This is the first in a summer series of guest posts by members of my personal/professional learning network. Mary Beth Hertz is the technology teacher and technology integrator at Alliance for Progress Charter School in North Philadelphia. She can be found on Twitter at @mbteach and blogs at Philly Teacher.

What I want to express in this blog post is not anything new or innovative. It is nothing that hasn’t been said before.  However, it is something that’s been mulling about in my brain while I was drinking my morning coffee and watching the Twitter stream from the Discovery Educators Network Leadership Council Symposium.

A video kept getting re-tweeted in the stream so I figured I’d better check it out.

You can watch the 2 minute video, Microsoft Labs 2019 Vision:

As soon as it started I felt like I was watching a car commercial. It was flashy, well-produced and fast-paced. I honestly was not that impressed. I guess what people felt was that it was a window into what the future holds for technology and digital devices.

That I won’t deny.

The name on the video is “Microsoft Office Labs 2019 Vision Montage.” This is the vision that Microsoft has for our future.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Many things.

For one, why are we letting Microsoft dictate what the future of digital life will look like? We could make the same statement about Apple or Sony or any other companies who manufacture digital products.  Many of these companies do use customer input and feedback to improve their products, but in reality we are all consumers of what these companies feed us.

What does this mean for education? It means that we need to be putting our students to the task of deciding what THEY want their future to look like. We live in a time unlike any other in history. Our natural resources are disappearing, we have devices that are more powerful than ever before and we have tools that allow us to connect with people thousands of miles away in a matter of seconds.

Companies like Microsoft are not in the business of planning for the future of our children as members of society or for the future of our global community. We must empower our students with that charge. It is they who will inhabit the future. We must also ensure that we empower ALL students to take part in the building of future society, not just the ones who are privileged and can afford it.

There are many obstacles to overcome when we begin to ask our students to solve real world problems. Solutions to real world problems don’t fit on a standardized test. Solutions to real world problems take time to understand and even more time to solve. Solutions to real world problems require a restructuring of school as we know it.

I have been having various conversations (and sometimes debates) about what it means to be a teacher and a learner in the 21st Century. Some of the conversation has been focused around guiding students to understanding rather than delivering content, creating learning environments where learning is a connected and social experience, and infusing technology into learning when it can transform the learning experience.  The world our students will inhabit will require them to collaborate with peers, understand social media tools and be problem solvers within their own communities and the larger world.  We need to prepare them for that world.

Schools need to allow for tinkering. Tinkering with ideas, tinkering with materials, tinkering with students’ perceived limitations. Tinkering teaches children how to learn from failure. Tinkering teaches children how to think about a problem or a project from many perspectives. Tinkering allows children to build self esteem and feel pride in what they do. Students who tinker are the students who build our future.

Some examples of what I’m talking about:

• The Tinkering School teaches children how to build and guide their own learning. While it is not a true ‘school’ it is a model that could be replicated on a smaller scale within the school curriculum. (Listen to the founder’s TED talk here.)
• Philadelphia High School Students Design the Car of the Future
• Project Based Learning motivates students to solve real world problems–Edutopia article
• Sylvia Martinez writes extensively about tinkering on her blog, GenYES

There are those who will look at these words as a ‘pipe dream,’ ‘utopia’ or ‘fairytale.’  To them I would argue that we must have a Vision. If Microsoft can construct a vision of what it thinks the world will look like in 2019 then we as educators, parents, community members, lawmakers and general stakeholders in the world need to have a vision, too. Even more importantly, we need to let our children begin to build their own vision for their own future and give them skills to make it real.

How would you sort these?

Take a look at this picture. If I asked you to sort them into piles, how would you do it? OK, now do it again a different way. No problem, right? Again. Took a little longer for you to think of a way to sort them this time, didn’t it?

I’ve done this with kids and adults of various ages. The first few times we sort, it’s simple and straightforward. The next few times it starts to get more challenging. Eventually there are people sitting there thinking, “There is no other way to sort these!”

When people have gotten to this point, I’ve said something along the lines of, “You have to stretch your thinking. Be creative!” This would often just result in frustration for both of us.

Now I know why. According to this article in Newsweek, telling someone to “be creative” can actually have the opposite effect, closing off their thinking and making it more rigid.

