More Facebook: Why are you surprised?

Something else that has caught my eye of late is the press covering the astonishing fact that students and their parents bad-mouth teachers on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.  I’m not sure when “rock-star popularity among youth” became part of the teaching job description, but the idea that this is “news” struck me as kind of amusing.

When my kids were toddlers I used to hear other parents complain about the fact that three-year-olds (and maybe even – gasp – their own three year old) tended to pee in swimming pools, and that fact diminished their enjoyment of the pool.  This phenomenon lead to my Personal Parenting Rule #47: Don’t swim where toddlers swim.

I love Facebook.  I have gobs of Friends who were high school classmates and whom I haven’t seen since, people whom I see maybe once a year if I’m lucky, and regular friends I see daily who need to coordinate a meet-up.  Also in there are a few kids who are friends of my kids, athletes my wife coaches, etc.  They exist in a group called “Kids,” and they do NOT participate in my Facebook life, though they can contact me through Facebook if they need to.

When I was first playing with Facebook, I allowed myself the ability to see former students’ status posts.  They hated and dissed some of their teachers, some of them my friends, so I changed my settings to exclude their status updates from my Facebook life.  This was their emotional space, not mine.

I remember my earliest teaching days when I thought I was a “friend” to some of my students, when I could secretly claim to belong to their generation, and when I said “we” in class, I felt like I was including them as peers at some level.  With 20/20 hindsight, what was I?  Role model & mentor?  Yes.  Trusted adviser?  Often.  Beloved teacher?  Occasionally.  Peer?  No.  Friend?  Never.

Stay out of your students’ social lives.  If they or their parents publish lies about you such that your career/reputation is being harmed, the same remedy applies: sue them.  Written defamation is libel, and teachers are not considered “public figures”; you are not a rock star.  Your principal is, however.  But know that if you share the conversation in which you are being libeled, your claim to having been damaged by their speech would likely be much weaker.

Know that just as three-year-olds pee in the pool, teenagers get unreasonably angry and verbally abusive, with parents often close behind them.  That’s why there are kiddie pools, and that’s why you don’t share your Facebook life with students.

The Edmodo alternative to commercial social media

In future posts I will be dwelling on the instructional wonders of Edmodo, but since I just put a lot of energy into bagging on the use of Facebook by K-12 teachers for instruction, it’s only fair to consider Edmodo as a ready alternative.  Using the same set of structural criteria I used in my critique of Facebook, let’s take a look at Edmodo…

Teachers are responsible for what occurs in their teaching environment.  Edmodo class pages, or groups, are occupied by invitation only via a code to enable a connection.  Any student signing up by alias can be summarily deleted, and teachers can switch signup codes or close enrollment to groups at any time.  Teachers may also enforce norms by deletion of comments made, and can guide student participation through any number of management strategies, just as in a FTF classroom.  If a teacher needs to step away from supervision for an extended period, or if certain group members are bent on disruption or abuse, comments can be fully moderated, reviewed by the teacher before posting to the group and effectively closing the page to spontaneous posting.  Since email accounts are not required for enrollment nor is there a chat function, the teacher cannot be held accountable for any back-channel interaction outside of Edmodo.  It is a non-public walled garden, always subject to teacher management.

Individual interactions between students and teachers must be above suspicion and reproach, with guidelines provided by law and a clear code of professional conduct.  All interactions between the teacher and group members are visible to the entire group and any administrator included in the Edmodo environment (if the account lives in a district subdomain).  The only exception to this rule is any comment held for moderation if the teacher has enabled that feature.  As noted above, there is no back-channel or private space for conversations in Edmodo as one would find in Facebook or Second life.

Teachers need to be able to design the learning environment to optimize learning.  While the esthetic of Edmodo is clean and certainly Facebook-esque, it is free of advertising widgets, game apps, and endless appeals to extend your Friends list through a daunting web of connectivity.  Edmodo functions as a means for groups large and small to interact on tasks.  Yes, casual and off-topic discussion is fully available and enjoyable, but they are still subject to teacher-set norms.  While Edmodo is an optimal vehicle for conducting project-based learning with its tools designed to support it, teachers can create a learning space that supports their personal teaching methods and goals through the use of polls, narrative feedback, small group assignments, etc.  Each class can have its own customized resource library, and students have a waiting depository for assignments.

