Monthly Archives: May 2010

Open to Change

Education reform, Teaching, ,

Open to Change

2010-05-30

by Richard White

It’s a fine line to walk, finding out what works for one’s self, but being open to change.

I found out the hard way a while ago, when, after 15 years of experience “mastering my craft” teaching in a number of different California schools, public and private, I had the good fortune to be able to invite a series of student teachers to share my classroom with me. On their worst days in my classroom, they left school defeated, nursing a sad feeling that they’d chosen to enter the wrong profession (been there, done that). On their best days, though, they blew me out of the water with their enthusiasm, their brilliant ideas, and outstanding teaching that left ME wondering if I it wasn’t time to turn in my lesson plans and go do something else. I learned very quickly that, when working with a student teacher, the best approach for me was to 1) listen to their ideas, 2) offer the wisdom of my own experience, and 3) shut up and get out of the way. Some days there would be post-lesson damage control to be done (for the students AND the student-teacher), but most days I’d walk away with a great new lesson/unit/teaching strategy that I could add to my bag of tricks.

Don’t get me wrong, though: working with a student teacher, when it’s done right, is a difficult and time-consuming process. The hardest part for me was always number 3 above, the shutting up. I mean, doesn’t this person know how much experience I have? Don’t they see how strong I am in the classroom? Don’t they realize how GOOD I am??! Of course, there are lots of different ways to be good, and what works for me isn’t going to work for someone else. There are lots of different strategies that can be employed in effective teaching, and I need to be open to the possibilities. I need to be open to the idea of changing some aspects of what I do, especially if there’s something better out there.

That’s the theory. The reality is that, especially as one spends a few years in the game, one gets invested in one’s system. To think about it from a media perspective, the carbon copies I used for my first lessons had to be typed into WordPerfect files, and then had to be retyped into ClarisWorks files, which fortunately were auto-translated into AppleWorks files, which required some finagling to be reformatted at Word .doc files, which are going to have to be completely redone (perhaps?) as LaTeX files… The time and energy that one spends in developing and presenting content has its own inertial legacy that becomes increasingly difficult to challenge.

At the level of the classroom itself: Do you make your notes available to students? Do you require students to take their own notes? Do you post your classroom content on the Internet? Do you allow students to take pictures of your notes? What about recording lectures?

We need to be open to the idea that students are developing new ways of acquiring and processing the information and procedures that we share with them. The “old way” of doing things isn’t necessarily the “best way,” although—and here’s the tricky part—it MIGHT be a really good way, and something that IS going to work for most of your students!

And there’s the rub. We have our years of experience that we are charged with using to help our students, but we have to be willing to accept that something new MIGHT be better, without yet knowing whether it really is or not.

My only advice here is to be willing to have the conversation. If students ask for your content to be made available online, consider doing that. If students want to take photos of classroom work, consider it. Why wouldn’t you want to allow that? Are you afraid that someone might actually get a copy of that information and… learn something??!

Oh, the horror! :)

Teachers: were curators, now filters

Teaching

Teachers: were curators, now filters

2010-05-20

by Richard White

I’ve had the good fortune in the last few weeks to run into a number of former students, including Megan, Danny, Eric, and David. These students, since I had the opportunity to teach them as long as ten years ago, have gone on to enjoy many successes in life, in lots of different ways. One was a reporter for the Washington Post, and embedded in Iraq for awhile. One worked at Apple before going on to work at a start-up. One is a few weeks away from finishing a doctorate in Electrical Engineering, and one is doing Ph.D. work on lasers at Caltech.

During a recent visit from Danny, we had a great chance to talk about the changing nature of the profession of teaching. It used to be that the teacher was a curator of sorts. One of the primary jobs of the teacher was to assemble information from a number of sources—textbooks, personal experience, encyclopedias, professionals; sources that the student might not ordinarily have access to—and present that information to the student, for consumption or manipulation. It was a good life, but a bit labor intensive, in many ways. Being a “teacher as curator” required a lot of management and coordination of resources.

Those days, for many teachers, are long gone. All that information from all those sources is, to a great extent, now available via an enormous firehose. Maybe you’ve heard of my friend Mr. Internet? Online textbooks, professional blogs, Wikipedia, corporate websites, educational websites, all contain enormous amounts of information, and provide the opportunity to learn from and converse with people in just about every field. Any teacher, with 15-minutes of googling and fact-checking, can assemble hundreds of links to quality information that can be used by students to guide their learning.

One of the new jobs for the teacher, then, is to manage that firehouse for our students. One of our new jobs is to reduce the number of hits from any given Google search from “thousands”—an overwhelming number that really doesn’t help anyone—down to a dozen or so.

