What's Old and New and 21?

Twenty-first Century teaching and learning means 90% of what and how master teachers have been teaching all along and 10% explicit instruction and practice with digital technology. The 21st Century themes as indentified by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills as environment, finance, health, civil and global literacies may have lost some prominence in recent years as reading "content" gave way to "skills." This is a reminder that the what is as important as the how and vice versa. In noticing what is different (the 10%) about 21st Century learning we might miss the core. As ever, what is being read and written (i.e. consumed and produced in a variety of media) is as important as how. If we bear this in mind we need not lose time playing with the toys of technology but use them as tools to literacy.

I  believe 21st Century education is a blend of traditional themes and novel technology in service to the enduring and essential questions. It's as much about our common humanity as ever because technology is shrinking the globe. Our students not only are going to have to deal with keeping their batteries charged but also working with or competing agains their peers half a world away.  Ethics, civics, and just good ole common sense are values for the post-Me generations.  The relationships and relevancy that engage learners are perhaps heightened nowadays, but everpresent in good teaching of yore.

Twenty-first century learning, in toto, may be a reminder of what great English language arts teaching has always been (and a call to realign our practice), as well as a call to work with ICT and audio-visual media with new emphasis.

Image created on "NGA Kids ARTZONE Collage Machine II." National Gallery of Art. Web.

PLN 2009: Looking Back at My Personal/Professional Learning Network

As the Year 2009 comes to a close, I'm thinking about how wide my Personal/Professional Learning Network is compared to its reach in previous years.  It's  grown much larger than 1984 student teaching files in manilla folders and much more digital than a decade ago as we began 21st Century learning, just getting the hang of email before the Web 2.0 wave.  Still the ideas of colleagues, experts, and students are the lynchpins of my PLN.

I've included incoming and outgoing directions of the learning-teaching dynamic.  Of course, I learn as much by teaching, if not more than anything else. For Auld Lang Syne, my friends.

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.

Remember

Let's be honest. Kids aren't going to remember what we teach them. Not the content at least and not most of it any way.

Think of how little we remember as adults of our school days? How many of high school lessons come to mind? If you're like me, not many. Over the years, over the lessons, the lectures, the seminars, the books--ideas atop of ideas--it's impossible to sift through the layers of learning. Yet, I bet there are at least 10 days you remember.

My memorable lessons of high school:

1. When my 9th Grade English teacher caught me watching the snow fall and just said "pretty, huh."


2. My typing teacher assessing my practice: "There is no pattern to your errors."


3. Parallel parking in driver's ed, successfully, after a night of practicing in the driveway.


4. My French teacher singing "Edelweiss" a cappella (in French) and teaching us to do so, too.


5. Running so close to the side of the track that I knocked the stopwatch out of my coach's hand, and his not getting angry.


6. The compliment "You have a natural sense of rhythm and movement" from my senior English teacher after I presented a dance interpretation (my first and only one) at a drama club assembly.


7. The day the principal approved of our starting a student newspaper, after his hesitancy and hedging.


8. My journalism teacher's allowing me to decide whether to print a damning editorial against an administrator at the risk of her job because "it was all true." (And trusting me not to.)


9. When my graphic arts teacher suggested I should put my first woodcut in a show.


10. All of the modern novels my 10th Grade English teacher had me read and that would change my life.

These might seem like small and random moments. Indeed, they are, but in each there's a teacher trusting, reaching, boosting, sharing, or simply being honest with me. I don't remember all my teachers taught me. I remember who they were.

Likewise, your students might not remember Fermat's last theorem, the Battle of Hastings, or the subjunctive tense. But they'll remember you.

Image credit: "Love, Teach, Imagine." By Denise Carbonell. 9 Dec. 2007. Flickr.

