Tag Archives: learning

Down the rabbit hole

The afternoon I went down a very dark rabbit hole. First I read a tweet from an influential twitter profile that grossly miss-communicated some data comparing the flu to COVID-19, making it look like this coronavirus was only a threat to those over the age of 60. This tweet went to her 2.2 million followers. Then I went to another public figure’s tweet that was very controversial and did something I almost never do, I went to the tweet and read the conversation/reply thread that followed. Wow. I remember now why I don’t usually do this.

It was dark. It showed the bipolar divide that I spoke about in my post, Ideas on a Spectrum. It was nasty, it was mean, it was ignorant, it was a complete waste of my time. It achieved nothing. Not for me, not for anyone that commented. The lines were drawn and both sides could only preach to their side.

I’m glad that this isn’t my typical experience on Twitter. I’m sorry for those that spend a lot of time in this sad, angry space on both Twitter and Facebook. I’ll happily go back to my world of educators geeking out, sharing, and learning on Twitter… and I’ll stay there for a while. A word of advice as we spend more time at home, more connected than usual to news and our social streams: Keep away from the rabbit holes and check your sources for news and for click-bait headlines.

A while back I wrote about a new tragedy of the commons. In this post I said,

Indeed we have a new, social-emotional, tragedy of the commons. Despite our understanding that perpetuating the onslaught of negative news is, ‘contrary to [our] long-term best interests’, we still do it. And social media isn’t making things any better. We used to be able to blame the media monopolies and moguls, but now we are the news-makers: We publish freely, and quickly and without thought as to how we are part of the problem.

We don’t need to feed this negative loop, and we don’t need to feed on it either.

Just shifting online or shifting the learning?

Across the globe schools are closing due to Covid-19 and the learning is being moved online. I recently shared in my Daily-Ink post, ‘Novel ideas can spread from a novel virus‘:

Discussion about the possibility of remote learning invites questions about blended learning where some of the work, both asynchronous and synchronous, is done remotely. It also invites conversations and questions about what we should be spending our time on when we do get together?

…this virus is impacting the world the way it is might impact how we think about operating our schools and businesses in the future. What excites me isn’t the idea that more work might be done remotely, but rather the ideas behind what we do when we connect face-to-face, and how we use that time? Will we focus more on collaboration, team building, social skills, construction and creation of projects, and more personalized support? How will we engage students in learning when they might not be coming to school every day?

With the shift of learning at school moving digital, the only thing that seems to be shared on my Twitter feed as much as Coronavirus updates are online resources. There are tons of free resources that you can use/share and teach with. But the idea that all we need to do is put work we are usually doing in a class online can lead to disengaged and overworked students.

“In a world where information is abundant and easy to access, the real advantage is knowing where to focus.” ~ James Clear

Here are a few things to think about as course content is moved online, and lessons are taught from a distance:

What can you do synchronously? There are amazing tools like Microsoft Teams and Zoom that allow you to meet with students. How will this time be used? Will you lecture or allow students to meet in groups? Will it be a Powerpoint presentation or a discussion? If you are giving a presentation that can be pre-recorded or viewed online asynchronously, then are you utilizing your synchronous time effectively?

What can you edit out? Taking everything you do face-to-face and trying to put it online will be overwhelming, especially for students that already struggle in class. What are the essential things students need to learn? What skills and competencies do they need and how can you create a positive learning environment to learn these skills?

What assignments can you create that engage the learner with questions that do not have a single correct answer? How can you make the assignments open ended? For instance, these video writing prompts invite students to personalize their writing, and can provide a variety of writing samples that can show you their writing competencies… while not being cookie-cutter assignments that box students in. The videos are easy to embed and share, and the answers can promote great discussions when you meet synchronously.

To summarize, ask yourself a few questions when you are shifting from regularly meeting students to providing an online/digital program:

  1. What should you do to most effectively utilize synchronous time, when you have it scheduled?
  2. What can you take out of your course so that you are reducing the expectations of students working from home, with less support than they get at school?
  3. How can you make assignments engaging, interactive, and interesting?
  4. What kind of things will you assess and how can you ensure that assessment is something that authentically assesses the students skills and competencies?

How can you shift the learning experience beyond just shifting everything online?

Also shared on Pair-A-Dimes for Your Thoughts.

A lesson taught with dignity and respect

My grandfather, Leon Bernstein or ‘Papa B’ as he was known, was an amazing man. As I shared at his funeral:

Papa B. is a Giant!

