So, what difference did it make?  Thanksgiving, that is.  Did you take a moment to:

• Say a thankful prayer?
• Post some sort of thankful blurb on Facebook?
• Share appreciation for a sacrifice resulting in your current privilege?

Then what?

Now what?

Back to the grind?  Your job?  Your kids?  Your parenting?  Your teaching?

Thanksgiving is over, yes, but your opportunity (responsibility?) to give thanks for the privileges you have is not.  No, you can’t gather your friends and family together every day for feasting, fellowship and football.

But can you live in a consistent state of appreciation?  Sure.  Here’s what that looks like.

Do important work.

Your job, your family, your community, your society . . . you have the power–no, the responsibility–to do this work with passion and joy and love.  They are your privilege.  Your craft.  Your art.

Your perception, your awareness, your intention about the “work” you do transforms these things into platforms for giving thanks, and giving back, and honoring the gifts you’ve been given–and those that gave them.

Your work is important.  The way you do it is your chance to give back.  Don’t waste it.

photo credit: Stuck in Customs via photopin cc

No related posts.

Your students are performing well in subject A, but not so well in subject B.  Your data shows improvement in this area but a slight decline over here.  If you compare your scores to the state, you look great.

So what are you going to focus on?  Are you going to take your lowest indicators, label them your “things we could improve upon” and ignore the rest?  What are your plans for the areas in which you are performing well?

Sounds like a great time for a couple cliches:

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

“You can’t argue with success.”

It’s not easy, and it takes courage–but you’d better argue with success.  It’s the best way to break free from “good” and take steps toward “amazing.”

Related posts:

1. “Choice theory” and student success. Glasser, W.

“When in doubt, raise ‘em.”

Often, I think that works.  I’ve seen it in my own teaching .  When I set, articulate and work toward higher expectations, things generally turn out better.

It’s the old,

“Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.”

thing–right?

But what if we swapped the word, “expectation” for the word “target?”

Hear me out.

Expectations are a double edged sword.  Set them too low and they become a self fulfilling prophecy–an artificial ceiling.  Set them too high, and you’re setting yourself (and/or your students) up for failure.

I know it sounds strange, but what if we consider not having expectations?   Instead, what if we set the targets, take aim, work as hard (and smartly, and efficiently, and effectively) as we can, and then simply observe the outcome.  Like a scientist.  Objectively.  Without judgment.

It’s not semantics.  It’s a paradigm shift.  And it’s not easy.  But creating an intention to let go of expectations in order to see your craft through a more objective lens will eliminate much of the drama and confusion swirling around your work.

And . . . it will turn you into a professional.

Related posts:

1. Who wrote your list?

How often will you say:

“It’s in the curriculum/schedule/contract.  I need to do this for my principal/PLC/RTI/a mandate/progress reports/awards banquet/ . . . we’ve always done this.”

In the beginning–when you were still dreaming of being a teacher–I bet the answer was different.

Maybe . . . You wanted to make a difference.  You thought you could relate.  You had a passion for your subject.

Whatever the case, you probably had a burning conviction that your reason was important–and that you brought something special to the table.

Clearly, regardless of your profession, you can’t be part of a system without agreeing (at least to some extent) to follow someone else’s lead.

Sometimes though, we’re not even aware that we’re checking off the boxes on someone else’s agenda–and, as far as agendas go, we’ve completely forgotten that we used one of our own.

As soon as you relinquish all responsibility for setting the agenda, your “why” changes.  And so does the energy with which you approach your craft.

Related posts:

1. Expectations: A new paradigm

“Mr. Wondra, could you read this to make sure I’m doing this right?”

“Sure.”  I knelt down at her side.

“Autumn.  Do you have any examples from your life in this?”

“No.”

“Did you decide whether you agree with your sign or not?”

“No.”

“Does your introduction include a story?”

“No.”

I think it was at this point that I noticed she was crying.

In the past, this would have baffled me.   In this post, I’m going to discuss why Autumn was crying.  But first I’d like you to consider the following research.  Trust me, we’ll get back to the drama between Autumn and Mr. Wondra shortly.

