Networks are Power - Part 2: The Teachers

 Some rights reserved by BlueRobot

by Sean Wheeler

Part 2: The Teachers

It's not an easy time to be a teacher, but it is an exciting one.  It's not that often that an entire profession has the ability to redefine it's purpose and explore entire new vistas in the field.  Unfortunately, most of us work under an oppressive weight of local, state, and federal mandates that seem to continually ignore the voice of teachers in the decision making process of what matters in our classroom, what we should be measuring in regards to student learning, and how we should go about preparing our students for a world that seems to be shifting at an amazingly fast pace.  As a teacher in Ohio, and like the teachers in Wisconsin, New Jersey and many other states, I especially feel like teachers are becoming the victims of an education agenda that would rather scapegoat teachers than work towards making significant changes toward the advancement of all students.  We feel like we don't have a voice.  We wait for the next hammer to drop.  We shuffle to meetings about initiatives that feel very far removed from what we know to be the most effective elements of the work of our classrooms.  And most importantly, we leave our schools everyday feeling like no help is on the way.  This isn't how it should be, and my suggestion is that we begin to use our ability to network to take the power back and shift the conversation about education in a whole new direction.

It starts with professional development.  It is truly a sad state of affairs that most of us associate the phrase "professional development" with irrelevance, top-down management, and having to muster up a sense of "buy-in" to things that we really don't see much value in.  If I have to go to another Common Core PowerPoint presentation about rigor, I might actually claw my eyes out.  However, if teachers began to reconsider what professional development might look like if we could design it ourselves, things might start to turn a corner.  

Teachers need to start participating in networked sharing of resources, strategies, and ideas.  While there are increasingly more teachers jumping into Nings, Twitter, and various other arenas of idea sharing, too many teachers have yet to test these waters.  If we could get more teachers involved, we could start to shift the conversation about education by our sheer numbers alone.  If our labor organizations returned to the original concept of organizing large bodies of employees that can't be ignored by creating vast networks of empowered voices all moving in the same direction, they might actually be able to redeem their less-than-positive public image.  It seems that the membership of our unions takes a rather dim view of social media, often resorting to a level of fear mongering that runs along the "be careful, you might get fired for saying something stupid" variety.  But if they could get past their fear, they just might find that the old folk song is true, "There is Power in a Union".  

I am of the belief that when teachers stop learning, they cease to be good teachers.  A personal learning network (#pln) is a great entry point into teacher learning.  If we could all begin to see the value of a pln, we could start to design a system in our districts and states that recognizes the value of that learning and would count towards our required professional development.  We claim to want our students to be independent and intrinsic learners, but many of us are missing out on modeling that behavior in the digital space.  Any teacher that says they can't learn online needs to be taught how, and any teachers that refuse needs to consider how relevant they are to their students' future.

It's about adopting a pro-active and empowered stance towards growing as professionals in times that simply demand that we do so.  We can wait around for someone in administration to order us to enter the digitally networked environment, or we can start to do so on our own, with a full realization that by combining our voices and helping each other we can begin to change the balance of power in a conversation that we all know has made us more weak and fractured than we should be.  We have the opportunity to use our networks to abolish the whole notion that our classrooms are "islands".  I love teaching, and so do most of our teachers, but if we continue to be reactive and resistant to change we will be bowled over by people with more power, and less knowledge about what works for kids.  And for those of us who are already building this community of educators online, we need to work even harder to patiently help others to see the value.  

Start now.  register for Twitter, type #pln into the search bar, and join in.  Search for anyone that your district talks a lot about (ex. Robert Marzano) and follow them.  Hit the "retweet" button on anything you like, reply to any post with a question or comment, and eventually start to lend your insights in a tweet.  You don't need to wait around for someone to offer a class or hold a pd session.  Change your stance, be a bit more proactive, and become the kind of learner we want all of our kids to be.

