Reflections Archives - Page 7 of 7

Dynamic reflection

What keeps you going? It is a common question volleyed towards teachers and is often answered with jokes and trite responses. I do not buy any of them, though I am guilty of using some of those old war horses from time to time.

Three things: June, July, and August

I do it for the kids.

blah, blah, blah

We are educators. We are trained. We are practiced. Many of us are polished and take great pride in our work. Many of us also enjoy the same self-deprecating humor. Dare I say that there are commonalities of temperament among career-educators?

In reality, it is the desire to improve and the desire to see our improvement exhibited through the achievement of others. It begins with us; it begins with you. It sounds like a joke, but it is not.

Education reform begins with you, not me. We are not capable of changing ourselves in the meaningful ways that education requires. But we can change each other and if we are successful, we can expect the same in return.

Dynamic reflection is a necessity. It is our lifeblood. It is the metacognitive practice that operates in the mind of the educator. Calibrating. Recalibrating. Examining faces, responses, reactions, non-reactions, and queries for fault and options for improvement and revision. Like an indestructible toy that keeps righting itself no matter what the obstacle, the teacher presses on through the class searching for that open window, a crack in the door; some way into that brain!

Some of these calibrating factors are common and not worthy of conversation. On a regular basis, however, the need arises for an adjustment.The educator must step outside of self and reflect with a harsh mirror. Not a

dance studio mirror, mind you, where the reflections are all long, lean,

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!

and strong characters. This is not The Chorus Line rogues’ gallery filled with beauty and insecurity–muscles and legs til Tuesday. This is the mirror of the observer. The visitor. The person in the back of the room.

If the need for this kind of intervention is not common to you, or if this concept seems like one for the extreme cases or the weak…then you need to pay close attention.

Dynamic reflection requires two key components.

The first component for dynamic reflection is what is commonly referred to as cognitive load. Cognitive load is the amount of different processes that your brain can manage successfully. Consider computers that once operated in a serial manner–one process at a time. Later computers possessed parallel processors, and now are capable of running several processes simultaneously without any dip in processing speed or accuracy.

In the brain, this method of multiple processes is happening all the time. Your mind is taking in information constantly and is discriminating what is and is not important to you. Important information is processed and addressed. If it is prioritized, it may cause other lower priority processes to cease.

How many of you turn down the radio when looking for a house number or when parallel parking? Be honest. That is your executive process making decisions and prioritizing your processing power.

How does this factor into dynamic reflection? We are only able to maintain so many processes while we are teaching. The catch is here: it is likely that we need to be most critical at times when we are least capable to maintain the cognitive load. Let me say that another way–when things are going well and we are cruising through content that we could teach in our sleep, we can devote more of our cognitive capacity to reflection on the fly. This reflection will likely produce the least interesting information for reflection and change. When we are in new content that requires more of our attention, and students are asking questions or resisting the instruction in some way, we are far too occupied to consider our teaching practice with the sober and careful honesty that it deserves and requires. We may even be so happy to escape certain death, that we fail to reflect adequately at all–or simply categorize it as a total failure so anything better than that is all win. We need more than we can do alone.

That is why collegial trust is so important. Collegial trust is not about trouble or blowing smoke. Collegial trust is most importantly about getting someone who is willing to accurately and honestly report on your teaching practice. To you. I encourage you to find a brutal critic. Build up some thick skin. Stay quiet, take notes, and change. Get used to it. Learn to love it. This person will become your best friend and may even be the person who saves your professional life. It may be important, to you, to find someone who is capable of keeping the observation confidential. Whatever.

Tell me the truth.

If you want to know the answer to longevity in education, the answer is dynamic reflection. Some may argue that this is true of many industries. I do not work in many industries, so I cannot comment on that. What I am able to say is that dynamic reflection both alone and with others is something that will change you and sustain you.

Think about it. Now think differently.

Brush your feet, shake your hands

In my earliest days as an educator, there were few full time jobs to be had and I chose to work in a situation of steady influence rather than hopping about as a substitute teacher from place to place and probably outside my content area. I was in between my fourth and fifth years of college and needed a break from academics and also needed to make a few dollars to pay the bills.

I found myself in South Philadelphia working as an assistant teacher in an early intervention classroom and it was there where I learned many of the ‘tricks’ that I still utilize in my classes today. Whether it was from my students, my lead teacher, or the several therapists who were working in the room, the novelty and variety of practices were never ending. I stole them all. I remember being told, upon hire, I was that the salary was low and the turnover was high–they did, however, get the benefit of fresh faces such as mine who were right out of college.

Being regularly surrounded by students of multiple involvements was a challenge of its own. Many had their own language and vocabulary with an expected repertoire of responses, some were quite distant while some were lucid and possessed more latent delays, and there were a few who were given to violent tantrums. If this were a seminar or in-real-life (IRL) discussion I would probably make some allusion to ‘multitasking’ and we would all smile a cautious smile. These were students who deserved more of us than we could give.

The first lesson that I taught is that the body must be ready to learn before the mind is ready to learn. Every student had a routine upon arrival–this is nothing new to us, is it? Keep in mind that these students had very different routines and, I came to discover, these routines were good for everyone. Routine one: brush your veggies and your feet.

By brushing the feet, lower legs, hands, and lower arms we created static input that acted to organize the nervous system. The students liked it. The brushes tickle and massage, they provided types of input that the students need. We need it too. When our minds or bodies seem out of sorts, we can use these techniques. The brushes that we used looked like this:

Veggie brushes — Brushes come in varied harnesses

and could be found at a variety of ‘frou-frou’ gourmet stores. There is far more to it than just brushing but you get the gist.

