“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 What tools are we still using that are already outdated?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. Teaching English language arts in a “flat” world. Burke, J.
2. Perspective-taking as transformative practice in teaching multicultural literature to white students. Haertling Thein, A., Beach, R., & Parks, D.
3. The Library of Congress is Using Flickr: Shouldn’t 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. Listen up! Boys and girls hear, read, learn differently
2. 3 Techniques for Brain Based Differentiation
3. Study reveals new magic word

We’re in the middle of a unit on persuasion right now. I love this unit because it’s so rich–it’s a great topic from which to teach so many cool things. Yes, students learn persuasive techniques so that they can better manipulate their parents and teachers, but we also hunt for these techniques when we read sales letters and advertisements (reading standards); we search for them on the radio and TV commercials (listening standards). Writing with these techniques requires discipline, a keen understanding of audience, and attention to details (writing standards). From a Language Arts perspective, it’s good stuff–great stuff.

But it’s also a blast because we get tap into a little psychology, human behavior, and begin to think a bit about thinking.

One of the mind benders I introduce is famously known (in psychological circles anyway) as the “The Copy Machine” study, conducted by Ellen Langer, the first woman to earn tenure as a professor of psychology at Harvard.

The following is an excerpt from an article originally published in the New York Times by Philip Hilts.

In that study, she stationed someone at a copy machine in a busy graduate school office. When someone stepped up and began copying, Dr. Langer’s plant would come up to the person and interrupt, asking to butt in and make copies. The interruption was allowed fairly often, about 60 percent of the time. But the permission was granted almost 95 percent of the time if the person stepping up to interrupt not only asked, ”May I use the copy machine?” but added a reason, ”because I’m in a rush.”

That seems to make sense. People heard the reason and decided they were willing to step aside for a moment. What was odd, Dr. Langer found, was that if the interrupter asked, ”Can I use the machine?” and added a meaningless phrase, ”because I have to make copies,” the people at the machine also stepped aside nearly 95 percent of the time.

The idea, she said, is that the listener at the copy machine heard a two-part statement: a request and something like a reason. That was all their mental script for such a situation required. They never did reflect on the fact that the interrupter’s ”reason” was not meaningful.

As a teacher, I get dozens of requests an hour. Most are fairly pedestrian:

• “Can I borrow a pencil?”
• “Can I go to my locker?”
• “Can I get a drink?”
• “Can I go to the bathroom?”

Now, after we learn a few persuasive techniques, I tell the students to persuade me. After learning about the power of the word “because,” most of them use that . . .because it’s relatively simple.

And it works even better than “please”. Still, most of them forget.

“Mr. Wondra, I need to go to the bathroom.”

“Persuade me,” I’ll say.

They’ll roll their eyes, sigh heavily, do a little potty dance.

“But Mr. Wondra! I REALLY have to go . . .BAD!”

I nod and smile. Eventually, they realize I’m not budging and so fumble around until they construct coherent request. After awhile they begin to do it automatically–or at least they remember after I look at them and say nothing.

I figure this is good teaching–reinforcing the content using a real world application–right? Plus I get to play the powerful-hoity-toity teacher role.

This was the case the other day. I was in the back of the room spot checking (quickly assessing) an assignment, when a fairly quite but confident a girl walked over.

“Mr. Wondra, can I go the bathroom?”

I looked up. There was a slight pause, but her expression never changed, and she never broke eye contact.

“. . .because I have my period.”

Talk about a persuasive argument. She knocked that one out of the park.

Image credit

Related posts:

1. How a Master’s Degree Changed My Instruction
2. “Consequence” is not a four-letter word. Sullo, B.
3. Key words in instruction: literature circles.