May/100
Puzzle or Mystery
I have been reading What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell, a collection of essays he wrote for The New Yorker. In one of the essays he discusses the downfall of Enron, using the metaphors of Puzzles and Mysteries (originally coined by Gregory Treverton) to compare how different people (financial analysts, prosecuting attorneys, undergraduate students, etc.) described the circumstances that led to one of the largest U.S. companies to declare bankruptcy and thousands of people to lose millions of dollars in investments. According to Gladwell, a puzzle is sender-dependent. That is, someone has a missing piece of information that, when shared with others, makes all the other pieces fall into place. He uses the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden as an example. Bin Laden is out there somewhere, and there are people who know where he is. When (or if) one of those people gives a clue as to where he is hiding (if in fact he stays in one place for any length of time) it will greatly facilitate the task of locating him. Mysteries, on the other hand, are receiver-dependent. While puzzles are defined as having too little information, mysteries have too much information and it is up to the person to filter, categorize and organize that information into a framework that can be understood. He cites the propaganda surrounding the German's development of the V-1 "Buzz Bomb," as a mystery because the Germans were giving an enormous amount of clues about the V-1 project through their propaganda as a way to maintain the country's morale. It was up to a group of experts who knew how to decode such messages to determine if (a) the bomb was even real or not, and (b) how urgent it was to find it. In this case, there was a lot of information about this weapon being sent out over the airwaves, but the common listener was not able to make sense out of it.
Along these lines, Gladwell's evaluation of the events that led to the Enron collapse is that they were a mystery, rather than a puzzle. The prosecutors argued that Jeffrey Skilling was withholding vital information from shareholders in order to make them think the company was making more money than it really was. In fact, what Skilling and his accountants did was create vast amounts of convoluted information through thousands of extremely complex investing schemes, each of which were legal (though not very ethical or wise) and openly available to anyone who wanted to read them (if in fact one finds reading thousands of pages of legal jargon fun). The issue was not that Enron withheld data; the problem was in the fact that there was so much data that no one could make sense of.
As I wrapped up my class on teaching, learning and assessment, these metaphors came to mind again. Is teaching and learning a puzzle or a mystery? Are the solutions to the problems in education (lack of student engagement, lack of a "thinking curriculum," performance gaps between different groups of students, just to name a few) still out there somewhere in Plato's "world of Forms" waiting to be discovered? Has the right genius not yet entered his or her doctoral program (ask a first-year doc student what he or she hopes to accomplish in grad school and you will see my humor in this)? Has the right technology or reading/math series or game or teaching strategy or professional development just not been invented yet? Or is it that teaching and learning is not a puzzle at all? Perhaps teaching and learning, collectively, is a mystery. The human condition is so complex, filled with competing relationships, environments, conflicting messages, emotions, struggles, beliefs, values, attitudes, desires and needs. If each of these factors interact with each other and lead to self-identity, isn't it safe to assume that these same factors will influence what my students and I bring to the learning table and what takes place between us? My message to my students was this: You have learned some skills that will help you teach, but don't underestimate the importance of your ability to make sense out of your teaching environment. I threw around terms like "scaffolding," "differentiation," "formative and summative assessment," "student engagement," and "student- and teacher-centered instruction," but I couldn't realistically expect each person to leave my class able to do those things proficiently (it was the first time most of them had ever heard those terms or attempted to operationalize them). What I hoped would happen is that defining, talking about and grappling with these concepts would make my students aware that the need for these concepts exists. In other words, I was trying to make these concepts part of the perceptual filter they will take with them into the classroom. They will develop their ability to differentiate, scaffold, etc. over time, but they must first recognize these as tools that will help them make sense out of a complex learning environment. Otherwise, they will, at best, be constantly chasing after the next great idea, and at worst, teach as they were taught as the world evolves around them. Teaching and learning is indeed a mystery, and teachers must know how to decode and work within their environment in a way that is sensitive to the students they are serving.
