My Dream Classroom - #EdTech

So to me, one of the BIG questions is and has always been this: how do we combine it all? How do we take all of the wonderful ideas - back-to-basics, #MakerEd, 20% time, writing to learn, project-based learning, authentic digital citizenship, cooperative learning, and individualized instruction (just to name a few) - and synthesize them into a coherent classroom model?

I've arrived at the conclusion that my classroom - the physical space - is one of the major barriers I face when I entertain the dreamscape mindset of a training, a conference session, a Twitter ed chat, or just a water cooler conversation about how we're all going to save the world. How am I to do things in a room that looks like this?

Okay, wait. To be fair, that is NOT my classroom. But frankly, my room doesn't have a whole lot more than that going for it. (And I thought that the window units were a nice touch for a 21st century classroom touted as an "air conditioned high tech classroom".) Both the room above at the University of Connecticut and my classroom here in Beaumont, Texas have several amenities one does not notice at first glance. They have desks that can be reconfigured into multiple arrangements (pairs, tables, arches, circles, and of course, columns & rows). They have mounted data projectors,
something that I know is still not as ubiquitous as it should be. And my classroom, being a secondary public school classroom, does admittedly have a little more tech than the university classroom above.

I have four dedicated desktop workstations and a fifth that drives my data projector but can be used by students if I'm not holding forth. I bring my own laptop to free up one of these, but even just the four is a veritable bounty where I work. I also have a Hitachi StarBoard interactive white board, two RF slates that can be used in conjunction with the StarBoard, and 30 NEO2 student keyboards that can be used as classroom responders and for taking Accelerated Reader quizzes, composing and submitting student writing, and other applications. While that last is a technology that is no longer sold by its most recent distributor, the company continues to support the device, and it remains a tool that I have at my disposal.

So what's the problem, right?

Well, the biggest problem is that very little of what I possess allows for the very much more robust applications available through the use of Web 2.0 and tablet technology. This is where the dream of 1:1 comes from for most educators with whom I discuss ed tech. If we can't have the whole ball of wax, what can we do? 

But the next biggest problem, as I suggested above, is the space itself. This is my actual classroom:

Now, pardon the dust. It's been a ridiculously hectic year, but as you can see, I'm basically dealing with a room full of student desks - 36 of them - some counters on two walls, and sundry ancillary furniture (bookshelves, file cabinets, etc.). When I think about something like 20% Time, I can only envision a mad dash for one of the five available computers. When I think about Maker Ed, I just look at my poor broom, the lack of space to lay out materials, and the budget I don't have and weep for the impossibility of it all, not to mention the little holes created at the center of each "table" of desks by the rounded corners where the four desks meet. We get out scissors and glue, that hole becomes the trash can. Out of sight, out of mind, right?

So how do we design a room where we could even begin to do all of this?

For starters, since we're dreaming, I'll either need to cap my students at 20 to a class or expand my space. The tables I want accommodate five students each, so I can take anything the district wants to throw at me provided they move my walls out to accommodate the tables. I want these conference tables made by SmartDesks (
http://www.smartdesks.com/HD-conferencing-teleconference-table.asp). They're beefy, so they should hold up to kids, and they're versatile, so we can flip the screens up and use the computers or flip them down and have a work space for pencil and paper work, projects and making, group discussion, or whatever else. I'll need four or five of these in the room so that everyone has a seat at a table.

After finally deciding on what to do about furniture, I put the gadgets in the hands of my students. We had a discussion at the end of a few classes yesterday about what we would need if money were no object. Here is what my 7th and 8th graders came up with:

