Right Message, Wrong Reasons - Not Reconvening InSchool Learning in June

 Right Message, Wrong Reasons - Not Reconvening InSchool Learning in June

         

              I am sure the decision was not an easy one.  For several weeks beforehand, the press was filled with articles about the need to see students back in school before the end of the school year. All that the politicians were watching for was the case count to go down and some appearance of the fact that there would be NO uptick in Covid cases if students went back to school. There was pressure from the teachers’ unions to keep schools closed until all the teachers had had their second shots. There was pressure from the parents to ensure no schools opened until it was safe for the students to be there all day and then come home. There were all the calls about the mental health of the students and the obvious decline in learning due to being at home and online.  To say that the issue was contentious was obviously stating the obvious,

              However, as all of these events were playing out on my devices and on the television, I was thinking what a crazy way to bring an end to the educational response to Covid 19.  I do not say that the cost to parents and students was not overwhelming. I do not argue against the problems teachers would have with having to be back in school full time.  But what bothers me was the fact that I never ever read anyone talking about the timing of the move.

             I am sitting here, in my air-conditioned office at the end of an extremely hot and humid day and there have been more than a few of them already these past two weeks.  I find myself reflecting on the times I was in a classroom on days like this in this very month when absolutely nothing was going right.  In order to understand where I am coming from, those of you reading this have to realize that the vast majority of schools in Ontario and other provinces lack any real kind of air conditioning equipment. Schools were built with the assumption that during the heat of the summer, they would be empty.  They have great furnaces and plenty of windows, but even on days like today, with all the windows open, if there is no breeze, the classrooms can become as hot as Hades.  How do you think teachers or students responded in the past to conditions like this?  They slacked off.  Students knew that heat waves meant summer was upon them, which meant cookouts, and backyard pools, and family trips, and fun riding on bicycles with their friends.  It meant freedom.  For teachers, it meant learning had ceased.  Students have limits to their ability to concentrate on anything academic when their minds are on other things and teachers are not miracle workers.  

            Pandemic or no pandemic, come the heatwaves of June, students are done.  We take our students outdoors and read or draw or sing songs or make up skits and try to find links to the curriculum constantly. We show movies in the classroom and struggle to keep students behaving and in their seats.  It might have been a long time since I was in a classroom, but I know that we have not been retrofitting all our schools with heat exchanges and air conditioners.  Planning has to take this into account, no matter how hard we wish we didn’t have to consider such mundane things.  Imagine how much harder it would be to start trying to get kids back into school for a week or two or three now and deal with the issues of heat and poor learning and lack of discipline and so forth. It is far better to aim to start in September, right off the bat, with specific plans designed to help create the kind of classroom culture where effective learning will take place. It is imperative that boards make sure they have at least one or two people per school who will spend their time hunting down former students who ought to be in school and working with the families to get every child back in school.

           Make no mistake about it.  It would be great to have kids in school now, for sure, but to what end. It would be better to start a week or two earlier, before Labour Day, to make sure all schools are fully staffed and ready to proceed with the hard task ahead of rebuilding student classrooms and school populations and ensuring young minds are ready, willing, and able to begin anew.  In September, we all of us are programmed to take hot days into account and students know they are there to learn and so they do not expect to enjoy any dog days.  Teachers are primed and ready to go.  It is part of our routines as classroom teachers. September means back to the bell and the classroom environment.  We will begin in September as we normally would.  How much better a start could we possibly ask for?  

Interleaving

 

INTEREAVING

 

              I saw this word in a posting I read today about something happening in classrooms and I immediately realized that it is a new way of referring to Integration.  When I was a classroom teacher, I automatically taught by integrating subjects.  We don’t learn history or geography as we are growing up and away from school. We learn about the world and its changes over time.  It is only when we are in school that it becomes first Social Studies and then History and Geography.  When we are studying music and learning how to read music we are confronted with terms like quarter and half notes but of course that has nothing to do with mathematics, right?  When I taught design in my art classrooms, I never thought to refer to patterning which is a strand on the mathematics curriculum.  We don’t think about subjects, we think about topics, or concepts whether they be from one area of a school curriculum or another.

