Tag Archives: learning

Fear & Teaching

I just read an interesting article, ‘ChatGPT is going to change education, not destroy it‘, and got to this sentence about a teacher using it in her classroom:

“Not all these approaches will be instantly successful, of course. Donahoe and her students came up with guidelines for using ChatGPT together, but “it may be that we get to the end of this class and I think this absolutely did not work,” she says. “This is still an ongoing experiment.”

The moment I read this I thought, ‘This is a teacher I’d love to work with!’ What’s her approach? Let me summarize it: ‘Here is a new tool, how can I use it in my classroom to help my students learn? Oh, and sometimes what I try won’t work, but if every experiment worked well then we wouldn’t be learning.’

I see so much fear when a new tool enters schools: Ban calculators, ban smartphones, ban Wikipedia, ban Chat GPT… But there are always teachers doing the opposite, wanting to use rather than ban new tools. Teachers who are willing to try new things. Teachers who know that some lessons will flop, and go in unexpected and unintended directions, yet see the value in trying. These teachers can look long term and see the worthy benefits of trying something new, they are unafraid to have a lesson fail on the path of being innovative.

It’s that lack of fear of flopping that I love to see in teachers. There’s a wide gap between, ‘That failed, how embarrassing. I’ll never do that again!’ and ‘Well, that didn’t work! I wonder what I can do next time to make it better?’ The former is quite fixed in their ways, and the latter is considerably more flexible. While fear rules the former, there is a kind of fearlessness in the latter.

Tools like Chat GPT are absolutely going to change education. I’m excited to see some fearless educators figuring out how best to use it, (and many new tools like it), in their classrooms, and with their students. The teachers willing to iterate, try, fail, and learn to use these tools are going to take their students a lot farther and learn a lot more than in places where these tools will be banned, blocked, and shunned.

The gap

I was one of those kids. I got the report card comment that basically said, ‘Not meeting his potential’ on a regular basis. I got ‘A’s if I really enjoyed the class or the teacher, and ‘C’s if I didn’t. Not just in high school, for my undergrad degree in university too. Well, at that point I wasn’t getting the comments, but my marks followed the same pattern. A’s and C’s, and hardly a B in sight.

This is a tough learner profile to work with: “If I care, if I’m interested, I’ll do the work… if I’m not, I’ll do the minimum.’ It’s not inspired. It’s also not bad enough to raise too much concern. Just flying under the radar, doing what needs to be done.

But when I was inspired, I was really inspired. I would go deep, dig right in and learn as much as I could. I’d create projects that teachers would ask to keep as examples. I’d spend 2 hours in the library just perusing books on the bookshelf related to the topic I was researching.

The gap between studying what interested me and what I was doing because it was required by school was massive. I was essentially a light bulb, either on or off, with no dimmer switch. No motivation (off) or fully engaged (on). And not a care about what my marks looked like as a result. I’d look at a ‘C’ and think, ‘Yeah, that’s about right,’ in the same way I’d look at an ‘A’ and think the same.

It took me going back to school at 29 years old to change this. Only heading into teacher education made me think about doing well even if I didn’t enjoy the course.

It’s good sometimes for me to remember that not everyone cares about marks. Not everyone is motivated to do their best. I cared enough to pass but not enough to do well in every course. I’m not the only kid that has ever thought that way. The interesting thing to me is that it wasn’t always the subject matter that drew me in. Sometimes it was the teacher. Good teaching bridged the gap for me.

Teachers who can build those relationships and foster excitement in learning are a real treasure. They are inspiring and make learning fun. They know how to reduce the gap between students doing the minimum and students being motivated to do well. They inspire students to do more and to find greater success than they ever expected.

The teachers that helped me cross that gap are the ones I remember most.

Communication gap

A decade ago I had a digital network that was pretty amazing. There were educators from many distant places, across Canada, the US, and the world, who I knew through Twitter conversations and conferences. This network was pretty amazing, and while we were seldom, if ever, in the same geographical location, I felt connected to these people.

