A teaching mantra: less us, more them

This was written by Gary Stager and Sylvia Libow-Martinez who writes and speaks about progressive education. He is the co-author of Invent to Learn. Gary blogs here and tweets here. Sylvia's website is here and tweets here. This post is an excerpt from his book Invent to Learn.

by Gary Stager and Sylvia Libo-Martinez

Anytime an adult feels it necessary to intervene in an educational transaction, they should take a deep breath and ask, "Is there some way I can do less and grant more authority, responsibility, or agency to the learner?"

Understanding is the result of existing knowledge accommodating and explaining new experiences. If we focus on a handful of powerful ideas and create experiences where students naturally need to stretch their understanding, students learn more. The role of the teacher is to create and facilitate these powerful, productive contexts for learning.

One simple way to do this is to make your teaching mantra, "Less Us, More Them." Piaget suggests that it is not the role of the teacher to correct a child from the outside, but to create the conditions in which the student corrects himself. Whenever you are about to intervene on behalf of a teachable moment, pause and ask yourself, "Is there a way I can shift more agency to the learner?"

Less Us, More Them (LUMT) doesn't exempt teachers from the learning process, or minimize the importance of their expertise within the learning environment. LUMT raises expectations and standards in our classrooms by granting more responsibility to the learner. In this environment, it is natural to expect kids to look up unfamiliar words, proofread, and contribute resources for class discussion without prodding from the teacher.

To start making your classroom more student-centred, demonstrate a concept and then ask students to do something.

Walk around and support them when asked. Bring the group together to celebrate an accomplishment or seize the next teachable moment. We need to operate as if students own the time in our classrooms, not us. Kids rise to the occasion if we let them. When students own the learning process, they also own the knowledge they construct. Self-reliance results when we relinquish control and power to our students.

I'm Learning about Project Based Learning

Over the years, I've dedicated myself to thinking and re-thinking about my teaching practices. My professional development has focused on assessment, accountability, homework, classroom management and public education policy. I've spent time on lesson planning too, but I want to dedicate more time and effort on how and why learning should be more about projects and performances collected in portfolios.

I'm reading Methods that Matter by Harvey Daniels and Marilyn Bizar and it's off to a wonderful start. 

The first chapter provides a great list of what school should be less about and what school should be more about.

LESS

• whole-class-directed instruction, e.g., lecturing
• student passivity: sitting, listening, receiving and absorbing information
• prizing and rewarding silence in the classroom
• classroom time devoted to fill-in-the-blank worksheets, dittos, workbooks, and other "seatwork"
• student time spend reading textbooks and basal readers
• attempt by teachers to thinly "cover" large amounts of material in every subject area
• rote memorization of facts and details
• stress on competition and grades in school
• tracking or leveling students into "ability groups"
• use of pull-out special programs
• use of and reliance on standardized tests

MORE

• experiential, inductive, hands-on learning
• active learning in the classroom, with all the attendant noise and movement of students doing, talking and collaborating
• emphasis on higher-order thinking: learning a field's key concepts and principles
• deep study of fewer topics, so that students internalize the fields way of inquiry
• time devoted to reading whole, original, real books and nonfiction materials
• responsibility transferred to students for their work: goal setting, record keeping, monitoring, evaluation
• choice for students; picking their own books, writing topics, team partners, research projects
• enacting and modeling of the principles of democracy in school
• attention to varying cognitive and effective styles of individual students
• cooperative, collaborative activity; developing the classroom as an interdependent community
• heterogeneously grouped classrooms where individual needs are met through individualized activities, not segregation of bodies
• delivery of special help to students in regular classrooms
• varied and cooperative roles for teachers, parents and administrators
• reliance upon teachers' descriptive evaluation of student growth, including qualitative/anecdotal observations

You can find a summary and study guide for the book here. 

I hope to use this book to fine-tune my classroom's use of projects and performances collected in portfolios.

Not every child can learn

This was written by my friend and colleague Dave Martin. He is a high school math teacher who blogs here and tweets here. This post was originally found here.

by Dave Martin

Lets face the truth now. It is about time we stop saying  "every child can learn".

After 8 years of teaching, I have realized that it is true that not every child can learn....by Friday.

Not every child can learn....by me standing at the front talking.

Not every child can learn....by working alone.

Not every child can learn....by reading the textbook.

Not every child can learn....by worksheets.

Not every child can learn....by passively taking notes.

So if we aren't going to talk about "every child can learn", we can then start talking about "what do we do when they don't".

The power of making: 3-D printers

I was reading Unbored: The Power of 'Making' in the Classroom when I came across this:

The girls open their sketchbooks and doodle possible solutions. One toothbrush plays music. Another comes with a timer. Still another has a tiny TV embedded into the handle. One model grows larger as you brush and then gets smaller when the two minutes are up. 

The project takes several weeks and involves more than a few trips to the school's Fab Lab, a state-of-the art digital prototyping and manufacturing facility that Marymount started in 2011 to more thoroughly engage its students in math and science. It's here that they transfer their sketches to computer-automated drawings, which are then sent to the classroom's MakerBot, a 3-D printer that seems like it was plucked straight out of The Jetsons.

