The Essences of Teaching: No. 3 -- Share, Spread, Show

Third in a Series of Three

(Review Part 1, Part 2)

And thirdly, great teachers, share what their doing—the pitfalls and panaceas—with others. The best teachers serve as resource not only for the students in their classrooms to other teachers down the hall, and beyond. They build bridges of collaboration and reflection, of experience and experimentation, and strategies and support. Teachers who share ideas, concerns, plans and materials redouble their own ability to create meaningful lessons for their classes.

Great teachers spread the word of their students' work (and their own expertise) by showcasing it with their administrators, parents, and community as their audience. It's important personally and professionally to let the world know what we accomplish with our students—how we strive and thrive in the classroom. Having stakeholders see us at our best can take the edge off when we risk a plan that doesn't turn out was well as we had hoped. Somewhere along the line, teachers as a profession became shy about telling others about the excellent work they do. Today we can't afford to be reclusive.

In this age, it's key to success of our profession to invite others into our classrooms and to show them what school is like nowadays. (My, how different from a decade ago!) Explain how we meet the challenges in creative, effective ways, and how we foster meaning and achievement for our students. Some teachers would argue that this is showing off. Well, yes it is, but as the old saying goes, "quality doesn't sell itself." Teachers must share their stories as well as their scholarship with other stakeholders besides their students.

Showing others our good work despite myriad challenges of low funding, lacking prestige, rising numbers of learning disabilities, and infrequent moral support from media, is good for everybody's sake. Students gain security and motivation knowing they're in the care of pros. Parents can rest assured their students will be equipped for tomorrow. And teachers can enjoy receiving some credit for their labors. Everyone benefits when teachers show the many, many ways we are effectively meeting students differentiated needs.

Now as the back-to-school season starts, is time to reflect, and shape ways to tell our stories, lay claim to our scholarship for the love of learning, and share the good news about teaching and learning in today's schools with everyone who will listen and then some.

"Beyond Here Be Dragons!"

"Why would anyone want to blog!" First, this is a question screamed at me today by a colleague. Second, notice I do not punctuate it with a question mark. The scream made it rhetorical.

I had been talking about a student who had recently removed a blog that included posts, though heartfelt and honest in tone and style, were perhaps so personal so as to compromise the author and his subjects in a less than perfect, not so understanding world. Although the young blogger had removed his blog, other bloggers were pulling up its contents in Google Reader and reposting them. Our world may not be understanding, but unlike the virtual world it could be more ephemeral. What we post can virsist on without us.

It is to this nonrecantable, uncontrollable existence of our posts to the blogosphere my colleague objects. She gave me pause. As she objected, I reflected.

Several thoughts came to mind. Of how she was right--it does seem unfair that once we publish, to others we cannot see, cannot know, who can abuse, misuse, and reuse our contributions in ways we cannot immediately imagine. I also thought of how I find the process of blogging--and publishing--to be almost as enriching and rewarding as reading the blogs of countless other educators who are doing the same. I have the sense that publishing my "reveries" is dues for reading the "buzz" of other bees. That together we create the prairie.

Indeed, I know that my metaphor is romantic. After all , the blogosphere is more a woods than a prairie. It offers what the 20th Century French philosopher Gaston Bachelard calls the "immediate immensity." To sit in front of a computer screen, less than a meter between you and the rest of the world, in the comfort of your own home, and not realize that it translates to billions of other screens (now and into the future) is to forget the forest for the tree. The forest may be lovely, but it is dark and deep. And there may even be wolves.

"Beyond here be dragons!" This makes me think of yet another topographical metaphor for cyber-space. The sea. But like the explorers before us we students and teachers set sail to explore while others cozy up to a cup of tea and a good book back at home. Nothing wrong with the latter, and someday I hope to make it home safely, so save a cup for me. In the meantime, I'm off.

Summer Stock

Almost a month since the school bells rang for the last time before summer vacation, it is just about now that I can begin to relax. It's also given me some time to do some remodeling on my class website charlesyoungs.com and reflect on what I've learned about blogging in the classroom this year. Er, maybe I should say, "outside of the classroom."

I believe I've learned more about my students' experience with blogging from my experience here at ifbeesarefew. Knowing this I would highly recommend to any teacher who is planning on creating a blog for his or her classes to also create their own blog or at least participate regularly in a blog.

Here's what I've learned:

Getting started is difficult--almost every time. Posting is scary, partly because, if you make a mistake everyone can see it, and partly because its possible that no may read what you are writing.

Writing develops thinking. As the great British teacher and research of writing Nancy Martin always contended, I think as I write. If I have no idea as to what to write a post on, all I have to do is sit down and start writing. Before I know it I have a post.

Ownership leads to quality. The same fear creates the positive results of ownership. When I blog I really care what I write, and my writing is generally better because of this care.

