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Tag: Veteran Teacher

  • The Two Minds Of An Educator

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    The Two Minds Of An Educator

    by Terry Heick

    In his essay Two Minds, Wendell Berry, unsurprisingly enough, offers up two tones of thought produced by two kinds of ‘mind’—Rational, and Sympathetic.

    One is driven by logic, deduction, data, and measurement, the other by affection and other wasteful abstractions—instinct, reverence, joy, and faith. These minds struggle for to manifest in our collective behavior. That is, they both seek to control our actions–what we say and do.

    Berry explains their distinctions:

    “The Rational Mind of is motivated by the fear of being misled, of being wrong. Its purpose is to exclude everything that cannot empirically or experimentally be proven by fact.

    The Sympathetic Mind is motivated by fear of error of a very different kind: the error of carelessness, of being unloving. Its purpose is to be considerate of whatever is present, to leave nothing out.”

    It’s no surprise that these two minds exist in education as well. These are instincts you’ve likely had as an educator—a teacher, administrator, developer, or designer. Probably as a parent too if you have children. The need to be rational and deductive and strategic colliding with the enormous complexity and scale of the circumstances you face.

    You’re told to be data-based—that is, to design learning experience with ‘strategies’ that are suggested by some measurement you’ve taken.

    You might plan lessons and units by asking yourself, why this instructional strategy? Why this assessment form? Why group at this point in the lesson rather than that point? Why this standard with this novel?

    This is your Rational Mind.

    But your Rational Mind is servant to another kind of thinking—in fact, is roused and spurred by a kind of insecurity that realizes that unmistakable importance and coinciding impossibility of what you’ve made it your life’s work to do: Teach dozens and dozens of other human beings what they need to know to about (insert your content area here).

    The Rational Mind (the same mind that drives policies and standards) wants to parse that task–to respond with logic. Preemptively, strategically, and analytically.

    So rather than worry that this student can’t read and this student is a brilliant artist ready for a professional mentor to foster his gift and this student needs both a hug and self-knowledge more than content knowledge, you respond analytically. Your Rational Mind takes over.

    You stare at standards and bar graphs and skim books by Marzano and Hattie that list the instructional strategies that their Rational Minds say will work. You listen to your colleagues, your instructional coach, and anyone else willing to offer advice. Then you teach, assess, reteach, re-assess, remediate, extend, and move on.

    You’re keenly aware, though, of the tearing that has taken place by acting with logic. You’ve separated a learner from their very human circumstances—their interests, past experience, insecurities, and affections.

    Academic content from their native schema.

    Proficiency from curiosity.

    Scientific concepts from the application of science.

    Reading level from the love of reading.

    The Rational Mind necessarily excludes curiosity, love, affection, and joy because they are inherently irrational. We live in an age of information that itself proceeds an Age of Enlightenment. By design, data and rationality can’t tolerate abstraction and humanity or they’d shake themselves apart in confusion.

    But this requires an adjustment on our part. We have to stop being obstinate to what we increasingly see in our students. Apathy. Distraction. Superficiality.

    As an industry, we are currently not just driven but dangerously preoccupied with research and science and that which is measurable and observable, having ridden our profession of superstitions like ‘patience,’ ‘self-knowledge,’ and ‘community.’

    We leave it up to teachers to buffer the collision between students from policies, or sterile academic standards with communities that need more than proficiency from students. But if we are “considerate of whatever is present” and want to “to leave nothing out,” we can now see that pure Rationality isn’t fully a ‘mind,’ but an instinctive reaction to the scale of our task.

    A challenge for you and I then may be to elevate teaching beyond singularities through a kind of marriage–joining our Rational and Sympathetic mind into something inclusive and awake and whole.

    Always insisting, no matter what, that we don’t resort to Rationality or even Sympathy, but rather act as ‘whole teachers’ in every single one of our interactions with and analyses of students, and in doing so model for them the significant practice of being human.

    Image attribution flickr user NASA Goddard Space Flight Center; Becoming A “Whole Teacher”

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    Terry Heick

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  • Teaching Students To See Quality

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    teaching students to see quality

    by Terry Heick

    Quality—you know what it is, yet you don’t know what it is. But that’s self-contradictory. But some things are better than others, that is, they have more quality. But when you try to say what the quality is, apart from the things that have it, it all goes poof! There’s nothing to talk about. But if you can’t say what Quality is, how do you know what it is, or how do you know that it even exists? If no one knows what it is, then for all practical purposes it doesn’t exist at all. But for all practical purposes, it really does exist.

    In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, author Robert Pirsig talks about the evasive idea of quality. This concept—and the tangent “Church of Reason”–heckles him throughout the book, notably as a teacher when he’s trying to explain to his students what quality writing looks like.

    After some struggling– internally and with students–he throws out letter grades altogether in hopes that students will stop looking for the reward, and start looking for ‘quality.’ This, of course, doesn’t turn out the way he hoped it’d might; the students revolt, which only takes him further from his goal.

    So what does quality have to do with learning? Quite a bit, it turns out.

    A Shared Sense Of What’s Possible

    Quality is an abstraction–it has something to do with the tension between a thing and an ideal thing. A carrot and an ideal carrot. A speech and an ideal speech. The way you want the lesson to go, and the way it actually goes. We have a lot of synonyms for this idea, ‘good’ being one of the more common.

    For quality to exist–for something to be ‘good’–there has to be some shared sense of what’s possible, and some tendency for variation–inconsistency. For example, if we think there’s no hope for something to be better, it’s useless to call it bad or good. It is what it is. We rarely call walking good or bad. We just walk. Singing, on the other hand, can definitely be good or bad–that is have or lack quality. We know this because we’ve heard good singing before, and we know what’s possible.

    Further, it’s difficult for there to be a quality sunrise or a quality drop of water because most sunrises and most drops of water are very similar. On the other hand, a ‘quality’ cheeseburger or performance of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony makes more sense because we A) have had a good cheeseburger before and know what’s possible, and B) can experience a vast difference between one cheeseburger and another.

    Back to learning–if students could see quality—identify it, analyze it, understand its characteristics, and so on—imagine what that requires. They have to see all the way around a thing, compare it to what’s possible, and make an evaluation. Much of the friction between teachers and learners comes from a kind of scraping between students and the teachers trying to guide them towards quality.

    The teachers, of course, are only trying to help students understand what quality is. We describe it, create rubrics for it, point it out, model it, and sing its praises, but more often than not, they don’t see it and we push it closer and closer to their noses and wait for the light to come on.

    And when it doesn’t, we assume they either don’t care, or aren’t trying hard enough.

    The Best

    And so it goes with relative superlatives—good, better, and best. Students use these words without knowing their starting point–quality. It’s hard to know what quality is until they can think their way around a thing to begin with. And then further, to really internalize things, they have to see their quality. Quality for them based on what they see as possible.

    To qualify something as good—or ‘best’—requires first that we can agree what that ‘thing’ is supposed to do, and then can discuss that thing in its native context. Consider something simple, like a lawnmower. It’s easy to determine the quality of a lawnmower because it’s clear what it’s supposed to do. It’s a tool that has some degrees of performance, but it’s mostly like an on/off switch. It either works or it doesn’t.

    Other things, like government, art, technology, etc., are more complex. It’s not clear what quality looks like in legislation, abstract painting, or economic leadership. There is both nuance and subjectivity in these things that make evaluating quality far more complex. In these cases, students have to think ‘macro enough’ to see the ideal functions of a thing, and then decide if they’re working, which of course is impossible because no one can agree with which functions are ‘ideal’ and we’re right back at zero again. Like a circle.

    Quality In Student Thinking

    And so it goes with teaching and learning. There isn’t a clear and socially agreed-upon cause-effect relationship between teaching and the world. Quality teaching will yield quality learning that does this. It’s the same with the students themselves–in writing, in reading, and in thought, what does quality look like?

    What causes it?

    What are its characteristics?

    And most importantly, what can we do to not only help students see it but develop eyes for it that refuse to close.

    To be able to see the circles in everything, from their own sense of ethics to the way they structure paragraphs, design a project, study for exams, or solve problems in their own lives–and do so without using adultisms and external labels like ‘good job,’ and ‘excellent,’ and ‘A+’ and ‘you’re so smart!’