Parents have the right to access the learning environment taxpayer-paid teachers provide.  Parents who wish to review their child’s activity on Edmodo can be issued an account that gives them access to what their child and their child’s teacher posts in Edmodo.  This account is special, in that they do not participate in the group, they are not visible to other group members or to their child, and they cannot see the posts or work products of other students.  They also have access to their child’s assignments and any grades maintained in the Edmodo gradebook application if the teacher uses it.  Unlike with Facebook, parent access is not dependent on any action taken by their child, being fully teacher-managed.

Teachers need to be able to provide a record of interactions they supervise.  While the necessity of maintaining physical or electronic records of all Edmodo class interactions is debatable, depending on district or teacher personal records policy, a teacher can elect to save all Edmodo pages as HTML files, a record far more complete than is possible in any FTF environment.  Also, students have no control over the fate of their posts.  Once posted, posts remain until removed by the teacher.  Should a teacher require evidence of misbehavior such as bullying or threats, s/he need only make a copy of the page to use in the course dealing with the situation prior to removing such post from the live group process.

Above I alluded to administrators and district subdomains.  It is the case that most teachers using Edmodo today do so through independent accounts established through Edmodo.com.  However, many teachers who wish to involve their colleagues in professional learning communities often seek the support of instructional leaders as they share their expertise, requesting that Edmodo create subdomains which are occupied only by the school sites and teachers of their school district.  Not only does this extend professional networking capabilities, it provides for backup in the event of an emergency.  Edmodo site administrators (which could be a colleague as well as a building administrator) can pop into your account and turn off active posting in an unexpected absence, and just as in FTF classroom supervision, administrators who can attest to the quality of the content of your online learning environment can have your back in the event of an issue.  Edmodo district administrators can create new groups alongside district school sites to serve as spaces for colleagues to network and conduct district-wide professional development activities.

Happy Birthday, Dr. Hawking

The press is full of news of the 70th birthday of Dr. Stephen Hawking on January 8th, including Discover magazine’s coverage of how he could have lived so long with Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Not that I feel he needs me to add to his accolades, but I do have a favorite “Hawking Moment” of my own that continues to inform me professionally, and indeed how I live my life.

In an earlier post here I promoted the book, Transforming School Culture by Anthony Muhammad.  In that post I described my encounter with Dr. Hawking thusly:

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Some years ago (I think it was 2003), the UC Davis Cosmology Group invited Stephen Hawking to present a recent paper, and as luck would have it, one of my 5^th grade students that year was the son of one of the cosmology faculty who had extended the invitation to Dr. Hawking, and I was politely invited to join the physicists for lunch with him. Yes, as an amateur astronomer I was thrilled to sit at the master’s feet, and he said a great many things of great complexity and importance during his public lectures.

But to this lunchtime crowd of mostly his peers, the one thing he said I will never forget was, and I paraphrase here: Forget everything you think you know.  Be like a child and receive the new data as if you were just born.  Easy for you to say, you might think.  Well, nothing is easy for Stephen Hawking to say, and he challenged his colleagues to engage in a personal dogma dump so they might comprehend the meaning of the new astrophysical data emerging at a fantastic rate.  He encouraged them to let go of everything they thought they knew about the universe.

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So, Dr. Hawking, thank you for encouraging the dogma dump, that we might regard our world and our roles in it afresh as the data informs and change remains our ever-present companion.  We are all the better for it.

Gaming to save the world. Not kidding.

Last September brought us the news that the online game Foldit had produced actual real-world solutions to a biochemical puzzle, leading to advances in medical research, specifically in the struggle against HIV/AIDS. The news of the discovery was good, but the fact that it was brought to us courtesy of the gaming culture those of my generation have long feared and disparaged was the real earth-shaker here.

Jane McGonagal, Ph.D., takes this news to the next level, and we need to pay attention.  For my entire professional career I’ve begged my students to become participants in the salvation of their deeply at-risk world.  With a number of stunning exceptions to the rule, for the most part the response has been, “Uh huh, let me get back to my X-box if you don’t mind, Mr. Storm.” For me, and most of us, this channeling of our brightest minds into (what we perceived as) mindless gaming was ample cause for despair, portending no less the end of civilization and perhaps the species.

In this TED talk linked below and in her book, Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, Dr. McGonagal sees not only hope, but cause for actual excitement arising from this enormous body of talent and passion growing from the gaming culture.  Have a listen, and see if you don’t find yourself allowing for the possibility she just may be onto something.

More writing on American “post-exceptionalism”

Larry Cuban, by coincidence, strikes a similar note to my previous post, such that it deserves special mention here:

Please check out Larry’s post, Being No. 1 in the World

The Big American Problem

The future is already here; it is just unevenly distributed.  – William Gibson

Disclaimer: I’m here at the NewTechNetwork 2011 Conference in Grand Rapids, MI, surrounded by educational brilliance and teachers deeply invested in best practices for 21^st Century Learning, and the following is an irrepressible rant.  We can fix education, we can regain education preeminence in the world; it only requires we pay attention to what we know.