Readership (and comments) encourage a blogger. When I get a comment, note a jump in my counter, or see a new city pop up in my visitor map, I get excited to think others are reading. Having an audience matters also shapes my "voice." Again, the "care" factor kicks in. For a variety of reasons an audience matters full-stop.

Writing models are powerful tools. I use others' posts as models. I have learned more about how to write, lead in, quote, document, give analysis, and develop ideas in my blog posts thanks largely to great models of others' blogs.

Ease allows for length and length for depth. Although most blogs require brevity, as a teacher, I know I encourage my students to write more than they would on their own. And there is something about filling up a blog post dialogue box that seems easy (as I say, once one gets started) than filling up a regular word-document. The conversational nature of blogging also seems to call forth "voice" more than conventional word-processing. So as my students wax on, they deepen their thinking/writing.

Brevity calls for precision and economy. For me, length is not a problem, once I get started. And so the challenge is to be concise and precise. Again, a valuable writing skill for my students.

As I said, I've learned about my students by learning about myself. My hunch is that the above attributes and experiences that are true for me are true for my students as well. They confirm a value I as a teacher see in having my students blog--if only for the sake of improving their writing and thinking skills, let alone practice in media literacy and civic responsibility.

Publishing Le Blogue, La Raison d'Etre

A colleague with whom I've been working on student blogs, Nicole Roth, recently finished her doctoral research on blogging and its effects on high school writing. Her study indicates that despite an initial drop in proficiency that we guess might be accounted for by the newness of the experience, a learning curve of how-to use blog technology, or perhaps a hesitancy to write for a real audience after writing for "just to get it done" across so many years of schooling, soon the students were surpassing their peers whether they were writing in long-hand or via word processors. So our hunches about students writing more and writing for publication--and instant publication at that--leading to greater proficiency are confirmed. More on that and Nicole's study in a future blog.

What got me thinking about this was something I heard in a screencast from Elizabeth Perry's blog. Elizabeth Perry is a fellow educator, blogger, author, artist, and last but not least fellow Pittsburgher. In her screencast she eloquently describes the process of how she came to blog her daily sketches in the Carnegie Museum of Art in the aesthetically-tuned museum drawing project. It's worth some time spent in mulling over her work. Lovely drawings. For those folks who know the museum, will be the recognition that she has caught the familiar, natural order of the place in her sketches. Perry comments on a motivation of her blogging that I think is integral to why it might works so well. She reflects:

"Once I started, the public and shared nature of that process made me want to keep going. The response has been encouraging."

I find myself connecting with this sentiment with regard to my own and my students' blogging experiences. I've blogged now for a month and I feel a sense of small, quiet accomplishment every time I put my two cents in. My sense is that this feeling comes not from the reflection inherent in writing, and the thinking at the point of utterance, but also because it is not just for myself. I don't know if will always be so. But I know it is good for today. My first motivation to blog was to find out if I could hack it. There I was asking students to do something I had not attempted, other than what comments I had offered in our class blog. Whether or not I have an audience or am rattling on in an empty room seems to matter not. My keypad needs the exercise. Wait! someone lurked in from London this week! There's the adrenaline rush and I'm good for another 7 days.

I can remember as a kid I would spend all day making art projects. I had piles of drawings, pastings, cutouts, paintings--you name it, if it could be made with construction paper, markers, paste, crayons, pencils, cotton, pipe cleaners, ad infinitum, it was in my pile. I created one or several art pieces a day. Yet, I still remember having the realization one day at age 4 that I was wasting my time because no one was going to see the pile. I gave up the practice and tossed most of it away. And although I continued to dabble with graphics on through the rest of my life, and copped an job at an ad agency because of it, and have a strong appreciation for art, as a boy I never imagined an audience. I stopped for lack of a public. So maybe would not have become an artist. After all, artists claim they create for themselves, right?

And I at 4 concluded an audience was my art's raison d'etre and mostly ceased to create. For this post, I pulled out a drawing from kindergarten. (Note my teacher Mrs. Pullings' encouragement at the bottom.) Like a chronically ill patient that manages to live to see the cure, it's a survivor to the day of personal, global publication. What if I could have published my pile in 1968! Who knows? Maybe my art would have continued. Ah, well, not meant to be.

Yet, I consider the empowering nature of Internet publishing to our students and how it contributes to the depth of literary analysis, synthesis, and composition as they make their own voices known on our class blogs (By the way, the reason there is no hyperlink to the class blogs is that for the time being anyway, they are closed-forums, for security concerns, and therefore I am unable to share). But rest assured, for all their groaning about "having to blog," my students are gaining in their writing and thinking because of the practice and even more so because of the publishing, not to me, but to each other. They have a public that matters to them and I have the wisdom of a 4 year-old boy telling me so.