I found this article via the ever-excellent Jason Kottke’s site. I can’t recommend the reading of it enough- it speaks hugely to how we need to be thinking about how we structure both our lessons and our schools in general.
For those data junkies among us, it’s worth noting a significant amount of research supports this.
When I was doing my udergrad work, I studied poetry a lot. I did this from the side of a reader, where I looked at and analyzed published poetry, but the more interesting part of my study revolved around me writing poetry.
There’s a lot to learn from a workshop class in writing poetry- the revisions of a creative work, the blindingly harsh critiques, the relentless need to continue to creatively produce quality work… these were all important experiences for me. That said, the parallel I want to draw today revolves around the use of self-imposed restrictions and their benefit to the end-work.
I had never understood (previous to workshopping poetry) why there was such a large body of work that had been produced of highly formalized structures. If the writers were free to choose the form of their work (as they clearly were), why were they putting any restrictions on themselves at all? Wasn’t it more desirable to work without restrictions? Why were so many great writers forcing their work into the form of a sonnet or a villanelle? Why on earth would you choose to write in iambic pentameter?
They answer, I’ve found, appears contradictory: By choosing and then sticking with self-imposed restrictions, if focuses the creativity of the creator. By not having to entertain every possible direction of work, you become free to deal with the finite issues at hand. Restrictions were allowing the authors of these poems to write better poems than if there were no restrictions. Focus comes from restraint.
A few years later, while taking a figure drawing class, I found a similar experience: by limiting us to only white paper and charcoal, all other barriers and decisions were removed and we were free to focus on the form of the drawing. I didn’t have to think about colors or papers- I only had to focus on the problem at hand. Ditto, too, in the photography I was doing. Black and white photography lives on because of the restrictions it imposes, not despite them.
And so I was pleased to discover the same thing worked with tech in education.
Yes, it’s good to have access to lots of tech. Yes, I believe that different grade levels and teaching styles require different tech. But in any case of tech integration, I find that imposing restrictions can help to focus people’s creativity with that tech. Instead of having hundreds of apps and using six on a given project- what if you limited yourself to two? What if you decided that you’d do your next presentation with nothing but the photo roll? Or if your entire workflow would only use Google Drive and Notability?
I’m not against people’s ability to use lots of different apps- My point is that if you’re overwhelmed by the sheer volume of possibilities, or if you’re struggling to find a good method to achieve a goal, consider self-imposing restrictions. Dial things back, allow your creativity to focus, and, in time, you’ll find you may want to slowly expand the tools you use.
I have the rare distinction of liking my dentist. He’s good to me- and he takes care of my teeth without causing (undo) pain. He’s come to expect me to ask a huge number of questions- to the point where he’ll give me a mirror so I can watch what he’s doing in my mouth. Let’s say he humors my curiosity.
One of the things I like about my dentist is that he’s up to date with his tech. Though I’d love for him to have a new 3d modeling system and milling machine to make ceramic crowns on the spot, I can accept that the six digit price tag might be out of his reach. Besides that, though, he’s doing things right. My fillings are a two-part white epoxy. My crown is a porcelain sculpted bit. He cures adhesives with UV light. It’s pretty neat.
It’s not at all like the dentist that my parents went to at my age.
My dentist has kept up with changes in technique and tools. He doesn’t complain to me about having to learn about the new light-curing epoxies. Or about the new high-speed drills. Or about the digital xrays he now takes. Not a single complaint- in fact, he’s pretty enthusiastic about the stuff in our conversations. He’s not overly fond of the old ways.
And the reason he doesn’t complain is his understanding that if he didn’t keep up to date with the new tech, he would have no customers. Nobody is going to go to a dentist that still uses drills for 1940. Nobody is going to have fillings done like they were in 1970. Nobody wants a root canal from 1980.
Yet in the teaching world, every new change is greeted by calls for PD or “change of conditions” negotiations. Resistance to the new is the norm. Change is something to be avoided. The schools, however, are still full. Our customers still arrive every morning.
What if they had the choice? What if students, like me and my dentist, could choose who to see? Could make a choice, teacher by teacher, school by school, district by district about what sort of service they wanted? What would education look like then?
I’m getting sick of having the following conversation:
Somebody: My elementary students like the Chromebooks way more than the iPads.
Me: Really? Interesting.
Somebody: Yeah, they like them way more. It’s because of the keyboard.
Me: Oh?
Somebody: They have a really hard time typing on the iPad keyboard. The real keyboard is much better.
Me: Uh-huh.
Somebody: I like the keyboards much better. I want more of those.
And there you go. It’s the “Kids can’t type on a flat screen” argument. And it’s old and it’s not true. What we have here is a residual-need from the legacy teachers that are inevitably telling me this. Teachers that have always had a physical keyboard and nothing else- who, by the way, are teaching students who do not have the same perception of “real” keyboard versus not.
