Leave Time for Serendipity

Today, my 4th grade students were supposed to analyze data from NASA's Climate Change website. I wanted them to look at real data and to have conversations about what it meant. I wanted them to draw conclusions and make predictions. That's what today's science lesson was supposed to be. It was a good plan.

Unexpectedly, about 10 minutes into my lesson, the distinctive tone of an incoming Skype call filled the room. My students know this sound pretty well by now.

"Who are we talking to today?"

"Are we supposed to be having a Skype call?"

"Who's calling us?"

In a few seconds I had to make a decision. Should I answer the call or continue on with my solid lesson plan? I saw that a teacher in Nepal, Pradeep Sapkota, whom I had been playing the Skype equivalent of phone tag with over the past couple of weeks was on the other end. He and I have been looking for ways to connect our students. His students had their school destroyed by last year's earthquake and are learning English. I wanted my 5th grade students who were learning about plate tectonics to connect with them to learn about the earthquake.

I knew that it was too late for Pradeep's students to be on the call. My 4th graders hadn't learned much about geology. They have the state's high-stakes standardized science test coming up in a few weeks. They were excited to look at the data from NASA. There were plenty of reasons to ignore this call and move along with my lesson.

But I didn't. I answered the call. Sometimes it's moments of serendipity that make the best learning experiences. If we never take the chance to allow them to happen, our students are robbed of opportunity.

My kids learned from Pradeep about the earthquake.  They learned that the Nepalese don't eat beef, that students are learning outside because their school is being rebuilt, that Mount Everest is in Nepal, and that the capital of Nepal is Kathmandu. They got a little taste of a different part of the world, which by itself is a wonderful experience and absolutely worth the time we took out of our lesson. When we travel and experience different cultures with an open mind, beit physically or virtually, we get the opportunity to see what parts of those other cultures we can incorporate into ourselves to make us a better person. I want my students to have as many of those experiences as possible.

And then, just as we were about to end the call, serendipity happened. One of my students asked, "We've been learning about climate change. Has climate change had an effect on you up in the mountains?"

The impersonal data that we were looking at just became a whole lot more meaningful. Pradeep told us how rising temperatures are causing avalanches in Nepal as snow on the mountains becomes less stable. He told us that many people were affected. He told us that Nepalese people were dying.

After the call we still looked at NASA's data, although we got to see less of it than we would have had I not answered the call. The data my students did analyze was a whole lot more meaningful to them, though. We also had great discussions about the shape of mountains in the Himalayas and how that relates to avalanches, plate tectonics (they'll have a great head start for next year's learning), and Asian geography.

It's the emotional connections to content that make knowledge stick in our students long-term memory. They may not remember in two weeks how many parts per million the carbon dioxide in our atmosphere has risen in the past three decades, but I guarantee they'll be able to tell you ways climate change is affecting humans.

Sometimes, with all the demands placed upon us as teachers, it's easy to forget why we do what we do. It's easy to focus on the content that needs to be covered, the assignment that needs to be completed, or the assessment that is upcoming instead of the inspiration that we have the opportunity to provide our students. The most important things we do in schools can't be quantified easily, and so it's easy to forget their power.

It's the unexpected, and often uncelebrated, moments of awesome that make all the difference for our students. As teachers, sometimes we just need to let them happen.

Friday's Five - Diversity and Understanding

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Friday's Five is a feature every week where I pick a new topic and list five items that I think fit best.  Then I ask you to share your thoughts in the comment section.  For an archive of past topics, check the Friday's Five Page. 

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.”

I love that Mark Twain quote.  Being open-minded, leaving behind one's own ethnocentric biases, and experiencing another culture is by far the best way to understand others and their points of view.  Unfortunately, it's not possible to travel with our students in a way that would allow them to have those experiences.  Many of my students growing up in rural Pennsylvania will go their entire childhoods without even visiting New York City or Philadelphia, both of which are a two hour drive away.  With school budgets being cut, even local field trips are becoming a thing of the past.  Certainly a class visit to a totally different country and culture is out of the question, and seems even ridiculous to mention.  

The challenge for us is to find ways for our students to interact, be exposed to, and appreciate the differences of other cultures. It's exceedingly difficult to do in a country where 95% of the news coverage is about domestic matters.  With the increasing bullying problems we seem to be having in our schools and online and the seeming lack of acceptance of anyone different in our society, finding ways to understand others is of increasing importance.  How, then, can we travel, meet others, and learn from them without leaving our classrooms?  Here are five suggestions.

