Creativity and Hard Work: A simple message for the first day

After reading Made to Stick last year I’m determined to communicate one simple message on the first day of school.

The message I hope to convey is how two important things overlap and become a key for academic success in my classroom: hard work and creativity (also called ingenuity). Success in my class, and I hope in much of life, comes where the two overlap.

Part of hard work means trying even when the purpose is not totally clear. To make my point I’ll turn to that classic scene from The Karate Kid:

I know students haven’t seen the movie and I’ll have to explain what leads up to that scene, but that’s easily accomplished. The point is that sometimes when you’re in the midst of learning, it doesn’t feel relevant. Yet if you don’t work hard even then, you won’t succeed.

For the creativity element I show a DVD version of Peter H. Reynold’s story, Ish. With creativity, you often have to forget about making things look the way everyone expects them to look before you can see something valuable. In my classroom, we value ish work, even if that means someone gives me something that is essay-ish.

Looking forward to the year. Thanks for reading.

Achieving is not learning and the difference matters

I thought about waxing long on an old article I read today from Alfie Kohn; instead I’ll recommend it to anyone serious about giving better feedback to students about their writing and I’ll mention that it isn’t surprising that I’d like it, given my disdain for rubrics.

Within the article Kohn aims a few shots at our misplaced focus in the classroom and points out that rubrics are part of an achievement focus rather than a learning focus. I perked at that contrast, because I hear a lot of folks say student ahievement is our main goal as teachers, and it always sounded a little funny to me. Marilyn French, as quoted by Kohn, states it nicely:

“Only extraordinary education is concerned with learning” . . . whereas “most is concerned with achieving: and for young minds, these two are very nearly opposites.”

That is why saying we are about student achievement sounds funny–it’s not what we’re about. At least, it is not what I am about. I am about learning. Achieving means getting A’s and high SAT or ACT scores and winning basketball games and scholarships. Achieving cares how many degrees you have and what your class rank was and how much you did today on five hours of sleep. Learning is about becoming smarter and wiser and taking risks. When it comes to this business of education, I hope what I am showing my students is that achieving isn’t worth a thing without learning.

We teach them obedience for their sake, not ours

Me, to the girls as I show them the following  photo on the camera: Now, girls, you know how we teach you to obey us and tell you how important it is to obey? Here’s another way someone could do it. Isn’t it better to obey?

Girls, nodding in amazement: Yeeeessss.

We can teach kids right and wrong, or we can try to tie them up and restrain them as long as it lasts. The problem is, someday you have to release them from the leash, and at that point the strategy has not done the poor kids any favors.

Thanks to my brother-in-law for snapping this shot with our camera while my wife and I were with our children for their naps and rests. He said both these kids were at least kindergarten age. My, oh my.

Thanks for reading.

Learning the Hard Way: Look Mom! No hands and no feet!

One thing I did when I was little that I am convinced no one else did is continually attempt to ride my bicycle with no hands and no feet. My friends and I were always doing tricks on our bikes. When I’d be riding down the street with no hands I’d always think I had to do more, to be trickier than all the other guys who were riding with no hands. It likely didn’t help that I’d rented this movie called Rad  about five times and I wanted to be the coolest trickster there was on a BMX bike.

There I would be, then, riding down the street with no hands and suddenly the idea would come to me–what if I were to go no hands and no feet?–and with the idea consummated, I’d lift my feet off the pedals. For one, maybe two glorious seconds I was the trickster I imagined myself to be. Then at the end of that second second the bike’s seat would jut to one side, throwing off my balance, tossing me to the pavement in a heap of inglorious shame. Discouragement comes slowly to young boys like me, however, and inevitably a month or two later I’d attempt the trick again, usually with a few people around to see me topple.

Somewhere near my mid-teens I attempted the trick while riding my mountain bike at a significant clip. It wasn’t the most rational moment, I suppose (Had it ever been?), but there I was, cruising with no hands, musing why I couldn’t augment it and ride with no feet. I gently removed my sneakers from the pedals, my eyes lifted to relish in my triumph.

The crash was so blunt that the quick release lever on my front wheel unfastened and my tire rolled another house down the street, twisting to a stop like the coins I’d spin on the tables at  Louis Pizza.

While I can’t recall exactly when my enlightenment arrived, I am convinced that while I sat in the bathtub cleaning out the long scrapes on my legs that I must have glimpsed something about physics–that with only my bottom connected to the bicycle, there was little leverage for balance. With that insight a lasting embarrassment coalesced, and I thus told the world I had caught my shoelace while pedaling and when I tugged on it, I had launched myself onto the street.

It’s not true, World. I had no problem of the kind. I simply thought I was so amazing I could ride a bike with my buttocks.

I couldn’t.

Thanks for reading.

Just in time observation for teachers’ just in time learning

I’m adding a new category for my postings, one which I’ve stolen from John Williams, a radio host I thoroughly enjoyed when I lived outside Chicago. It’s called “When I am king” – because I periodically have those silly ideas and plans I’d institute if I were principal, mayor, or even king.