• Laptops/Tablets - This broke into the familiar debate over laptops vs. tablets. In the end, since my chosen "desks" will accommodate a full desktop CPU for each child, we decided that a set of 10 or 15 tablets for projects requiring portability would be sufficient in addition to the beefy student workstations.
• A 3D Printer - This surprised me a little bit, but I should have known that there are hungry makers among us. This led us into a discussion about how our "desk" area would need to be expanded by about half to provide some standing worktables, counter space, and cabinets to accommodate making "stuff".
• Cameras - I asked whether the tablet cameras would be sufficient, but this young lady said, "No." She wants SLRs. Nice ones. Something with which we could take high quality photographs or shoot long periods of high quality video. Okay.
• Wireless Beats - At first I thought this was just a covetous wish, but then they told me that if we had online video lessons, interactive web-based activities, or were editing video, we would need the serenity provided by headphones. And wireless beats wires. And Beats beat everything else. I yielded at this point.
• A better data projector - Mine is old and sucks. So much so that they can tell. 'Nuff said.
• A telescope - I'm still not sure why, but I promised this young lady she could have one.
• Yoga balls - Some of my kids want these instead of the snazzy desk chairs in the SmartDesk photo. Sounds good to me. If we have to continue to switch classrooms, I suppose I would want a corral of yoga balls with which kids could switch out the standard chair since many students turned their noses up at the suggestion.
• Oculus VR goggles - Sounds cool. I said we could get 10 or 15 and check them out on an "as needed" basis like the tablets just because...come on, man. Really? Who wants to look at a classroom full of zombies jacked into the Matrix?
• Glass - They want Google Glass. Again, a small set on an "as needed" basis because, again, like, "Are you filming me? Creep."
• Touch Screen Smart TVs - They want these for small group presentation at points throughout the room, so I figure we'll have three - one on each wall that doesn't have my StarBoard. I like my StarBoard.

My only addition to all of this sexy tech was much more mundane, but critical, I think. Infrastructure. We'll need some serious bandwidth if all of these toys are to be worth a darn. So big wifi - fast and fat - throughout the learning space AND throughout the building to facilitate iPad scavenger hunts, geocaching adventures, and the like. So that was my two cents, and the children concurred.

At this point, I reminded them that this was our READING class, and what about just reading? So the discussion shifted to the "tech" we would need for a proper reading space. First, they said that they wanted a reading space removed from our classroom proper. We agreed on the suggestion of a loft - a staircase on one wall leading up to a loft that ran around at least three, if not all four, walls of the room. The short wall at the inside edge of the loft over which they could look upon the classroom workspace would be made entirely of short bookshelves and be full of everything we might want to read. The taller outside wall would have bookshelves, too, but with open spaces for a few other amenities as listed here:

• Hammock Chairs - They asked for alternative seating for reading, and while bubble chairs, egg chairs, bean bag chairs, poufs, couches, and pillows made the list, this idea was a hit. So we figure that periodically throughout the loft, we'll have nooks filled with various seating options.
• A Refrigerator - The kids want this filled with chilled bottled water to which they can help themselves. Why not?
• Fish - They want the bookshelves on the outer wall to be broken up, especially at the reading nooks, with built-in aquariums featuring different varieties of fishes at each nook.
• Music - I argued this one, but when 7th graders told me that soft instrumental music pumping through speakers at the reading nooks would help them focus, I acquiesced.
• E-book access - Finally, they want access to an e-book library that they could get into for new releases, books that we don't have enough copies of, or books we simply don't own.

So there it is. This is our vision of the 21st classroom. If any of you wealthy philanthropists out there happen upon this blog and decide you're going to build my kids' classroom, do me a favor and give me a call, okay? I'll drop everything, Dawn and I will sell the house, and we'll get to wherever you want to build just as quickly as we can.

On the perpetuation of little white lies

My head is spinning this morning and I’m not sure how to get it to stop. My wife suggested this, so I’ll give it a shot. We’ll see if I can calm it down by trying to get it all on paper.

At the July 28 Beaumont ISD School Board Meeting, Dr. Kimber Knight got the dubious honor of presenting our district’s 2014 state assessment scores to the newly-installed Board of Managers. As former Trustee Mike Neil recounted in a post on Facebook last week and again in this morning’s Beaumont Enterprise, the scores were not met with the blindness, the support for the façade that “all is well”, with which hard truths were met by our former Board of Trustees. It almost seemed as if Dr. Knight’s presentation had been prepared in anticipation of the reactions proffered by the old board; she used language designed to suggest that the district wasn’t doing as poorly as the numbers suggested. Then a shocking moment occurred. The board broke from the traditions fostered by their predecessors and demanded the unvarnished truth.

