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Mind the Gap, Jacques

Émile Jacques-Dalcroze had a few things right and it wasn’t just about music education. It was about where knowledge begins. Not in some deep ethereal way. In a tangible way. You have to know when to hold ’em; know when to fold ’em. Know when to walk away and know when to run. The same rules that we have learned from gamblers and from Nirvana apply to education. Keep it close to your heart–at the beginning, at least.

Best known for the concept of eurhythmics and for teaching music through movement, I find the heart of the Dalcroze method is the most profound and most immediately applicable to all education.

Dalcroze taught us that concepts begin close to the body. The farther a concept gets from the heart, or gut in some translation, the more abstract it becomes. That is why, in a typical Dalcroze setting, you will see young students stomping their feet, clapping their hands, patting their knees, and slapping their bellies. You are more likely to see students moving to demonstrate a musical concept than, say, writing about it. Or, perish the thought, typing about it on a computer.

How does this translate to education in other domains? Consider the process that we require of students. Consider whether knowledge begins close to the heart before it is in the hands; in the mouth before it is on the pen; on the paper before it is in the computer. With each added distance, there is an added level of abstraction. When tools are involved and the information moves beyond the body–using a pencil, a drumstick, and beyond to a computer keyboard that places words onto a screen–the learned concepts take significant leaps into abstraction. Are your students prepared to make that leap and are you prepared to intervene if they are not? If you prefer, you may think along the lines of another Swiss theorist, Jean Piaget. According to Piaget, the final stage of development is most notably marked by the ability to think abstractly. While Piaget’s stages are developmental across years, it may be a worthwhile consideration to parallel these stages through the teaching and learning within your content.

Tacit Knowing in Digital realms

Tacit knowledge can be a hard nut to crack. The elusive nature of a definition creates an informational onomatopoeia of sorts. In short, tacit knowledge is the information that is built into everyday life. For the industrial designer, tacit knowledge may be a well designed tool.

For the athlete, tacit knowledge is shaking off a tackle or switching feet on the mound. For the student in the here and now, it may be the difference between successfully and unsuccessfully navigating what are becoming the most important years. For the teacher of today, it may create levels of avoidance because the knowledge is not activated and the interactions necessary for transfer are not in place. This leaves a significant gap between those with a perceived ability and those left wanting.

Without getting into semantics, I will tell you that I will not be referring to modern students as 21st century students, or digital natives, or even digital primitives. It all sounds so silly. Regardless of the era, those who were young and readily exposed to new contraptions have been early adopters. For wont of another label and for some credit to their name, many race to describe them in some novel manner. Oh well. Let us just say “students” and I think we have made ourselves more than clear.

In digital realms, we are drawn to interfaces and technology that fits. We seek out stuff that is well designed and makes sense when it is being used. Familiarity does not breed contempt, it breeds complacency and a loss of development. We are not separated by generations of loss, but by generations of access and novelty. Some of us remember the touch-and-feel lawsuits of the 1980’s in which it was argued that the familiarity of the interface was a unique and, more importantly, a feature worthy of protection. Nowadays, it is expected that all software has a similar touch and feel and customers are sold on other features.

All novelty aside, the narrow set of options that exist in the digital scheme make for ready adjustment from product to product. From the outside, it may seem a reasonable statement that children are getting smarter and more adept but in reality, there are many simple explanations for this phenomena. The steady diet of technology exposure is an obvious attribute. The next may be the ready access to similar sorts of technology and the final is the likely good design. Products are doing much more with much less. Smart buttons on products replace entire strips of knobs and entire keyboard options of previous models. I would argue that folks in my generation (either pushing or pulling 40) look at a lack of buttons, like the iPod, as a potential issue–How can you do anything with that? It only has one button! Now, anyone with a full keyboard on their phone is probably ordering Brontosaurus Burgers on his bag phone. Right?

One of the primary considerations that we must maintain is that these demonstrations of skills do not imply thorough knowledge or deep skills. Observing a student interacting with materials in effective and appropriate ways does not suggest that they possess other skills with those products or interfaces. That is not to say that we ignore these abilities but that we build on them. Use these as points of inquiry on our part to explore the depths of knowledge so that we may best activate, access, and build on skills.

Be aware of your own trepidation regarding some digital technologies that may give you pause when you perceive a competent student. Make use of these situations to co-learn, to explore, and to create deep learning experiences. Facilitate exploration and fill gaps in student knowledge so that they are able to increase their skills while maintaining or building upon their self-efficacy beliefs. Model the kinds of attitudes that you wish to see in your students: take risks, explore, ask questions, take notes, and say thanks. You just learned something, too.

