The Greater Educator: Recent Episodes
The Greater Educator
Rachael and Erick discuss the role of the library media specialist and how the relationships forged with teachers can be a gamechanger in your school.
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You've probably heard of a digital portfolio, but we were surprised by the kind of learning that takes place when you're intentional about how you execute them with your students. Also surprising - that late-winter, early-spring "peas and onions" snow.
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Rachael and Erick discover Mind, Brain, and Education (MBE) and discuss their thoughts on some next-level implications for our teaching careers after taking on the often misunderstood and highly stigmatized dongle subculture, some effective remedies for that annoying winter cough, and the impact of implementing e-sports in our public schools.
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In today's episode, Erick and Rachael discuss the ethics of tricking people into giving an interview, "Live, Laugh, Love" and other terrible cliches, and a recent Forbes article about ten ways to make your classroom more innovative.
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To all the teachers who might have had a less than motivated student grace their classrooms - whose job is it to motivate these kids to learn? We tackle this question and attempt to consider the ramifications of our answers.
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Here are some of our favorite go-to instructional strategies that you can plug into your classroom right away.
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Check out the ISTE Standards for Students while we offer our thoughts on each of them.
https://www.iste.org/
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We have both been so lucky in our careers to be able to attend education conferences across the country. The opportunity to learn alongside and network with like-minded professionals is probably the most energizing experience a teacher can have. That’s a call to action for school leaders - find space in your PD budget to send teachers out to learn and see first hand the kinds of innovation you want your schools to adopt! I’m headed to the iNACOL Symposium next week and will be presenting a session on reimagining schools with personalized learning, and as I was thinking through what I want to say posing questions to myself about how I’ve changed as a teacher, I thought this might be a great opportunity to put you in the hot seat, Erick, and see how you would articulate some of what we’ve gone through professionally.
We haven’t really discussed who we are yet on this podcast, so let’s give our listeners a little context. Why don’t you share a quick glimpse of who you are and who you’ve been as a teacher?
Sure, so I grew up in a home where mom and dad were both teachers, by sister’s a teacher, education is such a huge part of how I was raised. For 12 years, I taught high school social studies and I always had an interest in using technology to push what was possible in the classroom. I welcomed Google into my classroom with open arms, and that challenged me to transform my teaching methods. At the start of my career, I considered my role to be the content expert and the final word on assessment. Toward the end of my years in the classroom, I was leaning more into the ideas that we need to ask “Google-proof” questions that drive to the deeper concepts of history, rather than merely the superficial facts.
For the last three years, I’ve been a media specialist and a technology integration coach, a role in which I strive to draw teachers together, across the curriculum, to engage in real world projects with their students, using the library space as a sort of learning hub - a place where all the disciplines converge and interact. As I do this, I also provide professional learning for teachers in a wide range of settings and circumstances - doing what I can to address their needs, while inspiring them to try things they may have never thought possible.
In the end, I’m still simply a teacher. I get to inspire and empower both students and teachers on a daily basis, and I love it.
I can say having known you since the start of my own career that you had a good reputation as a teacher since the beginning, but if your own reflection, what was it that changed your mindset from being the content authority taking an inquiry-based, immersive approach to teaching?
I can remember the actual moment that the transformation happened. I was delivering content to my very first class of honors European history students - a course I did NOT feel I had the content mastery to teach well. So, I did what any of us would do - I got online and searched for the best of the best unit maps, assignments, primary source documents, lesson plans, and of course, notes, that I could find. It was while I was lecturing from these notes I found online that I became paranoid that my students might actually get online and find the some notes I was using.
That was when it hit me. How absurd was it that I was withholding something valuable to my students’ learning so that I could retain my role as the “expert” in the classroom. After that moment, I everything changed - there was no going back.
Were the seminal moments in your career that called your teaching philosophy into question?
The example I just mentioned was certainly one of them, but I hit another one a few years later when it seemed that every student had a smartphone in their hands all day...
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Ah, group work!
For some of us, that phrase induces PTSD from projects in which we knew that we would have to drag our group members along, hoping they would carry their share of the load, only to take it all on the day before the due date and making sure we all don’t fail Mr. Smith’s American History class and ruin our lives forever.