In 1991, Janel Caine, a graduate student at the University of Florida, set out to design a study to determine if playing music to premature babies might lead them to improved appetites and faster growth.  What she found was interesting: babies exposed to soft music in their cribs did grow faster, had fewer complications, and were discharged home from the hospital an average of five days sooner than babies that were not exposed to music.

That data alone has far-reaching and potentially powerful implications, but when you break her findings down by gender (which, surprisingly, she doesn’t do in her paper), they become truly startling.

Baby girls exposed to music left the hospital an average of nine and a half days sooner than babies that were not.  Baby boys exposed to music left no sooner at all!

Again, interesting data.  But these findings become even more significant when linked with research documenting that the range of sounds around 1,500 Hz is critical for understanding speech.

All this helps to explain why, on average, girls pick up language skills sooner than boys.  But does this head start give girls an advantage throughout their years in school?  And what can we, as teachers, do about this?

We’ll get into what this all means for language skills in a minute.  But first, I’d like to discuss what this new information might mean for how our students experience the classroom environment.

If it is indeed true that girls can hear certain tones related to speech “significantly better” than boys, I’m going to want to keep that in mind when planning my seating arrangements.  I may want to avoid placing a girl near the door.  If someone is talking in the hall, she’ll have a greater chance of hearing it and being distracted.  On the other hand, since I often give instruction from the front of the room, and know boys don’t hear as well, I may want to seat them near the front.  Being a male myself with a voice that projects, I may also want to avoid seating girls in front or they may think I’m shouting.  This might also have implications for oral reading.

As a man, with a voice that carries, I also want to keep this information in mind when addressing girls individually.  If I use my normal tone, she might think I’m yelling at her.  In fact this is exactly what happened the other day with Autumn in the computer lab.

Because girls hear certain tones much clearer, often times, depending on a teacher’s tone, a boy will have trouble hearing it, and a girl will hear it as loud.  This has implications for both male and female teachers.

Women with softer voices may want to project a bit more for the boys.  Men with low booming voices may want to tone it down a bit so as not to overpower the girls. Teachers are presenters, and so we should reflect on the tone and volume of all our auditory instruction—not only our speech, but also any audio we present.

This also has implications for one-on-one communication—as illustrated in the example at the start of this post.  In the end, I told Autumn that I knew why she was crying, that I wasn’t angry, and I apologized for being loud.  When I toned it down, we began again and made progress on her paper.

The Anatomy of Aptitude

If you begin reading the literature on gender differences, it won’t take long before you stumble upon a book entitled Brain Sex: The real difference between men and women, by a couple of researchers by the names of Anne Moir and David Jessel.  Published in 1991, this was one of the first serious brain-based looks at the difference between sexes.  One of Moir and Jessel’s thematic premises is that innate differences in the biological brains and anatomy of children lead them naturally to different interests, which in turn strengthens that aptitude.  For example, they contend that girls learn language at an earlier age than boys because their brains are more efficiently organized for speech.  Then, since they are able to use language earlier, they do–playing and practicing their way to ever higher levels of proficiency–while boys don’t–which compounds any perceived language deficiency.

Cain’s study, combined with the growing scientific brain and sensory research indicating that girls hear better, leads us to the conclusion that girls are naturally better equipped at an earlier age to learn language.

It makes sense that girls would typically use language more often as they mature.  In fact, observation proves this.

Girls on the playground use more language in their play–working out who will roleplay what relational role, (“Ok, this time you be the mommy and I’ll be the baby . . .”).  Boys, on the other hand, are more often content making engine noises (trucks, cars, planes, backhoes), pushing things through the dirt, or throwing things through the air–crashing, chasing, tumbling, and kicking things around.

As Moir and Jessel point out, because language (both reading and speaking) is learned more through sound than sight–when it comes to learning to speak and read:

. . . the structure of the female brain gives girls the advantage.  This learning function resides in the left hemisphere of the brain . . .their more natural female strength, which is hearing, not seeing  (62).

They go on to support this finding by citing studies that indicate that while boys are better at identifying animal noises, girls are better at identifying human, social, and verbal communication.

