Thoughts on Ed Tech, Technology and Attention

I just came back from an interesting technology forum (a Massachusetts Superintendent's Forum on Transforming Teaching & Learning with Technology). There's a number of thoughts I have from the conference, but the first thing I wanted to blog from it was some thoughts on attention and technology that sprung both from the content and the form of the event.

Early in the conference, we went over some of the new National Education Technology Plan, in particular, the need to focus less on content (which changes too fast anyway, the reasoning goes), and more on creativity, collaboration, critical thinking and research, which will be the key to creating the highly adaptable citizens and employees we'll need in the future. All of this strikes me as true, although not in any fundamental way different from the what much older reformers (think Dewey) have had to say about skills vs. knowledge, which means valid and interesting objections to those theories that have been raised by some (think E.D. Hirsch) probably apply to this as well.

The first presenter, a superintendent of a school district that's done a lot of work to put technology front-and-center, talked about the importance of the shift from direct instruction to more collaborative models to support these goals. Much was said about the mountains of information created and consumed every minute on the internet and how obsolete modes of instruction couldn't cut it anymore. I was struck, as many participants at ed conferences before me surely have been, by the irony of the fact that I was sitting at a session that was, in fact, two hours of direct instruction hearing about how direct instruction was obsolete.

Looking around the room, I thought about us as a group of learners: the group consisted of superintendents, principals, technology coordinators, and teachers. I'd say about 1 in 3 or 1 in 4 people there had an iPad or a laptop out. A similar number had a smartphone on the desk in front of them, a number of which beeped and chirred during the event (though none actually rang). Of the screens in front of me, I saw only one that was engaged in notetaking the whole time, the rest all wandered to emails or other distractions at some point.

From what I could see, I was the only person actively taking notes with pen and paper. I'd actually run to CVS to buy a new pad of paper before the conference, knowing that I can't really focus in a big room without something to write on. With my pen and paper in hand, I was thoroughly engaged through and through, writing notes both on things I thought useful and things I found frustrating (I was frustrated by inane things, like the fact that a presenter bungled the definition of virtualization and also by substantive things, like a video we were shown of a group of students taking several minutes to do a task on linked iPads that could have been done in 30 seconds with poster and markers). At the front of my notepad I kept a list of useful references or concepts I wanted to look up later to learn about. When something a presenter said set off a spark of an idea for me about something I wanted to do at our school, I immediately sketched the idea on my paper. When it was time for Q&A, I had something to ask each presenter. After the presentation, I went up to talk further with the presenters, took down names and emails, and made plans to try to make further connections in the future. I came back to school energized and with a clear list of action items based on the connections I'd made at the conference. All of this is as it should be.

Which is to say is that I know how to sit at a lecture in a conference and get something useful out of it. On another day, I might be writing that we should have had a more collaborative structure at the forum -- that we should have had BOFs break off, or at least some small group work or paired conversations -- surely educators know how to do such things. There are lots of kinds of work for which this would probably be more useful and it may be this would have benefited some of the people at this forum as well. However, this conference was really about sharing best practices and showing what's possible, about disseminating information to people who are in a position to do something useful with it. Given that goal, direct instruction actually made a lot more sense than something more collaborative would have.

Given that direct instruction was the chosen format -- and I think direct instruction is actually a good format far more often than progressive educators tend to admit -- the skills I learned in school for learning from direct instruction -- how to take notes, how to keep my mind engaged even when I'm a little bored, how to maximize the usefulness of what I'm hearing for me -- those skills all played a key role in me having a useful 2 hours. I imagine those skills serve lots of people well in their professional life -- after all, lots of professions require learning at every level, and lots of learning happens through lectures and conferences.

That said, for the professionals around me, as for all of us, I think, the technology in their hands actually presented a real challenge to their learning. There was no one off-task the entire time -- these were generally people at the top of their field -- but lots of people were off task for good parts of the presentation, and there was far more rudeness (chatting, beeping technology, etc.) than I would have expected. It was hard not to think that technology was eroding our ability to learn from one another effectively.

