape of learning has experienced some deep and fundamental shifts in the last few years that many teachers have yet to even acknowledge, let alone adapt to.

In some cases, success can be the enemy of change. I once suggested to a very good teacher that there were a number of ways that technology could be used to enrich her lessons. Her reply was that every single one of her students achieved Band 6 results in the HSC (for those outside NSW, that's about as good as you can get), so why should she change anything? Trying to convince this teacher that technology might make the learning more engaging, more interesting, more rewarding was falling on deaf ears. By her standards the students were as successful as they could possibly be, so why mess with something that was obviously working? That's a hard argument to win, and makes it very difficult to convince someone to change what they do.

The other thing that makes it incredibly difficult to create systemic change in education is the "revolving door" nature of school. We all know what school looks like and how it works, because we all went to one. So when someone decides to become a teacher, it's usually right after spending 13 years in a school as a student, then spending 4 years at teachers college and then going right back into the same environment they just left a few years earlier. Of course they know what school is like! They probably feel like they've never left it. Whatever they might learn in teachers college has to fight for attention against the 13 years of day-in and day-out seeing their own teachers model what it means to "be a teacher". Even their lecturers at teachers college often come from a similar experience. It's incredibly hard to break the cycle. Education needs significant change and new approaches, but it's damn difficult to make that change happen when the steady stream of new teachers are just recycled students who feel like they already know what they need to know in order to be a teacher.

I've done a little bit of work with pre-service undergrad teachers, and to be honest I was quite shocked at their general level of apathy about the role that technology might play in their lives as future teachers. Not all of them mind you... there have been some good ones, but the number who openly admit to disliking technology or not relating to technology or not being interested in technology just scares me. These people will be going into classrooms as teachers in the next few years, and instead of being the much-needed catalyst for systemic change, many of them will just fall into the same old establishment that they experienced themselves during their own school life. No wonder it's so hard to make the shift happen!

Let me finish with a story. I was having lunch in a little café in Newtown a while back, and when the waitress came with the bill at the end of the meal I paid for it with my Teachers Credit Union credit card. When she looked at the card she remarked on it and asked me if I was a teacher. I told her yes, and she asked what I taught. I told her that was a technology integrator, to which she asked "What's that?"

I meet lots of people who have never heard of a technology integrator, so I replied with my standard answer. "I go into classrooms and work with students and teachers to help them use technology in more meaningful ways."

"Really?" she said. "I'm in third year at teachers college, and I've never heard of anything like that. So do kids use computers in schools much? Is technology, like, important?"

Third year teachers college. "Is technology, like, important?" This woman could be teaching your child in the next few years. OMG.

I'm sorry if I seem crotchety and snarky about this, but to me, this is just not good enough. How on earth will we ever break this cycle? We keep getting technologically clueless teachers incubating the next generation of technologically clueless teachers, and so on. We live in a world that is changing so rapidly, but the teaching profession seems to be stuck in some sort of endless Groundhog Day loop.

Image: 'Magic Revolving Door'
http://www.flickr.com/photos/32916905@N05/3074941476

Popularity: 4% [?]

Tagged as: breakthecycle, pd, teaching 11 Comments

14Jan/1014

Seeing with Different Eyes

Earlier this year, I had a visitor from South Africa contact me to ask if they could drop into the school at which I work while they were visiting Australia. She was were here as part of a study tour, and had heard some good things about PLC Sydney. In fact, her school in Johannesburg was a similar sort of school - independent, all girls, similar size - and she was interested in comparing a few ideas. Her school was also using IWBs extensively, and was keen to see how our staff were using them.

On the day she visited, we chatted for a while in the main staffroom, shared ideas about education and various resources for learning, before finally heading off on a little tour around the school.

Because I knew she was coming, I sent an email around asking for volunteers who wouldn't mind us coming into their classrooms. Several responded positively, so I organised to expect us to drop by their classrooms, however I wasn't specific about times since I didn't really know when we would be coming by... I suggested that they don't try and come up with anything special, just do whatever they would normally be doing at that time. I was pleased that I ended up with a cross section of year groups too, right from our very young students all the way up to some senior classes.

As we wandered about the school, we saw some wonderful teaching in action. My South African friend kept remarking on the quality of the teaching she was seeing, and how expertly these teachers appeared to get the best from their students. And she was right - there really were some wonderful things going on in these classrooms. There was great creativity, engagement, enthusiasm and learning taking place in every class we visited, and it was very obviously driven by the dedication, passion and commitment of these teachers.