I immediately searched for MakerBot 3-D printer and came across this video:



When it comes to curriculum and lesson planning, my mantra is: students should be completing projects that are in a context and for a purpose.

What if every student had access to one of these printers at home or at school? How might school be more active, relevant and engaging?

What if school was more like this?

This was written by George Couros who is Division principal of Innovative Teaching and Learning for Parkland School Division in Alberta, Canada. He is suspiciously well dressed and has the healthiest head of hair I've ever seen. He tweets here and blogs here. This post was originally found here.

by George Couros

Here is a little activity that you can do with staff when returning to school to get the wheels turning on project based learning inspired by this awesome video.

Take the Alberta Education Competency Wheel below:

Then watch this AMAZING video below about a self-initiated project done by a pretty cool kid:

As you watch the video, write down all of the things that the student did on his own to meet the expectations as listed in the “Competency Wheel”. Are all elements touched upon in this project? Discuss some ideas or projects that you can do with students that would be similar as a whole staff or within teams.

You could also discuss this article that has some lessons taken away from the video (quote shortened below):

1. Boredom is more of a statement about the person than the situation. “Hey Caine…want to come spend the summer with me in the back of my barely-trafficked auto parts store?” For most kids this would be summer vacation equivalent of the kiss of death. There was no gaming system. No swimming pool. No television. A perfect excuse for “I’m booooooorrrred.” But NO. Caine looked around and saw opportunity. Everywhere. Cardboard boxes, packing tape, gadgets and doo-dads. He chose not to be bored. It’s totally a state of mind. 

2. Keep working while the world ignores you. How long was it before Caine had customer #1? How many entrepreneurs or artists would have given up by then, or stopped working at their craft and improving their skills? Caine approached his arcade with craftsmanship and fervor, and that’s what I aspire to do too. 

3. Your craft will cost you something. Did you notice the prizes in the arcade? Caine’s own toys. His vision for his arcade required (demanded!) that he use all of his resources to make it work, and this meant forfeiting his own stuff for the sake of his vision.

Better yet, show the video to kids and discuss the wheel with them. Get them thinking on projects that they can initiate that would include these elements and would be something that they are interested in doing. Perhaps have them do some proposals of projects that they can do that would be an all year idea or could be used as the basis of a capstone project.

Best. Education cartoon. Ever.

Imagine the student who is in our class and is constantly distracted by the real world.

If only they knew how important that top down mandated, prefabricated, content-bloated curriculum that we are responsible for dispensing truly is.

If only they would focus on what they are told to do.

If only they would stop distracting others from doing what they are told to do.

If only they would stop asking questions that derail our laminated lesson plans.

If only they would sit still.

If only they would be a little less... human.

The best and worst curriculums

The best teachers understand that curriculum is not something that some distant authority publishes and mails to the school so that the teacher may merely deliver it to the students.

Instead, the best teachers understand that the best curriculums are co-created with students so that they may construct an understanding for themselves from the inside while interacting with their environment.

This is precisely why curriculum guides should be exactly that -- a guide. Never doubt that a thoughtful teacher and an engaged student can learn together; indeed, it's the only way real learning has ever really happened.

Formal & Traditional vs Progressive Education

I teach in a psychiatric assessment unit in a hospital for children under the age of 18 who present with a wide range of complex psychiatric symptoms.

Some of these children are in mainstream schooling. Some are in special education.

Some are in mainstream looking to move to a special education placement. Some are in special education looking for a mainstream placement. Many just want to get out of the hospital so they can get back to their regularly scheduled lives.

Preconceived notions about what school should look like heavily influences what some believe children should be doing during school. These notions tend to frame school around a pedagogy of poverty where the children are marinated in non-reflective acquiescence. When school is seen as something done to children while they play a passive role, compliance and obedience become the gold-standard. If a child can sit quietly through a morning's worth of lecture followed up with an afternoon of filling in worksheets, then they are considered ready for school.

As a progressive educator, my challenge is to engage those who have never been invited to reconsider their assumptions about education. The truth is that many people are reassured by signs of formal-traditional school and are disturbed by their absence.

By the time students get to me in the hospital, they tend to have received more than their fair share of formal-traditional education. Despite their prevailing problems in and out of school, I find it sadly ironic that conventional wisdom tells us to simply double the dose of the formal and the traditional. But if this worked, many of these children wouldn't need to come to the hospital.

This is precisely why spending all of our time trying to get kids better acquainted with a kind of formal-traditional education that they already know all too well is at best unhelpful and at worst harmful.