This moment was refreshing to every stakeholder who cares about the future of our school district. Dr. Knight, especially, as Neil pointed out in his column, seemed relieved to be able to report the facts and let the board and the public draw their own conclusions. Truth was finally having its day in the Board Room of the Beaumont Independent School District, and while the numbers constitute myriad hard, hard truths, only the unmitigated acceptance of those truths will allow us to move forward in a positive direction and repair the damage left behind by our district’s former leadership.

But then, I read the editorial leading off the Opinions section this morning, and the room began to tilt toward the surreal, and something out of a Serling-esque nightmare fell over the situation.  The Enterprise’s Editorial Board writes this morning that the value of our Board of Managers has been proven, exemplified by the managers’ ability to reduce the number of teacher layoffs in our district from the 221 teachers on the original Reduction in Force (RIF) list to less than 10. I shook my head at this little white lie and continued reading as the wall beyond the news sheet continued to slide askew.

When I got to the following line, though, whether through indignation, disbelief, or some other rejection, I could barely continue reading further: And if dozens of teachers had been laid off, the remaining educators would have had to deal with much larger class sizes, in some cases almost 30 students. This statement cannot remain in the collective mind of our city. This statement is a land mine waiting to blow unrest and division wide open once again destroying the fragile harmony of which Neil spoke in his letter. It is a lie, and if the citizens of this city believe it, they will have a rude awakening on the first day of school.

See, there was another moment during the July 28 Board meeting that some described as comical, some with only knee-jerk consideration attributed to the failing of the speaker, and others recognized as just a complete failure to communicate. The Board of Managers asked Dr. Dwaine Augustine to give them exact numbers describing the state of our district’s teachers and the RIF. Dr. Augustine tried very hard to explain several times and in several different ways what it took many of us – the teachers impacted by and potentially impacted by the RIF – several attempts to understand completely ourselves. It seems that the editors of the Enterprise are still working to understand it, too.

The RIF happened.

The Board of Trustees refused to vote, the Board of Managers weren’t installed in time to stop it, the Conservator did nothing, and the RIF still happened. It is important that we all start the school year knowing this.

Let me try to do for the editors what Dr. Augustine worked so hard to do for the Board last Monday night.

When the former Board of Trustees voted to approve the list of “affected areas” during the first stage of the RIF process, they eliminated teaching positions. Those positions are gone. That means that if there used to be three teachers in your child’s school to teach the 300 children in your child’s grade, each teacher had about 100 students to teach over the course of his or her six class periods. That works out to an average of about seventeen kids per class, an extremely manageable group of children. If one of those three teaching positions was RIFd by virtue of being in an “affected area”, however, those 300 kids will now be divided up between the two remaining teaching positions raising that average class size to twenty-five. Now that is a substantial increase when we talk about things like student engagement, classroom management, and discipline. And when we consider that this is an average, understand that some classes will remain manageable at twenty students or less while other classes rise to thirty or more. 

That part of the RIF happened. There will be 221 fewer teaching positions in our district this year than there were last year. That means that, through whatever mechanisms converged to bring it to pass, we will have 221 fewer teachers this school year. That is what Dr. Augustine was trying to explain to the Board of Managers. The only reason that this Board of Managers is facing a teacher RIF list of fewer than ten teachers is that so many teachers – good, strong, rock-solid teachers – fled from the uncertainty that loomed over the district last spring and throughout the summer. They retired. They transferred to other districts. They left education behind and moved into industry. They decided that the headache wasn’t worth the compensation and went home to tighten the family’s finances and find a way to make it on a single income. They said in gigantic numbers (more than 200 of them, in fact), “Enough is enough. We’ve had it. We’re leaving.”

The old Board frightened so many educators with their gross dereliction and ineptitude that those teachers and administrators sought greener pastures, security, and sanity rather than stay behind and live by a roll of the dice.

Now, I sing the praises daily of our state’s Commissioner of Education, our new Board of Managers, and our new Superintendent. I’m glad that they’ve all stepped up to face a nearly impossible task and are approaching it with the kind of grit and integrity that will be its only solution. But I cannot abide by our city’s newspaper and its Editorial Board engaging in the same kind of obfuscation and sugar-coating that were hallmarks of our former leadership whether they’ve done so through ignorance or intention.

