Unexpected Benefits - Connection at a Distance

This is a short post.  Teachers are tired right now.

I am currently in a hybrid teaching situation.  For those who think it isn't possible, it is.  I'm not saying it is easy, but with each passing day, the tech takes up less space in my working memory, and the ability to address those in my room as well as those on my screen gets a little more natural.

Because we are now two weeks in, it was time to give the first test.  Figuring out how to do this fairly has perhaps been the most difficult thing to wrap my mind around.  Giving a regular paper test makes cheating far too tempting for those at home.  Giving something different to those at home than those in the room was just going to create perception problems.  So, I decided to do what I did when everyone was at home, using a combination of Go Formative with monitoring (for multiple-choice questions) and Flip Grid (for short answer questions or skill-based questions).

While no method is perfect or without the potential for cheating, and the videos take a long time to grade, this combination is what works for me in this moment.  

Yesterday, I discovered a benefit I had not anticipated.  While watching the videos on Flip Grid, I got to know my students better.  From the hams who practically performed their answers to the introverts whose voices I rarely get to hear in the room to the creativity of a student who cut out a picture of a fire hydrant to use in her video as though it were real, I got to see the personalities of my students in a way that I would not have if they had written the answers to the questions on paper.  

The quarantine of the spring and the hybrid classes of the fall have forced us to examine our practices to figure out how to make them work in this situation.  Doing so has been difficult, and we are all tired.  It has, however, had the upside of finding benefits to methods we might not have otherwise used.  As you innovate, keep your eyes open for the unexpected benefits.

Good Problem Solving Takes Time

 This week, I went through the problem-solving steps required for credit with my physics class.  They're nothing special; I'm sure math and science teachers all over the world have similar requirements.  Identify your knowns (with units).  Identify unknown.  Write the equation you will use.  Apply the equation by substituting the variables.  Do the math and box your answer.  

While this method is not earth-shattering, is certainly not the only valid approach (just the one required in my class), and is meant only for having an organization system for solving math problems, I had a realization while teaching it to them.  It's a model for solving all kinds of problems.  If we zoom out from the specifics of math, what this method actually boils down to is this.

1.  Identify the information you have that is relevant to the problem at hand.

2.  Ask "What do I need to know to solve this problem?"

3.  Examine the tools you have available and choose the one that best fits.

4.  Apply the tool to the problem and analyze the results.  

We would arrive at better solutions to problems if we approached solving problems in this manner.  The problem is, we don't have the patience for it.  We want instant solutions.  Take a look at social media after a mass shooting, a weather disaster, or any tragedy.  Within minutes of the event, there are many posts with assertions of the solution.  Setting aside that the problem they are trying to address is large and complex and has no easy solution, these people have put five full seconds of thought into it before picking up their phone; so they clearly know what they are talking about.  

Smartphones have made us less patient than any other invention.  Answers to questions are instantaneous as long as Siri knows the answer.  We can get what we need from Amazon in two days (or, in some places, two hours) without having to bother with going to the store.  I find myself getting impatient with the microwave because it is taking 3 minutes and 33 seconds (It's a quirk of mine to put in all the same numbers, don't worry about it) to cook something that would have taken an hour to cook in the oven fifty years ago or hours to cook over a fire one hundred years ago.  We don't want to wait for anything.  How much less patience do we have when we have an actual problem?  

Here's the deal, though.  The solution that immediately springs to mind is rarely the right one.  It usually leaves out some of the information we need to properly deal with the issue at hand.  It may neglect a good tool simply because we didn't take the time to think about the tools we have.  Using the wrong tool or neglecting relevant details can not only be ineffective but dangerous.  If I had a flat tire, I couldn't just grab the nearest tool, which would likely be a hammer or a screwdriver.

This tendency we have to impatiently jump to conclusions is precisely why we have grown impatient with science during the COVID-19 crisis.  We want to just grab the nearest bottle of pills and hope it works, but that's not science.  If it did work, it would be because we got lucky, not because we found a real solution.  This morning, the President tweeted that the CDC was making participating in a trial too difficult (and, as is his practice, made it about himself).  I don't expect him to understand the nuances of clinical trials and the details of how people qualify for them because non-scientists don't spend time thinking about these things, but I do expect him to know why scientific protocols exist.  Not following those protocols could lead to an ineffective vaccine, or worse, a treatment that causes more problems than it solves.  Individual human bodies are complex, and groups of humans are even more so.  This is why science takes time.  During the AIDS epidemic of the 80s and 90s, activists widely criticized Dr. Fauci for moving too slowly while their people were dying.  He knew that doing it right had to be more important than doing it fast, and he eventually won them over.  A diagnosis of HIV is no longer the death sentence it was then because scientists took the time to look for real solutions rather than jumping to conclusions.  

