Summer Reading: Techniques & Strategies

After appreciating the breadth and clarity of Diane Ravitch's The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, I have devoted some of my summer reading to practical matters of technique with two books for K-12 teachers.

First up is Teach Like a Champion by Doug Lemov. His book describes 49 techniques that teachers can use to shore up their repertoire's effectiveness.  Speaking from his vantage as an administrator of Uncommon Schools, Lemov goes into great detail with each strategy from the fundamental to the ingenius.  As a teacher with 18 years in the classroom, I marveled at his ability to fill pages with the simplest strategy, but in that sort of detail he makes plain what might be otherwise be missed by the uninitiated.  The book is chock-full of great tips, and I'm surprised he didn't have at least one more idea to make it an even 50. The publisher Jossey-Bass markets the book as germane to K-12 and indeed the ideas in this book fit all grades in that range and some beyond.

No doubt teachers will find a few techniques that are already part and parcel of their practice.  But I must admit that this old dog learned a few new tricks. Lemov starts off with No. 1, for example, "No Opt Out." This is the idea addresses the scenario of a student unable or unwilling to answer a question and ends with the student answering that question as often as possible. Lemove offers at least four formats to make this technique sequence a successful one. Another technique, No. 3, "Stretch It," entails a sequence of learning that does not end with a right answer; rather, an on-target answer is rewarded with follow-up questions that extend knowledge and test for reliability.

Adding to Lemov's clear descriptions, rationales, and transcripted examples from real classrooms, the book comes with a DVD of clips showing great teachers using the techniques on the fly.  You can see some of these at The New York Times feature on "Building a Better Teacher,"which Lemov narrates.  The DVD confirms the feasibility when they return to the classroom this fall.

Akin to Lemov's book is Richard Howell Allen's High-Impact Teaching Strategies for the 'XYZ' Era of Education.  The title is not only giving props to the Generations teachers are serving but also to the ABC organization of the book's contents.  Allen has a strategy for every letter of the alphabet from "Acknowledgement" to "Zones of Instruction."  Allen's ideas might be a bit more basic, but no less essential than Lemov's.  One is strategies and one is techniques, and though there is overlap with these, a difference becomes distinct. 

My summer reading of both will no doubt tighten up my practice and make me more effective. They should be required reading in pre-service education courses and handy to the veteran. If Ravitch's book is a must read backgrounder for the systemic challenges we face, these two books are gotta-have manuals for the first-year and the fortieth-year practitioners on the front lines.

Image credit:  "Oil Lamp." By Jason Pearce. 1 June 2006. Flickr. Used by permission via Creative Commons Licensing.

Grammar in Advertising: Hanes Gets Their Gaffe

You can get away with saying just about anything if you say it with a smile.  Even bad grammar.

Hanes' recent advertising campaign for their "lay flat collar tee shirt" is so hilarious that I may have to forgive them for not calling it the "lie-flat collar."  I would call Hanes' attention to not only the verb tense but also the adjectival hyphen, except for the fact that they already know about their gaffe. In one of more than a dozen short commercial spots the grammar problem is brought up by a "bacon neck," and dismissed. So Hanes knows the grammar rules. As I tell my students, once you know the rules, you can break 'em if you can score.




And as a former ad exec, I understand lay-flat's appeal. Still, in the smaller copy text they could use the verb lie when referring to what the "lay flat collar" does. I'm afraid of their success, not of selling shirts (they've sold me) but of selling Americans on the use of lay as an intransitive verb in the present tense.

I'm on a loser I know.  I still blame Apple every time someone says "think different" or "any verb different." Recently the poster for the film Diary of a Wimpy Kid, with its comma-spliced tag line "It's not a diary, it's a movie" had me chaffing. Guess I need the comfort of Hanes.

Even as Hanes breaks the rules it scores big on the laugh meter with these spots.  Hanes has a comedy of manners in an airplane coach, starring basketball legend Michael Jordan, who plays himself and comedic actor Michael Torpey, who plays Rick, a carpet salesman that has read Me 2.0 a few too many times. (Believe me, reading it once is too many times, but I digress.)  When Rick finds himself seated next MJ and that they both are wearing Hanes, he figures it kismet.  The laughs come from both fellas playing their lines straight as Rick sidles up to Jordan in efforts to ingratiate himself to the basketball great. It's obvious this 15-hour flight just got longer for MJ. It's a sort of humor akin to The Office caused by awkward moments where strangers are forced to deal with each other.
The "grammar spot" is here:



You can catch all of Hanes Flight #23 series videos at this playlist of "Comfort Air" commercials site.  After a brief (no pun intended) introduction by a attendant that seems to be channeling a certain former Alaskan governor, you'll want to select "In-Flight Movies."

The "reality" of series is backed up by layers of simulacra. In the spots Rick mentions his blog, That's So Rick, which is actually up and running here. Read the blog  which boast Rick's adventures and insights as a carpet salesman, and the parody continues. On one post you'll find a link to sales of a items that the fictional character is hawking on Cafepress.com, such as a coffee mug with a mobile phone photo of MJ and Rick and tee-shirts with Rick's sales tips.

But what about Rick's carpet samples? Or is that all a lay? Smile.

