I had a Facebook message today from my daughter’s second grade teacher. She was “our” favorite teacher, not just my daughter’s but also mine. Every day, she met the students at the classroom door. High fives and smiles met those somewhat sleepy faces causing the energy levels to rise. In short order, the children were reading, acting out characters (my daughter was Tigger and she mastered the growl, I’m playing it in my mind now) and going about the process of learning. Each day was fresh and the routines provided stability. Ahhh, the wonder years… I miss this teacher. Her impact, made over a decade ago, is timeless.
I often make small talk to children and young adults about their education.
“Who is your teacher?” I nod appropriately, as if I know the person.
“What do you like about your class?”
“What is your favorite subject?” Hmmm…
“Yes, I liked that one too…”
Do we really listen to what the children tell us? High school students are fun. They work really hard at acting bored. Truth be told, they are bored… until a subject unlocks a passion or the teacher shares potentially the most uninteresting subject in such an interesting way that they can’t help but follow along.
I think about my most powerful learning experiences. What are yours? What if our lives were filled with these kinds of learning opportunities? Would we be talking about the achievement gap? Would we worry about how SAT scores have dropped 2 points, here and there? What would be possible?
Sometimes we need to step back to have the right perspective. Stand a few inches away from an Impressionist painting and you’ll see a bunch of dots. Step back a few feet back, however, and the landscape unfolds; a rich tapestry of colors creates a scene that you might have missed. How does this apply to education? Have we sat in the seats of our students? Do we think that toggling between two pictures of art on a smart board is an effective way of “leveraging technology to engage students”?
One of our bloggers commented on the lack of sleep that many teenagers are getting. This has to effect their learning, especially over time. For certain, they are “wasting” some time on Facebook and other activities. I wonder, though, if we had to follow their footsteps, even for a day, what would we say about the value of these activities, both assigned and discretionary? Would we do anything any differently? Would you be “at risk”?
What if we took the best parts of what is happening today and did more of it? What are we willing to set aside to make room? What is not essential to the outcomes but instead represent valid ways of doing things that are now yesterday’s issues? What would the solutions look like?
Please join the conversation and let us know what you think!
I’m wondering what Tour of Duty I, II, and III have on education. What is it about a video game that invites a student to work extra chores to pay for it, spend countless hours researching how to “beat” it, sit up for hours engaging in it, talk to friends and strangers about strategies to be better at it, and allow it to take priority to the top of the list of important things in life? If education could capture that, maybe we wouldn’t even be having this conversation.
Your comment reminds me of a term “flow”. Think of the hours we, as adults, spend on the internet. It seems like a few short moments, but the clock tells us 2 hours have passed. How can we take the concept of “flow”, getting lost in content, and transfer this unknowingly deep level of engagement into how students enter “flow” while on the computer as a way to impact critical thinking skills, reading skills, math skills? Do the computer based intervention programs used in school today make a long-term impact on student growth?
You ask an interesting question and one that we as educators should take seriously when deciding what technology to use and how to use it in the classroom. In a study from the University of Rochester the theory is that video games fill a psychological need. In essesnce they provide a sense of accomplishment (the longer and more you practice, the better you become-something all classrooms/teachers should strive for), a sense of autonomy (the more a student chooses his/her learning path the more likely they are to be highly motivated), and relatedness (the most popular video games such as tour of duty and new video games connect a large number of players from various locations together to work towards a shared goal). This should not be hard for us as educators to figure out, but it is sometimes hard to set in motion and harder to be comfortable implementing in class depending on teacher and administrator willingness to take try new things. We need more moments like we see in commercials where students are working with other students on a video chat, where students are searching out the problems and solutions together surrounding their laptops, mini’s, or in a perfect world iPads. Like always we must have a hook, but then provide the freedom to work together and towards a shared goal with an undefined team. We can’t just push technology and hope it works. As digital tourists we the teachers must always challenge our level of comfort if we intend to work effectively with the digital natives/our students.
We need to be very reflective and ask ourselves what type of world are we preparing our students to live in? What type of technological tools must they use proficiently to be successful?
Video games are a huge draw for students. However, as educators, we have to analyze the skills they have with the technology that manifests itself in the use of a video game.
Educators struggle to keep up with the proficiency using technology that our students already have when they come to school. It is essential that school and school districts provide the classroom teachers with the training and support they need so that we can help our kids obtain the skills they need in a competitive market.
We need to think of education much differerently than ever before. No longer do we have the option of thinking, “I’m retiring in five years, let the younger crowd figure it out.” I believe I heard Ray McNulty mention that “…we need to understand that it is our responsibililty to prepare our children for jobs that don’t exist today.”
Creating classrooms where students do more work than teachers is what will need to happen. No more worksheets. I cannot remember one single worksheet I ever had to submit in school although I know we did tons of them.
However, I do remember all of the cool projects I did with other students.
The reason public education continues to get a bad rap is because we are still producing the same product. We are very slow to change with the times.
Often my most powerful learning experiences were engaging, involved group work, and, as Gary mentioned, didn’t include a worksheet. These experiences had something that I valued. Of course my teachers wanted it to be the subject that hooked me, but in many cases the social interaction was the hook and learning the content was the byproduct.
I believe that teachers want to provide meaningful experiences for students that will be internalized, remembered, and applied. What I notice holding teachers back are grades. Teachers are asked to teach in new and innovative ways yet are expected to use the same grading policies and procedures that have been in place for decades. When I am presenting curriculum that provides students opportunities for higher-level thinking, problem solving, and analysis the question I’m most often asked is, “This is great, but how can I get a grade from it?”
We need to re-evaluate the grading systems we use to assess students. Students benefit less from instruction that uses cutting-edge methodologies when we use archaic systems of evaluation. We would see more powerful learning experiences and better results if grading were aligned with current teaching philosophies.
Grading sometimes seems so arbitrary. I’ve seen my own children get “extra credit” for bringing tissue or other supplies for the class. Some schools have focused on mastery instead of grades. This requires educating parents who derive value out of the status quo.
Do we have a shared sense of urgency to change?
I could not agree with you more about the need to re-evaluate the grading system. If innovation is what we all strive to see in our schools, how can we continuously engage our staff to think and teach in innovative ways when the reality of “How do we grade this…” continues to creep into the conversations.
Assessment of learning achieved is so much a part of what we do on a daily basis, even as we move towards a more “differentiated learning” mindset. Assessment (what the student will do as a result of what they know and understand) is instrumental in the differentiated learning process too.
I have to ask whether state assessments (which have more clearly defined accommodations and modifications allowable during testing) is driving some of the decisions we make at the local level as it seems the case more often than not since benchmarks and curriculum-based assessments indicate whether our students are on target for passing and commended performance levels on state tests.
Our district continues to discuss the report card system and it seems that we are making adjustments every year to the K-1 report cards as our knowledge about learning and mastery changes over time. The idea that a student is working “below level” continues to come up year after year along with the issue of using instructional accommodations versus instructional modifications, and whether remediation or acceleration of learning is the best approach to support individual students.
Ah! Grading — I’m getting ready to tackle that one with my staff (this coming Wednesday at faculty meeting) and will start with finding out what they believe about grading. Many teachers teach and grade students based on their own personal high school experiences. Instead, it is time to take a closer look at what we do and what our goals are when grading students. Are teachers just mindlessly grading papers or are they looking at student product and giving feedback to students desgined to help them learn the content?
whoops — “designed”