Tag Archives: learning

Rhythm and Rapport

I felt it. I mean I really felt it. A rhythmic wave resonated throughout my body. Before this moment I had enjoyed music but I never had it consume me so completely. And I was surrounded by others who felt the same way.

It was the early summer of 1992, and I was 24 years old. My uncle had introduced me to an NLP teacher, paying for me to take his course, and I loved it. NLP or Neuro Linguistic Programming is about harnessing communication patterns, that we all use, in more effective and powerful ways. The course I was in was very interesting because it seemed as if half the people were there to learn to be more effective and the other half seemed to be there for therapy.

The 9-day course started on a Saturday and ran daily from 8am to 4pm through the week and into the second weekend. It was the Friday morning and we were told we were in for a treat. We were taken to a small room filled with drums, shakers, tambourines, cow bells and assorted traditional music makers. The lesson was on rapport and we were going to use music to demonstrate it.

I think there were about 18 of us in this small room and we were broken up into groups of 2, 3, and 4, depending on the number of similar instruments. I don’t remember if we ended up with 5 or 6 groups. Next, each group was given a different beat to play. For instance, the cow bell players got tap-tap, tap-tap, pause, tap-tap, while a few drummers got a beat of 1-2, 1-2-3, 1-2-3-4, 1-2. That second example would have been the most complicated of the options with most others being quite simple.

We got counted down and everyone started playing their own beat in their groupings. As someone that doesn’t have musical training, it was good to have other people playing the same beat as me so that I could follow along and not be too distracted by the other groups. That said it was a ruckus in this small room. To put it kindly, we were making noise, horrible and loud clattering, pounding, clanging, dinging noise. It was awful.

I understood that we were supposed to build rapport and the music was somehow supposed to come together but it didn’t. There was just noise. We switched instruments and tried again. Noise. We switched beats. Noise. We switched instruments again, and I was given cow bells. More noise.

We were tired, and we were overwhelmed with the echo of instruments clamouring out of synch, and then something interesting happened. A professional dance instructor that was taking the course had a big gourd shaker in his hand, he stepped forward into the middle of our circle and connected with an older man on drums. This older gentleman that the dancer connected with was a retired music teacher. They sped up the beat slightly and I could hear their individual beats come together as if they were one pattern. The dancer with the gourd shaker was dancing to their beat and my beat fell into synch with his feet.

That was the moment it happened for me, and it was obvious that it was happening for everyone else in the room… our noise became music. But this was so much more than music, it was a wave of sound that reverberated through my body. I watched the dancer and realized that his gourd and feet were the backbone of the beat. We were all following his lead. Then I looked at the retired musician’s drum and I realized that it was him driving the beat. Then I looked at my cow bells and realized it was me that was leading the beat. Then I really understood what was happening. We were in perfect unison, we were one.

None of us were in the lead. All of us were in the lead. This was full rapport. We were all connected, all one beat, all one musical experience. We built up the sound to a full crescendo, it was all-consuming, bordering on ecstasy. There was a countdown, 3-2-1, and we all stopped playing. The instant silence was a final exclamation on an overwhelmingly beautiful experience. For the first time in my life I had felt, truly and to my core felt, the sound of music.

learn-by-gerait-on-pixabay

Learning on the job, for the job

I’ve been a fan of Tim O’Reilly ever since I heard his “Create More Value than You Capture” talk he gave at Stanford:

When a colleague suggested his new book, WTF? What’s the Future and Why it’s Up to Us, I knew I had to get it on Audible.

This quote from the book really got me thinking:

“A lot of companies complain that they can’t hire enough people with the
skills they need. This is lazy thinking. Graham Weston, the cofounder and
chairman of managed hosting and cloud computing company Rackspace, based
in San Antonio, Texas, proudly showed me Open Cloud Academy, the
vocational school his company founded to create the workforce he needs to hire.
He told me that Rackspace hires about half of the graduates; the rest go to work
in other Internet businesses.” ~ Tim O’Reilly, WTF – What the Future

This goes well with two other quotes:

The only thing worse than training your employees and having them leave is not training them and having them stay. ~ Henry Ford

And,

Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don’t want to. ~ Sir Richard Branson

When I think of Tim O’Reilly’s book and his catch phrase, “Create more value than you capture”, one of the ideas here is that there is social capital that you can capture by creating a workforce that is going to help you, not just because of the money, but because they want to. Yes, good and well trained people will leave your company, but is that because of the training you provided, or the lack of support or encouragement that came during or after that training? While some occupations will keep employees for decades, many employees will work for several companies in the careers, and some of those will be competitors. Creating a positive work environment, and training staff, are essential for success. Social capital will be essential for success in the future of most organizations.