So how can we help our students become more creative? Try some of these strategies:

• Plant the seed. Instead of a vague “be creative,” tell someone, “give me an idea that only you could come up with.” According to Marc Runco of the University of Georgia, this simple switch in directions can double the student’s creative output.
• Make it messy. Creativity is squashed when students feel like they are looking for one right answer. Give students problems that have multiple solutions. Even better, give them problems with no clear solution. Mucking around in the problem solving process can free up creative thinking.
• Never accept the first answer. Even if a student gives you the response you were expecting, say “Can anyone think of another answer?” or “Is there another way to do that?” It sets an expectation that one answer, even if it works, isn’t the end of the process but just the beginning.
• Teach creativity techniques. We often think of creativity as some sort of ethereal aura that some people have and some people don’t. In fact creativity is a skill and a process. It takes work and it can be taught. Techniques like SCAMPER can give kids a concrete handle on something that can seem abstract and complicated.
• Reverse the roles. Instead of giving an assignment to students, ask them to tell you what they would do if they were the teacher. “What would you ask the class to do to show they understood this unit?” Share the best ideas with the class and let them pick their assignment.
• Get out. Changing the perspective can change students’ thinking. Hold a class in the cafeteria, or the auditorium, or the football stadium. Or in a living room, on the sidewalk, or in an amusement park. Rearrange your classroom or your schedule.

And before you think, “That’s not possible in my school,” take a minute and come up with a way to make it happen that only you could think of. Or ask your students to figure it out. You might be surprised at what they think of.

So what did I miss? What are your surefire methods for getting your students to think and work creatively?

Last week I wrote about how design principles should apply to curriculum. I’ve been thinking about one of those elements in particular: the idea of white space. This isn’t really a new concept, but I think it bears some examination.

Curriculum today is very full. We do our best to stuff every little thing that may have some importance or relevance to a subject into the 180 day school year, and since it won’t all fit, we assign the rest as homework. Any teacher who has been teaching for more than a year knows that there is no practical way to complete the entire prescribed curriculum in one year, even if you take the tour bus approach and just point out the highlights to the students as you cruise by at seventy miles and hour.

I’m no longer convinced that the purpose of curriculum is to assemble in one place all the important “stuff” that a kid should know by the end of the school year. There’s too much that’s important anyway, we won’t all agree on which things are truly important, and the volume increases almost daily.

So what if curriculum instead were designed with holes, with a certain amount of white space? In visual design, the white space does a few things: it brings attention to the other elements of the design, it allows them to breathe, and it helps make them dynamic. Taking out some stuff and leaving more space in the curriculum can do similar things for the student.

Invite. Curriculum should first be built so that the student wants to engage with the content. It should be active, it should be interesting, it should be personal. Make it real and relevant. Start with where the students are. Connect to their interests and their worlds.

Inspire. Next the curriculum should motivate students to want to learn about the subject. The word inspire originally meant “to breathe into” or “to infuse life by breathing”. There is very little breathing room in today’s curriculum. Kids have no time to breathe in and reflect on their learning. They just have to cram it in and move on.

Ignite. Finally, the curriculum must light the fire. Leave students at the end of the unit or school year feeling like there is so much more to explore and so much deeper to go. If we ignite their passions and their natural curiosity, they will continue to pursue it on their own.

I remember so many times “discovering” a subject as a teacher that I thought I had no interest in learning about, but when I really engaged it (because I had to teach it), I found it fascinating and went on to study it on my own. I think a well-designed curriculum can do that for students.

Understand that I don’t believe curriculum can do this alone. None of these things can or will happen without an excellent teacher. Curriculum doesn’t live until students and teachers interact and engage it. But a strong curriculum will give the teacher the tools and resources to accomplish these things more easily.

Accomplishing this is the real challenge, of course. How do we create a curriculum that does these things? How do we anticipate where kids are when there are so many different varied experiences around the world? Perhaps this is an argument for purely locally designed curricula, but I’m not sure that’s practical. What do you think? How can we make this happen? Or is it just a fantasy that will never become reality?

While working on my model classroom presentation for this afternoon, I discovered a metaphor that helped me crystallize one of the things that makes learning today radically different than it was when I was in elementary school, and gave me a better grasp on how and why teaching and schools need to be different.

In the 1970s, writing a report was like buying fast food. I remember writing reports on many topics in elementary school: Morse code and Iraq are two that specifically leap to mind. (When we were selecting our countries to report on, I picked Iraq because I thought it was cool that the name ended with a Q. Yeah, I know.) I selected my topic, went to the library, found a book, read it (or more likely, skimmed it), then sat down to write my own version. Report writing really wasn’t research then, it was more like retelling. Like fast food value meals, someone else had really done all the work of taking the information ingredients, processing them, and putting them together into styrofoam containers and paper cartons. All I had to do was pick meal #2 and consume it.