Let Common Sense Be Your Guide . . .to the Movies and More

The folks at Common Sense Media recently released their 2010 Summer Movie Guide to help parents judge what's appropriate for their kids at the cinema. The guide is handily divided into the three summer months--June, July, August--and release dates are given along with a brief synopsis. 

The best feature of the Summer Movie Guide is the easy to follow content guides, provided with the simple icons shown here.  Bear in mind all must be taken with a grain of salt.  You'll note they point out  Toy Story 3 "might contain consumerism."  What's more American than Disney! Yes, maybe consumerism, but sometimes it's hard to tell the difference here in the U.S.  Despite this warning, Common Sense Media calls Toy Story 3 a "perfect pick" for all ages.

Movies aren't the only things Common Sense Media monitors.  See ratings for games, mobile apps, websites, television, books, and music. So if your are a parent or a teacher considering any of these media, CommonSenseMedia.org is a great starting point.

Sleep Starved

When I was an elementary school student, my bedtime was 7:30 p.m., into my PJs and after a bedtime story, and off to the land of Wynken, Blynken, and Nod. (Sunday was an exception, when I would have a bath and be ready for bed in time to stay up for The Wonderful World of Disney. But as soon as Tinkerbell blinked into the credits, off I would go.) Over time, my bedtime became later and later. By high school, though I was usually hitting the hay by 10 or 10:30 p.m. Staying up later than 11 p.m. on a school night, maybe to finish up a school project, was a rare occasion.

Nowadays that's when some of my students are just getting off work. They left school at 2:30 p.m. and punched the time clock until this late hour. How much homework can they get done, returning home at eleven o'clock? Worse yet, they drag themselves through the next day, and the next, till they take a day off school to catch up. More interested in making a buck to support fashion, cars, and college funds, school becomes a drag, an interruptive burden in their busy lives. Afterall, when do they have time to catch up on Facebook and Twitter?

A few parents have bemoaned to me that social networking sites are the ruination of their kids' study habits. Students tell me they are up till 2 or 3 a.m. on these sites.

On June 7, 2010, NPR reported on some of the latest sleep research that (again) suggests that we all, but especially children, preschool to college, need more sleep. These reports say that ten hours a night would be beneficial to cognitive development. It likely would make us smarter as well as healthier. I wish I could get that much during the school year myself.

Last night, after my last day of school for the term, I eked out a luxurious eight. I have to admit, I like the recommended ten. Still, most school nights I am lucky to get five or six, but I do try to sneak in a one-to-two-hour nap in the late afternoon, before a few more hours of grading and prep for the next day. I clock at least thirty hours per week of school work in addition to the regular duty, so weekend sleep is key to an exhausting routine for ten months out of the year.

I'm glad that my parents set a strict bedtime when I was young. Getting me off to bed at 7:30 p.m. no doubt gave them some much needed time for their lives as well as providing my brain and body needed rest. As I grew older my parents stressed my trying to get my homework done before dinner. This gave me time to relax, watch television, or play in the neighborhood before a reasonable 9 or 10 o'clock bedtime. Or, on busy homework nights, time to finish up before the parental curfew.

Ah, those halcyon days.  As I teach seniors Macbeth, Shakespeare describes slumber so well:

     Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleeve of care,
     The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath,
     Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,
     Chief nourisher in life's feast--

"Life feast"--of which most of my students are showing signs of starvation.
Image credit: "Asleep at the Wheel." By Aaron Jacobs. 17 Nov. 2005. Flickr.
Used by permission via Creative Commons: BY-SA.

What's at the Top?

THE ONE NEEDFUL THING

'NOW, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!'

The scene was a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a school-room, and the speaker's square forefinger emphasized his observations by underscoring every sentence with a line on the schoolmaster's sleeve. The emphasis was helped by the speaker's square wall of a forehead, which had his eyebrows for its base, while his eyes found commodious cellarage in two dark caves, overshadowed by the wall. The emphasis was helped by the speaker's mouth, which was wide, thin, and hard set. The emphasis was helped by the speaker's voice, which was inflexible, dry, and dictatorial. The emphasis was helped by the speaker's hair, which bristled on the skirts of his bald head, a plantation of firs to keep the wind from its shining surface, all covered with knobs, like the crust of a plum pie, as if the head had scarcely warehouse-room for the hard facts stored inside. The speaker's obstinate carriage, square coat, square legs, square shoulders,-nay, his very neckcloth, trained to take him by the throat with an unaccommodating grasp, like a stubborn fact, as it was,-all helped the emphasis.

'In this life, we want nothing but Facts, sir; nothing but Facts!'

The speaker, and the schoolmaster, and the third grown person present, all backed a little, and swept with their eyes the inclined plane of little vessels then and there arranged in order, ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim.

--Chapter 1, Hard Times by Charles Dickens
Image: "Secretary Duncan as Mr. Gradgrind."

$4 Billion Race

I've read several articles in recent weeks about the $4 billion that the U.S. government is planning to spend on the department of education's "Race to the Top" program. Looking up from the magazine articles or the online reports, I see my administrators scurrying off to meetings on this very topic. Talk is about funding, hustling, standards, performance pay, incentives, and how this is all going to look.

To this country boy it already doesn't look good.