Yeah, this one is personal for me.
Collaboration, the fourth of the 4 C’s we’ve discussed here on The Greater Educator Podcast, can easily be checked off the list by even the most reflective educator. Anytime we put students into groups of any kind, it’s easy to check collaboration off our list and start focusing on the thousands of other learning objectives we’ve prepped for our students.
Collaboration can take on so many different forms. We can obviously see it in our classrooms, but it’s also possible online. We can pick the groups our students work in randomly, or based on data, or we can just let students form their own groups. We can establish formal rules for collaboration, or we can allow it to develop organically.
Digging even deeper, collaboration can be an integral part of the learning experience...or not. I think that of the 4 C’s, communication, creativity, critical thinking, and collaboration, it is this last one that can seem so easy to implement incorrectly. It’s important for us to take a second to admit that, sometimes, asking students to work together on something doesn’t necessarily add to the learning process - it can actually detract from it.
Take, for example, the aforementioned group project - the kind in which 4 or 5 students are asked to prepare a presentation for the class. Without a strict rubric, and sometimes, even with one, we know what happens. Our motivated students take control of the project while our less motivated ones passively go along for the ride. Not only do we have some students doing more than their fair share of work, but we also have some students minimally engaging with the content. Worse yet, we just taught our students to dread working with others.
So, before we talk about becoming a greater educator in this regard, we need to take a good hard look in the mirror and ask ourselves if we’re putting our students in the same painful situations we were forced into when we were in school.
So, what’s collaboration look like done right?
The answer lies in the pedagogy - what do we want our students to learn and how can that be facilitated by having students work with each other?
We want our students to be prepared to take on the challenges of life after graduation - challenges that are too big for them to solve on their own and require working with others. Without effective collaboration, this podcast wouldn’t exist right now.
In order for The Greater Educator to exist, Rachael and I have had to apply our personal, different sets of skills to the project. Our personal opinions about the direction the podcast should go, the design of the logo, even the name itself, needed to be checked off of each other. Strong feelings about a particular topic were met with critical review, negotiation, and compromise. We have worked together, in person and sometimes not. We have engaged in writing, recording, designing, organizing our materials and our schedules, deciding which pieces of business were able to be done in person, and which could be done on our own time. We've also learned together and from each other through this process. In the end, what we have here is something that could not have existed without each others input.
This collaborative effort has been necessary because of the work that needed to be done, the limited resources we have, and the value that is gained by each of us bringing our talents and skills to a project we are both passionate about.
Does this sound like the kind of group work that is being done in our classrooms?
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Our recent conversations have been exploring the 4Cs of 21st century learning. I don’t know if it’s been as apparent to you as it has been to me, but the closer we look at the skills and talk beyond the buzzwords to figure out what they actually mean, the more I realize how interconnected and interdependent they really are. Today’s topic, skill number 3 on our list, is critical thinking, and in my opinion, it is no less dependent on its predecessors than the other two were. LIke many of the other learning traits and skills that teachers are groomed to value, critical thinking is complex and dynamic in its definition and abstract in our attempts to teach it. I fear that in my own practice, it was something I expected of kids without teaching to kids - another difficult admission that came to me after some self-evaluation. Thinking back to the turning point in my career, one of the reasons I knew that I needed to reimagine teaching and learning in my classroom was because critical thinking and the higher-order thinking skills that I was hoping my students would obtain seemed to be happening in spite of my teaching habits. I recognized the need to push learners to the more demanding rigors of the common core standards, but I think I did most of my “pushing” by revising the verbs in the questions that I asked. I don’t think I changed much about the way that I guided students to explore the curriculum, and that truly is one way that I characterize critical thinking - as a process of exploration. Whether we refer to Bloom’s Taxonomy or Webb’s Depth of Knowledge, critical thinking skills are the strategies that students use when they cross over from comprehension of information that they’ve received into formation of their own individual meaning of and use for the information. I think of the process like a ladder, where learners begin with a basic understanding and perhaps can even apply what they’ve learned across multiple, similar scenarios. Critical thinking happens at the rung where they begin to evaluate their learning through the questioning nature of analysis, and come out on top with the ability to synthesize, or we might say CREATE, new information or understanding because of our exploration. So to answer your question about what the difference might be between creativity and critical thinking, my answer might be that the critical thinking is the hard labor that has to take place before the big idea comes to us. Neither attribute is whole without the other, but when we unpack the meaning behind these attributes and their implications for our classrooms, that is my perspective. In my own practice, defining examples of critical thinking was key to intentionally unlocking the ability in my students. Some of the pedagogical practices that emerged naturally were things like embracing and highlighting the productive struggle in my learners, helping them to identify their own personal biases and those in all of the people around them, developing criteria for evaluating information in a variety of forms, teaching them to be truly active listeners, and to articulate similarities, contrasts, and contradictions. These might seem like really advanced skills for middle school students, but when I implemented best practices in actually teaching these things, they became tangible, achievable goals, and I saw critical thinking strategies emerge from all of my learners in one form or another. One of the byproducts of living in a society where so much information is so easily accessible is that human beings can only internalize so much in a day. New research and theory gains traction so quickly that by the time the message is transferred from expert to scholar to superintendent to school-level leader to teacher, it tends to be delivered in a manner that is honestly just scratching the surface...
