More Smithsonian Exploration
As a former Smithsonian Teacher Ambassador, I am very excited to be partnering with the Smithsonian Science Education Center (SSEC) to provide a webinar in our series of Noble Education Initiative opportunities for learning. Back in April we partnered with the Smithsonian Learning Lab and had two fantastic webinars and were able to provide outstanding resources to educators. I blogged about these webinars in Bringing The Smithsonian To You. Since then, we have continued to be asked for more from the Smithsonian Institution.
Tomorrow, May 20th, we will do just that with More Smithsonian Exploration: A Journey To The Smithsonian Science Education Center. We want educators and caregivers to join us to learn to use the resources that provide tremendous opportunities to learn with their students. The SSEC offers curriculum and digital resources that support educators and caregivers in providing authentic STEM experiences. EVERYONE is welcome and can still register here: https://m.signupgenius.com/#!/showSignUp/60b0b44a5a92ca7fe3-more.
I am really proud of this partnership to bring make this free webinar possible because of the aim of the SSEC to transform and improve the learning of science for K-12 students. Click here to view the SSEC fact sheet to learn how the world’s largest museum, education and research complex is bringing an interdisciplinary approach to education using science, history, art, and culture.
The SSEC is also providing tremendous resources and support to teachers who work with newcomers from all over the globe and English Language Learners (ELLs). Our webinar will be engaging and inquiry-based to model the strategies that are effective for effective learning with our ELL students. We will also get a first hand experience with the SSEC’s real world and relevant featured curriculum dealing with COVID-19: COVID-19! How Can I Protect Myself and Others.
Join us tomorrow and see how the Smithsonian Science Education Center is transforming science education.
Good Enough: Five Positives For Every Negative
I finished reading a great book, The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It by John Tierney and Roy Baumeister this morning. This was an interesting book to read during the COVID-19 Global Pandemic. It’s interesting to me that I interact daily with people who are very positive right now and those who are extremely negative. There does not seem to be much of an in between. Anecdotally, there seems to be more negativity than positivity. Tierney and Baumeister told us this is because negative experiences are more powerful than positive ones.
The authors reminded me that the Gottman Ratio is a pretty good rule of thumb. The Gottman Ratio tells us that we are happiest when we have five positive interactions for every negative one. The authors posited this is a pretty good rule, but that we should aim for at least four positives for every negative. Kind of makes you think about who you want to be hanging out with, or Zooming with, whichever the case may be. Or, if others want to hang out with you.
“If one thing goes wrong, don’t interpret it as a harbinger of inevitable doom, whether you’re dealing with a personal setback or contemplating the state of the world.” ~ John Tierney & Roy Baumeister in The Power of Bad
If we want to keep things positive we must avoid the negative things. A Yale study really caught my attention described in the book where abusive parenting was found to have a statistically significant effect resulting in unhappy children. The opposite of very supportive and loving parenting did not lead to a larger number of happy children. Therefore, reducing negatives was more important than adding more positives. I found this to be encouraging because I believe it is easier to reduce negatives that increase positives. For one, I can do this by just having a positive attitude myself.
Furthermore, I was reminded of what Voltaire said, “Perfect is the enemy of good.” I would add that “Perfection is the enemy of done.” Progress, tweaks, checks, re-do’s, and reviews do not equal perfection. Good or effective work is about moving toward the destination than about getting things done with spilling or knocking something over in the process. Momentum matters! As Confucius said, “Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without.” For example, if I am needing to market an event for next week, would it be better to have already gone out with an advertisement made by me that will for sure not be perfect (a marketer, I am not) or on Sunday of the week of the event, still be waiting on the perfect advertisement? For me it is the former rather than the latter.
