Tag: transparency

125/365 Is There Such a Thing as Too Much Transparency?

While I’m sure this idea has some connections in my brain to the U.S.’s current hemorrhaging of classified information, the real drive of what I’m about to think through has to do with policy, process, and our ability to come to the table and get work done.

In preparation to be interviewed today, I was asked to take a sheet of paper, visualize in my head the current state of education and then draw it to be explained during my interview.

What I ended up drawing was a series of faces, bisected along the vertical access, appearing angry and contemptuous on the left side and happy and open on the right side. Also, only the right side of each face had an ear. From each of the mouths (right and left sides) I drew lines that made their way to other faces after getting lost in a knot of other lines from other faces in the middle of the paper. I labeled the faces: Educators, Businesses, Students, Communities, Policymakers, Academics.

It wasn’t until I sat down to draw that the problem I’ve been attempting to explain verbally to people for the last few weeks came into focus.

What if our drive for transparency and our expectation of publicly-consumable communication is hindering our ability to get actual work done.

Let’s take policymakers for a start. They, like members of all other groups, are connected to some other set of constituents – peers, voters, allies of other sorts. When they sit down a whatever table is being sat at to work through the problem-of-the-moment, contemporary thinking calls for “transparency” before they even approach said table. They are expected to make known their views on the issue at hand, the other parties, what they plan to do and what they will do for their constituencies. In many cases, during the conversations, they are tweeting and posting to Facebook and updating their constituencies as to their progress. Much of the time, this includes explaining how firmly they are holding to the preconceived notions they touted pre-table.

This transparency of process, of motive, and of intent is harmful. It leaves no room for listening. It commits to a course of action before any other courses can be considered. For these policymakers or any of the other stakeholders practicing this breed of transparency, to do anything other than what is expected would mean the loss of face and (more damaging) the loss of power.

As much as I believe in transparency (and I vigorously do), perhaps it is time to admit not all steps of all processes need be transparent. Perhaps consideration of a new curriculum or policy to be adopted would go differently if those representing the stakeholders were able to be at the table alone so that they might be able to say, “I don’t know what we’re going to do, and I don’t think some of the points you’ve been making are half bad” without worrying about being billed as sellouts to their causes.

I understand the dangers and histories connected to closed-door, back room meetings, and I’m not proposing decision-making free of accountability. Our constant need to know, though, and our constant drive to offer our praise or condemnation before the thinking is through might be impeding progress.

When my students would write in my room, I stepped back. I reasoned it might not be helpful to them or their final products if I looked over their shoulders and said, “That’s what you’re going to write?” in the middle of their sentences.

Perhaps there’s a lesson there.

Thanks to Dean for inadvertently making me think about this stuff.

Image via JayGoldman.

41/365 We Must Be Our Whole Selves in the Classroom

Remember when you were in school and saw a teacher out in the real world? Do you remember that feeling of awe as you realized this person existed outside of the classroom? It was a mind-bending experience for me, filled with questions – Could they still grade without the classroom? Were they talking to everyone in the grocery store about the quadratic formula? Were they hiding our homework in their purses?

Then, when I was safely back in our roles as teachers and students in the classroom, I could say, “I saw you this weekend!” as though we’d caught them out of bounds. Those are times burned into our memories.

They have no place in the schools we need.

As much as we can, we must be out whole selves in the classroom.

It is easy to step into a classroom and decide, “This is my teacher self. This is who the students will see.” Then, when the day is done, we return to our nerdy appreciation of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, meet up with our kickball teams, or join with our fiction writers’ workshop as though the two identities are completely separate.

The separation of our professional selves and our private selves must be maintained, to be sure. Taking the problems and worries of every student home with us each night creates martyrs, not teachers.

Still, there is a place for our whole selves in the classroom.

This is the support to which our students must have access. We bring social capital with us. To ignore that and deny our students access is to do them a detriment and limit their access to the “real world.”

Whatever we were before we were teachers, we must take these roles with us into the classroom. In fact, we cannot help it, so we might as well make it explicit.

No matter the social standing of our students outside of school we must consider ourselves as conduits to the cultures they might access when they leave us. Much has been made of the “funds of knowledge” in which our students exist outside of schools, in their daily cultures. To be sure, these are cultures from which teachers should and must learn.

Little to nothing has been mentioned of the funds of knowledge existing in the non-school lives of teachers. Learning lives there. Whatever can be used by students to access the lives of their teachers can be used by teachers to access the lives of students.

As much as we must be our best teacher selves, we must consider how much of our whole selves we can be in the classroom.

A former student recently asked about how much she might share regarding her past. Now in college and preparing for student teaching, this student knew the hardships she’d known in childhood could act as anchors for her students. She knew she would have found it easier to navigate the difficult and tumultuous psychological spaces she’s encountered if she’d had a teacher in her life who’d said, “I’ve been where you are, and I found the way out.” Realizing she was about to enter the lives of her own students, this young woman wanted to make sure she was as transparent as she could be so that her students saw her as a source of strength if they were working through some of the same personal crises.

Certainly, teaching does not require we lay our lives bare for our students in hopes such nakedness of spirit will help them at our experience. When possible, though, whether it be a favorite television show or a traumatic event, begin our whole selves in the classroom gives students access not only to who we are as people, but to who they might become.

Things I Know 341 of 365: We are not doctors or lawyers

Life is filigree work. What is written clearly is not worth much, it’s the transparency that counts.