I know that, for me, my decision not to break out my laptop was crucial to my engagement in the conference. Had I had a laptop, I would have immediately started writing the emails when I had an idea for a connection I wanted to make, I would have looked up links to new software the moment I heard about it, I might even have installed and tested that software out there on the spot, all of which sounds like "engagement" but in fact would have distracted me and ultimately disengaged me. What's more, I would have checked the New York Times to see if France had started bombing in Libya or if they'd made any headway on the reactors in Japan and, had it turned out that something had happened, I would have read the articles in the entirety, not wanting to miss out on the events of the world. And that's just the distractions I would have initiaited myself: I also would have been receiving emails and instant messages from people who needed help with tech at school, from friends and family updating me with photos of little ones or plans for dinner, and so on.

When I imagine our teenagers faced with these same challenges, it is, frankly, terrifying. When I think that average class times are somewhere around 45 minutes in many schools, I wonder where on earth they are going to learn focus. One solution would be to just eliminate the two hour lecture format from the world, but I'm not sure that's optimal for reasons I've already mentioned.

People talk about technology as if the key to mastering it is using it more, as if we need to make sure our kids have lots of experience in front of screen to be prepared for "21st century jobs," but I don't for a second think that's true. I would love a chance to survey top programmers (the people who actually do master technology) to learn more about their habits. I highly doubt that they spend more time on facebook, or playing video games, or balancing three chats and two emails while working, than the rest of us do. My guess is that they work hard to find ways to fight distraction. I'm also guessing that they have an ability to focus that they may well have learned somewhere other than just coding -- I wouldn't be surprised to find that good programmers include a higher-than-average number of musicians or painters or readers than the rest of the population.

When I think back to the educational plan's learning objectives: creativity, collaboration, critical thinking and research, only research involves computers in a fundamental way. There, it seems, learning to evaluate and understand digital resources has to play a key role in what we teach our kids. Knowing the difference between this and this is vitally important for every adult, and schools need to give kids experience with both the good and the bad and help them learn the difference. But for the other skills -- creativity, collaboration, and critical thinking -- technology can be as much a hindrance as a help if not more. That's not to say I want to purge all the computers from our classrooms, but to say I don't think tech itself is the key to success in an increasingly tech-laden world. We will need students who know how to use a computer, sure. But, more importantly, we will need students who have more self-discipline, more ability to focus, and more ability to tune out distractions than students of the past. The road to those abilities may have more to do with music and art classes than it does with iPads and smartboards.

Stupid commas (if lisp ran the world...)

Does it give me away as a programmer that I think commas would be much easier to teach if we used parentheses instead?

And am I peculiar in my absolute conviction that commas basically are parentheses, where any nested parentheses (commas inside commas or commas at a sentence edge) get collapsed and disappear?

Here's a student sentence I'm giving feedback on:

Although Desdemona has no thoughts for anyone but her beloved Othello, he mistakes the kindness she naturally bestows on everyone, as a particular fondness for another man, Cassio.

In my mind, there are two acceptable revisions of the basic comma error in this sentence:

Although Desdemona had no thoughts for anyone but her beloved Othello, he mistakes the kindness she naturally bestowed on everyone as a particular fondness for another man, Cassio.

or

Although Desdemona has no thoughts for anyone but her beloved Othello, he mistakes her kindness, which she naturally bestows on everyone, as a particular fondness for another man, Cassio.

But what I'm really seeing in my head is that this:

((Although Desdemona had no thoughts for anyone but her beloved Othello) he mistakes the kindness she naturally bestowed on everyone) as a particular fondness for another man (Cassio))

should become this:

((Although Desdemona had no thoughts for anyone but her beloved Othello) he mistakes the kindness (which she naturally bestowed on everyone) as a particular fondness for another man (Cassio))

or this:

((Although Desdemona had no thoughts for anyone but her beloved Othello) he mistakes the kindness she naturally bestowed on everyone as a particular fondness for another man (Cassio))

Of course, as with lisp, this would be much clearer with a little indentation

(
 (Although  Desdemona had no thoughts for anyone but her beloved Othello)
he  mistakes the kindness
 (which she naturally bestowed on everyone)
as a  particular fondness for another man
 (Cassio)
)

Is it just experience with lisp that makes me think this way, or does this go on in everyone's head?

Thoughts on Lesson Planning

Like many teachers I know, I don't really write lesson plans.