“Striving to better, oft we mar what’s well.” ~ William Shakespeare
In The Power of Bad we were taught that rather than always striving for perfect, we need to think in terms of being “good enough.” Make no mistake, this does not mean lowering standards. It means paying less attention to transcending expectations and paying more attention to getting the basics right. Being steady and reliable is much more effective that dramatic ups and downs. So, don’t forget, your mood and demeanor and the mood and demeanor of those around you will have a huge impact on your own and the feelings and effectiveness of those with you. Positivity will cause social support and negativity will cause social undermining. Get out there and be positive and “good enough.”
66 Days To A New Habit
First of all it is important to note that as I write this post we are in Day 66 of the COVID-19 global pandemic. I blogged about the day, March 11th, that I am considering our first day of these uncharted times in The Day We Started Down The Path With No Footprints. The other night in one of our 3D Leadership gatherings I had the participants make their own Flat Stanley or Flat Sarah that represented who they had become since March 11th when the WHO (I thought that was a rock band) declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. O.k., the WHO is the World Health Organization.
Participants could either make the their Flat Stanley or Sarah using materials in their homes or using an online resource we gave them. The group did a great job with these and they were very creative. I found it interesting that many of the participants discussed how they had picked up, developed new, or restarted old habits. One participant said, “It takes a month to build a new habit.” She was referring to now doing a better job of exercising. Of course, I had to check and see if there was any research that backed this claim of taking a month to develop a new habit up.
Here’s what I found: Phillippa Lally, a health psychology researcher at University College London, did a study published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, Lally and her research team decided to figure out just how long it actually takes to form a habit. So, what was concluded from the study? On average, it takes more than 2 months before a new behavior becomes automatic — 66 days to be exact. And how long it takes a new habit to form can vary widely depending on the behavior, the person, and the circumstances. In Lally’s study, it took anywhere from 18 days to 254 days for people to form a new habit. But, as was stated, 66 days was the average. Thus, why I chose today to write this post. We are exactly 66 days into this pandemic.
So, why is the length of time it takes to form a habit important? During these challenging times, everyone in the world has been forced to change their routines, be creative, try new ideas, learn new ways of doing things, slow down focus on some of the most important things (in education-the most important content), and connect with people and in the case of education, students, in effective ways we never thought possible. The abrupt shift to remote instruction changed many aspects of our lives. In my case I continue to say I have grown in great and unimaginable ways during this time. In education, I continue to say that we have grown in the aspect of school no longer being a place.
Let me be clear; I realize there are those, and maybe even me still, that the crisis will be catastrophic. This post is not intended to minimize the seriousness of the consequences many people face, or may be facing. I believe that many of us have grown in our ability to be o.k. with feeling bad or being comfortable with uncertainty. Personally, I continue to see this crisis as a challenge to overcome and a conduit for personal growth. The 3D Leadership participant who talked about it having been a good time to use the month to develop new and better habits, I believe, had in mind that we can see the loss of our, pre-pandemic and regular life as a chance to focus on other aspects of your life that have been neglected because we’ve been too busy to address them. We have also identified areas we want to work on or improve in our lives and focus on developing those areas. We need to all use this break from “normal life” to seek balance in our life and pursue aspects of our lives that we did not have time for before the crisis.
We need to use our responses to the crisis as an opportunity to learn and grown and become more positive, adaptable, and resilient which will, no doubt, serve us well when the current crisis passes. We can all create new structures and routines in our lives around school, work, daily activities, and social life. Finally, and most importantly, we can take action. Keep in mind, we’ve already had the 66 average days it takes to make a new habit become automatic. Are you happy with your new habits?
Life Is A School As Well
Today, during our “best of week” of educator professional development, I repeated my webinar, “Angry Teacher 1: What Can We Learn from Angry Birds About Engaging Students?” During the webinar a teacher made the comment in one of the discussions that “Life Is A School As Well.” This comment really struck me as we were discussing student engagement and making sure we were teaching students to adapt and use concepts to solve real world challenges and issues. We really have this opportunity right now because of the COVID-19 Pandemic. We have a socio-scientific classroom at our fingertips right now that can be easily accessed virtually with our students. Our students are living this right along with us. Therefore we must consider the intersection of our students real life and education. Right now the lines are pretty blurred.