    What can we do to nurture students that are willing to sit and dwell with the tension between possibility and reality, bending it all to their will moment by moment with affection and understanding?

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    Terry Heick

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  • 7 Ideas For Learning Through Humility

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    Learn Through Humility Teach For Knowledge

    by Terry Heick

    Humility is an interesting starting point for learning.

    In an era of media that is digital, social, chopped up, and endlessly recirculated, the challenge is no longer access but the quality of access—and the reflex to then judge uncertainty and “truth.”

    Discernment.

    On ‘Knowing’

    There is a tempting and warped sense of “knowing” that can lead to a loss of reverence and even entitlement to “know things.” If nothing else, modern technology access (in much of the world) has replaced subtlety with spectacle, and process with access.

    A mind that is properly observant is also properly humble. In A Native Hill, Wendell Berry points to humility and limits. Standing in the face of all that is unknown can either be overwhelming—or illuminating. How would it change the learning process to start with a tone of humility?

    Humility is the core of critical thinking. It says, ‘I don’t know enough to have an informed opinion’ or ‘Let’s learn to reduce uncertainty.’

    To be self-aware in your own knowledge, and the limits of that knowledge? To clarify what can be known, and what cannot? To be able to match your understanding with an authentic need to know—work that naturally strengthens critical thinking and sustained inquiry.

    What This Looks Like In a Classroom

    1. Analyze the limits of knowledge in plain terms (a simple introduction to epistemology).
    2. Evaluate knowledge in degrees (e.g., certain, probable, possible, unlikely).
    3. Concept-map what is currently understood about a specific topic and compare it to unanswered questions.
    4. Document how knowledge changes over time (personal learning logs and historical snapshots).
    5. Show how each student’s perspective shapes their relationship to what’s being learned.
    6. Contextualize knowledge—place, circumstance, chronology, stakeholders.
    7. Demonstrate authentic utility: where and how this knowledge is used outside school.
    8. Show patience for learning as a process and emphasize that process alongside objectives.
    9. Clearly value informed uncertainty over the confidence of quick conclusions.
    10. Reward ongoing questions and follow-up investigations more than “finished” answers.
    11. Create a unit on “what we thought we knew then” versus what hindsight shows we missed.
    12. Analyze causes and effects of “not knowing” in science, history, civic life, or daily decisions.
    13. Highlight the fluid, evolving nature of knowledge.
    14. Differentiate vagueness/ambiguity (lack of clarity) from uncertainty/humility (awareness of limits).
    15. Identify the best scale for applying specific knowledge or skills (individual, local, systemic).

    Research Note

    Research shows that people who practice intellectual humility—being willing to admit what they don’t know—are more open to learning and less likely to cling to false certainty.
    Source: Leary, M. R., Diebels, K. J., Davisson, E. K., et al. (2017). Cognitive and interpersonal features of intellectual humility. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 43(6), 793–813.

    Literary Touchstone

    Berry, W. (1969). “A Native Hill,” in The Long-Legged House. New York: Harcourt.

    This idea may seem abstract and even out of place in increasingly “research-based” and “data-driven” systems of learning. But that is part of its value: it helps students see knowledge not as fixed, but as a living process they can join with care, evidence, and humility.

    Teaching For Knowledge, Learning Through Humility

    wendell berry quotewendell berry quote

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    Terrell Heick

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  • A New Definition For Equity In Education

    A New Definition For Equity In Education

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    A New Definition For Equity In Education

    by Terry Heick

    In a profession increasingly full of angst and positioning and corrective policy, there are few ideas as easy to get behind as equity.

    Equal. Equality. Equity. Equilibrium. Equate. These are all fine ideas—each tidy and whole, implying their own kind of justice while connotating the precision of mathematics. Level. Same. Twin.  Each word has its own nuance, but one characteristic they share in common is access—a level, shared area with open pathways that are equidistant to mutually agreed-upon currencies.

    When discussing equity, there are so many convenient handles–race, gender, language, poverty, access to technology, but there may be a larger view that we’re missing when we do so.

    Equity is the idea and goal of fairness and inclusion to provide all students with the resources, opportunities, and support they need to succeed, regardless of their background, abilities, or socioeconomic status. Unlike equality, which treats everyone the same, equity recognizes that students come from diverse circumstances and may require different approaches and resources to achieve similar outcomes.

    The Scale of Equity

    There isn’t a more global issue—equity being perhaps the global issue of our time. United Nation statistics published last year in The Economist put it plainly. While progress is being made in sub-Saharan Africa in primary education, gender inequality is in fact widening among older children. The ratio of girls enrolled in primary school rose from 85 to 93 per 100 boys between 1999 and 2010, whereas it fell from 83 to 82 and from 67 to 63 at the secondary and tertiary levels. And elsewhere, in Chad and the Central African Republic, there is a flat-rate of less than 70 girls for every 100 boys.”

    This is a starkly different conversation about equity than the one we might have in the United States, the UK, Canada, or Australia. We have the luxury of becoming choosier, and harsher on ourselves, as progress is made, i.e., let’s first make sure there are free, quality schools everywhere, and that children can all read and write, and then at some point down the line we can concern ourselves with iPads vs Androids, or the broadband access in our poorest communities.

    It’s easy to miss the scale of this as an ‘issue’ because unlike assessment, curriculum, teacher pay, class sizes, educational technology, or any other persistently evergreen edu-choke point, equity never stops affecting. It’s both the center and periphery of everything because we’re always who we are, where we are.

    The Cultural Effect

    As a species, we express ourselves through differences. What makes ‘culture’ interesting is how it both recognizes the individual while simultaneously allowing them to disappear into the whole again. In culture, there is both identity and anonymity. There is a constant self–>group transaction that is based on both affection (inward expression) and image (outward expression). This transaction is then repeated across cultures, with completely different functions. Differences within and across cultures are differences nonetheless, but the individual can think while groups simply gather.

    So this is a brutally narrow take on how people gather and cohort and manifest their vision of what it means to be human, but the point remains: As educators, we suffer that same reductionism when we see the masses the same way Nielsen does television ratings. Students aren’t demographics, and it’s murky at best to see how treating them that way has improved their lot or our shared progress.

    While squinting and trying to narrow gaps, it’s too easy to lose the scale and product of our work. The segmenting of Mackenzie and Andrew into a group, and that group into a subgroup, and their understanding into data, and the knowledge we hope they come away with into standards we can teach with—this all becomes a tone—a posture dictates the terms of teaching and learning. Equity in the classroom is different than in the job market.

    A subcorollary is that we all share equity and inequity, both in possession and effect. In “The Hidden Wound,” Wendell Berry writes, “It may be the most significant irony in our history that racism, by dividing the two races, has made them not separate but in a fundamental way inseparable, not independent but dependent on each other, incomplete without each other, each needing desperately to understand and make use of the experience of the other…. we are one body, and the division between us is the disease of one body, not of two.” This is both abstract and practical. We share both living space and social membership.

    Somehow, though, public education, more so than any other industry or profession, is expected to aggregate these inherent disparities while transcending them. Our task?

    • Create a curriculum that provides a common language for knowledge without homogenizing the nuance of that knowledge
    • Design learning models that are inherently inclusive regardless of access to technology
    • Establish authentic functions for family members and communities who may speak a completely different language

    As individuals, we work to separate ourselves—as children, often based on image, and as adults, often based on income, where we choose to live, what we drive, the smartphone we carry, and what we choose to do “for a living.” But each of these expressions of who we are–gender, native language, race, sexuality, socioeconomic level, and so many others–are also opportunities for disparity all work to undermine the function of education.

    It’s easy to see equity in education as a matter of fairness, access, and inclusion, but that’s only the case if what’s being fairly accessed is a system of teaching and learning that is able to meet the needs of an increasingly global population—that means fluid, responsive, dynamic, neutral, and alive. For an industry that struggles to get every student reading on grade level, this may be a bit much. My gut reaction, then, is that this can only occur through the affectionate expression of the local—this student in this home in this community, with the school functioning as an extraordinary support system.

