Practice what you preach

    I believe educators today need to keep a growth mindset not only to set a good model for their students but also because we need to allow ourselves room to make mistakes and learn from them. It can be easy to forget that students are not the only ones learning at school, and this further supports the idea of social-emotional learning. We too are human and will eventually make mistakes or have something go less than adequate, and we need to grant ourselves the same kindness we will show our students when they make mistakes. I believe the times when teachers make mistakes are some of the most crucial moments in the classroom because it sets the expectation for students to follow. If a teacher makes a mistake and tries to hide it or react to it in a negative manner, that subconsciously tells the students that making mistakes is a negative thing that they must avoid doing to whatever extent they decide to take it. If the teacher takes the time to address the mistake and displays a collected and logical approach to fixing it, they are destigmatizing making mistakes and giving normalcy to seeing mistakes as opportunities for learning and improvement. 

    We may only have students for one calendar year, but the habits they pick up in school regarding their study habits, self-esteem, problem-solving, and bravery to take risks stays with them until they have to actively work at unlearning those habits. It is in their best interest as future functional members of society, and for us as educators serving hundreds of them to keep in mind just how mouldable their minds are as children, and we need to take caution of the hidden curriculums and unspoken rules that might be communicated. Transparency, a collective group effort to identify problems as they arise and solve them as a team, and open and respectful communication can go a long way for students, especially those that may not have healthy relationships in their personal lives.

What a time to be alive amirite?

    I am extremely excited for the future of education and even more so to be a part of it. Education is finally moving away from the framework that is designed to do little more than train children for the workforce and is moving toward equipping students with REAL life skills fit for our modern society. In my experience, school always just felt like a scam because I didn't feel like I was learning anything really useful to me (which, let's be honest, is more true than I would like it to be) but I had no choice but to go and the only motivation to even graduate was the social pressure rather than a desire to grow and learn. I believe this shift in goal orientation from content-driven to skill-driven is revolutionary and I am filled with anticipation to find out how this new framework is going to change society long-term. Many educators have ignored the resources that technology can provide us with for too long, and the trial this recent panini forced us into has been so much more successful than anybody expected and even a clear improvement from the old design in many ways. I believe we can and must continue this shift to the point where we no longer create curriculums based on the student's anticipated success on a standardized test but instead create curriculums based on the student's interests, assets, and needs.

    This system of memorizing a bunch of content to prepare for several high-stakes standardized tests that are essentially all the same, and is also severely exclusive to a distinct population of students with the ability to succeed in these conditions. However, the tests are still damaging to all students because they are not learning critical thinking skills, research skills, creativity, or individuality which has fueled a society of complacency, apathy, and redundancy. Students do not need to rehearse over and over how to fill in hundreds of little bubbles, and the skills they are supposed to be using to answer these questions become overshadowed by the content itself. There are now so many other and more effective ways to assess progress in students and technology is largely to thank for this. If the curriculum is student-centered, the assessments should be student-centered as well and technology has finally been recognized to allow educators the space, time, and resources to tend to the unique needs of each student on a one-to-one scale much more efficiently and personally. 

    Although I must say I am a bit jealous that I could not grow up in a school system with this new frame of mind and the resources made possible by modern technology, I cannot wait to be a part of it from the teacher's perspective of things.

Learning Curiosity

Successful teachers know to assume that students don’t know anything that has not been taught in their class because students often will not admit they don’t know something. However, I believe this mindset is often only applied to content knowledge rather than learning as a whole. We forget to consider that students have never been taught how to ask questions or how to wonder. Jeff Utecht’s podcast, Shifting Our Schools, addresses this issue perfectly by describing how most teachers aim to nurture curiosity in their classrooms, but do not teach their students how to be curious. When students are asked, they feel as though it is their job to answer questions rather than ask them. This mindset does not aid in an effective learning environment and needs to be addressed in classrooms. 

Personally, my primary goal as an educator is to grow curiosity and wonderment in my students, but like all else, we must know how to teach this. In a world where quick access to answers and overly structured curriculum, have killed curiosity, we must figure out ways to help our students relearn this. This should be the primary goal of all modern teachers.