It is neither the relative immaturity of boys, which results in their being  (less able to read), nor is it that they are backward, though much educational damage has been done in the past by the assumption that a boy’s slowness in learning to read must be due to stupidity or laziness.  It is just that while the girls are using the right tool for the job—the “hearing” skills—the boys are better endowed with the skills of seeing, not hearing.  And that’s not a good way of learning to read, says American psychologist Dianne McGuinness:

“It is clear that visual processing has little to do with reading, and in fact a strong reliance on the visual mode is often antagonistic to progress in learning to read.”

What does this mean for my eighth grade language arts class?

All that is well and good.  But I wanted to test some things out in my own classroom.  To my way of thinking, if all the above is actually true, by the time my students hit 8th grade, the average boy should have read significantly fewer books than the average girl.

So I had all my students sign up for a Shelfari account–listing every book that they could ever remember reading.  Next, I simply had them tally the books up.  The data was striking.  On average, girls listed 52 books.  Boys listed 25.

The next set of data I collected was from a Reading Interest Inventory.  My student’s answers to two questions from that survey were particularly striking:

On a scale of 1 to 10 where 10 is extremely important and 1 is not at all important:

• How important is reading to you? and,
• How important is reading to the world?

In both cases, girls valued reading more than boys.

Intrigued, I went on to have my students complete a survey in which students rated themselves according to Howard Gardner’s Multiple intelligences.  I was interested in how boys rated themselves in regard to the Verbal/Linguistic intelligence compared to girls.

As it turns out, of all the intelligences I measured, the greatest average difference was the Verbal Intelligence.

On a scale of 0-100, boys scored themselves at an average of 29.71—the lowest ranking of all the intelligences, while girls ranked themselves at 45–somewhere in the middle.

There were a couple of other interesting data points from my survey that showed up and are supported in the literature on gender differences:

• Boys rated themselves higher in logical intelligence,
• Boys’ viewed their highest intelligence as kinesthetic.

If you read the literature, all this makes sense, which might also explain why boys also wrote about sports in their daily journals more than any other topic.

For reasons I’ll have to write about later, the literature also supports the idea that boys would write in a more autobiographical nature than girls.  Girls also wrote more often about “school,” “friends,” and “family” than boys did.

So Now What?

So what does all this mean for teachers?  Simply put, we need to understand.

Interestingly, in his article, Getting Boys to Read, Jeff Wilhelm says that, “The reason certain text types (like nonfiction) and features of texts (visuals) tend to engage boys has much less to do with the text itself, and much more to do with the connection (my italics) these features encourage the readers to make to the world.”  Wilhelm goes on to list a number of features and conditions that contribute to boys being able to engage in their reading:

• Short
• Visual
• Challenging
• Edgy
• Real
• Current
• Humor
• A clear purpose and immediate feedback
• An appropriate challenge and assistance to meet it
• Functionality and a developing sense of competence
• A focus on the immediate experience
• The importance of being social

I agree, but when it comes to gender differentiation in the classroom, there is a lot more that can be done.  Stay tuned.  In coming weeks I’ll share with you some ways you can use gender differentiation to increase student engagement in your classes.

For now, however, let me ask you:  What differences do you notice between how boys and girls learn in your classes?

Homepage image credit

Related posts:

1. With boys and girls in mind. Gurian, M., Stevens, K.
2. Gender Differentiation: Should we really be treating boys and girls differently?
3. Getting boys to read: it’s the context! Wilhelm, J.

“Students today depend on paper too much. They don’t know how to write on a slate without getting chalk dust all over themselves. They can’t clean a slate properly. What will they do when they run out of paper?” –Principal’s Association, 1815 1, 2

“Students today depend upon store bought ink. They don’t know how to make their own. When they run out of ink they will be unable to write words or ciphers until their next trip to the settlement. This is a sad commentary on modern education.” –The Rural American Teacher 1928 1,2

by Chris Wondra, WTWL Editor

The problem with blind spots is that you don’t know you’ve got them. I mean, it’s obvious to us today that students weren’t going to need a slate or homemade ink in order to be successful.

But imagine living in that time. There was no way those people could have foreseen the changes that make us snicker at those statements today.  Might we also be clinging to faulty beliefs about what will make our students successful? If so, how do we identify them? How do we differentiate between the beliefs that are no longer relevant and need to go, and the ones that are and we need to keep? What skills and content are we teaching that will be irrelevant in five years? What tools are we still using that are already outdated?