Living through this time has taught us the that “life is a school” and that “school is no longer a place.” We need to make sure and honor living as part of the educational process. Henry Adams taught us this when he said, “Your life’s journey is your education.” I blogged about this in Your Life’s Journey is Your Education. We need to remember we are preparing citizens. Part of the answer for improving education is improving the sense of calling and commitment of students to take ownership of their learning and development. Burdens can many times create blessings and we need to keep in mind that our students have lives outside of the traditional education “walls” that we see the kids. We are learning to deal with this now more than ever. We cannot take this learning lightly and must use what we have learned to guide our path forward while we are on this path with no footprints.
If we really use “life” as part of education then we need to begin to reverse engineer how we educate using fulfilled adult lives and careers in the here and now to help inform the education content and process. We are not really doing this if we are honest. Most curricula are not designed by people who have experienced world-wide success in the areas being taught. This is why I am such a believer in the need of involving business/industry as partners in education. We must break through the barriers of:
- Teaching to deliver on, rather than change, expectations.
- Teaching to redeploy old ideas rather than originate and ideate new ones.
- Teaching about the dangers of originality.
These are the reasons why we get compliance instead of student engagement. Much of our education system teaches kids to be very good at being outwardly and entirely obedient. We need to provide an education where school work looks like real work and we have more than just very narrow parochial outcomes in mind. We need to be guiding students toward their largest, best, life-long interests; not just the narrow obstacle course we control. Life truly is a school as well.
The Day We Started Down The Path With No Footprints
As I write this post it is day 129 of the 366 days of 2020. With 237 days left in this leap year, I felt the need to go back and reflect on the 70th and 71st days of 2020. These two days marked the start of my life being very different. In fact I was reminded that my life is not really my own, apart from everyone else. My life is a part of an entire community and ecosystem. Our world, up to and including March 10th, was really built on the premise that our world and education works off of and teaches that we are individuals and act as individuals. But, overnight from March 10th to 11th we were taught that we are all part of a ecosystem and even our own health depends on others.
The 70th day of 2020 was March 10th. That day wasn’t much different that any other day, other than I had been invited to attend the Indiana Pacers vs. Boston Celtics game at Bankers Life Fieldhouse in Indianapolis, Indiana that evening with my Krannert School of Management friends from Purdue University. Other than the Pacers losing in a great and close game 114-111, it was a perfect evening of visiting with and networking. I do remember we had begun “elbow bumping” instead of shaking hands and there were extra bottles of hand sanitizer on the tables. Little did I know at the time I had seen the last NBA game of the season.
I do, however, vividly remember one comment I made toward the end of the evening: “I wonder what happens if one player on one of these teams has Coronavirus?” Well, the next day, Wednesday, March 11, the 71st day of 2020, I got my answer. Rudy Gobert of Utah Jazz was the first NBA player to be diagnosed with what, that day, we began calling “COVID-19.” That same day the NBA canceled the rest of the season and the NCAA said the college basketball tournament would be played without fans (a few days later the tournament was canceled completely). On Wall Street that day, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 1,465 points. Also, on that day I learned that my son would be coming home from Murray State University to take his classes online till at least April 6th (later, the rest of the Murray State University semester went to online). That day we started down a path with no footprints.
Additionally, on March 11th, we officially started calling it a Global Pandemic, as declared by the World Health Organization on that day. It was that day that I came to the realization that this was for real, and this was much bigger than all of us. I also realized that if I was going to survive the weeks ahead, I would need to think in terms of self reflection instead of self evaluation. Also, it was abundantly clear on March 11th that pre-COVID-19 life and what happened next was still a path with no footprints. My existence as an individual was forever altered to make me realize how dependent we are on each other. For example that very March 11th day, the hoarding began. It became a time when we couldn’t find a bottle of hand sanitizer because someone else had hoarded a truckload of it – literally. I realized we, as a people, think and act very individualistically. Even though we were being told that there was plenty of everything, people still hoarded. I saw with my own eyes the empty shelves. We weren’t thinking about ourselves as a part of a larger community that needed to think about the next person coming down the aisle looking for toilet paper – which for some reason became the most hoarded item early on.