    The equity is at the student level rather than the demographic level because demographics only exist in paperwork. For every student, there is commonness and there is difference; there is what’s shared (i.e., student needing knowledge), and there is distinction (e.g., poor, rural, white, black, male, female). This never stops. We can revise our schools, curriculum, pedagogy, and technology until it is inclusive, fair, and accessible to every student, but that’s been an ongoing effort that may represent a kind of basement for our goals.

    But why not consider something more ambitious? New thinking about the terms and definitions of gender emphasize both the characteristics and the fluidity of any culture. If we insist on standardizing content, maybe we can avoid standardizing education. How many different answers are there to, “Why learn?” Fantastic! Let’s iterate ourselves until we can honor that.

    The work before us, then, may not be to level an academic playing field for which there is no straight, but rather to create new terms for why we learn, how, and where—and then change the expectation for what we do with what we know.

    Simply guaranteeing access and inclusion into a body of content-based is no longer sufficient if our goals stretch beyond academic. A modern definition for equity in education may be less about equal, fair, or even, and more about personalization–a body of knowledge, habits, and networks that help each student realize their own perfectly unique potential.

    As for a definition for equity in education? How about, “eye-level access to curriculum, education models, and learning spaces that depend entirely on the native interests, knowledge demands, and human affections of learners individually.”

    Or more briefly, “a fully-realized system of learning that starts and ends with the humanity of each student.”

    A New Definition For Equity In Education; adapted image attribution flickr user helpingting and skotit;

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    Terrell Heick

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  • Improving The Relationship Between Schools And Communities

    Improving The Relationship Between Schools And Communities

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    by Terry Heick

    Education is a series of learning experiences informed by policy, and actuated by teachers.

    Policy, by its very nature, is sweeping and ambitious. It is designed to work on various scales, is well-intentioned, and often difficult to fault on paper. The teachers aren’t really much different. They are ambitious, designed to work on various scales, and are commissioned (quite literally) to enact the policies that govern the institutions (schools) they work in.

    The wrinkles arise however as teachers strive to realize a vision for education that is, as things are, entirely impossible: For every student to master every academic standard.

    No matter the starting literacy level, emotional intelligence, goals in life, family history, socioeconomic background, learning and thinking habits, or academic ambition, the same result is expected of all students–and increasingly troublesome word stuffed full of connotation and implication.

    Proficiency.

    And perhaps worst of all, this inclusive scale of proficiency is regarded not as a necessary evil, but the noblest of goals–equality manifest as democracy itself.

    Equality In Learning

    Equality in learning can mean anything. Same spending. Same resources–or rather, same fulfillment of relative needs. Same expectations.

    Fair doesn’t always mean equal, as many will correctly reason, but as we seek to democratize the learning process, we end up with scripted responses to unscripted circumstances, and as a result the homogenization of something that has no business being homogenized.

    Learning
    But equality in learning is a dangerous chase to give, full of dead-ends, rhetoric, and, at times, waste.

    Learning is messy and personal–messy because it’s personal, in fact. And it’s wasteful for many of the same reasons. Not because people learn differently, but because education often tries to impose ‘sameness’ on it all. And when that approach doesn’t work, gobs (and gobs) of resources are spent troubleshooting, ‘remediating,’ and erstwhile tail-chasing.

    Learning can be frustrating for the same reasons it’s compelling–because it’s instinctive and primal. It starts out as play, and then quickly turns more formal as self-directed experimentation turns into sterile academia. Schools–well-intentioned–care so much for the learning that they pull out every stop: sirens, meters, and relief valves to let us know what’s going on at all times.

    This, however, is a (small) part of the problem, like checking a rubric and data during your first date to see how things are going. That doesn’t mean there is no place for data and rubrics, but it just might be that, in pursuit of proficiency we’ve found dull edges.

    And in pursuit of excellence we’ve found mediocrity.

    Not An Argument For Learning Models

    At this point, this is usually where the conversation turns to learning models–entrepreneurial learning, self-directed learning, mobile learning, play-based learning, project-based learning, inquiry-based learning, blended learning.

    And so on.

    And this is all pertinent and felicitous–all screaming for thinking, integration, and revision. But instead, a more immediate focus of our scope might be the way teachers and teacher systems push back on one another in the vast majority of public schools today.

    The Systems

    So what are these ‘systems’?

    District walkthroughs and their ‘non-negotiables.’

    Professional growth plans.

    Professional learning communities.

    Data teams.

    District and school-sponsored professional development.

    News media publishing of test scores.

    Actually, let’s stop and look at that one for a moment.

    Public Reporting Of Test Scores

    The publishing of test scores isn’t the problem–it’s the void of context most people have for internalizing those data. The public sees in more binary terms–failing school and performing school. Maybe improving school. That’s it.

    Never failing test, performing attention to literacy, or on the rise community support. Schools are not seen as completely interdependent with society, but rather widget factories, and are thus judged by their widgets. And perhaps worst of all, these widgets are children.

    Why this is a problem has to do with connotation and loaded language–old-guard advertising tricks to get people to care. A widget is cold, but a child is a living, breathing, blinking thing that deserves the best possible future–and the best from us today to help make that happen.

    And of course that’s true.

    Vague & Emotionally Loaded Language

    So when we talk, our language can be empty and generalized. We talk about the future, the learning, of our collective and unyielding intent to ‘do right by these kids.’ We make decisions that ‘are best for the kids,’ rather than the adults, because what adult would propose the opposite?

    But it’s exactly through this selfless ambition and pathos-based grandstanding that we get ourselves in trouble. We simply cannot consistently fulfill what we promise, and, puzzled, turn to professional development to solve our woes.

    If school is an analogue of post-modern industrialism–and it shouldn’t be but it currently operates as exactly that–then teachers and administrators are the ones that operate the levers and the presses. We create the molds, fill the conveyors with widgets, fill the pallets, operate the forklifts, and take very serious notes on our clipboards as we watch with equally serious eyes.

    But it’s the teachers and administrators, tirelessly planning and revising while the entire operation teeters, that are wheezing and chuffing. We promise and swear in both creed and policy to help every single child meet their potential as human beings. The pressure–and hubris–of that promise!

    We add empowering signatures on our email, ‘Failure is not an option,’ or ‘Preparing children for the future,’ and then ‘recharge our batteries’ during weekends and holidays so that on Monday afternoons we can sit erect in two hour staff meetings that rob us of any bit of innovative spirit we had managed to restore.

    We invite the parents into school every quarter with the promise of bake sales or a school play and other extracurricular events, pretending not to notice how awkward it all is—how we both are raising different parts of their children but barely know one another.

    How we stubbornly continue to teach children as an industry produces goods.

    How we fail to connect organizations with families and schools and universities and cultural programs and community centers in any compelling way because, as schools, we insist on going alone, only opening the doors on our schedule and our terms to help us do what we want to do because we wrote the book on what needs to be done.

    We use language and processes of education that are completely alien to most families. And in the process, we create a completely unsustainable–and morbidly private–system of learning that reduces the capacity of families and communities while we toil away in proud martyrdom, never realizing that our ambition is costing us everything.

    If schools serve students, and students are deeply embedded in the fabric of communities, how can we serve those students without knowing those communities? And without those communities knowing us?

    Maybe we open our school and classroom doors for meaningful interaction with families and communities on equal terms not at an extracurricular level, but a curricular level.

    That’s much easier said than done, but conversations about school improvement could do worse than start there.

    Exactly Where To Start With School Improvement

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    Terrell Heick

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  • Teaching Students To See Quality

    Teaching Students To See Quality

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    teaching students to see quality

    by Terry Heick

    Quality—you know what it is, yet you don’t know what it is. But that’s self-contradictory. But some things are better than others, that is, they have more quality. But when you try to say what the quality is, apart from the things that have it, it all goes poof! There’s nothing to talk about. But if you can’t say what Quality is, how do you know what it is, or how do you know that it even exists? If no one knows what it is, then for all practical purposes it doesn’t exist at all. But for all practical purposes, it really does exist.

    In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, author Robert Pirsig talks about the evasive idea of quality. This concept—and the tangent “Church of Reason”–heckles him throughout the book, notably as a teacher when he’s trying to explain to his students what quality writing looks like.