If you are facing a problem (or your students are), take the time to solve the problem rather than instinctively throw ideas at it.    

High Expectations and High Grace

Your brain works best when it has a proper balance of neurotransmitters.  The big three are dopamine (released when exposed to affection stimulation - a loved one, likes on social media, a pet), serotonin (released when you are exposed to light or when you smile or laugh), and norepinephrine (produced in response to appropriate stress levels in order to keep you alert).  There are a few dozen more, however, and right now, most of us do not have a proper balance of them.  Chances are your norepinephrine is at least a little high.  If you haven't been getting touched very much, your oxytocin is likely depleted.  If you haven't been exercising, your endorphin balance is probably a little low.  

We know what happens if you are deficient in each of these, but it may be hard to predict the symptoms you will experience from a combination of deficiencies and excesses.  Some symptoms may physical (muscle tension, headaches, digestive abnormalities).  Others may be emotional (irritability, overreactions to minor stimuli).  Some may even appear to be mental (brain fog, memory lapse, shortened attention span).

As school starts back, you have to be aware that you, your colleagues, and your students have had different experiences during the past several months.  Some of your students may have received more touch than ever as their mothers were home with them all day.  Some of your single colleagues have not been physically touched since March.  Some students may be sensitive to sound than they were last year.  Some teachers may be more irritable than their normal personalities.  You may find yourself unable to remember what you were going to do next, and your students may experience the same.

High Expectations:  It's important to have high standards.  That's still true during a pandemic.  During the final quarter of the school year, my school continued to take attendance and give assessments.  Other schools in my area froze grades and essentially made class attendance optional.  I am not judging those schools because I don't think anyone could have known what the RIGHT thing to do was, but I did make some interesting observations.  Students who continued with some degree of normalcy and whose teachers still had expectations (with grace, which I'll address in a second) fared better emotionally than those whose schools no longer expected anything of them.  I am not an expert in psychology, but I believe the reason for this was that those who still had expectations required of them understood that this crisis was temporary.  Things would still matter in the future, and we were still attempting to prepare them for that future.  Those students who no longer felt like anything mattered were likely to believe there was no future.  One of the things I'm proudest of GRACE Christian School for last year is not panicking our students.  They saw emotion from us, but they never saw panic.  They knew we were sad because we missed them, but seeing us carry on every day was reassuring.  (If you are an expert in psychology and believe I'm wrong, please let me know.  This is just my own musing on my observations.)  This is a year for high expectations.

High Grace:  It is also important to have grace.  While this is always true, I think it is more so now.  With some exceptions, most people have walked around within an expected range of neurotransmitter balance in their daily lives.  That means their actions and emotional responses have been at least somewhat predictable in the past (or at least somewhat simple to understand).  This is not going to be the case this year.  While all of our neurotransmitters will be out of balance, they won't all be out of balance the same way.  Don't be surprised if you have more trouble holding some students' attention while others are unusually hyper-focused.  Some students may need to use the restroom more often than your normal policy allows.  Some may cry more easily than usual while some may show little if any emotional responses.  It is going to be more important than ever that we have compassion for our students, even if we don't understand why they are responding the way they are.  This is a year for high grace.

A word for parents and students:  This is also a time for you to extend grace.  School always involves a million details, but we can usually rely on experience to help make decisions.  This year, there are more details and most of them cannot be done in the same way they have been done in the past.  Your administration has spent all summer planning.  I think, from the outside, it may seem like this is just an issue of space and masks, but there is literally nothing that happens in a school that hasn't been influenced by this.  In the midst of their own neurotransmitter challenges, school leaders have exhausted themselves trying to think of everything they can in order to plan for it.  Whether they are teaching fully online or in a hybrid situation, your teachers are learning to do a thousand things they have never done before.  We are going to drop the ball sometimes.  There may be days when we only get 995 of them right.  We have very high expectations for ourselves, but we need grace from you just as much as you need it from us.  

More Than One Right Way

Think of your top five favorite teachers?  Were they all alike?  I cannot speak for you, but mine were not.  I had great teachers who used many different techniques to accomplish their goals.  Some of my best teachers were strict about deadlines, teaching me about responsibility.  Others were willing to accept things late, teaching me about flexibility.  I had great teachers who engaged us in collaborative efforts, but one of my favorite teachers was a straight-up lecturer.  I was enthralled by him, and I learned a lot as I absorbed every word.  One of my best teachers always affirmed students' thinking, even if they were wrong; but another one of my great teachers was not shy about telling you when you were wrong and needed to think again.  Not all great teachers look the same. 

Even in the midst of COVID-19, the beginning of the school year starts with professional development.  Professional development is great, but it can make you feel terrible.  One of the people near me (who is a fantastic teacher, by the way) said that she always feels guilty when she sits in a seminar because she thinks they are telling her that what she currently does is wrong.  It isn't.  I work with fabulous teachers, and their approach to education is fabulous.  I'm not saying we can't all learn ways to improve, but great teachers shouldn't feel like they have to turn everything they are doing upside down in order to fit in box that holds the current educational fad.  

