Bud the Teacher

In today’s podcast, recorded on my way into town this morning, I talk about some of my learning and thinking from Learning 2.0: A Colorado Conversation.  Specifically, it’s a chance to respond to a question Zac sent my way regarding just what I meant when I said in my presentation on show and tell that you can choose how much is enough when it comes to transparency, or words to that effect.  Yeah.  It bothered me, too, when I said it, but not because I’m wrong.  I think.  Listen to the podcast and let me know what you think.

Direct Link to the Audio

If you get a chance, take a few minutes to read the responses to the writing prompt from the session.  I’m still digging through them.  Thoughtful.

I tweeted a possible title for this post out earlier tonight, and hurt some feelings.  Understandably.  My apologies – that wasn’t my intention, and sometimes my mouth gets ahead of my brain.  I have nothing but the highest respect for the Science Leadership Academy and my friend and colleague Chris Lehmann.  I think he’d agree with me on what I’m about to say.  We’ll see, I guess.

This weekend, 500 or so folks will descend upon Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, PA for the third Educon conference.  It’s a wonderfully neat school, with a phenomenal staff and a fine bunch of students.  I’ve been to the school twice, and am in constant contact with teachers there.  They’re my teachers and colleagues and, in some cases, friends, and I think the community and educational opportunities offered there are nothing short of what I would hope for my own children and for all kids.  Simply outstanding.

That said, I guess I’d like to offer a suggestion or two to the folks who will be paying close attention to Educon this weekend, and who otherwise hold SLA up to high esteem. (And I’m one of those folks.)  Take it for what it’s worth.

The Science Leadership Academy is not The Promised Land.¹  No place is.²  The school is a place, a special place, that people made, and that is a response and a reaction to its contexts, geographical, political, social and otherwise.  It is not the only place where great things happen for and with kids, and it is not the only place or way that kids can learn.

You probably know some people who can make great things.  You might be one of those people.  Actually, let me say that again, and slightly differently – You most likely ARE one of those people.  But you have to act like it.  Simply fawning over the achievements of someone else and regretting that you live somewhere else isn’t a useful reaction.

So much of what I see right after a place like SLA is praised is a laundry list of reasons why the praiser’s school/community/whatever can’t be like SLA.   I don’t get that.  Of course your school won’t be like theirs.  You aren’t in downtown Philadelphia.  You don’t operate in the same space.  Your families are different.  So, for that matter, are you.  But that’s not a bad thing. It’s okay.  I live and work in Colorado.  There is opportunity here, too.

Chris and his staff built a place that made sense as a combination of the places they came from, the places they were, and the places and ideas that they wanted to build with.  They made the place.  Together.  With their students.  And you can make a place, too.  But it’ll be different, deliciously, brilliantly different, from SLA.  Not because they’re better than you, or you them, but because good schools are about context and environment and about taking what you have and what you want and striking a balance and working very, very hard. Good schools are about people honestly and intentionally working together very purposefully.

Good schools are not about taking another’s model and applying it without serious consideration to your own local environment, or about lamenting that you are not someone else. That’s irresponsible, and doesn’t honor a fine example.

So as you’re enjoying the school culture of SLA, a place that I would like to be visiting and learning from/with/in this weekend (and I kind of will be), I hope you’ll move past the “Wow,” and towards the critical eyes of “Huh.  Why does this work?  How might I make something work in my own context(s)?”

Because, we all know, imitation, and not worship, is the highest form of flattery.  Imitation without serious thought as to how to make and sustain change in one’s own situation is not useful.  And doesn’t actually honor the fine model that SLA might be for you.

You, too, can make special places.  In fact, you may already have.  Good on you.  Talk about them.  Tell us how you did it.  Help us, as Chris and SLA do, to figure out that there isn’t one way to do school well.  There are many.  And we need them all.

