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: Pedagogy

  • Some essential questions for teachers.

    What do you teach? Whether it be math, English, French, science, History, economics, computer science… are you allowing your students to use whatever tools they need to be successful?

    • Are you allowing your students to use their own technology to learn?
    • Are you allowing your students to record themselves (or you) with their phones or tablets?
    • Are you asking all of your students to do the same thing at the same time during your class?
    • Are you doing most of the talking in your classroom?
    • Are you allowing your students to use their phones or tablets to look things up in class?
    • Are you asking your students to write all of their work by hand?
    • Are you questioning your students and expecting them to conduct their own inquiry?
    • Are you providing your students with all of the answers that they need to memorize to pass a test?

    Whether your answer is yes or no to those questions… follow it up with

    WHY?

    (and here is the biggie…)

    Are you questioning yourself and your teaching practice on a regular basis?

    WHY?

  • My dirty secrets re: flipping the classroom

    I have a dirty little secret to share. Actually, I have a few.

    Dirty Secret #1
    I don’t think video lessons are all that.

    When we talk of flipped classrooms we talk of having video that students can watch out of the classroom to free up clasroom time from the shackles of lecture and allow application to reign in its stead.

    Yawn. If I were forced to watch a bunch of video on certain lecturey topics, I think I’d quit school.

    Yesterday I was excited to see a link to a recipe on some website for flourless pecan brownies. Mmm. Mmm. How disapointed was I to end up at a video that was going to show me how to make them. All I wanted to do was look at the ingredient list. I didn’t bother to watch the video. Didn’t want to invest the time if I wasn’t sure it was what I needed. Had there been a written recipe, or even just the list of ingredients, I may have watched it.

    A number of years ago, I had to review video to add to a list of resources for professional development. I wanted to write little blurbs so teachers would know if they were worth watching. The videos ranged from 5 to about 30 minutes in length. It didn’t matter how short or long they were. I lost focus. With some it was because they were just boring video, with others, though, that was not the case. I needed to be doing something in order to maintain focus. I needed to keep my hands busy, to maintain an optimal level of physical distraction so that my brain wouldn’t search for it elsewhere. So I started to create small posters to hang in my office. Writing and colouring allowed my brain to focus on the video.

    Dirty Secret #2
    I believe in differentiation but not because of learning styles.

    We need to differentiate our curriculum to meet the needs of the learners in our room. Full stop. Learning needs to make sense to those learning and I believe it makes different sense for different learners. NOT because of a perceived personal sense of how one learns but because of a very real sense of why mixed in with solid research-based evidence about how the more ways we can integrate new ideas and concepts into our systems, the better the learning will take hold and actually change how we think – after all, isn’t that why we learn?

    How many students have I met who have experienced years, decades (I now work in Adult Education) of failure, of thinking themselves inadequate because they were unable to grasp a concept or get an idea after years of being taught it in the same way (think Math lecture, History textbooks, first language inquiry processes…). Who, when they are delivered the same idea in ways that include reading, watching, listening, talking, and doing finally get it. When I think of these students I feel a deep sense of sadness.

    So how do we differentiate in this way? Offer content in a variety of ways – available in the classroom and outside of it (flipping in and out). Sure. Offer your video but add to it text, graphics, out of class or back-end (chats that may happen in class but behind the scenes) conversation, anything that can a) present the material using as many different modalities of learning and b) allow for students to choose the one that they need at a particular moment in their learning. Maybe at first, they’ll watch the video but when they come down to applying the concept, they may just need to scan through a text or look at a chart to get to a specific point. Or maybe the video watching will happen at the end of the student’s data gathering process, to ensure understanding.

    The main focus of differentiation for me has to do with loving my students. That and the fact that, as an educator, the action of lecturing content bores me to no end. I enjoy talking in front of people, presenting ideas that excite me. I think that does have a place in our classroom as well. Students need to see excitement. It’s a matter of communicating it authentically.

    Dirty Secret #3
    Yeah, I still don’t believe in learning styles.

  • 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.

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    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:

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    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.

  • 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.