findingDulcinea

Examples of Innovative Teaching Practices

 Since September 2006, we've been curating content and creating innovative tools to help educators integrate the Internet into their curriculum, and teach students how to use the Internet effectively.

A barrier to the wide adoption of our products is the status quo - textbooks and other crude tools from the 19th century that remain the primary method by which students learn. We've attended dozens of education conferences in the past two years, and have met thousands of passionate educators who are determined to bring about their own version of education reform - one that is focused on students. The goal of these efforts is to create a new system of education that is relevant to and engages students, addresses them as individuals, lets them develop their passions, and encourages the development of skills they'll need to succeed when they graduate, not the skills their parents needed when they graduated 30 years ago.

With the explosive growth in social media, it has become easier to interact with these educators on a daily basis, rather than at once-a-month conferences. The number of solid examples of innovative teaching practices we're seeing is growing exponentially. Here, we'll share just a few that we've come across recently.

In a blog post aptly titled, "Own It," Andy Marcinek writes of how he assigned his English 101: College Composition course what he termed, "not a standard, written essay, but a focused collection of media that they will use to inform, to persuade, to challenge or defend." He gave them a simple writing prompt, and then had them gather links, images, videos, and other media to synthesize, with his guidance, into a final presentation. Andy explains, "I am making an attempt to harness all the great resources we have available at the moment. I feel it is my moral obligation as a teacher to open up all learning avenues to them, not hide them." He then provides a new prompt, this one for his fellow educators: his work is "not the pinnacle of classroom innovation. It is a start. It is an idea that I hope you steal, remix and make your own, for your own students. Don’t we owe them that?"

One educator who feels Marcinek's sense of obligation to students is Lisa Neilsen, Technology Innovation Manager in NYC's public schools. In "Advice for Choosing Pages, Groups or Profiles When Using Facebook for Education," Neilsen gives advice and specific examples of educators who are using Facebook to teach, collaborate with students, and communicate with students, parents and others in the community. Nielsen writes that, "in schools where we’re doing what is right for kids, you see engaged youth who use the filter between their ears to determine how to best access information. Students are empowered rather than restricted from using personally owned digital devices in school.  At these schools they understand that people, not tools, have behavior.  Fortunately, more and more often these schools that mirror the real world are starting to crop up." 

One of the exemplars that Neilsen cites is Michelle Luhtala, whose library program at New Canaan High won the ALA's 2010 National School Library Media Program of the Year. Luhtala maintains separate personal and professional profiles on Facebook, as well as a Page for her library. In response to Nielsen's post, Luthala explains how friending students through her professional profile enabled her to, among other things, (i) get student input for the post, at 10 pm on a Friday night, (ii) collaborate with two groups of students who decided to enter a video contest at the last minute, and (iii) coordinate a trip by a large group of students to Philadelphia, for a Model UN.

Another teacher who is a living example of effective and innovative practices  is Pulaski (WI) High School English teacher Kim Noe, recent winner of the "Golden Apple Award" from the Green Bay (WI) Chamber of Commerce. According to the Green Bay Press Gazete, Noe's philosophy when it comes to technology is that students, “don’t turn it off very often, so why not tap into it?" The Gazette reports that, in Noe's classes, "tasks like memorizing vocabulary words are accompanied by related YouTube videos," students receive MP3 files with feedback to essays, and authors visit via Skype. Further, Noe chats with students every night on Facebook; she says, “I have found Facebook is one of the greatest tools to reach kids I could imagine.” How do the students react to Noe's practices? Her co-principal, Dan Slowey, tells the Gazette, “it becomes kind of a small, close-knit family in those classrooms.”

The last "practices" I want to note were not actually put into place by a classroom teacher; they were suggested by Ashley Appozardi, a student teacher who is observing classes. She sat in on the class of a teacher reviewing fractions, in the wake of a test where students had not performed well. In Azzopardi's view, the teacher:

"- Moved through the questions very quickly

- Did not give the students enough time to answer her questions

- Did not rub off the writing on the whiteboard once moved onto the next question

- Did not provide much praise to the students

- Did not allow the students to write anything in their books

- Did not allow the students to use concrete materials, and

- Did not use the interactive whiteboard."

Azzopardi believes that the students learned little from the lesson.

She echoes the calls from Marcinek and Nielsen to build upon the innovative work of other educators, as she writes, "we need to acknowledge that our students have changed radically. The educational system wasn’t designed to teach today’s students....Adapting materials to the language of this generation has already been done successfully, in particular the creation of games which help teach the content, even the most serious....I can only imagine how different that lesson could have been if the interactive whiteboard had been turned on. Instead of the students looking out the window, hoping not to be the one chosen to answer a confusing question next, they could have been excited, engaged, learning and participating in a visual and interactive math lesson."