1. I don’t believe that the folks at SLA say such things.  But I see and hear them from admirers. [↩]
2. Again, plenty of folks seem to believe otherwise. [↩]

Earlier today, I sent a link to a student’s Twitter account to a staff member in the school he attends with a request that she share the link with a counselor in the school.  I read some things that caused me to worry for him.  Nothing too extreme, the sorts of things that kids, particularly young adults in the space between adolescence and adult, say and that are important.  I like this particular student; I only met him briefly in a presentation at a school in the district, but I’ve enjoyed getting to know him a bit better from his tweets.  Smart kid.  Needs some attention.  Worth it.

I find much of value in getting to interact with many district students via Twitter, my preferred channel for such interaction. Our students are online, and they are curious about the world, and they have things to teach us, if we are prepared to listen and learn them.

But sometimes, they will say things that may make us uncomfortable.  When that happens, it is up to us to follow up.  That’s the job.

I was reminded today of a counselor that I used to work with some years ago.  I went to her one day during the semester when I really started to wrap my head around social media and the power of the subscribe-able, bring-the-world-to-you Web.  I wanted to show her what I was learning about my students by following their writings on Xanga and MySpace, their public postings coming into my RSS reader.  I saw these students as people engaged in the world.  I laughed sometimes.  Was amazed on occasion.  Worried for them others.  “What an opportunity,” I said to her, “To see a little bit deeper into our students’ worlds, to engage them as people.  Perhaps counselors could and should be paying attention to these public spaces and learning from them, maybe even catching early glimpses of future problems.”  (Thinking back – and opportunities.)

She was hesitant to invade the students’ “personal” spaces, space that they were sharing in public.  She didn’t want to intrude.

Intrude.

I don’t believe that we have the luxury of ignoring our students when they share in public.  I don’t believe that we should duck away from engaging them for fear of finding ourselves in awkward situations.  That said, I think societal climates suggest we should avoid private connections for a bunch of reasons – one reason I like Twitter as a meeting place.  I don’t encourage students to come to Twitter.  But when they’re here, I do look for them as folks to learn from and with.  And while they’re here, I will treat them the same as I’d treat any other person.  Perhaps better than any other – they’re students in my school district, and I have a professional and legal obligation to them as human beings first, students second.  We all get lonely.  We all get down.  We all worry and lose perspective and have rough moments.  Students.  Grown ups.  All of us.  And we’re supposed to look after each other.

That we avoid fumbling through awkwardness is human, too.  It is often simpler to disengage and to not know what happens in the world where our students will spend 85% of their time.  But it’s not right.

No one of us can pay attention to every utterance.  That’s beyond human. But together, we can look out for each other.  Some students will never reach out to us.  But others will.  What a gift.

I learn from and with students in a different way now than when I was a classroom teacher, responsible for the learning of a certain group of pupils.  Now we learn together wherever we can, in the informal publics of our school district, both the physical world of seminars and workshops and classroom visits and also in the virtual worlds of Twitter and the other public spaces of the Internet.  I’ve mentioned to colleagues that I follow students on Twitter and similar spaces.  Often, the response is surprise.  I always worry about that.

I want educators online and paying attention when a student exploring the public voice begins to share some things that are too often left unshared.  I want those educators and students to trust each other to handle those opportunities with respect and care.  I want growth to happen.  I want it to be good. I want positive and supportive models for students to light the way.

And, yes, I do want to intrude.  Each and every kid is worth the intrusion to keep them safe and vibrant and engaged and with us.

And you are, too.¹

1. A gracious thank you to Michelle Bourgeois, who kindly read and responded to an early draft of this post. [↩]

I received a Twitter direct message earlier today from someone who is frequently a teacher of mine.  This individual was curious about why my Twitter following/follower ratio was something like four to one.  My answer, which was also a direct message, was:

The short answer is because I don’t find value in following every person that follows me. It’s a bit more complicated than that, though.