              To help understand where I am going with this, think about browsing on the Internet. From the earliest days of the World Wide Web, students or most adults would sit in front of a computer screen and start in one location or web site and then perhaps click on another hot link which would take them somewhere else entirely, but it was the way their minds were working.  I might start reading about penguins living at the tip of South America but then I’d hit a link about Chile because all of a sudden something came to mind that I was interested in and so I’d click to find out and then I might read about the political situation while reading about Chile and find I was curious whether or not it was the same in Peru because I met someone who came from there.  Our minds follow our interests and our curiosities and if we are forced to NOT do that, some of us would lose interest because our minds are stuck somewhere else.  So, integration or InterLeaving follows the nature way in which we think which would mean it follows the way we learn, because we remember that which is of interest to us.  

              I always tried to integrate my teaching.  If I was teaching about flight, it was not enough to teach about the early experiments of the Wright Brothers, but to read about Daedalus and his attempt at flying and what the Greeks thought about attempting to fly and then to teach about birds and how come birds are able to fly and then about perhaps the principals of flight and then some history and the experiments and so forth.  By doing that, students are kept on their toes.  They are not just making notes, not just conducting experiments, not just reading books, not just watching videos, not just sitting in their desks.  AS I write this, you can perhaps see where the leaving part of InterLeaving comes from.  It is important to teach not according to subjects but according to themes.  That is how our minds work.

              Finally, one only has to think about the sciences that are now so important to our confrontation with the future. We talk about AstroPhysics, BioTechnology, 

BioChemistry, GeoPolitics and so forth.   Each of those began as separate fields of study, but we have come to see that, we cannot really understand one field without thinking about how it relates to other fields.  Interleaving is the way our world works and so too the way our classrooms should work. 

Culturally Responsive Teaching

 CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE TEACHING

 

            One of the unintended consequences of our world evolving into a global community is the necessity to teach students wherever they are about the rest of the world and how cultures differ.  Naturally, because we live in world connected by so many different ways to communicate, we also have students in our classrooms quite often from all over the world.  One can go to even the most far-off places on the planet and meet kids and adults speaking different languages, eating, or wanting to eat different foods and wanting to pick up news from home in a multiplicity of languages.  But cafes, restaurants, tourist spots, schools, bring people together and that cultural diffusion filters into our classrooms.  If we want to make each and every student feel as if they belong so that we as teachers can make a difference in their lives for good, then we need to figure out ways to make our teaching culturally responsive.  What exactly does that mean though.

           Well, first of all, I think it means not painting all of our students with one brush.  For example, since so many students eat at school and share tables as well as conversation, from a very young age, we see children looking at what everyone puts in their mouths.  Gone are the days when every kid had a peanut butter sandwich, some cookies, and an apple perhaps.  There will be any number of different foodstuffs and we should encourage discussions both in and out of class about what the different foods are and where they come from.  Perhaps it would be fun to have a bring your lunch to school day for everyone and encourage children to share what they would normally be eating if they were still where their families were from and what some of the events around lunch time might be. The object of the lessons would be to encourage everyone to share and come to see that although their lunch stuffs might be different, they are still eating for nourishment and pleasure.

             Another way could be to have opportunities for children to share what memories they have from their home countries.  Some of those memories might be harder or more embarrassing to share and this is where cultural sensitivity would come in on the part of the teacher.  He or she has to know what life was like for their students BEFORE they joined their class and ensure that they feel as comfortable as is possible.  Some students might have come from war-torn countries, Others perhaps left their extended family behind.  But we owe it to our students, wherever they have come from and whatever the circumstances of their current lives, to make them feel accepted and welcomed not just by us but by our students as well.

