Persistence in Educational Shifts

We know that there are major changes needed in education to prepare our students for a future that we cannot predict.  We call this type of learning many things: transfer goals, overarching standards, life skills.  There are a lot of ideas about how we can go about making those changes.  When we want to tackle an issue in education, it is tempting to insert it into the curriculum as a stand-alone item so that we can check off the “done” box.

My first experience with this idea was when we noticed that many of our students were not fluent with keyboarding by the time they reached middle and high school.  To address this, a keyboarding program was purchased and elementary teachers were asked to teach the program for a specified number of minutes per week.  While this program did a great job at teaching the kiddos where the keys were located and which fingers to use to strike them, the overall keyboarding performance was not enhanced.  This is because keyboarding is a skill that needs to be reinforced and practiced over time.  To be fluent, students need real-life application and a chance to practice over an extended period time.  In short, it would take reimagining how students complete assignments in those elementary classrooms to get them to proficiency in keyboarding.

My next experience was with the education craze STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math).  STEM is a teaching strategy where ideas in these areas are fused together in lessons so that students can see the connections between them.  To address this, many schools created a STEM class, where students continued to go to their regular math, science, and technology classes, but were given the additional option of going to a STEM class.  This class is designed to be full of real-life problems and experiments, which is a great learning environment for kids.  The problem is that it does nothing to connect the learning they are doing in their regular math, science, and technology classrooms.  The students understand that they really like their STEM class but still leaves them wondering why they need to learn Newton’s 3rd Law in their science class and how to solve for F given “m” and “v”.  

This brings me to my current, and most relevant, experience.  Almost my entire blog, and a lot of my professional effort, has been devoted to the 4Cs (communication, critical thinking, collaboration, and creativity) and the most effective way to increase student learning through the development of these skills in the classroom.  Again, the easiest way to introduce these concepts and “ensure” they are being taught is to create a class and have all students take it.  Let’s teach them how to collaborate and communicate!  However, when we remove these concepts from content, students will continue to struggle to make the connection between seemingly disparate pieces of information.  They are able to collaborate and communicate around topics important to them, but they cannot transfer those skills to other subject areas where they may have less personal interest.

I believe teaching our students proper keyboarding skills and technical literacy is important.  These are skills they will continue to use for the rest of their life.  I believe in the concept of STEM and other cross-curricular strategies.  It can connect subject areas in meaningful ways so that students stop asking “when will I need to know this?”  And most importantly, I believe in teaching the 4Cs skills in our classrooms so that we develop learners who are able to think critically about the world around them and apply creative solutions to real problems.

I also believe that this will be difficult work and that it cannot be marked as “done” within a year or even two.  To address these issues, it will take pedagogical, structural, and curricular changes through trial and error and a kind of persistence that is not necessarily common in education.  There is no textbook to adopt that will tell you the right way to implement any of these ideas.  If we don’t see the results we expect in a short period of time, educational trends tell us to cast it away for the next big thing.

We cannot give into that way of thinking.  I am advocating for us to plant our flag on these big ideas.  We must approach integrated teaching and learning that requires students to practice higher-order thinking and apply technical literacy to their own learning.  The result will be worth the effort.

Cultivating Trust

I am an advocate for using Twitter as a tool to expand an educator’s professional learning community.  I follow several teachers, educational researchers, and various subject-specific hashtags.  I even participate in a few twitter chats, which connect me with other education professionals around the country.  For more on this, please read my earlier blog post, Collaborating Like a Boss.

Although the topics of these Twitter chats vary, from technology integration to the 4Cs to personalized learning, I find myself referencing trust as a key component to success in almost all of them.  My most recent example was during a chat on mindset.  The discussion question asked how we can turn resistance or opposition into an opportunity to learn and grow.  Immediately I began to think in terms of a feedback loop, regardless of whether this loop is between colleagues, student peers, or a teacher/student relationship.  The ability to disagree respectfully, to give and take criticism, and thoughtfully apply feedback to our own point of view is essential to being productive members of a classroom, an organization, and our society.

When educators engage in a Professional Learning Community (PLC), we gather with our peers to publicly discuss our work.  PLC members must be willing to not only show our work but also be open to the possibility our version may not be the best it can be.  In this environment, trust needs to be present on both sides.  The person bringing forward his/her work has to trust the colleagues in the room.  They need to trust that their colleagues have something to contribute.  They need to trust that their work will be given thoughtful consideration and that the feedback given can be used to improve the product.  But trust is a two-way street.  The people giving the feedback have to feel that their opinions will be valued and considered.  They have to treat the situation and the person presenting with respect.  And, above all, they have to have demonstrated a willingness to engage in a discussion around possible solutions.  Sometimes we view feedback as criticism of the person we are instead of the work we produced.  This is particularly true when trust isn’t present within a group.  This environment isn’t mandated, it is built over time.

We cannot ask our students to engage in an effective feedback loop unless we have experienced it ourselves and work to cultivate the same level of trust within our classrooms.  We should be encouraging students to present ideas in a more raw form, at a time when feedback, opposition, or dissenting opinions can help to shape a more productive solution.  This strategy will not only produce better products in our classrooms but develop better problem solvers and creative thinkers.

As a bonus, it will also produce more thoughtful citizens.  Our schools have the ability to show students how to engage in a thoughtful debate of ideas that result in a better solution for everyone.