Here's the thing.  There's a lot of science behind what we do.  You can see a myriad of my own blog posts regarding things I've learned from Learning and the Brain conferences to see that there is a ton of science that can inform our technique.  There is, however, also a lot of art to our craft.  Just like a painter can understand the chemistry of paint, but mix it different ways to get the hues they want in their painting, we can apply the same brain science in a myriad of ways to accomplish learning in our classrooms.  One of the most interesting speakers at last year's Learning and the Brain conference made a great analogy.  He said the experiments we carry out in education research are like plants in a greenhouse.  We have very controlled conditions, so we can test one specific variable (because that's what a good scientific experiment is).  The conclusions we draw are based on those very narrowly drawn parameters.  Applying those techniques in your classroom, he said, is like growing plants in your yard.  You no longer have control over the conditions, and there are many variables involved that will influence the outcome of your technique.  That means you can't just adopt wholesale a technique based on the idea that "studies say" this works well.   You have to adapt techniques to your context.  It would be crazy to think that some techniques wouldn't work differently in a rural area than in an urban one.  I know some techniques that do NOT work in public school work beautifully in a Christian school because there is a different expectation of worldview.  Kids who have suffered trauma will respond differently to some words than those who have not experienced trauma.  As a science teacher who is interested in brain research, I have to resist the idea that there is a magic pill that will work with every brain.

I know there are some procedures in the world that can only be done in one right way.  I assume there is only one right way to land a 747, and that all other ways are dangerous.  Brain surgery, I imagine, doesn't have a lot of room for the individual expression of the surgeon.  Teaching is not restrictive in that way.  You might be a teacher who strongly believes in a student-led classroom and get your students to learn a lot, but you might also be a teacher who knows that their expertise is valuable to your students and that they don't know what they don't know and teach your students a lot as well.  There is not ONE right way to teach a class, and every other way is wrong.  There are at least a dozen right ways to teach the same content, so don't feel guilty if the one you have chosen doesn't fit the seminar you are sitting in.  That may just be another one of the right ways.

You don't have to be the same as the teacher across the hall to be a great teacher.  Good teachers don't fit in a box, so stop trying to make yourself fit in one.

Change Begets Change

If you spend much time around education, you'll hear it.  "Education hasn't changed in 200 years," someone says, and people nod.  I roll my eyes.  Some of you reading this have said it, and yes, I rolled my eyes at you so hard I nearly sprained a socket.  It's an easy line to say, and all you have to do to get people to believe it is show two pictures of kids sitting in desks.  The problem is that image is silent and stationary and doesn't show what is really happening in the classroom.  All that image really proves is that humans still sit in chairs and need horizontal surfaces to write on.  Education has changed dramatically in the two decades I have been doing it.  If you brought a teacher from 200 years ago into 2020 (even before the pandemic), they would not recognize what school now is.

Expertise in Classrooms

Two hundred years ago, you had the same teacher no matter what grade you were in.  She read a lot, but she had no specific training in any one subject.  She taught you reading, writing, math, and science with no specific training in any one of them.  Now, your science teacher has a science-related degree and is required to engage in professional learning in both their subject area and pedagogy.  You may have the same teacher a couple of times (if you are in a private school), but you don't have the same teacher from kindergarten until graduation, which is what was happening two centuries ago.  It started to slowly change at the beginning of the 20th century, when cultural values shifted from the idea of Renaissance men to that of specialization.  People stopped being simultaneously farmer and architect and musician and philosopher and started being a farmer or an architect or a musician.  Teaching changed because culture changed.

Lab Science

In spite of the fact that all it did was send a beeping radio signal, the launch of Sputnik in 1957 changed a lot of things here on earth.  In the midst of the cold war, scared people increased the construction of bomb shelters, worried that it might be taking pictures of them from above, and of course, propelled us to the moon.  It also changed the teaching of science in America.  Seeing the need for engineers, schools were asked to identify those with aptitude early, and science instructions took a major turn.  Lab experiments were no longer the domain of university courses only.  High schools began building labs, and hands-on activities became valued.  Teaching science changed because culture changed.

Collaboration

In the early 90s, there was a survey of business owners, asking what they looked for in a potential employee.  In the top five of those answers was the ability to collaborate on projects.  Schools began to implement cooperative learning programs, in which each member of a group of four was given a role, like the recorder or the one we made fun of in my math classes, the encourager ("Go girl, multiply those numbers.").  It was a little clumsy at the start, but as we have grown to value collaboration, we've gotten better at it, and students are better able to identify what their contribution should be. Social values changed, so education changed with it.