Mara Sapon-Shevin writes in her book Widening the Circle: The Power of Inclusive Classrooms:

More restrictive placements do not prepare people for less restrictive placements. Students are unlikely to be able to work themselves down the continuum. Being in a segregated classroom almost always makes the transition to general classes less likely and more problematic. Though certain isolated skills can certainly be taught "away" from the setting in which they will ultimately be displayed, the nature of that isolation often makes it difficult to transfer those skills or to even envision what "typical" behavior looks like. We become so focused on teaching Kevin to sit at his seat and attend to the task in front of him in a segregated setting that we lose sight of what typical fifth graders are required to do in the regular classroom. Learning to swim in the bathtub doesn't ensure that you will be able to swim in the ocean. Particularly because many students with disabilities have trouble transferring skills, it is far more effective and efficient to teach the necessary skills in settings that are authentic and normative.

The elements of "mainstream" education should not be built on the ability to sit passively during a lecture in order to regurgitate prefabricated facts on a worksheet. In fact, elements of real learning are built on characteristics that make formal-traditional education almost unbearable.

Debra Stipek, dean of School Education at Stanford University puts it this way:

Drill-and-skill is not how middle class children got their edge, so why use a strategy to help poor kids catch up that didn't help middle class kids in the first place?

It's important to note that a pedagogy of poverty is not just for the economically disadvantaged; children who present a wide range of mental health problems and children in special education often get more than their fair share of sit and get, spew and forget.

The most important attitude that can be formed is that of a desire to go on learning. The best way to nurture and support those who are hardest to educate is to see their learning difficulties less as problems with the child and more as problems for the curriculum to solve.

I'll close by making my point this way: Look at that chart again. Which kind of education do you want for your son or daughter and which one is good enough for other people's kids?

Stop writing the objectives on the board

How often have you been told that writing the lesson's objectives on the board is best practice? Can you think of even one reason why doing this might be a bad idea? Because the prevailing wind of conventional wisdom consistently blows in favor of content-bloated, prefabricated externally mandated standardized standards, it takes courage to pause and reflect.

Mike Fishback offers this post titled Objectively Speaking where he identifies three reasons why we should question the wisdom behind writing the lesson's objective on the board.

1. Communicating objectives to students sends a strong message about who is driving the learning.
2. Communicating objectives to students gives away the ending before the uncovering even begins.
3. Communicating objectives to students discourages students and teachers from pursuing potentially constructive lines of inquiry that appear tangential to the objectives.

I often share this clip of Alfie Kohn telling a story of a grade one class discovering the need for standardized measurement.

Watch this clip and think about what affect writing the objective on the board would have had on student learning.



I think we can all agree that writing the objective on the board might have ruined this experience in some way for some of the kids. When I hear that teachers are mandated to write the objectives on the board and are subject to being evaluated based on their compliance, I become concerned.

At the very least, teachers should be afforded the professional responsibility to decide whether writing the objective on the board is pedagogically appropriate.

Learning Patience

In China they say someone plants the Giant Bamboo seed.

In that first year someone waters it, fertilizes it, cares for it -- and nothing happens.

In the second year someone waters it, fertilizes it, cares for it -- and nothing happens.

In the third years someone waters it, fertilizes it, cares for it -- and nothing happens.

Sometime in that fourth year, someone waters it, fertilizes it, and cares for it -- and it suddenly shoots up 25 feet tall.

I believe this anecdote has a number of implications for education:

• Having high standards is one thing, but standardizing both what and how children will learn with a a fixed pacing schedule is quite another. Children are not merely widgets that teachers simply assemble at their respective grade-level work stations. Demanding all children to meet a certain standard by a certain "best-before" date defies what we know about how children learn. We shouldn't need research to tell us this.

• Rewarding or punishing teachers based on how a child does in their class in one year makes as much sense as punishing the first year farmer or rewarding the fourth year farmer.

• If we don't trust the farmer to properly seed, water, fertilize and care for the Giant Bamboo then it might make sense to dig up that seed each year and measure its progress. If we don't trust teachers to properly educate students, then it might make sense to constantly or even obsessively measure student growth. If we can imagine how doing this would hinder the growth of the Giant Bamboo, what are we doing to our children when we implement test & punish accountability regimes?
• While some kinds of Bamboo take years to show growth, others take far less time. The same goes for the kids -- ranking, sorting and filtering with tests that act like arbitrary gatekeepers condemn one kind of learner to someone else's definition of success.

Kids are weird

In his book We Are All Weird, Seth Godin writes:

When we see a jogger off in the distance, our brain fills in the gaps. We don't imagine a red-haired giant, wearing a chartreuse jumpsuit and a Cameron Diaz smile. No, at this distance, we fill in the gaps with our prototype runner, a standard runner, the runner we always use when we imagine a runner. To do anything else seems a waste of time and effort. 

As we get closer, reality intrudes. This isn't an archetype, it's an actual person. Short, perhaps, or with just one leg, or limping or wearing street clothes. On close inspection, just about everybody is weird.

When we plan curriculum for students (read: doing curriculum to kids), we see them off in the distance, allowing our brains to fill in the gaps. We don't imagine the dyslexic kid who needs to be the primary caregiver for his siblings while his single mom works the night shift, the adolescent who spent the weekend in crisis stabilization in a psychiatric assessment unit at the local hospital or the teenager who can't sit in a desk for 10 minutes but spends hours in the backyard meticulously mastering their snapshot.

