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.

Category: Learning

  • Remembering the human (in teachers, too)

    You teach a resistant teacher the same way you teach a resistant and disinterested and disengaged student. By engaging them, by challenging them, by making sure they have fun, and giving them ownership of their own learning will bring back even a hardened student to the class.

    Eric Pollack wrote this, as a comment to an article on coaching teachers by Elena Aguilar in Education Week.

    This is something I truly believe. Even so, it can be easy at times to be frustrated with what seem to be ‘resistant’ teachers.

    I fight for the rights of so-called resistant students yet am frustrated with so-called resistant teachers. There is a misalignment there. I must realign.

    I must seek to understand before being understood.

    I must remember the human, always.

  • A morning with Marc Prensky: idea bits

    We had the opportunity to chat with Marc Prensky at a Quebec convention for adult educators (AQIFGA). Here are some thoughts and comments from the morning.

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    “If the answer is findable on google then it’s not a good question.” Marc Prensky

    The idea of embedding curriculum within student interests and relevancy –> something I try to do no matter what / who I teach.

    From Marc Prensky: Evaluations allow us to conveniently rank people – where is the need to do that?

    My question…
    In adult Ed, by the age of 21 you can go on to university based on interest, drive, life experience. You can go into vocational programs at the age of 18 with GDT + 1 or 2 other functional pre-reqs. Why are we making learners jump through these evaluatory hoops before then?

    From MP: It’s easy to criticize but there are no alternatives…

    From me: (I like the notion of mature student interview and intent interview as a possible alternative… Something to look at)

    From Marc Prensky: What do teachers control? : We allow time to be the decider of what we teach (for example, snow days can cut whole sections out of courses…) but really, as teachers, WE can determine what is important in our curriculum to teach.

    From me + Marc Prensky: Imagine if teachers all strived to be a teacher of passion.

    From Marc Prensky: “Cellophane kids” – kids who teachers look right through because they are only concerned about the curriculum and the tests, not the kids.

    From me: A few adult learners were present – excellent. They expressed how they feel about the way exams work, how technology helps them learn. Important conversation to have. I suggest we consult with our students on a regular basis to make sure we are teaching them the way they deserve.

    Marc is trying to find alternative ways to tell teachers to relinquish control – if you tell someone they have to give up control, who would want to? Let’s go about it differently.

    From a teacher + MP: Classroom teachers will still have a lot of control, it just looks different –> let’s say this to as many people as possible. The only person a teacher will believe is another teacher. So teachers need to share these nuggets.

    From Marc Prensky: School ought to be about becoming not learning. Learning can help us to become, but shouldn’t be the main point.

    From Marc Prensky: When it comes to how to get students using social media in the classroom in a focused way, the first place to get practical suggestions from is the students.

    From me: We need to talk to our students. We need to listen to our students. Start with what they do, not with what we do. Confronting the notion of cellophane kids.

    From a student : Teachers have to understand how we deal with life so they can learn how to teach us.

    From a teacher : We may think they are fooling around on YouTube but really they are learning in ways we don’t know. Or maybe they are taking a break. Or maybe they are showing us that we aren’t reaching them. Or maybe they are showing us they need more/less structure.

  • Learning, Naturally

    …or is that Acquiring, Naturally?

    I’ve been thinking a lot about language learning lately, as I bring a group of students towards final evaluations in a few weeks’ time. This group is small, though of the 9 students there are 6 different levels I need to evaluate. So, I repeat, I’ve been thinking a lot about language learning lately :)

    A few lines from Mr. Krashen:

    “Language acquisition does not require extensive use of conscious grammatical rules, and does not require tedious drill.”

    ” Acquisition requires meaningful interaction in the target language – natural communication – in which speakers are concerned not with the form of their utterances but with the messages they are conveying and understanding.”

    ” The best methods are therefore those that supply ‘comprehensible input’ in low anxiety situations, containing messages that students really want to hear. These methods do not force early production in the second language, but allow students to produce when they are ‘ready’, recognizing that improvement comes from supplying communicative and comprehensible input, and not from forcing and correcting production.”

    Do I like what he says because this is how I ultimately end up teaching? I can’t stand drills, grammar exercises, worksheet after worksheet of sentences and vocabulary. I can’t. It would bore me to death – all of that paperwork and its organization or, ultimately, disorganization as they all look the same and can easily hide behind each other. All of that subterfuge just gets in between me and the learner and what he or she knows anyways. Besides which, after 16 years of teaching, I know myself well enough that I won’t get around to correcting paperwork in any timely kind of manner.

