How My Dogs Contribute to Teachers' Professional Learning

Mayer always wants to know what you are doing.

I love dogs. My wife and I have two: an older female named Emma, and a younger male named Mayer. We got both of them from animal shelters, so we don't really know what breeds they are, although it's obvious that Mayer is a pit bull mix, and that Emma has at least a little bit of husky in her. Other than that, it's a mystery. We also don't know much about their history, including their exact ages, since they were each picked up as strays by animal control, without any identification.

Whenever we get a dog, especially from a shelter, we make sure to do as much training with the dog as we can. A friend of ours runs dog training classes, and we very much like her approach, so we take our dogs through her class. They learn to come when called, to drop a toy or bone they are playing with, to be gentle with us and with others, among other important skills. Most importantly, we learn to be consistent and effective with our commands for the dogs, so they are constantly reinforced for behavior we want to encourage (and not for behavior we want to extinguish).

Emma (left) and Amelia (right), who died in 2010.

Every dog responds differently to training. Emma is easily distracted and often stubborn. She will respond to our commands when she feels like it. Mayer, on the other hand, is extremely smart and eager to please. He is very good at figuring out what we want him to do.

We have also had several dogs that we have fostered for various times, up to six months. For each of them, we have to teach them the rules of the house and how to behave. In each case, their training always has the same central idea: marking behavior that we want to encourage and positively reinforcing that behavior with a reward.

Which brings me to my main point in writing this post on an educational technology blog. It's a subtle idea, so follow me closely here:

Teachers are not dogs.

Teachers do not need "training". They need workshops, seminars, hands-on learning, professional development, conference sessions, classes, courses, discussions, meetings, round tables, symposiums, forums, conventions, conversations, colloquiums, interchanges, assemblies, pow-wows, and palavers. (Thank you, thesaurus.com.) They do not need to be trained to behave in certain ways through the use of positive reinforcement.

I think of my dogs every time a teacher asks me, "When will we be trained on this?" or "Are you going to have any more trainings?" The use of that word for professional learning is like nails on a chalkboard for me. I think it demeans my role and the role of the teachers who are doing the learning, by reducing it to a "button-pushing" training: push the right button, get a reward. By changing the language we use, I hope to change perceptions of professional learning, if only in a small way.

Evaluating the Credibility of an Online Source

One of the common requests I get from teachers is for help teaching students how to evaluate the credibility of a website. Luckily, there are lost of resources out there to help with that. One of the best is from Catlin Tucker at her blog: catlintucker.com/2013/06/common-core-evaluating-research-credibility/

It is a Google Form that students use to answer several questions about a website they are considering using as a source in their research. They evaluate things like the author's institutional affiliation, the quality of the writing, any identifiable bias, the quality of cited references, etc. This is a great way to teach students the clues that we all use when deciding whether a web resources is reliable and credible.

SAMR Poster for Classrooms

Here are two posters that I've created for teachers' classrooms in our district. One gives a description of the SAMR levels, along with "ladder questions" to help get from one level to the next. The other gives subject-area examples of tasks and how they might be adapted for each of the four levels in the model. There are examples for English, Math, Science, and Social Science (adapted from edofict.wikispaces.com), and then a general example (taken from Alice Keeler and Sean O'Neil).

They are both Creative Commons licensed, so feel free to use them in your districts if you find them useful.

Download both pages as PDF

What Physics Education Research Has to Say to All Teachers

Last Friday, I attended the eLearning Strategies Symposium, sponsored by CLRN and CUE. The opening keynote speaker was Dr. Eric Mazur, Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Harvard. I had been very familiar with Dr. Mazur's work, not in physics, but in Physics Education Research (PER), though I had not previously seen him speak. (I wrote a little about his book, Peer Instruction, here.) His keynote was titled "Confessions of a Converted Lecturer", and it inspired me to write about how the lessons of PER can and should be applied more widely.

Many of you know that I taught high school physics for sixteen years before taking my current position. (I intend someday to return to teaching physics, so I don't think of myself as an ex-physics teacher.) In that role, I was a member of AAPT, attended a number of their conferences, and followed the journals. In the late 90's, as I was starting my career, Physics Education Research was getting off the ground as well, led by researchers such as Lillian McDermott, Joe Redish, David Hestenes, Richard Hake, Eric Mazur, and many others, mostly taking off from the seminal earlier work of Arnold Arons. PER explored how people learn physics best, and found that it was NOT through listening to lectures. Researchers found that students who were taught through interactive engagement strategies learned more and retained it longer than students who were taught through traditional lectures. These researchers developed more and more tools for turning introductory college lectures into interactive classes. Some of these strategies were developed by Mazur, and published as Peer Instruction. In 2012, several of these teachers and researchers were featured in an NPR interview, to which you can listen here.

The vast majority of PER took place at the college level; I was one of the few high-school teachers to take an interest. Yet, the general results of PER were what high-school teachers have known for years: at best, lecturing produces small and shallow learning results. For deeper, more significant understanding, students need to interact, engage with the content, and learn through inquiry. My physics classes were always taught with inquiry methods, to the point where my students got frustrated with having to discover everything for themselves. ("Why won't you just tell us the answer?") I was able to take many of the tools produced by PER and either use them directly in my classes or adapt them to be more appropriate for high-school students. Most notably, I used McDermott's Tutorials in Introductory Physics; some strategies from Mazur; Ranking Tasks by O'Kuma, Maloney, and Hieggelke; RealTime Physics by Sokolove, Laws, and Thornton; and textbooks by Randy Knight, the first texts written with the results of PER in mind.

Now in my current role as ToSA for Technology and Learning, I find myself learning about 21st-century skills and helping to support the Common Core transition for our district. The more I learn about the skill expectations embedded within CCSS and the instructional shifts required, the more I find myself realizing that they are some of the same ones identified by PER over the last 15 years. CCSS, at its most basic, is about having students learn from texts (broadly understood) rather than from teachers. This is inquiry-based learning, and it's not just for science classes any more. Teachers in all subject areas are expected to guide their students in examining materials and drawing their own conclusions: constructivism writ large.

Creative Commons licensed image from MIT OCW
ocw.mit.edu/high-school/physics/

To which, PER says, "It's about time!"

Dr. Mazur's keynote speech from last Friday will be posted on the eLearns.org website shortly. When it is available, I highly recommend that you take some time to watch it. There is some physics in the talk, but don't focus on that. Focus on the lessons for education at all levels, in all disciplines, that Physics Education Research can provide.

Instructional Technology in Common Core

Over the last few weeks, I've been assisting with Common Core PD for our Science, Social Science, and Electives teachers. The main idea I've been trying to communicate is that instructional technology and use of digital resources are explicitly required by Common Core Anchor and Literacy Standards. Our current set of standards do not mention instructional technology; my guess is that the next set of standards that comes out in 20 or 25 years will not mention instructional technology either, because it will be simply assumed that students will be using the tools they have. But CCSS includes expectations that students will be able to identify and evaluate digital resources, and then create and publish their own products using technological tools.

The best resource I have found for investigating instructional technology in CCSS comes from the Fresno, California, County Office of Education. Their slick and well-designed Common Core Resource site includes a page on Technology, and provides a CCSS/Technology crosswalk, a matrix of expected technological skills for students from K through 12th, National Education Technology Standards (NETS) profiles for students of different age ranges, a Rigor and Relevance Framework that includes technology-rich products, and links to California Technology Assistance Project (CTAP) Training Modules and Mobile Learning Resources.

If you're looking to investigate instructional technology in CCSS, your first stop should be the Fresno County Office of Education website.