As we get closer to our kids, it becomes disturbingly clear that normal is a myth.

There is no cookie-cutter kid. No archetype student. All kids are human which makes them inherently weird -- and good thing too because diversity is what get's us through the day.

The best educators get what it means to say that every teacher is inexperienced with each new group of students. They get that prefabricated, content-bloated curriculums, pacing guides and laminated lesson plans are the definitive way to pretend to teach.

Upon closer inspection, almost every learner is weird and it's time school took the time to address their weird needs.

Do standards subjugate students?

Old School is not a place - rather it is a state of mind that ultimately thinks very little of the mind, and there are as many problems with this kind of education as there are Old School Teachers.

Old School is more interested in what teachers are supposed to teach than what the students are learning, and it is this premise that the Tougher Standards movement is built on. And yet how often is the idea of standards ever questioned? What are the chances you'll see at your next conference a session titled "Do Standards Subjugate Students?"

Reflecting upon one's beliefs can be a very productive use of time, and I can think of no better time to do so than when we have come to mindlessly accept something as a given truth. When questions are no longer answered because questions are no longer being asked, it's time to pause and reflect. In his book, The Schools Our Children Deserve, Alfie Kohn encourages us to do just that:

These days, anyone looking for a cause without controversy would do better to come out in favor of higher standards for our schools. It's a safe bet that almost any audience will vigorously applaud such a sentiment, since it is widely agreed that our educational system is in deep trouble and that raising standards is the solution. On the other hand, whenever agreement is a bit too quick and consensus a little too broad, it's worth taking another look.

I have a problem with distant authorities who are pedagogically even further removed from the classroom than they are geographically dictating what everyone else should learn based on their personal assumptions about what it means to be well educated. In her book One Size Fits Few, Susan Ohanian adds:

Give a Standardisto a pad of paper and a pencil and he goes nuts making lists of essential knowledge - without ever laying eyes on the children who must learn it.

I believe at the heart of Ohanian's criticism is the idea that there is something inherently wrong with seeing an education as something planned and provided for us, and the only thing worse than a curriculum made by someone else is one made by someone who never cares to know us. When children are not welcome to play an active role in not only what they learn but also how they will do so, there is only one way they can experience school - that is controlling.

When the teacher's role is less about artfully guiding students to thinking and reasoning for themselves in a kind of logic gymnasium and more about dispensing right answers and disciplining wrong ones, we openly choose to ignore the roots of real learning. Sixty years of research tells us that we don't internalize knowledge by simply being told to do so. Real learning is constructed from the inside while interacting with others.

In his article Beware of the Standards, Not Just the Tests, Alfie Kohn warns us:

On the one hand, thinking is messy, and deep thinking is very messy. On the other hand, standards documents are nothing if not orderly. Keep that contrast in mind and you will not be surprised to see how much damage those documents can do in real classrooms.

Considerable research has demonstrated the importance of making sure students are actively involved in designing their own learning, invited to play a role in formulating questions, creating projects, and so on. But the more comprehensive and detailed a list of standards, the more students (and even teachers) are excluded from this process, the more alienated they tend to become, and the more teaching becomes a race to cover a huge amount of material. Thus, meeting these kinds of standards may actually have the effect of dumbing down classrooms. As Howard Gardner and his colleagues wisely observed, "The greatest enemy of understanding is 'coverage.'"

Learning is not like instant mashed potatoes; kids have not been through an industrial process of cooking, mashing and dehydrating to yield packaged convenience learning that can be reconstituted in the classroom in seconds by simply adding curriculum or standards.

Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it's the only one you have; the idea of fixing school by simply 'doing what we've always done but better' (read: raise the bar) has held a monopoly over school improvement and education reform for too long.

At the very least, before we ask for guidance on how to best implement externally imposed standards, we should ask whether doing so is a good idea.

Why preschool shouldn't be like school

"'College begins in kindergarten.' No it doesn't. Kindergarten begins in kindergarten."

-Sir Ken Robinson

If you are a fan of direct instruction and the banking metaphor of education, you might find it interesting to read Alison Gopnik's Why Preschool Shouldn't Be Like School. The article features two experiments:

In the first study, MIT professor Laura Schulz, her graduate student Elizabeth Bonawitz, and their colleagues looked at how 4-year-olds learned about a new toy with four tubes. Each tube could do something interesting: If you pulled on one tube it squeaked, if you looked inside another tube you found a hidden mirror, and so on. For one group of children, the experimenter said: "I just found this toy!" As she brought out the toy, she pulled the first tube, as if by accident, and it squeaked. She acted surprised ("Huh! Did you see that? Let me try to do that!") and pulled the tube again to make it squeak a second time. With the other children, the experimenter acted more like a teacher. She said, "I'm going to show you how my toy works. Watch this!" and deliberately made the tube squeak. Then she left both groups of children alone to play with the toy. 

All of the children pulled the first tube to make it squeak. The question was whether they would also learn about the other things the toy could do. The children from the first group played with the toy longer and discovered more of its "hidden" features than those in the second group. In other words, direct instruction made the children less curious and less likely to discover new information.

