Category: TIK365

Things I Know 316 of 365: It’s best to teach two types of writing

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

– Benjamin Franklin

Yesterday, I was listening to and interview of one of my favorite television writers, Steven Moffat. He’s the head writer and executive producer of Dr. Who and Sherlock and one of the screenwriters of The Adventures of Tintin.

Moffat has been a fan of Dr. Who since he was a boy and was asked when he wrote his first script for the show.

I expected mid-20s.

Moffat answered 10 or 12. He and a friend scripted a 4-part series of the show on their own, in their free time.

My mind immediately went to how that interest could have been leveraged in school. The voice in my head sounded something like, “I’m sure they didn’t, but Moffat’s school should have had a program for script writing. He could have latched on to his passion much earlier.”

Thinking it over, I’m glad they didn’t. We might have ruined him. This was a boy so enamored and passionate about writing – this kind of writing – that he spent his free time playing with the form and structure.

While school could certainly have been the place for the development of his talent, it seems unlikely they would have given it room to breathe and time to develop.

I’m so tempted to argue that we should be teaching more forms and genres of writing in school aside from the expository and persuasive essays required by standardized tests. In the current curricular climate, though, we would teach those things in pieces with restrictions and a tone of teaching that says, “This is the way you do it.”

What I love about Moffat’s writing is how far he strays from the expected and how often he breaks the rules. It makes for interesting storytelling.

When I started my students on story slams, my guidelines were purposefully vague – tell a story, make it interesting. The judges in the audience were given two measures – content and presentation. We never stopped to define what a top score in either of those categories would look like. Rather than looking for certain characteristics, I relied on the idea they would know quality when they saw it.

If we could teach writing like this – if we could say, “Work until you think you’ve gotten to quality” – then I’d say we should carve out space in classrooms for our future-Moffat’s. Until then, their curation of their passions is safer in their free time.

Things I Know 315 of 365: Spencer is one of us

When I say I want my students to be successful, I mean I want them to blow adequacy out of the water.

– Spencer Nissly

Last Spring, SLA had the pleasure of hosting a group of pre-service teachers from Millersville University of Pennsylvania. They were part of a larger contingent visiting Philly schools and classrooms.

In my room was Spencer Nissly who will be starting his student teaching next semester. I’m eager to read about his experiences on his blog and twitter feed. He’s going to be a fantastic teacher. I know this because he loves to learn and has as many questions as possible answers.

While I’ll be offering any help and encouragement I can as Spencer gets his teaching legs under him, I want to do what I can to make sure he’s surrounded by a larger network of support as well. I asked him today if he’d mind answering a few questions as a way of introducing him to, well, anyone who might read this.

If teaching is to improve as a practice and a community, then we must support and foster one another’s growth – especially that of our newest teachers. Spencer and I are not likely to ever work with one another in the same school or district, but I education will be better because he is a teacher.

—
Q. Who are you?
A. On the surface my life is pretty much that of a normal 21 year old male. I love movies, music and sports. I like finding cool pubs that I can talk with my friends over a beer. On a deeper level I love literature and writing. For me this is where I can express myself and connect with other people. Reading is the way I make sense of life; it shows me that I’m not alone, that my feelings are apart of being human. At my core I am my relationships. The relationships I have with my friends, family, role models, God and even myself, exemplify the values most fundamental to who I am, and who I want to be. Those values being faith, trust, community, communication and compassion. It is through my relationships that I am reminded time and time again of these values and present a platform for personal reflection.

Q. Why Teaching?
A. Education is the most important thing for any person. It provides the means for social mobility, self-realization and personal growth. Essentially, education sets people on the path for them to pursue their passions. I am passionate about English, and education allows me to translate the passion in a way that others could appreciate it. On a deeper level though, teaching gives me the opportunity to model my own core values to kids. By doing this I can help them grow by recognizing what values they hold most important to their own identity. To translate their own passions into goals and help them achieve their goals. It took me awhile to find myself; to find my passions and live up to my potential. For me teaching is a way to fulfill my passion, and help others find theirs.

Q. Where do you do your learning?

A. I try to look for opportunities to learn all around me. Primarily I learn from reading; I am constantly reading all kinds of books. But I also find that I learn most from the interactions and relationships that I have. Through talking with people I trust and sharing personal experiences, I find that I am able to process learning on a meaningful level. Also by listening to their ideas and stories I am able to gain a deeper understanding that sometimes challenges my original beliefs. In engaging in this sort of exchange I’m often able to get past my ignorance and see things in a new way.