Like many of you, I know this because he told me so.
Papa wasn’t boasting when he said this, he was just telling you the way it is. If you were to measure a man by the legacy he leaves behind Papa would come as big as they get. In this way he is still a giant and always will be.

Here is a lesson that he taught me, wrapped inside of another lesson. It speaks to his character, and to the kind of person I want to be, that I strive to be. It’s a lesson he taught me when I was about 14 years old.

It happened at a family gathering at our house, it was the weekend and both sets of grandparents and a few aunts and uncles were over. It wasn’t a special occasion, our family often connected without a specific reason. I specifically know that it wasn’t a special occasion because I went for a bike ride with a couple friends, and if it was a special occasion, like a birthday, I would have had to stay at the celebration.

When I finished my ride, just before dinner, I came home and I remember that I was going very fast. I reached my driveway and I didn’t slow down. I made the sharp turn on my neighbour’s shared driveway and kept my speed up as I headed to the garage. But at the speed I was going I couldn’t make the turn and I hit Papa B’s car. My handlebar scraped across the car door leaving a scratch longer than a ruler, over 12 inches or 30cm. Then I fell to the pavement and scraped me knee.

It wasn’t a bad scape but standing up I looked at the scrape on me knee and then the large scratch on my grandfather’s car and I started to cry. I went into the house crying and I told my story of riding up the driveway and hitting the car. I didn’t admit to going too fast.

A few adults came outside to look at the car. I still had tears in my eyes as we looked at the large scratch on the front passenger car door. There was a remark about how big it was and the tears flowed. My grandfather spoke up, “It’s all right boy, the important thing is you weren’t hurt. Your knee will heal and the scratch can be fixed. All good.”

And with that we all went inside, me hobbling with exaggeration behind everyone that came outside. I got a bandaid from my mom, and the scratch on the car wasn’t mentioned again that night. I had convinced myself when I scraped the car that I was going to get in big trouble, but my grandfather said it wasn’t important, what was important was that I was ok. It was ‘All good’.

A couple days later Papa B came over and he asked me to come outside. He took me by the hand, something only he could do to a 14 year old in a way that felt natural. Holding hands was something Papa B did with all his grandkids. We walked to the passenger side of the car and he pointed. “See that,” he said pointing to the scratch I had made. “The scratch is horizontal. You were going too fast. If you were going a safe speed, the scratch would have pointed down as the bike fell, but you turned too fast and this scratch tells me so. It’s ok, I know it was a mistake, but I wanted you to know that I know you were going too fast.”

That was it. We went inside and it was never mentioned again.

This has shaped the way I have spoken as a teacher to students in my class, and now as a principal to students in my office. Papa knew all along, but he didn’t want to share this in front of an audience. He waited and taught me a lesson with dignity and respect. It’s easy to be angry and heated and forget to be like this.

That isn’t to say that I always choose to deal with things this way. And sometimes it’s good for students to see you upset, or disappointed with some emotion. But my default is to strive to be like Papa B. To choose a moment that isn’t public. To be gentle and respectful, but also to face the issue rather than let it pass.

Students make mistakes. People make mistakes. I make mistakes. When I remember this story, I remember that how we react to a mistake can be as much of a lesson as the lesson the mistake has to offer. Others deserve the same respect that my Papa B gave to me.

Novel ideas can spread from a novel virus

I travelled to China during the early H1N1 (swine flu) pandemic in 2009. Concerns were low in Canada and there wasn’t a travel warning at the time. On my flight to Japan there wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. However after leaving Japan, when we landed in Chana we were asked to stay on the plane and remain seated.

A team of people masked and dressed in white came on board and used an infrared thermometer to take our temperatures. Two rows in front of me a person that was coughing and unwell, and her husband, were escorted off the plane first. I remember thinking, ‘Oh man, sucks to be you!’

I thought that was it, but after leaving the plane I guess that we passed a heat sensor camera because I was tapped on the shoulder and pulled aside. A lady in a mask, shining a red light on my forehead, took my temperature and said, “Too hot.”

To say that I was freaked out is an understatement. I was visiting for 1 week to learn about my future job as a school Principal, and visions of quarantine in a foreign country, where I don’t speak the language, swirled through my head. Fortunately, a second reading was done and I was fine. I think a coffee right before landing, plus the fact that I run a little hot anyway, might have been the initial trigger.

