Teaching & Football, Together at Last

Earlier this month I read the Malcolm Gladwell article on how to identify / recruit good teachers.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_gladwell

A few great quotes. Typical Gladwell - not thinking of anything new on his own, just demonstrating his ability to listen to smart people within a certain field and write about it in plain english.

Basically my own intro to teaching was something like an apprenticeship - two years of working as an "associate teacher", where I was given 80% of a full schedule and also had an assigned mentor and weekly meetings with the other young teachers. It is a much better model than the baptism by fire public school approach.

Also agreed with the point about the unions. They're one (of numerous) reason I don't want to work in US public schools. Teaching isn't really a blue-collar job like most other unionized fields. automatic tenure and the annual increase in salary no matter how well you do your job, bleh. (Caveat - after student teaching, I've not clocked a single minute inside an American school.)

What Gladwell doesn't tackle thoroughly is that the US public system, and teaching in general as a profession, still hasn't figured out a way to fairly implement a different pay structure. There are plenty of failed attempts but to my knowledge not even one success story that's repeatable. One tricky part is side-stepped in the beginning of the article, in the comment that looking at value-added statistics only shows how well a teacher conveys learning that measured by a test. But if you open that door and allow for other areas of expertise, how can you afford the manpower to have a thorough performance appraisal system? The guys watching the video are at the university / district-wide level, not close to the site level.

My prediction is that we'll move towards hologram teachers - great quality courses available online at affordable prices - and that will result in a change in the responsibilities of the adults who work with the students inside the school.

I'm sort of serious about that, too...

Oh and. Happy Holidays to any lurkers out there still hanging on to this barely-breathing blog.

Oh How I've Changed

A funny "aha" moment this week when I dusted off my resume to touch it up for grad school applications. I'd already worked on it over the summer so it was just an issue of managing space / design.

And to my amusement / horror, I realized that I was still using Times New Roman.

!!!

What a philistine I used to be...

:)

Shanghai Takeaways

Went up to Shanghai and had another great conference at Learning 2.008.

This time I didn't feel so far behind the learning curve - last year my brain was about to explode halfway through the second day. And this time I presented a workshop. Very similar to what I gave last time at the HK 21st Century Learning. Felt nice to have a standing room only crowd, felt GREAT to have about half a dozen people stick around afterwards to ask more questions / start using their new readers. You can see the notes that people wrote about my preso here (maybe you need to sign in to the Ning first?), and the slidedeck is up here.

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What am I taking away from this? Well, had two fabulous meals - one that cost me 100USD (here), one at a local place that cost all six of us under 50USD.

I found the keynote speakers quite inspiring. David Warlick, Clarence Fisher, and David Jakes were my favorites. Warlick's preso on the future of education was brilliant in every way, from powerpoint to delivery to pacing to energy (it's listed in this post as "Telling the New Story"). Great to see Clarence Fisher in person - I LOVE reading his blog.

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However, it was a bit funny...the whole conference was framed as focusing on the teaching, not on the tools. But most of the takeaways I have relate to the tools. Shoot, even my preso was about a tool that should make life easier for teachers.

The big question in my head is, how do we get to a school full of teachers like Clarence Fisher, where every classroom is organized like the one he describes here?

How does that happen? What does that mean for the school day? More importantly, what does that mean for the curriculum? There are lots of great online learning systems getting rolled out in international schools, and tons of examples of 1:1 laptop schools. But it seems to me that these programs are in some fundamental ways still recreating the structures and hierarchies of a typical secondary school.

Where does participatory culture come into play? Where is the playing field leveled between teacher and student? Where is the school that truly organizes EVERYTHING around the principle that everyone in the building is a learner?

I would love to spend some time reading more of the posts in my reader, going through Warlick's website and scouring it for insight, following Fisher's blog devotedly to see what he's doing in the classroom with these ideas. Unfortunately, given the nature of a full-time classroom teacher's day, I don't know when that time will come.

So that's why I've been looking seriously into going back to the States to spend a year getting a Master's in Education. Figure that's when I'll have the freedom to direct my thoughts towards these big picture questions.

'Cuz right now, I gots papers to mark.

From Learning 2.008: Google Maps Embed

Up in Shanghai right now, at the Learning 2.008 Conference.

Just going to play right now and see if I can successfully embed this map into my blog.

What is it? It's from Google Maps containing placeholders that I created.

What do I want to do with it? I want to get all of my students in as collaborators on a class map, where we would place important information about people / events in the accurate location.

That's very important for a Humanities classroom. I'll see if I can find a better "finished" Google Map to show what I'd "like" the final product to look like.


View Larger Map

Thanks to Dan...

...I instantly saw how amazing this was:



Source: http://www.pitchinteractive.com/election2008/

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Anyone who's teaching secondary humanities, please make sure to spend at least five minutes in class (or right before / after) sharing this image with your students.

Why should EVERY humanities teacher use this?

1. If you're teaching American History, and not doing any work on the election, shame on you.
2. If you're not teaching American History, current events needs to be a part of any humanities course. What bigger event is coming up than the fall election?
3. This is an exemplar of how to analyze and represent research data - a staggering amount of it.
4. Unpacking this image is a great exercise in how to analyze a primary source.

This is even relevant to my students in Hong Kong - I am scattering into the curriculum mini-lessons about the US election in my G9 Humanities course to help them learn more about the electoral system of HK, which is probably MORE complicated than the electoral college. AND the amendments to the system are currently a huge item of debate in the legislature / op-ed pages, with major changes proposed over the past two years.

Oh and - if design's your thing - go to Dan's blog and check out everything tagged "design". The guy loves the stuff with an infectious passion.