Let me rephrase that, I have historically written plans for one of three reasons:

1. When someone was going to review a lesson with me (i.e. a supervisor would observe or a team would look at one as a model or to critique).
2. When co-planning (i.e. when another teacher was going to be using my plans the next day.
3. When required to (i.e. during my student teaching when I had to hand in all lesson plans).

When teaching on my own, writing individual lesson plans has never risen on my priority list above, say, working on something that students would be given, tweaking a project description, assessing student work, or working on longer-term planning.

That said I've certainly taught classes that would have been better if I'd taken even another 10-15 minutes to plan better. And of course I reinvent the wheel all the time, whereas if I had better plans I could theoretically be revising and revisiting rather than redoing and reinventing.

So the question this raises for me is how can I force myself to do those extra 10-15 minutes of labor to plan better and document what I'm doing for posterity without recreating the lesson plan templates of my student teaching that I find so overwhelming and droll.

Part of the problem, I believe, is that most of teaching I hold in my head. If I walk into class with a poem and three questions in my hand, I'm bringing much more: an idea about which vocabulary words will cause trouble and how I will pre-teach them in a drill, a sense of which lines are most difficult and how I will guide the whole class through an understanding of the difficult lines before setting them up with the (easier) rest of the poem for independent work. I also likely have a template to how my day goes -- we start with a drill, then have a Q/A with the whole class, then do small guided group or individual work followed by prolonged work and a wrap-up. If I take the time to explain it, there's a whole plan in there, but all I actually need are the questions and the poem, maybe with some underlining to indicate words to pre-teach.

Currently, many such templates mostly exist in my head, but I could probably benefit from writing them down. Templates would describe certain kinds of flow that could, over time, be refined, revised, and perfected. I could also come to notice those tasks for which I don't have a clear template and then start to chip away at the question of how best to teach them. For a given level and subject area, there may only be 5 or 6 templates over all: all classes fit those moulds. An individual lesson plan would then consist of basically a set of parameters that would slot into the template.

The list of parameters would likely take up no more than half a page, which is about the length of plans when I make them now (actually, now my usual length is a sticky). The beauty of something so short is that it is more readable and more adaptable for future years. Even when I have full lesson plans now, the very thought of reading a multi-page document is overwhelming. Having an ever-evolving description of a few templates in addition to sticky-length plans that reference those templates seems like something a more-effective version of me could actually do.

What's more, I have a feeling that both of these kinds of documents (templates and parameters) would be more useful to other teachers than full lesson plans. One frustration with trying to use other people's plans off the internet is that inevitably there are too many accidental factors that may or may not fit your class (class length, logistical rituals, etc.). Giving someone just the parameters -- here's the objective, the problem set, etc. -- would let them plug it into their own template for good teaching.

On the other hand, if what you're looking for is good instructional practices, then you want just the reverse -- a template that you can slot your own content into.

So this is my new idea. In programming, this is very common -- essentially I'm talking about separating data from display, or separating the model from the view. So the question that now occurs to me is: who else has had this idea? What names have they given it? Do there already exist books full of templates and parameters?

The other question of course is about the risk of abstraction. I am often guilty of the sin of over-abstraction in programming, and is it possible that templates, in the end, would be too leaky? I'm not sure, but I'm going to try to find out -- my goal for the end of this year is to start writing up templates and parameter sets. We'll see where it gets me.

Champion Teachers misteaching grammar

Inspired by the New York Times article a few weeks ago, I started reading Doug Lemov's Teach like a Champion in spite of a title so bad I can hardly bear to repeat it here. I very much like the idea of a teaching book that focuses on the mechanics of teaching, rather than on higher-order ideas that so often can become muddled or meaningless in practice.

Completely incidental to the points the text is making (which are content-neutral), I've already found two examples of "good" grammar teaching that are rather distressing to me.

In the first, the answer is right but the definition wrong, in the second, only the definition, which is wrong, is given.

1. Definition of a Subject

The task is to identify the subject and the sentence is: "My mother was not happy." The student (A) in the example guesses "happy." The teacher asks for clarification from another student (B) and gets the definition that "The subject is what the sentence is about." The teacher says this is correct and then asks student A what the subject is again. Student A replies "mother." End example.

