I am substitute teaching this week. Sixth-graders. I haven’t taught sixth-grade in quite a while.
But after two days, I remember now. The curiosity, the energy, the silliness. That I would arrive home every evening and say, “I love sixth-graders.”
And my dad would say, “You’re lucky. Not many people get up every day to go to work and say they love their job.”
He was right.
I am totally depressed by rain. Gray days make me gloomy and lethargic.
So when we headed out the door to go see James (and Ben) Taylor in Richmond last night, I wasn’t excited. Now I love JT, so this was kind of unusual. I found myself grumbling about how cold it was, how I would get wet walking from the car, how much traffic there was on 95–actually, I grumbled about everything.
About 45 minutes into the drive, I remembered a post I had read recently about our attitudes. How often a simple reframing of a situation can make us see the world in a different way. Usually, if I’m in a bad mood, nothing helps but time. However, I decided to give it a shot. Three or four minutes later, and I was on my way back up, getting excited about the concert, trying not to worry about the weather, and feeling a little sheepish that I’d let it all get to me.
How did I reframe this?
I reminded myself that the weather would break soon. It wouldn’t be gray and cold for months!! ( I tend to exaggerate.)
I focused on how lucky I was to be able to go see one of my favorite singers in person.
I reminded myself that I have this great job that allows me flexibility to do things like this–AND sleep in a little in the morning if I want to.
In other words, I stopped being negative. And I had a terrific time.
In our school culture, we often face negative people.
“I don’t have enough time.”
“There’s too much on my plate.”
So often, these attitudes could be changed by a reframing. That doesn’t always work, as our genes, our DNA, have much to do with whether we are able to move beyond the “glass half empty” mentality.
But imagine if we could help our students understand that their ability to recognize and “control” thoughts will change their attitudes.
(Aaron T. Beck, M.D., is the President Emeritus of the non-profit Beck Institute for Cognitive Therapy and Research, and University Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania.)
“…helping patients identify and evaluate these thoughts and found that by doing so, patients were able to think more realistically, which led them to feel better emotionally and behave more functionally.”
That’s powerful information.
image credit: by Karin Beil
Brooks talks about schools, teaching, and emotions….
As more schools grapple with Acceptable Use Policies to fit more devices and situations, I like this approach from Traci Gardner, who remixed Michael Hyatt’s reasons businesses don’t need a social media policy:
Consider these Five Reasons Why Your Company Doesn’t Need a Social Media Policy, from an article by Michael Hyatt, listed with a little rephrasing to fit the classroom:
- Students can be trusted. As Hyatt explains, “If you expect them to be honest and trustworthy, they will be honest and trustworthy.”
- Online discussions are just one more way to communicate. I don’t write up lists of manners for every interaction students will have. Imagine how silly I’d look if I passed out the rules of etiquette for office hours, for instance.
- More rules just make the classroom more patriarchal. How can I encourage student ownership for the work of the class if I sit around passing out rules?
- Formal rules only discourage students from participating.Rules “make people hesitate.” If students hesitate or decide not to respond, online discussion suffers.
- I already have policies that govern inappropriate behavior.Not only do I already have the acceptable use policies to fall back on, there are policies already in place for every situation from an honor code violation to disruptive or threatening behavior.
Actually, I would take things further by eliminating the AUP all together. Students behavior is best determined by agreed upon guidelines and dealt with regardless of whether technology is involved or not. Ongoing discussions about online behavior, appropriate commenting, and much more will allow students to learn and grow. Our social media world changes too quickly to come up with an arbitrary list of rules to follow.
Our online world is our world. Why do we differentiate?
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. T.S. Elliot, Little Gidding
As I sat in church Sunday, listening to the Homily on beginnings and endings and the coming of Advent, I thought, too, about teaching. Our school years certainly begin and end, giving us closure on one episode and an ability to re-do or start again. But I also thought about how difficult this shift in thinking about teaching and learning is for some. Letting go of traditional beliefs means an end to what we know, what is comfortable, and what made sense in our past.
As Carol Dweck says, people hold onto a mindset for a reason. At some point in their past it made sense in forming who they were and who they wanted to be. When we ask people to shift their mindsets about how people learn and what they should do in the classroom, that “end” can be difficult, almost painful. As Dweck says, it’s like letting go of yourself.
But beginnings can also hopeful if we approach them well. We need to look for examples of what is working, using those positive models to frame reasons for change. As the Heaths said in Switch: Knowledge alone doesn’t change behavior. “To create and sustain change, you’ve got to act more like a coach and less like a scorekeeper. You’ve got to embrace a growth mindset and instill it in your team.”