Anticipating the Rubber Hitting the Road

I find myself in the same quandary every year. I can't recall what teaching teens is really like. By now, my eighteenth year of teaching, I feel like Dante at the beginning of The Inferno, midway in life's path with a dark woods, threat of beasts, and a bit off the trail. No, teaching is not a journey through hell despite its rough moments, piles of essays, and lost weekends of work. It's just that I never can recall the pace or timing of teaching until the rubber hits the road.

Maybe I'm not supposed to. Every year is different as every class, every student is unique. And I'm changed, too. Every encounter with students is a new one despite my experience, the tricks in my bag, my attempts to keep up with slang, and the four four-drawer file cabinets filled with instructional materials. I've traveled to Africa this summer to steel the authority of my teaching Heart of Darkness and Things Fall Apart, and read a couple of books on "understanding by design" and "differentiation of instruction" to hone my practice in general.

Yet, students always show me the way. Rather than Virgil, a shade of reason to guide my journey, it's the rationale of student inquiry more than standards, student character more than habits of the mind, and student energy more than AYP (annual yearly progress) that charts the scope and sequence of the year.

Until there are twenty-five students--expectant, tired, nonplussed--facing me and I say "let's see who's here" will I know what teaching is really like again.

Out in Africa

Since 2007 when I started this blog, I don’t think I’ve let a month go by without a post. This year I’ve found it difficult to keep up. I’d like to post at least once a week, but working on National Board Certification took its toll and posts dwindled in number and last month I was in Ghana on a Fulbright-Hays group project abroad with little chance to stop at the rare Internet cafes.

Our group of twelve educators participated in fifteen lectures by top experts and visited four regions of Ghana, a country that is a vibrant mix of old and new, urban and rural, a democracy that is reaching toward the future, while remembering its past.

For all Ghananians’ optimism and earnest endeavor to become one of the leading countries of Africa (and a population that is nearly fifty-percent under the age of eighteen), their government apparently underfunds its schools. I found in all of the half dozen schools, students seated at wooden desks, chairs attached that look as if they were there when Ghana achieved independence in 1957. Although a few fluorescent tubes were mounted on the walls and fans hung from the ceilings, all were off to conserve electricity. Students wore bright, clean uniforms and carried oak tag covered notebooks; these I understand are supplied by themselves and not the school.

As much as one can tell from a tour of schools, the students seemed earnest and the teachers dedicated, and they all had the trademark Ghanaian good humor toward life and its problems. Of course, insomuch as bricks and books don’t make a school, the teachers and students achieve despite the lack of both. I saw elementary student notebooks that were printed and illustrated nearly as neatly as a Word document and a high school class of boys studying science unattended while they waited for their teacher to arrive, delayed because of heavy rains.

Yet, in a country that is freckled with cellular phone company kiosks and billboards, I fear the lack of technology in the schools is once again going to leave Ghanaian students without digital skills and more importantly digital paradigms—ways for thinking about and connecting in the world—as my home school wavers over glass and copper fibers for its ethernet.

The contrasts between the schools I visited pale somewhat when compared with the kinship of teachers brought about by the challenges we face, the work we do, and the students we love. When it comes to what these schools lack versus what I find missing in my own classroom, I’m not convinced we’d agree to exchange U.S. electricity and Internet access for the high-valuing education, triumphant sense of community, and focus of mission that I met with the lights out in Africa.

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.

Creative Stuff

Something Ken Robinson writes about in his book Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative has been in my head since I read it about a year ago. He describes the curious aspect of research in English studies as compared to research in say, as he does, physics. At least at the university level, physics profs are expected to do science, whereas English teachers are expected to research about English.

"Professors of English are not employed to produce literature; they are employed
to write about it. They spend much of their time analyzing the lives and
drives of writers and the work they produce. They may write poetry in
their own time: but they're not normally thanked for doing it in university
time. They're expected to produce analytical papers about poetry.
Producing works of art doesn't count as appropriate intellectual work in an arts
department: yet the equivalent in a science department, doing physics or
chemistry does" (65-66).

Point taken. At the high school level it's much worse, isn't it. As a teacher do more talking about English, than do English. That is, I research, and mostly secondary source research at that, on texts, authors, composition, grammar, etc.