Networks are Power - Part 1: The Kids

 Some rights reserved by LivingOS

by Sean Wheeler

All across the country our education systems are being forced to consider the significance of social-media as it relates to how, when, and if our students engage in a more networked learning community.  Questions of access to equipment, the use of firewall software, and the safety or danger of the digital environments now available are being considered in school board meetings, professional development programs, Acceptable Use Policy debates, and here in the digital environment itself.  Labor Unions are wrestling with issues as far ranging as teacher online conduct, definitions of class time and size, as well as when the work day begins and ends within an online structure that doesn't recognize the difference between 9 a.m. on Thursday and 3 p.m. on Sunday afternoon.  Parents rightly worry about bullying, their child's digital footprint, and the whole notion of what happens when young people gather together online largely out of the view of any adult guidance.  The emergence of networked social-media and digital learning is a disruptive force in the way we in education have always gone about our business.  Unfortunately, during all of this discussion and concern, a significant component of the rise of social-networks is being largely ignored.  The networks, themselves, are power.  And it is the power of these networks that will most likely settle most of the debate in the years to come.  Over the next few days I'm going to be posting about leveraging the power of social networks to help kids, teachers, and administrators.

Part 1:  The Kids

What if each of my students could leave my classroom at the end of the year with a Twitter following that included thought-leaders in the students' chosen field of endeavor?  What if the 15 year old aspiring doctor in my classroom here in Cleveland could be networked with the amazing doctors and thinkers right down the road at the Cleveland Clinic?  What if my aspiring chef could trade recipe suggestions with Michael Symon via a direct message?  Why isn't the young man who spends hours writing songs in his basement connected with the CEO of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?  It is beginning to become clear to me that all of these connections are a click away and do not require a field-trip form, any kind of academic pedigree, or even an expensive computer.  Part of the mission of our schools should be to help students begin to build a network of responsible and interested professionals that could assist these young people on their path towards meaningful work and lives.  What is the true cost of the connections that our firewalls prohibit?  How will we look years from now when we recognize that we failed to make very easy connections between those who want to learn and those that could teach them?

I had a young poet, Chania, read me something between classes today that brought home how little we sometimes do to help bring her talent and aspiration into contact with those who could help develop and support her as a poet.  Chania is working at her craft in the cracks of our education system, and though I can help her learn a bit more about delivery and word choice, I honestly don't know the many poets that are out there and willing to listen and nurture a young and eager voice emerging on the poetry scene.  So today I've decided that my first goal is to help Chania build a social-network of poets that will connect her with live readings, poetry blogs, and the publishing scene.   And after I help Chania, I'm going to start to explore ways in which all of my students can begin to build powerful networks that   engage my students in the conversations relevant to their career interests.  It's becoming increasingly clear that this is a way that I can work as a teacher to help my kids achieve the dreams that have gone unheard for too long in my classroom.

Don't you want that information?

by Sean Wheeler

There are really three main ways that information gets transmitted in a traditional classroom.

#1 - Raising Hands

The most often used method is through a teacher-led discourse in which students raise their hands to be called on.  The teacher uses various methods to choose who gets to speak, but rarely does everyone get called on, and there's always a social urge to not go back and call on the same student more than once.  

The problem with this is that there are kids who don't raise their hands, or choose not to participate in some manner.  That, or time simply doesn't allow for all of our students to contribute to the conversation.  A good deal of untapped thinking walks out our doors when that 40 minute bell rings.  

#2 - Group Work

When students work in groups, really good things can happen.  Students have an opportunity for peer-to-peer learning.  The teaching and learning naturally become more problem or discussion based.  And students gain a sense of how to work with one another collaboratively.  The teacher moves about the room, participating and prompting where needed, catching bits and pieces of entire conversations.

But what if one group is firing all cylinders while another group struggles because of the social dynamics or preparedness, or a host of other possibilities?  Why should some students, by sheer luck of the draw, get stuck in groups that they can't get out of?  To look at it another way, why should my child not learn as much today as someone in a different group?  What did my child do to get cheated like that?  The other issue is that the teacher can't be everywhere, so again, information goes unnoticed all over the place.  Maybe someone contributed something in one of the groups that was brilliant, but the teacher missed the chance to work with that idea because they were busy coaxing a classmate to get off the cell phone.  