There’s an awful lot of baggage tied up in followers and friends and whatnot online, but there doesn’t need to be.  One reason I’ve always liked Twitter is that I find that it’s incredibly open.  Through an @ message, anyone can get the attention of anyone else who uses the service (so long as the person you want to get a hold of  has their @messages settings in Twitter open to anybody.)

But the way I screen Twitter followers and make decisions about who to follow is pretty simple:  If I find the person or the content helpful to me in my work or engaging in some other way (funny, wise, curiosity-inducing, teaching, etc.), I follow.  If I don’t, I don’t.

It’s not personal.  Except when it is.  By that, I mean that there are far more people in the world than I can learn from at any one time.  If I find a stream useful, I keep it around.  If I don’t find it useful, I let it go.  If the person or stream is more distraction than help, I let it/them go, too.  I don’t have a magic number of people or a ratio, but about four to one seems to be consistent – I get the question of “Why are you not following as many people as follow you?” enough that I’ve noticed the trend.

I don’t follow all the folks that follow me for a bunch of reasons.  Some folks aren’t teaching me anything.  Others are sharing resources I’m finding from other sources.  For the most part, I don’t block folks whom I don’t like or find “offensive” that follow me.

I expect no reciprocity in my reading and/or following habits.  I continually think others who expect such are misunderstanding the opportunities herein, or are using social media for drastically different purposes than I, which is fine, except when they expect me to follow their “rules.”  I try to approach most of these spaces as places in which I can be selflessly selfish.

There’s very little new here.  Friendships and other relationships in “real life” are often one-way.  We get a little hinky sometimes when we see these relationships documented, though.  No need.

It was a dark and stormy night the last time I played this little game, the one where I tell you things that you might not expect about me because I’ve been asked to by fellow bloggers.  And it was quite some months ago that Michelle tagged me in this little game, one I usually don’t play.   But she’s become a trusted collaborator over the past several months, and I’m pleased to share that she will become a local colleague tomorrow when she begins working in district as our new instructional technologist.  Our district will benefit from her presence and work.  I know I sure will.  That said, I suppose it’s time to share the seven things.

Here goes.

1.  I’ve now lived more than half of my life in Colorado, but still consider myself a Southerner.  It’s true.  I moved from North Carolina when I was 12 and turned 31 last week.

2. I’m a Boettcher Scholar, which means pretty much nothing to those of you who don’t live in Colorado, but it was, and continues to be, a big deal for me. I still pinch myself on that one some times.

3. I sometimes don’t read the last few pages of exceptionally good books.  I reckon that’s as much about not being finished with them and always haveing just a few pages left.  Sometimes, I eventually finish them.  Other times, not.

4.  I used to carry one of these with me pretty much wherever I went.  It had the desired effect of bringing a smile to anyone I shared it with.

5.  The only reason I’ve read any of Moby Dick at all is that I was once staying in a hostel in Germany where there were only two books available to me in English.  One was Moby Dick.  The other was Message in a Bottle.  After ten pages, I took Message in a Bottle back and picked up Moby Dick.  I’m glad that I did – although I’ve not yet finished it.  That was ten years ago.

6.  When my wife is out of town, I feed the children fish.  She can’t stand anything from the water.

7.  I really, really, really, and I mean completely seriously and in a profound way, don’t like telephones.  Ironically, or unfortunately, I carry two of them.
So ends the disclosures.  Welcome, Michelle.  I’m glad you’re here.

I’m writing this post from the back porch of a family beach rental in South Carolina.  The breeze is ruffling the pages of the paperback Ive just put down, and will soon pick back up.  The ever-present hum/roar of waves hitting the beach drones on, in a most delightful way.  My father’s swimming in the pool below me, and my children are upstairs napping.  They have every right to be tired, because they’ve been exploring the ocean and the house and the pool and the greater Charleston area for the last several days and have plenty more exploring to do.