We have a Big American Problem… the achievement gap is just one symptom of a growing reality: traditional school has become more about schooling than it has about learning.  When we measure learning, what we see is the consequence of what children learn in spite of what we do to them more than what they learn as a result of our efforts.  When we bring children into our classrooms, we expect them to learn flawlessly regardless of the talents, issues, world views, and feelings they bring into that same space.  They can all learn, but the system we are sustaining for their benefit is not meeting their needs.  An exciting, scary world swirls around them 24/7 and they seek to interact with it in every way possible – that’s their irrepressible job one as kids – yet the place they go to prepare them to run this world, our schools, demands they “power-down” just to get through the day because the adults around them can’t see any compelling reason to keep school connected to the way the world really works.  “Adults” include all of us: those who decide how many dollars go into the system (the entire voter base), the teachers who protect their association memberships at all costs, and community groups who don’t care to understand the connection between instruction and technology.

Unlike industrial-age children, today’s highly mobile and wired kids each encounter life in an incredibly non-standard fashion.  Some children wake up to a broadband networked smart phone on their nightstands in their bedrooms, while many lack bedrooms due to parental mobility or homelessness.  School systems use the word “equity” in their programming efforts while the fundamental societal inequity, the exploding digital divide we see among our students, is the last item on the agenda because it requires real money to address.  The education technology investment failure along with our obsession with “fixing the education failure” by incrementally slashing funding is bearing its predictable fruit.

Children are essentially adaptable, and they astonish us with their ability to accommodate every lame idea adults have on their behalf.  We measure their “performance,” but what we really, truly are seeing is a picture of their ability to adapt to a set of behaviors we demand of them.  To the degree those expected behaviors are actually something useful for the culture into which they are maturing we hold the moral high ground for demanding they accommodate to it.  To the degree those behaviors are demanded for the sake of demonstrating compliance to memory tasks or ritualistic demonstrations of irrelevant rigor, we erode the foundation of any high ground we may otherwise claim.  Unfortunately, we long ago stopped asking the questions necessary to keep content relevant to what is real in the world, and the kids have found us out.  The king struts down the street with no clothes.

Whether or not we like to hear it, the kids continue to ask “Why are you teaching me this?”  If they find out you (in your role of teacher, parent, administrator, or Common Core Standards author) react negatively to this question, they will adapt to your wishes and shut up, but that doesn’t stop the question in their minds.  And because they are connected to each other (the average 13-18 year-old sends 3300 text messages per month), they are asking this question collectively. We sit here in the west and regard the sheiks, dictators and mullahs of Arab nations being brought down by their connected young people in the current Arab Spring uprisings, but our smugness belies our own national attachment to a formulation of education that is not authentic or even very useful.  It also belies our ignorance of the growing rumble among young people who are not getting what they know they need.

So why should we be surprised that children are voting with their feet as they increasingly seek out online education, and parents are voting with their dollars to find alternatives to good ole American comprehensive secondary education?  Because of our collective fixation on test numbers, class rankings and weighted GPAs, as a “system” we have utterly abandoned our mission of preparing students for their world and left it to them to figure it all out for themselves.  They are doing exactly that and we ignore their collective dissatisfaction at our peril.

To my educator readers: Start rattling your cage. Annoy your colleagues, and seek out those who agree that your students also live in your connected world (even more fully than you do).  Make your practice relevant.

To the public: Listen to the children.  Invest in them.  Acknowledge that they just might know more about what they need than you do.  Sure they need mentoring and guidance to know what’s smart and relevant, and that we can provide.  But controlling the digital air they breathe because we think we can?  Good luck with that.

The Facebook Quandary

Reading this post by Steve Jaffee on social media policy prompted a bit of a discussion here in the office, as while we often discourage teachers from interacting with students via social media due to the current complexity of the medium, particularly the security settings in Facebook which remain intentionally obscure and complex, we have true mixed feelings about going into our collective future with outright prohibition.

