Sharing is Caring

Today, I would like to share a few links to things I’ve been reading today.

A quick glance at Google reminds us that today is the 126th birthday of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, an architect whose influence, it turns out, was unavoidable in what I saw every day in the classroom buildings from my days at Penn State. Seeing the Google doodle this morning instantly reminded me of many buildings on PSU’s campus, particularly those of the engineering classes like the Hammond Building, located near the Daily Collegian, where I wrote. In some Pavlovian way, just seeing the building in the doodle instantly put me in a writing mood.

I know next to nothing about architecture, so I had to read a little to confirm my suspicion that this is the architect who had been the influence for all those campus buildings. During my surfing, I found a blog post from another Penn State alum writing about the same experience today, except he seems to have been a student of architecture or engineering, and has a completely different perspective than I on the architect and his influence on the those Penn State edifices.

Mies is often associated with the aphorism "less is more," which brings me to another piece of writing I’d like to share today, the poem by Robert Browning, “Andrea del Sarto,” which was, interestingly enough, penned in the same year as Penn State was founded, 1855. Read the poem here.

Mies is also often associated with the idiom, "God is in the details," which was attributed to his architectural style in his 1969 NY Times obituary.

An example that represents the idea that whatever one does should be done thoroughly, with great attention to detail, is the music of Phish. I’ve been reading the band’s biography, written by Parke Puterbaugh, this week, and his Rolling Stone article from 1997 is a great read about four musicians who are passionate about the details. If you can get your hands on the February 20, 1997, issue, check it out. It is not available online unless you are a Rolling Stone subscriber, but excerpts from Puterbaugh's Phish: The Biography can be found here.

Finally, in honor of the opening weekend of The Hunger Games movie, with its domestic box office making it the third-highest opening weekend of all time, here is a blog from Edmodo that discusses and links to a few sites about teaching with The Hunger Games that teachers have been most frequently sharing on Edmodo.

Happy reading! May the architecture, music, and odds be ever in your favor.

The Ideas of March

March seems to be a time for ideas.

Daylight Savings Time kicks in and we feel like we have more time to do things we want to get done. Spring is in the air, so our minds naturally turn toward springtime projects and we think of things we need to do (and we haven't been able to do these chores for months, so they actually seem exciting, or a change of pace).

We spend more time outside, and the fresh air probably stimulates our thoughts a little.

There's also the standardized testing going on in many states, so many teachers find themselves with a lot of time to sit and think about upcoming units and lessons.

There is something about this time of year which energizes and gets us looking forward. My help requests, which had tapered off throughout February, have seen a resurgence this week as teachers look ahead and plan new tech integration projects in their classrooms.

It's a busy, optimistic, energetic time of year.

As many of us in education know, "April is the cruelest month," so let's take this time to plan ahead, dream big, and jump right in with both feet to the ideas of March.

"So What is it You'd Say You Do Here...?"

When I set out to write a weekly blog as part of my position as a K-12 technology coach a few years back, I intended to write regular updates about specific projects, activities and classroom co-teaching I would be doing. However, I find myself usually writing more abstractly about educational technology ideas and methods than actual lessons.

Two days into this busy week, I'd like to give a snapshot into what I am doing as a coach:

* Working with teacher leaders who will facilitate eight excellent training sessions during the April 24th Engagement In-Service day. Planned sessions include blogging, making video podcasts, using Google Apps for Education, and many more topics that enable teachers to engage their students while preparing them with 21st Century skills they will need for college and the workplace.

* Facilitating an online flex session I designed to help teachers learn how to use Wikispaces. The flex session takes place entirely online, at the teachers' own pace, schedule, and location, during a two-week window. Teachers watch videos, read articles, and participate in discussions to earn two hours' flex, and can earn a third hour by creating and sharing a link to their own educational wiki. The conversations we've been having in our online discussions have been great, and I am proud to offer this cost-saving (more participants enrolled, no building/energy costs) and engaging (teachers get to design their own wikis for classroom use and have their individual questions answered on their own time) method of professional development.

* Helping 6th grade students put the finishing touches on their weekly news broadcast at Walton Farm elementary school. The news team rotates every week, and this week's broadcast had a particularly strong group of students writing, recording, and editing. As the editor puts the final transitions between the anchors, the field reporters, and the special segments, I can tell their hard work is paying off and an excellent edition of the school news is shaping up!

* Co-teaching a 12th grade English class as they begin a multi-faceted project based on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. One component of the group project is performance-based, and I am helping students collaborate on writing their scripts, then record, edit, and share their final performances.

* Working with an 11th grade teacher to develop her class wiki project based on duality in Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities. Students will collaborate to fill in multiple pages of information in T-chart form, sharing concrete examples they find in the text and exploring many themes of duality in the novel.

* Working with a Kindergarten teacher to help me make the specific connections between technology competencies and the Kindergarten curriculum. Our goal is to have K-12 tech competencies aligned with specific lessons and activities already in the curriculum, to give our teachers a place to go to see exactly how technology can be seamlessly integrated with the content we already teach.

* Helping the director of activities at the high school create a new web page for the school's activities and clubs.