These four educators are a very small sample of the passionate educators from all over the world who are beginning to offer up examples of innovative, and effective, teaching practices for educators to follow.

Mark E. Moran
CEO

 

In the comments, please offers your own examples that you invite others to "steal, remix and make [their] own."

You Can’t Teach Curiosity... But You Can Nourish It

“It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.”

- Albert Einstein

What does learning look like? Educators have been asking themselves this question for decades. How much time should young children spend playing and exploring and how much time should teachers dedicate to direct instruction?

In a recent DoubleX article, writer and developmental scientist Alison Gopnik explained how parental anxiety and government policies are driving schools towards a more rigid curriculum for pre-schoolers.  She argues that more direct instruction is not what young children need.

Gopnik cited two studies published in Cognition, a science journal; one from the University of California Berkeley, which she helped author, and another from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

In the MIT study, a teacher showed a group of 4-year olds a new toy with four tubes, saying, “I'm going to show you how my toy works. Watch this!” She then showed them how to pull on a tube and make the toy squeak. For a second group of students, Gopnik showed the students a new toy, and said she had “just found it.” The teacher acted surprised when she pulled a tube and it let out a squeak.

The group of children given direct instruction played with only the one tube that squeaked, while the students who weren’t given direct instruction played with the toy longer and discovered many of the instrument’s hidden functionalities.

In Gopnik’s own study at U-C Berkeley, a researcher showed a new toy to 4-year olds and performed many actions, such as pushing buttons and pulling rings in different sequences. Some of these actions caused the toy to play music and some didn’t. With another group of 4-year olds, the researcher acted more clueless, saying things like, “Wow, look at this toy. I wonder how it works?” The group of students exposed to the “clueless” researcher were more likely to find the simplest way of making the toy play music, whereas the other group copied the more elaborate sequence modeled by the teacher.

 According to Gopnik, the study demonstrates that “[w]hile learning from a teacher may help children get to a specific answer more quickly, it also makes them less likely to discover new information about a problem and to create a new and unexpected solution.”

Many other educators have written that, for authentic learning experiences, teachers must stop regarding themselves as experts and students as vessels into which they pour their knowledge. As John Seely Brown, consultant and former chief scientist at Palo Alto Research Center, asserts, the teacher must no longer be “the sage on stage.”  Seely Brown argues that pedagogy is transitioning towards participatory, passion-based learning, where students are encouraged to be curious, to solve problems and to discover their own interests. 

 This transition requires a significant shift in the teaching dynamic.

 Jeff Utecht, an education blogger at The Thinking Stick, explains, “We push when an effective education system is a pull system. Students need to pull education towards them around passion, curiosity, and imagination.” Or as Dan Pink, a former speechwriter to Al Gore turned motivational speaker and author, might say, students need to develop intrinsic motivation, rather than chasing “sweeter carrots.”

One way teachers can motivate students is to weigh their words well in advance, during the lesson planning stage, says Angela Maiers, a former teacher and education consultant.  “Often we think we are modeling skills and strategies for students when we are really just telling and assigning. The few minutes we spend thinking through our language can impact the flow and dynamics of the instruction.”

But changing the way teachers speak to students and enabling students to participate more directly in lessons doesn’t mean lowering expectations, it simply means changing our view of what learning looks like.

Returning to the example of pre-school students, Elizabeth Blackwell, a blogger for the parenting site Babble.com, grew worried when she compared her daughter’s preschool activities to those of children at other schools who had homework each night. She was concerned because her daughter couldn’t yet write the alphabet. But one day her daughter brought home a story she had dictated to her teacher. Ultimately, Blackwell came to realize that the story represented not only her daughter's imagination, but also an important phase in the reading process. 

 “Think of what it means from a child’s viewpoint: An adult is paying attention, writing down what I say … That’s a powerful incentive for learning,” Blackwell quoted Jerlean Daniel, deputy executive director of the National Association for the Education of Young Children, as saying.

 (See also “What Playtime Means to Educators”)

 Elizabeth Devine, a Social Studies teacher at Hall High School in Hartford Conn., teaches passion-based learning in her classroom. In one course, students learn about human rights issues by creating action projects where they try to effect a significant local or global change. “It’s absolutely a challenge but if we give them suggestions, and guidance along the way, consult with them about what they’re doing, they generally come up with some really fabulous ideas.” Devine listed several examples of her student projects, from developing mentorships at lower-income schools to raising awareness about depression and suicide prevention, to helping curb domestic abuse and violence.

