Leading From The Heart

by Tracy Rosen, teaching & consulting since 1996, blogging about it here since 2007. All views are my own and you should take them with a grain of salt, I do.

Month: July 2011

  • Looking Back: An Essential Question for EdTech

    As part of my Looking Back series, this post remains as relevant for me and my teaching today as it was when it was written on July 4, 2008. Click on the title below for a link to the original post and comments.

    —

    An Essential Question for EdTech

    Integration

    Integration by me: I realized this painting was ‘done’ when I had integrated colours from the daffodil’s cup into the petals.

    Recently I wrote a post on digital literacy within the wider context of literacy and, in writing, touched on what I realize is central to my own teaching:

    an essential question for educators today is how do we integrate literacies in our students? and in ourselves?

    It is not enough – it really, really isn’t – to advocate for technology in the classroom because it looks good and because others say it is important. A reflective school leader – administrator, teacher, support staff, consultant – will start digging deeper for essential questions around student learning in relation to the use of technology, as well as apply those questions to their own learning.

    I use technology in my teaching because literacy is the central focus for me at all times. “Literacy is about being able to make sense of the world we live in” (Dennis Harter, in comment to my post) and my deepest desire as a teacher is that I help students to begin to achieve this, that I give them the tools with which they can make sense of their/our world.

    I use a mashup of communication tools in my teaching, from word processing, to podcasting, to text readers, to visual editors, to blogging, to wikis, to debate, to improv, to (perhaps the most important) simple conversation. I do this because each of these tools can help different students make sense of the vast amount of information that is available to them in different ways. This is essential because each of my students need the opportunity to discover the tools that work best for them and I recognize that these are not necessarily the tools that work best for me.

    If I did not use technology in my teaching I would be going against all that I stand for as a teacher.

    That being said, if I return to my essential question from above, I need to stress that using tech to improve literacy is only part of the picture, part of the system. Literacy is a complex system made up of many and diverse components.

    I am moving more toward thinking about how my job is really to assist students in integrating their literate selves. In doing so, I need to recognize and honour the role(s) played by different technologies in their learning and in my own. That is essential for me.

    (this post was inspired by this one)

  • The philosophical bubble of technology in education

    Living in a Bubble – Viviendo en una Burbujaa, 2006
    Living in a Bubble – Viviendo en una Burbujaa, 2006

    I recently wrote a small blog post on BlogHer about using technology in the classroom. Of the 3 comments it received, 2 of them were from concerned parents. They were concerned with how students are encouraged to type on a computer rather than work on their writing skills.

    These comments mirror those made by some parents of my students in the past. For them, using technology in the classroom means using a computer as a word processor to eliminate messy work.

    Think about that for a bit.

    As educators we debate about whether or not using technology in our classrooms is a must on a philosophical level while some of our parents (and indeed teachers, too, but that is another matter) see it as an add-on to the curriculum. An add-on that could easily be done away with at times.

    To be clear, I do not think that to teach without ‘technology’ (I still cringe when I type that word. It means way too many things!) is necessarily a bad thing. Using technology (ugh) is one way of developing collaborative, thoughtful students with critical thinking skills. They are other ways (Yes! I said it!) but when we do use technology in our classrooms, how are we communicating with our students’ parents about why and how we use it to enhance learning in our students?

    I wrote a post about it for BlogHer as a way of bridging the gap between the philosophical bubble we have created as educators and those outside of it:

    What exactly do we mean by using technology in education?

  • Response to ‘British Educators Explain Why Boys Fail’

    When will the realization be made that it is not necessarily about different ways to teach different people?

    Umpteen years ago people felt that girls were getting a disservice so it was time to change how teachers taught girls.

    Now it is the boys who are getting shafted and it is time to change how teachers teach once again. And Education Week has made it all quite dramatic:

    Why boys fail

    Undoubtedly things will eventually tip the scales toward boy-teaching and girls will soon be failing once again. Or maybe boys schools are suffering from under-enrolment and this is a brilliant marketing campaign.

    Sigh…

    (I feel like a broken record lately)

    It is not this or that, it is both this and that.

    We can focus on an inclusive teaching philosophy that teaches everyone. We really can and it’s not rocket science.

    Let’s start with the same list I came up with when talking about how teaching kids with special needs was not rocket science, shall we?

    • Offer a variety of activities that use different modalities of learning
    • Provide scaffolding and support as needed
    • Provide a safe way for students to seek some down time when it is needed
    • Get to know my students’ likes and dislikes, interests and abilities
    • Talk with my students and their parents about their progress on an ongoing basis

    This just makes too much sense to me. I get irked that we are muddying the waters, looking for magic bullets when all we have to do is care more about our students as people.

  • Looking back: Attitudes toward teaching

    Another in my Looking Back series. With the ongoing and recent debates around teaching in the US, I thought it relevant. Please click the title below for a link to the comments on the original post. This one is from August 10, 2009

    Attitudes toward teaching

    Is there a big difference between public attitude towards teachers in the US and Canada?