I try pretty hard to take a few technology breaks a year, to distance myself completely from the devices that rule my work week and can dictate, on occasion, priority.  (Well, at least, I allow myself to believe that devices, and not the people connected through them, or my own agency, or lack of it, can determine priorities. But I know that’s not the case.)

This trip, I’ve found myself taking my “break” in a slightly different way.  Today’s a good example.  I made pancakes for my daughters with a few Twitter friends.  Then we dined on the porch, about three feet from where I’m sitting now, and I announced the view.  The girls and I then hit the pool for several hours, and returned for a late lunch.  In their pre-nap stupor, as they “rested” on the couch, I caught up with several colleagues attending a conference and chatted with a couple more friends/acquaintances/people I (don’t always) know.

Some of the folks I’ve interacted with today are folks that I work with.  Many are not.  Most have no business being “here” on a family vacation.  That said, I’d have it no other way. My world’s at my fingertips on my own terms mostly all the time now, and I’m nowhere close to prepared with how to deal with that.

I feel like I balance work and personal responsibilities fairly well, sometimes leaning one way, other times the other, and I still don’t think I’m anywhere close to certain about how best to handle the blending of personal and professional that we’re smack in the middle of.  It’s new.  It’s different.  It’s awesome.  And it’s tricky.  And I rather enjoy it. I’m not quite sure why I’m choosing to think about it on a day like today, except that I’m aware that my normal “power down completely” relaxation strategy isn’t comfortable today.  Balance is important.  But balance isn’t binary.

I’m an hourly employee in a world where schedules are less and less important at a time when time’s never been more precious.  My friends and my colleagues may or may not be on the same short list of people, but they’re always close and reachable.  And that’s a fine paradox for such a sunny afternoon here at the ocean.  As I head back to my novel, I’m going to take a few minutes to ponder the point further.  Whatever’s happening at present to my nomal routines, I’m still getting some rest and relaxation, and I’m not going to squander it.

Will writes this week about some thinking inspired by a tweet from John Pederson:

So when John Tweeted “Community building is the new professional development” it really resonated, because it suggests that unlike most so-called pd that schools offer, getting our heads and our practice around this is a process, not an event. It’s learning, not training. (I cringed a couple of weeks ago when a principal said “Wow, our teachers are going to need a lot more ‘training.’” Ugh.) It’s not something we can “deliver” in a four-hour PowerPoint-like session. As Linda Darling-Hammond suggests, “…teachers need to learn the way other professionals do—continually, collaboratively, and on the job.” If that’s not a description of what I see most of us doing in these spaces I don’t know what is.

The thing about trying to argue that network/community building should be the goal of 21st Century professional development  is that there’s an assumption in that argument that community building as a piece of professional development is a new way of doing things, that that building community is a 21st Century idea.  And, perhaps with the technology, there are some “new” things there – but there might also be some “good” things there that are done in new ways. (I don’t think that John and Will make that assumption, for what it’s worth.)

“New” and “good” are not synonymous.  Neither are “new” and “bad” or “old” and “bad.”  Or “old” and “good.” Plenty of new things are bad, plenty of old things are good and so on.  I would like it very much if people working on teaching and learning projects, people studying and thinking about and implementing tools and practices, would separate the age of something from its value and attempt to make decisions based on that thing or idea or tool or practice’s value, rather than its age.

I understand why the “21st Century” whatever label gets put onto things.  It’s sexy.  It sizzles.  It’s “new” and shiny.  And yet – good professional development has always been about community building.  Professional organizations in the 19th and 20th Centuries were about community and conversation and collaboration. And they and we should be in the 21st Century, too.

Yes, we are in community when we blog and tweet and share and read and write and learn together.  This is how I learn and sometimes how I teach.  Of course the technology changes (some of) the nature and the speed of those interactions.  The power of collaborative technologies is certainly “new” and, often, “good.” (Not always, though.  Plenty of “bad.”) But the networking itself, social or professional or otherwise, isn’t the new bit.  It’s the good bit.  Rich.  Rewarding.  Powerful.  Sustaining.  Rooted in professional conversation. Really, really good.