At the School of the Future, a progressive Grade 6-12 school in New York City, history teachers challenge students to ask questions and conduct research like real historians do. Science teachers helped students build a model of New York City that symbolized all of the parts of a human cell. According to Edutopia, “SOF measures the full range of student ability through formative assessments, presentations, exhibitions, and tests that focus on authentic tasks to assess students' skills and knowledge as they relate to real-world endeavors.”

School of the Future has a 98 percent graduation rate – which is all the more impressive given that most of the students at come from poorer families, with 40 percent qualifying for free or reduced-cost lunches.

 Students don’t need to begin their college preparation in pre-school. Instead, students of all ages need teachers need to step back and give them room to grow. Teachers who encourage autonomy, self-direction, and creativity are teaching students skills that will last them a lifetime.

Shannon Firth

Senior Writer

 

Time to Stop Teaching that ".Govs" Can Be Trusted

Sometime in the mid-1990s, someone created a tutorial that said that an important aspect of judging a Web site’s trustworthiness is its top-level domain, such as “.com,” “.edu,” “.org” and “.gov.”

This canard permeates virtually all Web tutorials to this day, and generally says that a Web site run by a government agency, school or organization could be trusted, while a commercial site, or “.com,” is suspect.

Teaching this does more harm than good.

First of all, it's simplistic.While students should understand the concept of Web addresses, the mere fact that something is published on a Web site with a .gov or .edu is now accorded far too much weight in evaluating its accuracy.

When we compiled the SweetSearch site index, we reviewed the entire lists of “.gov,” “.edu” and “.org” Web sites. Most of the “.gov” sites had a level of editorial oversight warranting their blanket inclusion in the index. But the presence of a sea of unaccredited schools meant “.edu” sites needed to be handpicked from the .edu list. And long gone are the days when “.org” meant a site was run by a well-intentioned not-for-profit organization; indeed, the .org index is now spammier than any other.

Further, students may not process much beyond the simplistic point. Debra Gottsleben, a librarian at Morristown (NJ) High School, tells of presenting a demo of the school's powerful databases. Minutes later, she found a student consulting Wikipedia instead. Asked to explain, he said "those databases are .coms, and Wikipedia is a .org, and my teacher says we can't trust .coms."

More importantly, an indispensible aspect to determining the accuracy of information is objectivity, which is often lacking in websites across all domains. In our presentations on teaching Web research skills, we teach that the first questions a student should ask when evaluating a Web site are "Who?" "Why?" and "When?"

When a student instead first asks "what's the top level domain?," it dilutes his analysis of who and why.

An Associated Press article from last week cites the example we've long noted; the presidential biographies on the official White House Website. It says, "White House biographies offer an unusual history lesson. Some are examples of blatant boosterism and outdated scholarship. Others are oddly selective or politically incorrect."

A current White House spokesman told AP that the White House would consider updating these biographies, but no amount of updating will change the "Why" - the site exists to celebrate the service of U.S. presidents, not to put forth a balanced, objective biography that includes a critical examination of presidential shortcomings.

For a more specific example of content on a .gov site being of highly questionable accuracy, read this press release from September 18, 2001 in which the EPA announces that "results from the Agency's air and drinking water monitoring near the World Trade Center and Pentagon disaster sites indicate that these vital resources are safe."

In an earlier blog post, James Sullivan related a lesson he learned while doing research for a profile of American political pamphleteer Anna Ella Carroll.

As Sullivan wrote, a frequently cited source of information on Carroll was the Maryland Women’s Hall of Fame, a page found at the Maryland State Archives’ Web site—a “.gov.”

Carroll’s legacy is her disputed role as the mind behind the Civil War strategy that eventually led to demise of the Confederacy. She was a feminist and suffragette icon for supposedly being denied recognition for a monumental idea based on her gender. However, some respectable resources paint a picture of Carroll as a politically savvy self-promoter, who in all likelihood embellished her claim and manipulated evidence to support it. While we take no position as to the historical accuracy of either of these competing viewpoints, surely a controversial assertion such as this would warrant mention in any biography of Carroll.

Yet the Maryland Women’s Hall of Fame piece ignores this contention, stating simply, “The President and his Cabinet kept her authorship a secret; the public was not to know that the Union plans were devised by not only a civilian, but by a woman.”

Why does this Website publish? In its own words, the Hall of Fame “seeks to honor Maryland women who have made unique and lasting contributions to the economic, political, cultural, and social life of the state and to provide visible models of achievement for tomorrow’s female leaders.” Perhaps Carroll would appear a less admirable role model if viewed as a cunning political mind rather than a repressed strategic genius.

This lesson reinforces the necessity of looking beyond the domain, and viewing potential source bias as a determining factor of Web site credibility, whatever letters its address ends in.

