Student Teachers are the bomb!

As I sit here today and reflect on my latest awesome experience with a student teacher I can't help but think that they are an underutilized resource in our schools today.  In my district there is an actual restriction on how many quarters you may work with a student teacher.  In a time of increased collaboration and the ever increasing push for interventions and small grouping I feel like student teachers are a valuable asset that needs to be used!  What do you think?

People can see who we are too :)

I love that we live in such a visual world....maybe more visual now than ever before.  We have transitioned through a time when verbal communication was paramount.  We used to make phone calls, tell stories and talk to strangers.... now we email, surf the Web and if you have been on a city bus lately you know that most on there are listening to music, surfing the smartphone or talking/texting someone.  It is a great time in our society to be seen :)

Teaching---

I suppose there are many unique aspects of my profession.......

I like to see my work, and it is there everyday....what I build, what I help grow, what I do....it is all there right in front of me each day.  A couple dozen minds, hearts and dreams :)  We all work for a reason.  When I worked in pizza joints, bars and gas stations...you saw it right away, immediate feedback....the oilfield was a little different, but it always made me think of the future.....people build houses and they never get to see the smiles of the generations that live inside, some people only get to see one side of society.....some deal in resources and services that are too huge to really get a personal connection...but teaching is different....it is right there and I love it!--just some random thoughts, from a happy teacher!

Mr. B

Organic :)

Maybe it is because we work with such a fluid product?  Maybe because we only get about a third of the time to complete our part of the plan?  Whatever it is....it isn't easy :)   I have been thinking a lot lately about having my own children....and then I realized that I have 18-22 a year!!  This school year leads me to new challenges, new meaning for "work"....it also leads me to new opportunities, new friends and a chance to work with some of the biggest hearts and most brilliant minds on Earth :)..big and small!  Here is to teaching! and especially the class of 2022!!!!

What will we do when the dust settles?

With the elections coming up and hopefully the ousting of some terrible politicians...I am left with a question.  What are we going to do when everyone stops fighting, when the dust settles?  We will still have vastly underfunded schools, struggling students from all demographics and a large group of Americans who have lost confidence and respect for education.  I will admit that I have been going crazy since last spring.  Everything about my career has been debated, threatened, changed and even ridiculed.  This really pisses me off at times and early on I had an easy target, some call him governor, but not for much longer.  Now though as I trudge through my Master's Degree and step back into higher education and as I hear of more ways that my pay, benefits and even working conditions will undergo more changes....I am left with questions.....Is there anyone out there who is interested in fixing the problem and not just winning a battle?  Is there anyone out there who is more concerned with a solution and not just "being right"?  If so I hope they stand up and make themselves heard, start to make a difference and put an end to this ridiculous power tug-of-war!  In the meantime, I am going off the radar.....no more Republican or Democrat....no more Union or not.....I'm just going to teach, collaborate with my great team, work hard to finish my Master's, coach a great baseball team with some goods guys......and at the end of the day....say a little prayer that sometime soon we can get back to making sure that the kiddos are winning, no matter how their parents vote, what tax bracket their family is in, or even where they were born..... Seems simple, but at times I really feel like I am staring up the mountain.....  What do you think?

Nothing in Life is Free.....why not?

Since I stepped into the teaching profession about 3 years ago, everything has changed!  Job security.....gone, knowing what my pay will be.......gone, good benefits.......gone!  Now I do think some things were due to change and I never did enter this profession to make it rich, but lately every time I turn around the rules are changing.  My recent "beef" is with the fact that I may not be fully reimbursed on the salary schedule after earning my Master's degree. 
    I want to get my Master's degree to be a better teacher, so let's get that cleared up right away.  I am investing about $20,000 dollars (on top of the $50,000 for my undergrad)...so that I can be the best.  I won't settle for anything less and I will be surprised if someday I don't even chase down more education...who knows, Dr. Bonnar sounds pretty sweet!  The thing is that I really can't justify going more into debt, right now it is just too risky.  So that got me thinking even more about how screwed up this all is.
    Why do teachers even have to pay to become better educators?  Isn't that the most backward way of thinking ever?  Why do universities ask us to take their student teachers (who pay full tuition for little to no services while student teaching) and foster their growth as educators for free?  Then these same universities turn around and charge us an arm and a leg to take grad classes!  I am proposing a trade.  I will teach your student teachers and give them more than they probably ever got on campus, and you can give me some free credits while I work my way through your grad or doctorate program.  Seems fair to me!
  Don't even get me started on who else I think should maybe pony up some cash if they want the best educators around.  I will let your imagination do the work.  I am not asking for anything that I don't feel like I deserve or earn.  A lot of people want to complain about the lack of great teachers, well then maybe it is time for somebody to help step up and make us great.....or at least quit letting politics put us in a nasty game of financial roulette.
  I will complete my Master's either way because I think it is what I need to be the best teacher for 21st century learners......but in the meantime......I won't stop asking questions and I won't just wait my turn.
Kevin