Does direct teaching also make children less likely to draw new conclusions—or, put another way, does it make them less creative? To answer this question, Daphna Buchsbaum, Tom Griffiths, Patrick Shafto, and I gave another group of 4-year-old children a new toy.* This time, though, we demonstrated sequences of three actions on the toy, some of which caused the toy to play music, some of which did not. For example, Daphna might start by squishing the toy, then pressing a pad on its top, then pulling a ring on its side, at which point the toy would play music. Then she might try a different series of three actions, and it would play music again. Not every sequence she demonstrated worked, however: Only the ones that ended with the same two actions made the music play. After showing the children five successful sequences interspersed with four unsuccessful ones, she gave them the toy and told them to "make it go." 

Daphna ran through the same nine sequences with all the children, but with one group, she acted as if she were clueless about the toy. ("Wow, look at this toy. I wonder how it works? Let's try this," she said.) With the other group, she acted like a teacher. ("Here's how my toy works.") When she acted clueless, many of the children figured out the most intelligent way of getting the toy to play music (performing just the two key actions, something Daphna had not demonstrated). But when Daphna acted like a teacher, the children imitated her exactly, rather than discovering the more intelligent and more novel two-action solution.

All this brings new life to an old quote from Seymour Papert:

The scandal of education is that every time you teach something, you deprive a child of the pleasure and benefit of discovery.

But if this is true then perhaps it's not just preschool that shouldn't be like school. Perhaps all learners would be better off if every level of education was a little less like school.

Prescription vs Construction

The teacher who plans without student input will be no more successful than a bride who plans her entire life without having a groom.

So let's be honest, planning is guessing.

Now there's nothing wrong with guessing, but let's make sure that we don't make prophets of ourselves. Year plans, lesson plans, curriculums and standards typically ignore the very clients they have been made for. This is why for the longest time these tools have been labelled guides. But is it just me or have they become rules?

When and why did this happen?

The answer is elusive, but I'm convinced it has something to do with mistrust and a gross misunderstanding for real learning.

Mistrust drives manipulation. It you don't trust teachers as guides, then it's easy to justify the need for rules. Prescriptive planning tends to turn learning into linear fabrications when real learning is non-linear and constructed.

Plans need to remain as vague as possible with the understanding that they should never play more of a role prescribing the learning than the kids constructing it.

No plan might be a good plan

Is there a place for a good plan?

Sure, but let's not kid ourselves - planning is guessing.

At best, plans can be used to guide us as we maneuver our way through life. Problems arise when we re-label plans from guides to dictates. When the tail wages the dog, we lose our way.

We tell kids we can't discuss this because we are suppose to be learning about that.

Instead of asking kids what kind of project they want to do, we tell them what project they have to do.

Peter Bergman explains Why Not Having a Plan Can Be the Best Plan of All:

Mark Zuckerberg and his college roommates were computer science students without any real plan. They started Facebook because it was fun, used their talents, and was a novel way for Harvard students and alumni to stay in touch. Zuckerberg never anticipated it would host over 400 million members. And he had no clear idea where the money would come from. But he kept at it until, in 2007, Facebook let outside developers create applications for it, and game developers started buying ads on Facebook to keep attracting players. Hardly Zuckerberg's strategy in 2004.



And when Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders of Google, started writing code in 1996 they had no clear plan or idea how they would make money either. But that didn't stop them from starting. It wasn't until 2002 and 2003 that AdWords and AdSense became the company's money-making platform.

Lesson planning has taken on a life of itself - often these content-bloated, overly prescriptive lesson plans are by-products of a curriculum that demands kids know an infinite amount of material in time for yesterday.

Just as Mark Twain coined the phrase "I never let schooling get in the way of my education", it is just as true that good teachers don't let lesson planning or curriculum get in the way of learning.

Spamming all-calls

That damn technology!

If only we could unplug the internet so those damn kids would pay attention to our damn lectures!

I mean, if they weren't so damn distracted with learning on that damn Internet, they would learn more from me!

Okay, I'm being a little over-the-top, but then so was this university professor when he says he can't figure out how to get his students off the Internet during his lectures.

Teachers don't need to survey their students for feedback on their lessons - students' behaviour in and of itself should be feedback enough. Sleeping, off-topic socializing, snoring, doodling, paper airplanes and self-mutilation are valuable forms of feedback that should tell teachers that something is awry.


Misbehevavior is the number one symptom of a boring and unengaging curriculum. If students feel less captivated and more like captives during school, then they are going to vote with their feet - and if they can't actually leave physically, then we shouldn't be surprised when they remain only in body.


But for the most part, we don't really want to hear it. Too often we ask for feedback, when we are really asking for praise.

When a kid misbehaves, for the most part, we don't look at ourselves - or our lessons - or our curriculum. Instead we blame the kids. They need more self-control.

Have you ever been to a teacher's conference? Ever sat in a room full of teachers during a lecture?