And how can we possibly determine that?

Out with the old, in with the new

As a quick exercise, take a part of your curriculum, any part, and imagine for a moment that it’s totally irrelevant to our students’ realities in the 21st century. Then make a bold and crazy statement–or two.  I’m an English teacher. Let me start.

1. The traditional research paper in English classrooms is dead.
2. So is the traditional works cited or bibliography–you know, that MLA or APA formatted way of documenting your sources.

In some districts, those two statements would probably be grounds for my dismissal. But we’re all friends here. So let’s just play around with this for a while.

The research paper: A closer look

Why do we have students write research papers in the first place? Why include a works cited? Well, we assign the paper to instruct and assess skills and knowledge related to researching, organizing, analyzing, and synthesizing information. We have students include a works cited to show that they’re not just making stuff up as they go along. But works cited and bibliographies also serve two other important purposes:

• They give credit for ideas, and
• they point us in the direction of those ideas–so that interested readers can follow up and learn more.

Organizing, analyzing, synthesizing, writing, and attributing ideas are valuable skills. So what could possibly be wrong with the research paper?

The problem is two fold:

1. If we want to read some of the sources, we have to do more work.  We have to order a book, go to a library, find a specific journal, magazine, or article. This takes effort.  But perhaps, more importantly . . .
2. This takes time.

What would happen instead, if we assigned students a research blog or asked them to collaborate on a research wiki?  Like this.

Couldn’t they then simply link to the actual source that they used, and/or help the reader along by linking to a definition for potentially confusing terms or concepts (as I did above)? Doing so simplifies the whole process by attributing, defining, and also actually supplying the source of the ideas referenced.

Yes, I know. Sometimes that’s not entirely possible. One can’t always link to an entire book or periodical. Alas, not everything is on-line and free. But we can still link to a listing of the book on Amazon.com, an author page, or biography. So we can get pretty close–much closer than a properly formatted APA citation.

So, in comparing this approach to the traditional research paper:  What skills are we missing?  Nothing. We’ve enhanced it. We’ve taken the research paper and made it better, faster and stronger.

But that’s not all . . .

Perhaps the most glaring weakness with the traditional research paper is who has access to it. If the topic and writing is truly relevant, aren’t they also potentially valuable to greater audiences?  And isn’t that audience’s feedback also valuable?

Today’s tools make all this possible in ways we couldn’t imagine as recently as five years ago.

So is the traditional research paper, in fact, going the way of the slate and homemade ink? I’m pretty sure it is.

And if that’s the case, and we’re still attached to the research paper (and we are), to what else might we teachers be clinging?

And how can we possibly know?

We can’t. But I think we can shine a little light in this darkness by asking ourselves two basic questions:

1. What will the future look like? and,
2. How do I prepare my students for that?

The engine of change revs to exponential speeds

If Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod are right:

• there are five times as many words in the English language than when Shakespeare lived, and
• the amount of technical information we have available to us is now doubling every 72 hours.

We think we’re supposed to know what our students need to thrive in the 21st century? C’mon. Let’s get real.

These kids are going to have fourteen jobs, many of which don’t even exist today, before they turn thirty-four. How do you prepare students for jobs that don’t yet exist, using technologies that haven’t been invented, to solve problems that we don’t even know are problems yet? How can we–how can they–possibly plan for that?

We can’t. They can’t.

The bottom line (and perhaps most important reality to consider) is that the rate of change is accelerating exponentially. We can’t possibly keep up. Ergo we can’t plan. Apple or PC? Explorer or Firefox? Google or Yahoo? Photoshop or Fireworks? A blog or a wiki? Ford or Chevy? It doesn’t matter. Today’s standards will not survive the night. Tomorrow will be completely different. By the time these kids hit the job market, we’ll be snickering at questions like these.

In fact, somebody somewhere is probably snickering already. The cost to communicate has fallen through the floor and the speed to do so has gone through the roof. This creates a whole new world. A flat one. Ideas, collaboration and creativity no longer have borders. Technology is removing the traditional constraints that used to slow progress. Today, our students can collaborate in real time, with information and people half way around the world, to solve problems, create solutions and to change everything.