But not new.

As today’s the first day of National Poetry Month, and as I’m a big fan of writing and sharing writing, and because Ben Grey sent me a link to a fine poetry competition for the month of April, and because I’m not much of a fan of writing for competition, but I do like writing for folks . . . .

If I publish several “What might I write about?” type poem prompts throughout the month, would you be willing to write a poem or two, if you’re so inspired, post them here, or on your own spaces, and tag them with a common tag, that I’ll let you decide upon in the comments?  No pressure, just poetry.  Just writing and sharing.  Because we can.

Do we have a deal?  Let me know and I’ll start with some prompts.

I’m sitting at DIA about to board a flight to Philadelphia, headed to Educon. It should be a good conference, and much of it will be available online. I hope we all learn lots. And I hope you, wherever and whenever you are, come, too.

Check out the wiki and join me and us. I think it’ll be useful. I’m doing a session on writing and I hope to get some writing done while I’m there.

What have you been writing lately? Where? Who’s been reading? What should we be talking about when we talk about writing? What shouldn’t we be talking and writing about?

In an age of ubiquitous publishing and always public if you want to be writing spaces, what new writing behaviors should we be adopting? What older behaviors still require our attention? What can we leave behind?

What about writing have we never gotten right in the classroom, and what can we do about that?

Your answers to these questions will probably make an appearance in the session, so feel free to share them in the comments.

It was about a year ago that D’Arcy Norman suggested that, if folks wanted to, we might challenge ourselves to shoot a photo a day for the year 2008 and share as many of them as possible.  I didn’t do so hot about the sharing part, but I’ve managed to work the question “What’s today’s picture?”

into my daily thinking.  My family, when we’re out and about, makes suggestions about what the day’s picture should be, and we’re building together a wonderful family archive of the photos I’ve taken and the memories that they carry.  This is, perhaps, my most thoughtfully documented year.  But that’s not even the good bit.

What D’Arcy’s invitation, and the group’s examples and conversations, did for me was to literally fiddle with the way that I see the world.  He calls it “mindful seeing,” and explains in a post he wrote last January:

Mindful seeing is the process of turning off the filters, of seeing your surroundings unfettered and unobstructed.

When viewing the world without filtering, even the most boring and banal subjects can become wondrous and interesting. We are constantly surrounded by interesting things that we normally don’t see – textures, lighting, patterns, shapes, objects, groupings, even messages.

Photographers are often described as distancing themselves from their surroundings by “hiding behind a camera” or “viewing the world only through a viewfinder.” I see photography from the exact opposite side of the coin. By mindfully seeing the world around me, I feel as though I am seeing much more than I would otherwise. I see patterns, convergence, divergence, shadows, lighting, juxtaposition, and composition that are likely missed by others. That’s not to say that I am “better” than any other – just that by being mindful of what I am seeing, I am aware of what is around me. And when I am aware, I am better able to take an interesting photograph.

I am paying better attention now that I’m thinking about what to capture, and what will look good, and what’s worth remembering and the like.  And as I begin my second year of trying to take a picture everyday, I’m not worried about whether or not I’ll keep up with shooting (yep) and posting (not so much), but it’s becoming a part of my day, a piece of who I am and what I do.  That’s a big deal.

D’Arcy, I’m grateful for your example.

If you’re interested, the group’s still there, and getting started with 2009.  There are also lots of other groups doing the same or similar projects.  Find one you like and join and start shooting pictures.  You don’t need fancy equipment – I alternate between a DSLR and my cell phone – you just need to be willing to look around and really try to see it.

You’re welcome to take a peek at the pictures that I do share online.  Probably the best way is to just take a peek at my photostream. I’m less interested in the presentation than I am in the capturing and saving and seeing – but one thing I’ll be working on this time around is the workflow that I use to upload, tag and organize my photos – that could use a little bit of tweaking.