Writing FOR Learning

If written before about wanting to take advantage of the hyperlinking brain of the digital native.  It took me a long time, but I finally found that ability in writing my own 8th-grade science textbook.  You can read about that here and here.  This year, I decided it was time to do the same for my other prep, Physics.

I put writing the book for Physics off longer for a couple of reasons.  First, it is more difficult material.  If I had been learning to use the app and writing for the first time with the most complex material I teach, it might have taken longer to finish the first book than it did.  Also, I wanted to see how the 8th-grade book worked for a few years before I jumped in.  The timing of this worked out well because the students who first used my book in 8th-grade will also be the first to use the physics book.  They know the deal and responded to it well, so they seemed like a nice group to start this book with.

In my posts about the other book, I told you some of the benefits of writing your own.  Among them were arranging it in the order you like, using examples and analogies that work in your classroom, and the increased likelihood the kids will read it.  I also talked a lot about the use of hyperlinks as that was the motivating factor in my effort to teach the digital native.  Now that I have worked with my book for three years and am writing again, I want to discuss other benefits.

1.  Do you have a chapter you struggle with in your teaching?  You try to explain things and find it difficult to get through to students with clarity?  I do.  Teaching electricity has always been difficult for me.  I like teaching circuits, but the explanation of voltage is difficult for me.  My understanding of it is so tenuous that it can be rattled by a student asking a question.  (By the way, to help with that, I show a Khan Academy video that day - Don't feel bad if you need the help of another explainer than you.  It's humility, not weakness.)  Sorry, back to the point of this paragraph - Writing about that topic helps you.  It helps you think through your explanation on a deeper level than you have before.  You read what you have written and realize it needs something.   That forces you to google the topic and find an explanation you haven't read before.  With clarity for yourself, you write a better explanation and include the link to the site that helped you on the page with your explanation.

 2. You will learn things you did not know.  I was writing about color blindness.  I don't spend a lot of time talking about this topic in my class, but I felt I needed a little more than a few sentences if I was going to include it.  I looked it up and learned the causes of 7 different kinds of color vision deficiency and found a great resource in the National Eye Institute portion of the NIH website.  It's well written, interesting, and includes video animations.  I will be using this website in a project assignment next year.  Not only that, I can answer more questions and explain more things to my students.  This happened a two or three dozen times during the writing of this book.  I have more knowledge and more resources for my students.

3.  I wrote about the hyperlinks before, but this morning I had more clarity about them.  I was doing my summer homework in which we respond to a professional development book we all read.  This summer we read The Innovator's Mindset by George Curos.  One of the questions we were supposed to answer in our discussion board was "What do you want students to do with technology?"  This is an important question that EVERY teacher should ask themselves.  You don't want to use tech for tech's sake.  You want to figure out what is important that tech makes possible.  For 18 years, I have hoped to inspire my students to love learning.  I don't believe they will all be scientists, but I hope they will all continue to be learners for their entire lives.  As I wrote about that this morning, I realized the value that the hyperlinks were giving my students.  They saw that I was interested in something outside my curriculum enough to find and provide a link to it.  Perhaps that will inspire them to participate in some self-guided learning.  Here are a couple of examples:

When discussing the trajectory of projectiles, it is fun to talk about food fights.  The greatest food fight happens in Spain every year, so why not include a link that a student might want to follow.  Perhaps, that leads them to learn about Spain or tomatoes.

If you are teaching friction or rotation, it just makes sense to add a link to the science of a thing they like.  Right now, that's fidget spinners.

I wanted some real data to write a problem with.   I knew the information for copper, so I used the Statue of Liberty.  I included the link to her Wikipedia page in the hopes that students would explore the statue, the sculptor, our former relationship with France, etc.

I'm not sure that writing a textbook is for everyone, but I am going to recommend it to anyone who is struggling to teach a specific concept well or wants a good way to model their own curiosity of their students.  You might not want to go as far as writing an entire book.  Perhaps you want to write one concept that you need help with.  Perhaps, you want to write one chapter because the book you are using doesn't handle that as well as you would like.  Writing for your own learning is helpful in a way I don't think I could acheive any other way.

Why We Should Take Better Pictures

Now that cameras are ubiquitous, so are photos.  Gone are the days when you had to decide if it was worth using the exposure on your roll of film or figure out how many exposures you had left on the roll.  You no longer have to wait to get film developed.  You can now know instantaneously whether or not the picture "came out" and retake it immediately if it didn't.  This should have left us with better pictures, but unfortunately, it hasn't.