Mar/100
The Powerlessness of Some Stories
I am still thinking about stories, memory and learning. As I wrote earlier, with a quick scan down the list of former students I can recall the digital story each one of them created for my class. I have had former students tell me the same thing. They can remember the stories created by their classmates, recalling some of the most amazing details. When I read the names of my students, I could hear their voices, see the images in my head, remember the anecdotes they shared, and in some cases, associate the music they included as part of their projects.
This made me think of another project I was involved in while I was teaching these undergraduate classes. I spent the better part of two years of my life working with teachers and helping they and their students create short historical documentaries by mashing up archival material and user-generated content. The movies ranged from the Harlem Renaissance to the Great Migration, to the causes and effects of the Civil War. I worked with about a half-dozen teachers and approximately 150 students. I didn't spend as much time in those classrooms as I did with my preservice teachers, but I did spend enough time with them that when I scan the list of students from each class I can place a face with the name. Over the course of 3 very intense projects, I helped them make about 150 movies, give or take a few students who missed too much school or didn't use their time wisely.
Oddly, I could remember very little about the movies they created, even though they shared many similarities with the movies created by the preservice teachers. In contrast, I helped over 200 preservice teachers create digital stories over a 4-year span and I can remember every single story. As another contrast, the quality and form of the movies was quite different. This is not meant to be a knock on 6th graders, but undergraduates at the University of Virginia knew a little more about storytelling and expression than the 12-13 year olds I was working with. Here are some of the notable differences in their projects:
| 6th Graders |
Preservice Teachers |
| Chose images from a pool hand-picked by teacher | Took or found their own images |
| Most of the stories used the same images | Every story was completely unique |
| Narrative was an expository essay | Narrative was a story |
| Most of the narratives covered the exact same main points (convergent coverage of the topic) | Narratives were totally unique (divergent coverage of the topic) |
| Stories did not have music | Stories had music |
| Stories reflected what the teacher told them they had to remember | Stories reflected personal learning |
I know this is probably not a complete list, but this is what I was able to come up with after viewing a few of each type of story. Honestly, the 6th grade movies all sounded and looked the same. Yes, the topics were covered in different order, there was slight variation on the images used and the narrative was worded differently, but for the most part they were identical. Kind of like Kevin Costner movies.
This is an interesting topic to me, and I plan on covering it more in the future. I am leaving tomorrow for SITE, and I hope to have some good conversations about digital storytelling and other tech-related teaching strategies.
Mar/100
The Power of Stories
I have recently been reading (and re-reading) some interviews I conducted with former teacher education students at the University of Virginia. The purpose of the interviews was to ask each person, who also happens to be in his or her first year of teaching, which aspects of their educational technology coursework they are using now that they are full-time teachers. The information obtained from these interviews has been fascinating, but what is even more amazing is how much they remember from the Digital Storytelling project we did. Most of these teachers were in different sections of my class and made their digital stories about various (sometimes random) topics. Some of them did creative writing, while others told personal stories. Some of the movies were based on a topic from the school curriculum, while other themes will likely NEVER find their way into a textbook or unit of study.
I always made a big deal about these movies. I would put them all into one, long movie and added my own silly introduction and somewhat sentimental/inspiring conclusion. We brought in food and generally had a lot of fun watching everyone's story. It was always a great way to end the semester.
As I was reading through one of the interview scripts, it dawned on me that I actually remembered the movie made by every participant in my study (n=8). So, as an experiment I went back and looked at every class list from every ed. tech. class I taught at UVa. Sure enough, I could recall what every single person's movie was about, just from reading each name! Stories about fathers who immigrated from other countries, stories of working with special needs students, stories told from a dog's perspective, stories about stuffed animals that wandered away from their class on a field trip and discovered the UVa Grounds in the process. Stories using scanned photographs, stories that were hand-drawn, stories using images from a memorable experience, stories with roommates posing as the characters in the story. I was amazed and was briefly lost in the symphony of stories washing over my memory. I remember pitching digital storytelling as a great activity to engage students in writing, but it's now clear to me that the real power of stories was completely lost on me at the time. People connect, identify, place themselves in, and yes, even remember stories.
Has anyone else experienced this power in their own use of stories in the classroom?