Q. What are your Goals for your Students?
A. My main goal for my students is success. Not success by achieving “adequacy” on some state standardized test. For me being “adequate,” is nothing I want for my students. When I say I want my students to be successful, I mean I want them to blow adequacy out of the water. I think this success will come in different ways for different students. For some kids that might be thinking outside the box and being creative. For other kids it might be participating in class, or just keeping their head up. I think success is something that needs to be pursued daily. Kids need to have personal goals and be constantly pursuing them, never being satisfied with where they are at. Another goal I have is to establish a legitimate classroom community. I believe this is paramount for learning to happen. My students need to feel safe and valued in my classroom. There needs to be a place for everyone’s ideas, stories, questions,passions and identities. Within this community there needs to be ample time for discussion and communication, as there is for personal reflection. I want this community to value the individual as much as the group. I think its my job to facilitate that community by providing an environment that makes it possible.

Q. What support do you need?
A. I think I would benefit most from a mentor. Someone who is willing to listen and give advice on a consistent basis. Who can relate to things I’m going through and help me find solutions to problems. Someone I can bounce ideas off of and complain to and will encourage me. I have a lot of meaningful relationships in my life and they are huge for me, but I don’t have someone who can fulfill that capacity. I have professor that I meet with but they feel like professional relationships not like a friendship.

Q. What are you reading?
A. Currently I am reading Sutree by Cormac McCarthy and The Courage to Teach by Parker Palmer. I am also going through two textbooks that I have used in the past but feel like I just scratched the surface in. One is called Bridging English  and is all about strategies for teaching all aspects of English. The second is a textbook with basic ed theory: Dewey, Adler, Freire etc.  – stuff that I was definitely not ready for as a sophomore. I also asked for a ton of books for Christmas so I definitely have my work cut out for me.

Q. What was the last thing you learned?
A. I was just reading in my Parker Palmer book before doing this survey about the paradoxes that are necessary in teaching. Such as how we need to value silence and speech. Meaning we need to encourage kids to share and make them feel comfortable sharing, but we also need to value silence in the classroom. We need to resist the urge to break the silence when we ask a question and no one speaks. Palmer further explains these paradoxes by showing how an analysis of your own personal teaching will show that your best and worst moments teaching can be attributed to the same personal qualities. The book is really good and it has me constantly examining myself and my goals and talking to my peers about their goals.

Q. When is the last time you changed your mind?
A. I changed my mind earlier today about a professor. He’s sort of a cocky guy and not very patient and all semester he’s just been making me feel like he doesn’t have time for us. So I’ve joined my classmates in complaining about him the entire semester. But the entire time, I knew there was more to him. He has a legitimate passion and ability to convey that passion to others. So I stayed after for a little today and talked to him abut some stuff going on in my field placement, and, again, I felt like he cut me off and rushed me. But when I got past that and listened, I realized he gave me some good advice. So I changed my mind about him and what I can learn from him if I just look past some of his downfalls and focus on his strengths. Which is something I hope people do for me and something I hope to do for each student I come in contact with.

Things I Know 314 of 365: You can find your thank you package here

Why you're great...
It’s important to let people know you see them. It’s best to do this when you see them at their best.

One of the things I loved doing in the classroom was sending positive notes home to parents and students. It didn’t matter. At the end of the day, or on my planning period, I’d sit down and write out a couple of cards explaining all the goodness I saw in a student, and then I’d drop them in the mail.

It was a practice I learned from Hal Urban, and it was a wonderful way to end the day.

Any time I get to talk to a group of teachers, I encourage them to adopt the practice as their own. A few sentences each day to remind your students and yourself why you love the people in your classroom.

I realize getting the supplies together might seem like the biggest obstacle to sending these notes, so I’ve decided to do the leg work.

The PDF of the document I used to make the cards is here.

You can find Staples’s selection of card stock here.

My go-to invitation envelopes are here.

And, if you wanna go crazy, custom design postage from zazzle with your school logo, favorite quote or whatever here.

Having stamps on the envelopes and the cards printed and ready in my desk made all the difference.

Even last semester, as a student, I dropped a few cards in the mail to former students and to people in classes with me when I could tell the going was tough.

We find a million ways to tell people we see the things they’re doing just the wrong side of right. Maybe we could focus on the other side a bit more.

Things I Know 313 of 365: I was a bit of a jerk

In cleaning out my box.net contents I found a folder containing my slidedecks from the first day of school of my fourth year of teaching. All was well and good until I found the class rules slide below.