The morning was a blur of focused activities categorized by the types of input provided. For those students who needed vestibular input, there was a platform swing which was aluminum and strong enough to hold an instructor and a student. There were weighted vests which, as explained to me, provided downward pressure to help students feel ‘more grounded.’There were all sorts of massaging devices–large, two-handed, AC powered massaging devices that provided sensory input to large muscle groups as well as fingers and toes; and small, hand held devices that the students could manipulate on their own–many of them liked the sensation along with vocalized sound. Along with clapping activities and stomping activities, the room was abuzz with the exact kind of racket that should come from a well-planned course of classroom activity. This was only the first 15 minutes.

Watch for Part 2: Nobody moves, nobody gets taught

Unshouldering the burden

Still wrapping up my thoughts from EdCamp Philly, I wanted to make sure that I put down a few thoughts that sprung to mind while in a session with Kevin Jarrett, Mary Beth Hertz, and Rob Rowe.

Flavio Canto, Judoka and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu black belt was speaking about his techniques, teaching, competing, and his drive to compete. The magazine interview has been long lost and the exact quote has long left my mind but the essence of his remarks were something like this:

I give away my techniques to my enemies in order to force myself to become better. I want to know that I am the best with no secrets and no excuses.

When I read that interview, I remembered something that had happened to me years earlier. I was recently out of undergrad and working in a bookstore’s database department on South Street. One of my coworkers was a writer and invited me to a writers’ get together in South Philly. Being a composer and fan of creative speak, I went along to this open house.

The small home was abuzz with talk of ideas, character discussion, critiques of plots and dialogue, and in a small crowd in the middle of the living room attention turned to me. “So what do you do?” I told them that I’m a composer and started telling the group about a piano piece that I was writing. Thinking that this would be a sympathetic crowd, I shared my current problems regarding the piece. I told them that I was “writing this piece for piano and I am in love with the thematic material.” They leaned in, eager to hear about my process and I was encouraged to continue. Sure that they would understand, I confessed “I like the material so much that I haven’t finished it for fear of ruining it in my mind. It’s really great and I don’t want to destroy the purity of the theme while exploring the development.”

They looked at me like I had three heads. Three ugly heads. With “I hate writers” tattooed on my eyelids. One of them spoke, “Who do you think you are?” I stared back at him. “It’s not yours. I might need that piece and you do not have the right to keep it.” The growing crowd (really, it grew and I think that someone turned the heat on) nodded in agreement. “You need to go finish that piece,” someone said. “I can’t believe you haven’t finished it yet,” said one of the throng. A few people walked away. “How long have you been letting it sit?” someone asked. I didn’t have an answer.

This experience is fresh in my mind. I can still feel the tension. It drives me, though. I think of Flavio Canto. I think of that weird Woody Allen-esque dude in South Philly. I think about how silly I am thinking that I own any of the ideas that come out of my head.

I become protective of my research, of my classroom management strategies, my course design, and my methods of increasing achievement. We all do. We have our pets. We have things that we share when asked. We plan those moments carefully so we do not give away all of our secrets. Why?

Feeling plugged up in your classroom approach? Could it be that you are shouldering a burden that is too great to bear? Education, I am finding, is something that demands to be given away. The same way that a quality story must be read and good music demands participatory listening, education requires action–and not simply the execution of the lesson. It requires sharing, grooming, perfecting, adapting, and giving away of all that you have so that it may reach its potential–without you. Your brilliant ideas will develop and become epic without you…yes, it’s true. Someone will do it better. Be proud. Now do it again. And again.

We think that we own it. Foolish, isn’t it? We protect it like a jealous love or a protective parent. Worse is when we think that it’s not that big a deal, that’s it’s not worth sharing. Also foolish. What are your confessions?

EdCamp Philly reflection 1

Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

On Friday night, I was considering sleeping in and skipping EdCamp Philly completely. I’m secure. I can be honest. It would require waking up at work time and putting on some respectable clothes. Then Dan Callahan told me that I could wear jeans and a t-shirt. I’m not quite sure if that was the turning point, but it was part of the turning–so much easier to get out of bed when it involves sensible clothing.

Let me cut to the chase–EdCamp was well worth the effort and alarm clocks (plural). I will get to the sessions in my next post but I thought that I would share a few survey thoughts. Obvious kudos to the organizing team and participants. The UNconference was well run and the attendees played by the rules of engagement and, honestly, demanded that this was the type of conference that they would want to attend. Connections were made–folks with whom I am sure to become longtime friends. Many of us scanned each room looking to see who else cared enough to attend; who else was fighting for their professional lives.

I presented on Expertise and–like many other presenters–never got to the end because the attendees had other questions and other ideas for the session. Not a problem. My only regret is, now knowing what to expect, that I would like to have decided upon my topic upon arrival as a few people had done. In the words of W. S. Burroughs, “Nothing like adding a modicum of challenge and danger to everyday life.” Now I know what to do next time.

Closing for now to say that these types of get-togethers are critical. How many times we have all felt alone in our zeal. In our love or hatred of technology, we have not found a sympathetic ear or understanding response. In our desire to learn and develop, we have been willing to be wrong and in the minority simply to produce quality conversation to no avail. In a metropolitan area of millions, there were attendees in the hundreds. Few of us were from the same school or even the same district. Such a great success this was, but we cannot allow the next one to come and go so easily. We must become activists and evangelists–fools for learning. What would we be willing to do and how far is too far if it means that our selves, our colleagues, and more importantly our students would benefit. Can you draw that line in the sand?

The excitement will wear off. The conversations will become less frequent. That is, unless we make decisions today about our behavior. Bringing this back to Expertise: What will you do in terms of improving in your own domain? From whom will you seek mentoring? To whom will you provide mentoring? How will get get practice in your area?

Make decisions. Make them soon. Stick to them. More to come.

more information at EdCampPhilly