Most of the time the curriculum I teach in asks my students to do the same--except for a semester or two when I might have section of Creative Writing or for the occassional assignment in my literature classes when I ask for a script or narrative piece.

A colleague of mine, Mary Culbertson-Stark, art teacher, and working artist, once asked me about my stuff. By this she meant original writing, presumably fiction or poetry, particularly what I going to be working on writing over the summer. I was flattered by the idea that she thought I had stuff. But I shrugged it off. Truth is, I've had a few poems and some short stories, and a couple of essays. Not much stuff.

Of course what concerns me is not only how little writing, acting, storytelling, and videoing my colleagues do ourselves but also how little we ask of our students. Much of literature study is done as a study without any attempt at writing, outside of a personal response of a paragraph or two, or a once a year ritual called the reseach paper. A dearth of writing of any sort by most of us English teachers exists. Some don't even read for pleasure.

I can hear the cry "where the time!" (I'm not sure I have the answer. It's been nearly three weeks since I've even posted to this blog.) We're are already teaching too much, and "covering a subject in instruction" is frequently just that covering, as in hiding and opaquing. Yet, I feel a bit of a hypocrite if I am not reading and writing while asking my students to do so. I challenge you, dear teacher-reader (as Dickens would say), to consider your own practice, in regard to yourself and your students. Begin to fit in the creative work in your life and your teaching and you students' lives and learning.

For every authentic project of writing, acting, or other creative work, about three other units must hit the dustbin. Isn't trade worth it? Our students are going to be called to be creative as much as they are going to be called to be analytical, so teachers might best get on with it and celebrate both. After all, can we teach creativity without critical thinking?

Surely, we've thought we could teach the analytical domain without the creative. And succeeded. On the other hand, creativity skills may, in fact, supercede anything on Bloom's taxonomy (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001). Adding doing your discipline to your own practice as well as to your curriculum can only lead our creativity and that of our students to deeper, more meaningful places of inquiry.

Essences of Teaching: No. 4: Summoning Our Courage

Fourth in a Series of Three . . . or More

(Review Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)

If I may add a fourth "S' along with storytelling, scholarship, and sharing, I would add the essential of summoning our courage to face and meet the challenges of our profession. Unlike random heroes of a dramatic moment, a time of peril or personal tragedy, people whom we hail as "hero" when faced by a non-negotiable situation of extreme circumstance, teachers must summon courage each and every day, with each and every classroom, and with each and every child. Our heroism comes from a steadfast vision of what should be the case, of what future we imagine, and what we know children can do, think and learn.Many Challenges

We must summon our courage inside and outside the classroom. To address the struggles of students can be daunting. Whether our students have learning disabilities, physical disabilities, emotional problems, drug addictions, English as a second language, or are bullied for sexual orientation, religion, or minority ethnicity--the sheer number of variables of what calls a teacher to intervene can make it tempting to "let that one slide." Yet we teachers know if they "let that one slide," then we've let a child slip through the cracks, and so rather great teachers take stands against mediocrity, make eddies in the river of complacency, place roadblocks to bullying and defamation, and shake off the hindrances to learning. As we do so we become exemplars of resiliency and accomplishment – the true sources of self-esteem for ourselves and our students.

A Tsunami of Technology

A great challenge is presented by incredible increase of technology that is reshaping the way students think and learn and therefore demanding we change the way teach. We must summon our courage, for this is not a pedagogical trend or a wave to ride out, it is a tsunami of technology and it is cresting above our heads. To survive, our communities must embrace the use of technology and support its funding. Teachers must be given training support and make every opportunity to learn and work with new and emerging technologies on an on-going basis. "Our schools are going to change more in the next ten years than they have in the last hundred. Everyone reading these words will be part of that change. Get ready." So says James Daly, editor of Edutopia magazine. Summon your courage.