             This list could go on and on, but I will focus on reading materials briefly here since I have addressed this before.  In order for children to want to read and to learn from their reading choices, we should try and find books to include in our libraries, in the classroom and in the school, that share a point of view different from our own. I have made l it my business to read some of the most current literature written by authors telling stories of poverty in India or escape from Syria or dealing with death in a new home in America. There are so many books written by authors who are non-white, African or Asian, who have something important to teach us about life from their points of view.  We can encourage our students, young and old, to read widely about life in distant places and see how although dress and foods and shelter might be different, kids are kids and growing up presents the exact same challenges regardless of where we are.  

          Being culturally responsive means attempting to see the world through the eyes of someone not from the same background as ourselves.  The beauty of that exercise is not only that we learn about different worlds and different cultures and so forth, but it makes us more tolerant because we are becoming broader minded.  That’s the most we can hope for if we wish to continue to enjoy life in a democracy where every person counts and is entitled to be treated fairly and justly.

Whether to Teach Cursive Writing or Keyboarding

 

 

 

Whether to Teach Cursive Writing or Keyboarding

           

           I noticed a headline today in one of the newsletters I get on various educational topics that referred to this long-standing debate that exists not only within our profession, but also amongst the wider parent community.  There are many who believe that schools should still be teaching children how to write using cursive script and with a pen.  Obviously, the alternative, which has much currency in the community is to teach typing instead.  From the very beginning of the digital revolution in elementary schools, there was this raging debate about students and their writing or not writing.

            When we look at the adult population, which I do when I go shopping, I see just as many people who have hand-written grocery lists as those who have handheld devices with lists that they are referencing.  I haven’t really noticed the difference between the two groups in ages, but I am going to guess that the younger the shopper, the more likely they are to have a list on a hand-held device.  That would make sense because that is how they engage with the world.  When they finish school, they do everything on their devices.  I don’t think any reader of this current blog entry would question whether or not this is true. I am an elderly educator now and I do as much as I can on my devices, but I still keep notes and lists on pieces of paper.  It is an old, ingrained habit.

            In order to think about what position to take today on this argument, I think we need to think about what role cursive writing plays in our daily lives. When you think about it, there aren’t many ways that anyone, even the elderly like me, sit down and write out in long-hand a letter or a speech or anything like that.  Everything we do, we do it on a tablet or a computer or a smart phone. When we engage with paper, it is to print out or make notes about something.  I write my lists, but I could just as easily print them out. This brings me to what I think we should be doing in the classroom.

           I believe we need to teach proper printing skills to encourage young people to put away their devices and engage with paper and a desk.  Once they have learned to print properly, then we can move to typing skills.  Typing skills are not easy to teach at a young age and most teachers are not able to teach others how to type. I learned that in Grade 10 and I’m forever grateful.  But most don’t know how and so students learn how to seek and punch from a very young age.  I don’t think it matters much about typing because you never hear someone young complain that they wish they could type, and you never see anyone NOT use their devices because they can’t type.  

         So, what is really needed is an educational campaign aimed at the older folks among us who think that because they learned how to write, their children and grandchildren should be able to do that as well.  But there are just some skills that no longer should be taught in school. They have run their usefulness out.  

Attributes Outweigh Skills

 

Attributes Outweigh Skills

 

             The first time I was forced to confront this concept was when I began teaching for Niagara University which was now almost 15 years ago.  One of my friends and colleagues at Niagara had been advocating for the use of this concept in conjunction with the assessment of teaching skills as a measure of future success in the classroom.  He argued, and it didn’t take me long to come to agree with his position, that the successful teacher needed to have the dispositions required to be a good teacher.  If you look at the graphic above, it shouldn’t be too hard to understand just what was being referred to.  