“My health is not my own. My health is the whole community’s, it belongs to the elderly, the youth, and even to the biome of organisms that live in my body and in the soil. This, is the opposite of everything that the last centuries of manufacturing, education and politics have forged into societal infrastructure and even the making of identity. ~ Nora Bateson
When people begin to talk about going back to normal, I cringe. I’m not sure I want to go back. I get it. You all now think I am crazy, and you’re arguing that not getting back to normal will cause the economy to crash. But, just going back to normal without having learned and grown from the experience is a huge tragedy. If it really takes a month to build a habit then we are in great shape because we have had nearly two months of developing new habits of realizing that what we do affects others and so on. We have also had a chance to slow down and ponder things like “how do we take what we have learned and make our education system better?” We’ve realized that school is no longer a place, and so how do we as Nora Bateson asked us, “What is the measurable value of changing the education system so the next generations may be more proficient at complexity and systemic understanding than their parents?” improve our education system. We do need an education system focused on developing our children to be able to deal with the complexities of our world that most of their parents don’t even realize exist.
I can truly say I have grown in ways I never thought possible in the last two months. And, a big part of that learning is the realization that we are all a part of something bigger than ourselves. As I finish writing this on May 8th, we are beginning to reopen, but hopefully we take advantage of of the clean slate of the path with no footprints to make the world a better place.
Bringing The Smithsonian to You!
During the COVID-19 Pandemic and the many webinars we have been doing to support teachers as they facilitate learning virtually, I keep commenting that the Smithsonian Institution is a tremendous resource. Or, should I say, plethoras of resources and services. Then I got to thinking that if I was going to keep saying that educators needed to check out the Smithsonian, we needed to do a little “show and experience” for them. As a former Smithsonian Teacher Ambassador, I really value all the resources available for educators. So, I decided to reach out to Ashley Naranjo, Manager of Educator Engagement at the Smithsonian Learning Lab, and ask if she would be interested in doing a webinar together. She was quick and enthusiastic to respond in the affirmative. Needless to say, I was excited.
Ashley and I had a great planning session where she had great ideas for engaging webinar participants in actually navigating and using resources. In fact, she and I will be modeling an activity at the beginning – I can’t wait! As I mentioned earlier in the post, I was a Smithsonian Teacher Ambassador back in 2010 and 2011. During that ambassadorship I was talking to groups of educators and organizations about the over 1,600 Smithsonian resources available. I told Ashley this asked how many there were now; she laughed and said, “Over 5,000,000.” Boy did I feel outdated.
Bottom-line: educators won’t want to miss this free webinar. This interactive and engaging webinar will include an overview of the Smithsonian Learning Lab and how teachers can curate their own digital collections of resources across subject areas and grade levels. The great part is that educators will learn, by doing, how to use Smithsonian Education museum resources in their own teaching and learning contexts. Please join us for this journey of bringing the Smithsonian to you!
Being Who We Want To Be
I just had another Lizzie West quote impact me. In this one, West said, “Freedom, to me, is imagination, the power of imagination to create what we want and be who we want to be.” This made me think about all our students, both high school and post secondary, coming out into the Gig Economy. We often talk about how our students will need to create their own job titles, create their own jobs, or adjust to jobs yet not out there, but this is more true today than ever. We must provide the environment for our students to imagine and then create who and what they want to be.
“Freedom, to me, is imagination, the power of imagination to create what we want and be who we want to be.” ~ Lizzie West
Our high school and college graduates of today are entering the workforce of the Gig Economy. The Gig Economy is made up of consultants, independent contractors, freelancers, side-giggers, and on-demand workers. Gig Economy workers make up approximately 30-40% (depending on what source you use) of the U.S. workforce right now. Alternative and flexible work arrangements have been increasing, but with the COVID-19 Pandemic these may become the norm.