Day 1 Per 3

Who wrote those two rules? When was I Severus Snape? The thing is, I had a decent idea what I was doing when I made this slide. I’d been in the classroom 3 years and came out of a decent teacher prep experience. The kids I’d taught the year before had taken the school from 47 to 81 percent passing the state writing exam. I had strong relationships with my colleagues, kids and their families. I’d headed up a partner student screenwriting program between our school and the local film festival.

Yet, there I was declaring war on cell phones and gum as though it somehow secured my power as teacher overlord.

Not only that, these were the first two rules I posted. Somehow gum chewing and the sight of a cell phone presented clear and present danger in relation to learning.

This list shows me what I told my students I valued on that first day of school, and it reminds me of how much what I said I believed stood in contrast with the beliefs I enacted as a teacher.

We do that, we get better at what we do, at being people with kids. If I had to guess, I’d say this authoritarian stance was a remnant of teaching students who were quite close to me in age and appearance. It was a stab at drawing a line between who I was and who they were. While I needed that line then, in the years that followed, I worked hard to erase it. I realized the way to teach was to connect, to become a person who mattered that asked students to do work that mattered.

It was a difficult lesson.

One I’m still learning. I’m grateful to younger me for sticking this slidedeck in the cloud time capsule to remind me how I’ve grown.

Things I Know 312 of 365: I’m Kickstart(er)ing the holidays

Kindness in words creates confidence. Kindness in thinking creates profoundness. Kindness in giving creates love.

– Lao Tzu

One of the best gifts for those who have everything is to give to those who have nothing in their name.

I’m a proud member of Team Shift Happens, I’ve gifted a pig, and I’ve let donors choose. Each gift has led to some wonderful holiday conversations around the purpose and work of these tremendous philanthropic organizations.

This year, I’m welcoming a new property into my charitable portfolio – Kickstarter.

For the uninitiated:

Kickstarter is the world’s largest funding platform for creative projects. Every week, tens of thousands of amazing people pledge millions of dollars to projects from the worlds of music, film, art, technology, design, food, publishing and other creative fields.

A new form of commerce and patronage. This is not about investment or lending. Project creators keep 100% ownership and control over their work. Instead, they offer products and experiences that are unique to each project.

All or nothing funding. On Kickstarter, a project must reach its funding goal before time runs out or no money changes hands. Why? It protects everyone involved. Creators aren’t expected to develop their project without necessary funds, and it allows anyone to test concepts without risk.

Each and every project is the independent creation of someone like you. Projects are big and small, serious and whimsical, traditional and experimental. They’re inspiring, entertaining and unbelievably diverse.

Though Kickstarter doesn’t currently support gift backing, I’ll be pledging in my recipients’ names. My thinking here is this – The recipient of the gift will receive whatever rewards are connected with the project I choose, and the project will be receive much-needed funding toward following their passion.

As a teacher and fan of passion following, this appeals to my sense of doing good in the world.

Kiva, Heifer, and DonorsChoose are still on the list this year. I’m just opting to diversify the giving portfolio.

Things I Know 311 of 365: Schools need question portfolios

Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question.

– e.e. cummings

I stood in the snack food aisle today, in awe of what we can do to a potato. Beyond ridges or smooth, the modern potato chip can look like pretty much anything we want it to look like and taste like pretty much anything we want it to taste like.

Humankind has mastered the potato.

Take that, blight!

After the awe, I started to wonder. How do we do it? How do we make this batch of potato chips taste like dill pickles and that batch taste like prawns? When I buy ketchup-flavored potato chips, is it because they used ketchup or they found the chemicals necessary to make potatoes taste like ketchup? I had to start looking for the dishwashing liquid because the potato chips were too interesting.

–

On the drive home, I started thinking about potato chips and how we keep track of students’ learning.

Portfolio assessment has been around for a while and more resources have been devoted to its use and misuse than I care to plumb. What if we’re doing it wrong?

What if, instead of or in addition to student work, we were to keep a portfolio of the questions students asked?

Imagine a question portfolio that followed students throughout their time in school that reminded them and their teachers of the questions with which they’d wrestled as they learned. What would it look like if, attached to each question, was the latest iteration or the lineage of answers the student had crafted for that question?

What difference would it mean to create a culture of learning where parents were encouraged to ask their children, “What questions did you ask today in school?”

I have a suspicion that in valuing questions, we’d have no other choice but to make school into places where students had the space to answer the questions they thought most intriguing. It also seems likely to me that a student who has been taught the value of a good question and been given the support, resources, and space to seek answers will have no trouble learning anything that’s necessary throughout her life.