             When I became used to my position at Niagara and had become less of a novice in the program, I found it very easy to argue the case to my students that it was one thing to know how to write a good lesson plan and how to assess students using tests or rubrics, but the difference between a successful classroom teacher and the opposite was the attitude towards students and teaching that one brought to one’s assignment, regardless of the class to be taught.  We would talk about what it meant to be born to teach and they soon realized that what that really meant was having the affects, the dispositions towards the other, towards the student, towards the task that made it possible to reach out to a student and have that hand accepted willingly and happily.  

           Over the years, it seems to me, the argument to be made for affect coming before skills has only gotten stronger. When you think about why some students are thriving online today given the need to do all their learning online, those who are the most highly motivated to be successful   are those who are taking the steps necessary to figure out the process of being online.  The teachers who seem to be doing the best are those who like teaching to begin with and will do anything that makes it easier for them to reach their students and help them learn.  If you want to help your students, you will find a way.  The old adage that where there is a will, there is a way more than applies here.  

           In conjunction with this conversation though, it is crucial to talk about grit.  This was not something we talked about a generation ago, but it is certainly more than necessary to identify it in the students and teachers of today.  To explain why, let me point out that when our kids were small I used to say that I had a weed and an orchid for children.  My orchid needed a hot house, a very narrow spectrum of conditions in which she was able to thrive, but our weed did just fine wherever he was, whomever he was with and whatever he was asked to do.  Our orchid though had grit.  She didn’t come by it honestly or naturally, but she acquired it because of the challenges she had as a teenager. She learned how to pick herself up by her bootstraps and move forward.  

             This to me is the most important of all the dispositions, whether we are talking about teachers or students. Teachers need to have it so that, no matter what happens today, tomorrow, they will be back eager to succeed and do better than the day before. I students need to have it so that they cn learn from their mistakes and move on.   Today, more than ever, we need to know how important it is to regroup and try again. I used to tell my students about the little engine tha could.  For all of us, it is worth remembering that if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.         

 Making Thinking Visible

 

             Recently, there has been an uptick in the number of professional articles that refer to thinking skills and how to encourage them in the classroom.  It is well known that thinking and pondering about topics and subjects leads to the individual student reaching for connections which in turn contributes to deep learning.  Deep learning is what happens when new connections are made to concepts already existent in the functioning brain.  For example, let’s say we ask a group of students to create bridges using popsicle sticks. This is a challenge that often presents itself in classrooms.  So, you provide the class with the popsicle sticks and the glue guns and the spaces to work and then you set them to work.  Sometimes, you can precede this activity with some pictures of bridges in various places and class discussions about how they are constructed and what they think makes the bridges strong.  This would create an activity for students to THINK about what they are seeing. We have to draw attention to what we want them to think about, but then, in classroom discussions, students will build on each other’s thoughts and contribute ideas. 

             Just talking about why bridges are strong or weak is not sufficient to enable students to remember the reasons or to create new learning pathways to support their ideas.  You have to write things down for them because some students will not remember and others won’t grasp the concepts at all. But this is all normal and natural. So then you can encourage a student to make lists for the students and allow them to specify how to write the concepts down.  By enlisting student scribes, you are enabling more students to engage with the thought process. Right there is an example of how we are making thinking visible.  You cannot rush this activity nor should you because you want the thinking to become abstract.  When students begin to create images in their heads of what you are talking about, you are contributing to deep learning. 

          The next step is to enable the students to experiment with their ideas.  They have begun to think about what makes for bridge strength and what factors might be necessary to consider when functioning as an engineer and planning a building.  Lest you are reading this and thinking that this is above and beyond any class, consider that there are all kinds of bridges and all kinds of designs and just enumerating all the factors that limit how and what to build is cultivating engagement with the students and thinking about the challenge.  All kids like to build things and they are not afraid to take risks and that is precisely what you want. You want them to experiment.  So from here, I would suggest that you turn to the actual building of the bridges with popsicle sticks.  You work with the students to enumerate how to consider a structure successful either using a rubric or a checklist, but they are evolving a mental determination of just what the challenge entails.  Then you let them go to work.  You encourage group work because, you tell them, no one works on their own anymore.  They will understand that these things are done in groups but you talk about why that is so.  You want them to understand that when we work in teams, we put ideas together and we become better because we all have individual ideas. 

