Taking a bat to TLWBAT

Insight often takes its time.

Quick, name a significant skill you have acquired in 48 minutes or, better yet, 40 minutes.  What's the matter, can't think of one?  Yeah, me neither.

Aftter the earliest grades, we teachers are, by and large, playing the long game.  Often teaching can be like a tossing a rock into a deep dark abyss and waiting to see when that distant "plash" can be heard. 

How many of us knew our teachers were complete idiots when we were in school, only to realize ten years later that we had learned something really important, something we were grateful to have learned?  (And how many times have you tried to reach out to that teacher?  Did you get a satisfactory response?  Me neither.  It's a sad fact that we will never be as important to our teachers as our teachers were to us.)

I suppose there are times in, say, math class, that a high school teacher can teach a certain specific operation which can be practiced a few times, and because that operation has few potential variables, it can be considered "mastered" within a single class period.  But most of the time, the application of that operation will need to be learned over a period of time, and integrated among other operations.  For teachers of literacy, it can be even more complex.  The great essayist E.B. White admitted that, 40 years after his time under the tutelage of Professor Strunk that he was only batting .500 with regard to omitting the "needless" words, "the fact that."  If E.B. White only got it right half the time after writing for The New Yorker for over 30 years, how is a high school student going to "master" a skill in 40 or 48 minutes?

So what's the problem?  Admit that things take time and get on with it! 

The problem is the way most teachers are required to report how they plan their lessons.  The plan for every day includes a space in which the teacher must specify what "The Learner Will Be Able To" do when the lessons is complete.  TLWBAT.  (When I started it was SWBAT, which is easier to pronounce, but evidently the Student  became The Learner while I wasn't looking.*  This is educational progress.)  The only honest choice here is to admit the lie to yourself and make the honest explanation.  No, the learner won't be able to do that when 3rd period is over on Wednesday.  But a few weeks from now, after some consistent practice, the learner should at least admit -- perhaps under duress -- that the learner ought to be able to do that by now.  Because other than grades or cookies, what is the incentive to practice an important but dull skill which demands steady application?  Yes, we'd like it to have an inherent incentive, but often that's just not going to happen.  Do you know a way to make mastering punctuation of quotes inherently engaging?    If you can't should we skip it?  No, we learn it because it is a small part of the inherently self-motivating task of making oneself understood by other people. 

There are a lot of moving parts involved in reading and writing well -- especially writing.  It is hard to assess whether those parts have been truly assimilated and meshed well together until a great many steps have been combined and practiced and practiced.  And mastery -- well, if E.B. White didn't get it after 40 years, what can we expect for our students?

The fact is, this daily mastery model does not comport with the science of how people learn.  There are long periods of confusion or mental dullness, followed by flashes of insight.  It is rarely a slow, steady progress.  We teachers just have to keep in there, pitching steadily, waiting patiently for the Great Cosmic A-Ha.

Teachers understand and accept the value of metrics.  We gauge our students by them, and the most honest among us gauge our teaching by our students' metrics.  But many deep, complex important things we teach are not really susceptible to hard-and-fast numeric measurements.  We can test you on whether you know the plot of Macbeth.  We can even ask you to identify themes and discuss how Shakespeare works them out.  But can you really quantify for me the level of cunning when Macbeth tells his wife "False face must hide what false heart doth know"?  Can we test how deep into the bowels of hell Lady Macbeth reaches to intercede with Hecate himself to "unsex me here"?  Can we measure how deeply you register Macbeth's existential despair as he spits out the words, "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing?" 

None of this desire to measure is fatal to learning. But why, administrators, why do you impose the necessity of a silly lie upon us, and then judge us on our failure to achieve a phony metric?

Ultimately, we are dealing with the indefinable, the unutterable, the ineffable, the -- literally -- unmeasurable.

And the end of that learning journey may be years and years from now.

