Obviously.
How do you empirically measure the value of art? Of architecture? Of learning?
What does 80% learning improvement mean? How could you possibly measure that?
Why is it so hard to understand that hard numbers don’t attach themselves to some things?
I try to avoid some touchy issues here, but I can’t sit this one out.
The NRA posted it’s plan to “make schools safer.”
It’s just what they’d hinted at- they want an armed officer at every school, and they want laws changed so teachers can be armed in their buildings as well. To qualify as one of the armed officers, you’d need to go through their 40-60 hour training. Then we’d be safer.
Right.
Besides that I don’t think guns belong in school, I’ve got a more pressing issue. Where I teach, you must have at minimum a Master’s Degree to continue teaching beyond the first few years. It’s law. The wording the federal laws talk about “highly qualified” teachers. What they’re trying to do, between the two things, is to mandate that teachers be experts at what they do. In fact, you’re not even eligible for a professional license until you’ve taught full time for three years (that’s 2970 hours in the classroom, minimum).
If you read about the qualities of “expert,” you’ll find much about the amount of time related to becoming an expert- the number most often kicked around is 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. In my line of work, that’s about 10 years of teaching full time. That said, every teacher I know worth their salt will say you’re never an expert at teacher. But I digress.
We’ve established that we want to only allow experts to teach (or work) at our schools. We’ve established that there is federal legislation aimed at this. And we’ve established that it can take (nominally) 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to become an expert.
So here comes the NRA saying that a “40-60 hour” course of study makes someone fit to carry a gun in a school and be able to defend that school. It defies logic.
Presentations are hard, I’ll grant you. And I’m not talking about performing them.
There are a lot of rules to keep in mind, and a lot of guidelines that you need to take into account if you don’t want yours to look amateurish or be unwatchable. I’m not interested in getting into those details here- there are better presenters that do a better job of writing about what to do and not do.
I’m here to offer some other advice- something I’ve not seen much text about. It’s about using tech in a presentation.
Presentations are about engaging the audience. That’s it. There’s no second thing. If you fail with that, nothing else you do matters. As such, every decision you make should be based on that first criteria. So when you pick the tech that you’re going to use in a presentation, you need to focus on the engagement of the audience. Ask yourself: Will my use of this tech further engage my audience? Be thoughtful about how you answer.
The audience doesn’t care what remote app you’re using, but they’ll care if you have to re-sync the bluetooth to it during the presentation. They don’t care if your computer is wired to the projector or wirelessly connected, but they’ll care if the wifi flakes out and they won’t talk to each other. If you’re going to use a website live, you better be sure it’ll load and function properly. If you’re going to play a YouTube video, you’d better be sure it’ll load and play quickly and at high res. If you’re doing an audience poll, it better work easily and smoothly with a group that’s likely never used it before.
Losing an audience happens quickly and without remorse. Any glitch, any bobble, any reason to check out and they will.
As a result of this, I keep the tech I use to an absolute minimum. Cables are better than wireless. Reliable is better than not. Saved to disk is better than live-on-the-web. Familiar is better than novel.
I’ve been taking this course with Dan Ariely from Duke about the nature of how we make decisions and the latent biases inherent in those. It’s excellent- I’m trying to keep up with it, but my life is such right now that I may not be able to do that. Either way, I’m learning tons right now.
One of the points more recently made was over the nature of decisions. Much of what we do (or don’t do) in terms of change is based on an ingrained tendency to keep the status quo. We don’t like change. We resist and avoid it to a very large degree, though we are blind to much of this behavior.
There’s an interesting work around: force a choice. Provide a t-shaped decision fork, where it is impossible to continue on without change. This forces us into a situation where we must consciously choose the direction and choice we make. This explains, by the way, why educators don’t change their techniques or methods when presented with opportunities (and support). If we want to see meaningful change, we must consider the tendency for all of use to maintain the current state- and create situations that do no allow this. An example:
Let’s say you have aging desktop computers in classrooms, and you want teachers to adopt the more mobile solution of laptops. If you offer laptops to the teachers, a number will choose to take them, but the bulk will insist that they also continue to use and keep the desktop in the classroom. Instead, if we stipulate that the desktop computer will be removed from their room and disposed of, and that they must choose between two available models of laptops, you provide a t-shaped decision fork, and the change must be addressed. The status quo becomes an unacceptable choice, and thus the decision becomes the reasonable option.
I’m sure this is relevant to the way teacher adopt (or don’t adopt) technology into their classrooms. It’s something, however, I see precious little thought being put into, and I think that needs to change.
I starting talking about teachers writing their own textbooks about 7 years ago, in 2006. I’d been thinking about it before that, but there was no practical way to make it happen. In the years since, I’ve been successfully helping other teachers and departments down the road of creating and maintaining their own textbooks. It’s great.
The question that keeps getting thrown at me most consistently on this subject is “Who vets this material?”
I’ve gotten angrier with this question over time, which isn’t like me. Usually I calm down and become more reflective, but in this case the opposite has happened. I’ve gotten progressively more and more irate with this response from professional educators. This is, I think, because the answer is so stunningly obvious.
Who vets this material?
You do.
You, the educated professional educator. You, the expert at what you do. You, the person who will deliver the material and work with the end product.
Anything else is to abdicate you responsibility as an educator. Banking on some large conglomerate publishing house to get the content, context, and whatever else right (and without error or bias) is to give over your students’ education to that publishing company. It is the easy way out. It is cowardly.