This meme absolutely infuriated one of my millennial Facebook friends.  She went on a tirade about how previous generations would have done it if they could have (probably true) and that there was nothing wrong with having fun with her friends this way (certainly true).  She went on and on about the ways prior generations wasted time (yep, got us there too).


She isn't wrong, but neither is the meme.


I have been taking photos as an actual hobby since 1990.  I have taken landscapes, animal photos, architectural photos, and vacation photos.  I teach yearbook, so I take pictures of kids doing work on computers, creating artwork, playing sports, performing in plays, dancing, singing, playing instruments.  I am one of the photographers at a camp during the summer.  I take photographs of kids doing woodworking, crafts, playing games with friends, posing with their counselors, participating in activities, and swimming.  I take about twenty-five thousand pictures every year.

Here are the pictures I don't take.
- Duck Faces - Five years from now, when campers look at the albums we gave them, duck faces will have no meaning.  A picture of themselves conquering a new challenge will.
- Tongue Out Faces - When my students look back on their yearbooks, I doubt that they will believe their tongue was their best feature and really wish that I had captured it.
- Shots of Body Parts You Can Only Take in a Mirror - I know that people who work out are proud of their hard work, but if you have to stand backward in a mirror in your underwear to show it, maybe there's a reason God made it that difficult.
- Selfies - I'm pretty sure even Narcissus would tell us to give it a rest.  He only looked at himself; he didn't force everyone around him to stare into the pool too.

There is a place for silly pictures, and I'm not saying you should have zero.  I am saying mix some meaning into the mix.  I am just asking people to slow down for a second and ask themselves how many identical silly shots are going to want in the future.  I have hundreds of prints in a shoebox in my closet; you have hundreds of thousands of digital photos on your phone or in the cloud.  When I flip through those prints, I'm glad there aren't twenty in a row of the same five people blowing their cheeks out at the camera.  Twenty years from now, when you flip through your photos, you might wish there were fewer of those and more of you actually doing something.  It only takes a second to document something you'll be glad you can remember later.  After all, it's in your pocket for the meaningful stuff just as much as it is for the silly stuff.

Book Recommendation - Two Sides of The Moon

I haven't had nearly as much time to read this summer as I read last summer.  As I spent time writing a book for my physics class (more on that later), I realized it was taking a lot more time than I had planned, so I put my reading books to the side.  That said, I did complete a few other than my required reading for school, and I want to share one of them with you.

Two years ago, I read Michael Collins' Carrying the Fire because my students often ask whether he was upset that he didn't get to walk on the moon after traveling all the way there.  I had owned the book for several years in a set including books by Armstrong and Aldrin as well but had not yet read it, so I did.  (For the record, he doesn't seem to hold any resentment about being the guy to stay in the capsule even though he acknowledges that anyone would have liked to have been in the other position.)  This year, it occurred to me that other astronauts of that time had probably written books as well.

As all of my students know, my favorite astronaut is Dave Scott, so I began my search with his name.  I'm so glad that I did because Amazon returned with this little gem.  It is called Two Sides of the Moon.  If you are an average consumer of NASA history, these two names may not mean much to you.  Dave Scott was a Gemini astronaut; he and Neil Armstrong performed the first docking in space.  He was also the commander of Apollo 15, and by then America had become bored with the moon (I do not understand that at all).  Alexei Leonov was a Russian cosmonaut, and I'm not sure any American can name one of those (maybe, maybe Yuri Gagarin, but I doubt most would know him).

This book is written by both men separately.  It alternates back and forth from the child of Alexei to the childhood of Dave.  Then it tells about Alexei's pilot training days, then Dave's.  You get the idea.  What I found compelling was that these were just guys doing their jobs.  They weren't political figures engaged in a global chess match, and they didn't see themselves that way.  They were guys who found jobs that they loved and wanted to do them well.

In reading this book, I also learned a few things I didn't know before.  Alexei trained as an artist and wanted to pursue that as a career, but he couldn't afford the school he got into.  He never gave it up and took crayons with him into space because he knew there would be moments words could not capture.  I learned the Yuri Gagarin died in a plane crash.  I learned the Dave Scott left a falcon feather, a clover, and Bible on the moon to represent the fauna, flora, and culture of Earth.  I learned that several American astronauts met and had drinks with several Russian cosmonauts on several occasions.  I knew already about the Apollo Soyuz joint mission, but I was delighted to learn the Deke Slayton actually finally got to fly on it.  (That will only matter to hard core space geeks; so if you don't know what I'm talking about, don't feel bad.)