We don’t know what, and we don’t know when. All we can be assured of is that, eventually, everything will change—again. And again. And again. It’s time to face the music. We can’t possibly plan for that. That’s the bad news. Welcome to the 21st century.

The Good News

The good news is that we can coordinate like never before.

Let me explain.

Remember what it was like a few years ago, before we all had cell phones, when you had to pick someone up at the airport? Remember what had to take place in order for that to happen? Lots of planning. You had to consider where the baggage was. You had to get there early to park the car. You had to meet at a prearranged time and place. And hope the plane was on time.

You don’t have to do any of that now. Just check the flight schedules on-line, and have your party call you when they land. If the flight’s late, run a few errands. If it’s early, just pick them up outside. Figure it out on the fly. No planning. Just coordination.

Now, with cell phones, it makes more sense to just wing it. Flight schedules change, baggage takes time to pickup, stuff happens. But now we can adjust on the fly. It’s easy to just roll with it.

Preparing our students for their futures is a bit like using our cell phones to coordinate an airport pick-up.

Successfully navigating the chaos of the pace of 21st century change will not require our students to know how to use today’s technology. It will not require them to plan very far ahead. It will, however, require them to connect to people and information and be able to create and collaborate in real time–on the fly.

It will require that they be able to “roll with it.”  To “wing it.”  To improvise.

Think of life in the 21st century as improvising in a jazz quartet. You never know exactly what’s coming, so you can’t plan too far ahead. Still, it’s not chaos.  You are connected to the other players through the structure of the music. The notes of the piece flow from a combination of that structure and the harmony of your collaboration and creativity.

Our job as teachers is to show students what is possible within the structure of our time and space, an how to coordinate information and people in ways that create music with our lives . . .

. . .and then to dance.

Your Turn

Reflect on your beliefs and add your thoughts in the comment section below:

• What skills and concepts are you teaching that will help students be successful in the fast paced changes of the 21st century?

• If the “Research Paper” is going the way of the Cuckoo, what are some other instructional techniques/strategies/tools that might soon be outdated, or look very different in the near future?

• Sometimes the more things change, the more things stay the same. So what essential understanding are you teaching today that won’t change in the 21st century. What do you believe will stay the same?

Source of quotes:

1. Thornburg, David. Edutrends 2010: Restructuring, Technology, and the Future of Education. Starsong Publications, 1992. (link)

2. To see additional statements read and scroll to the bottom of this article .

Related posts:

1. Perspective-taking as transformative practice in teaching multicultural literature to white students. Haertling Thein, A., Beach, R., & Parks, D.
2. The Library of Congress is Using Flickr: Shouldn’t Teachers?
3. Best practice: new standards for teaching and learning in America’s schools.

Clay Shirky’s latest Ted Talk has huge implications for education. Through the use of three modern day examples (a movement to prevent voter suppression, an earthquake, and a political discussion) he argues that the way people send and receive messages (news) has shifted from a model that has historically been largely crafted and controlled by the sender, to now one that is completely uncontrolled and reported (unedited) in real time.

Traditional audiences of media have now also become producers of media.

What that means is that through the use of media tools like Twitter, Facebook, and Blogs, citizens now routinely beat news and government agencies to the punch when it comes to announcing and spreading messages.

Shirky outlines the implications of a new media model that is:

• Global
• Social
• Ubiquitous, and
• Cheap

When it’s inevitable that the majority of your students are not going to simply sit back and listen to the media, but become active producers of media, wouldn’t it be wise to begin a discussion about what this means?  Since the production and distribution of media is no longer controlled, and amateurs are now as powerful as TV networks or newspaper conglomerates, how do we prepare our students to participate in ways that create value?

Watching Shirky will make you realize that shift really does happen. Now the question becomes, how do we, as educators, deal with this?

Using the comment section below, please share with us your thoughts.

Related posts:

1. Key words in instruction: literature circles.
2. Whose interpretations matter most – teacher’s or students?
3. Helping students value learning. Sullo, B

I just finished my first two years of teaching. They were spent in a very challenging urban district that I soon learned was, in short, not a good fit . The challenges were many and rewards were few. And, although I have grown in leaps and bounds as a teacher from my first to second year (which I’m sure my students would attest to), by the end I was left feeling frazzled, destabilized and unsure whether I even wanted to teach.