Today’s thought: If I were principal.

I’d have a person on staff full-time to be a tutor, much like we have in my school. Here, there is a special room called the Academic Resource Center (ARC), and it is staffed by intelligent, friendly tutors who help students with their homework. Since we’re such a big school, we have one tutor for each core subject area. What I’d do is take a tutor like this and have him or her be a tutor and an on-call substitute teacher.

But the substitute part would not be for emergencies when a sub was not available. This person would have an openly published schedule (on line) and a teacher in the building could claim a slot for the tutor to cover her class. The “covering” is not so a classroom teacher can run to the store or the dentist, it’s for observing other teachers and collaborating when it otherwise would not be possible.

For example, say I hear that Mrs. Smith is doing that great activity where she has students playing games and at the same time learning all their vocabulary terms. The easiest way to learn it myself is to go to her room and watch her do it, so I check the tutor/sub’s schedule, see that she’s open third block and schedule her to cover my class. I email my plans to the tutor/sub, and when the time comes, head to Mrs. Smith’s class and watch her, feeling confident that my class is in good hands, since it is being covered by a competent professional who is familiar with the students. When I’m finished, I fill out a report that takes less than five minutes to write but verifies that the time was used well.

My school attempted something like this last year and the year before, where small groups of teachers rotated for observations – the school hired subs, allowing each of us to watch one teacher and be watched by one teacher. The idea was decent, but the result didn’t always pan out, possibly because of differing ideas about the purpose for the observation. I think one way to improve it, though, would be to have this flexible person available anytime – a person who would be ready to fill in when that “just-in-time learning” moment arises.

Perhaps some of it depends on how good the sub is, but if you could have this guy, who wouldn’t want to participate? When I’m king, I’ll be able to hire him, after all.

Thanks for reading.

Hoping to rely on more than my own learning

A couple days ago I described my desire to create a wiki that would serve as a bridge between teachers who are united in cause and disjointed in work. Of course, as usual, I described the phenomenon like I’d discovered it, which I believe is the only way to write – with passion, conviction, and enough cluelessness to think that what you’re writing is worthy of the data it consumes. Despite that approach to the writing process, I am not naive enough to think I am the first to discover any idea, and so I was pleased to find that the dynamic of teaching where teachers are grouped in their task and yet extremely independent has been called “loose-coupling,” a term used by Weick in 1976 – the year before I was born. There is nothing new under the sun.

I am encouraged, however, to find that my department does not fit the classic characteristics of the communities described where attempts at using Internet technologies to connect employees failed. A highly cited factor in failing tools of sharing: teachers’ unwillingness to share. That’s not present in my department, where we boldly steal each others’ things (you leave a handout sitting around, and someone will snag it) and have almost open access to everyone’s filing cabinets.  Another bit these research articles cite is that teachers sometimes feel their material is not good enough to share. I could see that being the case with my department, but I hope that by following my instinct (and the advice of another writer) and making the wiki password protected (thus sealed from our administrators) teachers will feel more trusting of the motives of colleagues and will share. The other bit of data I’ve seen is that teachers most likely to share are veterans – those who have been around a while and have tips to share. That makes sense in light of the fear of being criticized, since veteran teachers are least likely to be bothered by such criticism (and least likely to receive it). If I can nudge some of those colleagues in particular, it may work to make the wiki something especially useful.

Today, obviously then, I am more encouraged with the outlook of what I’m about to create. A collegial environment exists – I don’t have to create that – and if I can craft the tool carefully enough, with templates and structure that will help my peers to create content easily, it just might work.

I would like more research, though, especially on the implementation of wikis in a professional environment. I can learn a lot from personal reflections and collections of knowledge, but as Tony Bowden mentioned on his blog a couple years back,

the problem with technology implementations is usually a social one, rather than a technical one, and this is rarely more true than with so called “social software”.

Its state as a social problem is exactly why some actual experimental research would be nice. Social problems are easy to misread, and misunderstandings and pre-set thinking is easy to impose upon observations of what we see. Thus, when we tell our friends we’re thinking about home schooling our children, they tell us they don’t want to home school because home schoolers “are weird.” Good one, guys. That truly shows how much you’ve learned in all your years of non-home schooling. Do they know any home schoolers? Have they seen how weird the people who go to school can be? I’m sure they’ve read some solid research on that – you know, empirical studies of home schoolers’ weirdness. In fact, I just stumbled across one in the Journal of Educational Oddities yesterday.

Back to my point: it would be nice if I could read more solid research on the social process involved with wiki implementation, so I could move on something better than my own hunches and people’s first hand perceptions and reflections.