Also related:

Work is going to get much more specific and instead of job descriptions like, “A bachelor’s degree and 5 years of experience in the field,” what we will see are descriptions like, “Familiar with at least 2 coding languages and willing to learn on the job.” Or perhaps, “Portfolio evidence of a growth mindset.” Both of these suggest the person is a learner, and willing to learn on the job, with the first example having a specific skill added (in this case coding), and the second one asking for evidence of learning, rather than certification or accomplishments. That isn’t to say that certifications won’t be important, in fact certifications will become more important than degrees.

My nephew has a great job with a startup in Silicon Valley. He didn’t get the job because of his 4 year college degree, he got it because of the 18-month comprehensive training certification in the field of programming and artificial intelligence. Even then, his learning curve on the job was huge. He is and will continue to be successful because he is interested in learning and he wants to learn. He is working in a job where the expectations are high, but it is a rewarding and positive environment.

There will always be a place for university degrees and technical colleges. There will always be a need for doctors, lawyers and teachers, as well as plumbers, electricians, and carpenters. Technology will remove some of these jobs, or some aspects of these jobs, but they aren’t ever fully going away. Neither will the degrees and technical training needed. But this won’t be what most work and educational pathways to work will look like in the future. For most employees in corporations and stores, both large and small, the nature of work is changing. The idea that there will be manufacturing and office jobs that don’t involve learning and training and re-training is disappearing. Employees of the future will need to be learners. They will be learning on the job, for the job, or they will be looking for a job.

Piano keys

Tuning in

Yesterday the piano tuner came to our school for our piano’s yearly tuning. I asked him if he used a machine or if he tuned by ear?

”I use a tuning fork for the first note, then I’m good.”

Later in the day I was in my core fitness class and I was doing an exercise where I was supposed to be activating my gluteus (my butt muscles), but I kept activating my quadriceps (front leg muscles). The Physio at the class asked me to show her how I sit down, and it turns out that I don’t know how to go from a standing to a sitting position properly.

A little background here, I have a bad lower back, and deal with discomfort or pain on a regular basis. For decades now I’ve been compensating for my lower back by using it less and using my legs more. While this protects my back for working too hard at a given moment, it also limits my range of motion and creates tightness in my upper legs and lower back that makes things worse.

The challenge, however is that after decades of misuse, I have no idea what the sensation is to use the correct muscles? Essentially, I can’t ‘tune in’ to the feeling of what it’s like to do the right motion versus doing the wrong motion. As I’m being coached and physically guided to use the correct muscles, and my Physio says either, “No, you are still activating your quads,” or, “That’s good, you’ve got it,” my internal reality feels no different. I can’t distinguish what I’m doing differently.

While the piano tuner has spent 40 years finely tuning his ear to be honed to the sounds needed for his trade, I’ve spent almost as long dealing with a bad back and tuning out certain muscles that I should be using to help me be more mobile and agile. He has become an expert at doing something very well, while I’ve become an expert at doing something very poorly, and I am now a novice at doing it correctly.

Like with most things, it’s probably much easier to learn something correctly the first time, compared to unlearning and relearning it. But that process of correcting ourselves is seldom something we can do on our own. We can’t tune in if we don’t have that reference point, that tuning fork, that coach/mentor, or in my case physiotherapist. We often aren’t aware of how we’ve tuned out, and we need outside help to help guide us to tune in.

Where do you need to tune in more? Who are you going to get to help you?

Be careful what you ask for

Turns out that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not always very intelligent.

See: The danger of AI is weirder than you think | Janelle Shane

I’m reminded of the saying,

“Be careful what you ask for because you just might get it.”