Still, that shook me a little. I wondered about why these measures were not happening elsewhere? The response in China seemed preventative, while in other countries it seemed merely reactive. I’m not sure too many lessons were learned and the novel Coronavirus currently spreading across the world will likely have a significant impact on our globe before things get better. Yet I don’t mean that to sound like foreboding, and ominous foreshadowing. This virus will run its course, then some valuable lessons will be learned that were not learned by viruses like this in the past. Lessons that will hopefully help prevent the severity of a future pandemic.

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I read in interesting article, “How the coronavirus will shape the future” and want to expand on one section as it relates to schools and education:

If the growing novel coronavirus outbreak becomes a lasting pandemic, it could accelerate fundamental changes in the economy, politics and the workplace...

Going remote: Videoconferencing and remote work have exploded as the virus has spread.

  • According to Kentik, a global provider of network analytics, videoconferencing traffic in North America and Asia has doubled since the outbreak began.

  • Led by tech firms like Twitter and Facebook, companies are encouraging and even requiring their employees to work from home, both to slow the spread of the disease now and prepare for the worst should offices be closed in a quarantine.

  • Many experts believe business leaders will come to see that central offices and face-to-face meetings are less vital than they thought. “We’re going to see that work can be tied to productivity anywhere rather than putting time in an office,” said Peter Jackson, CEO of the digital collaboration company Bluescape.

At Inquiry Hub Secondary every assignment is already available online. Students have access to Moodle, Microsoft OneNote, and Microsoft Teams from any connected computer or mobile device. The Microsoft tools also have immersive readers and dictation tools to support students no matters where they are learning from.

Using Teams, I can invite colleagues or students into a virtual classroom, sharing video including either my or a student’s screen, and we can all link to resources in the Chat. Students could collaborate and do presentations, submit work, and get feedback without entering a school. That creates a lot of opportunities that weren’t previously available. I have no idea if this is something that will become necessary in the coming months, but in some parts of the world schools have already been closed, and so the idea that this is possible becomes a topic of discussion.

Discussion about the possibility of remote learning invites questions about blended learning where some of the work, both asynchronous and synchronous, is done remotely. It also invites conversations and questions about what we should be spending our time on when we do get together?

We might not have to change anything to deal with the Coronavirus, but the fact that this virus is impacting the world the way it is might impact how we think about operating our schools and businesses in the future. What excites me isn’t the idea that more work might be done remotely, but rather the ideas behind what we do when we connect face-to-face, and how we use that time? Will we focus more on collaboration, team building, social skills, construction and creation of projects, and more personalized support? How will we engage students in learning when they might not be coming to school every day?

Adopting tools in a transformative rather than additive way

Years ago I was doing a presentation to high school educators and things didn’t go as planned:

I started my presentation and within 30 seconds the power went out. I picked up my laptop and said to the 100+ audience members, “Ok, everybody gather around here.” 😉

I started a conversation about ‘What tech tool can’t you live without, that didn’t exist 5 years ago… and by the time people had discussed this with their neighbours and we started sharing as a group the power turned on… “POP” … that would be the sound of the ceiling mounted LCD light bulb burning out.

That’s when I asked a new question: “How many of you have had the experience before of having a lesson planning epiphany… suddenly you are up late at night planning… you head into the school before class starts in the morning and when you get to the photocopier… it’s BROKEN!“ ~Most teachers raised their hands.

“So, keep your hands up if you said something like, ‘That’s it, I’m never using the photocopier again?’“ ~All hands went down.

Sometimes ‘technology’, be it a photocopier, a presentation, or even a pen doesn’t work.

Other times the technology is new, and different, and not intuitively transformative. That doesn’t mean the tool can’t be transformative, it just means it’s hard to see the benefit or the value.

This afternoon a good friend and educational leader, Dave Sands, and I will be presenting to principal and vice principal colleagues. We will be sharing the value we see in using Microsoft Teams with our staff in schools.

For some people this is just one more tool to add to the list of other things they need to look at in a day… it doesn’t add value, it adds work. However Dave and I see it differently. We see how this tool can change workflow in a positive way, making it an effective way to streamline communication with different teams of people that you work with. Here are a few key points about how a tool like Microsoft Teams can be transformative:

1. It can reduce and be more efficient than email.

Have you ever shared an email that requires a response from a group of people? Some ‘Reply All’, some don’t. And you’ve got to figure out what’s what, and collate the information while responses trickle in.

Have you ever shared information with a group and one-by-one people ask the same clarifying question that you end having to respond to individually?

Have you received an email from someone that you wish you looked at sooner than you did, but instead you were dealing with 30+ other emails that came in after that?

