What Can Teachers Learn From Chocolate Sea Salt Crostini?
Posted: January 20th, 2013 | Author: Michael Goldstein | | 2 Comments »
A. This was second most popular YouTube cooking video of 2010.
Let’s say you are NOT planning to make this dish.
Can you still learn from it?
I did.
I learned something about…
*Olive oil
*Sea salt
*Cutting and toasting bread
…stuff that I can use for other stuff I make.
B. Now let’s say you are a teacher.
You watch video of another teacher. But
You teach Grade K and the video is Grade 10
or
You teach biology but the video is reading class
or
You teach in Atlanta but the video is from a school in San Francisco
or
Your students are mostly Hispanic but those in the video are mostly white
or
You teach in a charter school but the video is from a traditional public
Do you tend to tune out?
For many novice teachers, the answer is: yes.
C. An Idea
I spent Thursday and Friday at a conference organized by New Schools Venture Fund. Many heads of teacher prep programs, whether traditional or alternative, described this reaction as common.
Of course there’s some merit to that “Ah, that won’t help me, my situation is different” reaction. But we all agreed that a decent chunk of rookies would develop more quickly….if they were more open-minded to learning from “imperfectly matched videos,” those that didn’t mirror their exact classroom situation.
A modest proposal. Our little conference group (Kimberly, Jesse, Roxanne, Scott, Brent, Andie, and Lennay Kekua) came up with an idea for an “inoculation video.” Something short, fun, and zippy, maybe 90 seconds. It’d be a tool any teacher educator could play before teaching with classroom video. The goal: “You can learn something valuable by watching this teacher, though we acknowledge her situation is almost certainly different from yours.” Email me (or comment) if you have any thoughts on the creative side, or already know of something that fits the bill.
*
Update: Reader RFC notes Seth Godin on same topic:
The search for the exact case study or the exact prescription is the work of the resistance, a clever way to stay safe, to protect yourself from your boss or your self-talk. If you wait for the perfect map before departing on your journey, you’ll never have to leave.
It’s also true, though, that you have never once had to solve a problem that is exactly different from what’s gone down before. We’d like to romanticize our problems as unique, as the one and only perfectly difficult situation that is the result of a confluence of unrepeatable, unique causes.
Your problem is your problem, and it is like no other. But it’s close enough to those that came before, close enough to the ones you’ve studied, that it probably pays to stop stalling and take the leap.
This is an interesting problem. I’m not sure about a 90 second video that would suit the bill, but this post takes me back to my days at summer institute in 09. TFA was leaning heavily on a few videos from an alumnus (I think his name was Justin Meli). He seemed to have an extremely organized classroom, a tight delivery, and efficient structures. One of the basic take-aways here was about time. Specifically: don’t waste it.
Cut to a few years later. I’ve had some experience, I’ve crafted a vision for my classroom, I know what I want to see from my students, and I’m getting more comfortable with my delivery. I know that I don’t necessarily want a classroom that looks like those institute videos–highly routinized, etc.
Let’s say now that I’m a Dean of Instruction at a school, and I have a group of teachers who are somewhere on this continuum: from tight, mechanized classrooms to those with somewhat looser structures (and maybe some really green teachers who are pretty lost). They are all strong teachers who are interested in their own development. I’m thinking some are using time purposefully and others need a nudge. Do I show them the Meli videos during PD?
Maybe, but not in isolation. I’ve been in too many PD sessions where the vision of teaching is pretty narrow. I still want to get teachers thinking about how they use time, but I also want to account for the kinds of complex decisions teachers make around time. I recently saw a video of Deborah Ball (I’m currently a graduate student at Michigan) leading a class discussion about the meaning of odd numbers. One student has a particularly odd-ball definition and is arguing that 6 can be both even and odd. Kids disagree; others seem uncertain. But the conversation they are having is pretty sophisticated. Ball doesn’t interrupt; after a certain amount of time (some think too much time), she leads the class back around to a definition from a previous class. Did she waste time?
So maybe my decision is to create purposeful contrasts in the videos I select. I would want to acknowledge that teachers make complex choices in real time; that they confront dilemmas every day; and that, as a leader, I won’t be skewing my coaching or evaluation toward one particular model of teaching.
This is one of those habits of mind that we want to encourage all teachers and leaders to develop: Take whatever lesson you can from every experience (starting with these videos), and set aside the stuff that isn’t helpful in your current situation. The trouble is that rookie teachers often don’t have the background knowledge to make these inferential connections, and are going to be distracted by the surface structure of what they see (e.g. kids SLANTing/not SLANTing), which will distract them from the key teaching practices they’re seeing.
To this end, I would absolutely support making a quick video to try to get this point across. I can’t think of a way to do this other than to essentially mock people who don’t look past surface differences, and, though this would likely work with fiercely competitive and highly sarcastic 22-year-olds, I can’t see it being particularly effective for a broader audience. The latter would be a tougher audience, as they’d likely come with preconceived notions of how the structure of the (mostly charter school) classrooms in the videos are not simply an inevitable outcome of being at one of “those” schools.