We do a decent job of telling kids there are no stupid questions, but a horrible job at showing them that the act of questioning isn’t stupid.

–

Once I got home, I remembered I’d read a passage about the science of potato chips in David Bodanis’s The Secret House. I found it on my shelf and started searching for answers to my grocery store questions.

What questions did you ask today?

Things I Know 310 of 365: I’ve got two ideas for improving teacher preparation (so far)

The stakes in student teaching are high. Student teaching will color teachers’ perceptions of students’ capacity to learn, shape their expectations for their own performance and help determine the type of school in which they will choose to teach.

– National Council on Teacher Quality

The quality of teacher preparation programs came up over and over again throughout my courses this semester. Common complaints:

  • The standards for teacher education programs are myriad across colleges and universities.
  • As teacher preparation programs account for large portions of college and university enrollment, they frequently lower enrollment standards as they have become reliant on the funding delivered by these students’ tuition.
  • Teacher preparation programs struggle to find an appropriate balance between theoretical and practical instruction.

My own preparation experience at Illinois State University was a strong one. I was required to spend over 120 hours observing and delivering drop-in lessons at partner schools near campus including the University’s own laboratory schools. While I never had any practice teaching my peers as they pretended to be students, I had plenty of opportunities to teach students as they acted like themselves.

Each outing in another teacher’s classroom was followed up by written reflection, conversation with the teacher, and class discussion with my fellow pre-service teachers and our professor.

It wasn’t a perfect experience. My peers and I started to see the cracks in the program the closer we got to graduation and thereby knowing everything. We wished our professors had more experience in classrooms to balance their well-meaning theories with the realities we found each time we ventured to the head of a classroom. We knew we wanted to see Individual Education Plans and 504s before we were on our own and faced with the task of informing their drafting. Most of all, we wanted to know what each other was doing and how we could best begin the time-tested practice of teacher stealing.

I’m not in disagreement with many of my classmates’ complaints from undergrad or grad school. I’ve started thinking about what I would do were I in charge of reforming or revamping a school of education based on these complaints. So far, I’ve two suggestions.

-1-

Require each teacher seeking certification to also complete certification requirements in special education or English for speakers of other languages instruction. Not completing either of these certifications when I was in college has always been a regret. What I learned in both areas I had to learn amid the process of learning to teach. It would have increased my program requirements, but it would have been worth it.

I’ve got a hunch it wouldn’t have been worth it for those people in my program who weren’t too keen on actually becoming classroom teachers after graduation. Requiring special ed and/or ESOL certification from all graduates would help cut down on program applicants as well. Those looking at teaching as a fall-back position would be less likely to do so if it meant more work. Those who apply and complete the program would enter the classroom better prepared to meet the needs of their students and speak the teacher-ese that makes up much of the learning curve as new teachers start out.

Such a requirement might also lead programs to rejigger their schedules of coursework to keep the requirements manageable and have the added benefit of more cross-curricular work.

-2-

Require every student teacher to blog. Require that blogging to be shared amongst the other student teachers in their program. Require every cooperating and supervising teacher to comment on every post written by any student teacher in his or her charge.

When I was going through my program, ISU had the sixth-highest rate of teacher graduates in the country. Dozens of people were completing their student teaching in small towns and cities across the state at the same time as me.

Aside from one friend with whom I carpooled to school, I had contact with none of them until the whole experience was over. I should have. I should have also been required to reflect on my practice at least once a week and those stories should have been archived for the classes that came after me.

When I became a student teacher, I might as well have been the first man on the moon for as much institutional knowledge as I took with me into the experience.

Requiring all student teachers to blog about their practice in concert with their peers in similar situations can create a culture of interaction and reflection that’s so easy to forget amid all that is clamoring for attention during those weeks. The comments they receive can help them refine their practice and feel part of community. For those who follow, the records of reflection can act as case studies and what-if scenarios leading up to student teaching.

Building these habits of transparency, reflection, and collaboration while their teaching identities are in the most nascent stages will help increase the likelihood those habits will carry over into their professional practice.

—

These are two beginning thoughts on how education can improve how it prepares its next generations. I’ll keep thinking.

Things I Know 309 of 365: Practice should be guided by relationships

We believe that ‘humanity of scale’ and the ‘primacy of relationships’ should not only inform the design of our schools but should also influence our public sector services.