Choice

Parenting changes with each generation.  In just my lifetime, there has been a pronounced difference from parents telling their child that the teacher is the authority and you should respect them whether you feel respectful or not to parents telling their child that the teacher works for us, and I will meet with them to make sure they understand you.  I'm not complaining because some of those changes have been positive, but if it it has changed this much in my 44 years, imagine how much it has changed in the last 200 years and the impact that has had on education.  One of the most recent is that of choice.  Parenting books and websites started advising parents to get behavior "buy-in" from their kids by giving them choices.  That training led kids to expect choice in a lot of areas, and teachers like the idea of "buy-in" as well, so we now incorporate as much choice as possible into our lessons, allowing students to choose from a menu of books and then allow them to display their understanding in a variety of ways.  The change in parenting values led to a change in pedagogy.

Shifts in Discipline

The changes in parenting also led to massive changes in discipline.  I never got spanked at school, but my brother did.  Corporal punishment has, of course, been eliminated from schools, but that is not the only change.  Detention and suspension still exist, but they are far rarer than they once were.  We are more likely to have reasonable conversations about feelings with students.  Again, I'm not saying this is a bad thing.  I'd much prefer a heart change to compliance-based behavior modification.  What I am saying is that the change in societal values and parenting techniques led to a change in schools as well.

Brain Science Based Pedagogy

The invention of the MRI and the fMRI changed everything.  Many myths we had about the brain (use only 10%, logical left vs creative right) were debunked.  It has taken a long time, but we are now in a position to apply the information coming out of that research to pedagogy.  I have attended two Learning and the Brain Conferences, but they have been doing this work for 20 years.  When we started learning what stimulates dendrite growth, we could use less trial and error and more confidence in our knowledge while lesson planning.  Change in science and technology brought about change in education.

Use of Technology

Speaking of technology, what impact has that had on your classroom?  It's been quite a bit in mine.  From the ability to communicate with absent students to quickly googling the answers to questions.  From 3D printing projects to twitter chats and blogs.  From online editing tools, like Grammarly and TurnItIn.  From out of class resources like Crash Course and Khan Academy to in class communication like Socrative and Flip Grid, my students in 2020 (even before the pandemic) had a MUCH different classroom experience than my students in 1999, when there was an internet, but using it meant reserving time in the computer lab.  Technology has changed rapidly, and we have taken advantage of those changes for our students.  We haven't even talked about how well-positioned some schools were to move their instruction online (I know they all weren't and that there was a digital divide, but imagine if the pandemic had happened in 1990 instead of 2020).  Changes in technology always scare people and lead to changes in instruction. 

Projects that are both Socially and Academically Minded

Because of internet access, there has been a lot of focus on expanding projects from knowledge-based to social-minded.  Almost all school projects now have some aspect that includes either a creative or social component, usually both.  Things like the famous 20% time projects were not possible when my career began, but we are now using students' interests in and knowledge of the wider world to have them think about their interconnectedness.  This was made possible by changes in technology and widespread because of changes in societal values.

"Relationships are Everything"

Teachers on Twitter use the statement "relationships are everything" a lot.  They aren't everything, but we have found they are critical to everything else in education.  Those changes in discipline and choice and buy-in that I mentioned earlier are helped enormously by students and teachers building a level of trust with each other.  The aggregate of society's changes in values led to a big change in education.  We spend far more time during the first days of school doing relationship building (and I maintain that's why online instruction worked well last year.  We'd had three quarters of knowing each other and trusting each other and knowing each other's voices before we went virtual.  That made all the difference.  

Discussion

Look into a classroom today, and you will see discussion.  Teachers asking prompting questions to students who may answer out loud or sometimes online or in writing.  Two hundred years ago, teachers did not discuss things.  Children sat silently until called on, and that was to elicit a specific answer to a specific question.  It was not to ask kids what they think or to relate learning to their experience.  If they spoke out of turn, they might be hit with a ruler or asked to stay inside while others played.  Kids now have a voice in the classroom.  While it as different levels in different classrooms, it is far more than it once was because we now value their thoughts in a way we didn't in the time of "children should be seen and not heard."

I could go on, but this post is already longer than I meant for it to be.  My intent isn't just to list the ways education has changed, but to show why.  Changes in the world, whether those changes be in values or technology or knowledge, lead to changes in education.  Here comes another one.  We are going to figure out the hybrid thing because COVID-19 will require it of us.  One day, having a student who is at home sick join us online won't seem like a big deal.  It'll just be part of the normal course of school because we figured it out when we had to.  Those tweets with hand clap emojis saying that we cannot do this will seem silly in hindsight because we will have figured it out.  

Change in the world begets change in education.  Most of the time, the changes are gradual.  This one isn't.  Get ready to adapt.  It's what we do.  It's what we've always done.