You might be smirking right now, because you know where I'm going with this. Try to lecture a room full of teachers and you'll see what I mean. The hypocricy is pungent.


Scott Berkun might be on to something when he explains that the technology is not the problem:

First, there is a strong academic argument that lectures are an inappropriate teaching method much of the time – it’s just that it’s the only method many professors know or are willing to try... Second, most people who lecture are awful – the bar is low – and in the case of professors, they are lecturing to people who are captives.

Berkun's comments are ironically cannabolistic - he makes a living as a public speaker.

This all got me thinking about how Seth Godin defines spam:

Spam is unanticipated, impersonal, irrelevant junk I don't want to get.

How much of a teacher's staff meeting agenda is considered spam by the teacher? How much of a teacher's lesson and lecture is considered to be spam by the students? How much of the content that plows its way over the public address speakers is considered spam?

Seth writes about the inefficiencies of the all-call:

Back when companies had offices, there was a button on the phone labeled "all call". It allowed you to page every speaker in the entire building at once.

"Tom P., you have a package at the front desk!"

It was a lot easier to hit all call than to just track down Tom. After a while, this group interruption gets tiresome because it's so wasteful. You interrupt 100 people to reach one, or you get ten offers of help (or someone to buy your hockey tickets) when one was all you needed.

The days of standardized swaths of lecturing where whole chunks of information is simply disseminated among the masses has come and gone. The kids are telling us there is something wrong with school - we know there are better ways.

The first step is to stop blaming them and start listening to them.

Flirting rather than lecturing

Chip Heath and Dan Heath's book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die was never written to be sold strictly as a teacher preparation text-book, but it should be. The Heath brothers borrow a term from Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point, sticky, and inside their 300+ pages they provide six characteristics most sticky ideas share: simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotional and stories.

The Heath brothers explain how gaining someone's attention is tricky enough, but keeping their attention maybe infinitely harder. If you're a teacher, you don't need to be told this. In fact, you could write a book on this topic.

Here is an excerpt that I found helpful when thinking of my next lessons:

Knowledge gaps create interest. But to prove that the knowledge gaps exist, it may be necessary to highlight some knowledge first. "Here's what you know. Now here's what you're missing." Alternatively, you can set context so people care what comes next. It's no accident that mystery novels and crossword puzzle writers give us clues. When we feel that we're close to the solution of a puzzle, curiosity takes over and propels us to the finish.

Treasure maps, as shown in the movies, are vague. They show a few key landmarks and a big X where the treasure is. Usually the adventurer knows just enough to find the first landmark, which becomes the first step in a long journey touward the treasure. If treasure maps were produced on MapQuest.com, with door-to-door directions, it would kill the adventure-movie genre. There is value in sequencing information - not dumping a stack of information on someone at once but dropping a clue, then another clue, then another. This method of communication resembles flirting more than lecturing.

Unexpected ideas, by opening a knowledge gap, tease and flirt. They mark a big red X on something that needs to be discovered but don't necessarily tell you how to get there. And, as we'll see, a red X of spectacular size can end up driving the actions of thousands of people for many years.

The best kind of learning occurs when you construct your own understanding - hence why most people who know anything about learning subscribe to the constructivist model. This model doesn't leave the learner to fend for themselves through the jungles of learning, rather the teacher does in fact play an important role. But rather than bieng the bulldozer who removes every obstacle in the jungle, the teacher is the compass, wineskin, or machete - in other words, the teacher plays a supporting role, but resists the urge to swoop in and rescue. To do so would sabotage the whole adventure.

We all know of children who are likely to buck the system and subvert the learning process, but you may find it ironic that the children are not the only one's causing teachers grief.

Because teachers are being asked to teach such monstrously large curriculums by the very system they work in, it is tempting to cover everything - travelling at break-neck speeds just to get to the end of the curriculum guide.

But there's a problem.

We call it a curriculum guide, but it's not a guide anymore, is it?

It's now become a rule book.

And it's threatening.

Howard Gardner wasn't joking when he said:

"The greatest enemy of understanding is 'coverage.'"

Despite the external, and threatening, pressures to do otherwise, teachers need to find a way to insulate our students from this madness. If not for our own sanity, then for the student's learning. That is why some of the very best teachers spend every day subverting or ignoring curriculum.

The next time your planning a lesson, remember that role as a teacher is less about lecturing the curriculum but flirting with it - presenting it in such a way that you care less about what your students know and more about what questions you want them to ask.

That is real engagement.

That is real learning.

Losing our way

Teachers encourage their students to prioritize and avoid distractions all the time. We employ all kinds of classroom management tactics to encourage a focused learning environment. However, perhaps more today than ever before, students are driven to distraction - and what's sadly ironic is that the adult's may be to blame.

In order to refocus ourselves, we need to understand what it means to properly prioritize.

In their book Made to Stick, Chip Heath and Dan Heath explain how defining and maintaining the essense of an idea can be so important:

It's hard to make ideas stick in a noisy, unpredictable, chaotic environment. If we're to succeed, the first step is this: Be simple. Not simple in terms of "dumbing down" or "sound bites." You don't have to speak in monosyllables to be simple. What we mean by "simple" is finding the core of the idea.