Standardized Tests

With George Orwellian flair of a name and Aldous Huxley's dystopian vision of education, the No Child Left Behind Act has ushered in Big Brother's Brave New World version of teaching and learning—every student to turn out like the next by 2014. Its euphemistic name makes it difficult to argue against its substance, for no teacher, no legislator, no community member would not be in favor of the phrase. But as professionals of in the field, experts in pedagogy, we know a name is a name is a name and that the current plan in practice does not smell like a rose. Standardized tests encourage cookie-cutter curricula that are limited in scope, purpose, and utility, while our students are unlimited in needs, potential, and talent.

Standardized tests, as they are now, with high-stakes emphasis and heavy penalties and few educational rewards are stifling our learning communities while offering little in the way of inquiry, relevance, or the future.

Since standardized tests have been introduced in the 1990s in Pennsylvania, one by one,--writing, then reading and math, now science, and with more proposed on the way--we know the Class of 2009 has sat in a class from Kindergarten to Twelfth Grade preparing for and taking and retaking government mandated standardized tests for at least 180 days. One whole year of their public schooling spent on a standardized testing. A whole year!

Standardized testing by definition negates variables of divergent thinking and innovation. Standardized testing by definition negates the uniqueness of our students, their differentiated abilities, and their varietal talents. Standardized testing by definition negates the ingenuity of our teachers, their ability to develop relevant curriculum, and their professional talents to deliver instruction in meaningful, learning activities and provide real-world assessments. The more we use standardized tests to measure student ability, the less our schools are empowered to offer students opportunities to show their true achievement. Each year that a school meets Annual Yearly Progress of testing, is a milestone of that school's curriculum's regress toward becoming irrelevant.

Such milestones become tombstones to the kind of student performance our state and our nation country needs in order to compete in a global marketplace, a marketplace in which the successes will be built upon creativity as much as productivity, upon designing as much as performing, and upon collaboration as much as invention. When have you seen a standardized test that calls students to be creative, to design, and to collaborate? They don't exist. We must, as Robinson says, be "out of our minds" if we think standardized tests are the measure of whether we have left a child behind. The tests themselves leave children behind.

Thus, we must summon our courage. We teachers must resolve to replace testing with authentic assessments that mean learning for students and accountability for educators.We must summon our stories and our scholarship--what we as professionals know to be true from research and in the life of a classroom and in the life of each child.

Dive Right In!

Whew! Made if through the first week of school with students. Usually there's a half-week beginning, but for the first time in nearly two decades of teaching I was jumping in the deep end of the pool for five full days!

What did I learn form this Monday-to-Friday dive? Well, it was great to actually get past the rules of the road and orientation lessons and start discussing some content in the first week. In English 12 Honors, Arjuna is debating with Krishna in Bhagavad Gita, in British Literature, Beowulf is battling Grendel, and in Writing Skills "I Am From" poems are listing our lives. So school life is good.

The grace period hasn't worn off. I'm still on summer-lag from switching my body clock to getting up at 4:45 a.m. (Isn't it amazing that in the 21st century American schools still start so early as to 7:30! Where's the science?) And the U.S. celebrates Labor Day weekend with a Monday off. An extra day of planning for the four-day week ahead. We are underway and the water's fine.

Image credit: Shlevich, Benny. "Go!" Flickr. Creative Commons Pool. 18 Aug. 2007. 31 Aug. 2008 <http://flickr.com/photos/shlevich/1157425215/in/photostream/ >. By permission via Creative Commons Licensing (BY-SA).

Look to This Day! And the Convention of the Class of 2009

Today, on my first day of school I started class by asking my senior English students if they were excited to get up today. It was afterall the first day of their senior year. Before they could answer, I told them I was.

If they had started with Kindergarten, by my figuring this was the occasion of the thirteenth year that the Class of 2009 convenes--and the last. I could tell by their reactions they had not thought of it that way before, but in that instant I had underscored the importance of our meeting. I told them they were born the year I started teaching. This also got their attention. So they and I had been on an eighteen-year trajectory. I had thought of them in 1991 when they had only been a thought.