Therefore, I get concerned that most high school and college graduates still receive a transcript instead of a portfolio. This plays to my belief we need to worry more about transferable skills and less about courses. Our students will need to be able to identify the skills they have acquired and then be able to market them. Developing portfolios begins to do this and gives them a usable product from their education.
Additionally, we need to be teaching the skills required of the Gig Economy. According to Fast Company there are four essential skills needed in the Gig Economy:
- Critical thinking and logic
- Human Resources
- Finance
- Marketing and communication
Gig Economy professionals must also be able to:
- Match personal skills to problems that need solved.
- Direct themselves.
- Ask good questions before devising a solution.
- Learn, learn, and learn some more.
Our students will need to develop a strong sense of self. They will also, now more than ever, need to be able to answer their own “why” of their learning. Understanding this “why” will help them imagine what and who she/he wants to be.
Angry Teachers 2
Today we started the second part to a great professional development webinar that I am calling Angry Teachers. The title of this webinar is “Angry Teachers 2: Interactive Lessons and Engaging Tools.” The through-line of the webinar is the game Angry Birds. At the beginning of the webinar I always say, “Everything you need to know about teaching you can learn from Angry Birds.” In Angry Teachers 2 we pondered the question, “Many people believe that learning should feel like work.” We then discussed the Finnish model of education where learning looks like play.
During the gathering, we actually play the game and we do a “design the solution” activity where the participants actually design a lesson while playing Angry Birds. At completion the groups had to answer the following:
- Explain your lesson’s objective(s) and standard(s) covered.
- Explain what teaching strategies will be used.
- Explain why you chose what you chose.
With over 25 groups in some of these webinars time does not allow for all groups to share out. So, I offered to the groups that if they would send me their designs I would post them in a blog. Since I’m facilitating six sessions of Angry Teachers 2, I will add to this after each session. So keep coming back to check it out for the next week or so. Here is what has been sent in as of 04/28/2020:
Group 7 (04/28/2020
7th Grade Geometry
Group 4 (04/23/2020)
- Small groups based off of levels (scaffolding of groups with high, medium, low in reading and math)
- Social and Emotional (ok to make mistakes, but we have to learn from them our next chance and how to recover from failure)
- Rewards chart (every so many levels gained, trip to treasure box on Friday’s)
- Balance of wanting to play, but must get work done first
- I Do (model on board, discuss elements), You Do (choose children to go to board and take 1 turn), We Do (small group break up)
- Respect (each bird is a different shape and size, but have their personal strengths, so they work together as a team for best practice of the task ahead of them)
- Build on lessons taught (can go back and retry lessons to practice a skill needed in level)
- Feedback (given as an OREO method (GLOW, GROW, GLOW))
- Include cross curricular ideas
- Rigor (levels get harder the further you get, so have to use critical thinking skills)
- Incorporate the 4 C’s (collaboration with group, critical thinking of what to do next, creativity to beat the level with what birds are given, and communication amongst group members to help those struggling succeed)
Group 5 (04/23/2020)
This group made a great Doodly® of what their lesson would be. Check this out:↓
Doodly® created by Dawn Eibel of Manatee Charter School in Bradenton, FL
Group 11(04/23/2020)
- characterization
- social-emotional: anger/empathy/hidden feelings, etc
- compare/contrast video game with movie segments
- mapping/sequencing/ordering (steps to get most boxes, etc)
- groupings of characters by traits
- writing a backstory event for a character – a childhood moment, embarrassing situation, etc
- LOTS of writing: setting, events, characters, develop themes or moral of story
Our objective had to do with a 3rd grade standard of sequencing order of events. The objective specifically stated that SWBAT provide a sequence of events in order for each level of the Angry Birds game that they have gotten through.