Enter courage and renewal work.

I’d first heard of educational activist Parker Palmer while still completing a practicum as part of my teacher certification course. My supervising teacher lent me a copy of The Courage to Teach-which I admittedly did not even look through amidst the hustle and bustle of the first year of teaching. Still, I’d find quotes from Palmer here and there which always left me thirsting for more… such as this one:

“Teacher-bashing has become a popular sport. . . . Teachers make an easy target, for they are such a common species and so powerless to strike back. We blame teachers for being unable to cure social ills that no one knows how to treat; we insist that they instantly adopt whatever ‘solution’ has most recently been concocted by our national panacea machine; and in the process, we demoralize, even paralyze, the very teachers who could help us find our way.”

And so I was thrilled to learn that there would be an introductory Courage to Teach retreat right here in Tucson, Arizona. Time spent in retreat–full of self-reflection and solitude (as well as conversations amidst like-minded people) seemed like just what the doctor ordered…and I thought would help me transition form the last two years of teaching and clean the slate a little before starting a new position next August.

We met at a retreat center at Picture Rocks. The desert is stunning, and it was impossible to forget when being thrust in the center of it–beautiful saguaros dotting the landscape, nestled in the mountains. A labyrinth and various petroglyphs are some of the other features at the retreat center. But there really is something inescapable about being out somewhere–away from home, away from the buzz of cell phones and constant internet chatter–where all of your needs (including tasty buffet lunches) are provided.

The retreat began with us gathered in a circle, discussing some touchstones to really create a circle of trust for the retreat.The hardest part for many, myself included, involved responding to others with open, honest questions–to really hear another person instead of immediately rushing to fix their problem. Being comfortable with their own uncertainty is a deeper level of intimacy than the panacea of solutions we often offer as teachers–and not being expected to fix things offered us a deep and unexpected sense of relief. Presenting a problem and really being heard provides the speaker the chance to listen to their own inner teacher, so that they can make decisions based on their own inner guidance. It seems so wise in its simplicity but is easier said than done! (This was taken to another extreme when we practiced a retreat version of an old Quaker custom–a “clearness committee”–in which one participant details a problem or dilemma they are facing and the rest of the small group of participants spend several hours asking open, honest questions…without curiosity, problem-solving or their own agenda. It was an amazing experience for the participants.)

Much of the weekend involved reading poetry and stories. We would then write in our journals–not a critique, but a response reflecting on what we had experienced in our own lives or work that relates to a line or two in the poem. We would have up to a half hour to write and 40 minutes to discuss our answers in small groups.

It is difficult to describe the transformation that occurred within me during the three day conference… yet somehow the process of reflection filled me with startling clarity about the two years that have just commenced leading to the year that is about to begin. Reflecting and writing about a variety of topics, such as my own joys and sorrows, the idea of living a whole, authentic life, people who have helped me along my own path, and finding a deep sense of center amidst the chaos… is what called me to teaching in the first place. I left feeling a deeper sense of purpose and better sense of understanding of what brought me to teaching and how to continue my own practice in a way that is sustainable and productive. Getting away from the everyday bustle and to a quiet space was incredibly helpful for creating fertile ground where insights can grow. We ended with our own reflection on what we’ve seen of ourselves during the retreat and our own list of small ways we can continue to attend to ourselves and insights we identified during the retreat.

Any inner work must be sustained over time to truly be effective, but it is Parker Palmer’s theory that we must tend to the “who” that is teaching–fill ourselves up as teachers so that we may have a lot to give to our students without burning our candle at both ends. I suspect he may be right.

Yael Grauer just finished two years of teaching 8th grade Language Arts, Reading and Lifeskills in Tucson’s South Side, and is about to embark on a new journey teaching Humanities in a charter school. She is a graduate of Shimer College, the Great Books College of the Midwest. In addition to teaching, reading and writing, she enjoys desert gardening, lifting heavy things and training in Brazilian jiu jitsu. She also runs her own very successful blog at www.dirttime.org.

If you’re interested in learning more about Parker Palmer, you might enjoy downloading and reading this free article by Palmer entitled The Heart of a Teacher: Identity and Integrity in Teaching

or view it here:

The Heart of a Teacher –

Image credit

Related posts:

1. Using toilet humor to teach writing
2. The Library of Congress is Using Flickr: Shouldn’t Teachers?
3. How Teachers Are Like Superheroes

by Jeffrey Ayer, WTWL Writer

In recent months, the Library of Congress has piloted a new photo series on the photo-intensive website, Flickr. If you’ve never been to Flickr, it’s essentially a website where photographers from around the world are uploading and sharing their photos, and commenting on the photographs other people post.

In this case, Flickr has teamed up with an unlikely photographer (or should I say archive of American historical photography), and the results are literally breathtaking. One example alone is Jack Delano’s “In the waiting room of Union Station”, taken in Chicago, Illinois. The photo features two officers who create shadows in spotlight-like beams of sunshine coming in from the gothic windows above.

And the list goes on. In all, as of May 2009, the Library of Congress has posted over 6,000 historical photos from its archives, including World War I panoramas, photos of President Abraham Lincoln, and the decades of the 1910s, 1930s, and 1940s.

How does this all fit teaching and learning, you ask? Think of the potential uses of this archive. Because Flickr includes a slideshow feature, you and your students could gaze at history through the lenses of long-ago photographers – and leave comments (thanks Web 2.0). A colleague of mine uses photography to inspire young creative writers, both to tell stories in prose and describe an image in poetry. The possibilities in art, photography, psychology, journalism, sociology, English, and history classes are just the beginning.

And if nothing else, it’s an easy-to-use site where students could be encouraged to use the old right brain and create using a digital camera. It’s also a site where some are using the space to store photographs for personal use (users can make photos private or public).

The site even encouraged me to get started and get more serious with my own freelance photography, so I’m excited about that alone.

To get started, simply go to Flickr, click on “Create Your Account” (easy to do if you already have a Yahoo e-mail account), and then click on “Sign Up.” Unlike Google accounts, this one asks for your full name, gender, birth date, and postal zip code, but if you’re using this for professional use, there’s nothing here that should scare you. In addition, like many Web 2.0 sites, everything is free (there is a megabyte limit to how many photos you can upload until you may want to consider “going pro”).

To get started, click here to access the Library of Congress’s photostream.

On a tech note, beware of the filters your school may have. Flickr can be accessed in some schools and school districts, and not in others. Having a conversation with your IT director or building principal would be worthwhile in a case like the one above. Remember: We are the leaders on a 21^st Century pioneering venture. If the Library of Congress is on board, shouldn’t our schools be as well? Happy Flickring!

Related posts:

1. Web, library, and teen services 2.0. Bolan, K., M. Canada, and R. Cullin.
2. Flickr-ing – out. Guhlin, M.
3. Videos for Teachers

“How’s it going guys?” I asked as I approached, kneeling down to their level.

Travis spoke for the group. “Mr. Wondra. We don’t get it.”

“What don’t you get, Travis.”

“We don’t know what to do,” said Travis, frustration wrinkling his brow. I could tell the rest of the group was getting a little stressed as well. The class had been working on this assignment for ten minutes, and many other groups were by now well on their way.

The activity I had assigned that day was a creative expansion of a reflection I had done with some colleagues during one of my St. Mary’s weekends. The activity we had done called for us to look back at a semester’s worth of learning and then visually represent that learning by creating a large poster or mural using a road and traveling metaphor. I thought the activity was great because it gave us a chance as learners to come together, each remembering and relating to the instruction in a different way, and create a product that helped us to cement this new information by attaching it to a metaphor.

If Howard Gardner were to talk about this activity he might say that it encourages deep learning or understanding by revisiting the information through the interpersonal, intrapersonal, spatial, and visual intelligence lenses. Daniel Pink, Thomas Friedman and Yong Zhao might call this a perfect example of “mashing” by using new information to create a novel story of our semester of learning—blending logical, analytical and creative thinking

Anyway, I thought the activity would be a great way for my students to reflect on their first quarter of eighth grade—particularly the experiences and learning that took place in language arts. Our St. Mary’s facilitators asked us to relate to our learning using a “journey” metaphor. While I could have done this, some of my pre-assessments, indicated that most of these students didn’t yet fully understand what a metaphor was—to say nothing about how to use one.