It becomes just another case of an educator imposing their own needs on the students as an excuse to not adapt to new technology.
Oh, laminators. How I remember your gently smoldering smell from my own youth. The smell of long-chain monomers pressing onto construction paper leaving it with a gloss and a sense of permanence.
And therein lies the beginning of my thoughts of lamination.
1. Those fumes can’t be good for anyone. Really.
2. They are expensive to supply- and they break on a regular basis. So they’re expensive to maintain, too.
3. The glare off the shiny surface of the laminated surface reduces the readability of the item you’re trying to protect.
4. Why would you want the thing you’re hanging up to be permanent? Making something like that last indefinitely implies that it is perfect and cannot be improved and is relevant to every group of students every year. Care to stand behind something you’ve made with that statement? There’s very little I’ve made over the years that I’d feel that way about.
So let’s all do each other (and the students) a favor and just stop. Ok?
Holy Hell.
I’m not sure- even in my wildest dreams- that I could have dreamed up much more off a mess than LA Unified has created with it’s botched 1:1 iPad program. In case you haven’t heard, let me share what’s currently going on:
LAU purchased 700,000 iPads (at a cost of roughly $1,000,000,000). Thus far, about 700 of those had made their way into the hands of the students. And today, news has come that students have “hacked” their iPads to remove the school-imposed restrictions. As a result of this “hacking” school officials have halted the entire iPad initiative. Stopped it entirely. There are a lot of problems with this story. I’m going to enumerate them:
In addition, they appear to have provided no training to teachers about how to use these devices in schools. Students and teachers were simply given iPads and expected to make it work.
No support = failure.
What angers me more than LAU potentially squandering a billion dollars is what this failure will do to the perception of 1:1 programs everywhere else. Their lack of planing and poor deployment endangers the future funding of all 1:1 programs. The public now thinks, erroneously, that iPads can be casually “hacked.” That they won’t get used. That teachers hate them.
And all of this could have been avoided- easily- if they had done two things:
Rant over.
So this happened. San Jose State killed their much-talked-about MOOC experiment. For some pretty good reasons.
But I don’t really care about that, if I’m honest. I think the wrong bit of it is getting all the attention.
Consider what the university did: They took the large numbers of at-risk freshmen who needed to take some basic and remedial courses, and mandated that they do so in a MOOC. In doing so, they took an ill prepared population and pushed them into a method of teaching that has little (none, really) interaction and personal connection with a human instructor, and has no face time- and requires very good time management skills as well as an ability to work independently. Freshmen. At risk.
See the problem?
I started a MOOC once- Dan Ariely was teaching a free course about Decision Making Psychology on Coursera. It was really good- good subject, excellent instructor, well structured, and free. I made it two weeks.
I’m clearly a decent student to have gathered the education I have- I can focus and time manage and all those other skills. But the complexities of my life pulled me away regardless- and this from a course I liked! What, then, can we possibly expect of at-risk freshmen?
I found this on tumblr today, and it comes from AMIT GUPTA . I have no idea if the anecdote described is true- and I don’t think it matters. The lesson here works- and not just for students, but also for educators.
…. let’s start with an anecdote from Art & Fear. It concerns a ceramics class:
The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.
His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”.
Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity.
It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work — and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
I’ve been reading a book about checklists. It’s called The Checklist Manifesto. The author supposes the checklist that are properly design should free our minds from the mundane tasks that absolutely have to be accomplished and allow us to focus on the more demanding and difficult creative tasks that need to be addressed as well. He offers examples from the fields of surgery, investments, law, and, most important to him, pilots.
It turns out there’s been an enormous amount of research done on what makes a good or bad checklist in the realm of pilots. Not only that, but the work that’s been done look at the failures and successes of those checklists and updates them regularly. This creates a cycle of creating and re-creating checklists based on the needs of the environment they will be used
in. This, the author argues, is the reason why air travel is so safe in this country, and indeed worldwide.
The book contains a series of the students observations, all of which made me think about its applic
It was powerful for me, and I suspect will will serve to change the way I interact with complex tasks in my future professional career. I never thought I would be proponent of checklists in the classroom, but the clear, well argued, and profound examples offered in this book allowed me to see the virtues of them even in a tasks such as education.ation in the realm of education. I am sure, were we to propose a checklist for creating a lesson plan in the classroom, that we would receive blowback from educators the world over. The argument about us not trusting the capabilities of professional educators, and trying to dumb something down to the check list would overwhelm us. I suspect, having read this book, that argument might be valid for poorly conceived in designed checklists. Rather, a well-designed checklist should empower us, as educators, to free ourselves from the mundane but necessary tasks that need to be accomplished in the classroom, and allow us to focus on the more creative problem-solving endeavors that we must apply ourselves too.
Highest marks.