Using Teams contextualizes conversations. It allows you to keep responses public to the team, and to clarify responses in contained conversations rather than scattered throughout email. It also allows you to prioritize your teams over the most recent items in your email inbox.

2. Using Teams creates a shared learning space within your community.

Have you ever worked as a staff on professional development, sharing paper resources that never get looked at again? Then someone shares a great resource through email, but that resource stays in your email?

My staff has created channels within a Team to work on our professional development. We co-create the notes, share files, and publicly follow through with our plans. Afterwards if someone adds anything, everyone has that resource available within the context of the learning that happened, not lost in email.

3. You are working with a team of people in other buildings and you don’t see them often.

Email is brutal for this. Conversations get scattered, supporting each other is challenging, it doesn’t feel like you are a community. When you create a Team with this group, everything is shared in one public space. When a question is asked, the whole team is there to respond, and resource sharing is easy. It shifts the environment from a broken up group into a shared community.

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That’s three quick examples of how a tool like Teams can be more effective than other tools like email, but it requires shifting practice to be truly transformative. If you are communicating with your team or staff using both Teams and email, then you are being ineffective and adding more to your plate. But if you replace communicating through email with Teams, now you have a few key advantages you didn’t have before:

  • You can actually prioritize the people within your community that you want to give your attention to by going to teams first, before dealing with the most recent and often erroneous emails at the top of your inbox.
  • Communication on Teams is public to your team, and responses are easily clarified for everyone.
  • You can embed forms where everyone can see everyone else’s responses.
  • You can easily switch to the private chat function when information becomes relevant to just one or a few people.
  • You can use the @name function to specially address a person or a whole Team.
  • You can build a sense of community and support that email does not provide.
  • Conversations are contextual. I can prioritize what I look at first, at a glance, not just by the most recent items.
  • You can reduce the amount of email you get! My email has gone down by more than 1/3 since adopting Teams.

For me the ability to prioritize my teams in a space outside of email, and reducing the amount of emails I get, have been the greatest benefits to moving to Microsoft Teams.

Note: I share expectations and etiquette with my teams about how and where to communicate. It’s a good idea with any new tool to make the intentions and expectations about how to use the tool clear. Otherwise, the tool isn’t transformative, it’s just one more shiny new thing to check, without really seeing the value in using it.

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Related: Transformative or just flashy educational tools? (Written almost a decade ago.)

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Also shared on my Pair-a-Dimes for Your Thoughts blog

The memories that make us who we are

What are the defining moments in your life? When asked a question like this, we often think of big choices, like choosing a university, a life partner, a house, or a country to live in. But what about the little moments?

  • Parents who hugged you when you fell and cut your knee.
  • Being read a bed time story.
  • Family vacations.
  • Visits to or from grandparents.
  • Sports teams.
  • Sleepovers.
  • Trips abroad.
  • Boyfriends or girlfriends.
  • Parties, camping trips, hanging out in basements, dances, night clubs, and concerts.

If you are lucky, each of these examples will bring fond memories, and smiles. For others, one or more of these could trigger a memory of abuse or neglect or of missing out. For some, the memories are mixed, a blend of joyous nostalgia and bitter reflection.

These memories accumulate and our choice to focus on them help define who we are now, and what choices we make in the future. We might like to think that today is a new day filled with potential, but that potential is determined by our past, and the patterns we have set for ourselves. If these memories and patterns didn’t matter, we wouldn’t need so many self-help books, and therapists, and seminars that are available to help us break the cycles we get stuck in.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could alter our past to help us better align with the future we want? Could we look back at past memories and make the painful ones more distant? Could we find the hidden lessons we need now and see the value from the hardships we faced? Could we alter our histories by deciding to focus on what has made us stronger, wiser, and more resilient?

Do we own our memories or do they own us? If this is a choice we can make, what’s stopping us? Do we not have the power to make the memories that make us who we are?

Learning Through Failure vs Failing to Learn

We talk a lot about learning through failure, but not a lot about failing to learn. When we fail because of lack of resources, lack of support, lack of knowledge, and/or lack of reflection, it’s just a failure. We do not necessarily learn.

When we talk about learning from failure, we are not actually talking about failure, we are talking about perseverance, and resilience, and tenacity. We are talking about coming up to resistance and unplanned outcomes and working through them to achieve a goal. We are talking about students learning significantly more than if everything went their way.