The Zotero group started by Wendy Drexler is often where I look for research regarding issues that interest me. Today, I had a focused discussion with a friend on whether teachers’ personalities made them embrace or more resistant to change, especially related to using technology to enhance student learning.
(As an aside, I should say I support student-centered, inquiry-based teaching and believe the use of social media offers opportunity for collaborative, global learning. If classrooms are teacher-centered and the discussions are focused on gadgets and not pedagogy, then technology is often a waste of time and money.)
After I left her office, I wondered if there was any research supporting our discussion. Sure enough, I found this (unfortunately in a PDF), a study from 2004. Here are some highlights (my emphasis):
Research has found that the personal beliefs and dispositions of teachers may relate to or predict successful technology integration. Honey and Moeller (1990) assert that teacher philosophy (student-centered versus teacher-centered) affected one’s ability to effectively use technology in the classroom, in that student-centered teachers were more successful. MacArthur and Malouf (1991) determined in their case study that teacher beliefs and attitudes greatly influenced how computers were used in the classroom. Other personal variables, such as self-competence and willingness to change, have also been shown to be closely related to computer use among teachers (Marcinkiewicz, 1994). Albion (1999) states that teachers’ beliefs, specifically self-efficacy beliefs, “are an important, and measurable, component of the beliefs that influence technology integration” (p. 2).
…this study suggests that the teacher attributes of time commitment
to teaching and openness to change combine with the amount of technology
training to best predict classroom technology use. The process of learning
to use technology requires time—time spent in training, but also time spent
playing with and exploring technology. This willingness to commit time to the
technology learning process may be represented by one’s willingness and commitment
to spend time beyond the typical work week to prepare instructional
activities. As such, this result suggests that time is essential in becoming a technology
using teacher, but also that technology use may predict time commitment
to teaching.
As a result, a teacher who approaches technology professional development with an attitude that is open to change and is committed to spending time outside of training to further explore technology may be more likely to use technology in the classroom than one who attends training with ambivalence and a lack of time.
Now I realize that one study isn’t necessarily the answer. But all of this makes sense as we determine how to best help teachers develop their own professional development online through social media and in “unconferences” where the onus is on the individual to contribute and learn. For those waiting to be spoonfed or who are unwilling to change, the effort may not be worth the trouble.
Teacher Dispositions as Predictors of Classroom Technology Use
For years, I’ve been telling my students I don’t grade for effort.
“It doesn’t matter how hard you work,” I’d say, “if the end result isn’t up to speed.”
This I would say this after my long discussions with them about the journey–and the process–and the learning–being what mattered in my class. I mean, I’ve been pushing Alfie for a long time.
Yeah, talk about sending a mixed message to my students.
Today I was reading Seth Godin’s book Linchpins and the proverbial light bulb went off in my head: effort, of course I want effort to matter.
See, this is where I was coming from. I have students who argue that even though they didn’t edit the paper, complete the paper, or finish reading the book, that any effort they put into the assignment should count. And I resented that they wanted credit for not really working, for turning in half an effort, for not really caring about our work. So I would tell them, “effort doesn’t count.”
But I also have fully capable students who “do school” with ease. They write well and produce competent (but not necessarily inspiring) essays; they read well and quickly; and they complete all assignments within an appropriate time frame. These are the students who generally earn good grades–but it’s not because they care about their work (though some do). Often, these are the students who have been taught how to follow the rules and do what they are told, as Godin says. And I was rewarding them for that. Plus, there may have been other unintended consequences.
My epiphany was when I realized that many of these students are no more eager to learn than the other group. The products just come more easily to them.
The students I want to encourage are these: the ones who write papers with original thought, even though they may not be grammatically correct; take longer to finish the book because they’ve put post-it notes and margin notes wherever they stopped to think; ask questions in class that make me ponder another scenario, a new direction, or a fresh approach to what we are doing. The ones who show effort because they are curious.
And, in fact, I do give those kids credit for effort. Rather, I give them credit for wanting to learn, even if they haven’t quite mastered the outcomes yet. I loved when one young man stayed after class to tell me how one of the characters in our book was “a man’s man, isn’t he Mrs. Carter Morgan.” What 13-year old uses that phrase? Or when a young woman told me what she valued most from my class was learning to be patient with her own learning. This from an athlete, an A-typer who has little patience for incompetence in any form. Or the quiet one who came to class grinning, sharing with me her “perfect thesis” she had thought of late the night before, trying to fall asleep.
As I’ve written before, my model of schooling would be a collaborative means of assessing growth that Sylvia Stralberg Bagley from Mount Saint Mary’s College in Los Angeles describes here:
…they [students] learn to view assessment as a valuable tool for growth rather than merely an arbitrary judgment handed down by someone in authority. (SS Bagley – The Australian Educational Researcher, 2010 – aare.edu.au)
This recent article comparing the judging method used on the television show “So You Think You Can Dance” to possible ways we can work with our students also resonates with me. The judges do not, the author says, “reduce their verdict to a judgment.”
