Friday's Five - Wisdom of Age, Wonder of Youth

Let me start this post by saying that I am amazed at the wonders of modern technology, invigorated by the natural wonder of kids, and appreciative for the wisdom of older generations.  I'm writing this post on my iPad at 36,000 feet while flying home from a visit with my grandparents in Florida.  Last night I heard wonderful stories about the jobs they had between my grandfather's service in WWII and the time he opened a jewelry store in New York. This morning I had the pleasure of explaining to my 6 year old why walking on the clouds he sees from the plane window would be impossible. Great stuff!

Photo Credit:  worradmu

Along those lines, I was wondering if it's possible to combine those 3 things (technology, wisdom of the older generation, and the wonders of youth) to create incredible learning opportunities for our students.  Here's five ideas:

1. Service learning projects involving local senior centers.  Students could read to seniors, help maintain the gardens, or help in other ways.  Afterwards, they could blog about their experiences and what they learned.
2. Invite senior experts into the school, or videoconference, to offer guidance on projects.  I am always looking for community members to help my students learn about real-word situations and problem solving.  There are plenty of situations where students can collaborate with retired members of the community.  My grandfather, for example, has Skyped in with middle school students to explain his experiences as a Jewish soldier liberating Concentration Camps during World War II.
3. Allow students to teach what they learn to seniors.  My grandparents mention often that they love when their community brings in college professors to give lectures.  Why can't our students do the same thing? My students would love to teach others how to use new technology, share their learning experiences, and present their projects with others.  It seems like a perfect match.
4. Invite local seniors in for a "games day" where they can teach their favorite card and board games to students.  The kids can then create descriptions and written directions of the games afterwards to publish on the class wiki or website.  In addition to being the catalyst for a great writing assignment, the interaction during the games would be great for everyone involved. 
5. Have children publish a biography of their grand-parent or other senior as a blog post.  They can do a series of interviews, and then compile a collection of stories from that person's life.  This way, the stories are saved forever, and students get a chance to learn a bit about their family history. 

Friday's Five - Self-Reflection

In order to become better at anything we do, it's important to take an honest look at our practices and look for areas of improvement.  Knowing our strengths, and recognizing our weaknesses allows us to make positive changes in our teaching.  Often, it's hard to do this self-reflection for a variety of reasons.

Flickr/nicola.albertini

Over the past few weeks, I've been forced into reflecting on my teaching, and it's been both humbling and immensely beneficial.  I've been fortunate to be nominated for the Presidential Award for Excellence in Math and Science Teaching (PAEMST), and the demands of the application process have forced me to seriously look at what I do as a professional both in and out of the classroom.  Because of this, I've been thinking a lot over the past few weeks about ways teachers can self-reflect to improve their craft.  Here are five ideas.

1. Videotape and watch a lesson or two.  Having to watch myself teach has made me realize a few things about my teaching.  As the amount of time in the period gets short, my use of formative assessment decreases.  When my students are discussing concepts in groups, I sometimes cut them off earlier than I should.  Sometimes they are having great conversations, and I should let them continue.  I never would have realized these things if I didn't watch myself teaching.
2. Allow others that you trust to come into your room, and discuss your teaching with them.  This is beneficial for both of you.  Too often we teach with the door closed.  Our great lessons never get shared, and we never get to hear an outside perspective on our teaching.  Some lessons are great, some stink, and most fall somewhere in between.  That's going to be true whether another teacher is watching your lesson or not.  The only difference is that you get professional advice and dialogue when you invite others into your room.
3. Re-write your resume at least once per year.  If you are not looking for a job, it's easy to forget about your resume.  It can be a great self-reflection too, though.  As you look over your list of achievements you'll probably find it easy to identify what areas are strengths, and areas that are lacking.  Identifying those lacking areas is the first step toward building them into strengths.
4. Develop lessons collaboratively with others who teach the same topics.  This can be colleagues in the same school/district, or it can be those you know from networking.  Collaborative planning gives you ideas of ways to improve upon your pedagogy, opportunities to share resources (like videos you make, math manipulatives, etc.), and different points of view.  Collaborating with those in a different location is easy now with videoconferencing tools like Skype and Facetime.
5. Participate in a Professional Learning Community (PLC).  This term has gotten a bad reputation in some places because it refers to mandatory meetings lead by an administrator.  That's not what a PLC should be.  Get a group of committed professionals together and agree to meet once a month or every few weeks to discuss pedagogy.  At each meeting, set the topic for the following meeting and decide upon the information and/or data that each teacher needs to collect.  One month you could focus on formative assessment and have everyone bring the two techniques that work best in their classrooms to share.  The next month you could focus on reading comprehension and have each teacher bring a summary of a journal article, blog post, or other piece on best reading comprehension practices.  The meetings should be voluntary, lead by teachers, and the topics should be set based on what the participants want to improve upon.  

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.