Escaping the Bubble

For ages, learning has been confined to what can be done within the classroom, but with new resources this boundary is expanding to be practically limitless. Resources like google allow our students to travel around the world and even travel through time. The future of education is breaking free from the chains of textbooks written by biased authors and finding exploration through technology. Today’s generation of students have been born into a world where unimaginable amounts of information sit in the palm of their hand. It is our responsibility as educators to teach students how to take advantage of these resources rather than confine them within the bubble of traditional learning styles. 

Resources like google offer tools like “site:” and google news which expand the students’ accessibility to knowledge and learning about their potential has open my changed my own outlook on the use of technology as a teacher. Ignoring the potential of technology in a classroom is the act of closing off students from the world around them and we should instead teach them to use it to its fullest potential.

Crossing the Canyon

The implementation of higher level skills into lessons is the key to student growth and SAMR offers such a useful insight into what this looks like. Being able to recognize the benefits or potential drawback of technology uses allows for constant evaluation regarding what is best for our students. Simply replacing traditional methods with technological ones offers minimal benefit to a lesson and often is more a hindrance to learning. Evaluating our own teaching techniques using SAMR allows us to continually be improving and crossing the monumental canyon standing between enhancement and transformation. Being able to reach a kind of technology usage that reinvents what it means to learn is how we truly transform a classroom. Of course the stages of SAMR are sequential and not everything we do will be categorized as ‘redefinition,’ but striving to hit these higher order of learning is how good teachers become great teachers.

Giving Students What They Need

It’s a brutal reality when we realize we are not giving students the tools they need to be successful. When the world outside of the classroom is moving faster than the curriculum, it’s the students who suffer in exchange. Acknowledging the fact that as students are progressing through their education new job positions are constantly being created and when they graduate skill sets will be required that never existed before. Education is a constant battle of how are we as teachers attempting to expect the unexpected and prepare students for a world we don’t even live in yet. 

I also struggle with my own pedagogy with regards to if P-12 should be responsible for preparing students to go to work or if school should be focused on teaching students to be learners, critical thinkers, and curious minds beyond just what is “useful.” So my challenge is: how do we do both simultaneously? How do we use technology that is current and developing while also still interacting with the task of making great minds not just good employees. 

Failures and Successes

I think many educators are scared, or at least skeptical, of changing their ways. This sentiment might be more prevalent among older teachers, but might also be more common based on the teacher’s cultural norms. These teachers desire to keep teaching the way that they are used to teaching, and maybe even used to learning — teaching to their own past. There can be good parts of this, both instructionally and in content. But there are also benefits to incorporating new ways of teaching, as well as changing content to be more skill- or process-oriented. These seek to teach more for the student’s future (in fact, everyone’s future) and naturally tend toward technology (hence the subject of these blogs and this course).

The biggest hurdle in implementing these new practices is implementing them — getting them set in place to begin with. I think a helpful aspect of this is seeing what works and what doesn’t work. I appreciated seeing both the failures and successes of technology use. Even beyond the ability to recognize the potential of a given method, these examples can give insight into the mindset and effort that can make or break a teacher’s efforts. Furthermore, teachers can determine for themselves whether one success might not be successful for them, or better yet, how a given failure could become a success given some modifications. No matter how or what the teachers implement, it is always helpful to see examples of it in action. Just as teachers model for the students, they can also see models from other teachers. 

Better prepare with less content?

I think education has often been described as preparing kids for life (whether or not that is successfully accomplished). I have also seen and heard lots of dissatisfaction with how schools attempt to do that — they teach something academic that is very obscure, but don’t teach practical things about finance or home life. I think education has the possibility of including more practical things and potentially even optionalizing some of the now-required content.

As Jeff was urging during our class, skills are the important thing to learn (to access knowledge rather than knowing it all). There are two trends that I have noticed. Alternative forms of schools have become more common, which, to my understanding, are often project-based rather than content based. This might leave some of the content unlearned, yet the students are still meeting standard and learning (arguably to a deeper or more practical degree also). Thus, not all of the academic content may be necessary to cover.