"Finding the core" means stripping an idea down to its most critical essence. To get to the core, we've got to weed out superfluous and tangential elements. But that's the easy part. The hard part is weeding out ideas that may be really important but just aren't the most important idea. The Army's Commander's Intent forces its officers to highlight the most important goal of an operation. The value of the Intent comes from its singularity. you can't have five North Stars, you can't have five "most important goals," and you can't have five Commander's Intents. Finding the core is analogous to writing the Commander's Intent - it's about discarding a lot of great insights in order to let the most important insight shine. The French aviator and author Antoine de Saint-Exupery once offered a definition of engineering elegance: "A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." A designer of simple ideas should aspire to the same goal: knowing how much can be wrung out of an idea before it begins to lose its essence. 

Because most teachers have curriculums that are bloated with content, it can be a real challenge to maintain our focus. With the advent of today's high-stakes, standardized testing accountability, teachers may be more apt to become distracted than ever before. As if printing students' test scores in the local paper wasn't distracting enough, now policy-makers want to tie teachers' salaries to their students' test scores with merit pay. We've gone from targetting teacher's pride to targetting their wallets. All of these distractions make it hard for teachers to focus on our primary objective: learning. And if the teachers are having trouble maintaining focus, you can only imagine how distracted the kids are.

In the military, the Commander's Intent intentionally remains vaguely focused on the primary objective. This way the original plan may go up in smoke, but you still execute its intent. In the classroom this translates into: If there's only one teacher left to teach, they better be doing something to help student's to learn.

Unfortunately, top management might know what their priorites are but be completely inept at sharing and achieving them.What's worse is that there is very good reason to believe things are worse than that- for too long education reform has been driven by politicians who are incompetent at even identifying the primary goal of education.

As you prepare for your next lesson, think not about what you can add to your classroom, but how you can peal away the distractors and make it obvious to every single student in your class that, in the end, students are in school to learn.

The problem with infinity

In his book The Dip, Seth Godin writes, "the problem with infinity is that there's too much of it." He ends up talking mostly about business and markets, but his point is not lost on education.

The trouble with focusing on content as the primary role of education is that there is an infinite amount of stuff to know.

If teachers are suppose to the be sage on the stage, they might never have time to get off the stage.

If teachers are suppose to be the jugs and the kids are the mugs, the teachers might never notice that their jugs are bottomless and the kids' mugs are already overflowing.

If teachers are to chalk and talk, they may only stop talking because they are waiting for their turn to talk again.

Rigorous and rigid curriculums that are bloated with content is used to rationalize all kinds of horrible pedagogy such as horrendous loads of homework to sit-and-get-regurgitate-and-forget lessons. We cover curriculum at break-neck lightning speeds so that we can say that we covered while we really have no idea whether we've uncovered anything for the kids.

I'm not saying content isn't important, but for the most part, school gets curriculum wrong. You can't demand teachers to dispense an infinite amount of material and then hold them accountable for reducing it all to a finite score.

Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson offer this perspective on planning in their book Rework:

Why don't we just call plans what they really are: guesses. Start referring to your business plans as business guesses, your financial plans as financial guesses, and your strategic plans as strategic guesses. Now y ou can stop worrying abou them as much. They just aren't worth the stress.


When you turn guesses into plans, you enter a danger zone. Plans let the past drive the future. They put blinders on you. "This is where we're going because, well, that's where we said we were going." And that's the problem: plans are inconsistent with improvization.


And  you have to be able to improvise. You have to be able to pick up opportunities that come along. Sometimes you need to say, "We're going in a new direction because that's what makes sense today."


The timing of long-range plans is screwed up too. You have the most information when you're doing something, not before you've done it. Yet when do you write a plan? Usually it's before you've even begun. That's the worst time to make a big decision.


Now this isn't to say you shouldn't think about the future or contemplate how you might attack upcoming obstacles. That's a worthwhile exercise. Just don't feel you to write it down or obsess about it. If you write a big plan, you'll most likely never look at it anyway. Plans more than a few pages long just wind up as fossils in your file cabinet.


Give up on the guesswork. Decide what you're going to do this week, not this year. Figure out the next most important thing and do that. Make decisions right before you do something, not far in advance.


It's OK to wing it. Just get on the plane and go. You can pick up a nicer shirt, shaving cream, and a toothbrush once you get there.


Working without a plan may seem scary. But blindly following a plan that has no relationship with reality is even scarier.

On the record, teachers are bullied into saying that they teach every single outcome that their state or province dictates. Afterall, if they admitted otherwise, they run the risk of being tossed out on their ear. But off the record, over an ice-cold beer, teachers will likely say that they don't get to everything because they just can't. There is too much.

And yet, there are some teachers who will stand stead-fast and recite their allegiance to their curriculums. To these teachers I say, wouldn't you like a little more autonomy? To be trusted a little bit more? A little more time and opportunity to explore the things you and your students would like to explore? In the end, all I am advocating for is more trust and autonomy for teachers.

