The Geography of Learning: A Hybrid Model?

Ever since March 16th I've been slowed down significantly with an ankle injury that I recently learned was a non-displaced fracture to the tibia. Though I only have taken off 4 days of work due to the injury, I'm still in cast and walking with a cane, and feel my teaching has suffered by a degree. As I've looked for solutions to personal mobility and energy issues (pushing myself around on the wheeled desk chair is one), I've begun contemplating distance learning.

For a range of reasons, students and teachers, enabled by technology, have taken up distance (e-)learning as an alternative or supplement to traditional classroom learning. I myself have done some webinars and online courses, that, everything considered, have provided a moderately decent education. I would never replace in-person education entirely, however, my recent injury leaves me wondering what possibilities for e-learning might fit into the traditional K-12 public education system. Even and especially as a hybrid model, I can imagine a system that reduces cost and increases flexibility by taking a given percentage of traditional classtime (say, one day a week) and delivers this instruction electronically and remotely. Implementing the system would raise many questions and probably a good number of protests, but I can't help but think that inevitably our society will demand it.

Better to be proactive than reactive. Sometimes putting your feet up (to reduce swelling or otherwise) can be a perfect occasion to confront a problem that otherwise seems to rest on too distant a horizon.

You've heard it here: let's see some experimental programs in public, K-12 schools that incorporate remote e-learning into the standard curriculum. What do you think?

Teacher websites

In the digital/information age, it increasingly makes sense that EVERYTHING has its own website. In my estimation, good teaching and learning will make efficacious use of the internet.

I recently launched a website for my own history classes. You can find it at www.ballouhistory.com. Please check it out and examine it's different capabilities and short-comings. What does it do well? What do you think could be improved? How can this website be used a tool for learning with my students in the classroom?

Getting Things Done: Students

I wrote last time about teacher productivity and efficiency, and while that obviously deserves attention, students have a much greater deficit of these skills (big surprise, they’re students) yet what methods do schools put in place to amplify and revamp student working methods?

Surely individual teachers guide students to be more effective thinkers, note-takers, planners, etc. And some schools have advisory programs, “life skills” classes, and yes, a culture itself which breeds productivity and efficacy for students. When these initiatives succeed they ought be lauded, and ideally, replicated. Unfortunately, we have not arrived at a stage—perhaps due to our lack of national standards—where best practices for increasing general student effectiveness are widely known and practiced. Whether through the use of student agendas, advisory meetings, technology solutions or something else, school systems need to get serious about evaluating the effectiveness of student effectiveness training. That’s right, lets state that again to let that phrase soak in: evaluating the effectiveness of student effectiveness training.

Here are a couple ideas I’ve tried in the classroom, but have yet to fully put them to the test for effectiveness (and would obviously need to implement a large scale study to determine statistical validity… nevertheless…)

1. Global History to do checklist: Students are given a template with columns for tasks (assignments, organizational goals, mastery of standards), priority rating (high, medium, low), and time estimates for completion. These lists would need to have prominent usage, and some class time would need to be devoted to coach students through the execution of their action items. It surprised me how few of my students had experience making to do lists, let alone using them. I would posit that this skill ought to be given much great emphasis in middle and high school curriculums.
2. Emailing: We’re in an age when email is ubiquitous and teachers and students need to take advantage of it. Students need to learn how to write a formal email, need to be held accountable to checking their email on a regular (but not obsessive) basis, and need to learn the email organizational skills of the professional (see my last post). My students are required to use email for certain assignments, and with the advantage of time stamps, it really helps in time management training.

Of course there are many other strategies and tools to instruct students in personal task, time, energy, information and relationship management. What do you use?

Getting Things Done as a Teacher

A teacher is basically an acrobat, performing for a crowd while trying to juggle a dozen things at once. Unlike an acrobat, most of the things a teacher juggles are not visible but abstract and thus, much harder to keep track of.

How do schools ensure that their teachers don’t “drop the ball”? How can teachers keep track themselves? Like any professional, many teachers use agendas, to-do lists, and calendars to keep track of their tasks, appointments, responsibilities and goals. But as far as my experience goes, the industry has a long way to go before “best practices” for productivity and task/time/energy management are established system wide for the principle managers of our children’s education.

A few thoughts, inspired by two books I’ve read in the past year or so:

-David Allen’s Getting Things Done-

Written more for the executive and corporate type, Allen’s procedures for creating and managing inboxes, outboxes, archives and to-do lists are on the money for anyone interested in productivity, including teachers. Since reading the book about a year ago, I have much more effectively managed my workflow/load. I have inboxes and filing systems at work, home, on the computer and in my email accounts. My favorite organizing innovations have to do with the division between action items and archival items.

Action items vs. Archive

Especially with my email, I try to clear my inbox as mail comes in, putting emails that need attention in the “Action items” folder, and everything else in the “Archive.” With my gmail account, I have labels that automatically apply to many items, making it even easier to sort the archive, but the best part is being able to have a clear inbox, and a separate folder clear of clutter, devoted just to action items. I make separate time to clear the inbox and to attend to the action item list. When I visit the action items folder I then attack them right there (if they are below the 2 min threshold) or I move the actions to my to do list.

I also maintain a separate folder titled “upcoming events/appointments” which serves as a reference until items get put in my calendar (and in case the calendar entry needs clarification). Every few days I visit this folder and delete or archive old and irrelevant items. This procedure confirms that I am on top of my commitments.