31 Flavors and a Brain Freeze!

The rewrite is finished and with mom's help I think I finally may have nailed this paper, well it is as nailed as it is going to get.  I am still frustrated by the restrictive APA format though and I will gladly debate with anyone over whether it should ever be the only way new ideas and information are shared.  Now having said that, I do see my professor's point in having us use that style.  My title is referring to the good old Baskin Robin's 31 flavors of ice cream.  I think writing is like this, there are many ways to write, and to read as well.  I like the variety of reading different formats of text and crave analogies, metaphors and figurative/descriptive language.  That style gets my creativity going and helps me motivate, understand and appreciate writing.  The brain freeze part is referring to the way my first paper was critiqued.  Even a great flavor of ice cream shouldn't be crammed down one's throat...it will result in a brain freeze and maybe not liking that flavor too much.   So to make a long story short, I understand the requirements, my collective has helped me produce a piece of work that should do well on the rubric and I am just settled with the fact that there are different ways to teach and learn....they were very evident in this case :)  I'm putting the new paper on here so that anyone who is wondering what APA might need to look like or if I could actually do it.....here ya go!
Thanks for all the comments, suggestions and help on this.....this is what learning in the 21st century looks like :)
Kevin
PS..I still like the first one :)

Kevin Bonnar

Critique: A New Culture of Learning

March 10, 2012

            Thomas and Brown (2011) explained in A New Culture of Learning that we must change our current system and thinking from “the stable infrastructure of the twentieth century to a fluid infrastructure of the twenty-first century” (p. 17). The authors made many great suggestions on how to make this transition. First, they asserted the need to switch from an old model of teaching to a new model of learning. Their second assertion was that technology is fueling a rapid change in the amount and speed of information being shared in learning environments. The third assertion was that collectives should be used to foster learning in the 21^st century.

Thomas and Brown (2011), in arguing that education must let go of an outdated mechanistic view, wrote, “Learning is treated as a series of steps to be mastered, as if students were being taught how to operate a machine or even, in some cases, as if the students themselves were machines being programmed to accomplish tasks” (p. 35). Furthermore, Thomas and Brown contended that teachers are viewed as the “givers” of knowledge and students as empty buckets waiting patiently to be filled with information, thus inhibiting the growth of today’s students (2011, p. 39). The authors described how our view of schools must change: “If we change the vocabulary and consider schools as learning environments, however, it makes no sense to talk about them being broken because environments don’t break” (Thomas & Brown, 2011, p. 36).

I embrace Thomas and Brown’s theory of a learning environment that cannot be broken. If educator and student can learn together, then it is harder for any one entity to be held responsible for learning or for blame to be placed when goals are not achieved. Instead, the two are intertwined, learning side by side, with each benefiting from the relationship. The struggle going forward will be the need for educators to reevaluate traditional learning models and learn to provide more opportunities for collaboration and change. Douglas Thomas experienced this when he taught a course at the University of California in 2004. Although initially feeling that he had “lost control” of his learning environment, Thomas instead learned from his students:

They, however, had taught him a great deal about what the new culture of learning might look like and how powerful it can be when students see each other as resources and figure out how to learn from one another. (Thomas & Brown, 2011, p. 25)

            Thomas and Brown’s (2011) second assertion was that technology is changing the way learners can acquire new information. Tom, an example from the book, had been diagnosed with adult-onset diabetes. He was frustrated and scared by new challenges his body presented. He turned to the Internet for information, advice, and social support. Tom described how connecting technology with traditional doctor visits helped him learn: “You also learn from other people’s experiences. You find out what are the right questions to ask your doctor and you can learn how to tell a good doctor from a bad one” (Thomas & Brown, 2011, p. 30). In the past, it would have taken Tom months, if not years, to gather the information on his own with a traditional approach of reading textbooks to find answers. Furthermore, the social support that Tom received would have been restricted by time and geography (Rehm, 1999). With new technologies, Tom expanded his social network and accessed them when his needs arose.