This is an example of the rule "No opt out," where students always are forced to give the right answer, even if they at first get the answer wrong. You might think that the teacher above was just going easy on student B to move the lesson along, but the next section of the book, "Right is right," is about how important it is not to pretend students are right when they're not, so I think we can safely assume that Lemov thinks this answer is right.

If you're wondering why the definition is wrong, it's easiest to just give some counterxamples:

1. It is raining. Grammatical subject: "it." Subject according to above definition: rain.
2. "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." Grammatical subject: "it." Subject according to the above definition: marriage.

2. Definition of a Noun.

The task is simply to define a noun. Lemov gives the example of a student who says "A person, place or thing." The champion teacher does not accept this answer but prompts a more thorough response, until given "A person, place, thing or idea."

The importance of the idea clause here is telling, because it is the vagueness of the concept "idea" that has let so many educated people believe this definition for so long. It is, after all, entirely obvious that not all nouns are people, places or things. However,if you consider that things like "liberty," "truth," and "proof" are ideas, conceptual entities if you will, then it seems like this definition might just do.

The trouble is many nouns are clearly actions. In fact, we have suffixes that let you turn verbs into nouns, thus creating newly minted nouns out of any action we please. Here are a few very simple cases of nouns that are not people, places, things or ideas:

"Destruction" as in "The hurricane resulted in devastating, wide-spread destruction."
"Liberty" as in "I am not at liberty to say."

How would I define "noun," you may ask. I teach students the following simple procedure for identifying a noun. It is not perfect, but it is close, and it doesn't include any out and out lies: "If for a given word X you can say "the X" but not "very X", then X is a noun." Every native speaker can apply my rule perfectly every time.

Pesky taboos

Quote of the day: "Está jodido", said by an earnest Spanish 2 student describing a character in a movie about to be carted off by fascists...

Meaning and usage learned correctly from an Orishas song he studied earlier in the semester. The description of the character was also correct. He just missed the pesky detail of register... It's always interesting to see the kind of Spanish students speak (and the kind of errors they make) when you give them authentic sources.

This is one of many words that students would typically never encounter in a textbook but which they would likely hear within a few days of arrival in a Spanish-speaking country (presuming they make contact with other youth, that is). Not all these kinds of words are swear words, they also include simple phrases like "mande", "vale", "venga" or "anda."

"Yo estoy" or "Estoy yo": word order, subject pronouns, and the sticky question of whether all text books take the wrong approach?

In my lovely grammar-book-in-progress, I make a point to put the subject pronouns after the verbs in all verb charts: hablo (yo) / hablas (tú) / habla (él), etc.

I do this for several reasons:

• To break the speaker's habit (from English) of looking for subject pronouns before the verb


• Because it is perfectly common in Spanish, as evidenced by the y-terminal "yo" forms (doy/estoy/voy/soy) which originated from "do yo / esto yo / vo yo / so yo/ etc.


• To help avoid confusion when enclitic object pronouns are introduced, since "me quieres tú" is easier to parse if you're used to "quieres (tú)" than if you're used to "(tú) quieres"


• Presenting "estoy yo" suggests, unconsciously, that the verb form ("estoy") determines the pronoun ("yo"), rather than that the pronoun comes first and the verb form second. I think this subtly helps prepare students for the fact that Spanish usually omits the subject pronouns, meaning that the verb form is the only source of subject information.

I consider these reasons sound. The only reason I can see for doing it the other way ("yo hablo / tú hablas / etc.") is that it will allow transfer from English. However, I see this as an anti-reason, and I wonder if teaching that focuses on drilling "yo amo / tú amas / etc" encourages other, incorrect transfer, such as "*ella hablas español" (there, the student has transfered both word order and the conjugation from English).

Given this, I'm sad to say I've never seen a Spanish text book that presented the subject pronouns as I do. Has anyone else? If not, are there reasons I'm not thinking of why teaching beginners to say "tú quieres" is a good idea?

Spanish spelling errors in English, and viceversa!

One of the things I focus on in my Spanish teaching is phonetics -- I focus there partly because understanding the phonetics of Spanish will allow my students to have a better accent, but largely because I believe a better grasp of the Spanish phonetic system enables students to understand authentic Spanish much better.