Both men write in the very straightforward style you might expect from military men telling a story.  They don't get flowery with vocabulary or make any attempt to present themselves as the final word on anything.  They touch on the politics of the Cold War, but they don't dwell on it.  Both speak with a lot of respect for the program in the other country and what they were able to accomplish.  They tell you what happened and what they thought about it.  That's it.

If you are a space nerd, like me, you should read this book.  If you like learning about history from a first person perspective, you should read this book.  If you want to know more about the Apollo program that we landed once (some of my students are surprised to learn we landed six times), you should read this book.  You will walk away with more respect for the people of the Russian program and may find the Dave Scott is also your favorite astronaut.

Elements of Successful Innovation - Part 5 - Communication

I almost made this my shortest post ever by saying, "Communication is everything" and being done with it.  I thought you might feel that was clickbait, so I will expand on that.  Communication always matters, but it matters all the more when you are doing something unusual, i.e. innovating.

Communication with Students
If you are doing something new, it is obviously something students have never done before.  You can't expect them to read your mind.  If you want them to present their findings in a specific format, you should tell them.  If you want them to choose the best way to present their findings, tell them that too.  I made this mistake last year.  My physics class was working on their challenge-based learning project on electricity.  These are juniors and seniors, and I want them to make decisions about the best ways to pursue it.  I thought I had communicated this to the students, but the day of the forum, a student came to me in a panic because every other group had made a poster to go with their presentation.  She was worried that she would be graded down when obviously "we were supposed to make a poster."  They weren't supposed to; that was just the choice made by the other groups.  Next year, I will make sure to emphasize the degree of choice they have in this area.  They aren't used to it yet, and it scares them a little.  Most new things scare most of us a little.

Communication with Parents
The more e-mails you send, the fewer you get.  This may be the most important thing I've ever written in this blog.  E-mail (or whatever method of mass communication your school uses) is the greatest tool you have.  Just as students aren't used to things when you innovate, their parents aren't either.  Because we have all been to school, we all think we know what it should be like.  Depending on the grade you teach, most of your kids' parents graduated from school at least a decade ago.  They built dioramas and wrote five paragraph essays.  They did not blog or animate concepts.  When you ask their children to do that, they may not understand why.

It is important to communicate both what their students will be doing and why.  Send them the same set of instructions you give the students.  That will communicate the what and give them the chance to converse with their students whose answer to "what did you do in school today" is usually "nothing."  It is also important that you communicate why you are asking these things of students.  My 8th-grade students blog publically.  Last year, a parent objected to the public nature of the blog.  She had safety concerns, but she also didn't understand why it needed to be public.  "If the point is that he reflects in writing," she said, "why can't it just be turned in to you?"  Let's be fair to her.  She doesn't go to education conferences or attend faculty meeting where "real work for real audiences" is discussed.  She hasn't read the research about why this matters.  She just sees one aspect of "the point" of the assignment.  We compromised by having his blog set to private so that only those people she had approved (his teachers, a few friends) could read it. (I am, after all, not his parent; and she had safety concerns.)  If I had explained the value of public work up front, she could have experienced less stress even though she might have ultimately come to the same conclusion.  In my school, all teachers read the same book over the summer.  We send those book titles out to parents so that if they wish, they can read them as well to get an idea of what the teachers are learning.  If you are innovating based on something you have read, it might be a good idea to include the book title or link to the blog post, research study, or article that explains the value of that innovation.  

When you communicate up front, you get fewer e-mails that begin with "I just don't understand why . . ."  I'm not saying you won't get questions from parents because you always will.  I am saying those questions will come from a place of inquiry rather than doubt in your teaching.

Elements of Successful Innovation - Part 4 - Common, Simple, and Reliable Technology

In recent weeks, I have taken a tweet from Jon Bergman in which he posted a list of elements schools need for successful classroom flipping and modified to apply to any innovation in the classroom.  In this post, I combine three of them because they are all about your school's technology.