    After some struggling– internally and with students–he throws out letter grades altogether in hopes that students will stop looking for the reward, and start looking for ‘quality.’ This, of course, doesn’t turn out the way he hoped it’d might; the students revolt, which only takes him further from his goal.

    So what does quality have to do with learning? Quite a bit, it turns out.

    A Shared Sense Of What’s Possible

    Quality is an abstraction–it has something to do with the tension between a thing and an ideal thing. A carrot and an ideal carrot. A speech and an ideal speech. The way you want the lesson to go, and the way it actually goes. We have a lot of synonyms for this idea, ‘good’ being one of the more common.

    For quality to exist–for something to be ‘good’–there has to be some shared sense of what’s possible, and some tendency for variation–inconsistency. For example, if we think there’s no hope for something to be better, it’s useless to call it bad or good. It is what it is. We rarely call walking good or bad. We just walk. Singing, on the other hand, can definitely be good or bad–that is have or lack quality. We know this because we’ve heard good singing before, and we know what’s possible.

    Further, it’s difficult for there to be a quality sunrise or a quality drop of water because most sunrises and most drops of water are very similar. On the other hand, a ‘quality’ cheeseburger or performance of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony makes more sense because we A) have had a good cheeseburger before and know what’s possible, and B) can experience a vast difference between one cheeseburger and another.

    Back to learning–if students could see quality—identify it, analyze it, understand its characteristics, and so on—imagine what that requires. They have to see all the way around a thing, compare it to what’s possible, and make an evaluation. Much of the friction between teachers and learners comes from a kind of scraping between students and the teachers trying to guide them towards quality.

    The teachers, of course, are only trying to help students understand what quality is. We describe it, create rubrics for it, point it out, model it, and sing its praises, but more often than not, they don’t see it and we push it closer and closer to their noses and wait for the light to come on.

    And when it doesn’t, we assume they either don’t care, or aren’t trying hard enough.

    The Best

    And so it goes with relative superlatives—good, better, and best. Students use these words without knowing their starting point–quality. It’s hard to know what quality is until they can think their way around a thing to begin with. And then further, to really internalize things, they have to see their quality. Quality for them based on what they see as possible.

    To qualify something as good—or ‘best’—requires first that we can agree what that ‘thing’ is supposed to do, and then can discuss that thing in its native context. Consider something simple, like a lawnmower. It’s easy to determine the quality of a lawnmower because it’s clear what it’s supposed to do. It’s a tool that has some degrees of performance, but it’s mostly like an on/off switch. It either works or it doesn’t.

    Other things, like government, art, technology, etc., are more complex. It’s not clear what quality looks like in legislation, abstract painting, or economic leadership. There is both nuance and subjectivity in these things that make evaluating quality far more complex. In these cases, students have to think ‘macro enough’ to see the ideal functions of a thing, and then decide if they’re working, which of course is impossible because no one can agree with which functions are ‘ideal’ and we’re right back at zero again. Like a circle.

    Quality In Student Thinking

    And so it goes with teaching and learning. There isn’t a clear and socially agreed-upon cause-effect relationship between teaching and the world. Quality teaching will yield quality learning that does this. It’s the same with the students themselves–in writing, in reading, and in thought, what does quality look like?

    What causes it?

    What are its characteristics?

    And most importantly, what can we do to not only help students see it but develop eyes for it that refuse to close.

    To be able to see the circles in everything, from their own sense of ethics to the way they structure paragraphs, design a project, study for exams, or solve problems in their own lives–and do so without using adultisms and external labels like ‘good job,’ and ‘excellent,’ and ‘A+’ and ‘you’re so smart!’

    What can we do to nurture students that are willing to sit and dwell with the tension between possibility and reality, bending it all to their will moment by moment with affection and understanding?

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    Terrell Heick

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  • The Relationship Between Reading And Critical Literacy

    The Relationship Between Reading And Critical Literacy

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    by Terry Heick

    Phonemic awareness is knowing that certain letters make certain sounds.

    Phonemic awareness is knowing that sounds can blend together in predictable and unpredictable ways.

    Phonemic awareness is about loving the sounds that letters can make, then noticing common patterns across symbols, media, and languages.

    Phonemic awareness makes decoding possible.

    Decoding is being able to blend sounds together to ‘make’ words you recognize.

    Decoding is collecting as many words as possible into your ‘sight word bank’ to increase your reading speed and comprehension.

    Decoding is recognizing common word parts used in many words and using knowledge of those parts to predict the meaning of unfamiliar words.

    Decoding enables comfortable reading speeds and oral fluency.

    Decoding makes literacy possible.

    Literacy is about comfortable reading speeds, sufficient background knowledge to make sense of embedded ideas, and syntax.

    Literacy means understanding that the order of words in a sentence affects meaning (and includes a basic grasp of grammar categories).

    Literacy is about knowing how punctuation can enhance meaning.

    Literacy is choosing to read a variety of authentic texts and digital media for a variety of authentic purposes.

    Literacy is thinking about what you read after you’re done, then sharing what you read with others.

    Literacy is, in part, reading important texts because you want to, then using those ideas to inform your behavior.

    When practiced well, literacy breaks down who we were to create who we might become.

    See also The Definition Of Critical Reading

    Literacy makes critical literacy possible.

    Critical literacy begins with being able to decode a text, and then analyze it for meaning, implicit and explicit themes, the relationship of a text to a given perspective, existing texts, biases, and so on.

    Critical literacy is about a text and the motives of the people behind the text. (Critical literacy might insist that authors cannot be separated from what they write in the same way as one’s ‘self’ should be seen as indistinguishable from one’s work.)

    Critical literacy is also about understanding how what we read and consume affects us. Critical literacy, then, suggests we become critical consumers of any given media. Think: What am I ‘consuming’, and what might I do as a result?

    See also: Stop Worrying About Screen Time

    Critical literacy, further, means understanding the potential human value of a text or digital media–value to people rather than ‘literary canons’ and purely academic pursuits.

    Critical literacy means understanding the relationship between seemingly disparate media forms (e.g., books, social media, music, etc) as examples of human expression.

    Critical literacy is also about creating--writing, socially sharing, remixing, etc. (Reading and writing should be seen as two hemispheres of the same sphere.)

    Critical literacy, now more than ever, recognizes that human expression depends on prevailing local technology. As that technology changes, so do communication patterns. One things impacts another.

    Critical literacy makes cultural literacy possible.

    Cultural literacy is, in part, about acquiring knowledge and perspective that helps us create that which is worth creating, and realizing that answer is different for everyone.

    Cultural literacy can support cultivating genius, disrupting inequalities, creating sustainable systems, emphasizing our cultural memberships, and seeing our own role in the various natural, digital, and human ecologies we are a part of. (Digital citizenship, for example.)

    Cultural literacy depends on our knowing who’s said what and why–which messages and themes and ideas persist within them. This means we have to read, understand what we read, critically examine what we read, and use those lessons to inform our behavior.

    To do this we have to choose to read.

    To choose to read, we have to be able and choose to closely scrutinize texts and digital media.

    To do this, we have to know what words mean–what they really, really mean.

    To do this, we have to know that in digital media, modalities (e.g., light, color, sound) are symbols just like letters are symbols in texts, and these symbols–if we’re attendant to those sounds and the possibilities–can change the world.

    Sounds lead to words, words lead to ideas, ideas lead to perspectives, perspectives lead to behavioral change, behavioral change–if done critically–leads to a better world.

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    Terrell Heick

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  • An Innovative Learning Model: How To Sync Your Classroom

    An Innovative Learning Model: How To Sync Your Classroom

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    An Innovative Learning Model: How To Sync Your Classroom

    by TeachThought Staff

    In just the last decade, the image of technology in the classroom has shifted from rows of desktops in a dedicated computer lab (all facing the same direction) to one where a variety of different devices coexist, often uneasily, in and out of the lab.

    The role of the teacher, on the other hand, remains dynamic as ever: morphing hour to hour, if not minute to minute, between lecturer, coach, guide, mentor, referee, and on-call problem solver. Has the unleashing of technology out of the lab, away from bulky desktops, provided the classroom with better tools to support the teacher in all her roles, and the students in all their activities?