I've never known throwing money at people to bring out the best in them. I'm all for a fair wage for an honest day's work. As an English teacher I coach students through about 2,000 pages of essays and research papers a year. Helping students read critically and write effectively, I figure I do my fair share. But it's not just about English teachers. What all teachers do day-in-day-out is vital to our collective, democratic future. It's important work to be valued and compensated handsomely, but not to be pimped and whored with pay incentives and extortion of headlines of "failed schools."

Some fifty years ago, my uncle, a farmer, had a cheeky motto: "You can buy better, but you can't pay any more." He had it printed on yardsticks and we all got a chuckle out of the nonsense. Nowadays, I'm beginning to see the joke, but I'm not laughing.

This is what I mean: I am passionate about my students, their future, and the discipline we share. But those are the reasons I teach. I'm not some salesperson who will teach longer, faster, more to reach a quota. I already work 80 hours a week on my craft. In the past year I've garnered top honors in my state for my teaching and National Board certification without pecuniary incentive or end-of-the-year bonus. Throwing money at me won't provide me with more time and motivation, especially as more of what is being asked is to be devoid-of-passion standards that have little to do with my students, their future, and the discipline. Rather so called "initiatives" will work to sap it from all authentic meaning and purpose with bubble test items: What is the best meaning of the word "craft" in this paragraph? A boat, B writing, C art, D work.

Throwing money at educators, won't bring out the best in them or in their students. We've seen what money has done to the standard of living in our culture; we've seen what a concern for "how it looks" has done for "what it is" and "how it feels," sacrificing style for substance, standards for understanding. Now we are asking teachers, some of our most optimistic and idealistic citizens--those workers who have been shown to be the least motivated by pay incentives--to go for the buck a.k.a. to race for the top. Ostensibly, to be the best. It doesn't make sense. We know from experience in every sector--but most notably of late the financial sector where dollar signs reign--we know, the most idealistic will be maligned, the lesser will fall for the bribe, and the least of these will cheat for it.

Placing more pressure, attention, and importance on poor measurements of students is a miscarriage of pedagogical planning. The tests show more about social, economic, and cultural advantage and disadvantage than about intelligence, and less about purposeful learning or teacher value-added effect. Moreover, the tests are skewed to favor certain verbal and math skills and are mute on others.

Much knowledge and skills so important to our students future defy being boxed in on such tests. Would not only the students that are born to excel in these vital disciplines be discouraged from pursuing and developing their given talents, but also the teachers who teach these subject be denied the incentives? What might happen to our country's lead in creativity, innovation, sports, arts, entertainment industries--none of which are tested by standardized tests? (Could that be a reason they are so good?)

These questions about varying disciplines point to the problem of teaching teams and collaboration among professionals. Merit pay promises to make competitors of us all. Why should one teacher share the strategies that are going to give her an edge on the year-end bonus even if it means greater learning for all students? It's taken the decades of my experience to see teachers become less territorial and open to team-planning; this "race" is poised to undermine such joint efforts posthaste and take us back a generation.

A parent of one of my students recently asked me what can we do? I'm not sure there's much to be done so long as lobbyists for the testing companies loiter in our capitol buildings, so long as the politicians long for a simplistic message, so long as citizens are fooled to by test results, and so long as universites do not stem the tide with better research and measures that can offer the alternatives. The last of these is probably our best hope. We need policy makers to reverse the trend. But in my more fearful moments, I worry that many policy makers are in fact hoping that we teach less not more to our students. It's insidious.

I'm not under the illusion that there's much I can do about this save quit teaching, and little that will solve. So I'll keep teaching to the test as nominal as possible, stay in the race so to speak, but try to do as much as possible to teach around the test in effort to serve students' futures. I don't have $4 billion to reward schools that help students innovate, create, and solve, let alone the billion that will be spent on misinformation about "racing to the top." Nor am I under the illusion that that those schools, teachers, and students that will be acclaimed as the top will be substantially better than the ones below--they'll only get paid off for spending so much time prepping for a test. A short term gain for a loss of a generation of learning.

The ones who don't make it will be maligned but what will be worse is the learning lost in teaching to the test that they failed. It's a lose-lose proposition. With $4 billion on this Race to the Top, my uncle's adage sadly takes on new meaning.

"You can buy better, but you can't pay any more."

The Darnedest Thing About Multitasking

Kids say the darnedest things. They say they can multitask. For a decade, as they grew up in the digital age, we adults thought "kids these days!" and believed them. I believed them, too. In fact, I envied them.

But then I read Brain Rules, by John J. Medina, a molecular biologist, who points to research that shows our brains and our students' brains don't work on two things as at a one. Like the computers we created in our own image, we are binary thinkers. We sequence. We this then that.

So multitasking is a myth. Stephen Henshaw, Chair/Professor of Psychology at University of California, Berkley, correctly names the activity of processing more than one media at a time as quicktasking. His comments are part of a new video feature at Common Sense Media. While quicktasking may be useful at times, constantly moving from one thing-task-idea to the next leaves our students without the skills of concentration and focus.

Two tips offered by Common Sense Media include:

• Limit distractions, turn off the electronics
• Encourage more reading

What makes this multitasking myth more insidious is the fact that it seems as if it's not a problem. Kids (and adults) think they are doing just fine. The National Academy of Sciences finds that heavy media multitasking students lack focus, understanding, and retention while trying to attend to two or more activities at one time. Time seemingly gained by doing or learning two things at once is actually lost if they are not able to be recalled later.