And with my own long history of teacher baggage, I need to be sure I am clear with the messages I send.
image: flickr/photos/walkn/3314689121/
The rain comes steadily now.
Not like last night when Heidi, David, and I sat on the steps of my house, handing out candy and chatting with princesses, lions, and monsters. During the drizzle , the eighth-grade girls dropped by to say hello and get their sugar.
Seven or eight of them surrounded my front steps where we were sitting, all talking at once, huge smiles plastered across their faces. Heidi, ever the history teacher, challenged them with questions from class the day before, saying she wouldn’t give them a treat until they could answer. They did. Others excitedly yelled to me, “Give us an English question! One from the book!”
Laughing, I threw one out. They screamed the answer back, throwing their heads back in giggles and joy.
It was hard to not love the moment. Kids taking the time to stop and visit, wanting to share a moment from school, delighting in showing what they knew. Not for a grade. Not really even for candy because they would have gotten that anyway.
I awoke early today, hearing the steady rain hit our roof.
And as I sit here working on still more ways to teach A Tale of Two Cities, I am reminded of how much I love the relationship with my students, which inevitably leads to them wanting to learn and share.
And that what I do and say matters to them.
I don't think there's anything better than knowing students "get it."
We are reading The Importance of Being Earnest, by Oscar Wilde. We have been reading in class, taking turns playing characters, but the students must also must read sections at night on their own.
Today, we had reached the point when Cecily shares with Algernon that she has been engaged to him for three months (all in her head), even though they have never met.
I wondered if they would understand what was happening…because it all hinged on their having done the reading last night—carefully.
Suddenly, a giggle. Then a snicker. Then the whole class burst into laughter.
I could hardly keep from laughing myself, enjoying the moment when my students could fully understand the contradictory events, Wilde's cynicism, and the Victorian era's layers of rules and rule-breakers.
Sigh.
As they filed out, a boy…. A BOY…came up to me and said, "I didn't think this would be very good, but it's really funny!"
Oh, and in addition to reading, the students are annotating their work by finding references to history, jokes, and class discussions. They use the tools in Word to create comments and then hyperlinks within the document. They've also used Inspiration and other graphic organizers to create plot maps, plus they are writing their own scripts in pairs on wikis and Google Docs. The supplementary tech tools have certainly helped them with their understanding of drama, the Victorian period, and this play.
But today it was the laughter that made my day.
Uploaded on June 30, 2008
by new-ars
My husband gets a kick out of me.
I'm glad he still finds my quirks funny and not annoying.
The problem is that I love talking about how we learn, which, of course, involves how we teach. Whether it's a Tweet from The Washington Post about homework
Researcher Cooper says studies show that up until fifth grade, homework should be very limited. Kids in middle school shouldn't be spending more than 90 minutes a night on homework. In high school, the limit is two hours, Cooper says.
or a link via a colleague about an open, free online international university, I immediately click, read, and start chatting with him.
Suddenly, I'm wondering if learning is possible without homework, or if our new schedule means they have less. Then I flip my brain to Alfie Kohn, or John Medina, or Carol Sweck, remembering what I've read recently about brain research and learning.
The other night I kept him at the table arguing about Shirky's book, telling him that the ease of collaboration and sharing had changed the way many people view institutions, authority, and structure. I shared this from a recent post on The Chronicle Review:
One of my students put it this way: "It is imperative that someone studying this generation realize that we have the world at our fingertips — and the world has been at our fingertips for our entire lives. I think this access to information seriously undermines this generation's view of authority, especially traditional scholastic authority." Today's students know full well that authorities can be found for every position and any knowledge claim, and consequently the students are dubious (privately, that is) about anything we claim to be true or important.
Contrast that with 50 years ago, when students would arrive in awe of the institution and its faculty.
He just sat there and smiled.
He's not there yet, but he lets me go on and on.
My RSS reader has more than 300 blogs, feeds from four major news organizations, various shared items,and feeds from my students' blogs and wikis.
Sigh. No wonder I can't sleep.
I find it all fascinating, and the more I read, the more I think. People wonder how I have the time to keep up with all this, but I tell them it's what I do. I don't like to cook or garden, paint or watch television. I do run and workout everyday, but… learning about learning is what I enjoy.
So, on our first snow day of the year, I look forward to catching up with this and this today. I will also create a screencast about wikispaces for our teachers. There are also several podcasts I haven't had a chance to listen to yet.
Someone once said to me, "Get a life."
My response? Thank you. I like my life just fine!