But Twitter changed and I changed. I ended up not participating in this network nearly as much, and the gap between conversations with these people widened. Sure I still consider these people I met through rich conversational exchanges friends, but I don’t chat with them like I used to. I don’t know them like I used to.

It’s easy to get nostalgic and want the old connections back, but the network isn’t as easy to maintain. The conversations don’t seem to be as rich in learning opportunities. The value for time ratio seems lower. But I do miss those deep learning opportunities, the long blog posts with 15-25 comments, and the subsequent Twitter dialogue that continued the learning.

The connections I miss were rooted in learning conversations. Conversations that I might now have in person, but seldom have online. I don’t engage in online conversations like I used to. I auto post this blog to Twitter, LinkedIn, and a Facebook page, and then I really only go on those networks to respond to comments but I don’t go to them for conversations… unless someone responds to my post, then I respond back.

That’s not the way I used to engage. I used to read and respond, I used to question and compliment. I used to actively seek out conversation and connections. So, while social media has changed, so have I. I’ve started seeking videos to learn from, not conversations. I’ve moved to searching for content and viewing, rather than using Twitter like Google, asking questions and letting my network help me.

I miss the conversations that used to happen, but I don’t imagine I’ll ever rebuild what I had. The effort seems too great at this point, and even the people I see still making those connections tend to be ones who travel and maintain those relationships with face-to-face connections… the relationships purely connected by social media network engagement just don’t seem to be there anymore. It’s not a mutual relationship, but a network of influencers and followers, not friends.

Perhaps that will change in the future but for now I see a gap in the way conversations happen online compared to how they used to happen, and I don’t see a social media network that is changing this any time soon.

The 4 ‘D’s leading to office discipline

It was early on in my first job as a vice principal. The position was in a middle school just a few kilometres away from the middle school I taught at for 9 years to start my career. Our secretary came to tell me that a student had been sent down to the office. I sat down with him in my office and he told me why he was sent there.

“Really, that’s all you did?” (I was sure he was leaving something out, I’d never send a kid down to the office for this.)

“Yes!” He said defensively.

We worked out an apology, and rehearsed it, and I sent him back down to his class. Minutes later he was back up at the office. I looked at him quizzically and he quickly responded to my unspoken question, “Mr. Truss, I did exactly what you told me to!”

After a bit of back-and-forth I took him back down to the class and waited for a an appropriate moment to talk to him and the teacher together. It became very evident that she had no interest in letting him back in the room. This surprised me for two reasons:

First, as mentioned, this minor altercation was nothing me or my peers at my previous middle school would ever have sent a kid to the office for. In my eyes, sending a kid to the office was essentially telling the kid, “I cant manage you,” which takes away any leverage I may have the next time this student has any challenging behaviour.

Secondly, why not take him back? I verified with the teacher that the students wasn’t downplaying the behaviour, he was apologizing, and he wanted to come back to class. But the teacher was not interested. I offered to come in with him and that got us passed the impasse.

When I started writing this, my intention was going to be on empathy and growth in understanding that not every student, teacher, or principal is just like me, and how important it is to understand this. But as I was sharing the story above I remembered my 4 D’s that led to the rare occasions I’d send a kid to the office. I wrote about this back in 2008, and I’ll share them here:

________

In 9 years as a teacher I have made very few classroom issues into office issues. I have 4 D’s that I think are issues that should be dealt with at an office level. The first two D’s are cut-and-dry/immediate office issues. These are ‘no-brainers’, you break these rules and you go to the office!

1. Drugs- Alcohol is included in this category;

2. Dangerous- Not just weapons, but physical violence too. The best policy is a zero-tolerance policy… We don’t solve problems this way.