1. Virtual Field Trips - While it doesn't allow you to interact with others, virtual travel is a great way to experience other locations without spending any money or travel time.  As an added benefit, you aren't limited to the present time.  If it fits your studies, you can visit Ancient Rome or Colonial Williamsburg.  There are many resources out there that will allow you travel virtually.  A few weeks ago someone shared a "List of 100 Incredible and Educational Virtual Tours You Don't Want to Miss."  That's a great place to get started.
2. Find a class in a very different culture and connect as pen pals.  Up until the past decade, this would have been an expensive and time consuming option.  Now, with the technologies available to us, the cost of postage and the time it used to take to send letters is no longer an obstacle.  Use e-mail, Google Docs, a wikispace, or some other technology to instantly communicate with other student around the globe.  Exchange pictures of schools, classrooms, and pets.  Discuss upcoming holidays and favorite dinners.  Share family traditions.  Talk to your students about how "different" doesn't mean "wrong."  Your students will start to see that while many of the things that people do around the world may be different, we have a lot more in common than many people realize.
3. Videoconference with other locations.  If your students are studying King Tut, who better to conference with than an expert in Egyptian Archaeology who is currently digging in Egypt?  If you are discussing addition and subtraction, why not Skype in with students from Europe who learn to add and subtract from left to right and ask them to explain why that makes sense to them?  If we want our students to think about solutions to problems from many points of view, we need to expose them to many points of view.  Videoconferencing makes that easy and fun to do.
4. Collaborate with students from other cultures on a project.  The number of web 2.0 tools that make it easy to collaborate is exploding.  Instead of only using those tools to allow for in-class collaboration, connect with other classes in foreign locations and collaborate with them.  If you are studying the rainforest, maybe you can connect with a class in Brazil and figure out how you can work together to make a difference to save species.  If your class wants to know the effects of climate change on glaciers, why not connect with a class living in the Alps, Rockies, or Himalayas and study it with them?  We don't know a lot about the future world we are sending our graduates into, but we do know that it is getting smaller and that global collaboration is becoming more important.  It's important to give our students opportunities to practice those skills in school.  
5. Model the skills you want your students to have.  How can you find classes, experts, students, and teachers in other cultures and countries?  Build a global professional network of educators with whom you regularly collaborate using social networking sites like Twitter, Plurk, Facebook, and Google+.  Regularly seek out different ways to do things and be open to change.  Share new ideas that you stumble upon with your students.  If you want your students to be life-long learners, model for them what it looks like.  

Now it's your turn.  How do you teach diversity and understanding in your classroom?  How do you connect with other cultures?  What tools have you found most helpful for collaboration with others around the globe?  How have you build your Professional Network, or what difficulties have you faced in doing so?  Do you find that your students are lacking understanding of other cultures?  Please share with us your ideas and pass the post on to others using Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Plurk so that we can hear their ideas as well. 

Friday's Five - What We Should Be Teaching

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Friday's Five is a feature every week where I pick a new topic and list five items that I think fit best.  Then I ask you, my readers, to share your thoughts in the comment section.  For an archive of past topics, check the Friday's Five Page.  If you'd like to make suggestions about future topics or discuss topics I bring up on the blog with others, make sure you click the "like" button on the right hand side of the page to join A Teacher's Life for Me on Facebook.  Don't be shy about sharing the blog and Facebook Page with others.  Each post has a "Tweet" button on top and buttons on the bottom that allow you to share in several ways, including e-mail, Facebook, and Twitter.

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Ask a parent what qualities they want to see in their children when those children become adults.

Ask a teacher what qualities they want to see in their students when they graduate high school.

Ask your neighbor what qualities they want to see in the next generation of young adults that will be living in the neighborhood.

Ask a businessperson who is looking to hire someone to work at their business what qualities they want in their employees.

I can guarantee that none of them will respond that they are hoping young adults will be able to find the main idea of a passage, identify the author's purpose for writing a poem, or be able to calculate the mean of a series of random numbers without context.  With that in mind, today's post will focus on five subjects that are largely ignored in schools today due to the culture of standardized testing and the push for "accountability."  I don't think that one can argue that a focus on the following five areas in schools would not be beneficial to our students, our communities, our country, and the world as a whole.  If our students were "proficient" in these areas, everything else would take care of itself.