Parents know about this: Ask a kid to clean their room and you get a disaster in the closet where everything gets shoved in, dirty laundry mixed with clean, etc.

Teachers know this:

If we are not providing the correct parameters to AI machines, the solutions these machines come up with will not necessarily meet the outcomes we intended.

While this can be humorous, it can also have serious consequences, like the examples shared in the Janelle Shane video above. We are still a long way from AI being truly intelligent. While computers are beating humans in strategy games, and although when AI gets as smart as us, computers will be instantly smarter, we are still tackling the really hard problem of putting the right information into more intelligent machines. The rules of a game are easier to define than the rules to hiring good people or interpreting unusual circumstances that a self-driving car will come across.

The challenge is that we don’t know our hidden biases, and our human biases that we are missing when we ask an AI to observe and learn. For instance, a dog, a cat, and a human all see a plate of food falling:

The dog sees access to delicious food.

The cat sees it fall and the crash of the plate sends it fearfully running away.

The human sees a waste of food and is angry for carelessly dropping it.

What would an AI see, especially if it hadn’t seen a plate accidentally drop before? How relevant is the plate? The food? The noise? The cutlery? The mess?

Is the food still edible? What is to be done with the broken plate? Can the cutlery be reused? How do you clean the mess left behind?

What we ask AI to do will become more and more complex, and our perspective of what we want and ask AI to do has inherent biases, based on how we view the world. What we ask for and what we actually want will be inherently different and that is something AI will take some time yet to figure out.

12 years on Twitter

The early years of Twitter were wonderful. Back when I was following between 150 and 300 people, and most of them were following me back, Twitter was a conversation. I can remember coming home from work, going to my timeline, and following it all the way back to the last tweet I’d seen earlier in the day so that I wouldn’t miss a tweet.

I ‘spoke to’ Claudia from Argentina, Alec, Kelly, and Dean from Saskatchewan, Kim from Thailand, Wesley from Oklahoma, Sue from Australia, Rodd from Ontario, Miguel and Shelly from Texas, and Bryan from my own school district.

When these educators and others that blogged as well as tweeted shared a link, we would all go to it, read it, comment on it and retweet something that we added to the ‘conversation’.

I’m not a fan of nostalgically romanticizing the past, but that era of Twitter was so exciting and engaging. Now, I rarely get comments on my blog posts, and quite honestly I’ve reduced my own commenting too. Now I share a link and it is retweeted faster than the article could have been read.

My main timeline is ignored, with tweets flying in faster than I can possibly read them. The volume of tweets worth reading has decreased, with misleading but catchy, and retweetable headings and motivational quotes taking over from conversations and learning.

I still love Twitter, and it is still my go-to place to connect and learn from others when I’m online. But, 12 years in, I miss the power of this network to engage me in deep learning filled with rich conversation. However I also recognize that my focus has changed too. I transmit more than I converse, I dabble more than I engage. If I’m honest, I probably could not have maintained the engagement I gave Twitter at that time for 12 years.

For those new to Twitter, I hope that my book, Twitter EDU, can help you get the most out of it.

For those who have been here a while, how has twitter changed for you?

Hitting the goal posts

Wayne Gretzky had an amazing talent for scoring goals.  Three records that he holds, that may never be surpassed, are scoring in 51 consecutive games, scoring 50 goals in 39 games, and scoring 92 goals in one season (80 games). To accomplish this he did something very well… He would visually focus on the back of the net, the open space between the goal posts and the goalie, and he would send the hockey puck into those spaces. Yes, that’s what most hockey players want to do, but it’s not what they actually do.

When most people are aiming at a goal, be it in hockey, water polo, soccer, lacrosse, or any other sport with a net and a goalie, they are (almost) always aiming for the edges of the net, near the goal posts or crossbar. However it is challenging to aim at an empty space, so many people end up looking at the posts instead, and that’s what they end up hitting.

When I coached and saw someone hitting the crossbar a few times, sometimes I’d pull them aside and ask them to close their eyes. “Imagine the goalie and the bars of the goal behind her. Do you see them? Ok, now make them all one dark colour, like black. Now brighten the space between the goalie and and the bars. Got that in you head? Ok, aim there.”