So can we at least put some qualifiers on our TLWBATs?  Or spread them out over days and weeks?  Or do something to make them honest aspirations, rather than industrial-model evasions?
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* At least "SWBAT" can be sort-of pronounced -- "SwƏ- bat."  But TLWBAT is unprounceable.  You can invert a couple of letters and get "Twill-bat," but that's cheating.

UPDATE:  My friend Keith Peterson suggests I adopt the phrase "The Ideal Learner Will Be Able To", yielding the slightly-more-pronounceable TILWBAT.  Still not sure exactly what to do with the W, but I think it's an improvement.

Taking down the scaffolding

Since I began teaching about a decade ago, I've heard about scaffolding.  I was congratulated early on, before I had even begun Alternate Route courses for my instinctual scaffolding.

For those not acquainted with the jargon, and to grotesquely simplify it, scaffolding is supporting student learning by posing a problem, then guiding and coaching the student through the task, often relying on the students' prior knowledge.

The idea behind the metaphor is that one erects scaffolding to provide support to the workers who are constructing a building, and eventually the job is completed and the scaffolding comes down.  Thus, eventually the student achieves mastery and is able to perform problem-solving independently.

But I don't like the metaphor anymore and I think it leads down some cul-de-sacs.  Because I worked in Manhattan for 20 years and there's one thing a Manhattanite knows -- Scaffolding Never Comes Down.  That piece of sidewalk will never see the sun again.  Those contractors will figure out a way to keep the job going and going and going.  And your students will figure out ways to keep you from dismantling your scaffolding and maintain their dependence on you.

Second, scaffolding is not generally used in construction.  It's for renovation.  New buildings use cranes and elevators, not scaffolds.  Hopefully we are not renovating knowledge, we are building it afresh.

And third, we really aren't building knowledge.  Most of the time, we are exploring knowledge that already exists.  True, the student hasn't seen it before, but it is already there.  We are not creating anything.

We are laying down a path through this forest of knowledge.  We are mapping it out.  We are exploring.  Even when there are skills involved, those skills are not ends in themselves, but means toward acquiring knowledge.  To take my own discipline, one doesn't learn to write literary analysis in order to write literary analysis.  That is not a very valuable product.  It exists almost exclusively within the tight borders of academia.  One writes analysis in order to explain TO YOURSELF what you just read.  You may also be demonstrating your mastery to your instructor, but that is merely a by-product.  The chief end is to set out the metes and bounds of one's own understanding of the reading. 

We are not a construction crew -- we are explorers, hoping that the young explorers we train will go deeper into the woods and come back and tell us of the treasures they found there.  It is pure arrogance to think we are making something from nothing.  In fact, unless our students are creating genuinely new literature, conducting new research, fabricating new inventions, they are not building, they are mapping the terrain.  We take them through the part of the forest we know, then we let them go.  Some move beyond us, others wander back to home base.

So from now on, although I will use the jargon as required by professional courtesy, in my mind I will know that I am not a foreman, but a surveyor, training others mostly to be surveyors and a few special ones to go beyond our maps, out into the darkness, out toward the edges, out where there be dragons.

Video gaming is the future of teaching

Since I started teaching, early in the previous decade, it has been accepted wisdom to treat video games like television, instant messaging and pop culture -- a distraction that pulls students away from a disciplined program of learning.

I've learned better. Video games ARE learning. We teachers need to not only accept this, but embrace it. As long as we abandon the field to commercial game-makers, we are surrendering important real estate in our student's brains which could yield better and deeper learning than we have seen in our generation as teachers.

I was converted largely due to this episode of On The Media, an NPR show I am seriously addicted to. The episode made two points that were clinchers to me: First - of all the things video games are teaching, they are teaching perseverance. So many of us are convinced that kids don't want to do anything that's hard or that takes a lot of time and has a lot of obstacles. Beating a video game is hard, takes time and has many obstacles to success. The key difference is that players are motivated to play and to win. That is obviously the piece that we are missing when we are teaching. We do not create tasks that students want to succeed at. Some will be motivated by secondary rewards like parental approval, better GPAs with possibilities for better futures, but not everyone is wired that way. That has nothing to do with our "modern high-speed culture." Twas ever thus. Most people need reinforcement while they are working and they need to be able to visualize the goal right in front of them. Video games do that.