Jan/100
Research and Evidence
From early on in my doctoral studies, I gravitated toward research that had practical implications. I am not suggesting that survey research is not practical, but for the most part it really didn't interest me that much. I was far more interested in studies that measured things that matter to teachers and students: time on task, engagement with the instruction, student artifacts and learning. As a teacher, these were the things that interested me. I had to be sensitive to each student as an individual and the different factors that directly influenced their lives, but I felt more compelled to make my classroom as exciting as possible than I did to try to change their lives at home or their attitudes toward school. This is just where I chose to put my time and energy.
So, when I see research that is really creative, unique or practical, I am suddenly interested. There are two such studies that I find fascinating. The first is a study about the influence of success or failure on perception. This could have easily been done with a research instrument (survey, questionnaire, etc.), but these researchers chose to measure the influence of success or failure (in this case, kicking field goals) by having participants adjust a miniature goal post to the size they thought was to scale after they had just attempted 10 field goals. People who kicked too low routinely adjusted the mini goal post too high; people who kicked wide right or left would judge the distance between the goal posts to be more narrow than they really are. Even more surprising, the more field goals a person made, the wider they adjusted the goal posts. It's fascinating to think that people standing side-by-side, based on their success at kicking field goals, were actually not looking at the same object. I really like this study because it accurately reflects how people might actually perceive objects or experiences with which they have had past success or failure. I used to notice something similar with my students in regard to reading ability. Those who struggled with reading were more likely to perceive words with a lot of letters as harder. I found them skipping past or mumbling long words, even if the words weren't really that hard to read (e.g., doorstop). I have no formal data, just my own experience, to back this up, but based on the findings of the field goal study it makes sense that this phenomenon would apply to other areas of life.
The second study, if one can call it that, is based on a series of VW commercials. The premise is that people will be more likely to do otherwise mundane or bothersome activities if they are made to be fun. You need to watch the videos to see what I am talking about. What I find interesting is the way they measure the influence of "fun" on the desired behavior: the number of people using a recycling bin, number of people using the stairs and the weight of the trash in a garbage can. Each of these outcomes measure exactly what the fun was meant to increase. No surveys or other validated instruments; just an increase in the thing that is meant to be increased.
Of course, student outcomes aren't as tidy as the number of people to use the stairs instead of the escalator in a 24-hour period. Concepts such as "understanding," "effort," and "engagement" are really hard to define, thus, are hard to measure. But there are some things that teachers would like see more of from their students that can be measured: time on task, attention to detail, and higher-order thinking. These two studies have breathed a little life into my interest in student outcomes and classroom-based research. They are innovative, creative and, at least to the people who are interested in perception or increasing civic-minded behavior, relevant. Research should be, if nothing else, relevant.
I can still hear the words of two of my professors ...
Professor A: By the time you leave my class, I want you all to be from Missouri. Why Missouri? Because it's the Show-Me State, and if you make claims based on your research, you need to show me. Your data should show me something.
Professor B: If something exists, then it exists in some amount and can, therefore, be measured.
I didn't realize this at the time, but these have become words to live by.
Sep/093
I won’t read this unless you print it
I recently read Keith Barton's 2005 article, "Primary Sources in History: Breaking Through the Myths" for about the upteenth time. It's a great article that talks about the misconceptions many teachers have about using primary source documents with their students. The belief many teachers have, especially those with little experience with primary sources themselves, is that students will learn more from reading/analyzing primary sources directly than they will from secondary sources. These teachers assign primary sources as reading assignments as if they were chapters from a history textbook. This is almost always confusing to students, and they rarely make the connections between documents that expert historians do. This has less to do with the documents or the students and more to do with the way expert historians approach primary sources. In order to make sense of primary source documents, historians employ certain strategies that help them contextualize the source and see where it fits with other sources written about similar events at around the same period in time. OK, make a mental note: historians, reading primary source documents, strategies.