#3 - Write It Down, Turn It In.

Sometimes teachers do need to hear from every student to assess individual learning.  This is traditionally done in the format of homework, exit tickets, quizzes, tests, etc.  The whole group receives some prompt or task and they write their response on paper and turn it in.  The teacher grades it or provides feedback.  Students get their papers back, put them in the backpack, lost forever to time.  

Only one person winds up benefitting from what everyone knows in the classroom, and that person is the one in the room who probably needs to learn from that information the least.  The teacher gets to know what everyone else knows but the students get no benefit from the responses of their peers.  Perhaps having that information would help kids who were still formulating their ideas or learning the concepts being taught.

CC licensed by Hyperakt

None of the above is anybody's fault really.  We've been doing the best with what we have, and I believe strongly that our teachers have been doing great work.  This isn't about who is to blame, it's about whether or not we want all of the information we're losing by doing what we've done for so long.  The three systems we have are the three systems that have had to exist because it's been impossible to do otherwise.  

When my students interact in our online space, I get all of the information.  And so does everybody else.  Every group that works together online, is visible and open to input from each other group. If a student is stuck in a bad group, they don't have to be.  If a student wants to join the conversations of the other groups at some other time, they still can.  No information is lost to that student.  The teacher can see the work of the whole group, each one of them, and can also assess each contribution by each student.  If a student revises their thinking, they are not bound eternally to it because they spoke it out loud in class and never got called on to voice their change of thinking or deeper reflection.  My students aren't limited to formulating complex thought right away either.  They can really take the time to formulate their thoughts before they type, and kids who need a bit more process have the time because there are no bells in our online classroom.  

And the kids that don't get called on or never participate in class get a voice.  The student too embarrassed to talk in class can directly instant message me with thoughts, the kid that needs more help or clarification can ask for that help without the stigma of "slowing the class down".  Every one of my students can work with me individually as needed all the time.  

I have to admit that dealing with all of that information can be overwhelming.  Providing feedback at that level takes time.  Getting the whole online thing up and running takes patience and persistence. But if we can capture the learning of every one of our students, don't we want that information?

#edcampcolumbus Reflection

by Sean Wheeler

As part of what will now have to be considered the "lost" Smackdown, Toby asked us all to take the time to reflect on the experience and share what we took away from our time together.  It's now two day later, and I am just now fully appreciating what edcamp Columbus did for my growth as a teacher.

I was a bartender at a brewery before I started teaching.  And in the last couple of years doing it, I would particularly dread "Staff Meeting Saturdays".  Usually we'd learn about the new spring menu, or our newest recycling efforts, maybe even work in some training on "The Sullivan Nod".  I would sit in those meetings and wonder what would happened if the meeting got called, the bosses didn't show up, and we could talk about how to really fix up the place.  That never happened and hadn't really happened in any real sense once I became a teacher, either, until this past Saturday.  

I drove down to Columbus from Cleveland because I wanted to see an edcamp in action.  I wanted to see how it worked and meet the kind of people who would put something like that together.  For some reason I had the sense from the start that meeting "this kind of people" was going to be a significant part of what I would eventually take away.  From the time I walked in to the time I left with an over-stuffed brain hours later, I was reveling in the feeling that everyone who was there actually wanted to be there.  Many had driven as far as I had.  Husbands came with wives.  Friends and co-workers travelled as a group.  The Upper Arlington HS crew were all on hand to welcome us, show us around, and talk to us about the teaching and learning they were doing at the school.  The first session I went to consisted entirely of people who had never attended an unconference before.  We instinctively kept looking at the door for someone to come in and tell us how to proceed.  Of course, that didn't happen.  We jumped in and quickly found that we were surrounded by people who understood, cared, and were genuinely interested in the kind of stuff most of us bore our friends with when we talk about work.  It was just like those daydreams on "Staff Meeting Saturday".  No bosses, no directives or initiatives, no rollouts. It was brilliant.