    Terry Heick’s article on ‘second screen learning’ (What Is The Sync Teaching Method?) addresses this question head-on. He provides a framework for understanding how a 1:1 (or 1:few) environment can best be leveraged. How can today’s potentially ubiquitous technology support the variety of interactions between students and content in a classroom? What should we think about when we think about the sorts of interaction between the teacher’s device and the students’ that may best support and extend a classroom’s effectiveness?

    The difference between 1:1 and second screen learning ‘is a matter of syncing.’ Synced learning requires two potentially opposing technologies: one, the ability to engage the same core material, and two, the ability to engage the material independently. “In second screen learning classrooms, the teachers and students are ‘sync’d’ content-wise with one another, while still having the tools, strategies, freedom, and space to clarify, extend, create, or connect the learning.”

    This notion of a class that moves fluidly from a focus on a single theme to individual or small group activities, and back again, is not new. The teacher guides the class as a ‘conductor’ while unleashing each student to delve into topics on their own as well, harnessing each individual’s curiosity and aptitude. And this occurs routinely with or without digital media.

    This post is a brief introduction to the technologies that can support a synced classroom using second screens—focusing on the use of web-based resources. As web-based resources play an ever-larger role in K-12 education, the ability to better wrangle and adapt them to the natural rhythms of classroom instruction rises in importance.

    The hope is for this discussion to be useful to educators thinking about what technologies to adopt in amplifying the ‘syncing’ that they already practice.

    5 Steps To The Sync’d Classroom

    Step 1: Sync’d Resources: Common Access To A Predetermined Set Of Educational Resources

    An anchor for sync’d learning is the ability to have students engage with a common set of educational resources curated by the teacher. From email and browser bookmarks to more elaborate social bookmarking and curating services, the options are many.

    To enable deeper engagement, bookmarking can be supplemented by two additional features: the ability to add commentary, and the ability to freely add to one’s own collection of resources.

    The ability to comment on resources enables teachers to put resources in their proper context and sequence. Students in turn can engage with the resources with questions, reactions, answers, and thoughts.

    The initial set of resources provided by the ‘conductor’ becomes a core around which the students can start to create their personal collections, be it videos, scientific articles, or URLs of apps that provide a ‘gamified’ introduction to programming.

    Even with just these elements, a classroom may be ‘sync’d.’ Whether loosely around a collection of resources and comments or more tightly on a page that the teacher is discussing live, the teacher can vary the interaction to create a synced experience. The following steps, however, would significantly ease the burden on both the teacher and the student–and support interactions not possible before.

    Step 2: Sync’d Navigation–The Same Thing At The Same Time

    Though ‘synchronous navigation’ may bring to mind a lecture, armed with second screens, it can be more. Because most digital resources are at least partially interactive, landing on the same page or using the same app does not require everyone to engage with the content in exactly the same way.

    However, screen sharing apps usually work only in one direction—very much like a ‘first screen’ (the teacher’s) on a projector. Instead, teachers should be able to take all students to a page and, perhaps after a context-setting introduction, set them free to explore on their own. Synchronous navigation differs from screen sharing because it provides a common path around which exploration is encouraged.

    To use both definitions of the word, the teacher is a ‘conductor,’ guiding where necessary, corralling everyone in the same direction when called for, and asking everyone to disembark and go off on their own when appropriate. Coupled with the ability to view the teacher’s comments and the ability to contribute one’s own thoughts, synchronous navigation supports a blend of guidance and freedom, of focus and creativity.

    Students should be allowed to lead these sessions as well—to present their finished work, engage their peers and their teacher in the research phase of a project, and lead each other in smaller groups as a part of everyday learning.

    Step 3: Different things at Different Times—Switching Between Sync’d & Unsync’d

    A blend of synchronous and independent activity may be determined on the fly. This blend is often the magic of live teaching, where instruction is leavened by questions, pauses, changes in direction, as well as time for independent work. So the ability to shift fluidly between the two is critical. Even if planned, the easier the mechanics of the transition, the more transitions there can be.

    Necessary elements include the ability of the teacher or a student to pause navigation to allow for discussions. They also include allowing students to ‘catch up’ and re-engage after having gone off on tangents of their own.

    It should also support the full use of the shared resources in Step 1—to guide a session, to add new resources during a session, and the ability to comment on everything. Figure 1 shows a simple example of the type of progression possible with ‘on the fly’ switching.

    synced v unsynced classroomssynced v unsynced classrooms

    Step 4: Sharing Ideas—Communication & Collaboration

    Although teachers can incorporate existing messaging and note-taking apps to support Steps 1-3, the ideal would be to have commenting, messaging, and chatting be integrated into a common platform.

    For example, synchronous navigation would include a messaging function. Even when all participants are in the same physical space, writing comments, questions, and answers through an integrated messaging function will provide a more focused channel for engagement, to augment verbal exchange as well as substitute for it.

    To encourage dialog and collaboration, discoveries and comments should trigger a ‘new message’-like notification. And once notified, participants should be able to have both synchronous and asynchronous discussions. Much like how synchronized navigation should be switchable on the fly, commenting and messaging should also support the seamless transition between synced, real-time discussions (similar to chatting or instant messaging) and conversations adapted to each student’s own pace (more like email).

    Step 5: The Glue—From The Individual To The Group

    This brings us to the synced classroom’s structure. Whether the entire class is synced on the same page at the same time or smaller groups are synced loosely, the teacher must determine both the degree of syncing and the scale of it for different occasions. And the two decisions may be tightly related. Technology can help by making it easy to create different groupings for different purposes—from the single student all the way to a combination of multiple classes.

    Different grouping should also exist simultaneously, for collaboration, messaging, and synchronous navigation. These need to act as the glue that creates the context for synced learning at different scales. One can imagine the cross-cutting groupings in Figure 2 all going through their own seesawing between synchronous and independent activities on their screens over the course of a day, with the teacher orchestrating as much as needed or desired.

    A Successfully Synced Classroom

    As Terry Heick reminds us, “Interaction is possible with teachers and textbooks as well as it is with apps and tablets, but not on the same scale, with the same degree of personalization, or the same engaging form factors.” Sync teaching using technology is valuable because the analogous method of sync teaching without technology is effective. The appropriate enabling technology, especially when combined with the “abundance of engaging and flexible learning resources on the internet,” becomes a way to amplify a tried and true method.

    To be even remotely useful, the technology outlined above needs to be convenient. For it to be relied upon by teachers looking to support an adaptive and responsive learning environment, it too has to provide an adaptive and responsive service. So the challenge is to combine the above functions in a way that is intuitive and easy to use, if not also a little fun.

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  • 8 Things Students Need In Modern Project-Based Learning

    8 Things Students Need In Modern Project-Based Learning

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    project-based learning in the 21st century

    by Terry Heick

    We recently offered a definition of project-based learning and looked at keys to designing Project-Based Learning.

    We also have looked at the difference between ‘doing projects’ and project-based learning, various project-based learning resources, project-based learning apps, and offered ways for using an iPad in Project-Based Learning.

    And have shared some practical ideas for better teaching through project-based learning as well.

    What might be missing from these posts, however, are simply the characteristics of project-based learning in the 21st-century. What does it look like? What might be evidence that it’s happening consistently? What needs to be built into every project–or the design of the required curriculum–so that students can shift from a mere ‘project’ to a thoroughly modern learning experience that runs parallel with the connected world they live in?

    We tend to think of project-based learning as focused on research, planning problem-solving, authenticity, and inquiry. Further, collaboration, resourcefulness, and networking matter too–dozens of characteristics ‘fit’ into project-based learning. Its popularity comes from, among other characteristics, its general flexibility as a curriculum framework. You can do, teach, assess, and connect almost anything within the context of a well-designed project.

    But what if we had to settle on a handful (or two) of itemized characteristics for modern, connected, possibly place-based, and often digital project-based learning? Well, then the following might be useful.

    8 Needs For Project-Based Learning In The 21st-Century

    1. Connectedness

    Or connectivity. Interdependence–however you want to phrase it. The idea is, what does this project connect to? A community? A hope? An app? An existing project already in place? A social challenge? Some kind of conflict? Something downright unsolvable?