At the end of this month, in nearly every classroom in our city, our children will walk into larger classes than they ever have before. We will need to come together as a community and support our teachers and our administrators and the students and families they serve, as together we weather the storm wrought by the ignorance, insolence, and pride of our district’s former leadership. We will need to support our volunteer Board of Managers and not turn on them when we discover that the promise woven into this morning’s editorial was broken long ago and will not come to pass for months or years to come.

Haven't checked out #slowchatED, yet? What are you waiting for?

Many of the educators who stop by the blog here also use Twitter to help build and maintain their PLN. Some dedicate their time to state chats like #txeduchat, #ILedchat, or #norcalchat. [If you don't know whether your state has an edchat running you can check Joe Mazza's (@Joe_Mazza) Official State Hashtag Map or Jerry Blumgarten's (@cybraryman1) Weekly Twitter Chat schedule]. Other educators devotedly follow chats where their particular subject matter is discussed like #APlitchat or #alg1chat. Still others tune in to chat about the specific population of students with whom they work - #LDchat or #gtchat.

Many of you, however, have not yet turned on to one of the greatest ideas in Twitter professional development since the very creation of the hashtag. Of course, I'm talking about #slowchatED. If you still haven't added this column to your Tweetdeck or popped that hashtag into your search box, you're missing out on one of the most intense but relaxed chats available to us. But don't worry. As #slowchatED's illustrious founder, David Theriault (@davidtedu), would probably suggest, now is the time to FIX IT.

I'll give you the gist here, but then I'll link you to the genesis, history, and NOW of the thing. Basically, we chat all week long instead for only an hour. Every #slowchatED begins on Monday morning of a given week and ends on Saturday. Depending on who's moderating, you get one or two questions each day, and we spend the whole day hashing those questions out. 

Perhaps my favorite aspect of #slowchatED (although not one of which I've availed myself as often as I'd like) is that, given that kind of time, if you have more than 140 characters to add, you can shoot over to your blog, pound out everything you've got to say, then just tweet a link to your thoughts into the stream. Between occasions like these and the various backchannels that grow like ivy, the discussion becomes much more robust than it ever could in just an hour's time.

Another big advantage, of course, is time. Ever have one of those days where you have conferences through your down time, classess running full tilt all day, meeting(s) after school, a quick bite to eat somewhere, then something with the family that takes you right up 'til bedtime? Oh, yeah, that's most days.  Well with #slowchatED, you can take a whole day off. Shoot, take two. We'll still be there, hashing out the topic, whenever you can get back.  You can even go back and answer the questions you missed. We just want as many intelligent voices in the conversation as possible.

So, if you've been lurking in the #slowchatED house during these last couple of months or just seeing your Tweeps' additions to the conversations drift through your feed, wait no longer. Now is the time.  Here are the promised links if you need to know more. When you get done reading, jump in. Join us. 

Because sometimes slow is better.

How #slowchatED came to be

Where #slowchatED has been

Where #slowchatED is RIGHT NOW

Differentiation vs. Standardization, a reply

My friend, colleague, and tweep, Jenn Roach (@JennGRoach), presented me with an answer to a question I threw into a Twitter chat this weekend.  We were both participating in #sunchat which is kind of a melee of ideas, opinions, platitudes, facts, links, and the occasional fit of weekend educator silliness. Well, somewhere in the noise, I asked about differentiation and standardization, and she wowed me with a reply that would not fit into the 140-character mold made gospel by the folks at Twitter.  Instead, she wrote a post titled "Differentiation VS Standardization" on her blog titled Literacy, Leadership, and Life. She then tweeted the link to me, and asked for my input.

Well, like Mrs. Roach, I could not fit my reply into a 140-character box. In fact, I couldn't fit my reply into the 4,096-character comment box that Blogger allows at the end of a blog post. So I had to come here.  Maybe go read Mrs. Roach's post, then come back here to read my reply. I don't know whether we'll agree to go our own ways on this or keep it up for a bit, but either way, I know that I love being challenged by so worthy a colleague.  Here, then, is my reply:

I'm not sure whether the weekend has left me in any state to wax philosophic about two of the biggest issues facing educators today, but I’ll have a go.

Let’s start with standardization. As an RtI Coordinator, I deal with many of the most marginalized students in our population. As a Pre-AP teacher, I deal with another group of marginalized kids. These two ends of the spectrum are among those most detrimentally impacted by the notion that there is some one-size-fits-all standard that will prepare every child for the rigors of this world.