Earlier today, Willy from edfoc.us referenced an article by Mark Bauerlein, in which he claims online reading is a literacy of a lesser kind. His premise is that people, especially students who have gorged themselves on media since they were able to sit upright, don't really read online text. They skim, click and scroll past vast expanses of text, mining out the words they want to see (my paraphrase). The whole argument Mr. Bauerline poses is reminiscent of Marhall McLuhan, who believed that different media would embed themselves with the message, affecting the way our brains would perceive the message. If this perspective were to be taken to the extreme, one could argue that it doesn't matter what a person reads online -- a classic poem, a love letter, a death threat, sports scores, War and Peace -- because the end result will be scanning, clicking and scrolling. A lesser kind of literacy. If people follow this line of logic -- and trust me, school adminstrators have been known to take it in hook, line and sinker -- then it's no wonder there is such a knee-jerk reaction to digital technologies.
In Mr. Bauerlein's defense, I have taught online classes for several years, and I know firsthand that many students don't read the course documents that could very well mean the difference between passing my class and failing it. These documents are online, and although I urge my students to print them off and read them carefully, I know they skim, click and scroll. Then they argue with me that I was unclear about the due date for a paper they failed to turn in on time. So, yes, online reading can be a problem, but would these students have studied the syllabus any closer had I handed them a printed copy? Probably not.
This brings me back to the problems associated with giving students historical documents. Regardless, of the potential to do more harm than good, there can be tremendous payoffs for student learning if teachers structure the activity appropriately and give their students strategies for decoding these documents. Strategies such as SOAPS, APPARTS and SCIM-C are all designed to give students a heuristic for analyzing primary sources. The same is true of reading instruction, where students are taught strategies for comprehending what they read. Teachers don't give first graders a pile of books, then complain that they don't know how to read, and this shouldn't happen with online text either.
What Willy addresses in his post is that new types of media -- digital text, in this case -- require different, and sometimes new, strategies for avoiding the pitfalls they introduce into the learning environment. Rather than demonize digital text, we should see it as a challenge that requires new ways of thinking about the problem. We don't approach other content areas without strategies for navigating through them, and online reading should be no different. Whether it's using new tools, employing new strategies or simply pointing out the pitfalls, online reading is here to stay and should be approached proactively.
Aug/090
My Self won’t stop following Me
I just browsed a really interesting book on autobiography in education. I plan on finding it at my school's library or through ILL because the Google Book only gave excerpts from each chapter. I have always been a believer in reflective practice in teacher education since my professors made me do it in college. They were successful in indoctrinating me. 
Seriously, self-reflection exposed a lot of "baggage" about my own experience as a student that, if left unexamined, could have led to some less than desirable outcomes as a teacher. In a nutshell, I was the guy who made good grades but never really thought much about what I was learning. I never made trouble for my teachers, but I never really made a difference in my school. I stood out because of my own talents, but I never really stood up for anything. Seth Godin touches on this in an insightful post. Schooling is about learning the ropes and working the system; whereas, learning is about getting it. I don't honestly think I got it until I was a sophomore in college.
In many ways, I still don't get it. However, I am content to know the difference between what I get and what I don't get. The things I don't get that I still want to get, I am pursuing. The things I don't get that I don't mind if I never get, I am content to drop them. Or at least shelf them until I have a desire to get them again someday.
OK, enough of that. The reason I brought this up at all is because I am really wrestling with the kinds of things my students should be reflecting on, and how they should be reflecting on them. For me, blogs are great but they don't work for everyone. For me, transparency is OK, but not everyone feels comfortable with it. I want my preservice teachers to have the freedom to admit when they are struggling to find the "teachable moments" in their field experiences, but I want them to look past the schooling game so many of them have played for so long and think about learning. On the other hand, I don't necessarily want to push every student toward the "deeper experience," as one of my online students so accurately put it this summer. Some of them may not be at that point in their learning, and it just adds unnecessary pressure when students think they need to uncover the drama in an experience that was probably pretty bland to begin with. Frankly, my K-12 experience was devoid of very many light bulb or a-ha moments, so a dramatic account of my school days would be predominantly fiction.
This gets me back to the scaffolding issue. With a little modeling, some constructive formative feedback along the way and a clear target for the kinds of things they should be looking for in the classrooms in which they observe or teach, I think reflective practice can be, and is, very effective. I know entire dissertations have been written on this topic, so I haven't even scratched the surface. But it's a timely thing to be thinking about as I start my classes next week.