This is why the very best teachers spend everyday of their lives subverting or ignoring curriculum. And they do so because it is in the best interests of their students.

Teacher's Intent

Every year I get a couple student teachers from the local college. They are third or fourth year university students who are learning to become teachers (Bachelor of Education typicall takes four years of university in Alberta - sometimes five). And every year I have to convince them that everything they have been told about lesson planning was maybe a little bit of a lie.

Let me explain by using an excerpt from the book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip and Dan Heath.

Every move an Army soldier makes is preceded by a staggering amount of planning, which can be traced to an original order from the president of the United States. The president order the Joint Chiefs of Staff to accomplish an objective, and the Joint Chiefs set the parameters of the operation. Then the orders and plans begin to cascade downward - from generals to colonels to captains.

The plans are quite thorough, specifying the "scheme of maneuver" and the "concept of fires" - what each unit will do , which equipment it will use, how it will replace munitions, and so on. The orders snowball until they accumulate enough specificity to guide the actions of individual foot soldiers at particular moments of time.

The Army invests enormous energy in its planning, and its processes have been refined over many years. The system is a marvel of communication. There's just one drawback: The plans often turn out to be useless.

"The trite expression we always use is No plan survives contact with the enemy," says Colonel tom Kolditz, the head of behavioral sciences division at West Point. "You may start off trying to fight your plan, but the enemy gets a vote. Unpredictable things happen - the weather changes, a key asset is destroyed, the enemy responds in a way you don't expect. Many armies fail because they put all their emphasis into creating a plan that becomes useless ten minutes into battle."

The Army's challenge is akin to writing instructions for a friend to play chess on your behalf. You know a lot about the rules of the game, an you may know a lot about your friend and the opponent. But if you try to write move-by-move instrucitons you'll fail. You can't possibly foresee more than a few moves. The first time the opponent makes a surprise move, your friend will have to throw out your carefully designed plans and rely on her instincts.

Colonel Kolditz says, "Over time we've come to understand more and more about what makes people successful in complex organizations." he believes that plans are useful, in the sense that they are proof that planning has taken place. The planning process forces people to think through the right issues. But as for the plans themselves, Kolditz says, "They just don't work on the battlefield." So, in teh 1980s the Army adapted its planning process, inventing a concept called Commander's Intent (CI).

CI is a crisp, plain-talk statement that appears at the top of every order, specifying the plan's goal, the desired end-state of an operation. At high levels of the Army, the CI may be relatively abstract: "Break teh will of the enemy in the Southeast region."

...The CI never specifies so much detail that it risks being rendered obsolete by unpredictable events. "You can lose the ability to execute the original plan, but you never lose the responsibility of executing the intent," says Kolditz.

No plan survives the enemy. Even those who have no connection to the military must find a lot of truth in that statement. For teachers, no lesson plan or curriculum survives contact with students.

Lesson planning is stressed a lot in our teacher education programs in Alberta, but it shouldn't be that important. A teacher who plans their entire lesson from start to finish without bringing the students in on the planning is no less foolish than the bride who plans her entire wedding, honeymoon and life without finding a husband to share it with.

The same can be said of inflexible and top-down prescribed curriculums. Good teachers know that no curriculum survives first contact with the students. That is why curriculum should be focused less on a 'bunch o' facts' and more on teaching the cognitive, thinking and collaborative skills that children will need.

If we are going to continue to seriously pursue national, state or provincial standards then we need to seriously look at keeping those standards as vague as possible.

Alfie Kohn summarizes this standards movement nicely in Beware of the Standards, Not Just the Tests:

Considerable research has demonstrated the importance of making sure students are actively involved in designing their own learning, invited to play a role in formulating questions, creating projects, and so on. But the more comprehensive and detailed a list of standards, the more students (and even teachers) are excluded from this process, the more alienated they tend to become, and the more teaching becomes a race to cover a huge amount of material. Thus, meeting these kinds of standards may actually have the effect of dumbing down classrooms. As Howard Gardner and his colleagues wisely observed, "The greatest enemy of understanding is 'coverage.'"

Just as standards and curriculum should be kept vague, so should lesson planning. The vagueness is necessary so to allow teachers and students to personalize their learning to suit their own personal needs.
Susan Ohanian's book One Size Fits Few and Peter Sack's book Standardized Minds are fascinating reads on why standardization is doing more harm than good.

Made to Stick shows how important it is to keep planning to a simple primary objective, but they also show how training your personal properly and then trusting them to understand the objective is at the heart of good planning.

Like the Commander's Intent that the Army created, we might be better off creating a Teacher's Intent that keeps the primary objective of school focused on one very focused, primary objective - that all children would have the desire to go on learning. An interesting model of this Teacher's Intent might be found in UNESCO's Four Pillars of Education.

But none of this works if teachers are distrusted. If we continue to try and 'teacher-proof' education with more top-down prescribed standards and standardization, we will never be able to properly provide our children with the education they deserve.