I have dyslexic kids, for example, who fire on all eight cylinders intellectually provided they don’t need to visually process written text. Unfortunately, reading written text is a big part of the standard to which legislators and ivory tower theorists would hold our children. Under a standardized system, these children are often lost. We just lost Michael Faraday, Jack Horner, Ansel Adams, David Boies, Nelson Rockefeller, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sir Richard Branson, Steven Spielberg, and a host of others.

I have kids with autism spectrum disorder which can extend their processing time to more than twice that of their peers. If the standard includes completing an assessment within a four-hour window (as it does here in Texas), these kids are lost. We just lost Mozart, Temple Grandin, and Vincent D’Onofrio among others.

Add to these troubling considerations the fact that, while approximately 8.6% of American schoolchildren live with some type of learning disability, approximately 32% of incarcerated youth live with learning disabilities. So what is our standardization really preparing these kids for? For college and career? Not for the kids in this margin of the population.

Then I consider the kids who sit in my Pre-AP class and are tagged as gifted and talented. That means, according to the process by which we make these designations in the system, I have a child who is operating intellectually at two or more standard deviations above the norm, and he’s cooling his heels in a Pre-AP class in which he’s already figured out most of what I need to present to his peers before I’ve begun to present it. Where will this child’s fire to excel be born if I don’t differentiate, if I standardize my teaching? I can tell you this: by virtue of only being in my Pre-AP class and not in the IHP group or at our gifted magnet campus or somewhere even more suited for him, this child’s fire for learning in an academic setting has already begun to die. So we lose the other margin of our population by placing our standards down at a level these children have already surpassed.

I’ll tell you what. I don’t like standardization. It’s mass production mentality, and it doesn’t work when the product being produced is a human mind. They just come in too many shapes and sizes to all fit on one conveyor belt.

I have a child who could probably progress to a great art school. He could probably learn from a master cartoonist and make his way in the world one day if such a mentorship were available to him. But his parents have already been told that that will likely never happen. If he does every work hard enough to ever be accepted into a post-secondary institution, he will be steered toward process operations or some other skilled labor field. He is in our life skills class. That is the standard for him and his classmates. Never mind that right now, today, he’s one of the most gifted cartoonists I’ve ever met. That will be allowed to languish and die, as he trudges forward through the standards our system grants him. Where is the 2e – twice-exceptional – designation for this child? Why can’t his strengths be recognized and developed while his limitations are built up through interventions appropriate to his needs? Why does he need to take and pass the same test that will open the doors to a future lawyer or surgeon? Where does his path lay?

And this brings us to differentiation. I would rather see our entire system – every classroom, every teacher, every course, every assignment, every standard of mastery – differentiated based upon the needs of every child than see one tablespoon of talent go wasted and undeveloped. I would rather not think of gifted junkies sitting around between shifts delivering pizzas self-medicating in order to turn down the volume in their own heads. I would rather not know that there are three times the number of learning disabled kids in jail than there should be, statistically speaking, but they didn’t get what they needed in school and didn’t see another way to go.

Differentiation means knowing your kids. That’s not bad, and there can never be too much of that. Differentiation means teaching them the way they need to learn. That’s also not a bad thing and not a thing we can do too often. Differentiation means recognizing the differences in your students’ strengths and allowing them to demonstrate their mastery of content according to those strengths. How can that be bad?

If I’m pie-eyed, let me know. But I, for one, will take a differentiated education paradigm over a standardized one any day of the week.

On differentiated instruction and beyond

Every definition of Response to Intervention (RtI) that I've ever read starts with the same basic premise: At Tier I  - which includes every single student who walks through our doors - teachers must be offering high-quality, research-based, differentiated instruction to all students.  What does that mean to us as teachers?

In short, we're supposed to teach every child. To be a bit more detailed, we're supposed to meet each child where he is and teach her in the way(s) she learns best. That probably seems like a daunting task to most educators who remain married to the one-worksheet-fits-all, columns and rows education model.  I won't lie. It's not easy.  But to me, it's easier to try as hard as I can to meet every child where he or she is than it is to live with myself as I lie awake at night wondering why little Johnny failed.