Design interests me a great deal, and it was great to see a session offered on Human Centered Design.  It was a powerful session and I think the conversation will have an impact on my work for awhile.  I'm in the planning stages of doing some really cool research with my students, and it helped to be refocussed on the vital concept that students need to be central while designing the work for the upcoming project.  Sometimes I get lost in how I would teach something instead of how students might want to learn it.  It was cool to walk out of that session and into a discussion on Moodle in which an Upper Arlington teacher, who happened to be in the school for something else entirely unrelated to the conference, heard us talking about Moodle and joined the conversation.  He got so excited he logged into his page and showed us all a few things he was doing that were really amazing.  We talked for a few minutes about the way that our online spaces are designed to make them intuitively accessible for the kids.  That kind of interaction really typified the day.  Things just went where they went, and everyone was very open to seeing where our conversations and viewpoints would take us. 

I'm going to take away how many times I heard someone note that we were all there on a Saturday, for no pay, and were walking away feeling a sense of community that most of us out on the fringes rarely get to feel.  We proved that a revolution from the bottom up isn't all that difficult.  We discovered how different it is to go to a conference in which you can be a participant instead of an attendee or presenter.  It was like everyone else had wondered the same thing I did on those Saturday morning meetings at the brewery, and then we really did get together and start to fix things on our own.  

Low Hanging Fruit: Why Technology in Our Schools is a Matter of Equity

 Some rights reserved by ax2groin

by Sean Wheeler

There are things that we could be doing for kids that we are not.  And more importantly, there are things we should be doing for our students that we are not.  I'd like to look at two relatively easy uses of technology that would go a long way towards helping two distinct subgroups of students in my district, and at the same time, would push our staff deeper into adoption of technology as a way to provide equity in our classrooms.

English Language Learners

I work in a district that serves a variety of English language learners.  There are close to twenty-five languages spoken in our district, and many of our students have been in the country for fewer than two years.  Needless to say, they aren't faring very well on our annual state assessment, the Ohio Graduation Test.  This year, our district has identified improving the education of these students as a major goal.  However, after six months of this intense focus, little has changed in our district that would point to any sort of real improvement in how we are working with our English language learners.  Our main ELL teacher, a colleague of mine that I really admire, recently spoke up with a tone of frustration at a staff meeting and asked for any kind of help that we could offer her students.  I started poking around online, and found something that I think could help, but it's going to have to be adopted school-wide, maybe district-wide, and the only way we're going to get that done is to tell the right story to our staff.

One of the problems confronting our ELL students is that they have trouble translating assignments in their core classes (LA, Math, SS, Sci) and conversing with their teacher.  Even if a student manages to translate the assignments and complete the work they miss out on getting good feedback from their teacher due to the language barrier.  We can't have every teacher learn every language spoken in our school and we can't expect students who have been in the country for a very short time to be able to have these detailed learning conversations with their limited English.  But what if we could find a way to take a teacher's worksheet and make it readable by the student in their native language?  What if every student had a translator with them throughout the school day who could help the students get the feedback that they need, as well as allow the students to ask questions and participate in class conversations? Would it help and could we get our district to do it?  Before I get to the answers, I want to examine a different issue with a different subgroup of our students.

Special Education Learners

My district has also identified our special-education learners as a main focus for this year.  Again, this focus is prompted by a perceived need to raise test scores.  I have found that our special educators are a dedicated group that really fights to help their students, but they face a good deal of frustration in enlisting the full support of the rest of our staff in inclusion settings.  As a result of their disability, many of the special-education learners in my classes struggle with organization, long-term memory, and follow-through.  These issues lead towards a learning minefield, a seemingly endless cycle of lost papers, forgotten due dates, and incomplete learning tasks.  Our response to these problems has mainly involved having students organize their backpacks and carry around a planner that gets signed by the teachers.  Of course the planner always winds up lost, but at least we gave it a shot.  