Related to this, have you ever noticed the weird odds that a car accident will often include the collision with a telephone pole or a post, when there isn’t any other obstacle for quite some distance? The less interesting reason for this is that accidents that do not involve poles and posts are faster to clean up. The more interesting reason is that when a driver is in a dangerous situation and sees the post, they fixate on it, and while consciously scared and wanting to avoid it, their hands steer where their eyes go.

In school, there are many ways that a student can aim for the goal posts:

What do I need to do to get a ‘A’?

What’s the fastest way to get this done?

What does the teacher want me to do?

There are also many ways that educators can aim for the goal posts:

Teaching facts void of big ideas.

Teaching ‘the how’ without ‘the why’, (such as in Math, teaching that a negative times a negative equals a positive, and not explaining why this works). 

Counting marks rather than marking what really counts. 

None of these questions or examples are about learning. They aren’t on target; they aren’t the goal. But when we aim for the posts, we tend to miss the intended target, or in these examples, the intended outcomes.

What’s a goal post you are aiming at? And what would you be doing differently right now, if you were aiming at the net rather than the posts?

Teacher as compass

I love the metaphor of ‘Teacher as compass’; helping students navigate their own learning journey.

Last night I read this tweet from Will Richardson:

I quoted his tweet and responded:

This made me think about the first time I used this metaphor? I went looking on my Pair-a-Dimes blog and it turned out to be 13 years ago: David Warlick’s K12 Online Conference Keynote 2006. David used a metaphor about trains and ‘riding the rails’, and I decided to create a different metaphor:

“A great metaphor here, on the theme of learners navigating on their own, is the teacher as the compass. We point in a direction, (not necessarily the direction that the student is going), and we are a reference point or guide to the learning. As students sail (rather than ride the rails) they must choose their destination, (what they want to learn), and tack and adjust their path as they go… using the teacher as a compass that keeps them on their ‘learning’ course.

Challenges

  • Students and teachers need to know how to sail- they need to be literate in these new ways of learning and communicating. They must be adaptable, willing to course-correct as they go.
  • Students and teachers need to seek out other sailors- communities of learners, online this too could be considered a literacy issue .
  • Students must bring their own sails- and not all sails are created equally, the metaphor can work with sails being competency (skills), motivation, handicaps (the ability to function physically, emotionally, intellectually (not everyone has the same sized sail), and technically (the ‘new’ literacy issue again)).
  • Teachers need to let students steer- it will take a while for many teachers to give up the steering wheel and become the compass.
  • Teachers need to be ‘useful’ compasses- “Don’t confuse the pointing finger with the Moon” comes to mind here… also think of using technology for learning rather than using technology to teach. If students steer themselves, they will take us into uncharted water, and we need to be able to point the way even when we may not know the best course of action. (It isn’t about ‘right’ answers, it is about the journey- this goes back to Warlick’s [or rather Toffler’s] idea that learners (students and teachers) need to learn, unlearn and relearn all the time.”

—

If teachers are focussed on providing content, they don’t need this metaphor because they are essentially taking all their students on the same journey. The teachers are captains with their students on the same boat. However, ‘Teacher as compass’ works very well with inquiry-based learning. Students will do projects where they become more knowledgeable than the teacher in a specific area of content. If teachers are trying to be the content providers for students who are all on different learning voyages, the teachers will fail. However, if teachers are guiding their students, helping them seek out information, and expertise, and supporting them in creating a learning plan… if they are the compass… then they can support students on their individual learning journeys.

Teacher as compass: Teachers provide the true north, and help students find a worthy course… one that will challenge their skills on the open learning seas.

__________

Also posted on Pair-a-Dimes for Your Thoughts 
Image by Ylanite Koppens from Pixabay

Too much choice

I’ve been thinking a lot about creative constraints recently. In the move to give students more choice and more freedom to explore their own passions and interests, we sometimes forget that constraints and limitations can help foster both creativity and work completion.

Tell kids to pick any topic to study and some will flourish while others will flounder. Tell kids they have a lot of time to work, some will engage and use it well, while others will squander that time. Tell kids they can present in any format they want, and some kids will be creative while others will choose the easiest path, (even if they love the topic they are presenting on).