           So after giving them lots of time to play around and experiment, you lt them talk about why some of them were successful, somewhat, and some were not. Not every group will be successful, but that is what you want, because you want them to be able to debrief, to talk about what they did right and what they did wrong and why some of them are more successful than others.  Hopefully, you will allow just as much time afterwards to talk about the results as you did to talk about the planning. Obviously, everything has gone from abstract to real but while they are now dealing with real bridge building and the problems that arose, they are deepening their knowledge.  They will be thinking about what they accomplished and why and analyzing what went right and what went wrong. This is also deep thinking.  

           This is what it means to use problem-based learning to help students acquire knowledge, skills and affect but it is also a very real and fun way for students to actually visualize their thinking.  You can use this same strategy over and over again and the kids will remember the challenges that you present to them while they are acquiring knew knowledge, skills and affect.  The only way this works is if you do it over and over again.  It becomes part of their learning repertoire that way.  

Teacher Shortages Leading to Change

Teacher Shortages Leading to Change

 

             Everywhere you turn and everything you read is pointing to a crisis in not one but two professions as a result of the pandemic.  This past week, every doctor and every nurse interviewed on the course of the pandemic has indicated an increased level of frustration with the public and how it is refusing to acknowledge the severity of the situation caused by the variants of the virus.  While hospitals are overwhelmed everywhere, teachers are complaining about the workload placed upon them as a result of having to pivot back and forth between in-school and at home learning.  Everyone is tired, no more so than the women in the medical and teaching professions because they are the ones bearing the brunt of having to be at home with their kids and teaching or straddling the two things.  The reality is that, when this is all over, hospitals and doctors will return to a more normal pace of life and the burdens of medical care will diminish, at the same time as some of the professionals will quit, due to burn out.  While the burdens will diminish and retirements will occur at the same time in those fields, work will increase when schools return to full function because there will be deficits to catch up on in students at every turn and on every level. There will however be huge gaps in the workforce to meet the needs of the schools.

             Thanks to my doctoral studies, I did a bit of reading on the unforeseen consequences of technological change.  What was and still is apparent is that every change forces more changes and often in ways one was unable to predict before.  This is also going to be true of schools.  And I think that the changes that will come are those that needed to change anyways.  

             Take for example online learning.  It has become apparent that online learning can, in some instances and cases, admirably fill in for in-class instruction, but there is still a lot to be learned about when it works and when it doesn’t.  Sadly, however, as several editorials have indicated already, politicians looking for ways to cut costs are already seeing online learning as a money saver.  It was suggested two decades ago that online learning would lead to cuts in the numbers of teachers required to support and educational system.  But what will take much longer to learn from will be how teaching has to change to meet the moment.  For example, online learning works if there is an increase in the contacts individually between teacher and student.  You can’t just put 30 or 40 students in front of a teacher online and expect good things to happen.  You can put 20 kids into a class with one teacher who reaches out and gets to know all his or her students deeply and intimately, in terms of their learning needs.  This our current teachers are not prepared for. So, here there will be years of instability while professionals learn how to make on-line and in-class learning work successfully.  

             There are also lessons to be learned about ages and stages of students and how to mix in-class and on-line learning depending upon the child’s needs.  Older students will need to learn how to be more self-directed and younger students will have to be introduced to online learning slowly and gradually.  This will mean changes to how we prepare teachers for their careers in education and how we prepare administrators for the physical changes that will accompany the changes in how we bring schools and teachers together. Change is coming but it will not be easy and society will need to be patient. Inevitably the changes will be good once they are fully. Implemented, but until then……..there will be lots of bumps on the road.