Re-Siever

Three more sleeps until school starts. Four until the students arrive, actually. I am feeling a bit jumpy, but still ready to bounce into a new year.

Teacher Beliefs

I have been reading a lot about student engagement and motivation as I prepare for my master’s degree action research, and the school year generally. I keep re-sifting the  research, and many interesting ideas are getting stuck in the sieve. My attention is being drawn to the idea of teacher beliefs. Two big ideas: a teacher’s sense of efficacy–my confidence about how effective my teaching will be to bring about student achievement, and a teacher’s expectations–my beliefs about my students’ ability to learn.

Our Identity, Our Mission

Here’s inspiration for a good beginning:

Each student’s heart must be caught up in the passion and enjoyment of learning and reading. This attitude is a mindset that must be nurtured daily. Time for this cultivating of spirit is set into every day’s lesson plans. It is imperative that I teach each student that they can learn, regardless of whatever they believe hinders them…Teaching students to know they can learn requires that I couple an academic sense of identity with a sense of mission. This begins the first moment I meet my pupils. (A. Isennagle in At-Risk Students: Portraits, Policies, Programs, and Practices, 1993 pp. 373-74)

Intention

Bud Hunt wrote An Open Letter to Teachers reminding us of the essentials; it’s going up on the wall in my classroom this week. It’s rich and full of encouragement–please read it. Here’s the part that gets stuck in my throat:

I wish you well. I ask you to be brave and humble and kind and tenacious and wise and caring and gentle and fierce. We so need you to do well… Do good stuff.

That’s what I hope for my students too, because we so need them to do well. And I hope–I intend–that my expectations and efficacy will show that I believe to the core that they will.

Tags: beliefs, Bud Hunt, engagement

Now, if you could be a fly on the wall of any one teacher blogger, in whose class would you land and why?

I often find myself wishing there was a way to watch people in action with their students. You get a sense of what they are about through their posts: über-organized, creative, resourceful, kind, funny, engaging, reflective, generous, approachable–or not. But wouldn’t it be neat to observe for a day? What would you learn? Some of your assumptions would be confirmed, but there’d be surprises, too.

Given the chance, I’d perch on the wall of Clarence Fisher’s class in Snow Lake, Manitoba. I’d rub my little forelegs together with glee. I’d be somewhat familiar with what goes on in his room, because Clarence is quite transparent about his practice. His podcasts from the K-12 online conference and his ustream presentations say a lot about what he believes about his students and what they can do. His recent pictures of his classroom (taken in that surreal time before the students arrive) had me (and Brian Crosby) wanting to channel him. I will, and am going to post pics of my work, too.

Clarence teaches roughly the same age group as I do, and he’s a generalist teacher, as I am, so I think I’d recognize many of his strategies, but I’d learn a bundle. I want to see how the learning is orchestrated. He talks about being a network administrator for his kids–helping them grow their personal learning networks. Does that promote student efficacy and engagement? Bet it does.

What I’d likely see:

• hive-like activity: not all doing the same thing at the same time, but a sense of purpose none the less
• students showing respect for each other’s opinions, but still willing to challenge them
• peer mentoring and coaching, students teaching the teacher
• students comfortable with thinking, willing to take risks
• students engaged with content as amplifiers not mirrors, as David Warlick describes

Clarence’s first unit on Global Lives sounds like a great hook, and he’s injected rich and relevant content and activities for his students to chew on. I’d love to be a kid in that class–forget being a teacher.

It is tempting to whine, I’ll admit. I have one computer in my room, so I can’t reproduce the circumstances (1 to 1.5) Clarence has. I’m 1 to 30. But, I now have a data projector + iwb and internet access in my classroom which is a universe more than I had four months ago, so I’ll go with that, and work for more.

So thanks for inspiration, Clarence. Thanks for modeling and sharing. Have a great year.

And fellow voyeurs: where would you like to be a fly on the wall?

Image: Green Bottle Fly by jpctalbot Creative Commons license

Tags: Brian Crosby, Clarence Fisher, David Warlick, teaching

Merlin Mann (prolific guy, and very funny) writes, among other things, 43 Folders. According to his site, Merlin’s “practical and encouraging advice has helped thousands of professionals to regain their time and attention — to make better decisions, both in the moment and at a strategic level.” Gimme some of that! I have just begun to dig through his vault of stuff.