The second clincher was this: 10,000 hours. According to this podcast, studies show that students will spend 10,000 hours playing video games during their school careers. Anyone who has read Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers knows that 10,000 hours is what is required to create an expert or a virtuoso. That's the amount of time young Bill Gates spent learning to write programs; it's the amount of time the Beatles spent in dirty German dance clubs learning to become a band; it's the time Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan needed to become who they are. So like it or not, are students are becoming experts, and the problem is that we don't know at exactly what yet.

Another important element, which I picked up from a book called What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning and Literacy by James Paul Gee is that despite the stereotype of the lonely, isolated nerd, gaming at its best is intensely social. First of all, many games, especially online games require one to enter a milieu, adopt an identity and interact with others. Right away, the gamer is performing critical learning and synthesis functions, taking information about the environment and the persons one finds in that environment and transforming the data into tasks and choices. This is higher-order learning, and the learning increases. Moreover, one can work cooperatively with other players, or learn about cheats, shortcuts and easter eggs from other players. And most experienced players don't mind helping out novices, and teaching them how to avoid rookie mistakes. This is exactly the kind of cooperative learning that we are trying to implement in school, both because it is an element in workplace preparedness and BECAUSE IT WORKS. Students learn better by teaching and learning from each other.

Game playing transforms the learners relationship with text. As Gee notes, people under 40 don't pick up manuals to learn to play a game, they start playing. And if you pick up the manual before you play, it doesn't make sense. After you have some expertise, the text starts to make sense. So it is with reading. For a 14-year-old to pick up a 19th century novel makes no sense. The entire environment is foreign, and it works by rules the reader has not yet learned. How much more sense it would make in cooperation with an integrated course which included social studies which laid the groundwork for the novel and made acquisition of both texts more comprehensible and enjoyable.

I'm not saying that schools should buy video games with educational content pasted in to Make Learning More Fun. What I'm trying to say is that we need to understand how it is that students are becoming willing and enthusiastic learners for thousands of hours without coercion or compulsion, and use those discoveries to make our students into motivated learners, without regard to external rewards and punishments.

Here's an example: Learning is more engaging when it's embedded in narrative. I'm not saying everyone should teach literature. We English teachers have made the teaching of reading into a stunningly boring process by dissecting the beast, tossing the juicy meat of storytelling away and forcing students to chew on the gristle of literary devices and "authorial voice" and sociological interpretation and a whole lot of rubbish. So don't look to us to help. Here's an example. You have to teach trig. You have to. And as you begin to draw charts of sines and cosines, the students ask "why do we have to learn this?" and you get pulled down that boring road.

What would happen if you never mentioned trig, but simply started with a blood-spattered crime site, one which required you to figure out from the angle of the spatter on the wall, exactly where the bullet impact had taken place. What if you arrived at trig inductively from a narrative, rather than introducing the narrative AFTER the boring bits. Suddenly the "boring" bits become a means to an interesting end, and I would bet that students would breeze through for the opportunity to solve a murder.

That's just one example of what we learn about learning from gaming, and I for one will need more time and study to glean what I can. But I know that I need to start now.

A lot of real smart people have given a lot more thought than I have to this, and one of the most inspiring is Jane McGonigal, as you can see in this TED talk:



In the interest of full disclosure, there are educators, such as Ali Carr-Chellman, seen below, who believe in the actual use of video gaming in instruction, for the specific purpose of re-engaging young men who have become disengaged or even absent from school, a observable trend over the last 40 years. This is a more localized application of the concept, but may be of specific interest to some of my fellow teachers:



I've been kicking and screaming about kids playing video games instead reading Hawthorne for many years now. I'm convinced now that the video games are not the problem, but the way I've presented Hawthorne; and that, moreover, the solution is found in a discerning analysis of what it is that makes those games so compelling.