A study at Stanford University, showed that multitaskers were the worst at multitasking. By frequently multitasking, students are not only suffering when it comes to focusing on one thing, but are less able to focus on anything whether there's one, two, or more things. They scan but do not internalize information presented, perhaps because they treat all information with equal attention and do not focus, prioritize, or otherwise sort it out.

As much as I love to revel in our media world and the creativity it invites, I'd shudder to think that my students live a life without getting lost in a book for an hour or two or sit and write a journal or a poem without interruption. Beyond these romanticist ideals, as a teacher, I am concerned that our students are not able to "turn it on" when focus could mean the most. It is not an enviable situation. Focus, concentration, and retention are benefits too important to be winked at.

The darnedest thing is our students don't know what they are missing.




Image credit: Reformatted from"Multi-tasking." By Atonal. 27 Nov. 2007. Flickr/cc.

Idealistic, Content, Disheartened? (Or Burnt Out?)

"I don't know whether I believe in teacher burn out," my college supervisor Hilda A. Kring, Ph.D. said to me more than twenty years ago. She called herself a "realistic idealist" when it came to most matters, including the topic at hand. One of her proteges, I would say the same of myself, and as for her comment, ditto.

A recent comment by a reader prompted my consideration about this idea of "burnout." He suggested that I get out of teacher if I'm burnt out. Agreed, but I'm still not sure about the idea of burnout. (And if you're wondering, I don't think I am nor in denial.)

While I was thinking about this, I see a recent study by the Public Agenda has released a report on a related topic: Teaching for a Living: How Teachers See the Profession Today. The study sheds light on what makes teachers feel valued and less likely to quit. It mentions things like:

• offering career paths in education,


• ensuring technology is available to aid instruction,


• and increasing teacher salaries to levels of other professional jobs such as lawyers and doctors.

More interesting to me, the study separates the 890 teachers surveyed into three groups: contended, disheartened, and idealists. When I heard the three monikers, I instantly thought this made sense. Don't we fall into one of the three categories?

Well, in the study 40% fell into the disheartened category, 37% contented, and 23% idealist.

I've already tipped my hand. You know I fall in to the minority--which brings me back to my wondering if there is burnout. Maybe there is such a thing--and dishearteneds are the best ones to ask about it, 77% of those studied who have been teaching for more than 10 years. But this realistic idealist can't see it.

Although I'm "way older" than most idealists teachers recorded in the study (77% of idealists identified by the study are Gen. Y'ers with fewer than 10 years in the classroom), I'll find a path for my career (36% of idealist teachers said this would be in education but outside of the classroom for them), a way to get the tech, and take whatever raise my union can muster.

Drilling Down

This has been a difficult start to another year of teaching. Seems demands are more numerous and trying out new, innovative strategies with technology are paradoxically piling up next to outdated testing pressures. On one hand we teachers are being held accountable by standardized testing and drill down into the data; and on the other hand we are being told that technology, creative, and performative skills are the way to go. It's like trying to get the moon by digging to the Earth's core: as ineffective and as frustrating.

This past month I've been drilling down on a standardized reading test that is sampling our state's standards. Pennsylvania has 3 reading standards with a total of 35 specific skills defined. Of those 35 skills, 12 have been translated to assessment anchors, or ways of measuring a third of the defined skills. Of those 12, the test samples 9. Of those 9, the questions sample 3 skills 3 times as much, while sampling others only once or twice. So as I drill down on 120 students individually--taking 5-10 minutes on each--my mind wanders and wonders if knowing so little about so little is worth the effort, let alone the time: 10-20 hours, if you do the math. Taking into consideration that the student might not have felt well, had had a difficult time that morning at home, or just didn't care so much to take the test seriously and the worth of standardized test scores wanes in my estimation.

So we've headed the wrong vehicle in the wrong direction to the wrong address.

I worry about my next dozen years or in the classroom, not because of the future, but my past. Before teaching I was in advertising, first the creative end and then the business end. I couldn't stand the marketing numbers. So then I worked for a family run book retailer which emphasized the love of books and knowledge. But they sold they went public and became a national corporate concern--and the concern was price points. I got out and returned to my first love--teaching. Now after 20 years of the testing movement and despite the call for 21st century skills, a dinosaur of data-driven decision-making is starting to bang at my classroom door. Is it time to move on? Or face the dragon? A lesson life keeps presenting might be a lesson worth learning.

Image Credit. "Free Mixed Numbers Texture for Layers." By D. Sharon Pruitt. 18 Nov. 2008. Flickr. Used by permission of Creative Commons License.

Technology Never Promised to Take Less Time

Technology never promised to take less time. Well, if it did that was back in the '70s when we thought 2001 would never come and by then we'd all be wearing white zippered polyester suits a la Star Trek. This week I spent four days doing with Web 2.0 what used to take ten minutes the old-fashioned way.

Okay, now, to do it again, I could probably accomplish it in two-days, given what I learned in the process.

My students had made what I call "Beowulf Tapestries," panels of muslin fabric on which the students depict a scene from Beowulf on each panel. Together they roughly make up a project in the style of the Bayeux Tapestry, which we study as well. Each panel is to depict a moment from a particular canto and quote text. Then students identify themes that resonate from this scene.