– Human Scale Education Movement

Earlier in the semester, as I was working on my argument for collaboration as a key principle in the design of my theory of learning, Chris MacIntosh hit me up with a link to this wonderful paper from Human Scale Education in the UK.

I hadn’t the time to delve too deeply into the people at HSE as I was writing the paper, but I’ve since gone back, and I’ve got to say, I am really digging the work they do.

In the paper, HSE Director James Wetz frames his argument around the following themes:

  1. The need to see schooling as more than just an educational project but one which integrates the education and the care of our children on their journey from early childhood to young adulthood.
  2. The need for our schools to have an explicit theoretical framework, based in relationships, that informs policy and practice.
  3. The need to make the task of creating emotional and social capital in our schools a key educational process.

Certainly, these theories aren’t new. The relational aspect of education was appreciated by everyone from John Dewey to Ivan Illich. What struck me as contemporarily important about Wetz’s work was the practical applications. He writes about interviewing Linda Nathan at the Boston Arts Academy and Ann Cook at Urban Academy in New York as people putting these theories into practice.

The paper is a brief 11 pages, and well worth reading. Also worth looking after is HSE’s first free school opening in Dorset in 2013.

Things I Know 308 of 365: I’ve got your must-read list right here

The smarter the journalists are, the better off society is. [For] to a degree, people read the press to inform themselves-and the better the teacher, the better the student body.

– Warren Buffett

I’ve mentioned longform.org, a site my friend Max and his friend Aaron started April 2010. From an education standpoint, though they didn’t start the site for education, longform is perfect for schools wondering how they can find and incorporate extended, high-interest quality non-fiction reading into their curricula.

But this post isn’t about the classroom.

Longform has curated it’s Top 10 (or 20) best pieces of long-form journalism of 2011. With the list’s publication, my reading list for the next few weeks has been set. I also subscribe to the site’s spin-off, sendmeastory.com, which does what the name implies each weekend. Two weeks ago, I got this story from Esquire about Michael May a man who had been blind his entire life and his struggle over whether to undergo surgery that could give him sight.

I cried.

That’s not an infrequent occurrence as I read stories from longform. The site does the work of collecting the most interesting and impactful stories being told and putting them in one place. What’s more, they’ve fully integrated Readability, Instapaper, Read It Later and Kindle queueing so I’m not tied to the computer screen when I want to read.

While I still think longform is the unintentional answer to the wants of many a curriculum designer, I know it’s the intentional answer to the wants of anyone in search of a well-crafted piece of journalism.

Things I Know 307 of 365: The horizon of school must be clear

Continuing to explore William Glasser’s The Quality School, I found this:

On the other hand, and this may seem contradictory, if you ask students working at McDonald’s if they want a good education, the answer will be Yes. They have a vague picture in their quality worlds of what they conceive to be a good education, but I believe few of them have any idea of what it actually is. It is easier for them to see quality on the job than at school. To find out why requires a few more questions.

If you ask if it takes hard work to get a good education, students will again answer Yes. They are still not clear about what a good education is, but whatever it may be, they think it takes hard work to get it. Further, if you ask them if they are smart enough to get a good education, almost all will answer Yes, even if they do not know exactly what it is they have to be smart enough to do.

But if you ask them if they are working hard in school, most will answer No. What they are saying is that, as much as they want the vague something that to them is a good education and know it takes hard work to get it, they do not have any clear idea of how schoolwork, as they now know it, relates to what they want. Until they have a much clearer idea about what a quality education is and how it can be attained from that they are asked to do, students will not work hard in school.

My first two years in the classroom, I was teamed with one of the most caring and thoughtful teachers I’ve had the pleasure to meet. His name was Doug Powell and he taught 8th graders math. I respected Doug for numerous reasons, not the least of which was the fact he saw our interactions around teaching as reciprocal. Though I was as new to teaching as someone can be, Doug never made me feel as though there wasn’t something he could learn from me. I felt valued, and it was the same feeling he brought to his classroom.

At the beginning of each year, Doug gave the students his “Horizon Speech.” He told the kids the horizon was the distance they could see and explained how sailors used the horizon in setting and keeping course. Doug told his students that they came to him with horizons on their futures that were of varying distances. Some couldn’t see past that day, some were blinded beyond that school year, and some could see for years.

His job, he told them, was to help them extend their horizons. I think that’s what Glasser is getting at. Doug helped students extend their understanding of the lives that lay ahead of them so the courses they set were better informed and free of the “vague something” so many kids see when they look at school. Doug helped students understand where school fit in their understanding of a quality life in ways that were detailed, unambiguous and tied to who they were.