* Surveying participants in my upcoming flex session called "Everything You Wanted to Know About Your Computer ... *But Were Afraid to Ask." The session takes place in a few weeks, and the agenda is designed to answer the specific questions of the teachers who enroll in the flex session. To my knowledge, this is the only flex session of its kind in our district, where the agenda is built to answer the specific needs of the participants. I look forward to hearing from them what I will be learning and teaching in a few weeks' time.

* Answering the emails and requests that come in to our online Help Request every day, researching the answers and responding to teachers' specific technology needs in a timely "on-demand" fashion.


With a difficult budget looming ahead for next year, it looks like my position will not exist in our district next year. While I am personally excited to teach English again and looking forward to bringing the ideas I've developed over the last five years into an actual classroom of my own, I do wonder how all the needs that coaches fill will be met. Schools are surviving difficult times and doing the best they can with limited budgets, but I don't suppose they will be met as well. We, like most districts in our state, will suffer from the lack of coaching until better budget days return and these positions can be restored. More than ever, teachers will have to rely on the resources that coaches and others have created. We will adapt, and we will make do, but I hope, for our students' sake, that we can get through these "lean years" quickly, and return to the proven and effective coaching model soon.

Rethinking "Easy"

I remember a website that was popular with our students six or seven years ago called “Rate My Teacher.” Students could rate their teachers for future students, or anyone, really, to see. There were three categories: helpfulness, clarity, and easiness. There was a lot of discussion among my colleagues about whether a teacher should even acknowledge the site existed, whether or not we should ever click on it or read the comments, and the conventional wisdom seemed to be that we should ignore it completely. Ironically, teachers were clearly looking at the site, because I remember hearing complaints about their ratings on the site, and occasional grumblings that the teachers with highest ratings were logging on and pretending to be students to boost their own ratings. While I’m sure this is possible, I doubt it happened often. Who has the time with all of our teaching, grading, planning and extra duties!?

Of course I looked at the site, and was relieved to find that anonymous students of mine had given me the highest rankings for helpfulness and clarity. I enjoyed reading their comments, as affirmations of things I was trying to do in the classroom, and even revelations of things that were working that I didn’t know I was doing. But one part I remember that bothered me was the “level of easiness.” I had a high ranking for “easiness.” As a new teacher, I remember learning from other colleagues that being an easy teacher was not a good thing. I guess I had never thought about this before going into a career in education, but I imagine as a student, I would’ve thought a teacher who made learning easy was a good teacher. But a few years into my teaching career, I didn’t think like this, or probably even remember a time when I did think that an “easy” teacher (though the eyes of a student) was doing a great job. I had a few years of being told by veteran teachers that certain teaching strategies were “too easy” or not challenging enough, and constant refrains of “high rigor” and “high expectations for all” beaten into my impressionable young mind. There is a common belief that teachers who give too many As are doing something wrong, without regard for whether the students are earning those marks. I bought into it, at least enough to be a little disheartened that I was seen as an easy teacher.

I talked to the student who had first told me I was listed on this site about my concern that I was rated “easy.” The student said that it was a good thing. This was when I first remembered to look at it through the eyes of a student. A teacher who made the content appear easy was doing a good job. I told the student that I was a little embarrassed by the level of easiness, and joked that I would have to work a little harder at making sure more of my students fail.

I did not think about this website until several years later. It was two days ago, in fact, when a student approached me and said (with a level of surprise that I can only hope came from the fact that I have not been in the classroom for the past five years, and not that I have in fact become the old curmudgeon my younger teaching self aspired to be!), “You have a really high rating on RateMyTeachers.com.”

My memory of feeling slighted at being called easy came back to me, and I mentioned it to this student. “I remember that site!” I said, “I had good ratings, but they said I was easy!”

The student said the exact same thing the other student had told me years before, that making learning easy is a good thing.

What a simple concept – make learning easy. We all say we want to make lifelong learners out of our students, and inspire them to enjoy their experiences with education so they stay in school, stay motivated, and stay passionate about learning throughout their academic careers and after. We all want our students to feel like they can master the content that we have learned to master. We all want the content to be easy for our students when those final exams roll around. So why are so many of us afraid to be easy teachers? How hard do we work at putting those "distractors" in our multiple choice tests just to make a student get a wrong answer? And what IS the point of that? I know they have to learn to take those standardized tests, but… I can count on one hand with zero fingers the number of students who are going to enter the workplace and be given 4 intentionally confusing options to help a company, business or workplace.

I don’t know why it took me until the end of “the first trimester” of my career to realize this, but it is going to be a focus of mine next year to make learning easy. I know many methods for doing this, including providing opportunities for all students to demonstrate their knowledge on their own schedule (standards-based grading), and through their own methods (differentiation), utilizing 21st century skills (especially collaboration), and applying their learning to real-word problems (project-based).

I still like, “I don’t give grades, you earn them,” and I never liked, "Don't let them see you smile until Christmas," but it’s time to turn the OTHER old adage on its head. Instead of, “I didn’t fail the student, the student failed me,” I want to say, “I will not fail my students,” and take on the responsibility of finding the way to reach each student individually and show each one the paths that can make learning easy for him or her. I am going to work really hard to be an easy teacher.