            One factor for change in the way that we learn is the speed at which technology is being introduced. The Internet, arguably the most influential piece of current technology, shows us how fast our culture is being supplemented by technology. From 1997 to 2008, the proportion of homes with Internet access grew from 18% to 73% (Thomas & Brown, 2011, p. 41). The increase in Internet availability is astonishing when combined with the fact that current broadband Internet capabilities are up to 100 times faster then the dial-up service that most people used just 10 to 15 years ago (Woodford, 2011, p. 1). The vast amount of information so speedily available to students is changing everything about learning. Ken Robinson (2011) discussed the way that many educators are sometimes confused by 21^st-century learners: “Many educators suggest that some students may have ADHD and need to be slowed down in order to fit into the teacher’s self-contained, limited, and often slow-paced collective.” As an educator, I often try to go the other way—knock down the walls, open up the world, and match the pace of learning with each student’s needs. For example, I have provided online forums for my students to share different aspects of literature they are reading. This gives them a bigger audience to engage in discussion, as well as freedom to self-pace their own reading and discussions. Like Tom, my students are using technology to change the way we learn.

            The author’s final assertion was that collectives should be used to foster learning for 21^st-century learners. Thomas and Brown (2011) define the collective as “a collection of people, skills, and talent that produces a result greater then the sum of its parts” (p. 52). I interpret this as a classic case of power in numbers and using teamwork to reach a goal or answer a question.

An example of one such collective was a study group created by Chris Avenir in 2008 at Ryerson University (Thomas & Brown, 2011, p. 68). The 146 students in the online group helped one another solve individual chemistry problems. The university charged Avenir with 147 counts of academic misconduct; all charges were later dropped (Thomas & Brown, 2011, p. 69). That charges were even pressed against Avenir illustrates how many of the cultural changes in education that Thomas and Brown discussed are often misinterpreted or challenged. I don’t think many teachers would argue against student teamwork in learning or in sharing resources, but students are now also collaborating in different ways. Avenir described how his group used the online collective:

So we would each be given chemistry questions and say: “Does anyone get how to do this one? I didn’t get it right and I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.” Exactly what we would say to each other if we were sitting in the Dungeon. (Thomas & Brown, 2011, p. 70)

I am glad that Avenir was cleared because I would consider his conviction a huge setback for education. I often try to find opportunities for students to learn as a collective. They can learn a lot more by collectively looking at a variety of problems than by approaching learning all by themselves.  

            Albert Einstein once said, “The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence” (Clark, 2011). Questioning is the foundation of my own ideal culture for 21^st-century learning. Tony Wagner (2010) explained the importance of asking students great questions:

I have consistently found that the kinds of questions students are asked and the extent to which a teacher challenges students to explain their thinking or expand their answers are reliable indicators of the level of intellectual rigor in a class. (p. 53).

Everyone involved must feel safe asking questions, supported and engaged in finding answers, and—most important—motivated to never stop finding new ways to chase down new answers. The kicker is that those answers will have to be questioned in order for this new culture to work and keep up with new information and new work by collectives.

           

References

Clark, R. (2011). Einstein: The life and times. (Electronic ed.). London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Retrieved from http://books.google.com/books?id=6IKVA0lY6MAC

Rehm, M. L. (1999). The internet as a practical problem: Empowerment in the electronic global village. Kappa Omicron Nu Forum: Technology, 11(1). Retrieved from http://www.kon.org/archives/forum/11-1/rehm.html

Robinson, K. (Producer). (2011). Our school system is broken! [Web Video]. Retrieved from http://ahrengot.com/opinions/our-school-system-is-broken/

Thomas, D., & Brown, J. S. (2011). A new culture of learning: Cultivating the imagination for a world of constant change. Lexington, KY: CreateSpace.

Wagner, T. (2010). The global achievement gap: Why even our best schools don't teach the new survival skills our children need and what we can do about it. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Woodford, C. (2011, October 31). How broadband internet works. Explain That Stuff. Retrieved from http://www.explainthatstuff.com/howbroadbandworks.html