Breaking Fallow Ground

The most eternal part of my work is empowering teachers to reach a point in their profession when they claim with passion, “I can’t imagine teaching without technology.” Transformation … they have changed the way they approach teaching. They deliver curriculum differently and they design a different type of assignment for students. Their curriculum is more interactive and relevant. Their assignments are more authentic, open ended, and closer to the kind of tools students are naturally comfortable with.

The most satisfying part of this work is not necessarily with early adopters, those who readily embrace new ideas, but with the reluctant, the skeptical. These teachers are good, hard working professionals who care deeply for their students, but they vision or confidence, vision for how technology translates into student results or confidence in themselves as users or in the chaos the often borders on a technology-rich lesson.

My homestead is surrounded by rich agricultural lands where rich soil is a pre-requisite to a rich harvest. Fallowed ground must be plowed before seeds are cast; without it, the seeds lay bare for birds to feast on. Likewise, teachers’ must be ready to receive new ideas, to break up the fallow attitudes about how teachers teach and how student learn.

Enter technology. When a teacher approaches a technology-related training, they are at their most pliable state; their ground is broken and they are more ready to embrace new ideas. You don’t have to get them to change, they expect it. They admit they don’t know enough about these new tools and they succumb to disequilibrium; they invite change.

Strike now! Drive home the payoff strategies that have nothing to do with technology but have everything to do with to great teaching. Press first Marzano’s nine strategies, problem-based learning, good questioning techniques, and the like. Then connect technology.

Too often trainers fail to understand this fact and instead they go straight to the “how to use the tool.” Better trainers may throw in a few student samples; but still, the point is missed. These new tools are to be used in new ways. The time to learn this fact is when they are most ready to learn something new.

I have found better success to tell the teachers that traditional teaching methods don’t work using technology. Let’s not pretend they will use the projector differently than an overhead; let’s set the bar high. I bluntly say, “The digital projector can’t be used as a lecturing tool … it can’t. Students should never pen a first draft on paper if they have sufficient computer access to type it in from the start … never.” With these “cultivated” teachers, I talk first about the method, the pedagogy, the expectation of students being in charge and responsible for their own learning, the permission for teachers to release some of their fear and control.

academic vocabulary

Breakthrough! In constructivist terms, confusion is a good thing. It is the first step to new learning, new understanding ... Piaget refers to this learning process as dissonance. In my quest to understand RSS feeds, podcasting, and blogs, I suddenly found myself immersed in foreign vocabulary. Ah, academic content, the key to understanding any new subject material.

My appreciation for Marzano’s strong position on vocabulary development grows. He states, “One of the most glaring differences between successful and less successful students, across the grade levels, can be readily seen in their vocabulary knowledge and lexical skills.”

Some statistics lend perspective:

• High knowledge 3rd graders had vocabularies equal to low performing 12th graders.
• Top high school seniors knew 4 times the words of lower performing classmates.
• 1st grade students from high SES groups knew twice as many words as lower SES students.

Important teaching decisions include:

• Connecting new vocabulary to common terms comparisons. “An RSS feed is like subscribing to a newspaper. It comes to your house each day, rather than you having to drive down to the local market to retrieve it.”
• Visual clues … show a RSS feed.
• Hands on experience … create an RSS feed or examine one already created.
• Speak the word in authentic ways … “Where can I find the RSS feed to subscribe to this blog?”

Vital to remember when training teachers is to use these valuable classroom strategies.

dear diary vs. professional journal

Blogs come in many shapes and sizes.

My first review of many blogs left the impression that folks need to get a life. Their personal dribble cast out in cyberspace either trolling for a comment or just expressing their audacity. "Dear diary, today I was so mad at my mother for not making me the lunch I asked for so nicely ... she ticks me off." Personal therapy perhaps, but what value does it add to the community? To be true it doesn't have to, but in my search for technology's best role to support learning the blog must serve another purpose.

Professional journals are common ways to reflect on practice whether a student as a learner or teacher as an instructor. I begin to see blogs serving the same process as a professional journal with the added value of novelty, and ease of use, and lower overhead to traditional PJ's. Next steps ... ?

back story

Producing a "ken burns" documentary with MovieMaker or Photostory can be a more engaging, powerful way students demonstrate their deeper understanding of a subject. A traditional approach to a research projects is to ask students to sift through a selected body of content and "retell it in their own words."

"Students, you will write a reseach paper on a Civil War general." With this question, the teacher returns a series of similar pieces of work that spit back the hard facts from the encyclopedia, textbook, or even selected repositories on the web.

If however, the question was more interesting and connected to the student's world, the returned work is likely to be original with greater attention to detail. "Students, who do you admire, who do you respect, who would you follow? Consider why a civil war soldier would follow a particular general into battle. He depends on this general to keep him alive, to succeed in battle. Take the view of a soldier who has aligned his loyalty with a civil war general. Define this general through the eyes of his loyal soldier. As the soldier, write a letter to his parents back home that explains in detail the great qualities of this general and why you as the soldier dedicated your will to this great general.

I assert that the practice of digital storytelling naturally draws us to focus on the back story, not just the obvious facts. Your thoughts?

first step ... charting a new course

so this is a blog ... my endeavor here is to develop a deeper understanding, appreciation, and vision for the role bloggs play to catalyze student learning ... to stimulate dendrite growth.

Keenly focused on the growing role technology plays to change instruction to realize increased student learning, I am just now exploring the many Web 2.0 applications that show promise in this field. I am a constructivist at heart, a Logo believer, one who has witnessed the learning magic of microworlds and the incredible power ownership has on any form of learning. I have come to realize that a child not engaged is a child not learning and that without an audience, an authentic out-of-the-classroom audience engagement is limited.

Let's see where this journey goes.