Something that occurred to me later that day was that every one of these classrooms we visited were all of teachers who had not always been teachers. Every single one of them had done other things in their lives besides being a teacher. For example, the Year 2 teacher had originally trained as a teacher, but then spent several years as a professional opera singer with the Australian Opera. The Year 6 teacher used to be a corporate lawyer before deciding to retrain as a teacher. The maths teacher we visited in the high school was originally a computer programmer before he started his teaching career.

I thought about other great teachers I knew, and I could think of many examples of where this pattern seemed to consistently continue. The number of really good teachers I knew who had done other things outside of teaching was quite astounding. Whether they had originally done something else before discovering teaching, or whether they had started out as a teacher then left the profession to do something quite different before returning, the nexus between having out-of-school experience and being an outstanding teacher seemed incredibly obvious.

Before you jump on that last statement, I'm NOT saying that there is anything inherently wrong with teachers who have always been teachers. Not at all. There are many wonderful educators, many of whom have only ever been teachers, who do a fantastic job of teaching kids. But I'd still argue the case that to be a good teacher you need to have some level of broader interaction with the wider world, and whether that comes from involvement in something extra-curricula like being active in a club or organisation, having a part-time job, doing volunteer work, helping your spouse run their business, or even having your own small business "on the side", there really needs to be some other way of gaining exposure to the world outside the classroom.

I can't help thinking that teachers who have this wider experience beyond the classroom, who have had to deal with that dreaded "real world" we hear so much about, add an important extra dimension to what they bring to their classrooms and to the experiences they offer their students.

We can all recognise the value of work-experience programs for students, and most people would agree that it's important that kids get to see what life is like outside of school. But I'd like to see some sort of "real world experience program" for educators. Perhaps teachers need to do a work experience program just as much as students do? Maybe we need an arrangement where teachers can choose to spend part of a term away from the classroom every few years, working in "the real world"? It would help them understand the world their students are preparing for, it would give them a far more rounded perspective on life beyond the classroom, and overall I really think it would make them better teachers in the long run.

What do you think? Have you noticed the same thing with teachers who have done other things outside teaching? Would some sort of a teacher work experience program help make us better at what we do?

Image: 'Visionary'
http://www.flickr.com/photos/70405662@N00/1204637477

Popularity: 8% [?]

Tagged as: perspective, profession, realworld, teaching 14 Comments

7Dec/095

Staying On Message

Over the last year or so, I've been invited to present at a number of conferences, including a couple of keynotes. It's been an enriching experience, and one I enjoy immensely, although I do always end up feeling like I'm "a mile wide and and inch deep", to coin a well-worn phrase. I feel like I know quite a bit about a lot, but not a lot about anything. Despite the fact that I like to dabble in lots of stuff, I'm not sure I'm really a master of any of it.

This afternoon, I was asked to run some workshops for another Sydney school, to talk with some of their staff as they prepare to launch on a journey of 1:1 student computing next year. I took a workshop session with a small group for an hour, then presented a keynote to the whole staff for 45 minutes, followed by facilitating some planning and goal setting with a small group of teachers. I took an approach with today's sessions that I rarely do... I prepared nothing in advance. Normally when I present, I spend hours beforehand, collecting resources, planning what I want to say and figuring out the best way to say it. I assemble a presentation, set up a wiki page and so on, and go into the presentation fully prepared.

Today I didn't. I just rocked up, opened my Macbook and essentially asked, "what would you like to talk about?" There were reasons for that... It was partly because I wasn't given a lot of notice for these sessions, so I didn't have any time to put together something super organised. The other reason is that the brief was pretty open-ended, without a really firm outline for what needed to be covered. But mostly, I went in there ready to fly by the seat of my pants because I've come to understand that I can. I do actually have a good enough overall knowledge of technology, of education, of what I think is important, what I believe matters in education, and a pretty good mental catalog of what resources I have at my disposal. I find it relatively easy (and I quite prefer) to "make it up as I go along", just me and a web browser. Conversations can't be planned in advance, and I wanted these sessions to be more of a conversation than a lecture. In fact I started the workshop by opening a Google Doc, and asking the group "what do you want to talk about today?" Their responses - the differences between Web 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0, the use of blogs versus wikis versus discussion forums, and useful Web 2.0 tools for the classroom; these were not things I would have predicted in advance, but were apparently what this groups wanted or needed. We explored a number of other ratholes, including an exploration of Wikipedia and how it works, along with some simple ideas for developing a PLN. I thought the session went well, and the feedback was positive.

But it was during the keynote that I actually learned a lot about myself. Again, I didn't prepare anything in advance, but simply had the topic "ICT in my school: Lessons learned" as a starting point. My reasoning for not preparing was that I live this stuff every day... I shouldn't need to "prepare a talk" to give this talk.