We don’t always benefit from choice. 15 kinds of toothpaste to choose from doesn’t translate to us choosing the best toothpaste… and probably delays our selection time. Sometimes it’s easier if we have less choice or limits to how much time we spend on something. “Constraints aren’t the boundaries of creativity, but the foundation of it.”

When we put constraints on projects, limiting resources, time, scope, size, delivery, or focus, we might be restrictive and limit choice, but done with thought and purpose, we can also inspire creativity.

Teaching and Learning Beyond Google

When students get time in their day to solve interesting problems, they need to learn to ask questions that go beyond Google. The problem isn’t interesting enough and worth solving if the answer is easy to find, if the data has already been collected, if the information is readily available.

If students are asking interesting questions, the teacher can’t be the content expert, they can’t know the answers that every student is seeking to discover. So, the teacher becomes the compass. The guide that points students in the right direction. Teachers steer students away from questions that are too general and easy to solve. They help refine questions that are too vague or too hard to accomplish. Teachers in the era of Google must still provide content knowledge, but they know that this knowledge is the foundation for discovery, not just the information to be learned. Learning is a process, not a product.

When learning goes beyond Google, students need to be supported in learning to communicate and collaborate with others. They need to seek experts outside the classroom. They need to solve authentic problems in the community or in students’ lives. Sometimes the teacher needs to create or help create the questions; They need to provide the scaffolding, direction, or support to ensure students are becoming competent learners. Sometimes teachers need to step back, get out of the way, and let students lead, teach, thrive, and even fail… on the path to learning through discovery, trail and error, and reflection.

The journey is seldom a straight line. The path is seldom easy, and well defined. It is not the teacher’s job to remove obstacles on the path to to solving interesting problems. On the contrary, they must ensure that there are enough obstacles in the way, and that students are challenged while not being overcome by obstacles too big to navigate. The compass does not know the final destination, or even the best route, but gives direction by pointing to north. This is the art of teaching in an era of learning beyond Google.

The J-stroke

When you are in the stern of a canoe, you need to master one important stroke, the J-stroke. No matter how good the paddler in the bow of the canoe, the boat will drift towards the side that person is paddling on, and away from the side the stern is paddling on. Paddling at the back of a boat steers the boat the other way. The J-stroke is what you do at the end of the stroke to push water away from the side of the boat and steer it straight, rather than letting it drift.

The J-Stroke (Click image for instructions on openboater.wordpress.com)

When you first learn this stroke, it has 2 distinctly noticeable parts. First there is the power part of the stroke that pushes the the boat forward. Then your ‘J’ pushes water away from the boat to steer it. As a beginner, these two parts are quite separate and so the boat lunges forward, then is steered, lunges forward, then is steered… It should go without saying, but if you are spending time on steering, you are not spending time helping the boat go forward.

As you get better, you start to realize that you can put these two parts together and eventually the boat ‘feels more like’ it is heading in one direction, rather than bouncing between going forwards and being course-corrected. I say feels more like’ it’s heading in one direction because no matter how good you are in the stern, you are always doing some course correcting, unless you and your partner in the bow are perfectly in sync every stroke. It’s just that when you are good at it, this course correcting becomes a smooth part of moving the boat forward.

However, moving from two distinct parts to one continuous stroke is not easy. What makes it harder is that when you try, and it doesn’t work, you end up feeling like you have to steer even more to make up for not being able to pull it off. So many new paddlers will stick with the lunge forward then steer process, and avoid getting better.

You’ve heard it a thousand times before: “The definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result”. Paddling stern in a canoe can be one of those things, because if you don’t intentionally try to put the two parts of the stroke together, you will always be stuck in the lunge forward then steer parts of the J-stroke. Coaching can help, but intentionally trying to put these parts together, and failing and having to compensate, is far better than thousands of strokes just repeating the two parts separately. It will not go smoothly for quite a while, then eventually you’ll realize that things are smoother and you don’t have to think as much about steering with every stroke you take.

Where else in our lives can we take this lesson? Where do we break things up when we should be building them together? How can we use this idea to build up good habits or eliminate bad ones? What daily rituals do we have problems with, that we can integrate with things that we already do well? How can we steer ourselves in the right direction, without even realizing that we are steering?