by Mary Worrell
“How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” – E.M. Forster
That quote from E.M. Forster seems to grow in its relevance as my years as an educator roll over. Each year I discover a new angle of it, finding more to think about and laugh about and worry about. My short but fulfilling time in the Master of Arts in Educational Technology program at Michigan State University has been one of those experiences to give me pause and make me question and reshape everything I know about learning. One might expect to leave a graduate program spouting off the many new bits of knowledge digested during courses. However, I am leaving with more questions than answers and I am proud of this. I am proud of the questions I asked myself on this journey and how many times my courses made me stop dead in my intellectual tracks and consider aspects of my teaching practice I thought I knew and understood.
Teachers should remain learners. I thought I had been a learner, questioning and being open-minded to change, but my MAET courses pushed me to go deeper down this path as a learner and I have come out on the other side a better teacher and person for it.
Becoming a student again confronted me with a lot about myself I would rather forget, but the time gave me a chance to shed the thick layer of expert bias that had accrued and to identify with my students more. I am leaving this program questioning more than ever before, but being confident in my ability to seek the answers and comfortable with the uncertainty and the ground that is shifting beneath our feet as educators. I am like those sky scrapers in Japan, set on flexible foundations, prepared to weather the earthquakes and still remain standing for the next rumble.
…as a teacher
I am often the first to promote online learning, blog reading, tweeting and other digital networking to teacher colleagues. When colleagues ask “where do you find these links?” my answer is often “Twitter, of course.” However, in recent months I have scaled back the level of my own networking to regain touch with myself as a teacher. During many of my MAET courses, I was confronted with theory and research that suggested, more often than not, that I was doing it all wrong. I’m being a bit hyperbolic there, but it can sometimes feel that way. For a young teacher struggling to “get it all done,” those confrontations can wear on you. The social web of education blogs and feeds can seem like a fire hose of conflicting information and top 10 lists to make your head spin. They make you wonder what your pre-service courses were for in the first place if everything you learned seems to be “wrong.”
Planning is very important. But wait, here’s a tweet that talks about how important it is to be flexible in your planning. And another that tells you to let your students do the planning. Don’t forget the reflection, though. You should start a blog. Reflection should be transparent. Teachers should be sharing online. It will help you and it will help other teachers.
Whew.
You know what I realized after endlessly scrolling through those links in a zombie-like state? It’s all important. There are countless binaries floating around the world of education and those binaries seem to threaten my motivation the most. As a teacher in this graduate program, I’ve realized that “either or” discussions are rarely fruitful and so one should instead see planning and reflection and teaching strategies – all of it – as fluid parts of education. There are no stupid questions, my teachers always said. I think there are also no right answers in education. There are possibilities and we test them and we consider them and we adjust them. Hopefully we share them, letting them become a part of the public education discussion, and they change further.
Many of my MAET courses allowed me to sandbox these ideas in a safe place.
I enjoyed CEP 817 with Punya Mishra and Kristen Kereluik a great deal because it was unlike most other courses I had ever taken. We explored concepts of creativity and ideas. We delved into philosophical discussions around making things and why. I struggle so much with intention in my teaching – being scrupulous almost to a fault about making sure every little task relates to my original objective or unit question, but realizing at the end of a disorganized unit that my scruples were for naught. The thinking required in CEP 817 and especially our reading (and my re-reading) of Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud allowed me to approach my teaching practice from the angle of creative work. Sometimes just seeing your work in a new light can breath new life into it.
In addition to viewing my teaching practice as a work of creativity and design, I am also practicing being more aware of the different factors at work in my planning – not just the text boxes of our particular flavor of unit planning template. I think a lot these days about Understanding by Design (UbD) and the TPACK model. I realized in using these two frameworks that every choice I make in the classroom fluidly affects the learning. The content affects the methods and the tools and I can no longer see the three as separate aspects of my practice. This realization makes “beginning with the end in mind,” as the UbD framework teaches, crucial in planning.
As the “techy” teacher at my school, people are often surprised to see my students with pencils and markers or to see the laptops put away. The Venn diagram of TPACK is often in my mind when I sit down to plan and think “how are we going to do this?” My knee jerk reaction often goes to a Google Doc, but while in Dublin completing my courses face-to-face, I watched my professor Leigh Graves Wolf explain her reasons for using different tools for tasks. She was modeling her use of TPACK and I brought that mindfulness back with me.
In addition to TPACK, I have a strong memory of an exercise Punya Mishra challenged us to do while in Dublin to make a lesson “sticky.” We had just read an article by Chip Heath and Dan Heath about the importance of making learning “stick” and the reasons some lessons don’t. As a result, I find myself looking for new ways to get my students out of their chairs doing something or just small ways to inject humor into the room. For example, I am confident that Elizabethan pronouns will stick in the minds of my 7th graders, because we translated the meme YOLO (you only live once) into “Shakespearean English.” In case you are wondering, it’s “though only liveth once,” according to my students.
My planning method also includes more anticipation of misunderstanding than it ever did before and intention in the way I check for understanding. The Understanding Understanding project we completed in Dublin and a chapter from the Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey book Guided Instruction brought theory and evidence to something I have observed myself but just didn’t quite know how to classify. Students sometimes don’t grasp learning because they have misunderstood a simple fact along the way. Often times it is the teacher who is left looking at the final assessment task and a wrong answer asking “how did he get to this conclusion?” I am trying to avoid that with more intentional, anticipatory planning, asking myself what the bumps in the road might be and how I will deal with them. Of course, you can’t anticipate them all, but you can try. I am trying.