    Through connectedness, students can then identify a proper scale to work within. (In fact, ‘Scale’ could well be an item of its own.)

    2. Meaning

    ‘Meaning’ is always first personal, and then academic (if it becomes academic). This kind of meaning requires authentic audiences, purposes, and collaboration set in real, intimate communities that share history, space, and meaning with learners.

    3. Diversity

    Diversity of purpose, scale, audience, digital media, potential resources, existing models, related projects, and so on require first analysis of these kinds of diversities on the part of the project manager–that is, the student.

    This can also be a matter of differentiation–less diversity and inherent complexity for students struggling with certain strands of project-based learning as a kind of set of training wheels until they get their balance. And when they do? Add it right back in.

    4. Research

    This one’s not sexy or compelling–this is a big part of the ‘work’ of any project.

    Researching the history of an issue or problem. Understanding the subtleties of given demographic data. Analyzing the credibility of information. Seeing how technology can serve or distract you (or rather, them) from the meat of the issue. This kind of knowledge helps you turn a problem into an opportunity.

    5. A Necessity For Creativity And Critical Thinking

    Among other themes, the 21st-century is about niches, innovation, and scale–seeing an opportunity, and designing something that works on a given–and clear–scale.

    Too often, however, creativity is encouraged without being required. Points are given and a column is added to the rubric and teachers ask for it explicitly but designing a project–or helping students design their own project–that fails without creativity is another thing altogether.

    Lateral thinking, outside-the-box thinking, and taking the best from existing models are all part of 21st-century learning.

    6. Pivot Points

    Perhaps the most modern of characteristics is the ability to be agile–to pivot as circumstances, data, and needs change. The world changes quickly, and the ability to adapt is an extraordinary sign of strength. Pivoting to a new digital media, audience, programming language, timeframe, purpose, or other parameter is crucial for 21st-century survival.

    If a student is designing a kit that helps test water quality for third-world communities but instead finds instead a way to use Google Maps to help certain communities share water cleaning technology instead. This is a pivot and is how creativity works.

    Building an app to help people find restaurants, but find out people use it more to set up lunch dates with friends? Pivot.

    Trying to build an art museum, and find an incredible source of collectible books instead? Pivot.

    When students can ‘pivot’ within the development of a project, it shows they’re able to see both the micro details and the macro context–which is a pretty remarkable assessment in and of itself.

    7. Socialization

    This is ideally accomplished through an authentic purpose and audience, but there’s more to it than that.

    See also Using Authentic Audience In Project-Based Learning

    The socialization of thinking by connecting, collaborating, publishing, and socially curating (see more on that below). Ideally, this would be done in multiple media forms and in multiple languages if possible. The English and Angle-centric image of education–and of edtech especially–is rapidly coming to a close.

    Not all aspects of all projects need to be socialized, but for the sake of transparency and shared journeys in education, choosing something to share, socialize, and perhaps even collaborate on in the future can be powerful.

    8. Elegant Curation

    Crude curation is saving an email, favoriting a tweet, or pinning randomly to a board no one reads that students will never reference again in the future for anything.

    Elegant curation is about saving a ‘thing’ while honoring the thing itself. Showcasing it without losing its meaning or fullness. Somehow capturing both that which is being saved and its context as well–and doing so in a way that makes it accessible to yourself and others as technology continues to change.

    8 Needs For Project-Based Learning In The 21st Century

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    Terrell Heick

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  • The Pedagogy Of John Dewey: A Summary

    The Pedagogy Of John Dewey: A Summary

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    by TeachThought Staff

    What did John Dewey believe about education?

    What were his views on experiential and interactive learning and their role in teaching and learning?

    As always, there’s a lot to understand. John Dewey (1859–1952) developed extraordinarily influential educational and social theories that had a lasting influence on psychology, pedagogy, and political philosophy, among other fields. Stanford University explained that because Dewey “typically took a genealogical approach that couched his own view within the larger history of philosophy, one may also find a fully developed metaphilosophy in his work.”

    One way to think of his ideas, then, is unifying and comprehensive, gathering otherwise distinct fields and bringing them together in service of the concept of teaching children how to live better in the present rather than speculatively preparing them for a future we can’t predict.

    See also 15 Self-Guided Reading Responses For Non-Fiction Texts

    Major Works By John Dewey

    My Pedagogic Creed (1897)

    The Primary-Education Fetich (1898)

    The School and Society The Child and the Curriculum Democracy and Education Schools of Tomorrow (1915)

    Experience and Education (1938)

    See also John Dewey Quotes About Education, Teaching, And Learning

    What Did John Dewey Believe About Teaching And Learning?

    What was the pedagogy of John Dewey? Put briefly, Dewey believed that learning was socially constructed, and that brain-based pedagogy (not his words) should place children, rather than curriculum and institutions, at its center. Effective learning required students to use previous (and prevailing) experiences to create new meaning–that is, to ‘learn.’

    Most of Dewey’s work is characterized by his views on education itself, including its role in citizenship and democracy. But in terms of pedagogy, he is largely known for his emphasis on experiential learning, social learning, and a basic Constructivist approach to pedagogy, not to mention consistent support for the idea of self-knowledge, inquiry-based learning, and even self-directed learning, saying, “To prepare him for the future life means to give him command of himself” and considered education to be a “process of living and not a preparation for future living.”

    Further, his philosophy on pedagogy would align strongly with the gradual release of responsibility model that while still in need of a ‘more knowledgeable other’ (the teacher) would create learning experiences designed to result in the autonomy and self-efficacy of a student as they master content.

    What Dewey believed about ‘pedagogy’ depends on what parts of his work you want to unpack, but broadly speaking, he was a constructivist who pushed for a ‘human’ education experience that leveraged communal constructivism and the role of inquiry and curiosity in the active participation of a student in their own education.

    Further, his social constructivist theories pre-date those of Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky (who are arguably more well-known for these ideas), and he lamented even around the turn of the century the problems with ‘traditional’ approaches to pedagogy that focused on institutional curriculum, instructional practices, and assessment patterns.

    Wikipedia’s entry on Dewey provides a succinct overview of his work: “Dewey continually argues that education and learning are social and interactive processes, and thus the school itself is a social institution through which social reform can and should take place. In addition, he believed that students thrive in an environment where they are allowed to experience and interact with the curriculum, and all students should have the opportunity to take part in their own learning.”

    “He argues that in order for education to be most effective, content must be presented in a way that allows the student to relate the information to prior experiences, thus deepening the connection with this new knowledge. In order to rectify this dilemma, Dewey advocated for an educational structure that strikes a balance between delivering knowledge while also taking into account the interests and experiences of the student. He notes that “the child and the curriculum are simply two limits which define a single process. Just as two points define a straight line, so the present standpoint of the child and the facts and truths of studies define instruction” (Dewey, 1902, p. 16). It is through this reasoning that Dewey became one of the most famous proponents of hands-on learning or experiential education….”

    Education is a social process. According to the creed, it should not be used for the purposes of preparation for living in the future. Dewey said, “I believe that education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.” We can build a child’s self-esteem in not only the classroom but in all aspects of his or her life.”

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  • How To Help Teachers Create Their Own Professional Development

    How To Help Teachers Create Their Own Professional Development

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    help teachers create their own PD

    by Terrell Heick

    Traditional teacher professional development depends on external training handed down to teachers after having identified their weaknesses as a professional.

    If you’re not so great at teaching writing, or if assessment is becoming a bigger focus in your school or district, you fill out a growth plan of some sort, attend your training, get your certificates, and repeat until you’ve got your hours or your school has run out of money to send you to more training.

    Oftentimes, these ‘professional growth plans’ are scribbled out in 15-minute meetings with your principal, then ‘revisited’ at the end of the year as a kind of autopsy. What would happen if we flipped this model on its head? What if, instead, we created a teacher-centered, always-on, and social approach to teacher improvement? One that connected them with dynamic resources and human communities that modeled new thinking and possibility, and that crucially built on their strengths?