-Tim Ferris’ The Four Hour Workweek-

This book is great for the teacher who is always swamped with work (except in the summer) and needs a glimpse of the big picture, particularly how to be more efficient. Ferris has 4 rules and while a teacher can’t follow them completely, they can guide the teacher to greater effectiveness. The four rules are:

-Define

-Eliminate

-Automate

-Liberate

This book is all about putting things in context of what really matters, what really works, and what you really need to do (and what can be done by others/not at all). Ferris encourages putting limits on work, to preserve sanity and balance; for the teacher, this can mean instituting a rule that no work will take place after 9PM, for a 24 hours block on the weekend, or during their lunch break. Email and phone calls too—rather than checking constantly or not at all, check every day at the same time (say, 4PM), and “chunk” it, that is, get them all out of the way at once.

An interesting thing I’ve tried is one of Ferris’ most compelling and controversial suggestions—that of the “virtual assistant.” Throughout last year I experimented with three virtual assistants: a well educated professor of education in the Philippines ($6 per hour), a large outsourcing firm in India ($4.5 per hour) and a stay at home mom in the Midwest who had a Master in Education ($11 an hour). Far and away the best deal was the American woman, who I could talk to on the phone, had a better understanding of American culture and education, and produced more quality given the higher wages. The experience of delegating, especially remotely, was good management experience for me—and that turns out to be the best take away from this experiment. Outcomes on individual assignments were mixed, but a few things are for sure:

-the longer one works with a VA, the better the results over time

-the more work that can take place remotely and which is straightforward to explain and perform (data entry, for example), the more promising the relationship

-hourly wages are hard to negotiate across cultures, ocean and time-zones, so expectations need to be extremely clear from the get go.

I think it would be a great idea for a school to pioneer a program where teachers received a small budget—say, $500 per year—to hire an assistant, virtual or otherwise. Teaching should really be a team based job, and teachers should be able to delegate certain tasks in order to focus more on planning, assessing, guiding, etc.

The last big take away from Ferris’ book worth noting at this time is his application of the Pareto principle, or the 80-20 rule. Applied to business, the benefits are clear—focus attention on the 20 percent of clients who give you 80 percent of your business, and eliminate the 20 percent of your clients who give you 80 percent of your headaches. Taking a similar approach to education could produce interesting results: intervene with the 20% of students who give you 80% of your challenges; coach students on the 20% of the skills that will give them 80% of a boost in performance, etc. Obviously some real scientific study should go towards investigating the potential of this approach in teaching and learning, but there is definitely a range of intriguing application of the rule to education, which I have rarely, if ever, heard spoken about.

Teaching Revolutions

Uprising, injustice, massacre, anarchy…freedom, hope, revelation, unity…each of these themes, and many more, characterize the study of revolution. Since November, I have been teaching my students about revolution but have failed to discover the key to how the essence of this concept might be transferred. How to convey the hope and despair, the agony and elation, that comes with political revolution? How to convey the shifting in consciousness and lifestyle that comes with economic and scientific revolutions?

I have yet to encounter a comprehensive program that specifically addresses the proper pedagogy. Obviously we ought apply the standard, proven methods to this topic as any other, and we should find success. But isn’t there something special about revolutions?

I would posit that the following aspects of teaching revolution has particular importance if students will apprehend the true, complex and controversial essence of revolution:

1.    Details matter: In teaching global history, by nature a survey course, there is a tendency to gloss over the details in favor of trends. By revolution, in particular, warrants a deeper treatment of individual cases. Why? Because there are no trends! Every revolution is, in reality, so different from the next—from the likelihood that the ousted leaders will return to power, to the depth and breadth of reform—that students will fail to see the importance of a single event (a foreign intervention, a religious belief) on the outcome. Since every revolution has a different context, and since revolution is so transformative, it needs a unique way of approach. Perhaps it should its own course.

2.    Cause and effect relationships matter: As with the details, students need to approach every aspect of revolution with the critical lens of cause-effect. Since the essence of revolution is change, new tools should be developed to map change, and to test whether competing hypotheses for the revolution’s causes and effects are accurate. Revolution offers a rare opportunity for high school students to actually practice history (ie research and analysis), not just regurgitate it.

3.    The enduring understandings matter: Even if you teach with detail and strategies to distill cause and effect, what enduring understandings will the students walk away with? This goal is particularly crucial, as revolution is rife with misunderstanding, which leads to poor application to today’s world. Particularly for this reason, when choosing which trends, outcomes and relationships get emphasis, comparison to the issues of today should guide such a deliberation.

4.    Choice matters: Depending on the course, it matters which revolutions get taught (I’d make the same argument from a systematic point of view: Depending on the grade, school, nation…) What difference does it make if you study the French Revolution but not the Haitian Revolution? The American Revolution but not the Glorious Revolution? Just as significant, which narratives are chosen to teach these revolutions? I think most educators see the messiness of revolution and try to clean it up… “Here’s a document about a peasant, here’s a document about a lord… they hated each other, and BOOM!” It didn’t happen like that. Every revolution had so many factions, alliances, competing interests, and diverse and fluid outcomes, that in reality, students should walk away from studying revolution with many more questions than answers.

Recommended reading: Barrington Moore’s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy.