Tag Archives: teaching

Many years later…

Somewhere between the years 2000 and 2002 I taught a grade 8 art class. I was teaching a lesson on drawing faces with pencil and one student was a far better artist than me. She could really capture the details of the face, and not just be anatomically correct, but also bring life to her drawings. However she was hesitant to go dark with her work. It lacked contrast. Her drawings were like beautiful but faded photocopies.

“Don’t be afraid to go darker.” I would say. She would try and the image would get ever so slightly darker, but still look faded.

“Darker!” I would say.

“It is!” She would retort.

“Not enough, go darker.” Or, “You know what I’m going to tell you!”

It was a banter that went on all year, because no matter what we did in art, she had a pencil journal that she also worked on. Again, her work was beautiful, but too light.

Fast forward to yesterday, and this former student, now a friend on Facebook, did a tribute drawing of an older photograph, of a loved one. (It’s 5:30am, and I haven’t asked to share the story, so I’m not sharing names or details.) The drawing is beautiful with rich dark highlights, and still has her soft touch that brings her drawings to life.

I commented on the photo:

“Beautiful. Nice to see that you are no longer afraid to use rich dark shades 😜”

She replied,

“NO joke, I was actually hearing you repeat to go darker/not to be afraid to commit to it and smiling about how this many years later your teachings still come out 😊”

And,

“I even wondered if you’d consider it dark enough 😆 glad to see I’ve made progress with it!”

My response,

“It really is, and you’ve captured [your subject’s] sparkle… not easy to do in a drawing. I love it! ❤️”

I truly enjoy interactions like this. They warms my heart. They remind me of why I wanted to be a teacher, and make me miss being in the classroom.

We are lucky to live in an age where we can connect with former students and celebrate their marriages, the birth of their children, or just check in with them when things aren’t going their way. And it’s so much fun to know that we can make small differences in their lives, long after they’ve left our classroom.

Rewind

A year ago we were heading towards the March break and, at the end of February, had no idea that we would return from the break doing remote learning. I was recovering from breaking my kneecap, and not mentioning Covid-19 or physical distancing yet here on my Daily-Ink. That changed in March.

What a year it has been! Part of me wants to call it a rollercoaster ride, part of me wants to call it a long straight drive on a deserted road through the prairies. No matter how you look at this past year, it is nothing any of us expected a year ago.

Rewind to the end of February 2011, I was a principal in China, and found out I’d be coming back to BC to be vice principal of the adult learning centre. This would lead me to my current position both with Coquitlam Open Learning and co-founding Inquiry Hub.

Rewind to February 2001 and my wife and I had a 1 year old who completely changed our lives. February 2002 our second was born.

Rewind to 1991 and I had not graduated on time from university and went to a different university to finish my degree, choosing this school so that I could play varsity water polo. This brought me back home and I ended up lifeguarding and coaching at a high school. I wouldn’t be a teacher today if I hadn’t made this move and got experience working with and coaching students.

How will I look at February 2021 a decade from now? Will it be a blur in the covid years, or will it be stepping out into a post-covid frontier? Maybe that’s going to be February 2022… I think we will have to keep driving the long prairie road for a while, and look forward to slow and gradual changes in the coming year.

Blockchain and education

Blockchain defined: Blockchain is a shared, immutable ledger that facilitates the process of recording transactions and tracking assets in a business network. An asset can be tangible (a house, car, cash, land) or intangible (intellectual property, patents, copyrights, branding). Virtually anything of value can be tracked and traded on a blockchain network… ~ IBM

One place that I see blockchain technology being used in education is credentialing. Right now a general arts degree at a good university is a credential that says, ‘I know how to study, write essays, and express my ideas’. Unlike professional programs like engineering or law or med school, a general arts degree is about building more general skills. More and more jobs are not requiring a professional focused degree, but also demand more specific skills than a general degree.

Can a potential job candidate manipulate pivot tables in Excel? Or understand the basics of coding in python? Or use a design thinking process? These questions aren’t always answered by a degree, and might be answered by a certificate. What if Microsoft or other large companies delivered skill-based credentials through online courses? What if when you received certification of completion of the course, you didn’t just get an easily copied and doctored paper certificate, you also got digital certification that could not be doctored by you, but could be verified by anyone?

Imagine having a digital portfolio that linked to all your credentials in immutable ledgers. Your skills could be verified and job descriptions could include expectations of specific skills and credentials. What do you know? What can you do?

So, maybe in the future a college degree will be less impressive than a series of verifiable skills. Maybe high school students will start getting these credentials before they graduate. To me this had a few implications to think about:

1. If we move to a more skill-based economy, how will this affect our school curriculum?

2. If credentials and credentialing become a major driver to workforce hiring, will this force more specialization in high schools?

3. Where does that leave the soft skills like communication, critical thinking, and creativity?

Some people think that credentialing like this can replace teachers, I don’t. I think teachers become more valuable. Let credential testing and digital training measure the skills that are easily measured, and let teachers loose on helping students be more creative, more entrepreneurial, and better problem solvers. Let teachers focus on helping students trying things that are epic, things that are so big they are likely to fail, and help students understand perseverance. Have teachers focus on developing communication and cooperation skills, and helping students understand the importance of learning and process.

Credentialing won’t diminish the role of the teacher, it will magnify their importance in creating leaders and problem solvers. And to me, that’s the more exciting part of being a teacher.

Thinking time and space

The last few weeks have been busy. That is a statement I could probably say at any given point in the school year, but specifically I’ve been task busy recently. What I mean is that my day disappears with me doing what I need to do and not at all what I want to do. I haven’t had much thinking time.

So at the end of last week I started a drawing on my office whiteboard. It a hero’s journey metaphor for our school. I’m not ready to share the drawing yet, ideas are still being put together. But I can share a couple parts I’ve already written about:

Teacher as Compass

And,

Learning and Failure

I’ve probably only spent about an hour and a half over 4 days on this, not too much time… But this time has allowed me to think… It has given my brain permission to go beyond the tasks at hand… It has excited me about the journey ahead.

It’s easy to get caught in the hamster wheel, racing to nowhere, but getting there quickly. It takes intentional effort to step off the wheel and to pause long enough to think, to be creative. My whiteboard has become that space.

Yesterday after lunch, I was working on a section of the board where my secretary could see me making notes and she said, “You are having so much fun on that board.” For about 15-20 minutes I was! I’ve created some thinking time and space in my day. It’s not only time well spent, it’s time that charges my batteries and help me see value in all the other things I must do. It reminds my of why everything else matters, because our personal journey matters… if we make time for it.

Voice and choice

This was my Facebook memory from 3 years ago:

Spent well over 15hrs at work today and came home totally pumped! Students rocked their presentations at our open house tonight.

The whole event exceeded my expectations, starting with about 240 people coming (more than I had reservations or seats for), and ending with students interviewing each other with questions from the audience.

It is simply amazing what student’s can do when they are given voice & choice, and they are provided with time to explore their passions and publicly share them.

Congratulations to our Inquiry Hub students, you were amazing school ambassadors today!

I’ve been thinking and writing about giving students choice, voice, and an authentic audience for over a decade now. And, I’ll always remember this night as the night I really saw it fully come to life.

Everything about this open house went amazing. The only challenges where parking, and adding more seats to the gym. The students did 90% of the planning and executed a seamless event with perfect sound and incredible presentations that opened people’s eyes to what’s possible when students feel empowered in a school.

The best part of the night was watching students interviewing students about their inquiry projects. Our students got to share what kinds of projects they do, designed by them, to follow their passions and interests as part of their school day. This is the real strength of what we do at Inquiry Hub.

There are students just like ours in every school. The difference is, in many other schools, students spend their days following a pattern of going class to class and doing what the teacher tells them to do. Yes, some of those things teachers ask them to do are amazing. But students seldom get a part of their day to choose what they want to work on. Students seldom get to design their own learning on a topic of their choice.

What we’ve learned as educators at Inquiry Hub is that to do this, students need scaffolding and support, working on progressively bigger projects. Students need assistance with time management and being self directed. And students need to try, fail, learn, and grow.

Whenever I hear a senior student at Inquiry Hub talk about their projects, they talk about being fearless learners who aren’t afraid to fail along the way. They will often do this while telling a story about something others would consider a huge success, but to them there was still more to do, or aspects of the project not yet achieved. This resilience only comes when students feel they have voice and choice in their learning, and this open house three years ago told me that we were finally achieving the kind of student empowerment we were hoping to achieve when we started the school.

Parenting and teaching

This morning I read a tweet from Bill Ferriter (@plugisin):


I have two awesome kids, both currently in university, that approached K-12 school very differently. One was an overachiever who always had to do well… ‘tell me what I need to do to get the best mark’. The other is also bright and wants to do well, but is happy to find her own path there. She’s more likely to put work off, but will be disappointed if she doesn’t do as good as she could.

They both did well in school, but they both had their own struggles as all students do. One such struggle they both had was math. Neither of them enjoyed doing math and we ended up getting tutors for both of them at different times.

It’s a massive shot to my ego getting a math tutor for my daughter in Grade 9 Math when that’s a subject I taught. But I couldn’t help her without tears and frustration. I was always showing it wrong. It took all the patience I had, and that wasn’t enough.

On the flip side, I know that it wasn’t always easy for our kids to be daughters of two educators. We deal with kids all day, and sometimes when we got home, we were kinda ‘done’. We knew every trick in the book, and they didn’t always get away with much that their friends could. I could share more on this, but want to respect the privacy of my kids.

Bill’s tweet, shared above, made me think of two things. First, it’s not always easy being a parent as well as a teacher, while not letting the teacher get in the way of parenting. Secondly, being a parent and watching your child struggle can make you a better teacher… it gives you perspective on how something that you as a teacher might think is simple, can become a huge challenge for a kid at home. It can make you question the value of homework, and it can remind you that kids have struggles that you don’t see at school.

Parenting is a humbling experience, and it can be an experience that makes you a better teacher.

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Related: 7 Parenting Tips for Learning at Home ~ Available on YouTube and as a podcast.

The wrong hill to die on

I came across this Tweet and felt compelled to discuss it,

“Can someone please explain why a student wearing a hat or a hood in class is so bad?

Why is that a hill so many teachers are willing to die on?” @ryanr_lester

I’ve worked in schools where ‘No hats’ was the rule, I’ve worked, and still work, in schools where it doesn’t. Students appreciate the freedom to wear hoodies and hats, and while I’ve dealt with policing this in schools where it is policed, I can’t think of an instance where this was a major issue in the schools where it isn’t.

Could a kid pull the rim of a hat down low to hide their face? Yes, but that might be something that helps them cope in a stressful situation, and that might also be something a teacher addresses… it depends on the moment. And if you think that moment that needs addressing would have vanished if the hat wasn’t on, well then you probably haven’t worked with that many kids who would do this… they would find another way.

Rules like this are about control and compliance, masked as issues of respect. Respect is neither earned nor demonstrated through control and compliance.

This is an uphill battle. You are better off choosing a different hill, and taking the high ground.

Whose problem is it?

A couple thoughts about assessment:

1. I taught Grade 9 Math for a year then after a year of only Humanities I went back to teaching Math, but for Grade 8’s. After about 5 years of teaching Math 8 I caught myself saying something as I started my unit on Exponents. I said to the class, “Every year this is the hardest unit and the hardest test that I give you.” I had to say it out loud to realize what I was really saying.

What I was really saying was one of two things, either I wasn’t doing a good enough job teaching this unit, or I was giving students much too hard of a test. Looking carefully at the test, I realized it was a bit of both. Because I had taught Grade 9 and new what was coming, when I looked at the test I realized that I was expecting students to know the content at a Grade 9 level… I was ‘preparing them’ for what’s to come. In every section of the test I had questions that started out with basic Grade 8 outcomes, but questions got gradually harder and always ended up with a couple (or more) questions that expected them to exceed what was required in the curriculum.

It was my problem, not theirs, that they struggled. I was pushing them to learn hard concepts at a very high level and testing them so that they all had to be competent at a higher grade level just to get a decent mark. My intentions were good. The outcome and experience for students who were not strong in math were not so good. I reworked my test that year, and some of my teaching as well.

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2. This isn’t one I’ve done, but my daughter has faced this. Last year in her university French course, the professor said, “Nobody gets an ‘A’ unless they are native speakers”. He then proceeded to give my daughter ‘B’s in every assignment, no matter what she did, and what feedback she used to improver her next assignment… that is, until her final exam. In her final exam, the marking was blind (the teaching only saw a number, and not the students’ names). On that exam, my daughter got an ‘A’.

If our job is to teach students, and improve their work, then what are we telling them if our message is, “You aren’t good enough to get an ‘A’.” … Is this not also saying, “I’m not a good enough teacher to help you improve.”? What message does this give to a student who is always striving to do her best and is a high achiever? What message does this give to a student who is struggling? Whose problem is it when every student that comes to your class isn’t good enough for an ‘A’ both before they arrive in class, and also after you have been their teacher for a semester?

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Assessment isn’t just measuring progress, it’s also measuring teacher expectations, and it’s up to us to make sure those expectations are realistic and fair.

The power of a good teacher

Last night I asked this question onTwitter:

I didn’t know that I would become a teacher until I was almost 30, so I can’t say that any teachers influenced me to become a teacher, but I had many that inspired the kind of teacher I wanted to be.

Mr. Lapoint taught me not to be a marshmallow in class, and I started my career telling kids to speak up, go beyond the expected answers, and to not be marshmallows. That said, this motorcycle loving hippie was tough as nails and had high expectations… and scared me a little.

Mrs. Lane taught me to love fiction and helped me find my writing voice. She was one of my favourites and I think of her as inspiring me to be the kind of teacher I want to be.

Mrs. Forster made me appreciate social studies. She also stepped up to coach a sport she knew nothing about, and encouraged me to become a player coach… in a way this was inspiration to becoming a teacher since continuing on as a coach is where my passion for working with kids came from.

Mr. Towe taught me that I have a creative side.

Mr. Harrison made learning fun.

I had other teachers that influenced me and helped me know what kind of teacher I wouldn’t want to be, but that’s not the spirit with which I started this post and I won’t mention any names.

Mr. Greven was never my teacher, but he taught in the high school where I worked as a lifeguard and coach, and he came to work every day whistling with joy. And when a kid was late with an assignment, he would tap me and ask me to nudge the kid, because he knew I had a good relationship with them as their coach.

Overall, I had many good and great teachers, and while they may not be the reason I became a teacher, they gave me respect for the profession, and left me with positive learning experiences.

Teachers make a difference!

What’s that one thing?

I know that a lot of educators feel a bit overwhelmed right now. I know that others have started to strike a balance, they are figuring out what they can and can’t do in a day. For many, the current mode is: what can I do to sustain this crazy pace? What can I do to maintain my current levels of energy and output?

And yet, I’m going to ask a bit more of you… what’s that one thing you really want to try this year? What is it that you want to do to challenge the status quo, or rather challenge your status quo? Maybe it’s too early to act on this, but it’s not too early to start thinking about it.

We do not thrive when we are thinking about survival or even maintenance. We do not thrive when our minds are only on what’s next on our agenda, or our ‘to do’ list. We excel when we let our imaginations soar, and when we dream up how we can make a difference. We get excited when we push our own frontiers, and when we enter uncharted territories in new directions that we’ve chosen for ourselves.

Maybe it’s not the time to flip your whole world upside down or to take on a big project, but it is always time to ask yourself small, incremental questions that steer you in a new and exciting direction.

What can I do to help my students own more of their learning? What guiding questions do I want to ask? What can my students teach me? What new assessment strategy can I try? What can I do to connect to the parent community? What new project am I excited to introduce? What extensions can I offer my students who are ahead of the class? How can I embed some more formative assessment? How can I get my students to share their work with another class, or with the world?

What’s one thing that I’m passionate to try, that will charge my batteries far more than drain them… because doing this will make me excited about being a learner, and in control of my experience?