As a young teacher in the 80s, the convention for teachers was to be completely unlisted in the phone book to deprive students’ access to their teachers’ personal information (in practice it was mostly to avoid decorative toilet paper technology). I never fully bought into that ethic, as I felt the need to provide some means for my students to contact me in an emergency.  While my address remained unlisted, my phone number was published in the phone book, and students took advantage of that exactly three times, all for life-threatening events in their or their friends’ lives.  As Steve points out here, personal boundaries between students and teachers are not so clean and official as an outside observer might assume.  Teachers of younger children often become surrogate parents with deep and lasting relationships, and that dynamic does not come to an end when a child leaves elementary school, rather it becomes even more complicated and volatile.  Successful students are still in need of personal mentoring, intervention, and occasional responses to emergencies by teachers.

I currently “Friend” former students, students still in our school system, and I do so with mild trepidation, carefully installing them in their tightly constrained “Students” list.  This allows me to look in on them as I wish, and gives them a means to contact me should they have the need.  It does not give them access to my posts, photos, profile, and other interactions on Facebook.  I say “mild trepidation,” because I have had technical issues with Facebook in the past that rendered my security settings utterly nonfunctional.  They work now, but I have no idea when they may revert to their nonfunctioning status.  As a result, I post to Facebook in a professional manner as if it may be viewed by those students, hoping for privacy, knowing it’s possibly not perfect.  If I was still teaching and I lacked a district-provided web portal, I would establish a professional page on Facebook as a one-way communication device, and the means by which students could contact me off-campus.  That’s not student access to personal information, but it is access to me in an appropriately defined context.

It’s probably going to take another generation or so before we work out the details of the current social contract, and we’re going to make errors in both directions.  It’s important to keep thinking about school culture and relationships, and to mind the well-being of all parties without choking off meaningful interactions that let education happen.

Interesting Creatures, We

Andrew Revkin, New York Times writer and author of the Dot Earth blog has succeeded in putting words to my swirl of thoughts regarding belief systems and the way society deals with polarizing issues.  In his blog post today, Pedal to the Metal, Revkin looks at how humankind thinks about risk assessment in light of the climate debate.

We know we face serious challenges in the future of our species, yet there is a range of responses among individuals from the “calamatist” to the “complete rejecter” of the risks.  He sees this lack of uniform response to issues that threaten us all as due to our being a relatively young species with limited experience with rapid change, with a good part of us (collectively and individually) “locked in our reptilian little fight-or-flight fear reflex.”

A second aspect of this phenomenon identified by Revkin is our inclination to regard someone who doesn’t share our response to an issue (climate change activists vs. naysayers, or education reformers vs. traditionalists) and try to figure out how to fix those defective people, something he terms anthropophilia.  If this line of thinking about cognition interests you, follow the links here and give Andy a read.

At the very least, check out this brief video of Andy discussing the topic in an interview:

The takeaway for educators, though, is the question left for environmentalists and educators alike: How do we go from here to tackle issues we as humans have never faced before?  Since bringing a child to productive maturity is the mission of any educational system, and presumably of any parent or individual educator, we can probably begin by agreeing that adults pointing fingers at each other has never proved a terribly useful tool for getting the job done.

In this blog I’ve discussed varieties of belief systems that bear fruit of both the sweet and bitter kind.  A teacher can believe a specific child can learn, and that another can’t for any variety of reasons.  A teacher can believe that a digital native child presents an impediment to teaching and learning, or they can believe that child is the possessor of vital keys to his/her own future.  A teacher can believe that a colleague can provide an opportunity for reflection and growth, or a teacher can believe that a colleague will stifle his/her individuality and interrupt the safe zone of practice established over many years.  As Revkin points out, “we are an interesting creature,” and it serves us well to settle back into our most comfy chair and think about ourselves, our great variety of cognition and creative potential, and appreciate that no matter our personal belief system, we are in this thing together and solutions must be designed together.

Modern educational research strongly supports the idea that when a child feels as though he or she “belongs” in their school, believes he/she is valued and wanted there, and feels a part of the culture of the school, achievement is enhanced.  This is not accomplished by mailing a flier home stating the school considers the child “in” or by setting a board policy.  Belief in belonging is nurtured in a children’s minds through their entire experience in their learning community, principally through their relationship to teachers and peers, all of whom contribute to the perception of safety, mutual respect, high expectation of achievement, and hopeful anticipation for the future.

Achievement as a product of community is not limited to children.  Educators from every corner of the process, from the newly elected school board member to the most senior teacher, is tasked with the mandate to achieve, and they do so most effectively when they feel a positive connection to the culture of their place of work through their relationships with colleagues, students, and members of the entire community.  This atmosphere of safety, mutual respect, high expectation of achievement, and hopeful anticipation for the future is no less important for adult members of the community.