In my early years, I would stitch the panels together for a wall hanging. One year I had a panel for each of the hundred-some cantos. Lately, I've stapled them together on a bulletin board for a similar effect. This year I decided to go digital.

Rather than present their work in the room, I had my students snap a picture with the web cams in their laptops and maneuver the file into our PB Works wiki for an online ensemble. No sweat, right?

No. . . sweat! Computers didn't log on. User names were mispelt. And my students had never played in a wiki space before. So it took four days and we learned along the way. By the third day I realized that I should have started by having everyone make a sandbox page first. This facilitates them all working at once and uploading their files simultaneously--a huge time saver. They also can "play" in their sandboxes! while waiting for others to finish.

All in all the project turned out. My students and I have a few more digital skills in our respective repertoires and Beowulf is still our hero.

A Meter of Happiness and Success

A few years ago I blogged about "booby-trapping your day for happiness," or at least some happy moments. Now research backs up this idea. And it's not just good advice for teachers. Kids too, and in fact everyone benefits from at least three positive experiences for every one negative.

In a recent U.S. News and World Report article, "Positive Psychology for Kids: Teaching Resilience with Positive Education," points to experts' findings of how accenting the positive in experiences can help students cope with the stress of learning. And that means learning how to deal with failure as well as success.

This goes much better than mere self-esteem. In the past decade or so, I've seen the hollow sense of self-esteem students have been given by the empty words of "great job" and "excellent" no matter what the outcome. Rather than our gilding every effort no matter how weak or futile, students need to learn to find the silver-lining in the clouds of their mistakes and missteps.

The article also links to a free website to test your own happiness ratio, designed by Barbara Frederickson, a professor at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

"Doing so might help you learn the sources of your positive emotions and the
triggers for you negative ones. 'The truth emerging from the science is that
feeling good as it is a wise investment in our future,' she says."

Studies are showing that teaching our students as well as ourselves how to interrupt the negative scripts we have in self-talk and with each other can lead to greater achievements in the long run and longer life. Resiliency.

As a result of inflated grades and so called lessons in self-esteem, I've seen students in my office in tears over the "first B" and dealt with parents who complain about a score because they "know" their child is an "A student." What ridiculous--pressure on students with all the emphasis not on achievement and learning but on scores and false ideas of esteem.

Remembering the maxims about learning more from our mistakes than from our success, I ask whether students did their best, what they learned from the activity, what they learned from the score, and what they can do to make their best better. Only be being honest with children, with what is expected and what is accomplished can we truly accentuate the positive, teach the positive, and teach resiliency--all which is much more lasting and fulfilling than a cliche high-five for mediocrity.

A Dry Spell?

I think of the students who say "I don't have anything to write about." I coax, I cajole, I tell them to get busy. But it nags me, could it be true?

I'm having a dry spell myself. The crush of this past school year. The end-of -the -year burn. I feel like I just want to lie in a hammock. So what about my students? How would I know if they really don't have anything to write about?

I say things like "write that you don't have anything to write about." Not original. Pliny the Younger said as much. Most of the time they are just not trying, right? Or just out of practice.

Could that be with all the practice of Twittering and texting and updating their status? Have they worn themselves out? Have we asked for so much writing they are tapped dry?

At any rate and back to my own dearth, I recall Franklin's charge: "Either write things worth reading or do things worth writing about." This summer I am headed on a Fulbright-Hays Group Project Abroad to do research on West African Culture in Africa.

And it's the rainy season!

Image credit: "'Dry' Season Road." By hoyasmeg. 19 Feb. 2009. Flickr. Used by permission of Creative Commons License: BY.

Time is of the Essence: "Our Students are Showing Up Tomorrow"

Sir Ken Robinson, author of the must-read Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative and advocate for arts and sciences education that is inclusive, expansive, and collaborative, presents compelling arguments against standardized testing and for programs that encourage creative, imaginative, and innovative thinking.

I met him last week at the Regional Arts Collaborative, held near Pittsburgh. It was delight to meet a man knighted for his leadership of a national commission on creativity, education and the economy for the UK government bringing together leading business people, scientists, artists and educators.

Now living in America, Robinson points out that No Child Left Behind, with its regimen of assessments and funding "amounts to leaving millions of children behind" and kills their creativity, while demoralizing and stigmatizing students, educators, and whole learning communities.

He calls this crisis, "a scandalous misuse of human resources," at a time when we need to encourage performative skills in our children more than ever. When, as Sir Ken notes, "a college degree is not a passport, but a visa" to success in a future that we can't predict,it is absurd that educators and students must contend with standardized testing that narrows curriculum to traditional reading, writing, math and science. These subjects are certainly important, yet with high-stakes testing placing incredible emphasis on children being able to demonstrate knowledge that fits into bubble sheets, we see critical thinking, collaborative skills, technology applications, and aesthetic capabilities being pushed out of curriculum.

Sir Ken notes a waste of the most important resource our unsteady economy needs most--human potential, which can be realized in creative, performative pursuits in the arts and sciences. Furthermore, dichotomy arts and sciences is not only artificial but also--and more dangerous--obsolete in this new century. I agree that such tests do more to limit students abilities and potential for learning, while at the same time have the effect of making school irrelevant to our students.