The next 2 D’s have some grey area between being an issue for the office and being an issue that I handle myself. They are:

3. Defiance- an absolute refusal to participate and/or co-operate. If you don’t come to class prepared to learn, or if you aren’t willing to participate with the class… If you can’t offer me 5% of what I am offering you, then that probably hinders my ability to give everyone else the time and attention they deserve. I obviously can’t help you, so there is no reason for you to be here. I’ve only ever had one student absolutely refuse to engage in learning to this point. I honestly felt that it was a disservice to keep him in the class and made this the reason to send him to the office. (I have used this as ‘leverage’ with other students in the past- not an ideal strategy, but sometimes a student needs to know that you have limits);

and the final ‘D’,

4. Disrespect- If you are going to treat me, or others in a way that is hurtful, if you are going to ‘injure’ others emotionally/socially… then we have a problem. Hitting someone, or physically hurting someone puts you in the ‘Dangerous’ category and becomes an immediate office referral. Disrespect on the other hand is a little different. If you emotionally or socially injure someone then you are defying one or two of our school beliefs : Respect and/or Inclusion.

________

In ‘administering’ these rules, #3 and #4 had to be pretty extreme to get sent to the office. Otherwise, I handled them myself. But that’s me. Some teachers would be faster to send students away to be dealt with out of class. I just always felt that the most important relationship was between me and the kid. So, while #1 and #2 were likely immediate grounds for an office visit, #3 and #4 only resulted if the relationship was broken such that the defiance and/or disrespect didn’t allow me to be the teacher anymore. At that point the student is clearly a disruption to the class and I’m unable to manage it.

I think in my time as a teacher, I could count on one hand how many kids I ended up sending to the office, but looking back now, I probably should have asked for help a few more times. It’s good to try to hold on to the relationship with a kid, but sometimes a little help and support could go a long way. And I think having clear lines of what constitutes needing that help is a good place to start.

The effort of learning

As an athlete, I didn’t have very good body awareness. My swim stroke was awful and that’s tough to deal with as a water polo player. My coaches spent a lot of time trying to fix my stroke, and they’d have me try all sorts of drills and drill strokes, but I often wouldn’t feel the difference or wouldn’t be able to get my body to do what my coaches wanted it to do.

I was also a player who has no issue being yelled at. I listened whether the coach was speaking at a regular volume or yelling at the top of his lungs. Didn’t matter if it was encouraging or angry. I heard, I tried. I tried again. And often again because listening wasn’t doing, and I had to work extra hard on the doing.

For me, learning new skills was always something I had to work at, and the idea of learning being an effort has stuck with me. Maybe it’s not true for someone who finds that skills come easy to them, but for me if there isn’t a struggle then there isn’t much learning happening. That’s why I frequently go back to the ideas I shared in ‘learning and failure‘. We should teach kids to struggle through things that are not easy and not guaranteed to work. We should have them feel the struggle of failure… even if they are solid ‘A’ students (perhaps especially if they are – see #3 here).

I think sometimes we try to make learning too easy. We forget the sense of accomplishment that comes with succeeding at something hard. We forgot that the challenge is what makes the learning stick. Learning can be fun and hard. It can be challenging and rewarding. It is seldom effortless and still processed meaningfully. The effort is what helps make the learning stick, and while it need not be painfully hard, it does (often) need to at least be uncomfortable. Easily learned skills are not nearly as rewarding as the skills that are more challenging and harder to accomplish. Real learning comes with effort.

Shades of grey

Just a simple reminder that we don’t live in a dichotomy. The world isn’t either black or white. Most ideas sit somewhere in between.

Nuances in politics, in culture, and in our communities create opportunities to learn, to explore, and to be empathetic. Not sympathetic, empathetic. I remember interviewing a friend of my aunt’s for an essay about discrimination. He was in a wheelchair and I quoted him in my paper, “The only place sympathy belongs is between shit and syphilis in the dictionary.”

We don’t learn if our ideas aren’t challenged. We don’t learn by talking but by listening. We can disagree. We can even argue and debate. We can research and support our ideas. We can walk away… and maybe we can change our minds. Maybe we can find the grey that allows us to coexist without feeling like we have to change others minds.