Heisenberg comes to English Class

I know you all recognize this diagram as a demonstration of the Uncertainty Principle, a concept which guides my life, especially before 9:00 AM and my second cup of coffee.

It is true, I can qualify as a genuine Vague Scientist who spouts science stuff he heard on NPR which neither he nor the radio reporter really understands. And while I cannot wrap my brain around the mathematics of Uncertainty (you can click the picture to expand it and read it more easily), the essential metaphoric truth of it is crystal clear to anyone who has spent any time constructing or deconstructing narrative, to wit: The act of observing something changes the nature of the thing observed. (It also states that you can know where something is going and how fast, but never know both exactly at the same time. This applies to my students most of the time.)

Teachers reading this know where I'm going. I'm being observed this week. And being pre-tenured (I prefer that term to "non-tenured"), I am being observed three times within a one-week span. This is a strange phenomenon for anyone, like me, who had a substantial career in another professional field. I was an attorney for 18 years, a negotiator, a deal -maker. By and large, I was judged by my results. How many deals did I get closed, how good were the terms for the client (or the company), and how long did it take. I rarely was bird-dogged on the actual process, unless there was a sensitive client or corporate matter which required monitoring by someone in a higher pay grade. But they were not there to judge me on how I did the deal--just to make sure there were no promises made that could not be kept, issues that could not be opened.

From time to time I had bosses who wanted to control how I arrived at the results (as contrasted with assessing the results). The technical term for this kind of boss is clueless controlling jerk. Many lawyers think this is a good way to manage. Many lawyers are idiots. Because personal style has a lot to do with the arts of persuasion and negotiation (and that is what ALL lawyers must do, no matter their specialty). There is no one size fits all. When these situations arose, there was a parting of the ways.

But teaching is different. Because like it or not, we haven't yet really figured out how to assess the results of our work. Oh yes, there are constant "assessments;" tests, quizzes, projects. But we don't really know how to find out if and what anyone has learned--at least not for 25 or 30 years or so, when it's far too late. Real learning, not the mere accumulation of data, is at its heart ineffable.

So to some extent, it is necessary to make some judgments about process. One can fairly assess classroom management, responses between students and teachers, the structure of a learning plan, especially as to whether it is likely to be effective given what we know about students and learning at this point. But then Uncertainty kicks in--and the very presence of the observer alters the behavior of the observed--teacher and students.

And despite our best intentions, aren't teachers today like doctors of the pre-Scientific era? We try our best, but it is still necessary to promise to--at least--do no harm.

Wish me luck.

Teacher as conductor

My principal is very much into technology, and as I believe it is important to our students, I am interested in its application to education as well. I do think that this is a slower process than he would like it to be, because you cannot teach with a technology you have not used to learn with yourself; otherwise you don't understand how learning is done with that technology.

And beside, there is a romantic part of me that imagines that a great teacher needs nothing but a room and students. Not even a book, a piece of chalk--just those selves gathered together.

This video featuring the conductor Benjamin Zander of the Boston Philharmonic is about learning to love classical music. And Zander is an exciting teacher himself, which would make it worth your 20 minutes in any event.



The money line comes 14 minutes in when he says,

"The conductor of an orchestra doesn’t make a sound. He depends for his power on his ability to make other people powerful. My job was to awaken possibility in other people. If their eyes are shining, you know you’re doing it. If they’re not shining you get to ask this question: 'Who am I being that my children’s eyes are not shining?' ”

As an English teacher, I don't dispense information. I teach process. I try and impart good ways to do something the student already (sort of) knows how to do--but in order for that to be effective, I must create passion. I need to remember that Monday morning when I go back to my classroom, whether it's filled with gadgets or a bare room. I need to be in the passion business.