The Low-Hanging Fruit

If we digitized our classrooms, we could go a long way towards helping each of these two groups of students, and help the rest of our student population as well.  In this instance, I'm not saying that teachers need to adopt digital learning and jump to blended-instruction, mastery learning, or problem-based projects.    Though I think all of these would also help, I'm thinking on a much smaller scale and much more about equitable access to teachers and instructional material.  

To go back to our English Language learners, what if we did provide each student with a translator?  I recently checked into the Google Translate and this seems like something that could easily be used to aid in the communication between teacher and student, student and assignment, and involve ELL parents in the process as well.  While several of our students speak languages not currently used in Google Translate, it could really help to serve the majority of our students who do speak languages recognized by the software.  I envision a situation in which students could copy-and-paste assignments into Translate and get them translated into the students' native languages.  Students could compose their responses either in English or their native language, and then copy-and-paste them into Translate for proofreading and/or translation into English.  Teacher comments and student questions could be conducted via email or instant messages with Translatete working on either end to facilitate the conversation.  This is something that can't be done with hand-written or photocopied paper assignments.  Those assignments would need to be scanned into a digital version that could be text-edited, and all assignments would need to be hosted online where students could easily locate them.  Students would also need regular access to the internet in school, and would most benefit from a handheld device (phone, iPod, tablet, netbook, laptop, etc.) with online connectivity.  These are both hurdles, no doubt, but they are not walls.  If we want our ELL students to thrive, and we feel that they deserve access to course materials, the ability to engage in classroom conversations, and to receive meaningful feedback from their teachers, than we can take the step of learning how to work with these digital tools.

Posting all student work and feedback digitally would also work towards helping our special-education students overcome several of the key barriers mentioned earlier.  An assignment isn't lost if it's also located online.  A due date is rarely missed when it is programmed into their digital calendar, complete with weekly, daily, and hourly reminders.  Students rarely forget class content when it is always accessible via a link, a video, or a set of class notes posted online.  If digitizing class content affords equitable access to tools that help our students overcome some of the affects of their disabilities, isn't that what we should be doing?

Every student in my district would benefit from having these tools available as well.  My fourth grader regularly loses the hand-out that holds his daily-journal assignments for the week.  When this happens, my wife and I are at a loss to help, and my son frequently has to stay after school for not doing his journal writing because we couldn't find the assignment.  It sure would help us if we could go online and look up the assignments, just like we do everyday when we go online and decide if our child will pack or buy his lunch by consulting the online lunch menu.  It would be fantastic if our students were not limited to learning from materials printed only in English.  Google Translate has helped me to read Brazilian literary reviews, Arabic-language tweets, and Norwegian song lyrics.  My students can now communicate via blogs and messages that are written in a wide variety of languages and with people who would be otherwise unreachable due to language barriers.  And all we'd have to do is teach teachers to take what they're doing and post it online.  It would open the door to our teaching and learning in a way that would be truly transformative.  I'm pretty sure that even the most technology-challenged of us could take this step in much less time than it's taken the district to do anything else that we've tried.

Eric Sheninger recently spoke at the eTech Ohio conference, and he said something that really hit home with me.  He said, "I'm not looking for buy-in, because I'm not selling anything.  It's an expectation that we should have, that we will do what we can do because it's the right thing to do for students."  I think this is one of those things;  easy to do and for the right reasons.

To Anyone Looking to Get Into Teaching: Stay Right Where You Are, and Keep Going.

by Sean Wheeler

photo by flickr user Rickydavid

I'm fortunate to know and work with a growing list of pre-service teachers.  Whether they are just getting into their first education classes, or about to enter their first day on the job, they all have an expectation that their life is about to change.  They occupy a unique mid-position between being a student and being a teacher.  They're a bit of both and not wholly either.  This post is addressed to them.

First of all, thank you.  Thank you for taking the time to really think about teaching and learning.  Hopefully your classes are great, your professors are amazing, and your classmates are as excited about all of this as you are.  I hope you have had the opportunity to be engaged by different teaching philosophies, to sort through your own educational experiences and beliefs, and have begun to develop your own approach.  It's going to be great.