Here’s one post that caught my eye: What Makes a Good Blog? His first point is:

1. Good blogs have a voice. Who wrote this? What is their name? What can I figure out about who they are that they have never overtly told me? What’s their personality like and what do they have to contribute… What tics and foibles fascinate make me about this blog and the person who makes it? Most importantly: what obsesses this person?

Scott McLeod, at Dangerously Irrelevant, talks about the uncovering of personality through the social web. “Chink by chink, brick by brick, pixel by pixel – the picture becomes more clear and complete. Is this someone with whom I want to connect? Is this someone with whom I want to converse? Is this someone from whom I want to learn?”

I notice the blogs I go back to have a voice, a personality revealed through the style, content, and tone of the author. I have been enjoying Michele Martin’s The Bamboo Project blog, particularly because her voice is honest. Bloggers whose humanity, not infallibility, shine through their posts keep me reading and learning (though, yes, I admit to reading bloggers whose arrogance pushes me out of the room). Michele’s latest post, In A Panic, points to a side of life most of us keep hidden: dealing with stress and anxiety. This is so familiar:

My first inclination when I feel the panic rise is to stuff it back down, like an inappropriate relative who pops up at a gathering to say embarrassing things in front of the guests. I keep smiling and nodding and speaking over my panic, as though by pretending that it’s not there, it will decide to go away. Sometimes it does. Usually, though, it’s simply biding it’s time, waiting for the moment when my attention is turned elsewhere.

I’d like to say that with the years of teaching I have under my belt that I don’t get worried at this time of year, but I do. Just twelve days ’til school starts, and I am feeling the surge of panic–I don’t feel ready. Yes, I am excited, but…well, it’s the same worry about the unknown that kids experience too.

Perspective and optimism have helped me in the past: I will get through this! I remember telling myself during pregnancy that the only way out is through (which is both literally and figuratively true). And then there is the voice of Dory (Finding Nemo) reminding me to “just keep swimming, just keep swimming–that’s what we do, we swim, swim, swim.”

So, on blogging: what aspects of a blogger’s revealed personality most interest you?

And on school: how will you stay afloat this year?

Photo: Why so glum?? by bensonkua Creative Commons license

Tags: blogging, Merlin Mann, Michele Martin, personality, Scott McLeod, teaching

Find my degree now! Please!

I am looking ahead to 14 months or so remaining in my master’s program. The action research piece starts this Fall. I have wrestled my question into focus (I think) and now comes the reading, the designing, the writing, the thinking and doing. And as Lady Diana was so fond of saying, “It’s all rather daunting.”

But who knew?

Apparently I can bypass all this and Find my degree now. Just a drop down box away. Yippee! Technology rocks!

Tags: Learning, technology

I have been pondering the ingredients of School 2.0. The School 2.0 Manifesto wiki has me considering what makes a nutritious, hearty, and inviting mix for learners.

One of the elements of the learning stew I have been serving up in class is drama. I am really excited by the enthusiasm and deep learning that comes from enactment (drama) strategies. Jeff Wilhelm’s book Action Strategies for Deepening Comprehension got me going. All of his books do. The strategies he describes, like role plays, tableaux, and mantle of the expert, hook kids and connect them to content in an active and personal way; they play with the language, the ideas, the images. They explore the possibilities of what if? and get closer to the answers of how come?

In examining the question “Is Web 2.0 going to lead to School 2.0?”, David Warlick says in one of my favourite posts,

Students stop being mirrors, and instead become amplifiers. Their job is not merely to reflect what they encounter, but to add value to it. Content and skills are no longer the end product, but they become raw materials, with which students learn to work and play and share. Information is captured by the learner, processed, added to, remixed, and then shared back, to be captured by another learner/teacher and reprocessed. Each exchange and improvement not only runs on the energy of students (learner/teacher) curiosity and intrinsic need to play, work, and communicate information, but it also generates energy, which the teacher (teacher/learner) channels.

Warlick is not talking about drama strategies at all, but he could be. I find it powerful how neatly his ideas transfer from technology to other active, engaging methods that don’t necessarily involve or require a tech element. Project-based learning, inquiry, and math explorations come to mind.

So here is where my [limited] stew metaphor takes me, for now at least:

Technology is not the carrot that students chew own (technology as enticing add-in), nor is it the bowl that contains the learning (technology as sole vehicle for learning). Technology is one of the spoons that stirs the mix and lets learners serve understanding and experience to themselves and others.

Hmmm. Metaphors have a habit of getting away on me. Better get out while the gettin’s good.

pot-au-feu italian by shok Creative Commons license

Tags: David Warlick, Jeff Wilhelm, metaphor, School 2.0