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.

Author: Tracy Rosen

How can the way I help other educators affect their practice?

I recently completed a 4-month contract as a technology consultant at two adult education centres. I loved it. Throughout the whole experience I felt this is what I am meant to be doing. The focus on tech reached out to my inner geek and the focus on relationship reached in towards my personal ethics of care.

The other day I was doing some thinking about the past 4 months and decided to put it on paper (so to speak) and to frame it within a guiding question. The question I came up with was:

How can the way I help other educators affect their practice?

I used Dabbleboard to help draw it out and came up with this (click to enlarge)

July 13, 2012
Moving out towards reform

In an age of constant reform, a teacher is constantly put in the spotlight. The way that he or she teaches is constantly in question.

The teachers I know became teachers because of something from deep within – a passion, a desire to help others, to pay something back, to follow in the footsteps of their own teachers, to make positive change – whatever the impetus it comes from deep within themselves.

The very fact that they are teachers is closely enmeshed with their own sense of self. Teaching, then, is closely tied to our values, even to our sense of what is right and what is wrong.

And so, when teachers are told that they need to change how they teach they just may feel that their values are being put into question and they will hold on to them like there is no tomorrow. It will become messy, no doubt.

Think about that as we struggle through curricular reform, technology integration, differentiation, classroom flipping, backwards design, project-based learning…

(I think that the answer lies somewhere in starting from values and moving out towards reform.)

June 18, 2012
Beware the bedazzlement

Was reminded today…again…of the importance of good pedagogy.

We can have fancy tools to bedazzle our students/parents/community with but if they aren’t being used in support of good pedagogy, they will remain a sideshow.

So what is good pedagogy in an age where bedazzlement threatens to get in the way?

Same as always – asking questions that invoke big ideas. Designing situations for learning that tap into those big ideas via the acquisition of knowledge, skills, and concepts. Allowing for students to experiment and to follow those big ideas as they will.

Beware the bedazzlement.

June 11, 2012
Interesting conversation about teaching and technology

I had a very interesting conversation with a colleague the other day. She is a teacher in adult education with upwards of 35 years in the classroom and she said to me that the model we recently used in her class and others, with me going directly into the classroom and working with students, makes sense to her.

I love this drawing of a classroom. It was done by Todd Berman, a substitute teacher in San Francisco. Click it to go to his website.
(I visited her Economics classroom and talked about technology and advertising. Then I returned on 3 different occasions to work directly with individual and small groups of students as they created advertisements for virtual businesses.)

She said (and these are her words) that she will never know enough about tech to be able to teach her students anything new about tech. She said that it is a waste of time to send her off to do workshops to learn a new technology in the hopes that she would then teach it to her students, and that it is best to show the tech to the students so they can use it within the context of her curriculum and that, if anything, they should be the ones showing her how to use it.

This model
a) keeps teachers in the classroom as opposed to sending them out of the classroom for PD.
b) allows teachers to focus on their curriculum while offering different pathways to students to get through it
c) allows for professional collaboration between teachers and consultants
d) fosters student leadership as they learn new tools from a consultant and can show it to each other and their teachers.

We went on to talk about how the big work is in creating teachers like her who are willing to let something like that happen in their classrooms.

I like that idea – the idea of classroom as a site of professional learning.

May 7, 2012
Let me tell you a story … about teaching and technology
I’m teaching a class on creating a radio show and podcasting. I’m working with 11 enthusiastic and interested adult learners and I’m quite excited about it myself. Yesterday was our 2nd meeting.

Let me tell you a little story about teaching and technology…

My plan was 3-fold:
The first two parts were easy, the components were me and them. It was the last section that proved…challenging. And guess what? That last section involved a 10 minute presentation. It required technology. And the technology wasn’t cooperating. I realized it wasn’t cooperating an hour before the course so I did have time to place the presentation on individual laptops for students to view at their tables. The thing was, I wasn’t planning on needing headsets. There was audio. At one point in the presentation I say, “You must be fed up of hearing my voice by now …” When I heard it an asynchronous 6 times I laughed out loud and so did the students. It’s a good thing they have a sense of humour!

Other little things… laptops kept logging out (need to remember to shut off the logout feature) during the class, some of them decided to do the Windows update thing and re-started mid lesson.

Like I said, at least we all had a sense of humour and I knew what was going on nevertheless it was still very frustrating. I had spent a week preparing for this class, not a week straight but on and off for a week. I had an idea of what I wanted to do and it really should have gone off without a hitch but it didn’t.

And. Capital A ‘And’ here… I am a technology consultant. I understand that things sometimes don’t work and the majority of the time I can work around that And still, I was met with this frustration.

When teachers tell me their own stories of how technology trumped their lessons I know that they are less and less willing to try it again. It is frustrating to put so much time into something to have it fall apart because a wire is missing, a network is down, a button they don’t know about needs to be pushed, an ActiveX control needs to be allowed to run, a program needs to be updated, a this, a that.

So where do we go from here?

Is it about teaching teachers how to troubleshoot all of that? It would be nice if everyone knew how but I’m not sure if that is a very practical answer.

The largest protest I hear from teachers about their day is that there is not enough time to do anything. We know that there isn’t. Teachers have so many responsibilities, a mere fraction of which is the hours of time where they are physically tied to their classrooms and the rest generally gets done on their own time. We know that. So throwing more training at them that requires them to use their precious out of class time in order to learn how to troubleshoot technology that they perhaps do not even want to use well…I think that is problematic.

So again. Where do we go from here?

For myself, I am in the process of creating a webpage for the course where I will drop any resources. I’ll be expecting the learners in the course to access any presentations there. It’s something they can do during class time, at home if they have computers, on their phones, whatever their preference or requirement. This way the theory won’t be trumped by the tech. As well, the class time will be reserved for collaboration, creation, and questions.

But that is me. I teach one little course a week. And I am a technology consultant.

Where do we go from here when it comes to working with educators and supporting them with not only the opportunities but the challenges of using technology in the classroom?
April 20, 2012