“A good teacher is never done with their preparation—grading, evaluations, planning—because they are always trying to reinvent, improve, and inspire.”
Dr. David Carlson, Duke University ’92 (2002)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
Back in the early 1980s, while living in my hometown of Madison, Wisconsin, I fell in with a group of doctoral candidates in the genetics department of the University of Wisconsin. I was and remain no genius when it comes to science. At that time, the lab in which these scholars worked, under the direction of a man named Fred Blattner, was on the cutting edge of genetic research. So perhaps only initiates into that world really understood what was going on in the Blattner Lab, as it was known.
The fellow who introduced me to this circle, Tim Durfee, remains a close friend of mine. So I was delighted this week when he sent me a PDF from the Genome Web on a new technology, developed at Columbia University, to bring what was once the arcane science of DNA sequencing into middle school and high school classrooms. Tim will develop the analytical software for this endeavor, and he is clearly excited about it.
For this is, in fact, exciting: bringing real-world scientific inquiry into the high school classroom can only be a good thing. If this interests you, you may want to have a look at this PDF: PlayDNA Works on Bringing DNA Sequencing, Big Data Analysis to Secondary Schools.
In my classroom, I rely almost exclusively on the Socratic method in my teaching for a variety of reasons, the most salient of them is simply that students who are talking in class–i.e. answering questions–are also thinking. As Daniel Willingham, the cognitive scientist at the University of Virginia (with whose work all teachers ought to familiarize themselves) succinctly puts it, “memory is the residue of thought.” If you want your students to retain what you teach them, ask questions that compel–or, one hopes, impel– them to think about the matter at hand in your classroom.
A couple of years ago I read Education for Judgement: The Art of Discussion Leadership by C. Roland Christenson, David A. Garvin, and Ann Sweet and published at the Harvard Business School Press. It’s one of the better books I’ve read for my own professional development, and I highly recommend it. To give you a sense of the riches this book contains for those interested in developing their skills in leading class discussion, I offer as this week’s Text this taxonomy of questions from its pages.
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. Since this isn’t my work, I seek no peer review of it (and in any case, it seems like a safe bet that this material has been peer-reviewed by some of the best people in education).
If your school is dealing with rules concerning cell phones, and more specifically, smartphones, then I wish you luck. I won’t win any friends with the administration of my school in noting–as I have to the administration itself–that it has failed in its attempt to arrive at a sensible policy regarding these devices. In fairness to the principal and assistant principals of this institution, this is a very complicated and challenging area in which to formulate disciplinary code.
Educators can muster many reasons for prohibiting the use of smartphones in school. At the very least, they are a serious distraction and impede learning. It now appears that these devices may impair cognition and stunt brain development, perhaps permanently. For some time I’ve been waiting for the science on this, particularly science that teachers can use to design teaching activities that raise students’ consciousness about the risks theytake when they use smartphones excessively. My own sense is that until we educate students about the hazards of these devices, we don’t stand a chance of competing with them, let alone assisting students in developing their own understanding of the hazards of the excessive use of smartphones.
So, lo and behold, this morning when I woke up, I heard a short squib on the BBC about the problems associated with excessive social media use–which is the mainstay, I expect, of patterns of smartphone use among adolescents. I can’t find the exact link, but if you search “BBC Social Media Report” in your preferred internet browser, you’ll find that the BBC has done an comprehensive job covering this.
After getting myself to Lower Manhattan on the 5 train, I turned on my computer, opened Diane Ravitch’s Blog, scrolled down a few posts, and found that she posted yesterday this excellent post from Edward Berger (which actually links to a podcast) on the dangers of excessive screen use among children.
In my not especially humble, but nonetheless formed-from-direct-experience, opinion, smartphones are one of the major educational issues (and this, remember, in an environment where someone as manifestly unqualified as Betsy DeVos can be named Secretary of Education) facing teachers. Until we develop pedagogy around the cognitive hazards of excessive screen time, we will play a losing game with smartphones.
Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes
Tagged cognition/learning/understanding, professional development
Elsewhere on this blog, I have written and commented on the issue of poverty and cognition. Friends and colleagues of mine across the country have complained that this is a forbidden issue in professional development sessions in their schools; administrators don’t want to hear about the struggles of poor kids in the classroom, preferring instead to flog the issue of educators’ “accountability.” If you been subjected to this (it happens, alas, in the institution in which I currently serve, as it has in others in this city where I’ve had the misfortune to work), you probably agree that the best thing that can be said about this discourse-ending trope is that it is tiresome.
It is also ignorant.
In any case, reading NEA Today, the magazine of the National Education Association over the past couple of days, I came across the union’s offer of this handbook on teaching children living in poverty or surviving trauma. I haven’t had a chance to look at it in depth, but it’s something I want to get out to readers of this blog. If you are working with struggling learners, there is a strong possibility, if not a strong probability, that they have been subjected to these social pathologies. We owe it to our students and ourselves to understand these challenges, and to use that understanding to improve practice.
“Surely there is enough for everyone within this country. It is a tragedy that these good things are not more widely shared. All our children ought to be allowed a stake in the enormous richness of America.”
Jonathon Kozol Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools (1991)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
“Any genuine teaching will result, if successful, in someone’s knowing how to bring about a better condition of things than existed earlier.”
John Dewey (1859-1952)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
Now that screen technologies have achieved ubiquity, it is surely time (actually, that time has long since passed in my estimation) to take a critical look at the way they are shaping our lives. My fascination with gizmos has never extended beyond their utility to help me manage my complicated workload. My smartphone is off a significant portion of the week; besides basic productivity applications, I only have word games on it, and I only reach for those in moments of ennui, or when I am stuck on a train.
Perhaps the most important place to apply critical analysis of these devices is in their use by children and adolescents. I don’t think these devices exactly do wonders for kids who already have short attention spans. Late last week, to my relief, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued its guidelines for appropriate use of digital devices for children. I recommend a look; it’s long been clear to me that kids are spending too much time with this technology and not enough in parks, and in their own imaginations.
Unlike leading software companies, I try not to publish or release material that I haven’t tested repeatedly in the classroom for effectiveness with students. This week’s Text, a learning support on clauses and correlating conjunctions, is an exception to that rule. I’ve only used this once, for a unit I designed on writing stylish sentences for advanced students. As I reformatted it yesterday, and generally tried to clean it up, it occurred to me that it might be rewritten into two different supports for struggling students.
Of course, there are probably a number of ways to make it more effective. For that reason, there is a distinct possibility that I will revise it and repost it sometime in the future.
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it.”
Hannah Arendt, Teaching as Leading
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
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