I’ve got to admit, I used to scoff at the idea of a programmed WebQuest, dismissing it as just a way for teachers to repackage some of their old content in a new medium. I’m starting to realize, though, that telling my programming students only that “you need to use Google to find resources that will help you program a game in Python” is a bit vague; it leaves too much to chance and will almost certainly result in a certain amount of time wasted.

Part of my job, then, is assemble resources for them, not by collecting materials they wouldn’t otherwise have, but by pre-sorting the materials that they already have (via the Internet). A smaller subset of websites, etc., delivered in class or made available on the course website, helps to narrow down the places they need to dig through, and allows for a more efficient use of class/study time.

Setting up filters

Workflow, ,

SETTING UP FILTERS

by Richard White

2010-05-14

Too many computers. Not the average teacher's desk.

Sounds like a pretty technical article here: “Setting up Filters.” That could refer to spam filters, or search result filters, or filtering content to restrict the types of webpages that are being delivered to students at your school’s network. All discussion worthy, but… today, I’m thinking about personal filters.

Let’s look at how you can set up filters in your personal/professional life, filters that allow you to focus on the good stuff coming through—the things that you want or need to focus on—without being distracted by the bad stuff:things that are only going to interfere with your job/life/effectiveness.

Because the reality—our reality—is that there are simply too many channels for input in our lives, and no one is able to manage that firehose unaided. No one. Not me, not you, not your multitasking, ADHD, twenty-something friend living on espressos and Monster drinks.

You’ve almost certainly already taken advantage of some of the coping strategies that have been made available to you: your email client (I use Apple’s Mail.app) or webmail provider (gmail) already has spam filters built in, lucky for us.

If you’re feeling a little overwhelmed lately, here are some options to consider:

  • Reduce your networks
    Social and professional networks allow us to be more connected than ever. Feature? Yup. Feature AND flaw. More connections are good up to a point, but you’ve got a limited amount of time and energy. If you can’t monitor what’s happening in Facebook, your Ning accounts, your LinkedIn account,… why belong to all of them?
  • Reduce your peripherals
    This could run the gamut, from that extra printer that needs to be recycled to the bluetooth mouse you hardly ever use, from the old cellphone (recycle it!) to the extra car that you no longer use. Get rid of all that extra crap that you keep moving from one corner of your desk to another, and free up some CPU cycles.
  • Reduce distractions
    There’s ample documentation on the web that getting any actual… you know, WORK… done while you’re AT work is a Herculean /Sisyphean/Greek hero-of-your-choice task. Phone calls (work & cell, emails, text messages, chat messages, colleagues stopping by to ask a question, friends stopping by to take a coffee together, all conspire to make it extraordinarily difficult to do what I love most, and what I’m actually paid to do: teaching. Don’t get me wrong. I love the people I work with and the fact that I can socialize with them. But when it’s time to work, you need to find a way to shut out the distractions.

    Turn off email. Close your browser. Silence the cellphone. I still had one colleague who kept coming in to chat at inopportune times, so I got the clever idea of buying a pair of Sennheiser HD 202 headphones that I could pop over my head when I really needed to get work done. I was wearing them when the guy came in earlier this week when the guy came in and and cleared his throat a few times. I pretended I couldn’t hear him. After a few more tries, he poked me on the shoulder to get my attention, forcing me to look up and take off the headphones.

    “Wow, those things really do a good job of keeping out distractions, eh?” he said.

    “Not good enough, apparently…” I said.

    Was that too mean?

  • Reduce complexity
    Life’s a lot more complicated than it used to be, from the television shows we watch to the decisions we have to make as consumers. It makes sense to reduce complexity where possible, in order to save your processing power for the things that are truly important.

    Why carry 7 credit cards in your wallet? Why keep 37 files scattered over your computer’s desktop? Why pay for a landline? Why try to keep your complex schedule in your head, as opposed to on a decent calendar app in your smartphone?

    “You can have anything you want… but you can’t have everything you want.” Figure out what’s important to you, and ditch the rest.

  • Organize your news consumption
    This may seem silly, but I’ve stopped reading newspapers, or at least buying them. It’s hard to justify buying magazines, too. I don’t know how the whole “who’s going to support journalism” thing is going to settle out, but while they’re discussing it, I’ve taken to bookmarking RSS feeds on my laptop, syncing those feeds to my cellphone, and reading the news on the computer/cellphone at convenient times. Less waste, and I have enough different news sources now that I can easily scan the RSS headlines, just like I used to scan articles in the newspaper. It’s the new thing.

    Give it a try!

What strategies have you found to simplify your life, things that allow you to filter the distractions in your life so that you can focus on things that are more important to you? Keyboard shortcuts? Cutting your cable service? Ditching your smartphone?