    The idea here isn’t simply that educators can improve by connecting through social networks- they are already doing that. Rather, that schools can decentralize the teacher training effort by cutting them loose and supporting their self-directed efforts through various resources. The purpose of this post, beyond clarifying how social media-driven and self-directed teacher professional development might work, is to offer some (mostly) concrete ideas for actually getting started designing such a program in your school or district.

    Also, note that none of this precludes national-level conferences, on-site PD, and the like. These more central and formal solutions should continue to be powerful PD tools. In fact, a flipped professional development program–one that is self-directed, always-on, and social–could help inform the kinds of conferences and on-site PD most relevant and authentic to your local circumstances.

    How To Help Teachers Create Their Own Professional Development

    1. Establish a compelling big idea –then stick to it

    This can be thought of as a mission or theme, but it’s really more of a tone and purpose. One example could be “To help teachers create always-on development that connects them with networks and builds on their natural strengths and interests.” Then–and this is the critical part–refer back to that constantly as you make decisions that might impact the program. This is your lighthouse.

    You can revise this big idea as necessary, but be careful not to drift too far away from it, or you will end up right back where you started: one-size-fits-all, top-down, corporate-driven garbage that almost everyone on your staff despises no matter how much they smile.

    2. Set the ground rules

    You could probably call this a policy, but it’s the non-policy policy—just some basic rules and a common language to ensure everyone starts and finishes at the same point.

    Here you should explain how training will be qualified and quantified–or if it will be qualified or quantified. Also, you’ll emphasize the big idea so it’s crystal-clear—personalizing educator training through self-directed and social media-based professional development. Flexibility and innovation here matter more than uniformity

    3. Diversify professional development sources

    This is the anti-program program. Less about experts and more about staff capacity. To achieve a self-sustaining, always-on program, the program has to be turned over to the teachers through dozens of sources, from books and district resources to blogging and social media.

    And not all teachers will be chomping at the bit to hop on Twitter to beat the bushes—so give them somewhere to start. Maybe a challenge during a staff meeting:

    • Find five apps for struggling readers, a book, two articles on better literacy, a short video, and a quick webinar–bonus if you can find a literacy framework to make sense of it all. Then find an elegant way to curate and share it all with the school (our district filter does not block that)

    4. Create a pilot or template that works for teachers

    Pilot it in one department or grade level at first to work out the bugs, the factors you didn’t consider, and to better understand how it might work yourself. You may find this new open approach to PD confuses folks, and that’s okay. Simply go back to steps one and two.

    5. Connect teachers

    Connect teachers from different schools or districts—even in different states or countries—to not only improve the diversity of resources but naturally expand professional learning networks in the process. These connections will catalyze the effort as you move on. Relationships and curiosity will take a teacher beyond a policy or minimal requirement.

    The point of this whole thing is staff capacity, not corrective training.

    See also How We Overcame Challenges To A Flipped Staff Meeting

    6. Focus on student learning

    When evaluating efforts, offering training, or discussing the process one-on-one, focus on the effects of the content rather than the medium or the source. The idea here hasn’t changed—improved student learning via improved teacher efficacy. The whole point is the ‘stuff’–strategies, tools, and thinking–that ends up in instructional design, curriculum, assessment, classrooms, teacher-student interactions, and ultimately ‘student achievement.’

    This, then, should be the program’s focus, not social media or meeting minimum requirements.

    7. Celebrate teacher strengths & interests

    Teachers need to see themselves as craftspersons–skilled and passionate professionals who are all exceptional somewhere. Strengths could be collaborating with colleagues, assessment design, classroom management, curriculum development, or other traditional educational pillars. But they also might be character-driven artifacts as well–flexibility, creativity, service attitude, and so on.

    How? Have them describe one another. Use team-building games that make it okay to brag. Promote reflection and metacognition. Provide a template they can ‘fill in’ that helps them see what they do when they do it, and why. Then, highlight any talents, share them out, and celebrate them.

    This maybe should come a bit earlier–or be visible at every step. Traditional PD focuses on correcting weaknesses. Certainly, teachers must continue to train themselves to close gaps in their ability to lead students to learning. But building a program around weakness and deficiency doesn’t do much to rally the troops–and isn’t sustainable in an always-on, self-directed approach.

    8. Plan to iterate 

    Whatever you do the first year will be a trainwreck (compared to the nice and tidy sit-and-get PD). So, from the beginning, everyone should know that it’s all a work in progress—just like the profession itself.

    Perhaps the greatest potential here is in the chance to personalize professional development for teachers. The above ideas are too vague to be considered an exact guide, but an ‘exact guide’ really isn’t possible without ending up with something as top-heavy and standardized as the process it seeks to replace–or at least supplement. Instead, focus on the big ideas–personalizing educator training through self-directed and social media-based professional development.

    Image attribution flickr user stevegarfield

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  • 25 Questions To Guide Teaching With Project-Based Learning

    25 Questions To Guide Teaching With Project-Based Learning

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    25 Questions To Guide Teaching With Project-Based Learning

    by Terry Heick

    I’ve been thinking of the kinds of questions I consider when planning a project–or planning a unit when students plan a project on their own.

    There’s a lot to consider here–so much so that 12 isn’t even close to enough, but that’s because I tend to over-complicate things (so my kids tell me). I”ll stick to a ‘primary’ set for the first dozen, and then add a secondary set you can take a gander at below.

    I’ve more or less organized them into a kind of spectrum, from the simplest questions to consider, to the most complex. I focused more on creating compelling and student-centered projects, rather than creating a list of questions to use as a checklist for pure academic planning.

    For related reading, you might check out the difference between doing projects and project-based learning, as well as our project-based learning cheat sheet that provides some examples to jumpstart your thinking.

    A Project-Based Learning Spectrum: 25 Questions To Guide Your PBL Planning

    SIMPLE

    1. What role is the learner assuming? Designer? Engineer? Brother? Artist? Cultural Critic? Naturalist?
    2. What is their purpose? What are they doing, and what should the project itself ‘do’?
    3. Who is their audience? Who is the audience of the project’s design, impact, or effect?
    4. How can different learning spaces (e.g., classroom, home, digital) work together? To promote meaningful interaction? An authentic audience? Personalized workflow to meet each student’s needs?
    5. What kind of support does each student need individually? Who can provide it? How much structure is enough for that student? (Scoring Guide, Teacher-Provided Tools, Rubric, etc.)
    6. What’s the ‘need to know’? Is there one? Where did it come from? Is it authentic? Teacher-based, school-based, curriculum-based, or student-based? What are the consequences of each?
    7. Which academic standards are the focus of the unit? How will data from formative assessment (that target these standards) help teachers and students respond within the project?
    8. Who will provide learning feedback? When? How? And feedback for what–the quality of the project? Progress towards mastery of academic standards? Will it be ‘graded’ with letters, numbers, as a matter of standards-mastery, or some other way? Which way best supports student understanding?
    9. How should the product be paced to maintain student momentum? What ‘check-in with the teacher’ markers make sense?
    10. How can assessment, iteration, and metacognition improve student understanding?
    11. How can the student bring themselves (affections, experience, voice, choice, talent, curiosity) to the project? Also, what is the teacher’s role in the process? Is it the same for every student?
    12. What sort of quality criteria make sense? How will we know if the project ‘works’? Was it effective? Performed? Who designs this quality criteria?
    13. What kind of project would the student never forget? 
    14. What’s most critical to the success of the project? Creativity? Critical thinking? Organization? Grit? All may apply, but how might the project be designed to focus on the factors you or the student value most?
    15. How can students work within their local community to solve authentic problems, or celebrate meaningful opportunities?
    16. Is technology use distracting, useful, or critical to the success of the project?
    17. Does it make sense for the project to also be Inquiry-focused? Problem-based?
    18. How can students build on their unique schema and background knowledge to produce something special?
    19. What role might iteration play in the project?
    20. Is the project research-based? Product-based? Service-based? 
    21. Can mindfulness be embedded into the project to help students see their own thinking, identify barriers and opportunities, and respond in a self-directed way?
    22. What filtered (e.g., a teacher-selected book, an encyclopedia) and unfiltered information sources (e.g., a Google search, a social media stream) might they use cooperatively?
    23. What learning taxonomies or cognitive actions might guide students to think best? We covered some of these in a recent post, many of which are shown in the graphic below.
    24. What scale makes the most sense for the student to work best?
    25. Is the project designed to build on student strengths (rather than trying to ‘correct deficiencies’)?

