:Connecting the Dots

Well, Doug Johnson saw my link to LifeHack’s 10 Essential Skills and has challenged the Edublogosphere to come up with their own lists.  Here’s mine:

1. The ability to understand and interpret data: So many people - especially in education - try to prop up weak arguments and ideas with even weaker/incomplete/misleading statistics.  Worse, many people lack the tools to see when others are doing the same.
2. Seeing the big picture/putting things into perspective:  People who consider only their little corner of the organization when making decisions will forever remain in that little corner.  Teamwork means not only understanding your own “stuff” but how it fits in with everyone else’s “stuff” and collaborating to chart a path accordingly.
3. Communication: Okay, I’m a former English teacher, so I suppose this is to be expected.  Whether it’s writing, speaking, reading, or listening, there are few jobs that don’t require us to interact with others in varied settings and through diverse media.  It’s sad that one of our assistant principals had to send out a blast e-mail to the school clericals reminding them to be polite when answering the phone.  And I’ve seen people lose their jobs because they couldn’t write to save their lives.
4. Being a good compromiser: The ability to walk into a room where people are fighting and find a solution that meets everyone’s needs is very valuable.  It’s a creative, thinking-out-of-the-box act: taking a situation that has reached an impasse and finding a way out.
5. Empathy: Right on, Doug.  I would go beyond just understanding the needs of others, however, and ask that all leaders know how to minister to those needs.  Asking about family, sending a note when someone is sick, complementing a co-worker on a job well done: these little actions mean a lot.
6. Critical understanding of technology: It’s about more than just knowing which buttons to push and which icons to click.  People need to be able to recognize appropriate tools for a task and use them properly to achieve the desired outcome.  They need to be able to reject those tools that are poorly-designed, harmful, and/or irrelevent.  Otherwise money gets wasted and there is a backlash.
7. Math and logic:  The greatest value in math is the habit of mind toward logic which it develops.  Geometric proofs, in particular, are valuable because they help students to understand how to work methodically through a problem.   I’ve seen so many poor decisions made because people lacked the ability to temper emotion and intuition with a little hard reasoning.
8. Creativity: In a world where so many insitutions appear to be failing and/or inadequate to meet the needs of such a rapidly-developing culture, people need to be able to dream up innovative, new solutions to the problems we face.  People who succeed are the ones who aren’t afraid to fail, and I think that’s what creativity is all about when you come right down to it.
9. Knowing where you put things- both physically and mentally:  Complexity seems to be increasing faster than our brains’ capability to manage it.  The ability to leverage tools to stay organized - both in terms of physical items, contacts, and appointments as well as ideas and facts - are invaluable.  And perhaps part of that means managing a storehouse of facts that we can quickly and easily recall - you never know when someone will name-drop “Harold Pinter” or need to know how to convert gallons to liters.  No, I’m not saying it should all be memorized and yes, it can be Googled, but we need to be able to contextualize and use that knowledge effectively.
10. Responding well to setbacks:  We all identify this as an important skill in children.  It even shows up on standards-based elementary report cards.  I think it’s equally valuable for adults: the ability to work through any crisis without giving up and without losing your head.   In the words of Judge Smails:

It’s easy to grin, when your ship comes in,
And you feel you’ve got the stock market beat,
But the man worthwhile, is the man who can smile,
When his pants are too tight in the seat!

I know I’ll think of at least 2-3 more over the next few hours now that my motor is going…

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I presented at NECC Unplugged today in a very noisy but welcoming Blogger’s Cafe.  My topic was, “Grassroots Technology Change, or: Stop Telling People What to Do.”  I spent a long time preparing a long text for a 10-minute “TED-type” talk.  When the time came, I plugged in my mic and opened the floodgates.  It was hard to stay focused on the text and hard to keep people engaged with so many people walking past and so many conversations going on around the room.  But more clapped than booed  (OK, no one booed) and at least one attendee came up afterwards to congratulate me and discuss.  It was over before it began but I’m glad I did it.  Click here to view the complete version of that long text.

The weirdest moment occured as I was waiting to present and took a casual look around the room.  The woman sitting next to me was reading this blog!  So strange to see your writing on someone else’s screen…

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Last week I had the pleasure of hearing George Siemens discussing the challenges involved in organizational change. Some very thought-provoking ideas from our neighbor to the north. What I keep coming back to is a comment that one audience member made, something along the lines of, “how can we teach kids in our classrooms when they are constantly being bombarded with information from the many devices and media to which they are connected 24/7?” There was some nodding in the room as he said it. And it’s a complaint I hear frequently when I talk to teachers about kids’ infatuation with technology and their need to stay constantly connected. How can we compete?