Who learns more, the person who follows the cookie-cutter curriculum and content-focused assessment, or the student who tries something really original, challenging, and maybe even epic? Even if both paths led to the coveted mark of an ‘A’, which path holds the most promise for deep learning?

We never want students to fail, but we also don’t want them to have such an easy path to success that the learning is forgettable. The struggle that potential failure can create is something that separates learning through failure from failing to learn.

(Image by Bill Ferriter)

My new approach to learning from books

I’ve always been a slow reader, and so the transition to audio has been a refreshing way to consume more books than if I stuck to reading text. Even so the amount of books I can read is very limited, especially when you consider that a typical audio book runs somewhere between 7 and 12 hours of listening. So I was very interested when a colleague told me about Blinkist, a book summarizing service. He shared a link with alternative summarizing services and I ended up getting a competing service called 12 Minutes. The app chose me when a lifetime membership went on sale for less than 2 years on Blinkist.

I tried this out and I didn’t like it much. Although the summaries are short, I found my attention waned. Informational books devoid of the compelling stories and examples couldn’t hold my attention even for 12 minutes. I was disappointed.

But recently my desire to get through more books increased after reading a Tim Ferris blog post that said,

“We don’t have that much time left to read books. Tim Urban’s The Tail End makes this clear. Based on his calculus, he might only read another 300 books before he dies. He and I are roughly the same age, and Tim is a very fast reader.”

I’m older, and a slower reader than both of them. So I thought, let my try again with a different approach. I opened up my iPad to a sketching app, called Paper, and then opened 12 Minutes and saw the feature book was The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. This is the perfect book because I wanted to read it, it was gifted to me by a parent at my school over 3 years ago, and it sits on my shelf unread, not even on my list of books I have have time for in the near future.

Here are the notes I created while listening to The Lean Startup:

It took longer than 12 minutes. I didn’t time it but I’d guess 20-25 minutes with pausing and reminding. However this book is relatively small at only 8 hours and 38 minutes on Audible… and I likely would never have gotten to it.

With this new two-pronged strategy, I was able to stay focused and take a couple useful ideas from the book. I also have some notes I can come back to later. So unlike my audiobooks that I listen to working out and commuting, I will probably use the 12 Minute App in conjunction with a sketching app, and I’ll see if this new approach to learning from books is something I will stick to?

Just follow the steps

I enjoy solving puzzles like this:

The thing about these kind of puzzles is that if you don’t see the solution, you make a guess, you toss around ideas, then you eliminate them, and suddenly you see the pattern… you’ve figured out the steps, and you know you are right even before you’ve completed the answer. At that point you just follow the steps.

Easy… Or is it?

Sometimes the solution eludes you. Sometimes you just don’t see the pattern. In the example above, I can even tell you the next line of numbers and if you don’t see the pattern, it won’t help you understand: (13211311123113112211). The new row I shared would just become another set of confusing numbers. The solution won’t help you figure out the steps.

For some learners, getting started on a project or an assignment is like this. The blank page is daunting, giving no hints as to what to do next. Interpreting the question is too hard even before thinking about possible answers. For others, getting started is easy, but knowing how to finish involves a roadblock such as, explaining a process, collecting relevant data, summarizing information, extrapolating what the teacher wants, understanding the conclusion, or figuring out the purpose of even doing the assignment in the first place.

It took me about a minute and a half to solve this question, with half of that time doing the simple math to ensure I was right:

Find next number in the series:
23 21 24 19 26 15 28 11 30 7 36 ?

If you know the pattern, great! But if you don’t and I told you the answer is 5, that wouldn’t actually help you figure out the next number in the sequence.

When you know or understand the steps to get to the end of an assignment, it’s just a matter of doing the work. When you don’t understand the steps, or when a learning challenge gets in the way, then the steps become cliffs, too big to climb.

How often do we ask learners to climb cliffs?

Kids do well if they can

I love this video by Ross Greene:

Moving from ‘kids do well if they wanna’ to ‘kids do well if they can’ is a significant change in philosophy. I like that Ross admits that this philosophy is “a lot harder and… more productive”.

It’s easy to blame a kid who doesn’t want to do school work. It’s hard to figure out what’s getting in the way of their learning. But which of these models provides the most reward, for the student and the educator?

I know there are students who are really hard to figure out. I know there are students who refuse to accept help. I know there are educators willing to bend over backwards to support kids who still opt out. But if you believe they will do well if they can, then you are still in a better mindset to find a way to support a student than you would be believing they just don’t want to do the work.

Kids do well if they can.