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There’s a fantastic advertisement by Adidas called “Calling All Creators”. The ad features a group of professional athletes sharing a roundtable discussion with some other folks: musical artists, a fashion designer, and a supermodel are all present for a conversation about what it means to be a creator. Take a listen:
[transcript from the ad]
Calling all creators those with the need to make something new, you who are obsessed with progress creativity is everything in today’s game it’s about making a statement i think what we’re all trying to do is leave a mark so the game will never be the same the game will never be the same we’re all creators related by a mindset that’s our job; to continue to try to enlighten while we inspire i’ve been taking the example of you but now I have to create for myself It’s not about borders, gender, race (I ain’t tryin to say) I’m trying to strike while the iron is hot it’s all intertwined fashion inspires music (art design is for it together) Come on Hopkins, you know you listening to push the T before you get to fear it and Aaron Rodgers, maybe you should! Join us, join us, pull up a chair, let’s change sport, change lives let’s create let’s create
I can’t watch or listen to this ad without thinking about how it applies to what we do, or what we should be doing, with our students everyday.
I love how the ad starts: “Calling all creators, those with the need to make something new, you who are obsessed with progress”. I love how this elevates creation, one of the famous 4 C’s, alongside collaboration, critical thinking, and, the subject of last week’s podcast, communication. Creators are framed as being people who don’t have a choice in the matter - they MUST be original, the MUST re-establish the standard. This is just what creators do - they can’t help it.
The ad continues, “It’s about making a statement..leaving a mark...so the game will never be the same”. Creators don’t just mimic greatness. They don’t just reach the standard that is set before them. Creators don’t just win the game, they change the game.
Creators are also natural leaders, because by changing the game, the encourage others to do it like them. Quoting the ad, “we’re all creators, related by a mindset...to try to enlighten while we inspire” While creators started as learners, they can’t leave well enough alone, “I’ve been taking the example of you, but now I have to create for myself”.
As teachers, how can we nurture the attitude expressed in this ad? The best way is for us to model creativity for our students.
Being a model-creator means letting go of control and allowing the game to be changed. We can’t let go of control without embracing a degree of risk, and this is our biggest obstacle. The demands of the teaching profession can be overwhelming, even when all we try to do is play the game the way it is set up for us to play - teaching the way we always have, the way teachers have for decades since the dawn of the industrial revolution. Obstacles that come to us from the widespread needs of our students are made even more difficult to overcome when our class sizes grow, our resources shrink, and our professional development is uninspired. With so much seemingly on the verge of collapse, our instincts are to tighten our grip, not to loosen it.
Yet, if we are to model the kind of creative spirit that will inspire our students to be game changers in the world, we simply must embrace the risk inherent in letting go. We must be willing to let go of our carefully-crafted lesson plans and routines if we are to ever discover something that might work better. And it’s in the discovering that we improve - our improvement changes the game - the game will never be the same.
Allow me to tell a little story about how my ‘letting go’ led to my history students using SoundCloud as a way to inspire them to keep up with their daily reading assignments...