Until I find some, I’ll have to rely on my own ability to remember “lessons learned.” That’s not the worst situation, I suppose, since I’m not totally bad at learning things. Take how well I have learned to shut the toilet seat as quickly as possible after the girls have used it. So paranoid am I that I often try to get the kiddie-seat off and the lid down before helping the child in question fully dress. What have I learned that has made me this way? That children are not as aware of open toilet seats as adults, and when flinging off articles of clothing – say, a camisole – they may end up inside the bowl for Daddy to fish out and clean.

By increasingly basing the organization of my instructional content on the web for the past three years, I have learned a lot of hard lessons about web design and human behavior. Most are not as hands-on as the toilet bowl-camisole lesson, but they have changed how I design content for the web, so hopefully I’ll be able to make this work even without ample research on wiki implementation.

If not, I could fail with style and write my observations on it as if I were the first to have failed in such a way. I’m sure as soon as I finish writing that article I’ll discover the very research I’m missing, and it will be dated 1996.

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Weick, K.E. (1976). Educational organizations as loosely-coupled systems. Administrative Science Quarterly. 21(1), 1-19.

Learning from a Little House

My wife and I lived starkly different childhoods. She watched MacGyver and Little House on the Prairie with her entire family, and that was practically it. I watched MacGyver and basically everything else, from Knight Rider, The Dukes of Hazard, and the A-Team, to every episode of Transformers and G.I. Joe (and I don’t need an Internet flashback to remind me that “Knowing is half the battle”). I remember getting cable television – it meant that 1) to get a clear-ish signal, we didn’t have to crank that little directional knob that turned the antenna, and that 2) we got great channels like the USA Network, which played mostly cartoons, and Nickelodeon, which had You Can’t Do That on Television and Double Dare.

With all that action to watch, it’s no wonder I completely missed Little House on the Prairie, a show about girls and with relatively few gunfights. It’s also a wonder our family has taken such a drastic veer away from the TV. In contrast to my life, our girls can watch one “movie” every other day, and not until we discovered the Little House DVD’s at the library did their length stretch past 30 minutes. Yes, the girls are little, and I doubt I watched much more than they when I was their age, but we have no plans to increase the frequency as they grow.

It’s a change from my life, but it’s a change in favor of my girls. What good is TV for their souls? How is exposing my children to the onslaught of pornography that is  broadcast television in 2008 going to help them? And, I might ask, how is it going to help me?

If one doubts whether TV’s content is pornography, Jason Byassee’s test might make it more obvious. He suggests in the January 2008 issue of First Things that we will notice more clearly the prevalence of pornography by turning off our TVs for a month and then turning them back on. What we see then would shock us. Maybe I’ve turned into an old moralist, but it’s probably because I’ve taken on a longer version of Mr. Byassee’s experiment: apart from the Red Sox World Series runs and a Tour de France, I have now had the TV off for seven years. By now, I see no reason to flip it back on.

I won’t unplug that DVD player, though, because I’m having a great time with Little House. We’re getting a kick out of family situations and no indecent commercials, and we’re learning quite a bit about frontier life, even if it is a television-adapted version of it.

Take the other night as an example. While watching the Ingalls family eat dinner, I reminded Ellen that we have a lamp just like the one they use to light their house, and I suggested that we light ours at dinner. She thought it was a great idea, of course, and we gathered ourselves around the table with an oil lamp as the centerpiece.

Mommy made the first mistake as far as Ellen was concerned, because she clicked on the light above the table. At Ellen’s respectful protest (we’re working on the respectful part – she gets it when prompted) she agreed to turn it off, but she did ask Ellen to let us leave the kitchen light on so she could see what she was eating and so she could feed Annie.  Ellen agreed but asked numerous times through the meal for the other lights to be turned off. As the meal progressed, we gave her more and more of what she wanted, and by the end, the only source of light was the oil lamp.

We did it because Ellen wanted to do it, but you know, if we hadn’t done it, I never would have realized fully how dark a house is when all you have is an oil light. Mommy and Daddy sat at the table and discussed the finer points of living the frontier life: how the summer wouldn’t be so dark, how the fire in the winter would surely give off light, but how we’d still likely head to bed at an early hour.  Had we stuck with the uninvolved perspective, we never would have learned what it really might have been like. We would have stayed spectators, thinking we’d learned what life was like in another time because we’d seen it on a movie, but we’d have never implanted in our own episodic memories what the experience could be.

To generalize, then: How often do I take the easier, spectator position? More than I care to count, I’m sure. It’s easier to think I’ve learned than to throw myself into a learning experience and discover first hand. Each assignment I do half-heartedly, each time I pass by the opportunity to test something out or try it myself, I choose a spectator position.

Maybe worse, of course, is each time I fail to provide for my students anything more than the spectator’s position, at least when more is possible. I think Ellen has it right, though, and it’s a challenge worth taking on – creating experiences and seizing them when the opportunity arises. I’d probably be surprised how much we could all learn.

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Image Attribution:

Original image: ‘Oil Lamp‘  by: Cindy Seigle