Friday's Five - I'm Not a Trained Monkey! (and other thoughts)

Some Fridays it's hard to come up with a topic about which to write.  Others it's hard to choose one topic because there are so many ideas I have floating around in my head.  Today is the latter.  I guess that means I should have blogged more during the week.  In any case, I'm going to share five thoughts that I've had the past couple of days.

Photo Credit: C. Frank Starmer

1. I'm not a trained monkey.  It's state assessment week(s) here in Pennsylvania.  The majority of my time in school has been spent watching students fill in bubbles with a #2 pencil.  Any trained monkey could do this.  I want to teach.  I want my students to learn.  The purpose of assessment is to guide teaching so that students learn more.  I won't get the results of this assessment until these students have moved on from my classroom.  It's a political shell game that doesn't benefit my students, and all the free snacks in the world won't convince them differently.  I'm a teacher, not a trained monkey.  Let me teach.  Let my students learn.
2. About those free snacks during state testing time - If research shows that kids' brains work better when they are well fed, have snacks, etc., shouldn't we be giving them the snacks during the learning and not during the assessment?  Funny how something as simple as a snack can illustrate so perfectly how out-of-whack our priorities have become.
3. Yesterday in the faculty room, someone was complaining that our elementary school pedagogy is too driven by the demands of colleges.  When talking about being more innovative with how we assess, teach, and organize schools, the counter-argument is often, "But what will happen when they get to college?  They'll be expected to listen to lectures and learn on their own."  Here's the thing: sticking 50-200 people in a room, lecturing at them (whether you use a PowerPoint presentation or not), and telling them to read textbooks in order to find additional information is not good teaching.  It's not the best way for people to learn.  I don't care how much people pay to subject themselves and their kids to that nonsense, it's still lousy pedagogy.  If colleges really cared about student learning and not their profit statements, they'd tailor their pedagogy to be more like kindergarten.  More play.  More investigation.  More collaboration.  More learning.
4. The difference in the restlessness of elementary students after changing the clocks for Daylight Savings Time in the spring is stark.  It's like they know they should be outside now.  After hearing John Medina explain during his ISTE keynote last summer how the human brain performs optimally outside, while the body is in motion, and in changing meteorological conditions, this restlessness makes a whole lot more sense.  
5. I've been lucky enough to be nominated for the Presidential Award for Excellence in Math and Science Teaching (PAEMST) this year, and a whole lot of my energy has been spent the past few weeks preparing my application.  The application is extensive and overwhelming, but I'm benefitting a great deal from the reflection and introspection into my practices that is required.  Part of that reflection has made me re-realize how much I benefit from all of you out there in my PLN - on Plurk, Twitter, Facebook, and those who I connect with in the blogosphere.  I am sincerely grateful to all of you for helping me better myself and my teaching.   

ISTE 2011 - Day One

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I feel very fortunate to be attending my first ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) Conference this year in Philadelphia.  Since I've gotten so much incredible information from attendees at past conferences to which I was not able to attend through tweets, plurks, and blog posts, I want to share my experience.  You can also follow the conference on twitter.  Those tweeting the conference are using the hashtag #ISTE11.

I could write dozens of blog posts on what I learned just during yesterday's opening keynote and my interactions with members of my PLN.  Actually, I'm sure that the experience will lead to numerous posts in the future, but in order to keep this post reasonable, you'll have to forgive me for using a bulleted list.  Here's a snapshot of my learning and experiences from the first day of ISTE 2011:

• It's hard to imagine the scope of the conference before you experience it.  I've been to other 10,000+ people conferences at the Pennsylvania Convention Center before, but nothing has been like this.  Almost every space in the 3 connected buildings and 4 floors is being used.
• Meeting so many members of my PLN was a wonderful experience.  These educators have been incredibly influential in my career.  Interacting with them has fueled my passion for teaching, but I had only met two or three of them in person before yesterday. It's a strange experience to introduce yourself to someone who've had discussions with for years, yet it happened many times yesterday.
• As soon as I arrived, I learned a new tool through a discussion with a member of my PLN:  My Brainshark.  It's an add-on for Google Apps that allows one to upload video, pictures, and other files, and then comment on them in several ways (microphone, telephone, etc.) It looks really useful.  I'll have to play around with it.
• I really enjoyed the opening keynote by Dr. John Medina, author of Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School.  I'm putting that book on my list to read.  Many of the things he said solidified my personal beliefs that our current system of education does not meet the needs of our students, nor our society as a whole.  Here are a few of the many points that he made that I found especially interesting:
• Brain science doesn't say anything about how we should teach people, but we do know the conditions in which a human brain is designed to function best.  If you were to design an environment that was the extreme opposite of those conditions, you would get a classroom.
• The emotional stability of the home is the greatest predictor of academic success because instability erodes executive function.
• The most important quality a teacher can have is "Theory of Mind" - the ability to diagnose others' gaps in knowledge and their brains' punishment and reward systems.
• Demanding that students do nothing more than memorizing will create a bunch of robots.  There needs to be problem solving and improvisation in order for students to reach their potential.
• There's a lot of educators here who understand the direction we need to take to revolutionize our education systems.  It's great to be among them.  All revolutions start with a small group of determined people who stick to their convictions and fight for what they believe in.  I feel like I am among those people here, and I believe that eventually we will change the standardized testing culture that is so devastating to our students, and the minds of people who cherish data over learning.