There was a time when you could innovate without reliance on technology, but I'm not sure that is possible anymore.  Even if the project or program you want to start in your classroom or school isn't specifically about tech, your students will be using tech to do it.  The biology and anatomy teacher next door to me had to interesting projects last year that we not, on their face, tech projects.  In his 9th-grade biology class, students were assigned to grow food plants, with the goal of reaching 1500 calories by the time they were finished.  They had to track water usage, minerals added, temperature changes, etc.  Given that there is nothing more old school than growing food, you might not think technology is an issue here.  It was, however, a huge part of their research, and those who didn't pay proper attention to the credibility of their sources killed their plants by mixing a lot of Epsom salt to their soil.  (They didn't realize it was good for some plants and not others and that there is a limit to how much they should put in.)  His anatomy class plans a crime scene in which all kinds of evidence is collected.  Other students then ask questions of the group members, which play the roles of suspects, witnesses, and detectives.  Again, this doesn't seem techy up front, and it may not have to be, but it is so much easier for students to print photos, edit them to make the scene, print fingerprints, etc.  Realizing that your students bring their knowledge of technology to any experience means your school needs to have good tech for any innovation you plan.

Common Technology - I understand that this is a controversial topic.  Many schools have gone to a bring your own device model because it is less expensive for the school.  I get that, and it is certainly better than not having any technology, but I don't think it is ideal.  First, it increases the likelihood of a socio-economic achievement gap.  Students who can afford to bring in better devices will have an advantage.  Also, the teacher will spend a lot of time trying to figure out what each student has at their disposal.  When GRACE began one-to-one, we had every student carrying a MacBook.  Soon, they will all be carrying something else, but they will all have the same devices with the same programs.  It means that I don't have to troubleshoot every kind of device when a student can't log into something.  I can assign a video, knowing that all students have a movie editing program.  I can provide a challenge, knowing that the students have access to all the same filtering.

Simple Technology - "Simple" doesn't have to mean cheap, but it does have to mean user-friendly.  There is a learning curve when you implement a new tool.  That is to be expected, but if the new tool is so frustrating to use that it causes students to give up, you are using the wrong tool for your situation.  People say, "Photoshop it," like that is an easy thing to do.  It isn't.  Unless you are teaching a digital media class or an art class that has a unit on digital image manipulation, you probably don't need it.  I teach yearbook, and I don't use it because the extent of my need is cropping, brightening, and the occasional color correction.  Your students need access to the tool that best fits their need, not necessarily the most high-end tool.

Reliable Technology - This is the big one.  No matter how good your tech is, it means nothing when it doesn't work.  Some hiccups are to be expected.  We have had a couple of days when Time Warner was having a blackout.  Those times should be rare, and we are blessed to have an administration that is willing to invest in more than having the technology but making it easy for students and teachers.  If you are going to hand out hundreds of computers, you can't be using the same wifi you did when only your teachers were using it.  Invest in a strong signal speed and access points.  Again, if it is so frustrating that your people want to give up, they will just revert back to pencil and paper.  (By the way, on those days when we were having access problems, my kids were stunned to discover that I could still teach with a white board.)

I had a class in college in which our equipment never worked.  Our professor would come into the lab and give us instruction, then go back to his office while we carried it out.  We would get started, only to find out the machine didn't work.  After troubleshooting for improperly connected circuits and other issues this type of equipment could have, we would go to the professor and tell him.  He asked the same troubleshooting questions we did.  When we gave him answers that indicated we had tried everything, he sent us back to the dorm.  One day I looked at the syllabus for that class and saw that troubleshooting equipment was one of the objectives.  We met that objective; but sadly, I think it was the only objective we met.  Not actually getting to experience the experiments in that lab was frustrating.  When you innovate, you owe it to your students to make it a learning experience, not frustrate them with an inability to achieve learning because your technology is confusing, complicated, or unreliable.

Elements of Successful Innovation - Part 3 - Embedded Support and Community

The post from Jon Bergman's Twitter account came across my feed months ago, but when I look at the list, I'm still grateful to work at GRACE where almost all of these things were part of our culture before we adopted the one to one program.  As we talk about other innovations, we are blessed to still have all the things on this list.

Two of the things Bergman finds critical to flipping that are also important for any innovation are Embedded Support and Community.