The emphasis for the sort of education Sir Ken calls for, schooling that involves high level applications authentic work in arts and sciences, and that involves collaboration, creativity, problem solving, performance, would produce a relevance and rigor to develop active intelligence and cognitive development that are missing in our schools and needed for our future.

In good measure time and energy of teachers and students are being misfocused on a very limited skill and knowledge set that won't serve our futures. So call your representative? Wait out the upcoming election? No way, says Sir Ken. Legislation of recall or reform will take years. And he flatly points out that this can't wait: "Our students are showing up tomorrow."

We educators are the ones that must work to ensure our curricula are preparing our students for economic, cultural, and personal success. Sir Ken presents a rallying cry in his book and his presentations around the world. He reminds us that sustainable "human organizations are organic not systemic." The time has come--as always has been the case--for the centrality of teachers in educational reform. Curriculum design and assessement design cannot match the wit of teachers to make our schools relevant and rigorous for our students.

Sir Ken's knightly call for educational transformation reminds me of Postman and Weingartner's a generation ago. Effective teachers know of Teaching as a Subversive Activity. Some educational ideas are always right for the practice.

When Tech Works, It Works Wonders

My previous post was as close to a rant as I plan to get in this blog. Rants usually have an audience of one. Let me make amends, dear reader, by noting some of my wonder when it comes to technology working that pulls me through. I've had several parallel experiences of dealing with online technology-in-education; here I share three.

After six-to-eight hours of reloading my students usernames and passwords to our Edublogs-based blog and then getting my students in successfully, I'm reaping the rewards of the power of scholarly dialogue in our literary discussions. You can take a look for yourself at our English 12 Honors Blog (if you are reading this post within 6 months of its posting). These are great first attempts of students finding their ideas and their audience online. I'm most impressed by the quality not only of the posts but also the comments that go beyond "way to go!" and "I agree." Next I hope to see bloggers bring research and links into support and extend their findings and support their claims.

In addition, for the past few months to I've also been beta-testing an online writing, grammar and research program from Pearson Education. The product is called MyCompLab. It's a poweful, comprehensive web-based resource in grammar, writing, and research and features a dynamic, interactive, collaborative place for composition, peer-review, tutorial, and assessment. We've had some hurdles to surmount with such a rich and complex project. This summer the new MCL was launched and my colleagues and I have been trying to get started with the program, not without several hiccups. Nothing more frustrating than being ready to work in a writing center (after pulling favors and making deals with other teachers for the scheduled time) to not have the students be able to log in. "Okay, class back to the regular classroom!" But in the past week, obstacles flattened, it's been exciting to see students engaging with the media, each other, and me in this online environment.

A particular labor of love has been working with the education department of Carnegie Museum of Art, located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, especially during the current exhibition of the 55th Carnegie International "Life on Mars" (now until January 2009). My pet project has been to help teachers with online resources for school visits to the museum, or virtual visits. Again, collaborating with web developers, IT departments, artists, curators, funders, and fellow educators can resemble a instructional technology tower of babel; we all have a common goal but speaking a variety of languages. Sometimes it seemed like that we had aliens-among-us, some sort of educational end users encountering technicians from a different world who we depend upon us launch us into the blogosphere. (I'm sure this resonates with many teachers and IT departments throughout the universe.) After more than a year in the making. the International's online complement is offering unprecedent resources to reach out to students, teachers, and the general public via the Web.

Not only is Carnegie Museum of Art inaugurating it's first blog for this exhibition, which celebrates the finest contemporary art from around the world, but also it has no fewer than five! Museum staff sends its Signals blog to an general public audience who can send back blog posts in Soundings. A group of teen interns offers Zero Gravity blog. Teachers share ideas for the classroom and the exhibition on Ideas & Updates blog. And finally, teachers and students can augment their school visits with private or public blogs devoted to their own school group.

With this many opportunities for writing and reading online in response to one of the world's most significant and historical art traditions--the Carnegie International--it's been worth sweating the details of how to tweak the tech to make it work. My students are gearing up for their visit later this month. We use school-museum visits to inspire narrative writing and other compositions. Stay tuned for their posts.

I invite teachers from around the world to virtually visit the Carnegie International and the works of forty of today's top artists, the "old Masters of Tomorrow," with their students. And if you are in the Western Pennsylvania region, plan a school visit. Leave your teaching suggestions in Ideas & Updates and create a classroom blog with your students via the Classroom Resources. They'll be sharing their ideas on the art of their age for audiences now and in the future.

You know the cliche about "teachers touch the future." Well, when it comes to instructional technology, it's great when the future taps you back.

Image: View from inside Richard Serra's cor-ten steel scupture Carnegie, located in front of the entrance to Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. (cc) 2007 Charles Youngs. Some rights reserved: BY-NC-SA.

Hack or Crack?

I'm far from a hack with computers. But I do enjoy figuring out how to do things with technology for the classroom. Today, I'm not sure if I'm more a crackbrained fool than any kind of hack. I guess it comes with the territory of perpetual beta that comes with trying to keep up.

Let me explain. This year I am trying my class blogs with Edublogs. Having used another basic provider since 2003, I'm lured by the bells and widgets of Edublogs and what I thought would be the stability of using a popular site designed for educators and powered by the respected WordPress. Tonight I'm not sure.