    COMPLEX

    A Project-Based Learning Spectrum: 25 Questions To Guide Your PBL Planning; image attribution Wikimedia commons (the spectrum to the right)

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    Terrell Heick

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  • Why Education Needs More Than Reform

    Why Education Needs More Than Reform

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    by Terry Heick

    On Collaboration As An Industry

    Hopefully, we can agree that education–as it exists–isn’t good enough.

    For students or teachers or communities. It just isn’t.

    This is a tired argument, but it’s an underlying assumption of this concept: education needs more than reform. Iteration. Evolution. Transformation. Whatever word reflects the level of urgency you’d assign it all.

    It’s curious that in seeking this evolution, we turn to the product of the system rather than the systems themselves. We criticize the egg instead of understanding the chicken. Of course, the bits and pieces–the gears–of that chicken are complex to the point of obscurity. This makes self-correction through iteration–the current model for ed reform–a challenge.

    This is in lieu of so much creativity, knowledge, and expertise out there because these same experts get behind the machine and push. We seek approval from the same power holders and institutions that nod their heads yes or shake their heads no, not realizing it is their way of thinking that got us into this mess. We seek change not just from within but from above.

    In response, we need collaboration between and across innovators and experts that is disruptive, even if it’s simple for the sake of disrupting. Make noise. Draw attention. Walk into a movie theater and scream, “fire!” Unplug the television. Turn off the WiFi because this whole thing isn’t getting anywhere quickly.

    Disruption, in general, is about unsettling and is often thought of as chaos. Disruptive collaboration is working together to force change. It’s the artful unsettling of that which has become inartistic. Reconfiguring systems that can no longer see themselves or replacing them altogether. It’s about shifting the locus of control.

    On Collaboration In Thought

    We could talk about helping our students collaborate disruptively–and we should–but most immediately, this is about teaching and learning. As educators, we should first want our thinking disrupted–taken apart, criticized, and scrutinized, then handed back to us in pieces. And not as contrarians but as equal partners seeking to understand one another.

    We could seek collaboration that torpedoes our ideas–and the ideas of the power holders up top that have shut off their innovation trying to please the folks above them–and then emerges on the other side a kind of hybrid of what we think together. And then want it all to disappear and only come back to us in bits and pieces that we can’t recognize as my thinking, but only thought.

    We could stop seeing ourselves–or the people we collaborate with–as simply ideas and opinions because ideas and opinions replace people and diplomacy and friendliness and compliance get in the way–swapped for creative and careful thinking that actually stands a chance to survive the whole clumsy process.

    And once these ideas are articulated and broken apart and transparent, and nobody’s thinking, let’s color them with the wonderful stain of idea exchange so that we can own them as a whole thing ourselves. And then we can produce something of worth together.

    On Collaboration & Its Products

    We should want the product of our collaboration to be disruptive, too. Existing systems already have their own momentum and don’t need our help. They don’t need our hashtags or likes or affection. They’ve yielded the context that necessitates our collaboration to begin with.

    If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together. So, let’s build something that offers viable alternatives for everyone–especially those marginalized by the existing system. Let’s stop demanding rigor and accountability and instead create something ourselves that is scalable beyond the walls of your school or the reach of the concept of ‘academia’ that continues to haunt learning everywhere. 

    Something that thinks not in a pattern of school->curriculum–>content–>proficiency, but instead person–>learning–>knowledge–>lots of people–>lots of learning–>social capacity–>wisdom.

    Let’s connect and build something that doesn’t serve you or the past or what’s already here but others and the here and now. Let’s build something we’ve never had–and do so by empowering everyone that’s a part of this.

    Something that isn’t built to make your school or classroom spin faster, but rather is built for the real work of understanding something.

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    Terrell Heick

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  • The Inside-Out School: A 21st Century Learning Model

    The Inside-Out School: A 21st Century Learning Model

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    by Terry Heick

    This post has been updated from a 2012 version

    As a follow-up to our 9 Characteristics of 21st Century Learning we developed in 2009, we have developed an updated framework, The Inside-Out Learning Model.

    The goal of the model is simple enough–not pure academic proficiency, but instead authentic self-knowledge, diverse local and global interdependence, adaptive critical thinking, and adaptive media literacy.

    By design this model emphasizes the role of play, diverse digital and physical media, and a designed interdependence between communities and schools.

    The attempted personalization of learning occurs through new actuators and new notions of local and global citizenship. An Inside-Out School returns the learners, learning, and ‘accountability’ away from academia and back to communities. No longer do schools teach. Rather, they act as curators of resources and learning tools and promote the shift of the ‘burden’ of learning back to a more balanced perspective of stakeholders and participants.

    Here, families, business leaders, humanities-based organizations, neighbors, mentors, and higher-education institutions all converging to witness, revere, respond to and support the learning of its own community members.

    The micro-effect here is increased intellectual intimacy, while the macro-effect is healthier communities and citizenship that extends beyond mere participation, to ideas of thinking, scale, legacy, and growth.

    The Inside-Out School: A 21st Century Learning Model

    The 9 Domains Of the Inside-Out Learning Model

    1. Five Learning Actuators

    • Project-Based Learning
    • Directed and Non-Directed Play
    • Video Games and Learning Simulations
    • Connected Mentoring
    • Academic Practice

    2. Changing Habits

    • Well-being (for teachers and students) as a matter deserving of innovation & design
    • Acknowledge limits and scale
    • Reflect on interdependence
    • Honor uncertainty
    • Curate legacy
    • Support systems-level and divergent thinking
    • Reward increment
    • Require versatility in the face of change

    3. Transparency

    • Between communities, learners, and schools
    • Learning standards, outcomes, project rubrics, performance critera persistently visible, accessible, and communally constructed
    • Gamification and publishing replace ‘grades’

    4. Self-Initiated Transfer

    • Applying old thinking in constantly changing and unfamiliar circumstances as a constant matter of practice
    • Constant practice of prioritized big ideas in increasing complexity within learner’s Zone of Proximal Development
    • Project-based learning, blended learning, and Place-Based Education available to facilitate highly constructivist approach

    5. Mentoring & Community

    • ‘Accountability’ via the performance of project-based ideas in authentic local and global environments
    • Local action –> global citizenship
    • Active mentoring via physical and digital networking, apprenticeships, job shadows and study tours
    • Communal Constructivism, meta-cognition, Cognitive Coaching, and Cognitive Apprenticeship among available tools

    6. Changing Roles

    • Learners as knowledge makers
    • Teachers as the expert of assessment and resources
    • Classrooms as think-tanks
    • Communities not just audience, but vested participants
    • Families as designers, curators, and content resources

    7. Climate of Assessment

    • Constant minor assessments replace exams
    • Data streams inform progress and suggest pathways
    • Academic standards prioritized and anchoring
    • Products, simulation performance, self-knowledge delegate academia to a new role of refinement of thought

    8. Thought & Abstraction

    • In this model, struggle and abstraction are expected outcomes of increasing complexity & real-world uncertainty
    • This uncertainty is honored, and complexity and cognitive patience are constantly modeled and revered
    • Abstraction honors not just art, philosophy, and other humanities, but the uncertain, incomplete, and subjective nature of knowledge

    9. Expanding Literacies

    • Analyzes, evaluates, and synthesizes credible information
    • Critical survey of the interdependence of media and thought
    • Consumption of constantly evolving media forms
    • Media design for authentic purposes
    • Self-monitored sources of digital & non-digital data
    • Artistic and useful content curation patterns

    The Inside-Out Learning Model Central Learning Theories & Artifacts: Situational Learning Theory (Lave), Discovery Learning (Bruner), Communal Constructivism (Holmes), Zone of Proximal Development & More Knowledgeable Other (Vygotsky), Learning Cycle (Kolb), Transfer (Thorndike, Perkins, Wiggins), Habits of Mind (Costa and Kallick), Paulo Freire, and the complete body of work by Wendell Berry

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    Terrell Heick

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