Nuances. Empathy. Shades of grey.

Reexamining the term FAILURE

Six years ago in Philadelphia I ran a session at Educon on Failure. Bill Ferriter came to the session and after the interactive presentation he created this image:

This was the premise I was working from,

When is failure really a success? When we engage students in EPIC projects and challenges, the journey to success is often fraught with failures that can prove to be amazing learning opportunities. 

Do we need to reexamine the use of the term ‘Failure’?

Our present education system is built around always finding the ‘right’ answer, but when can the wrong answer be valuable? How can we provide rich, meaningful opportunities for students to make mistakes, iterate, persevere and develop alternative approaches to problems relevant to what they are learning?

4 years before this presentation I created this image:

I shared an acronym that I came up with:

F ailure
A lways
I nvites
L earning

I share in an accompanying post,

Think of this: If students (regardless of skills and abilities) have only ever met success, and accomplished every task, assignment and project they have needed to do for school, then they weren’t pushed hard enough. In this case, it is the program that is the failure, because the students were not challenged as much as they should have been.

The learning potential of failure is significant. If the work is meaningful enough, there can be more learned from an epic failure, than a marginal success, where the measure for success was set too low.

We talk a lot about ‘learning through failure’ in education, but we don’t really mean failure. Because when a student takes lessons from something not working, then it’s a learning opportunity and not actually a failure.

When you think about it, lack of knowledge is where the learning begins. If you give students the knowledge, they don’t really learn, you actually rob students of their learning. You want them to struggle and to find the learning challenging. And if the challenge is authentic, if it’s really a challenge, then it’s not something they’ll get on the first try. So hitting the ‘failure point’ is part of learning. Trying to achieve too much needs to be part of the process… and so bumping into failure is an essential part of learning.

So a failure is only a failure if the challenge lacks reflection, resources, support, or effort. If these things are provided (by the teacher and more-so by the learner) then the learner didn’t actually fail. They may not achieve their original goal, but they invited learning into the attempt… and learning is achieved. That is not a failure.

The idea of learning through failure is actually not a failure at all. It is accepting that there are opportunities for learning in not achieving the intended goal but still identifying that there was learning to be acquired and often the struggle is something that makes this kind of learning stick.

—–

Related: This Ignite presentation on Transforming Our Learning Metaphors:

The learning cliff

Whenever I am talking to new or potentially new employees of our online school I share the idea of a learning cliff. We all know about a learning curve… when you are learning something new, there is an effort you have to exert as you gain knowledge and learn how to use new systems and tools available to you. There’s a slow uphill climb to learn the new job. But some jobs have a few too many systems to learn just by doing things once. I call this the learning cliff.

In a new position you’ll inevitably get to a point where you don’t know how to do something and you need to ask for help: This is true for both the learning curve and the learning cliff… With the learning curve , you ask, you learn, and you don’t need to ask again. But in an organization where too many things are new, you try to absorb so much information at once that you don’t actually remember the help you got the next time you have to deal with the same situation… You asked, you got the help you needed, but you didn’t actually learn because your brain was taxed with too much new information to retain one more thing. So a few hours, days, or weeks later you have to ask the same question again.

You’ve left the learning curve and hit the learning cliff. I tell my new employees that with so many new systems to learn, we have all hit those cliffs and every one of us knows you will too. So, ask again. Ask a third time. We won’t judge. We remember hitting the cliff ourselves. We know you feel bad having to ask again when you feel you should know. We know you can’t, just like we couldn’t, remember everything and need to ask again. We expect it and want to assist you.

A learning cliff is not a scalable slope without help, so let us help you over the edge, and when you come back to the same issue, or a new one, and it’s still not a traversable slope… ask again. We are expecting it and happy to help.