The Professional Learning Community is where we have a chance to make this kind of cultural investment.  The future of education, both in terms of profession and outcomes, is no less dependent on our willingness to create in a community context than the future of the planet depends on our collective intelligence.

I hope we are bound to pay attention.

Collective Bargaining vs. Collective Obstructivism

We teachers in K-12 public education have a press problem.

Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin has unleashed his attack on some public employee unions in his state, an act that many identify as a political act in the guise of fiscal reform.  Those of us whose jobs rest in the bosom of a collectively bargained contract take these events quite personally, as it is an attack on how we see our very work lives.  Many if not most of us see our place in the labor movement as quite separate from our professional duties, our paychecks a somewhat separate reality from our duties as teachers.  Our representatives negotiate on our behalf with those who represent the public whose children we teach.  It is a very delicate dance we perform, as the interests of all stakeholders are inextricably interwoven.  In contentious times, such as now, an attack by one “side” inevitably comes back around to damage the interests of the attacker.  It is a brutal and unavoidable consequence, usually the result of one set of stakeholders misrepresenting of the motives and intentions of another.

When one party becomes entrenched in perceiving another stakeholder in this dance as essentially dishonest or strictly self-interested, it leads to some pretty paranoid if-then conclusions:  “If you want to protect your salaries, then you must not care about the children you teach,” or “If you want to pay attention to district infrastructure, then you must want to undermine the financial security of district teachers.”  This seems to be especially fierce when it comes to technology infrastructure, new enough to education to still feel expendable.  We hear statements from a few teachers such as “We didn’t need computers twenty years ago, so we can do without them now in these hard times.”  Meanwhile, the community wonders why their entire world is networked except for the one their children occupy for 7 hours per day, 180 days per year.  It becomes tempting for parents to conclude that nothing is happening in classrooms that benefits students when something so fundamental to the twenty-first century social and work world is often absent in many educators’ practice.  These disconnects in communication become even harder to resolve when parties decide someone else is evil.

It’s from this ever-hardening of hearts that we find ourselves in the midst of an assault on collective bargaining in general.  After nearly a century of workplace tradition, what is happening to create this fertile moment for those who would see collective bargaining disappear?

I contend that some groups of educators – and I speak from the perspective of a teacher and proud union member for thirty-three of my years – have confused the role of collective bargaining in their professional lives.  Rather than the collective bargaining process serving as a means for securing a collective voice in the larger educational discussion, for a few teachers collective bargaining has become their weapon for collectively obstructing necessary change in education.  This single-minded fundamentalism provides ammunition to the likes of Gov. Walker who can use examples of obstructive rhetoric by a few in leadership to loudly and unjustly proclaim that teacher unions are destroying our schools.

In the same spirit of auto workers and assembly plant managers who have opened plant practice to accept constructive criticism and the flattening of communication structures in the effective manufacturing of cars, teachers need to embrace a culture of community criticism and open discourse to become more effective at what they are charged to do every day.  For teachers to hear criticism of their practice and immediately seek refuge in the collective bargaining process is to invite the friends of Gov. Walker to question its very existence.  Collective Obstructionism is destructive not only to education but to the entire notion of collective bargaining, and we need to take a good hard look in the mirror at just why we respond to criticism as we do rather than become our own worst enemies.

Pedagogy… am I boring you?

One of the Necessary Thinkers I attend to, Steve Taffee of the Blogg-Ed Indetermination blog , published a provocative post today entitled “School Bored: Is Boredom Bad?”  It’s a thoughtful piece that teased up the response growing in me since I entered the education field, and I copy my response to his post below.

In my experience, any educator’s demand that students accept boredom as part of their educational experience is a kind of self-absolution for mediocre pedagogy.

Sure, academically we can ask students to reflect on their own perceptions and attitudes toward learning (the sex ed scene from Monty Python’s “Meaning of Life” comes to mind), but whenever I hear the expectation of boredom-acceptance uttered in the classroom, it sets off alarms for me.

Students can memorize in an non-stimulating classroom context, but I think you’d get some hefty argument regarding whether this represents learning.

As our students increasingly come to us digitally fluent and highly networked, we need to stretch ourselves into different pedagogical shapes to accommodate this complex of perceptual/processing skills that are admittedly quite foreign to us.

In the early 80′s medical science was confronted by a new epidemic we now call AIDS, and the field had to scramble with everything they knew to wrap their minds around a very new challenge, and they remain in a process of discovery today.  Educators are faced with a very similar challenge: never before have children changed so much from their parents’ generation in so little time, and we need to pay attention to our own biases and expectations bound by our own experience as students. We are babies in this, and we’d better pay attention.