To me teaching is a special calling. To teach literature and its power, nothing less than sacred. I explain this to my students with the example of the Sankrit "The Salutation of the Dawn," reciting it to them from memory as one of my great teachers had done to me:

Listen to the salutation to the dawn,
Look to this day for it is life, the very life of life,
In its brief course lie all the verities and realities of our existence.
The bliss of growth, the splendour of beauty,
For yesterday is but a dream and tomorrow is only a vision,
But today well spent makes every yesterday a dream of happiness and every tomorrow a vision of hope.
Look well therefore to this day.
Such is the salutation to the dawn.

The same sun that dawned on the Class of 2009 today, rose on the same eastern horizon some 3200 years ago and one of our great-great-great ancestors realized the miracle of the ever-returning sun, ever-beginning day, and took out a slab of wet clay and reed, and carved this poem for our inheritance. That's what excites me about teaching ever-returning students, ever-beginning years. The human conversation over time and space is both our inheritance and our duty.

In this class, in this convention of the Class of 2009, we shall celebrate such conversations across cultures as take a literary travel around the world in 180 days.

We are the only species that saves its stories, I remind my students. We are stories told together. By the time my students are my age, it will be 2037 and they may have seniors of their own graduating. (This frightens them a bit--they can't imagine being my age let alone the year 2037 or having teenagers of their own.)

I tell them this is important and a key mission of this convention. They must pass on our stories. In 2060, I tell them, they'll be headed for retirement, and I'll be dead. I count on them to save the stories and share them.

"Look to this day!" It was written 3200 years ago. It's up to teachers and their students to see it through for the next 3200. "Look to this day"

Be-Attitudes for the Start of the Year

This past week I spent a few hours in my classroom, moving desks, rearranging bookshelves, setting up bulletin boards. I pulled out my "Be-Attitudes Poster," a one-foot by four-foot poster I made years ago and have used as my reminders of how to Be-have in class. I call them Be-attitudes because attitude really shapes behavior. Get the attitude right and you've got behavior taken care of. So up go the "Be-Attitudes" on the front wall of my classroom.

Mr. Youngs' 12 Be-Attitudes, or Ways of BE-ing in Class
1. BE on time.
2. BE ready.
3. BE safe.
4. BE courteous.
5. BE heard.
6. BE hungry for ideas!
7. BE-autiful already.
9. BE personal.
8. BE done already with the restroom.
10. BE silent during tests.
11. BE original.
12. BE civil.

The poster is shorthand for what is on my syllabus and class policies orientation sheet.
1. BE on time. Have book bags stowed, English notebooks, textbooks, and any homework ready.
2. BE ready. Study before class. Don't simply read assignments, study them, know them. Bring materials--notebook, pencil, completed homework, books as assigned. Sit in assigned seats or as directed. The instructor plans to start at the bell; you should, also.
3. BE safe. No horseplay; stay alert--no slouching.
4. BE courteous. No side-talking, back-talk, blurting out, pointless noise nor distraction. No profanity, harassment, hate-speech, vulgarity! Use good manners, etiquette, and courtesy. No hats--show others respect. If you have something to say, raise your hand.
5. BE heard. Speak up! Practice public speaking skills and care enough to be heard.
6. BE hungry for ideas! No candy, food or drink. Any snack items will be discarded.
7. BE-autiful already. No vanity items such as mirrors, lipstick, makeup or brushes. Why embarrass yourself and others by seeming vain? Let only your hair stylist know your secrets.
8. BE done already with the restroom. Plan to use the restroom virtually NEVER during class time. Do so between classes and during lunch--that's eighty minutes of rest! Furthermore, asking to leave class is a bothersome interruption to the teacher and the whole class to issue a pass. If one were to use the restroom once a week, he would miss nearly a full week of class time in the year; once-a-day and he would miss more than the equivalent of twenty-two classes! Don't flush your education away.
9. BE personal. Never submit homework or other assignments on the teacher's desk. Submit work to a person, such as the instructor or the Building #4 secretary.
10. BE silent during tests. No communicating or cheating anytime during test days until all tests are collected. First offense is a penalty of 7% on your score; second offense is a penalty of receiving zero for a grade. Cheating is reported to the principal.
11. BE original. Plagiarism is "copying someone's words, work, or ideas" and is not tolerated. It is cheating; it is theft. To repeat: rewording someone's words or ideas is plagiarism. Nothing is duller than using someone else's work. Be brilliant! Be original!
12. BE civil. The instructor dismisses the class, not the bell. Let whomever is talking at the end of class finish--chance are information that'll be important to you is being offered. In any case, offer other people human dignity by showing your civility. In short, BE NICE. You will find the teacher responds well to courtesy, friendliness, scholarship, and hard work. Good attitudes and good class participation count along with good results toward good grades, especially when you really need it.