Having listened to a lot of presenters at a lot of conferences over the last few years, I've noticed that many of them have a consistent message. A theme. A common thread. Some, even almost a mantra. There are influential people within this ed-tech sphere that have their own important message to share, and they become almost synonymous with their message. They talk about all sorts of stuff, but they manage to stay "on message" all the time. I'd often wondered to myself, as I shotgunned around all sorts of interesting but largely unrelated ICT topics, "What's Chris Betcher's consistent message?" What is the one thing that underpins all the other stuff I'm interested in? It's easy to be a dabbling dilettante and be interested in lots of different things, but it's harder to have some sort of consistent structure that it all hangs off. I had no idea what mine was...

And here's what I learned about myself as I talked to this group today with no particular agenda. I do have a message. There were consistent themes I found myself coming back to over and over, themes that are really at the core of what I believe education is all about.

Trust in people. I honestly believe that, by and large, most people are good people with right intentions and will naturally do the right thing if given a choice. This belief has implications on how you treat those around you - colleagues, students and others. It affects how you manage your schools, how you build community, how you interact with your students, how you design learning tasks. My basic belief in people permeates every decision I make in every interaction with others. I was asked by a teacher today for strategies to help deal with kids in a 1:1 environment, and my answer, without even thinking about it, was "Build trust". I don't think it's the answer she was looking for, but I honestly believe that it was the best answer I could possibly offer. Trust your students. Trust that they will do the right thing because the work you give them is interesting enough and they want to do their best at it. Trust that they would much rather do the right thing than the wrong thing. I know that there are many who think this is a Pollyanna attitude; that you should plan for the worst rather than budget for the best, but that has never worked for me.

Have high expectations. I also believe that kids are far more capable than we usually give them credit for, and that by and large we present them with fairly small-minded tasks that require fairly small-minded efforts. We ask them to write a few paragraphs when they are capable of writing a short novel. We give them tasks that are too uninteresting, too unchallenging, too mundane, and we too often short-change their potential to be great. We need to set the bar high, expecting greatness from them, pushing them to exceed the capacity they, and we, often mistakenly believe they have. Trust that they will meet your expectations. I always expect the best, especially from kids, and I usually get it.

Understand what a teacher is supposed to do. I don't, and have never, believed that the role of a teacher is simply to "teach" students by imparting a fixed body of knowledge. We are so much more than that. Our job is to know our students well enough that we can find interesting things for them to do, things that help them see their world in ways that they have never thought about, then provide them access to the resources, tools and ideas they need to explore those interesting things, getting out of their way enough that we don't impede their own natural progress, yet available enough to help them when they require it. I truly believe this is my job. I'm not there to do it for them. I'm not there to watch them fail. I'm there to connect them and their interests to a world of possibilities they have not yet discovered for themselves.

I don't think teaching is all that difficult, and I suspect we usually overcomplicate it with a whole lot of stuff that just clouds the issue. There are standards and outcomes and requirements for graduating, sure. But the real focus of education is pretty simple. Help your kids find their passions. Trust that they can. Believe that they will. And get out of their way while they do it.

That's my mantra. That's my message.

Image: 'Slide'
http://www.flickr.com/photos/11705469@N07/2047419687

Popularity: 2% [?]

Tagged as: believe, lesson, mantra, message, teaching, workshop 5 Comments

28Oct/091

Finding New Things to do with an IWB

The following post was originally written as a reponse to a thread about interactive whiteboards on the www.iwbrevolution.com Ning. One of the thread participants there made a statement about needing to see IWBs used in new ways.

I'm interested (read desperate) to see the revolutionary value adding aspects. I have an IWB, I love using my IWB, but I need to grasp the ideas and strategies that move people to describe it as a 'revolution' in learning. Show me an idea that is actually new!!!

While I appreciate where he's coming from, I think the question is somewhat flawed. In responded to the post, I found myself "thinking out loud" about the value propsition of interactive whiteboards. For what it may be worth, here's the post. As always, your thoughts and feedback are welcome in the comments...

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I used to own a mobile phone, an iPod, a digital camera, a video camera, a GPS, and a voicerecorder, and I often carried many of them with me at any given moment. I also used to carry photos of my kids in my wallet. Gradually each of these devices has become subsumed into devices that could combine many of these functions - at first, my mobile phone gained a camera, and then my next phone had a camera, and a voice recorder. I still needed an iPod if I wanted to have my music with me, and I still needed a GPS if I wanted to know where I was going. I could maybe carry 3 or 4 photos of my kids at most.