The other trend is well known — technology is infiltrating our lives more and more. Thus, fluency in technology is an important skill for almost everything. The many ways we accessed classroom interactions or assignments, both in similar ways or new ways through computers, demonstrates the prevalence of them. It also demonstrates how the classroom is the perfect place to integrate their use in a way that can streamline some processes and also teach the skills associated with using technology. Therefore, using technology in our classrooms will practically prepare students for modern life and set them on track for what new developments there could be in the future (the “true” purpose of education).

Technology: A Waste of Time?

     I am used to growing up with parents and others who never cease to say phrases such as, "Staring at that screen will turn you into a zombie if you don't stop soon!", "You'll never have a life if you spend so much time on video games!", and "You should be spending more time outside!" While all of these came from a well-meaning concern for my health and success (and in most cases very likely helped me to live a healthier lifestyle), they still created a sort of stigmatization in me. This stigma has basically been telling me my whole life that "technology = bad" regardless of whether or not that was the message that was intended to be conveyed.

    This childhood experience has led me to believe that simply regulating technology use is not an effective approach. Rather, I think much more time needs to be spent on teaching kids (and adults for that matter) how to properly manage technology in their lives. There are so many wonderful and useful tools in technology for finding knowledge, entertainment, communication, and much more. however, improper management and responsibility when dealing with technology can be highly counter-productive, time-consuming, and harmful. The recent digital age has made it abundantly clear that technology will only become increasingly prevalent in our lives, so it has become all the more important to learn and teach how to effectively and healthily navigate a technological world. 

Wikipedia is here to stay

I had only recently in the last few years started to hear some buzz about Wikipedia's surprising level of reliability when I started to assimilate into the education community through music education conferences and workshops. I had no idea about the rating system or the coordination that goes into maintaining pages on the site though, and I was quite shocked at first! Now I almost feel compelled to go out and start looking for pages to supplement, although I probably won't go that far until I have more free time on my hands. This in itself goes to show that education and learning are collaborative because complete strangers around the world are coming together to provide anyone with an internet connection easy access to knowledge for free. I think it’s important to keep the love of learning alive in students and providing such easy access to knowledge will help fuel this love, but it is important that we teach students to evaluate the credibility of their sources and teach them how to research properly. 

I think it’s extremely valuable to have such a massive database of knowledge on pretty much anything you can think of in a digital and changeable format. Information changes constantly as new things are being discovered, and as those discoveries happen the documentation can change with it in real-time, and we will never lose that access as long as technology still survives. There has been so much documentation, culture, and knowledge lost to age or deliberate destruction over time, more than we could even fathom. I often think about the Library of Alexandria and wonder what information we could have still had access to if it hadn’t been devastated. I find it comforting that there is so much information stored on the internet that will never be destroyed.

The Library of Alexandria

#Google #Community #Hashtag

The final words of Jeff have been ringing in my ears. After being on technology overload for the past two days, the one thing that I cannot stop thinking about has nothing to do with technology. It has everything to do with being a human being.

The best thing we can do as educators is love our students from the moment they walk into our classrooms and never stop.

No matter how much we practice with technology or study all of the benefits that it brings to the classroom, we cannot change the fact that we are human beings and that we have needs that transcend technology. 

We all have a need to be seen.

To be loved.

To belong.

The beautiful part about technology is that it can be utilized in the classroom to create and foster a sense of belonging and community.

Take Google maps for example. Google mymaps can be used to show how our students are connected with each other and how our students are connected around the world. We can utilize Google mymaps to map out the location of everyone's houses. Doing this gives a visual representation to how close or how far everyone is living from each other. It can also provide a spark or connection for that new student who is looking for a way to connect with their classmates. Google mymaps can be utilized to plot points of the places everyone visited over the summer or maybe spark an interest in students of where they might want to visit one day. When students can visually see these connection points, it provides them with the opportunity to build community based on place and interest.

Take Wikipedia for example. A Wikipedia article is basically a community of individuals looking to provide the world with accurate and unbiased information on a topic that they find interesting. Think about all of the great projects that can come from this concept.  Students can be linked together through common interests and then sent off to provide the rest of the world with the best Wikipedia article they can produce through collaboration. As students are working together, they might "meet" other people from around the world that become part of their "Wikommunity." 

Take the hashtag for example. Creating a classroom hashtag lets educators engage their students on social media in a way that was never possible before. Creating a classroom hashtag allows educators to create communities that can travel together. Creating a classroom hashtag builds a community with an online portfolio for all time. The possibilities are endless!