MAET has also given me the courage to deal with the monster hiding in my teaching closet. I find myself consulting the principles of Universal Design for Learning and sharing them with my colleagues. Differentiation is a big, hairy monster, especially for secondary teachers. We hope if we just close our eyes it will go away, because we don’t know how best to deal with it or address it practically, unlike our primary colleagues that do it every day. At least that’s how it feels for me sometimes. UDL is one way I can practically approach differentiation without thinking about catering to the needs of every single student, which can be overwhelming. Instead I am casting a wider, more accessible net for my students with some easy changes.
Sometimes, as my colleagues remind me, you need to take the easy way out. I’m still working on being balanced and finding the right pacing for my teaching. I’m not the best at thinking ahead. I never was a chess player. And therefore I’m often saddled with two groups of essays, a project, and two new units to plan at the same time. I want to take the philosophical exercises and thinking routines we practiced in CEP 817 and in Dublin and apply them to my teaching and curriculum development in hopes of evening it out a bit.
One would imagine my take-aways from MAET would be tech-related, but instead they have more to do with the day-in, day-out work of a teacher in trying to find the best way to help students learn. These models and frameworks I picked up along the way in MAET are giving me the scaffolding I need to get better at what I do.
…as a learner
During this graduate program, I wasn’t the star student. In most cases I was the last-minute, too much thinking, not enough doing, hard-to-focus, way too big of an idea student. I had trouble meshing my learning style with the tasks presented by no fault of my teachers. I experienced something my students deal with every day in school: I was a learner with my own, unfortunately unproductive style that made meeting deadlines a true challenge. I needed accommodation, yet I also struggled to stomach the realization that my learning style was something that needed to be accommodated. I had flashbacks to my time in ninth grade when faced with snowballing homework and deadlines, I instead spent time recopying my notes and reinforcing loose-leaf paper holes in my notebooks. It was the happy place of a stationery-adoring 14-year-old that hadn’t yet been diagnosed as ADHD because somehow she always managed to make honor roll.
I am still that same learner. I haven’t “grown out of it,” because that is who I am. A perfectionist with big ideas and trouble focusing. I get a lump of empathy in my throat when I think about myself as a learner in this program and see myself in my students. Their quirks, differences, disabilities, and other things that require our differentiation aren’t going to change. They need us to help them become aware of those differences, to work through the frustration of being different in a way that makes school harder, and find ways to support and scaffold themselves.
I haven’t figured out how to do that yet, but I’ve realized over the last two years in this program that it is a worthwhile endeavor regardless of the content that needs to get covered. One of my MAET colleagues this summer in Dublin reminded me that students rarely remember the content they learn in your courses years later, but “they remember you.” And so I try to be the learner I want them to be – to model the messiness that comes with being a learner.
During my time in Dublin for Year 2 of MAET Overseas, I learned how much I benefitted from face-to-face, focused learning. I was invigorated by seeing my classmates everyday and thrilled to see us stumble and climb through the authentic projects, such as the GREAT12 conference. I was entrenched in the experience and performed better there than I did in any of my other courses.
The tough reality I discovered there is that I am not the best distance learning student. As much as I love the online world and enjoy my directionless style of Wikipedia page jumping and other learning, I’m a bit of a “problem child” in a traditional online course. These are all awkward realizations to have as an adult and even a bit embarrassing as a proponent of such technologies, but being a fan of teachable moments, I remind myself that I am living the grey area I espouse. I am that student that doesn’t fit the binary and the one that reminds us to differentiate, to offer choice of projects, to avoid going on auto-pilot.
…as a person
Every teacher has an opinion. Spend some time in a staff room at a school, and you will hear plenty. However, we rarely have our opinions tested. We’re alone in our classrooms where strategies are attempted, learning happens or it doesn’t, and then the bell rings. No one sees what happens or observes our theories being tested in real time. I have MAET to thank for shaking not only some of the naive opinions I’d formulated since receiving my teaching license in Virginia not so long ago, but for creating opportunities for me to have my self-perception questioned.
My work and learning in Dublin allowed me to observe different communication styles, planning methods, and personalities. It was uncomfortable at times. Our professor Leigh reminded us that being a teacher leader means dealing with different personalities and confronting our own skill set. We can’t be good at everything.
One of my own weaknesses is diving into a project or task before I’ve really considered what part of it is best handled by me and what parts should be delegated to others. I often remind my students when they work in groups to draw on their classmates’ skills and to divide up the work based on those skills. MAET gave me space to work through this weakness and instead find a way to sit in the backseat and be comfortable with others leading while I support. Working in the background allowed me to see problems from a new vantage point and experience what it’s like to be led by others.
We each need help to succeed even if that success is found in failure. MAET in Dublin reminded me how much I need to practice this lesson I try to teach my students.
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Sometimes learning can feel like a burden. I read Mad Cowboy by Howard Lyman and the weight of my eating and food choices weighed like a barbell on my neck until I went vegan many years ago. We can’t un-know without blinding ourselves to the world moving around us. I embrace this ever-changing landscape where yesterday’s ethical question is replaced by a new, more pressing dilemma. While I seem to enjoy this messy landscape, drawing energy from the movement, I am grounding myself in the best practices I learned during my courses at MAET.
MAET may be a future-gazing graduate program, innovating through new styles of teaching with every term, but I was reminded throughout the program of the tried and true methods of good teaching. The warm-up. Student-centered learning. Think-pair-share. These methods may not be sexy enough for a tweet, but they have their place in my 21st century classroom and I have my MAET courses to thank for that. This has been a wild ride, with lots of new thoughts and ideas planted in my mind, but it has also been a refresher and a reminder of the reason I dedicated my work to teaching and learning with children.