    So maybe it’s my lazy teaching correcting style that keeps my classroom free of worksheets and workbooks. Instead, we talk. I let them talk in English, even. It’s all for the purpose of better understanding French. But they always do some kind of talking and listening in French. At first I was following some kind of instructional format (like, today we will learn about past tense, or today we will learn vocabulary words for sports) but that made everything too…unnatural… and, ultimately, boring. It drove me nuts. So I told them to stop coming up with sentences about sports they used to play and to talk about the things they like to do now or the things they dream about for the future. I let them write it out in English and then they had to translate. We used dictionaries, translators, me, other students, whatever they were comfortable with and by going through that process they began to take more risks in speaking. Since I have all those levels I can’t quite have conversations with all of them at the same time so I’m happy for the tablets we have access to. There’s no waiting for their turn to talk, they practice talk into the tablet. Then they listen, erase, and practice talk some more. I make my rounds and record something as well, so they have my voice to listen to even if I’m not there.

    Basically, the classroom is just a spot where we experiment with language. I think it grew out of my lazy correcting practice but just by listening to my students experiment with French, taking risks they would not have taken a few months ago I can say that being a lazy corrector may just have made me a better teacher for this group of learners.

  • Respectful guidance

    In everything. We can’t go around trying to do new things without someone to guide us. And we can’t go around asking people to try to do new things without ensuring the guidance is there for them: guidance that is offered in a way that respects us as learners, as people.

    20121028-105050.jpg
    challenge me to stand on my own but remain close so I know you’re there if I need you

    There is nothing worse than to walk into a classroom and see students scrambling to ‘get’ what it is they are supposed to be doing. More often than not they just end up doing something else or not showing up – that’s when you get the acting out, distracted, and distracting behaviour. If I were given a text to read and answer questions about in Hebrew or about electrical engineering without anyone there to guide me in the learning of the language or science I’d probably look for something else to do pretty quickly.

    There is also nothing worse than to participate in PD with a group of educators who know that there will be no follow up, that the topic is just one in a long line of topics designed to keep everyone busy and tick off some boxes in terms of pedagogical development. Again, no real guidance here. At least none that is based in learner respect.

    On the flip side, there is nothing better than to walk into a classroom and see students who are being challenged at exactly that point – you know the one, the one where they are right on the cusp of what they know and what they don’t, that zone of proximal development point – where learning is magical.

    There is also nothing better than to participate in PD with a group of educators who are directly involved and invested in what they are doing. Who are learning for a reason that comes from within and not from external goals.

    The first instances are insulting and disheartening, barren of respect and guidance. The second, enlightening and full of heart because they involve respectful guidance.

    I’ve been blessed to have been able to experience both in my teaching and consulting practices. Blessed because the former ensure that I help create more instances of the latter.

  • On Motivation. On Learning. In Ourselves.

    Last night, at 10:39, I found out about the midnight deadline for applying to the Google Teacher Academy taking place in New York this October. How was it that I only clued into the application process in the, practically literally, 11th hour? That may have a little something to do with this kind of thing:

    20120730-091426.jpg

    Maybe.

    I decided to apply.

    A few years ago I wrote a post inspired by a line from Michael Wesch: it’s basically about shifting from getting people to love you, to you loving them.

    Last year I wrote about how I motivate my students and manage my classroom without reward systems.

    And I’m realizing that me in 2012 is not much different from the me when I started teaching 16 years ago. Nah, actually I am a lot different. I’m more focused, I have more knowledge when it comes to working with a diverse student group, more knowledge about pedagogy and curriculum and integrating technology but that focus and knowledge are steeped in the same locus of care that brought me into teaching in the first place.

    So my application video is nothing fancy. Really. Nothing. Fancy. It’s 50 some odd seconds of me sitting on my bed looking like I am talking to someone off screen because I still haven’t mastered the iPad video feature (I tend to want to look at my eyes when I’m talking to a camera…) but it is honest and it reflects what I believe needs to be the starting point for anything to really happen in education: the recognition that motivation and learning come first from ourselves. The educators. Discover what motivates us as educators and stay true to that.