*****

Mark E. Moran

CEO

Want to Empower Students? Expect More of Them

What happens when educators and parents set high expectations for students?

Annie Sullivan was hired to tutor a young Helen Keller, an unruly deaf and blind child. Sullivan raised the expectation for how Helen would behave. In "The Miracle Worker," this leads to a heart-wrenching physical battle. They later reached a breakthrough moment as the teacher spelled a word into the child’s palm. As Helen wrote in her autobiography years later, 

“I knew then that ‘w-a-t-e-r’ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away.”

Keller graduated with honors from Radcliffe College and became a renowned writer and public speaker because a teacher pushed her to recast her challenges from an excuse for poor table manners into “barriers that could be swept away.”

Maya Angelou faced her own barriers as a child. As a result of traumatic incidents, Angelou refused to speak from ages seven to 12. She found solace in poetry, and memorized the work of Edgar Allan Poe, Langston Hughes, Shakespeare and others.

Angelou describes how a teacher, Mrs. Flowers, convinced her to speak:

“She said, ‘You don’t love poetry.’ And it was the cruelest thing I think she could have done. Because she seemed to be taking my only friend. She said, ‘You can’t love poetry. In order to love poetry, you must speak it. You must feel it come across your tongue, through your teeth, over your lips.’ … She was trying to shock me. And one day I went under the house … and I tried poetry. And I had a voice. I had a voice.”

Decades later, that voice was used to read a poem at President Clinton's inauguration.

A similar encounter with a teacher helped create one of the great voices of the past half-century. When James Earl Jones went to high school, he was functionally mute, as a result of a severe stutter he developed at the age of five.

In a 2010 interview with The Daily Mail, Jones called a high school English teacher, Donald Crouch, "'the father of my voice." Crouch challenged Jones to prove that he did not plagiarize a poem by reading it out loud from memory in class. "Which I did. As they were my own words, I got through it," Jones said. Crouch continued to encourage Jones to read out loud every day, and get involved in debates.

For Helen Keller, Maya Angelou and James Earl Jones, Anne Sullivan and Mrs. Flowers and Donald Crouch all were the “one person” that Aimee Mullins says every child needs.

 Mullins is an athlete, model, actress, and motivational speaker, who had her legs amputated below the knee shortly after birth.  In a TED Talk titled "The Opportunity of Adversity," Mullins spoke the hideous synonyms she found in a thesaurus for the word “disabled.” What upset her, she said, weren’t the words themselves, but rather “the values behind the words and how we construct those values.”

 For a child to overcome the low expectations set by labels or value constructs, Mullins said, “all you really need is one person to show you the epiphany of your own power and you’re off. If you  can hand somebody the key to her own power, the human spirit is so receptive, if you…open a door for people at a crucial moment, you are educating them in the best sense. You are teaching them to open doors for themselves."

If empowering students to reach their true potential is the root of education, how do educators achieve it?

Angela Maiers, an educator and author, focuses on the power of words. In "12 Ways to Let People Know They Matter" She writes that if we choose our words wisely, we can help students "stretch their thinking, envision success, and open the door to their true potential."

Steven R. Schrader, a language teacher in Japan, defines empowerment as “helping learners become aware that they can have an impact on their environment, and can exert some control over their circumstances.” Schrader writes that, when we use language to remind young people, especially those marginalized by society, of their potential, we give control over their circumstances back to them.

Children’s Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman has spoken about the powerful effect when students do envision success, exert control over their circumstances, and see the epiphany of their own power.

In a July 2009 interview, she argued that the present state of minority education in the U.S. may be worse than in the days of segregation, asserting that back then,

“We had teachers who had very high expectations....We were going to learn our tables, we were going to learn how to read. And we had this community buffer, because while the external world told us we weren’t important and couldn’t succeed, our parents said it wasn’t so … our teachers said it wasn’t so, our preacher said it wasn’t so, and so we knew it wasn’t so. … And we always were taught that we could change the world, and we had these role models everywhere. That’s missing today for so many of our children.”

Do you have high expectations for your students?

Are you the "one person" students need to learn to open doors for themselves?

Mark E. Moran

Update:

• Two years after I wrote this article, I met Angela Maiers, whose work I had quoted in it.
• I helped Angela launch Choose2Matter, a movement that reflects many of the principles above.
• I was blessed to witness its life changing impact on thousands of educators and students.
• Angela and I recently co-authored an online course that is the one vehicle that conveys all aspects of the most powerful message I have ever heard, and provides advice on adopting strategies included in this post.
• Among other things, it addresses the root cause of bullying and self-harm.
• It also cultures a foster of innovation that transforms #GeniusHour, PBL & other student-centered learning into something that launches a lifetime of learning, growing and changing the world.
• Click here to learn more!