I hate commercials

Easy targets. Trite complaints. Broken records. They are powerful because they resonate. I now have your attention and your (at least) leaning towards being on my side.

Snake oil — Step right up! You need, I have!

You may have heard salesmen use the Feel, Felt, Found method of developing affinity with current/future clients. They understand how you feel and they have felt that way too. But you know what? They have found the cure for everything that ails you!

As a teacher, I feel the same pressures that you feel. I have felt the sting of pointed words and critiques because my students do not perform the way that non-educators think that they should. “If you are such a great teacher” they say, “why aren’t your test scores higher???” I have found that the answer to this is to do away with standardized testing.

You see what I did there? I created a scenario that resonates. It is a common experience that we have had or one that has been explained to us. The frustration. The insult. The pain. We are professionals, are we not? We do not need this kind of treatment. They do not know what we do every day.

In Waiting for Godot, the character Estragon suffers from terrible pain and is constantly futzing with his shoes. Frustrated, Vladimir comments,

“There’s man all over for you, blaming on his boots the faults of his feet.”

I use the example of standardized testing because it is one to which many of us can relate. Test results are misused. Surprise. Does that mean that assessment of this type should be tossed out completely? Please. Teachers misuse test results every day. Good teachers. Maybe even you.

There are more items on the docket for the snake-oil salesman. They make grandiose statements that seem to have credibility. That credibility is strengthened when they make statements and use terminology that gets your Irish up. Grades. Detention. Rewards. Punishment. Bells. Classes. Uniforms. Tests. Paper. Technology. Who ever said that we need school anyway?! It is just a conspiracy to prepare us to be mindless cattle for corporate America!!

Relax.

Breathe.

This week I joked with a friend on Twitter and told him that he was a crackpot. His response was one of gratitude because “after all it’s usually “crackpots” that change the world.” Seem innocent enough. If you say that enough, you will believe it.

I rail against those who abuse nomenclature and also fight the colloquial research that we pass on over and again. Myths that we propagate. Do not fall for it, folks. Simply ask questions and expect answers. We need to stop taking peoples’ word for it and get back to real experience and real research that suggests best practices.

Personal myths-personal cages

My grandmother is a saint. My father works harder than anyone. My mother pulled herself up by her bootstraps against all odds. My uncle is a brilliant mind who retired at 50, or was it 45? My friend Matt is a fount of knowledge who never forgets anything. My wife is the most organized person I know. I only applied to one school and got in. I had a great GPA, great SATs, never had to take GREs, and wow everyone in interviews. In a few minutes, this paragraph will morph into a plug for The Most Interesting Man in the World.

Recognize that our view of ourselves, even if lofty, is a potential cage for what we could be and how others may see us.

Our personal myths seem innocuous and may even be some of our charm. Some of our friends have a walking joke about our tales. But are they harmless? Hardly. Personal myths develop into beliefs and expectations.

It is believed by some that the personal myth is an extension of the centric view of the world described by Piaget. Children go through a phase where they think that their life is the subject of a film; they are being watched and evaluated. They make faces at walls, ceilings, and other places where people or cameras may be hiding. This comes along with the development of conscience and/or guilt and passes with developmental progress.

Personal myths can overwhelm and cause issues as severe as depression. As we mature, we realize that these truths that we have known do not match the life that we understand. Myths can also be career-threatening as our experiences are inserted into the classroom. In working with pre-service teachers, I regularly stress that we cannot teach our students through the window of our experiences. Our histories have been manipulated in our memory and are unreliable. We have turned our lives into a mythology and we have to frame our remembrances as such. We provide our students with our foggy anecdotes thinking that it provides a level of connection-it may, in fact, cause them to consider that they cannot meet your expectations.

Calibration is key in our lives and our teaching.

A good friend is a successful lawyer who has recently left the city. I remember him most for one thing: When I would tell him something about myself, he would ask, “Do people tell you that, or do you tell people that?” Such an excellent question. Does my view of self come from my own perceptions and experiences or the perceptions and experience of others?

When you tell people something about yourself, do they say, “Oh, really?!” Are they surprised to hear you say that you are a hard worker, an over-achiever, and impeccably neat and orderly? Make a list, mental or otherwise, of descriptors–words that define you. Have a friend do the same with you in mind. Do they match? How do your students view you? Has the view of others been limited by the persona you profess?

Let’s think differently.