By Embedded Support, Bergman doesn't just mean a strong IT department - although that is important and will be featured in next week's post.  He means people with knowledge of both technology and its pedagogical use.  The first step on my road to tech was bringing in my own laptop.  While that went well, it was not particularly innovative; I was using slides and video rather than the whiteboard and overhead projector.  It was not a bad first step, but it would obviously not be enough to have stayed there.  The school bought a few SMART boards, and we were given a day's training on HOW to use them. What we were not given was training in how to incorporate them into a lesson.  I think we did a pretty reasonable job of figuring it out, but we could have implemented it far better if we had someone dedicated to learning as much about the pedagogy of the smart board as possible.  For that reason, when I served on the committee that was choosing our one to one devices, I beat the drum of training.  A board member expressed concern that he didn't want the one to one program to be like the SMART boards.  I knew what he meant.  Those are very expensive devices that were not being used to their fullest potential, and I was one of the people using it.  I said frequently on this committee.  Teacher MUST be trained, not only in the use of the device but in how to best use them IN the classroom experience.  If you want us to innovate with them, we can't rely on what we learned about books and expect it to translate.  Without training, you can get a chisel and stone or an iPad.  The innovation level will be about the same.  The school stepped up in a big way.  Not only did our IT people constantly seek out tools and pass along articles, our administrators sent links to ideas and articles.  Our media specialists became technology coaches and even created a program for our improvement.  There were also a few teachers who were more tech savvy than others who were identified as those you could go to with questions.  We even got special training from Apple (who are better at teaching you how to use it in school than Microsoft - Sorry Microsoft, but your trainers don't see the difference between education and business).   Everywhere you looked, there was support.

In addition to that, we were a community learning together.  It's hard to describe the power of that in the first year of a new, widespread innovation.  We shared ideas all the time, at meetings, in e-mails, on our lesson plans, in online discussion boards.  We were in this together, not just as teachers, but with students.  Students gave me some of my best tools, and they suddenly felt comfortable e-mailing teachers.  They had the ability to do it before, but now they experienced a culture shift that made them feel they could (and boy do they - like all the time).  Our school is already strong in community, but it really showed during this time.  That doesn't happen by accident.  It happened because a culture had been cultivated for years and was intentionally strengthened even more during this time.  Our innovations now are not as widespread.  They tend to be within a grade level or department, but that community still exists.  In an earlier post, I mentioned our project brainstorming meetings.  English, science, art, math, history, and foreign language teachers sitting in small groups have a lot of brain power.  We were able to view projects from such a variety of angles that we couldn't help but get results.

You can innovate alone if you don't have these things in your school, but you should at least seek out support and community online.  There are lots of communities out there.  Search education-related hashtags.  Find teachers to follow on Twitter.  It is better to have it in your building, but if you don't have it in person, have it online.  It makes a difference.  Next week, I'll address technology specifically, but innovation isn't just about technology.  It's about doing something different, whether that uses technology or not.

Elements of Successful Innovation - Part 2 - Time and Focus

This is the second post in a series of thoughts on the elements required to innovate in the classroom.  Last week's post was on the importance of leadership and acknowledgment.  This week, we look at the next features of Jon Bergman's list - Time and Focus.

Time - Everyone wants to innovate.  It is in our nature as human beings.  We don't want to repeat the same things over and over, whether or not they work, as the world changes around us.  We want to take advantage of new research and technology.  The reason we often do not is that doing what we have always done doesn't take any time, and doing something new does.  We have discussed various innovative ideas in our school many times.  We made progress as individuals, but doing it on a large scale takes a lot of committed time, particularly if you want to implement things in a cross-curricular fashion.  It requires discussion with other teachers, writing instructions, constructing rubrics, and figuring out how to answer questions from students and parents, etc.  One of the things we found helpful this year was a series of brainstorming meetings.  A teacher would present a project that needed help or an idea for something new and allowed other teachers across different disciplines to give their input.  For some, it led to joint work between teachers.  For others, it just brought a set of fresh ideas for how to improve.  I enjoyed being part of these meetings both for my own work and as the input person for others.  The side benefit is that you have a better idea of what is happening in your school as a whole and can talk to your students about the things happening in other classes.

Focus - In Bergman's original post, he describes a school-wide focus this way. "The change is a focus of the school, and the school does not have many (if any) competing programs."  I would say this depends on the size of your innovation.  If it is for one unit or only affects a few classrooms or one department, you can have several innovations at once.  If you are doing something big, like implementing a one to one program or trying to create a flipping culture, you should focus on it for at least one year before adding anything else.  No one wants to be a mile wide and an inch deep.  To keep that from happening, there must be time to focus on the best ways to incorporate the innovative idea without competition from other tools.

Next time - Embedded Support and Community