A fellow teacher down the hall has switched to EB with me. A few weeks ago he noted that the site when down and we all had to reset our passwords. This afternoon, he stopped by again to see whether I had noticed that Edublogs had suffered another attack and was requiring its users to reset their passwords, again. Ugh, I had just set up sixty student accounts! Not that big of a deal, unless you have your student users all wired to one Gmail account.

It's actually a hack technique suggested by Edublogs, and it's a clever way of getting by not having your students sign up with third-party services. You can set up the blog user accounts without requiring students to have their own email accounts. Students at our district cannot access email at school. So trying to recover passwords can be an impass during the day.

But a teacher can create an email account on Gmail and simply add the student user names to the formula of Gmailaccountname + studentusername @ gmail . com. Gmail ignores anything between the plus sign and the at sign, and all the mail comes to you, the holder of the Gmail account. Thus websites requiring accounts get a real email address and your students get the accounts without disclosing emails, and you get control over retrieving passwords, spam, and errant messages. Nifty, yes.

That is until something like what happened at Edublogs today. All of the passwords need to be reset. This involves a login, an email, a hyperlink, another email, and resetting the password to something the students will understand and remember. This painstaking process made worse by the slowness of the site (perhaps because of everyone resetting their accounts). It's slow-going. Each account adds up about 10 minutes to reset and then redo the profile, maybe more. A process that's taken me five hours and counting. I'm a git more than half way, and I've had to . stop working on the redo because Edublogs seems to have gone off line again. Yikes!

I'm not sure I can endure another crash and run at this process. Better to start fresh, no? As I've said before (here and here) teaching with technology is not for the feint at heart. Times like these I gotta wonder whether I can hack it.

Image remix: Red envelope is a trademark of Google's Gmail and the blue "eb" is a trademark of Edublogs.

The Essences of Teaching: No. 2 Scholarship, or "Teacher, School Thyself"

Part Two in a Series of Three

(Review Part 1)

To be a great storyteller, a bard must learn his tale, and make some of it up as he goes along. Storytellers are always on the alert for another great story to add to their repertoires. Likewise, great teachers are always ready to learn something new. Indeed, they seek it. To truly succeed at their profession, teachers must be life-long scholars.

Pre-service teachers know this, or learn quickly that this is the case. I can recall an occasion when planning an upcoming unit with a student-teacher, she blanched "I don't know anything about the medieval period."
"Wonderful, but you will. Now! is the time to learn, " I replied.
"Teacher, school thyself" is a motto that means you'll never be limited, never get rusty.

Great teachers are avid readers, adventurers, and students themselves. This is true for their whole career, if they are lucky, because it means life is full of discovery. Scholars look for and are drawn to experts. If one doesn't know the taxonomy of art criticism, she seeks a curator; if another needs the decade's influenza statistics, he calls the health department. Master teachers collaborate with teams of colleagues who, like them, are hot for discoveries. Working together across the disciplines can mean new insights for teachers and students alike.

Teachers-as-scholars are travelers, pilgrims, inventors, dabblers, and doers. For instance, an American literature or social studies teacher might visit Lexington and Concord, the stomping grounds of Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Stowe, as well as the beginnings of the American Revolutionary War, all a stone's throw from Salem and Boston and more stories and lessons from history. Or a science teacher might embark on a trek through the rain forest of Peru. Such exploratory teachers find professional development closer to home as well in conferences, classes, tours, events, concerts, dramas, and mini-expeditions to keep their spark for learning (and teaching) alive. Volunteer work not only serves the community, but also informs teachers of local issues, additional skills, and networks of experts to invite into their classrooms.

As scholars, teachers delight in educational challenges, whether its an additional degree or certification, or just for their kind of fun—the joy of knowledge for knowledge's sake. Yet, of course, we all know that this knowledge is for their students' sakes as well. Students love teachers who know how to learn. Such teacher-learners model the adventure of learning, and share knowledge in depth and breath from first-hand study. Next, sharing, spreading, and showing . . .

Teaching and Self-Loathing

Entry #2 from a periodic series on National Board Certification

For all the buzz of past decades on self-esteem for students, teachers could use a boost. When I got to my second installment of NBPTS pre-candidate classes, I was nearly stymied to find that cancelling the program was a real possibility. Why? Lack of funding? No. Lack of teacher interest in taking the challenge of becoming National Board Certified.

I was crushed. I had tried to get into last year's class to find I was too late. Now that I was in, was I going to be denied the chance because no one else wanted to?

Fortunately, the happy few of us that showed up were able to commit, cross our hearts and hope to die, and convince the leaders to hang in there with us.

But this got me to thinking why? Why aren't teachers clamoring to become Board Certified? With the promise of state funding, money can't be the excuse? Time? Sure, time is always precious for good teachers. Yet, I think it has to do with fear of not measuring up and low self-esteem.

Teachers have so many nay-sayers to their talents. Media, administrators, parents, even students' criticism can get a teacher down. (Why this week alone, I was obliquely called a "goat," " a fool," and "cruel" by students.) So, of course, why would they want a National Board to give 'em one more hit? It's easy to see their view.

Ironically, that's exactly the opposite of the NBPTS's intent. It's to take account and certify all of "what teachers should know and be able to do." It's portfolio assignments and assessments are aimed at acknowledging the great things teachers who become candidates already are doing well.

Our National Board advisor tells me we are thirty years away from when National Board Certification will have established itself as the hallmark of educators' professionalism. Maybe by then teachers will be less fearful and more proud.

