Archive for the ‘Wisdom’ Category

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Talk To Your Students, Not At Them

Monday, June 15th, 2009

One of the best tips I received early on in my teaching career was to talk to my students as if they were adults, not at them as if they belonged to a different human sub-species. Here are some reasons why you should consider talking to your students instead of at them as well:

1. The most obvious reason: You talk to your friends, colleagues, and adult strangers. You don’t talk at them. Why would it be any different with your students? Are they members of a different human sub-species?

2. You reduce the chance of being viewed as a hypocrite. If how you talk to people depends on their station in life relative to your own (i.e. inferior, equal, superior), how can you ever hope to become an “integrated” person?  On the other hand, if you talk to everyone the same – whether they are friends, students, and/or colleagues – you increase your integrity (from “integrated”) and reduce the risk of being perceived as a hypocrite (from Greek hypokritēs which means actor).

3. When you talk to someone you’re indicating respect. When you talk at someone you’re broadcasting your own arrogance. Respectful people are liked. Arrogant people are not. In fact, I’m willing to bet most of those teachers who say, “My students just don’t respect me,” talk at their students.

4. You reduce the occupational hazards that come with teaching (e.g. bossyness, complusive social planning & ogranizing in social situations, not admitting to not knowing something, etc.). Put another way, when you talk to your friends, you don’t boss them around, you admit you don’t know things, and you don’t organize their lives for them. But when you talk at someone (even your friends), it’s easier to do all these things.

5. You’ll develop confidence as a leader amongst your friends and peers. When you talk at someone you view them as inferior, but when you talk to someone you view them as an equal. Teaching requires one to give orders, determine worth, enforce consequences, and manage people. Most people in life do not have to do such things. These are leadership tasks.  Teachers who view their students as equals learn how to do all these things in a fair, respectable, and positive way. Teachers who view their students as inferiors don’t. Teachers who talk to their students learn how to become positive and well-liked leaders.  Teachers who talk at their students don’t. It all starts with how you talk.

Conclusion ~ When you talk to your students, they’ll know that they’re working with “the real you.” As a result, they’ll respect you more, they’ll listen more when you do have to talk to them seriously, you will develop enviable leadership skills, and life will become easier because you’ll be able to be the real you.

TIP: Ask yourself on a regular basis, “Would I say it this way to a friend, to a colleague, or I’m standingbeside in a movie theater line-up?”  You’ll be amazed at the results … both in the classroom and in your personal life.

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Posted in Philosophy, Teaching Ideas, Wisdom | No Comments »

We’re All Big Kids

Monday, May 25th, 2009

A few times this year my wonderful wife has sent me to work to help with our “VISA repayment plan” (it’s the least I can do considering she’s pregnant and working full time). So I’ve embarked on a few stints of substitute teaching. It’s been, surprisingly, amazingly educational.

Last week I found myself in a gymnasium with two classes of Gr.4 boys, organizing and refereeing “The Super Hockey Championships” between team green-hockey-sticks and team orange-hockey-sticks. We had a mini-training camp where we did stutter steps until there were two kids standing, lines with push-ups and sit-ups intermixed, and running races. It was serious business. And if it was something other than “The Super Hockey Championship” right afterward, they would’ve been too bagged to play. But it wasn’t, and the training-camp made the game all the more important.

I noticed one of the little boys right at the start of the class. He was very athletic and a couple of times I caught him whispering things to his teammates. What he said couldn’t have been nice considering how deflated the recipients of the messages looked once the whispering ended … and the scowl on the whispering boys face confirmed my suspicion. I thought to myself, “I better keep an eye on this one.”

Each team had an A-shift and a B-shift. They were to take turns playing every three minutes. Four minutes into the game and one minute into B-shifts first shift, I noticed that a frumpy and clumsy looking boy hadn’t played yet. I walked over and asked him if he wanted to play. He nodded fiercely. I asked why he wasn’t playing and he looked up at the whispering/scowling boy. “Hmmm … ” I thought.  I gave whispering/scowling boy a penalty and insisted that frumpy/clumsy boy play during the penalty plus another shift to make up for his lost time.

Ten minutes later I announced, “4 minutes left!” At the same time I caught the same team trying to keep frumpy/clumsy boy on the bench … but this time it was another boy. This meant that new-penalty-boy would sit on the bench, and someone else from that team would have to come off so frumpy/clumsy boy could play. I chose whispering/scowling boy. He slammed his stick on the gym floor.

It was a close end to the game. The team taking all the penalties was trying to protect their one goal lead, and swarms of orange and green hockey sticks clashed and banged in that tiny little gymnasium. For these Gr.4 kids it meant everything. It was epic. And out of the corner of my eye I saw whispering/scowling boy wipe a tear from his eye. I realized he had only played about 4 minutes of the 20 minute game. I recalled how hard he worked in training camp. I thought how badly he wanted to win. How excluded he likely felt. How unfair it was that this strange man was making him miss the most important game of Gr.4 hockey. His tears were so real that I felt silly and ashamed.

And then I thought how we’re all this way. We’re all big kids. Some of us scowl and whisper, some of us klutz around, and most of us do other sorts of things. But at the end of the day, we all just want to be included. We just want to be part of the action. To be liked. To be acknowledged and validated by our peers and the people we look up to. But we forget these things as we get older because we get so good at hiding our feelings, forgetting that all of our own feelings – and other people’s too – come from the same place regardless of our age.