For all of technology's short falls, it can still be utilized to meet that basic human need of...

#community

#belonging

#love

We can't live longer, but we can get more time

I think the best way to look at technology is as a means to give more quality time with students. SAMR gives good context to this. Even if a technology is not revolutionary — if it doesn’t “redefine” an aspect of education — it can still achieve the goal of getting more time with students. If an activity is enhanced with technology as a substitution or augmentation, the technology would hopefully make the activity more efficient. The activity could also give some independence to the students, which would then free up the teacher from instruction to interact with the students individually.

On the other hand, technology can be implemented in a way that does not achieve this goal. Sometimes when it is just substituted in, it does not fulfill a purpose beyond what the original activity did without technology. In that case, the substitution might just be more work, and might in fact decrease the quality of learning and interaction. If this is the case, the technology does not meet the goal of getting more quality time with students and should not actually be used in that way. Technology should be implemented in a judicious, intentional manner. 

Cheers to the Future

     Being forced to change and adapt last year because of school moving to an online/virtual format really forced the world of education to open its eyes. Education, for better or for worse, has been changed for good. The interesting thing is that many of the technological tools that were used and will continue to be used have been around for years... We have just had no "need" for them. This past year, we were forced to use them, and I believe that because of that, we finally have maybe come to recognize the value of these tools. Technology in the classroom can be a useful tool for building connections, maintaining relationships, and interacting with learning communities all over the globe. 

    I think that one challenge moving forward will be finding the correct balance of screen-time. I feel that kids today have their faces in their devices a lot, and the last thing that needs to happen is continuing that habit at school. It will be important to explore ways to use technological tools in the classroom effectively, collaboratively, and responsibly.

Education is a moving target and technology in the classroom allows teachers to stay on target more easily and effectively.

Times tables won't go away

 I can't stop thinking about the opinion I heard today about preferring to have students learn two-letter country codes rather than multiplication tables. They are both straight facts. Also, both can be found easily or quickly with a calculator or a quick search, but I think one is more useful to know than the other. When doing simple calculations (or more complex ones with simple components), it's very helpful to be able to do quick multiplication without needing a calculator. On the other hand, it seems like any time people would be using a country code, they would be able to look it up as part of the process. Thus, in my opinion, I think it's more valuable to know multiplication tables.

The One True Learning Theory Doesn't Exist

About Culturally Responsive Teaching

Article here: https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/culturally-responsive-teaching-strategies/           

Trying to teach Black students by rapping or Latinx students by talking about Cinco de Mayo tokenizes students. I was never motivated to participate by being compelled to act as “the Jewish expert” when I was growing up.

The way to activate and engage students is through genuine, authentic connection. Without achieving authentic connection between students and teacher as well as peer to peer, learning will be stilted at best. Trust is the first step in learning.

We know that many children have Adverse Childhood Experiences (https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/aces/index.html) during K-12 education, and that these experiences can scar them for life. What can we do to better support the children in our classrooms as they are going through one of the most formative periods of their lives?

I feel quite strongly that the first few weeks of school, and whenever a new student is added to the classroom, must be spent building authentic connections.

We have to acknowledge that all of our students are from diverse backgrounds. Each one of them is unique, a human being with a human being’s story. Family, or no family, friends, or no friends… we all come to the table with everything that we’re born with and that we have lived. What is most important is that everyone has a voice, and that their voice is heard and valued. Listening skills are key. Many paths to knowledge and different pieces of knowledge depending on capacity must be available and easy to access. Technology is one of the necessary paths that must be widely available and utilized regularly.

I have been feeling frustrated by the theories of behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism. This idea of one theory being correct above all others doesn't make sense to me and seems too simplistic. I believe that reality is internal, external, and interpreted; and I believe that knowledge is both innate and acquired through experiences, thinking about experiences, and constructed.  

These things all go together. How learning happens is both clearer and more nebulous than I have seen properly articulated by any learning theory I have yet read. It almost seems as if there’s a desire to find the “One True Path” when such a thing does not exist. Teachers must meet students where they are and provide them with genuine connection and a broad range of social and academic activities.