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.

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 . . .

The Essence of Teaching, er, the S's of Teaching: No. 1 - Story

Part One in a Series of Three

First is storytelling. Teachers are natural-born storytellers. Whether its anticipatory bellringer to catch the attention of sometimes reluctant learners or a personal anecdote to illuminate a point, teachers are telling stories. Of course some of us are reading or English teachers and "story" is in the job description. Our collegial cousins, the social studies instructors have "his-story-ical" accounts to retell. Yet, teachers in science, technology, and art, too, are storytellers of matter, microchips, and media.
Stories shape understanding.

As a first grade teacher plants seeds in half-pint milk cartons and the class watches the marigolds bloom by Mother's Day, a story of nature and nurture is demonstrated. As a geometry teacher gives a makeup exam, a story of second-chances it taught. As a coach rallies her team for the championship, a narrative of hard work, results, and love of the game is told.

Stories help teachers and students make meaning of the curriculum, ideas, and life. If you've never thought of it this way, then consider the stories you tell and how they tell you and your subject to your students. Next, scholarship . . .

Teaching Tips Blog

Teachingtips.com is a blog in the traditional sense. That is it is a resource that lists other resources. With archives dating back to last month, this is tight contemporary resource that's quick to scan.

While it seems supported by advertising from institutions of higher learning and offers a search tool to find programs for education and professional development, the love-at-first-sight part is the blog that contains posts like "100 Best Resources and Guides for ESL Teachers," "100 Unbelievably Useful Reference Sites You’ve Never Heard Of," and "50 Must-Read Up and Coming Blogs by Teachers." The last of which included "If Bees Are Few" and so, I figured I'd post for some cross-pollenization.

The "Must-Read" list links to blogs from teachers across the spectrum of rants, to rationalizations, to reality-checks. Good stuff.

And I thought the pile of books in my home office was enough summer reading, already!

Time Flies in the Real World

This last month I've done little else in the moments spared from school prep than work on presentations at a variety of conferences, including a few halcyon days in the United States' most southern commonweatlth at the invitation of the University of Puerto Rico. In working on the workshops I've learned even more about technology, education, and art. The conferences have had the respective foci of Web 2.0, writing, and art museums.

I'm more sure that I'm not an expert on these topics than I am sure how I've come to be regarded as one. It seems I am just one step ahead or to the side of someone else. As I mentioned in my last post, their is a subtle difference between the novice and the veteran.

At the four conferences in which I've participated in the past month, I have been awe of the collective knowledge that abounds in a variety of fields and how instructional technology can bridge so many gaps. While at the Carnegie Museum of Art, we were making connections from scrapbooks to Scrapblog, in Pittsburgh's South Hills, we were sharing knowledge from practice, in Cayey y Ponce we were bridging art and technology, and in Pittsburgh's North Hills, blogs and writing research. With blogs at the center of the sessions, the diverse and overlapping themes of collaboration, knowledge-sharing, excitement at what's possible and potential with the Web 2.0 paradigm became abundant.