School today is still set up for our kids to be fast food knowledge consumers. State and federal governments have already done the work of selecting what kinds of things are on the menu. School districts and textbook publishers have already chosen the ingredients, developed the recipes, and prepared the food, ready to deliver to the students. And just like fast food, it all looks and tastes pretty much the same everywhere. A Whopper in Denver is identical to one in Philadelphia.

Simply being a consumer is no longer sufficient. In the seventies, kids (and most adults for that matter) couldn’t access information directly. We only had limited sources, and all of them had been preprocessed for us by others. Today, on the Internet, we can tap directly into the raw data. The problem is, many of us still just consume it the same way we used to. We’re getting fresh produce and meat, but we are eating it raw.

We must teach kids not how to pick a good value meal, but what do do with the ingredients they have. We have to teach them how to create their own meals. We’ll begin by following recipes, but we have to also teach them the principles behind the recipes, the thinking that went into creating them, and eventually how to develop their own recipes. They need to know how to select quality ingredients, and which ones go together well. They need to develop their palates so they can experience the enormous variety of ideas and relationships that exist in the world. This will involve skills like critical thinking and problem solving.

Even this isn’t enough, though. I believe we need to get kids out of the grocery stores and into the fields. Teach them not just to select the right foods, but to grow them. We need to give kids the seeds, the tools, and the techniques for becoming their own knowledge farmers, to create knowledge and share it with the world.

And of course, all of this means that teachers have to get out of their own value meals and learn how to shop, how to cook, and how to farm. I suspect that at least for a while we’ll all be learning these things just half a step ahead of the kids, but that’s okay. What matters is that we recognize that there’s a world of cuisine outside of the food court and that we’re willing to live there.

Let me just say up front that I know I’m &submit=Search" target="_blank">hardly the first person to address this topic, and I’m sure I won’t be the last. In fact, so much has already been written on the subject of student blogging that I’m not going to spend time here talking about the basic reasons or the how-tos of doing it. Others have done that better than I.

What I want to explore today are a few of my thoughts about why blogging is a particularly powerful tool to give to gifted students. Gifted students have some unique needs that blogging can help teachers to address. Read the rest of this entry

Though it has taken me much longer than I planned to get back to this topic, I want to share with you today what I believe is an outstanding and probably very obscure tool that would be excellent for gifted students.

Think back a few years. No, further back. A little further. When home computers had memory measured in kilobytes, an 8-color monitor was high resolution, and disks were floppy.

The cutting-edge trend in computer entertainment was something called a “text adventure game.” Zork is the classic example of games in this genre, but there were dozens of them. They had no graphics and no need for a controller, because the entire means of interacting with the game was through text.

For those who have never played a text adventure, here is a typical sequence of moves you might see in one of these games (this is part of the sample transcript that was in the instruction manual for the original Zork): Read the rest of this entry

It’s a line you’ve probably seen on ads for sports equipment:

Better Tools for Better Performance

A debate is swirling among many people in my PLN about what’s more important: the tools and technology, or the teaching and learning. Before I begin exploring examples of great technology tools to use with gifted students, I thought it would be worth exploring, since it is directly relevant. The crux of it can be summarized in this exchange I had recently with Tony Baldasaro (@baldy7) on Twitter: Read the rest of this entry

It is important for teachers to get feedback from knowledgeable observers. A good supervisor will help you elevate your practice, hone the skills that are already sharp, and identify the areas where you have allowed lax habits to seep in.

Even the best supervisors can only visit a few times a year. Having peers watch us work is helpful, but making that happen is often a logistical challenge. We could videotape the lesson and watch it later, but that too is often complicated and time-consuming.

We often forget the team of observers that is readily available: our students. Ask your students regularly to tell you how you are doing. They’ll tell you. In excruciating detail.

Even better, do what a colleague of mine did the other day, perhaps without even realizing what would result: Ask your students to teach. It was fascinating to watch as students took on the persona of the teacher, then walked around the room, shushing other children, gesturing, and explaining. We saw, in sometimes frighteningly accurate mimicry, the precise methods and mannerisms that the teacher uses on a regular basis.

If you really want to find out what you do well—and will dare to find out what you don’t—put your students in the front of the classroom.

When I first moved to Bucks County, I knew the major routes to get around the area. I could, by rote, drive from my house to my in-laws’ house. I could also drive from my house to the school where I worked. I could flawlessly and efficiently travel those well-worn paths and arrive promptly at my destination.