1. Innovation - We are robbing students of motivation and an understanding of what they are capable by forcing them to only perform tasks related to multiple choice questions on reading and math (those terms are used loosely) tests.  It used to be that "creating" meant that students would glue cutouts from a magazine in a shoe box.  Now, technology gives students the ability to share what they've learned in many ways instantly.  Their writing can be published instantly on a blog for the world to read.  Their videos can teach children thousands of miles away.  The possibilities are vast and numerous, and we need to take advantage of them.  
2. Empathy - The ability to understand others emotions and be compassionate is something that is rarely focused upon and is of paramount importance for our students.  There are numerous studies that show that empathy and success in business are closely linked.  A Google search for "empathy and success" produces over 770,000 results.  Even more important than business success, however, is the fact that being able to empathize makes one more able to help others.  
3. Service - In my experience, nothing gives a person a feeling of self-worth and a satisfaction of having filled one's purpose more than the act of helping others in need without expecting a reward in return.  We should be giving our students opportunities and encouraging them to find ways to provide service in areas about which they feel strongly.  
4. Critical Thinking - This crucial skill, which is closely related to innovation, is the one that has been most ignored due to our current standardized testing craze.  There is simply no way to truly measure the ability to problem solve and think critically on an easily scored multiple choice assessment.  Teachers don't demand critical thinking because they don't have time; they are forced to teach students to interpret test questions that measure low-level thinking skills instead.  Teaching critical thinking takes time, leads to unpredictable lessons, and puts students in control - all things which are frowned upon in many of our schools.
5. The Love of Learning - We have to stop using our schools as places where we fill students' heads with facts.  Unfortunately, most of what we teach can be Googled in less than 30 seconds on their phone, which too often we won't let them take out of their pocket.  Our students have figured this out and largely find school to be irrelevant.  I wish I could say that they are wrong.  We need to start using schools to show them the power of learning.  If we combine the above four subjects and teach our students to empathize with others, allow them to find ways to help others they can become passionate about, and give them opportunities to develop their creativity and critical thinking skills, what we will start to see is students who take control of their own learning.  They will learn without us asking them too.  How often do we hear complaints that students don't study?  What if they were so engaged and passionate about a topic that they didn't view learning outside of school as studying, but rather as necessary to fulfill a desire deep inside of themselves?  

Is what I describe above possible?  Yes, but not in a culture based on assessment and test scores.  It's being done right now in several amazing schools.  Unfortunately, those schools are the exception.  We need to change the culture of education so that this type of education is what is expected.  What if we defined success by the positive impact we have on others rather than by how many low-level thinking questions one answers on a once-per-year assessment? 

Now it's your turn.  Are there any important skills that you think we are not teaching our students?  What are some ways we could teach these topics in our schools?  Should schools be teaching the above qualities?  Would our society be better served if we left the development of these qualities to parents and continue focusing on reading and math?  Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below, and share the blog with friends and colleagues.  We'd love to hear their opinions as well!

Bully-Free Schools

My students are in the process of writing essays for a contest in conjunction with our school's annual Peace Day celebration, which will be held on Tuesday.  The topic of the essay is "Bully-Free Schools."  I thought it fitting that I, too, share my thoughts on the subject.

Bullying is a hot topic.  Recently we've seen suicides and school shootings that resulted from students being bullied, an increase in cyber-bullying as students spend more time on-line, and new laws passed that give more responsibility to schools in stopping bullying.  No longer can a school claim that what happens outside of school is the responsibility of parents to deal with.  Any bullying that affects a student in school, regardless of where the bullying took place, must be investigated by the school.

Unfortunately, schools will never truly be "bully-free" because it is in the very nature of children to establish hierarchies and test boundaries.  It's naive to think that we can totally stop this from happening, and dangerous to get complacent.  We can certainly reduce bullying in our schools, though.  That's one reason that we need to focus energy on teaching students to respect each other.

We can start by modeling respectful behavior for them.  Unfortunately, many of our students are not fortunate enough to have this modeled at home.  If they cannot count on school being a place where adults treat each other with the utmost respect and professionalism, they may never see that modeled.  We should never underestimate our position as role-models for our students. 

It's also important that our students receive explicit instruction in how to handle conflict with others.  For the students without these skills being modeled at home, it is unreasonable to expect this skill to be present unless we teach it.  Emotional maturity is one of the most important skills that people of any age need to be successful.

With the increase of cyber-bullying, this explicit instruction must include on-line safety, proper digital citizenship, and lessons on how to resolve problems confronted in the realm of digital communications.  Parents must be made aware of the risks to their children, both from others and the danger that their child could harm him/herself.  Many students and parents are unaware of how easy it is to commit a variety of serious crimes by texting with a cell phone or communicating in a chat room.  Many are also unaware of how permanant those electronic communications are, and how they can have massively negative effects down the road.   

Finally, every adult in a school must make a commitment to protecting every student in that school.  All schools have anti-bullying policies.  The difference between the schools that have bullying problems and those where bullying is effectively handled is the enforcement of those policies.  Students learn quickly who will allow them to get away with bending the rules.  If there are weak links in the chain of enforcement, those students who have tendencies to bully will quickly find the places and times in school where they can belittle others.

While our schools will never be free of bullying, our students should know that we will make every effort to protect them, and that every incident of bullying in our schools will be addressed.  The more we create a school culture where respect is the norm, the less likely we are to have students acting in ways that are disrespectful.  The more everybody in a school teats others with respect, the less bullying will occur.