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For years now, I have been a huge believer in the power of a more personalized, student-centered approach to learning. I bought in to the philosophies of empowering student voices and forging past the factory model of school pretty early in my research, but, If I’m being honest, I struggled immensely to put my beliefs into effective practice in my classroom. There are several reasons for this, but one of the most substantial was a lack of access to practical strategies for implementation.
One of the cornerstones of innovative education is the 4C’s movement. It’s not hard to convince teachers that fostering communication, collaboration, creativity and critical thinking are incredibly important in preparing students for college and career readiness. Yet, when we deconstruct any of those tenets, there is such depth that it can be confusing and overwhelming to know how to best equip students and embed these lessons into our learning culture.
Let’s start by diving deep into the idea of communication. We could argue that communication is central to everything else that human beings do - it is the vehicle by which we make sense of the world around us. And effective communication is an intricate web of conversation, written expression, fluency, representation, body language, listening, reading, conveying opinion, persuading an audience, motivating, emoting, and crafting a clear message among innumerable other modalities. All of these things are taught and assessed in some form in our schools, but the elements of verbal communication that are encompassed in 21st Century skills may not be as intuitive in instructional planning for teachers. If clear and effective communication is valued so strongly in our schools, our workforce, and our society as a whole, then educators should be more direct and intentional about providing instruction geared at eliciting the skills.
All teachers bear the responsibility of considering the communication skills necessary to be successful academically, and we need to be disciplined in recognizing this responsibility. For example, while reading teachers provide instruction on drawing meaning out of words on a page, content area teachers know that learners utilize different skills sets when reading for or about scientific inquiry, mathematical proofs, or historical perspectives. Are we utilizing effective instructional practices to explicitly address those differences? And are our school systems organized in a way to make this feasible?
Think about the standards that are designated as your responsibility and take the time to identify the forms of communication necessary in order to master those standards. Some teachers might identify tone, questioning, initiation, respectful disagreement, or social or cultural norms as necessary attributes, and probably even factor these criteria into assessments, but do we provide the modeling, scaffolding, guided practice and feedback necessary to refine and effectively utilize those skills? It is easy to assume that learners implicitly possess an awareness of these components, but it is unfair to assess their demonstration of them if we are not providing adequate instruction.
All levels and areas of education can build strong communicators. It comes down to identifying the skill as a core value and being intentional about teaching it. We can do this by providing students with opportunities to evaluate effective communication in action. Use video or role playing as a way to gauge what students already know, notice, and wonder about the role of communication in a particular scenario. Provide vocabulary, questioning techniques or sentence stems to build proficiency. Strategies like fishbowl discussions, think alouds, identification of desired outcomes, and self-evaluation can provide targeted practice. Apply the skills in a variety of contexts, utilizing digital communication platforms and seeking diverse interactions...
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Here at The Greater Educator, we’re kicking off the school year thinking big. I’m setting a vision for myself and my students that I think is a surefire way for any educator to improve, and it’s just two steps. If, at the end of each day, I can say that I’ve done each of these two things, then I think it’s going to be a pretty awesome year.
So, with each lesson I teach, I will aim to 1. Inspire and 2. Empower my students.
I know those two things seem like they might be too broad and vague to be meaningful, but I really do think that, with the right approach, keeping these two simple things in mind will help me to constantly reflect upon what I’m actually doing in class.
So, let’s take each of these steps one at a time. What’s it really mean to inspire learning for our students and it is practical to try to achieve this every single day?
For me, inspiration is a prerequisite to learning. We can’t really learn something on a deep level that will transform the way you see the world or permanently engrave itself as a lifelong skill unless we care about what we’re learning about on a personal level.
This can seem very daunting and maybe a little unrealistic. How do we know if we’re really inspiring our students?
I think it’s one of those things that you know it when you see it. Think about that project you do that your students absolutely love - the one they look forward to from day one because they’ve heard about it from your former students - the one that you need to pry your students away from when it’s time to move on to the next lesson - the one that other teachers, and maybe even parents, get annoyed with because your students are spending all of their time on it and not enough time on their other responsibilities.
I think the thing your students love so much about that learning experience is something we should try to replicate as much as possible.