One day, I received a simple phone call from my wife: “My parents are making dinner for us tonight. Just come straight from school and meet us there.”

Not a problem. I left work at my usual four o’clock and with traffic arrived a little after 5:30 PM.

“What took you so long? Did you have a meeting after school?”

“No, I left as soon as I could.”

“But it should only take a half hour.”

“That’s impossible. It’s more than that just to our house, then another 40 minutes to your parents.”

“Um, no, dear. There’s a more direct route.”

Read the rest of this entry

Students come to our classrooms with many assumptions and misconceptions, and it is the teacher’s job to anticipate them, recognize them, and correct them. Here are a few that I have seen or heard about:

• When you add or subtract, always line up the numbers on the right
• When you multiply, the answer is always bigger
• Rockets work because the exhaust pushes against the Earth
• Magnets stick to anything made of metal
• Christopher Columbus was trying to prove the world was round
• The American Revolution was fought over high taxes

Many student misunderstandings are simply a lack of experience. There is a scene in the 1982 movie, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, where Khan, the villain, is trying to hunt down our heroes. Kirk flies the Enterprise into a nebula in order to obscure the ship from Khan’s scanners. After a few minutes, Spock makes an observation about Khan:

SPOCK: Sporadic energy readings port side, aft. Could be an impulse turn.

KIRK: He won’t break off now. He followed me this far. He’ll be back. But from where…?

SPOCK: He’s intelligent, but not experienced. His pattern indicates…two-dimensional thinking…

Kirk looks at him, smiles.

KIRK: All stop.

SULU: All stop, sir.

KIRK: Z-minus ten thousand meters. Stand by photon torpedoes.

Like Khan, our students are intelligent but have limited experience. I wonder, though, how often we reinforce misunderstandings instead of correcting them?

Often in the name of making our lessons accessible or understandable we simplify concepts and use stereotypical examples. Consider geometry, for instance. When we draw shapes, they always look essentially the same:

Standard pattern block shapes

Triangles are always equilateral and point up. Rectangles are always wider than they are long and are parallel to the ground. At the extreme, we even refer to shapes by different names depending on their orientation. I actually heard this statement during a math lesson once:

And if you turn this diamond, it will become a square.

The shape was always a square; the direction it faces doesn’t make any difference.

Try these suggestions to avoid reinforcing the misconceptions of your students:

• Know your own misconceptions. Begin with the assumption that you may have picked up your own wrong ideas in school or from popular media. Review the material ahead of time and look for places where you yourself didn’t quite get it right. (Incidentally, if you read any of the items in my original list and thought, “What’s wrong with that?” you may want to do a little research and find the subtle problems with them.)
• Plan ahead for student misunderstanding. Learn the places where your students are likely to get confused or have preconceived ideas about a topic. Many misconceptions are common and repeated, so it’s easy to prepare for them.
• Use a wide variety of examples. Deliberately choose examples that stretch students’ thinking. Use counterexamples to help them better define concepts in their minds.
• Let students construct their own definitions. By letting students build definitions and explanations around examples you use, you are encouraging them to analyze the examples and understand the concept deeply instead of just memorizing a sentence someone else has provided them. After they attempt to build a student-friendly explanation, you can come in and provide more precise vocabulary where necessary to give them a more concise way to express it.
• Expect students to explain and justify their reasoning. Sometimes students are able to apply a rote algorithm accurately and get a correct answer to a problem without really understanding what they are doing. Asking them to explain, even when their process seems obvious to you, will give you insight into whether their thinking is accurate or has flaws that need to be corrected.

Soon after Kirk changed his tactics to account for Khan’s misconception, he was able to sneak up behind Khan’s ship, ultimately winning the battle. While it is unlikely that the misconceptions our students carry through school will result in such life or death circumstances, we can make our own jobs easier by preventing them in the first place.

SPOCK
                             Sporadic energy readings port side,
                             aft. Could be an impulse turn.

                                           KIRK
                             He won't break off now. If he
                             followed me this far he'll be back.
                             But from where...?

                                           SPOCK
                             He's intelligent, but not experienced.
                             His pattern indicates two dimensional
                             thinking...

                   Kirk looks at him, smiles.

                                           KIRK
                             Mr. Saavik, all stop.

                                           SAAVIK
                             All stop, sir.

                                           KIRK
                             Descend ten thousand meters. Stand
                             by photon torpedoes.