This might come across as a bit of a rant- and I don’t mean for it to. I’m not that angry. But I am emphatic.
There seems to be a growing push towards forcing collaborative reading on our students. There have been a rash of applications and web sites devoted to allowing teachers to assign reading, and mandating that students both contribute and share notes on that text. It’s a concept that’s been around for a while, but seems to have gained some traction recently. I suspect that much of that traction comes from some very decent apps and services that have done a very good job of approaching and managing the inherent problems. Cudos to them, honestly.
All that said, I’m not convinced. Collaborative writing is a great too for educators- it can really bring better conversations into the classroom about deeper concepts by more voices. That’s a very good thing. The issue I see/have is the mandated nature of this combined with the tendency of educators to overuse tools. While collaborative reading can be good, it isn’t always a good thing. And we, as educators, tend to find things that work and then promptly overuse them to death. We found wordles, and then everything had to be a wordle. We found twitter, and suddenly twitter is all we use.
In addition, and as I’ve mentioned here before, I’m an introvert. I don’t really like doing things like this publicly, and forcing me to do that creates resentment, worry, and essentially guarantee that I’ll hold back my best stuff. Then, to make matters worse, there’s the virtual certainty that I’ll be penalized for holding back my best stuff. It’s not going to go well for me.
Before you start thinking that introverts “need to learn” how to share what we’ve done, hold up. We’re not broken. We don’t need fixing. And I’m happy to share- on my time and when I’ve done my thinking. I’m not ready to write down my working, in-process thoughts for the whole world to see. That doesn’t feel like collaboration to me- it feels like exposure.
Reading has always, always been a private act for me. From a very young age, reading what the thing I knew I always got to do by myself- no matter how many people were around. It was between me and the book, and that made it a sanctuary for me. I’d be heartbroken to see my sanctuary taken away.
From time to time I get asked about remote teaching- that is, teaching when I’m not in the room. I talk about how I’ve Google Video Chatted into my classroom to teach when I’m not physically there, and people are often… skeptical.
Just yesterday, however, an former student of mine sent me a video they’d shot from the first time I’d ever taught remotely- my kids had kept me home sick, and I felt some obligation to help my students with Midyear reviewing. It’s a short video, but it’ll give you an idea what it looks like.
Anywho.
There’s been a lot of talk around about “flipped” classrooms. I’ve written about them a bunch, and I’m not here to re-hash any of that. The new “thing” has been people talking about “blended” classrooms- it’s a little like flipped, except not all the time. Or something.
Anyway, I’m seeing a rather large problem with all this.
Responsiveness.
If you aren’t in the room with the students (either physically or virtually), you can’t see or predict the engagement you’ll get from students. I don’t care how many years you have been teaching- some lessons that look great on paper fail in the classroom. There isn’t any rhyme or reason for it, it seems. It happens. When we see it happen in the classroom in front of us, we can adjust- throw out the lesson, change the tone or delivery, or otherwise modify what we’re doing to adapt to the conditions we’re being presented with. It’s what we do. But if we’re not there, and if we can’t see, then we have no way of doing any of these things. The lesson goes on at whatever pace, in whatever tone, with whatever activities were in place when we began. There’s no adjustment. There’s no adaptability. You’re locked in from before the start.
The analogy here is to the new(ish) driverless cars from Google. They’re capable of getting from place to place- merging, obeying traffic rules, and so on. In theory, all that should be capable with nothing more than GPS- after all, the car only really needs to know where it is and where it’s going. But that’s clearly not the case- road conditions, traffic, accidents, construction… all these factors mean that the cars need to have “eyes.” In this case, that means Lidar, cameras, and other sensors.
We can’t excuse ourselves from the classroom after locking in our lessons ahead of time- via video or otherwise. We must make our lessons, however (whenever) they are delivered responsive to the reactions of our students.
I usually avoid politics and social commentary outside the strict realm of Education on this blog. I’m a human with opinions, yes, but I choose to focus my efforts on a subject I feel I have some mastery in. That said, I’m writing an open letter about an issue I feel profoundly about- as an educator as well as a human. In case you’re unaware, there is an ill-conceived attempt to ban LGBT students form the prom at a High School in Indiana. A teacher has supported and spoken in favor of the effort. There’s an article here that’ll bring you up to speed. The following letter is to the superintendent of the district she teaches in. The letter (which I have sent via email) follows:
Dear Mark Baker,
I’m writing to you as a long-time educator. I am writing to you as a human being.
It is incumbent upon you to immediately dismiss Diana Medley from your staff. Her recent public statements have (and this is beyond doubt and debate) caused serious harm to an already at-risk population of students in your system. You are duty bound to provide first and foremost a safe environment for your students, and Mrs. Medley’s statements make it clear that she does not value as human beings a significant populations of your students. She has publicly stated that they “serve no purpose” and such a statement sends a clear message to her (and your) students: they have no worth.
The suicide, depression, and homelessness rates of this population are far above that of the general student population. This qualifies them as at-risk implicitly. To make such a statement about such a fragile population therefore puts them further at risk. Such actions by an educator are unacceptable.
Thank you for your time,
Tim Calvin
Think about this:
When a educator sets up a classroom, what are they trying to get the students to focus on? How does the configuration of that room help with that focus?
And then ask why that educator’s desk is at the front of that room.