So we differentiate instruction at Tier I.  Fine.  But wait, there's more.  Ginger Lewman, a long time advocate for differentiated instruction, has argued that there may be an education paradigm that's even leaner.  Problem-based learning (PBL) takes differentiation to a whole new level.

Tonight, at 8:00 CST, we're going to talk about all this on Twitter at #reg5chat. I'd like to hear your thoughts. So join us, won't you? And if you're getting around this post after the fact, don't worry. I should have posted a link to the chat summary and transcript by now, so scroll around and feel free to share your thoughts in the comment box below.

My faith restored...it worked!

Well, I want to thank the members of this week's #slowchatED for not letting me throw in the towel last night or this morning.  I had resolved at one point yesterday afternoon to realize that I was, once again, charging windmills, and just for the love of all that's holy STOP.  But some of you were eager to hear what happened.  Some of you encouraged me to stay the course.  And do you know what?

It worked.

They came to life.

They changed, and we had to shut the door to keep the toxins out and to keep the blessed, blessed energy in the room.

I started today's class reminding them about their homework.  "You mean how you told us to get a folder?" one child asked.  I turned to my desk and prepared for the worst.  My head, of its own volition, began slowly moving left to right as my back was turned to them as if to deny the reality I faced.  And then another spoke up.  "No. He means how he asked us to tell him how we want to learn...what was it we're learning." And then another, "Persuasive texts...or somethin'."

I turned back.  Some of them had paid attention.

After I acknowledged that my wish was for them to direct our learning, hands started to rise. One child made a rather mundane suggestion that we go to the computer lab and just look at some speeches that I could find for them before hand.  This just didn't feel student-centered enough. I called on a soft-spoken young man who suggested, "Couldn't we just, you know, try to persuade each other of something?" And then two young ladies at a table across the room raised their hands almost simultaneously.  They each wanted to beat the other one to suggest a group debate.  This turned, from another student's suggestion, into breaking the group of twenty-two kids into two groups of five and two groups of six and having one topic for the five-on-five debate and another for the six-on-six debate.  "But wait," one child said, "What is it we're debating?" The skepticism was palpable. He knew I was going to swoop in and steal this from them right about now.

Then a thought struck.  I rummaged for some index cards, sent my intern around the room to hand one to each child, and began explaining that each child needed to write down one controversial topic that we could debate.  After clarifying for these 7th graders that "abortion" was an example of a controversial topic (and, therefore, off the table, thank goodness), they began to write. Then we collected the cards, and I read out the topics. I asked them to try very hard to withhold emotional responses (laughter, snickering, groaning, etc.), as we were in the process of brainstorming and everything should, at this point, be considered.  Here is what they wrote:

• hunting whales
• speeding
• Are girls more mature than boys?
• argue for either the plaintiff or defendant in a mock trial
• dress code policy - specifically, tucking shirts in on campus
• year-round schooling 
• Should marijuana be legal?
• Are people separated into classes? Why are people thought of as lower or middle class? Does our school exist under a class structure based on money or status? (and she went on furthur to explicate this idea class structure in our society)
• why we should or should not have homework (four suggestions)
• gay rights (two suggestions)
• gun control (two suggestions)

And look...you're not even ready for this last one.  I know I wasn't.  And FOUR children suggested this. Of all the controversial topics available to them, in my classroom today, in this environment where I spent fifty minutes not having to tell anyone how to act, to be quiet, to pay attention, or any other disciplinary diatribes, four children suggested...

• SCHOOL IMPROVEMENT

How many of you are savoring the beauty and the irony of that as much as I did?  My God! They got it.  This was better.  This didn't suck!  School CAN BE IMPROVED, and we're experiencing the evidence of it right now.

Tonight I will construct a brief Google poll, and tomorrow, they will get to vote on topics.  We narrowed it down to the four with multiple nominations - homework, gay rights, gun control, and school improvement - and one student insisted we consider the class structure topic, and another wanted the drug debate to be included.  Those six will make the poll, and tomorrow we will narrow the field to two.