This presented me with the unique opportunity to combine new learning (metaphor), with recent instruction (what we learned in the first quarter). So after some additional instruction on metaphors and how they can be used to create understanding, I asked students to come up with their own metaphors to represent their experiences of the first quarter—linking important language arts concepts to it.

Also realizing, however, that as eighth graders, my students were also having countless meaningful experiences outside of my classroom, I invited them to include/attach other important events, milestones, and learning that they experienced in other areas of their lives as well, be they family, extracurricular, or social. In this way I hoped to honor, validate, and link their lives holistically to my language arts curriculum.

But Travis and his group were struggling, so I chunked it up for them.

“Well, what do you remember learning in here so far this year? What do we do in here every day? What does language arts in the eighth grade look like?”

“Um. Well, we do planning pages every day,” said Travis.

“Great! What else?”

“We have vocabulary,” said Sarah.

“Now you’re getting the hang of it. Alex, start a list.”

“Ok. What about mind-maps. Does that count? And the multiple intelligence stuff? And the important pattern? And chapter club?”

“Awesome. Now, I want you to keep brainstorming. Then once you get your list, see if you can come up with an image that all of these ideas can be a part of.” I then gave them another example and let them have at it.

About a week later, each group having had the opportunity to share and explain their metaphors, all the posters hung around the room. It was quite a sight and a fun way for the parents, who where coming and going during parent-teacher conferences, to see what we had been up to during the first quarter. But I didn’t fully realize the impact that this simple activity had had until I met Travis’s mom, and she asked if she could have the poster when it was done hanging in the room.

It turns out that Travis was so excited and had taken so much pride in their creation that he had talked about it at home and wanted to keep it and hang it in his bedroom.

It’s possible, but I’m not sure this level of excitement would have manifested through my teaching before I started the program. While my curriculum remains the same, the instructional tools I now have at my disposal have been greatly enhanced. In addition, a deeper understanding of both theory and practice has given me a confidence in myself as a professional that I’ve never experienced before.

Among other things, this new-found clarity stems from an understanding that:

• Backward design works and that I can (and should) shape my units around essential concepts and understandings. Allowing the content of my instruction to flow from a limited number of core concepts has helped me to stay much more “on message” or focused throughout the course of a unit of study.

• Reflection will slow the pace of instruction but allow for deeper understanding. I am now allowing more time and space in class for reflection of various forms—products (as in the above example), surveys, exit slips, critical incident forms as well as written and discussion.

• Formative assessment creates a valuable ongoing loop of feedback, decreasing time between an event and the feedback and increasing feedback opportunities, which, in turn, increases student engagement and motivation. I am now developing and using many more rubrics, checklists, and peer assessments and activities than ever before in an effort to make assessment more useful.

• Written instructions and “half-sheets” are valuable instructional tools for clarity. Instead of only verbally explaining what I may feel is a fairly simple assignment or activity, I now also find myself typing up a simple explanation in much the same way that my St. Mary’s facilitators do. These simple adjustments to my instruction have greatly increased students’ confidence in that they understand exactly what is expected. This is another example of a practice that also makes sense on so many theoretical levels.

• It is more important than ever to meet students where they are. Allowing opportunities for students to succeed using such theory as Multiple Intelligence, Meyers-Briggs personality, Brain Gym, Essential Understandings, Brain Based, Gender Based and Emotional Intelligence has become a major part of almost every lesson for me. Maybe one of the most valuable parts of the St. Mary’s experience for me is how it has helped me to better see my teaching through the critical lens of my students. Allowing students to access learning through their own aptitudes as well as encouraging them (by allowing play and failure) to experiment with abilities with which they are not as proficient greatly enhances their engagement levels in my classes. To this end, I now search for ways to include movement and technology as much as I can in my lessons. Skits, Web 2.0 technology, graphic organizers, and storyboards and varied reading topics as well as other environmental parts of my physical classroom have greatly enhanced my instruction.

Related posts:

1. Key words in instruction: literature circles.
2. Listen up! Boys and girls hear, read, learn differently
3. The Edge of Education Carnival. Issue 3