Blogging: More Than a Nifty Strategy?

Last month's National Council of Teachers of English Convention in New York City boasted a session on blogging, podcasting, or wikis, just about every hour. I attended several hoping to cull a few new tips or tricks, or even better, hear some discussion on how and why teachers were using blogs and other Web 2.0 applications. Ultimately, I wanted to know what others are finding their students are learning from this sort of practice.

From research done at our school, we know that writing proficiency improves from students' blogging. And we have some hunches about why. We figure modeling and the writer's confidence and compositional structuring that develops from models have much to do with the improvement of writers over time. But what else?

The sessions on Web 2.0 were lacking in reflective pedagogy. I don't expect to hear all the answers. (Do we ever have them?) But I'd like to hear some questions and inquiry. What I heard instead were cutesy, superficial "and then we have the students' post them (projects, writings, pictures, recordings) to the Web without any consideration as to why or what happens differently when we do this.

I'm not an alarmist--rather I think we are missing an important (teachable and teaching) moment that is actually replete in positive implications for our practice. Maybe that's what concerns me most. What I was hearing was blogs and wikis being regarded as just another "thing you could do," and I think they are more than that. My experience is that teaching/learning, i.e. meaning-making and sharing of meaning in the classroom is significantly changed by the power of collaborative, public posting of ideas and products of learning on the Web.

More research is needed. More discussion is needed. More reflection is needed. For a presentation at U of PR, Cayey I wrote a one-page sheet of some questions with which to start.

eLearning: Not for the Faint at Heart

This month I am participating as session presenter in four conferences on Web 2.0. Every presentation is a bit different than the other. Prepping for diverse audiences on the same general topic has its own challenges and rewards. The challenge is obvious, but the reward is what interests me.

As I work on my presentations--to be "an expert in the room"--I find out how little I know about a vast subject. There are so many wonderful meanings and applications of Web 2.0. Everyday there are new blogs, widgets, wikis, videos, podcasts ad infinitum. As I prepare to mention some "old standbys" I notice new tools on the horizon. It can be overwhelming to consider.

Likewise it is exciting. By sussing out the answers I need for the next presentation, I find new ways to use the Web. The "teacher-as-expert-training" in me panics over not having all four corners of the World Wide Web pinned down. The digital immigrant in me is thrilled to know a few more tools in the lexicon of educational media literacy.

The best advice I can give for those who attend my presentations and have the same feelings of trepidation of swimming in an ocean of information and technology that becomes fathoms deeper and leagues broader every minute is to embrace the concept of "perpetual beta." Yes, the world is changing--it has changed, it will continue to change. Most likely we teachers will never again "know it all." We may not even ever "know as much" about some of the emerging media as our students already do. That's okay.

As digital immigrants, we may never loose our BG (Before Google) accents, but if keep at improving our understanding of the IT lexicon and rethink our pedagogies that have served us well, we can offer our students one of the best models: that of a genuine learner.

How to Endure: Work Around or Break Through

If teaching in world of "perpetual beta" isn't enough, as I reach the midpoint of my career (inshallah) with "sixteen years down, sixteen to go" my sciatic nerve, damaged in an accident years ago, is acting up. I'm moving slower, having to ask for help to move boxes, not able to make the mad-dash to the copy machine as I used to. As one of my doctors told me a couple of years ago, "Welcome to middle age, Mr. Youngs."

Far from burnout (I hope, I would know), it is daunting to think of the road ahead. It's a thought I've started the year with and so I was struck by a comment made by author Philip Roth, speaking with consummate interviewer Terry Gross on her show Fresh Air, which was aired yesterday. Referring to the character of his new book Exit Ghost, Roth notes that he has come to a point in his life when he has to figure out how to endure.

How to endure. Hmmm. I am a different teacher than I was when I started. Sure I have more tricks in my bag, multiple intelligences, authentic assessment, process drama, narrative inquiry, web technology. But because of the oxymoronic constant change, I'm not sure if I am any better equipped. What will I be --have to be, get to be--in another sixteen years?

No matter how much I learn about teaching--so much is changing! Do I teach the old stuff to give context or the new stuff to be relevant? Finding time to teach into the future while still teaching the background, the classics, the histories, the foundations can be very frustrating. And finding ways to explain it to parents, administrators, colleagues, and students is another great challenge.

Now, don't get me wrong: I believe the alternative--i.e. to stop trying new things and keeping up with the kids and the world--is a nonstarter. Call the engraver and put no hopeful verse on my tombstone.

But how to endure? I can remember in my first year of teaching my principal, Ralph Packard, said "have a hobby." In many ways I've tried to wrap my hobbies into my teaching. Perhaps this blog is a hobby. (I'm an amateur, I don't get paid, It's at my whim, right?)

I've always been a teacher with bundles to and from school. I don't know whether I am more in admiration, disbelief, or frightened by my colleagues who can walk in and out of the school parking lot with nothing in their hands. If the paper load weren't enough, there's the artifacts, the foods, the music, the art, the books that I use to teach literature. Tomorrow I am going to have to make few trips with all the India stuff I'm going to be using in our wrap up of reading Siddhartha.

As I age as a teacher, I suppose I am going to have to lighten my load. Maybe find tricks that don't require a bag.