As I said, you occupy a great place in your life right now.  But most importantly, you are at a moment in which you occupy two distinct positions within a framework that will come to dominate the rest of your career.  The difference between being a teacher and being a student will hover over everything that your class will accomplish or fail to accomplish every day that you walk in the door.  The tendency, I think, after awhile, is to walk in that door more as a teacher than as a student each time you do it.  The gulf between student and teacher, which in the case of the pre-service teacher doesn't exist, tilts increasingly towards the latter as we get more comfortable with "the way things are" and "what we do".  It happens.

But I'm challenging you to go a different route.  When you end your time as a student-teacher, try to forge an identity as a student/teacher.  This is less about seeing the world through the eyes of your students, and more about seeing the profession of teaching from the perspective of a student studying teaching.

Right now you are wondering whether or not it's going to work like you hope it will.  You are open to suggestions, willing to learn, keenly observant, and eager to work with your students.  Stay that way.  Don't lose that critical eye, those thoughtful ambitions.  Be a bit bold and ready to take on the challenges and rewards that this amazing field is going to bring your way.

It really is more hard than easy.   There's something alluring to being up front and in charge.  There's a great comfort in teaching what we know in the way that we know it.  After the first few years things start to become more automatic.  You get used to being referred to by your last name.  You begin to rely less on what you've recently learned and more on what your experience shows.  Change, of all things, starts to slow down to an easy series of minor adjustments and begrudgingly approached initiatives.  It's been the typical trajectory of every generation of teachers that have come before you.  We start eager, we find our niche,  and we settle in to a series of oscillations that move between the beauty of learning and the frustrations that stem from seemingly everywhere.

I'm hoping you begin to swim the other way on this trend.  You are living in the midst of one of the greatest revolutions in human capacity for learning and thought that has ever existed before.   You know this.  You've been told it all of your lives.  The only thing that we now know for sure is that we're in for some big changes in the way the world operates.  And education, now more than ever, is in dire need of some serious reflection, criticism, and enthusiasm for the unknown challenges that lie ahead.  Anyone going into education right now is going to have a career that will necessitate an expectation that change is going to be a constant.  The new information and communication landscape is wide-open, and if we're going to succeed as a profession, we're going to need you.  We're going to need you to keep being a student as much as you are a teacher.  Keep the distance between learning and teaching at a minimum, and move forward through your career ready to learn, grow, and embrace new ideas and ways to do things.  Let people see you learn.  Let them teach you as well.  Keep working on your voice.  Just like now.

Stay right where you are, and keep going.

Trusting the Process, and the Processors

 by Julie Rea

Teaching the humans we have in our 9^th grade classrooms this year has been challenging.  They are masters at disengaging, “forgetting” assignments, logging time at school until their real lives start.  Failing a class is a non-event for them, to be met with a shrug of the shoulders.  A majority of our students are satisfied with doing just enough work to pass and keep their parents and teachers off their backs.  It has been very challenging. 

We have been introducing project-based learning, and struggling to teach the students how to participate in and contribute effectively to groups.  In geophysical science, my co-teacher just introduced a unit on Newton’s Laws with a project on forces in sports.  Students are to answer the question:  How can we use forces to improve an athlete’s performance in hockey, baseball, rugby (the sport of their choice)? 

On Friday, I went to the science room to help the groups as they worked.  The situation looked promising as I walked in the room.  Students were in their groups, and there seemed to be lots of discussion.  Full disclosure here:  I am an external processor.  I do not know what I think until I have said it.  To me, discussion is a good sign.  One group of students caught my eye:  two boys were standing, and two girls were sitting, everyone looked glum, and no one was saying a word.  To me, this is not a good sign.  Deep breath and approach: 

How’s it going?  

Ok.

What sport did you choose?

Basketball.

What is your question?

We can’t think of one.

Hmm.  Do any of you play basketball? 

(one student raises her hand.)

Great!  So what area of your game would you like to improve?