The irony is of course with all of this real world activity, my presence in the virtual waned. I guess that's not a bad thing. It's an ebb and flow.

Avoiding the risk of making another surf metaphor, I'm going to wrap up this reflection with a recollection of the opening of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness." It's not the plot or characters that I'm thinking of, but the occasion that allows Marlow that space to spin his yarn--the men are sitting aboard a merchant ship on the Thames in London "waiting the flood." Nothing else to do, but wait and tell of one's adventures.

Moving between the virtual and the real life of a blog is something like that perhaps. While sailing amid the high tide there's little time sit and talk about it. Maybe as the flood ebbs.

Image created by ceyo at the National Gallery of Art (USA)'s KidZone Collage Machine .

Novice to Expert in a Few Clicks

It's my understanding--not my experience-- that in terms of snowboarding, the difference between a novice and an expert is two weeks. That may not be true--and I'm sure for those who are "extreme" it is not. We all know the when it comes to making a PowerPoint slideshow the difference is 15 minutes (just to make one) and 15 hours (to make a really good one).

So what does it take to be a Teacher 2.0, a poweruser of Web 2.0 tools in the classroom?

Well, at the BOSSAC 2007 In-service Day, I witnessed 30 teachers go from novice to expert in under 5 hours. Where the were only two teachers who could define seven out of twenty-five Web 2.0 terms at the start of the day, everyone was creating their own blogs, wikis, and podcasts by day's end. It was great witness.

Two perceptions (of many) I took away from the day. One: how easy Web 2.0 technology really is, even for digital immigrants like our "shift happens" generation. And two: how powerful just a few Quick Starts can be to making that shift happen for the willing. I have no doubt that that Monday won't make a difference that shows up in the classrooms of our region. Here's my challenge to those of you who were part of the workshop and learned something new: Pass it along to at least one other teacher.

Now that you know, pay it forward.

For those of you who weren't at the workshop but are interested in learning about a few ways to use contemporary Web tools in your classrooms, find the handouts and Quick Starts at http://www.charlesyoungs.com/ under Media for Educators. Soon you, too, will be "catching some air."

Image credit: Smith, Jonathan. "Snowboard Air." Dziner. 10 Jan 2007 flickr.com.

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.

Battery Recharge #2: A Li'l PD

Personally, this has been one of the toughest summers for relaxing. Not to bore you with the number of homestead projects (painting, gardening, fixing, fixing, fixing, and a guerrilla war on some surreptitious carpenter ants) or the number of academic ones (lecture presentations, editing textbooks, and curriculum writing), let's just say I'm not getting much of a tan.

Still when I had the chance to work for three days in "A Seminar with Dorothy Heathcote" at The Ohio State University's Department of Teaching and Learning, I backed my bags and headed for Columbus and some professional development in the realms of process drama and "mantle of the expert." Dorothy Heathcote, internationally renowned for pioneering work in educational applications of drama, is indefatigable as she is inspirational. Three days running at on hot August days at OSU, after a week at my alma mater NYU, she was raring to go as the forty of us students were ready for our naps.

I've been using process drama for the past 14 years and have always wanted to know more from the grand dam herself. Indeed it was a very worthwhile trip . . . and will take some time to make sense of the whirlwind of ideas and stories and structures shared.

Before I sift through my notes and recordings, I want to simply pause to reflect on how different the worlds of dramacraft and I.T. are. One as ancient as the first story, one momently emerging. Yet, imagine the mashups that could come about in putting the two together!--as students can not only capture their dramatic expression in media but also share them in a vast forum. Moving from the very private integral audience of process drama outward to product. Indeed their are possibilities, but I am wary of the price to be paid of moving in that direction necessarily. Some things are better--indeed precious--when left unpublished. Process drama might be one of them.

This leads me to weigh other processes, such as the writing process, and in fact, the learning process. Sometimes publishing process means a tombstone or albatross.

P.S. When I titled this, I meant PD as in professional development. But I suppose "process drama" works, too. PD on pd.