You can’t police it

I said Chat GPT is a game changer in education in my post Fear of Disruptive Technology. Then I started to see more and more social media posts sharing that Artificial Intelligence (AI) detectors can identify passages written by AI. But that doesn’t mean a person can’t use a tool like Chat GPT and then do some of their own editing. Or, as seen here: just input the AI written text into CopyGenius.io and ‘rephrase’, and then AI detectors can’t recognize the text as written by AI.

The first instinct with combating new technology is to ban and/or police it: No cell phones in class, leave them in your lockers; You can’t use Wikipedia as a source; Block Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok on the school wifi. These are all gut reactions to new technologies that frame the problem as policeable… Teachers are not teachers, they aren’t teaching, when they are being police.

Read that last sentence again. Let it sink in. We aren’t going to police away student use of AI writing tools, so maybe we should embrace these tools and help manage how they are used. We can teach students how to use AI appropriately and effectively. Teach rather than police.

Fear of Disruptive Technology

There is a lot of fear around how the Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool Chat GPT is going to disrupt teaching and learning. I’ve already written about this chatbot:

Next level artificial intelligence

And,

Teaching in an era of AI

And,

The future is now.

To get an understanding of the disruption that is upon us, in the second post, Teaching in an era of AI, I had Chat GPT write an essay for me. Then I noted:

“This is a game changer for teaching. The question won’t be how do we stop students from using this, but rather how do we teach students to use this well? Mike Bouliane said in a comment on yesterday’s post, “Interesting post Dave. It seems we need to get better at asking questions, and in articulating them more precisely, just like in real life with people.

Indeed. The AI isn’t going away, it’s just going to get better.”

And that’s the thing about disruptive technology, it can’t be blocked, it can’t be avoided, it needs to be embraced. Yet I’ve seen conversations online where people are trying to block it in schools. I haven’t seen this kind of ‘filter and hide from students’ philosophy since computers and then phones started to be used in schools. It reminds me of a blog post I wrote in 2010, Warning! We Filter Websites at School, where I shared this tongue-in-cheek poster for educators in highly filtered districts to put up on their doors:

Well now the fervour is back and much of the talk is about how to block Chat GPT, and how to detect its use. And while there are some conversations about how to use it effectively, this means disrupting what most teachers assign to students, and this also disrupts assessment practices. Nobody likes so much disruption to their daily practice happening all at once. So, the block and filter and policing (catching cheaters) discussions begin.

Here is a teacher of Senior AP Literature that uses Chat GPT to improve her students’ critical thinking and writing. Note how she doesn’t use the tool for the whole process. Appropriate, not continuous use of the tool:

@gibsonishere on TikTok

Again going all the way back to 2010, I said in Transformative or just flashy educational tools?,

“A tool is just a tool! I can use a hammer to build a house and I can use the same hammer on a human skull. It’s not the tool, but how you use it that matters.”

And here is something really important to note:

The. Technology. Is. Not. Going. Away.

In fact, AI is only going to get better… and be more disruptive.

Employers are not going to pretend that it doesn’t exist. Imagine an employer saying, “Yes, I know we have power drivers but to test your skill we want you to screw in this 3-inch screw with a handheld screwdriver… and then not letting the new employee use his power tools in their daily work.

Chat GPT is very good at writing code, and many employers test their employee candidates by asking them to write code for them. Are they just going to pretend that Chat GPT can’t write the same code much faster? I can see a performance test for new programmers looking something like this in the future: “We asked Chat GPT to write the code to perform ‘X’, and this is the code it produced. How would you improve this code to make it more effective and eloquent?”

Just like the Tiktok teacher above, employers will expect the tool to be used and will want their employees to know how to use the tool critically and effectively to produce better work than if they didn’t use the tool.

I’m reminded of this carton I created back in 2009:

The title of the accompanying post asks, Is the tool an obstacle or an opportunity? The reality is that AI tools like Chat GPT are going to be very disruptive, and we will be far better off looking at these tools as opportunities rather than obstacles… Because if we choose to see these tools as obstacles then we are the actual obstacles getting in the way of progress.