I don’t know.

Let’s think about all the parts of basketball—what do you have to do to play basketball?

Dribble.  Shoot.  Be fast.  Be agile.

Good!  So dribble, shoot, run—which would you like to study?

(Silence.)

There are different kinds of shots in basketball.  Which is the most interesting to you?

(Silence.)

Well, I’ve always wondered why so many pros are bad at foul shots.

(Silence.)

Ok, so are you thinking in there?  Are you all internal processors?  Am I bothering you with my questions?  (I am related to some internal processors, and they have shared that, at times, talking is an annoyance.  I sympathize, but cannot empathize.)

(Silence.)

Well, I’ll let you process those thoughts, and I’ll be back.  

5 minutes later. . .No one has moved, everyone looks glum, no one is talking.

             How’s it going?

             (Silence.)

Got a question?

No.

Hmm.  You could always think about equipment in basketball.  Hey, I know.  I always see players rubbing their shoes before they go on the court.  Wonder why?

To get the dirt off (this is followed by a look which says, Do you have a brain?)

Well, maybe forces play a part in that.  Can you think which ones?

(Silence.)

You might want to look at your notes, or on-line to see what forces might be involved.

(Silence.)

Well, I’ll let you process those thoughts, and I’ll be back.

5 minutes later. . .No one has moved, everyone looks glum, no one is talking.
             How’s it going?

(Silence.) 

Got a question? 

No.

             Hmm.  Well, I was thinking about that shoe thing.  (I am getting desperate now.  The project guidelines say that they must have a question by the end of the period.)  My son played basketball in high school and college.  You know, in college the team buys your shoes for you, and one year my son was really disgusted with the shoes the coach had picked out.  No one on the team would wear them.  Can you imagine why?

            (Silence.)

            They said they were too heavy!  Do you think shoes could really make a difference, like in jumping?

            (Silence.)

            Ok, well, you process some more, and I’ll be back.  (Exchange worried looks with co-teacher.  We have been having similar discussions with other groups, and those groups have been making progress.  We got nothing here.)

5 minutes later. . .three of the students haven’t moved, but they are looking at me expectantly, and the group leader is approaching me where I am working with another group.   She is holding a notebook, and has a look of quiet confidence.  She holds the notebook up, and I read a perfectly wonderful question about forces and the lay-up shot in basketball.  We do a high five, and I say “well done” to the group.  They smile, and the boys finally sit down. 

            Here are my take-aways.

·      Wait Time works.   All those silences up there?  They were big, long, empty silences.   Doug Lemov (Teach Like a Champion) includes wait time as one of the championship techniques.  It can be painful, but it works.  Kids need time to process—my co-teacher and I had already been thinking about and discussing this project for some time.  We were familiar with it; the students needed time to catch up.

·      No Opt Out, another of Lemov’s techniques, works.  I kept circling back to be sure that something was going to come out of this group.  If necessary, we would have been there for some time after class, or after school.  It wasn’t an immediate No Opt Out, but it was in play.

·      Trust the process.  Project-based learning works.  Struggling is part of the process and is good for students—I almost blew it by inserting myself too much in the process.  I needed to let the students struggle, and be patient with the struggle.  Self-esteem comes from struggling and overcoming, not from writing down what the teacher said, however brilliant and insightful that may have been (I thought my shoe question was both!)  The pride on the faces of this group at the end of the process was palpable.  It wouldn’t have been there if we had given them the question—either as part of the assignment, or as they struggled to come up with their own.

·      A group of internal processors can work!  Quite possibly NASA already knew this, but I would never have thought it.   If these internal processors had been in groups with external processors, would they have gotten the chance to cogitate, ponder, wrestle, and finally succeed?  Is this another grouping criteria to consider?  If internal processors benefit from the space to process internally, would external processors benefit from learning how to work in a group in which everyone has to talk to think?  I want to investigate more about how internal processors work, so I can be more helpful to them.  If you have suggestions about resources, or are a self-aware internal processor willing to share, please let me know.