My latest device is an iPhone, and it has finally merged all of these tools into a single pocketsized device. I now no longer carry all these things around with as individual tools, but I still have all these tools in my pocket. They are now just one device. The phone, the cameras, the voicerecorder, the GPS, the iPod with all my videos, music and photos accessable whereever I go, combined with mobile internet access and the dozens of amazing apps I have installed for doing just about anything you can think of, has fundamentally changed the experience of interacting with these devices individually.

I find my iPhone to be "revolutionary", not because it allows me to do anything I could not do previously with all these individual devices, but rather because of the way it has combined all these tools into a single device. The revolution has been in the convergence, not in each the specific tools. I could do all this stuff before - I just had to carry a bag full of devices to do it! It's also evident in the way these tools interact with each other... the maps can talk to the GPS, which in turn can access the web to look up an address, which in turn can let me make a phone call to that address. There's nothing terribly "new" about the map, the GPS or the phone. Individually, these are all old, existing tools, but combine them together and they produce an overall experience that is new, different, and dare I say it, revolutionary.

The argument I hear that "an IWB does not let me do anything I couldn't do with xxxx" - pieces of cardboard with words on them, sheets of butchers paper and blu-tack, an overhead projector, a pair of real dice, a big wooden protractor... you name it... is a complete piece of misdirection about the real value that an IWB can bring to a classroom. It is NOT about whether an IWB can "only" be used to do something that was already possible using a different technology. The real point is that the IWB, by converging so many classroom tools into a single, digital, point of contact on a large shared screen that every participant of the classroom can see, hear and engage with, fundamentally changes a whole lot of things.

There ARE great examples of how IWBs can reinvent what happens in classrooms, but if the onlookers want to constantly dismiss them because they might be able to be done in other ways with other tools, then they will never see the value that convergence brings to these tools.

You say you are desperate to see something "new", but what do you need to see before you class it as "new"? There are very few new ideas under the sun... if people are waiting for that magical moment where they see an IWB being used to do something that is so unique and special it has never been done ever before by anyone in teaching history, they might be waiting a while. Few examples exist.

However, many examples exist of IWBs enabling teachers to bring digital media, online video, rich learning objects and realtime data into lessons. There are lots of examples of IWBs being used to bring disparate resources together in ways that were cumbersome and awkward using disparate technologies. If you've ever tried to show students specific scenes from a DVD - or heaven forbid, several DVDs - in a class, you will know that juggling disks in and out of the DVD player and trying to find specific places in the movie can take up most of the classtime. The same lesson, where the relevant video clips have been pre-prepared and embedded into a flipchart is a totally different experience.

Likewise, the ability to have an IWB as a "window to the world" where not only is the answer to so many random questions just a Google search away, the important thing is that it is only a Google search away in a shared, publicly viewable, social space of a classroom. I would argue that classroom participants using the shared digital space of a large screen connected to the internet and able to divert a lesson into unexpected directions at a moments notice is fundamentally different to traditional classrooms. The ability to do this is, in effect, new.

Perhaps we should stop looking for these profound, earth shattering instances of how an IWB can be "revolutionary", and instead see the whole picture. The convergence of tools into a shared space that can be instantly adapted into whatever digital tool that might be appropriate is a an incredibly fundamental difference. A large screen tool shared by the whole class that is a place to write, a spreadsheet, a video player, a photo album, a maths lab, a world map, a link to world libraries, an encyclopedia, a highlighter pen, a post-it note, a place to brainstorm, and so on and so on, is an incredibly valuable tool. The fact that these individual parts can be dynamic, realtime and interactive makes it even moreso.

Whenever I hear people saying that an IWB can't add anything to a classroom, I ponder how they are using it. Are they using a narrow set of IWB tools or do they use it in a myriad of connected ways that build on each other to create a dynamic ecosystem of tools. Do they treat their IWB like a hammer or a Swiss Army Knife? Is it just an expensive highlighter pen, or is it an amazing pandora's box of digital tools waiting to be combined in interesting ways by creative teachers and students?

That's where you'll find your new stuff.

The REAL trick to all this is to ensure that this potential is being realised by teachers who understand the world of possibilities their IWB offers. If a teacher cannot see the potential, then of course we will struggle to see genuine "newness" in the way the IWBs are being used. As always, it is the creativity and insight of a talented teacher that brings this potential to the surface. Let's stop being so hung up about whether IWBs can add value to a classroom. They can. The real question is whether the teachers who work with them can make the most of that potential and use them to bring that "revolution" into their classrooms.

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Tagged as: iwb, new, newness, teaching, whiteboard 1 Comment