    When people find out that I am a teacher I NEVER (and I am not a wanton all caps user) am made to feel like I have settled on teaching for lack of ability to do otherwise. Did I mention NEVER?

    On the contrary, people usually respond with cools and wows and I have great respect for you, it must be hard, how do you do it? They then follow with talk of their memories of school, the teacher who they’ll never forget, the cafeteria food – whatever. The point is that my job conjures up memory, stories – of hard times and good. The stuff that life is made of.

    Ken Dryden talks about our personal Board of Governors and who we would like on it. He reminds us that while few of us could name specific accountants or salespeople for it we could all think of teachers we’d like to sit on it.

    So I have a hard time understanding the article linked to by @AngelaMaiers today, called Schools Need Teachers Like Me. I Just Can’t Stay by Sarah Fine in The Washington Post, Sunday, August 9, 2009.

    Or at least parts of it.

    I can definitely understand teacher burn out. When you love teaching sometimes it’s hard to find the off switch. There’s always one more thing to do, to plan, to correct, to prepare, to present, to remind ourselves of, to talk to a student/colleague/parent/volunteer about. And that’s during the regular school year, figure in report card season and the things to do possibilities multiply exponentially.

    I can definitely understand that feeling of loss when you just can’t get to that one (or more) kid. No matter what you try, s/he will still give you the cold shoulder, still skip class, still (seemingly) not care about learning. Then I remember that this is learned behaviour. That the child must have experienced so much loss of her own that she can’t let anyone else in. And my feeling of loss grows.

    I can definitely understand the frustration of massive failure, when a large chunk of your group fails. Within a long history of failure, a few months with a new teacher will rarely be able to make the monumental difference needed to turn 30s to 70s – no matter how much we want it. Though it is sometimes possible with the proper structure and trust.

    Working towards that structure is what keeps me sane.

    But I don’t understand the lack of social recognition Sarah Fine writes about in fully one half of her article. Or, rather, the dismal recognition she describes it as having. She writes that teaching is considered as being for the unambitious and untalented, that people think it is a second class profession.

    Do I live in a bubble? Are people coddling me with cools and wows and then sneering once I leave the room – can you believe she’s a teacher? How gauche!

    I don’t think so. The reactions I get are honest and from the heart. People don’t share stories through whimsical smiles about things they think are second rate and undervalued.

    She does have it right though. Teaching is hard work, it is life work. I wouldn’t describe it as grueling and the fact that she does makes me think that Sarah Fine was just not meant to teach. My gut reaction? This article was an attempt at justifying that.

    Then I read the comments and there were quite a number that supported her views. As well as a number who felt like me, if you aren’t meant to teach don’t teach.

    But I recognize that I write this from a Canadian perspective. Which begs me to ask – are Canadian teachers more valued than our American colleagues? What is different here?

    3am sleepless update: Apparently Michael Doyle tried to reply to this post but he wasn’t able to post the comment. Lucky for us it made it to his own blog. Go read his take on the matter – as always, it points to truth for me. —> On Why Sarah Fine Left Teaching

  • Questions about tech and children

    I like to use technology in education. But that isn’t any different than how I like to use technology in other aspects of my life. It’s a part of my life – in the classroom and out of it – and it is there to enhance whatever it is I want to achieve. But I make that choice, whether to use it or not.

    The other day I was sitting in the waiting room at my chiropractor’s office, Dr. Paul Poirier at Earthway Family Chiropractic in Cornwall. As always, Jack was with me in his car seat. I was randomly flipping through a magazine and talking to a lovely lady sitting next to me when I noticed that Jack was craning his neck to see something. He was watching a slide show about back and foot problems that was showing on a tv in the waiting room. He’s 5 months old and I couldn’t break his gaze. Finally I got down right in front of him and showed him the magazine, which he did get very interested in, but it took a while to tear his attention away from the screen.

    When I was breastfeeding every 20 minutes or so for the first 3 months of his life I spent a lot of time ensconced on the couch watching movies (had no actual tv plan at the time) and playing around online (google search – is it normal for a 3 month old to want to eat every 20 minutes? Is green poop normal?…) on the iPad I won through Etsy last summer. Once in a while I’d show a slideshow of black and white images that he’d try to touch and I’d giggle as he changed the size or image or whatever as he accidentally interacted with the iPad screen.

    My son will obviously grow up with tech as a solid part of his life – it is a solid part of society and plays a large roll in his mother’s life. Even his father, self-proclaimed Luddite, just purchased a smart phone and is getting all geeky with his talk of megabytes and kilobytes per second and all.

    The thing is, I hated watching him stare at that tv screen in the waiting room. I could understand that the flashing screen with its bright colours was fun to look at but I hated how hard it was to break his gaze. And I hated how that gaze seemed so empty.

    The question is… (yes, finally getting to the point) … how do I (as a mother at home, as a teacher in the classroom) ensure that technology is used purposefully and not just something to stare at, to bemuse? I think the answer lies in modelling purposeful use of technology and sometimes the entertainment factor IS the purpose. But my mind keeps flipping back to his vacant gaze at that tv screen…