Yet as with so many of these criticisms that are frequently leveled at the younger generation, I’m finding it helpful to turn it around and ask the opposite about “us” - the old folk. Why are we so obsessed with being the center of attention? Why does it all have to be about us? Perhaps the real question to be asking as this rising floodwater of information makes its way up the walls of our classrooms is, “how can we allow our learning environments to be so impoverished, so stale, so univocal?”

I couldn’t help thinking as I drove back to work after Siemens’ talk that for so long our classrooms have been so many little Gilligan’s Islands - places where everyone has a role and those roles are played out week after week with only the slightest variations in theme and content and scant few new ideas or ways of doing things. No one grows, no one changes, no one really learns. At the end of each week the Gilligans are still Gilligans, the Professors are still Professors, the nerds are still nerds and the “dumb” kids are still “dumb.” Or as Ani DiFranco says, to the goldfish in his bowl, “the little plastic castle is a surprise every time.” Scary as it may be, I think it’s time to open our classrooms to some of the surprises from the world outside and get off that island.

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Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about something that has nothing - and everything - to do with educational technology. I’ve been thinking about higher order thinking skills and the emphasis that educational reformers place on them. There is definitely a bias among progressive education critics against rote memorization and towards critical thinking, synthesis, and creativity. Let me start by saying that I would generally place myself in that group and I do think that it is important for students to build those skills throughout their educational careers.

Yet something’s been troubling me lately. In reflecting on teaching and learning in schools, I oftentimes find it helpful to consider my own learning experiences outside of the classroom. I think it’s healthy to be someone else’s student and to struggle with something that is new, foreign, exciting, maybe a little intimidating. My recent return to guitar lessons and time spent a few years ago studying karate have helped me to remember how simultaneously fulfilling and frustrating it can be to learn.

As I’ve thought about these experiences lately, though, I keep coming back to one fact: both rely to a great extent on rote memorization, “drill and kill.” In karate, there are the kata: memorized sequences of punches, kicks, blocks, and dodges performed against invisible opponents. To move from level to level, students must spend hours practicing and then perform these kata perfectly. There is no room for improvisation, no room for personal styling. In a sense, it is the most inauthentic assessment possible. You are fighting invisible people according to a script. What good would pinan-nidan kata do me if I launched into it after being jumped in a dark alleyway?

In music, there are the scales. Major, minor, pentatonic, dominant, and on and on. To what end? Who wants to hear a musician walk on stage and play the A major scale in five positions up and down the guitar neck? This is particularly ironic given the association of musicianship with creativity. Musicians are supposed to “just let go” and “play what you feel.” How does memorizing and tuning scales help with that?

I think in both cases, the masters would say that the benefit of these exercises is discipline and automaticity: after a few hundred times, those scales are in your fingers and you don’t need to think about what note you’re playing before you play it. With kata, the form of the kick is perfect because you’ve done it thousands of times. Internalizing the fundamentals and relegating them to muscle memory frees up mental resources to concentrate on the big picture: what are my opponent’s strengths and weaknesses? what mood am I trying to create in this solo? In a recent edition of the excellent Smartboard Lessons Podcast, Ben Hazzard and Joan Badger discussed an online poetry generator that, according to Ben, allows students to focus on content rather than struggling with form. It’s about giving kids a structure, a toolbox to help them be creative, rather than just pushing them out on stage and saying, “do something creative. Do something smart.”

Is there a valid connection here to what we do in K-12 classrooms? What are the implications for technology use in instruction? And if we decide that this is indeed an important activity to include in a meaningful way in our curricula, how do we integrate it to support and not displace those very-important higher order thinking skills at the top of Bloom’s Taxonomy? I think educators are right that students can quickly become bored and frustrated when faced with this kind of work. But maybe we can’t afford not to engage our students in these activities…

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This video was made in 1989 - a high school student’s vision of what school would be like 30 years down the road.  Well, here we are 18 years later.  What did he get right?  What did he miss?  I look at this video and see project-based learning, multimedia, content management systems, distance learning, student collaboration… but no teachers! 

 What an interesting exercise for students in today’s classrooms: Ask them to describe the classroom of the future.  I think that would tell us a lot about what students find exciting - and lacking - in the classrooms where they are learning today.

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