So I let the whispering/scowling boy with the face full of tears start playing before his team penalty “officially” ended with a nod and a smile. And I don’t know if it was the fact that he could play, or the knowing, warm look I gave him, but you should have seen his eyes light up. And maybe that was all the little tyke needed in the first place … just a bit of acknowledgment and validation.

And maybe that’s what all of us are looking for … the same things kids are: fair rules, solid boundaries, high-expectations, and a little bit of encouragement and validation along the way.

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Posted in Experience, Philosophy, Reflections, Wisdom | 1 Comment »

Knowledge Work Learning vs. Industrial Work Learning

Tuesday, March 24th, 2009

50 years ago, Peter Drucker, management visionary and guru, forecast a massive shift in the kind of work that would be done in our economy – a shift from industrial work to knowledge work.

Industrial work has boundaries. It has limits. It has superiors telling inferiors what to do, how, and by when. It has clear-cut rewards/punishments for meeting clear-cut goals and targets. Industrial work is quantity-based.

Knowledge work has no boundaries. The most critical task in knowledge work is deciding what needs to be done to reach the goal. And, in many cases, one needs to identify what goals need to be reached before he/she can decide what needs to be done. Knowledge work demands constant and ongoing learning. It’s self-paced, self-regulated, and quality-based … not quantity based.

This was described in 1959. It’s now 2009. And I have to ask myself, “Why aren’t schools waking up to this? Why are we still packaging learning for industrial work?”

Think about it. Most states/provinces require their schools/teachers to guide students through chunks of information packaged in what we call a course. The boundaries are clear (be able to do/recall this, this, and this by the end of this course) and we attempt to calculate results with equal clarity (especially with the standardized testing movement of the last 15 years). What needs to be learned and reached – and why – is predetermined for students, and teachers too. It has industrial work written all over it.

Sure, the state/provincial tests we use measure quality of mastery … but by and large they measure the quality of mastery based on the prescribed quantity … which, in essence, can be reduced to “quantity of mastery.” The ubiquitous Advanced Placement Program epitomizes what I’m describing here. I know. I taught an AP course. I had to ask my students to chug, chug, chug information and churn, churn, churn it out on test after test after test in preparation for the big test. Industrial, industrial, industrial.

What we should be doing.
If we want to prepare our students for knowledge work, our educational focus has to change. We need to teach our youth how to determine their own outcomes and how to identify what they can or should do with a chunk of information instead of memorizing it for the sake of recalling it. If we want to get serious about knowledge work education, standards should focus on presenting students with real-world scenarios and/or problems, asking them to identify their own outcomes, and challenging them to reach them.

Why it’s tough to change.
I’m going to offer some practical ideas and suggestions on how we can tilt the focus of our educational delivery towards knowledge work/learning in future posts (I can’t wait actually), but I end this post with some comments on why – I think – our system continues to package teaching/learning for industrial work when we all know it’s not what we should be doing, but I’m sharing these realities because I get frustrated with too many people’s 5-minute solutions to the education problem when they ignore just how steeped it really is:

1. Efficiency. Let’s face it, teaching and testing industrial work is efficient. And efficient is cost-effective. One test can be written for an entire nation of students to take. It should also be noted that when you offer something to the public for free (i.e. public education), it has to be cost effective.

2. Licensure. Although schools are, by their nature, factory-like, what’s more significant to their perpetuation of industrial work/learning is the fact that they’re part of a world-wide licensure system. My wife recently was cleaning out her university binders and asked, “Why did I have to do all this stuff? I’m never going to use any of it again.” Answer = licensure. She did it to get a teachers license, just as a doctor takes courses/tests to get a doctor’s license, or any of us take much shorter courses/tests to get a driver’s license. Licensure focuses on ‘quantity mastered,’ not on a learner’s ability to grow and progress continually.

3. Tradition. This is the big one. Most teachers received an education that focused on industrial work, and then find themselves teaching in the same system that’s oriented towards industrial work. It’s difficult enough trying to do something different that what the system expects you to do, but it’s even more difficult when that’s all you know. It takes a lot more work to unlearn than to learn, and given the over-burden most teachers face, it makes sense to do what takes less work. Thus, industrial work/learning perpetuates.

Just some thoughts. What do you think?

p.s. I’ll revisit this topic in the weeks to come, offering some constructive suggestions on what we can do to fix/change this.

Posted in Growth, Knowledge, Philosophy, Wisdom | No Comments »

Practicing Innovative Instruction

Tuesday, March 10th, 2009

I read another educator’s great blog post about failure and risk taking in the teaching and learning process. You should read it, it was great. But one sentence in the post really caught my attention, and that was this sentence:

I, for one, am tired of reading about innovative instruction and not practicing it. It seems that many of these philosophies of curriculum and instruction exist only on paper written by academics who publish in journals that often go unread by the classroom instructors.

The best use of learning – in my opinion – is putting what’s learned into constructive action. This makes it real. It makes it tangible. It makes it meaningful. And this includes the learning about teaching and learning.

If all of us educators did what the quote above suggests on a regular basis – if we tried out just half of the new teaching ideas and practices we stumbled upon because we looked forward to learning from what didn’t work as much as from what did work – not only would we be modeling the best kind of learning to our students, but I think we would become much better teachers … much more quickly.

Posted in Teaching Ideas, Wisdom | 1 Comment »

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