The structure of the debates themselves is a little up in the air at the moment. I'm not of a mind to force anyone to argue for a viewpoint with which they don't agree.  We'll see how it all shakes out tomorrow.  I know this, though, right now.  Tonight I will sleep the sleep of a satisfied educator for the first time in a long, long time.  These children refreshed my soul and my being and my optimism more than any Twitter chat or association conference ever has.  They gave me back my sea legs, and I feel grand.

Thank you, all, for your gentle prodding in response to last night's post.  Thank you for #slowchatED. Thank you for reminding me that my kids will only rise as high as I will let them and that when I rip the ceiling off the classroom, they will orbit planets we never knew existed.

I love being a teacher tonight.  Again.

My student engagement dilemma

Most of the Twitter chats in which I participate often seem to become a litany of platitudes decrying the brilliant things strong educators are doing to make their lives and the lives of their students more tolerable trapped as we all are within the mass production mill that American education has become. And that's great. We all walk away from the computer full of wonderful ideas and a sense of camaraderie that only occurs when one finds kindred spirits and remembers that one is not alone before returning to work among the morass of mediocrity that can usually be found poisoning the proverbial water cooler in teachers' lounges across the country. But tonight, I have no successes to share. Tonight, I am left feeling frustrated by the particular machine of which I am presently a part.

You see, yesterday, I decided to ask my students how they would like to see us tackle our upcoming topic - persuasive speech. It was near the end of the period, but I wanted to leave them with the thought in the hope that it would simmer overnight.  Today, I reminded of the assignment to reflect on possible ways that we could tackle the subject over the next week or so.

The kids looked at me like I had a third arm growing out of my forehead.

"You were serious?" one of them asked.

They were incredulous.  They couldn't believe that I was asking them to help me plan our course. And then the familiar fear set in. What does he want us to say? What is the right answer here? Shouldn't he be telling us what to do?  And then the anger. He is still the teacher, right?  Why should we have to do his job for him?

You see, I realized a long time ago that my students do not come to me with any exposure to the process of thinking for themselves.  They arrive at my doorstep having been spoonfed an "education" for more than seven years.  They have outgrown such childish exploits as creativity, exploration, discovery, independence, and faith that their minds are capable of anything valid.  Instead, they trust their brains to collect, know, remember, and at the appropriate time, regurgitate.  The fact that this chain of events is utterly fleeting is of little consequence to them.  At the end of the day, all that really matters to most of them are the following:

• grades - These are short-term constructs that constitute payment for short-term rote memorization and recitation
• attaboys - For the teacher-pleasers, especially, the completely damaging set of compliments - You're so smart! Perfect, honey! That's EXACTLY what I wanted! - These little bits are the very manna and ambrosia that get them through each day
• Standardized Assessment Performance - We've come to a point where mere passing is enough for the majority of kids. They've heard the outcries round the dinner table, but they are loathe to look stupid on the one day of the school year when the returns come in.

None of these trinkets, though, constitute anything to do with any kind of authentic LEARNING. These are the products of our mill, and they are worthless.  These are how we measure our students' progress, and this is how they in turn measure their own value.  When we remove these from the picture and place the learning in their hands, they become shiftless and uneasy, adrift in an unfamiliar sea.

I have come to realize that all of this is part and parcel of the spoon-feeding process.  When the majority of your tasks cross your desk in the form of worksheets, you have a set of clear instructions and a set of right and wrong answers. And if you don't feel like reading the instructions, you can raise your hand and ask the kindly schoolmarm for "clarification" at which point she will gather her spoons, chew up the directions, and dribble the bits into the childrens' beaks for them.

We give our students myriad opportunities to exercise their brains, but little to no opportunity to develop their minds. 

This is the root of the corporations' lament over the last several years.  This, too, is the root of the despair felt by professors in the nation's colleges and universities.  We do not teach them to think.  I want to make them feel empowered, but at times, it feels like giving the car keys to a drunkard.  But then, if I drive him home, I am guilty of the same enabling behaviors that have gotten him so drunk in the first place.

So I've made a decision.

Tomorrow, I will go into class and stand firm. Tomorrow, I will dunk thier heads in a barrel of water until sobriety sets in and they remember the days of their early youth when imagination reigned supreme, discovery was the sole method for learning everything, and they were like little gods in a world that seemed to be their oyster.  Tomorrow, I will concentrate on teaching them, again, to think.