– Louis-Ferdinand Celine

When people hear “teacher” two things happen, they think of the teachers they’ve had and they think of all teachers. If they are parents, these people also think of the teachers their children have or have had in class.

Teacher pulls in images of the specifically personal and the generally vague.

Often, teachers find themselves working to elevate the prestige of the profession to the level of doctors, lawyers and other similarly regarded careers. I understand the comparison and the temptation to make it.

Teachers aren’t doctors or lawyers. They do not enjoy the same social distance as those professions.

The regard given medical and legal practitioners comes from the foreign nature of what they do. Though average Americans might know and be related to a doctor or lawyer, they do not spend the first 13-17 years of their lives in courtrooms or operating rooms. They know enough to understand the role of each profession in society, but not enough to feel as though they understand the minutia. If forced, the average person would likely feel comfortable running a classroom. They wouldn’t, I’d wager, feel the same sense of comfort if forced to defend or prosecute someone on trial or perform a surgery.

Thanks to television, they would have the jargon, but not the level of comfort appropriate to the moment.

Teaching is familiar. It is accessible through our memories.

We have spent hundreds of hours watching teachers. We’ll just do what we saw them do. What we did not see, we cannot know to do.

The familiarity of teaching keeps it from aligning with other practices similarly dedicated to the furthering and preservation of society. Teaching is visible, participatory and engrained in the lives of citizens. This works against the profession as it attempted to elevate itself.

Teaching must become wholly and completely familiar rather than working away from public access.

I received this horrendous email from change.org today about a mother who arrived at her son’s school to find him tied inside a bag meant as therapy for his autism. What the teacher did was unconscionable. It is also what the public of Mercer County and anyone who hears the story will know of Mercer schools. This will be the practice of Mercer teachers when they come up in conversation. Few will know or speak of the thousands of moments of kindness, care, professionalism, and wisdom that happened the same day and every day that follows at Mercer schools.

The gross familiarity with schooling has long been the handicap in elevating the profession. Let us then reverse that. Make all of teaching and schooling public. Make transparent the pieces children and parents did not see as students. Show the complexity of practice inherent in moving a diverse classroom of students toward learning, and esteem and regard will accrue. Respect for the work of teachers lies not in the further drawing of the curtain, but in the opening of it.

Things I Know 112 of 365: It’s not enough to have the door open when I teach

An open mind leaves a chance for someone to drop a worthwhile thought in it.

– Unknown

One of the few specific pieces of training for being a teacher I remember was a piece of cautionary advice – Don’t teach with your door closed.

As is often the case with this sort of advice, no one ever really filled in the gap of how to do the opposite of teaching with my door closed. Namely, I received no direct instruction in door-open teaching.

I often read about technology’s affordances for networking teachers with one another. It’s always seemed a bit like showing someone a telephone and wishing them luck on finding useful numbers.

Teaching with my door open is best when it is a combination of the personal and the virtual.

A few weeks ago, I received an e-mail from a fellow SLA teacher linking to a Slate article about movie theaters’ resistance and attempted avoidance of the Food and Drug Administration’s draft rules requiring restaurants to post the nutrition information for the food they serve.

Movie theaters would rather not have their patrons realize each tablespoon of butter they just doused their popcorn with had nearly double the number of calories of a tablespoon of the butter back in their kitchens.

I tagged the article in delicious (long may it live) and stowed it away to use last week in my food class. The students and I read the article and engaged in some pretty fantastic conversation about the economics of movie theater food as well as the cultural implications of the event of going to the theater.

I’ve talked all over the place about this food course. Even before it started, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut about it. I wasn’t bragging, I was just thinking and planning aloud, inviting anyone who read or heard what I was thinking to throw in some ideas.

Thus, the e-mail.

We read the article in Tuesday’s class, whetting our appetites for Friday’s convening.

I remembered about a month ago one of my science teacher friends explaining an experiment to me during my first year at SLA.

Students exposed popped microwave popcorn to a sodium hydroxide solution that corroded the organic matter.

One would imagine that would include everyone one would find in a handful of microwave popcorn.

No so.

I remembered this experiment because it had sounded interesting. Were I a teacher who claimed open-door teaching, but who really only carved a window into the door, I would just have told my students about the experiment.

While, I’m fairly eloquent, me telling can never replace them doing.

Friday’s class, everyone met in my room. Then, we walked down the hall to VK’s room where we donned safety goggles and completed the experiment.

First, we submersed the popcorn to a hydrochloric acid solution so the kids could see what happens in their stomachs.

Next came the sodium hydroxide or lye.

We watched as it ate through the corn and could feel the heat of the exothermic reaction.

When all was said and done, we were left with a white substance at the bottom of our beakers. This, VK explained, was the plastic used to coat microwave popcorn kernels in order to keep them from burning through the bag during the popping process.

More importantly, this was the plastic a person ingested with each handful of popcorn.

Not only had I kept the door open, I’d led the class out the door and down the hall to experience a perspective I wasn’t equipped to provide.

This Tuesday, we’ll return to the article and reflect on the experiment and try to cobble together an understanding of the role of popcorn at the intersection or science, culture and literature.

Had I propped my classroom door open and simply waited passively for technology to bring me something worthwhile for class, it never would have come.

What I wasn’t taught in my teacher preparation, but needed to experience for myself is that teaching with my door open works much better if I’m willing to walk through the door and see what’s out there that I can bring back to the classroom.