This quickly turned into what we said could eventually be a “strategy guide” of sorts that the students could collaborate on because we don’t do work just for ourselves but we are creating for the world to see and consume. An extension activity that we thought would be beneficial is if the students could do a STEAM ativity to where, over time, they create a real world Angry Birds level to test out different scientific principles.
On a personal and professional note I have enjoyed your PD’s so much because I’ve been a proponent of looking at different mediums to promote and incorporate into education. I actually started a You Tube Channel for parents that covers different pop culture references and relates it back to education. If you have any amount of time please check it out. www.youtube.com/c/jeremywhiteeducation (It’s called LIFT Tutoring)
I hope your blog post for this specific idea of incorporating Angry Birds into the classroom is beneficial to a lot of educators as we continue to rethink what education is, especially during this time of remote learning.
Let’s Talk Student Engagement: Part 1
This morning I started a new iteration in supporting teachers and administrators during this time of remote learning due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. We are now doing 30 minute small group supports. I made two different types of support and one of them is called, “Let’s Talk Student Engagement.” The idea is to have groups of five teachers working together, coming up with solutions to increase student engagement and share expertise. I have to say I really enjoyed my first session. We had a great discussion around how to do better at engaging students.
One teacher stated that she has done away with worksheets and switched totally to projects. She is giving the students three to four choices of what project he/she wants to do. I am a huge proponent of student choice and agency when it comes to education. We also discussed the value in staying a little more general or broader in topic. In other words, don’t get to specific. Also, chunking content into smaller pieces is a best practice. Learning online can be physically, mentally, and emotionally taxing. Use of long reading passages or big projects is not advisable, unless chunked very intentionally. I philosophically believe in the Self-Determination Theory, which holds that we are most deeply engaged, and that we do our most creative work, when we feel that we are acting according to our own will on behalf of goals we find meaningful.
From a pedagogical standpoint it is very import to remember it is very important to allow for:
- in-depth discussions
- group work/projects
- both watching and creating video/audio clips
- hands-on projects
- individual time to work
“In the midst of every crisis, lies great opportunity.” ~ Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein is credited with saying, “In the midst of every crisis, lies great opportunity.” We should not forget to look at the opportunity in front of us. One of the great advantages right now, teaching virtually, is the ability to individualize and personalize like never before. There must still be the opportunity for students to have peer/group interactions and very clear expectations. We must enable our students to work autonomously, but yet develop and enjoy learning relationships with others, and feel they are competent to achieve their own objectives.
Gaps In Our Consistency
At one of our most recent gatherings of 3D Leadership, a topic came up that the participants were calling “gaps in our consistency.” When I asked about these gaps they said they were the things that really kept them from being great teachers and the schools which they taught from being as great as they could be. One of the most important tools in effective schools is consistency. Research and practice have proved that school leaders and teachers must be consistent every day in carrying out their duties if they want to improve student performance and conduct. Here is what the teacher leaders said the gaps were:
- Being Reactionary
- Everything done short term/constant change
- Lack of training to make sure initiatives/processes could be implemented
- Relationships must be in place for there to be the trust for everything to be going well
- Besides the why, there needs to be the what and the how
- Teachers need to teach and not be auditors
Really, what any teacher wants is to be able to get to work and feel like what he/she is doing are the right things to be doing. What teachers don’t need are things constantly changing or different expectations or directions. These result in confusion. It is really about being on the same page and staying on the same page. Consistency really can be the protagonist or the villain of great accomplishment. There is a difference between being agile and continually changing focus, priorities, and behavior patterns.
One of the biggest problems that inconsistency brings on an organizational and personal level is a loss of trust. Judgement becomes not trusted, follow through on initiatives is not trusted, and trust that what is being implemented today will even be important as soon as tomorrow. The administration and staff must operate like a single coherent unit. If we are able to build this consistency in any organization we can build what researchers have called a “culture of consistency.” We need to recognize our gaps in consistency; delivering consistently can have a profound impact on our effectiveness.
Byron's Babbles 
5 comments