I'm often excited when I see students make the very errors I try to warn them off of in their interpretation assessments, because it lets me reinforce that the phonetic patterns I'm teaching are real (they often seem to only half-believe me). For example, when a student transcribes a Spanish "r" as a "t", "d" or "l", and when they transcribe an intervocalic Spanish "d" as a "v", it's a great opportunity for me to talk about what the Spanish "r" and "d" actually sound like (the "d" being transcribed as "v" is particularly interesting -- the English phoneme that matches the sound is spelled "th", of course, but students know "th" is unavailable as a Spanish phoneme so they hear another voiced fricative -- "v" -- in its place, until, that is, they've internalized the pattern that intervocalic "d"s are like our voiced thorns).

Anyway, today in my geek blog reading, I read the following in a Spanish-speaking hacker's blog:

Benchmarking software is not an easy thing to do. It may look trivial, but it requires a bast amount of time and effort when you want to do it right.

Notice the "b" for a "v" there. What that tells me is that Alvaro almost certainly learned the word "vast" orally, rather than through writing, since his spelling is otherwise impeccable, and that, in spite of being literate in English, he is still hearing English with Spanish phonemes. Which is to say, he hears the voiced labiodental fricative ("v") as a voiced bilabial fricative (β), which he understands as the intervocalic allophone of the phoneme /b/.

Of course, one possible reading of this is to say that Alvaro appears to be a fully functional English speaker who has not internalized the English phonetic system... which suggests that the typical Spanish student who does not understand that, for example, the Spanish phoneme /d/ encompasses something very like our "d" as well as an allophone that is exactly like our phoneme /ð/, which we spell "th", may not be in such a bad situation.

Nonetheless, I think it does make a difference... a student who hears the phrase "de dónde eres" as "devonderes" is surely at a disadvantage (and that error is not that atypical in my experience, provided you provide students with actual examples of Spanish speech, and not with typical American-Non-Native-Speaker-Spanish-Teacher pronunciations.

D.A.R.E., fear-mongering, and a question about identity fear

So when I was in high school, it was a cliche to make fun of D.A.R.E. as a fear-mongering, ineffective program. I don't actually remember if I ever went through the D.A.R.E. program, so I can't comment on whether it was or was not effective or fear-mongering as a high school program, but I had an experience today where I was accosted by a D.A.R.E. representative on the street in my role as parent (I was with Grace), and I learned that our local D.A.R.E. folks were involved in a whole new kind of fear-mongering: working off of the fear of medical emergencies (and, oddly, identity theft).

What the D.A.R.E. representative tried to sell me on was not (as I would have guessed) donating to D.A.R.E. Instead, she wanted to sell me, for a mere forty dollars, an identity card for Grace that would include medical information about her and give permission to treat her in case of emergency. She showed me a sample card and explained that it was an "official" something-or-other. She then reassured me that the card wouldn't have Grace's full name on it, so if it fell into the wrong hands, I wouldn't have to worry.

This raised a number of questions for me. Some of them rhetorical, some genuine (actually, maybe they're all both rhetorical and genuine):

1. If a child were to show up in an emergency with a treatable, life-threatening condition and no guardian present, would they deny treatment? I somehow feel like they wouldn't (it's also hard for me to imagine just how Grace could end up in such a scenario, but I understand that in order to get into the proper D.A.R.E. mind-set I am to imagine the worst of all scenarios in the worst of all worlds...)
2. Is there in fact a subset of plastic-like-identity cards that are "official"? What makes them so?
3. Why would I be afraid of someone finding out my daughter's name? Aren't names public information? Is there anything scary that can happen to her with her name known that couldn't happen to her with her name unknown? (I've heard the name worry come up in a web context. A number of students have told me they're allowed to have facebooks/myspaces/etc., so long as they don't use their full name, or their last name, or what have you. I presume that the fear behind this is that someone will see their picture, decide to stalk them, and then, knowing their name, be able to track down their home address, etc. Are there other things about names that I should be afraid of that I don't know?)
4. Why is D.A.R.E. selling medical-alert-ish identity cards? (Note: I couldn't find anything about this on their website, nor could I find the cards -- is it possible the D.A.R.E. table in Arlington center was actually entirely a scam? seems unlikely...)
   

If anyone knows the answer to these questions, I'd be interested to hear them.