I recently delivered a lesson on effective storytelling by creating a video production project for my students. I set this project up by showing them some videos from their favorite YouTubers - the ones our students spend so many hours consuming each day. My goal was to turn these consumers of content into creators. So, my pitch was that we were going to take a crack at becoming YouTube stars by analyzing and then mimicking the storytelling styles of our favorite YouTubers.
This lesson was a hit right out of the gates because it met a lot of my student right where they are - on YouTube. It shattered their assumption that watching YouTube was something they did in their freetime and that school hours were when you did school stuff. I tried to cram the two things together and show them that there is something worth learning from their favorite YouTubers that we could apply to our own classwork.
But what really made this lesson take off was when I took the initial inspiration for learning - in this case, the learning was all about effective storytelling, and followed it up with step #2 of empowerment.
I empowered by students in two ways. First, I put professional-grade tools in their hands in order for them to create in the same way that their YouTube heroes did. (We can discuss how I was able to pull this off in another pod.) And second, I removed as many restrictions as possible regarding how they were going to do their work. I didn’t spell out for them step by step how they should create a video; I didn’t even tell them what their video had to be about. My students had free reign to do it their way and the tools at their fingertips to do it.
It wasn’t easy for me to relinquish so much control over the day to day activities of my students. I forced myself to sit idly by while they made mistakes that were costing them valuable class time...
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It’s the start of a new school year and many of the country’s greatest educators have been readying plans to kickstart new projects, goals, procedures, instructional strategies, and countless other fresh ideas in their classrooms. Many of us spend the summer months exploring our craft and searching for the something that might work just a bit better this year. For those with these innovative mindsets, the ideas might be overwhelming. Even when a school year wraps up with a sense of achievement and satisfaction, lifelong learners feel the urge to continue experimenting with their pedagogy. As social media has changed the game of lesson planning in recent years, our feeds are flooded with captivating ideas, often accompanied by impressive photos, anecdotes, and resources published with attention-grabbing graphics and fonts. How can educators sift through the options to choose the best ideas and implement them with integrity?
We are all aware of the marketing platform that is social media, but the marketing of learning experiences that bombards teachers each time they log on is unprecedented. To determine which of these ideas are worth our precious class time, it’s important to remember to keep our overarching goals in focus.
Before curating a list of ways to change your lessons this year, articulate the change you want to see. In broad terms, we want to positively affect the quality of learning in our classrooms. More specifically, many use the avenue of increasing student interest and engagement in their lesson topics in order to affect learning. While I will never undermine the importance of engaged learners, I have come to realize that this pursuit can sometimes derail my overall intentions in the classroom.
At times, my most creative ideas end up being an “event” rather than an authentic element of learning. A simple Google search for lesson ideas related to a particular topic will turn up countless results that might not be quality, standards-aligned practices. I encountered this most frequently when I tried to plan projects in the past. I would look for activities to wrap up a teaching unit, and often it turned out to be what students remember most about the topic. Unfortunately, if I am honest, too often those culminating projects didn’t showcase my learning objectives. Instead, they tended to either assess memory, compliance, or nothing at all. But they were cool, man!
I have absolutely been guilty of using technology just for technology’s sake. I’ve been “sold” on new apps or other tech tools that I looked for ways to use in my instruction just because they were cool. I’ve spent hours designing lessons in fancy presentation format that really didn’t expose my students to anything different. It was only through some really serious reflection that I admitted to myself that I was falling for the marketing and losing sight of the change I actually wanted to happen in my classroom.
In many cases, teachers have tech at their fingertips before they have a clear vision for why and how it should be used. Undeniably, connectivity can offer a HUGE boost to student engagement, but it’s important to keep coming back to our purpose. We need kids to be engaged in the right things, after all. It’s a theme that you’ll hear us discuss often: the greatest resources in the world won’t affect student learning unless they are used effectively. The goals or objectives need to come first every time. I still have to remind myself of this repeatedly. It’s so easy to lose sight and it’s not easy to admit it.
A simple way to keep our sights set on our true intentions is to write it down, look at it often, and speak it aloud to others. I use a sort of vision board for myself, and that is what I look at as I am thinking about unit planning. When I read a tweet or pin an new idea, the act of looking at my intentions helps me to mentally assess whether it is going to help me or distract me from doing what I’ve set out to do...
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