So are you suggesting that if a teacher doesn’t have the time to learn to master a form, then they should not use that form as a means for helping students develop knowlede/skills in the teacher’s subject area/domain of mastery? In other words, if I don’t know much about film making, I shouldn’t ask my students to make a video to demonstrate/explore their learning?

I completely get this point: “The existence of the button does not make good pedagogy out of the button.”

But I don’t think that this necessarily follows from it: “if you don’t know … then you should have the humility to recuse yourself”

Because while it may be true that “we must act as bulwarks against that decline, not accelerants of it,” it’s also true that we can’t act as bulwarks against the decline of everything. What battles do we pick? Or do we shrink back in fear of “doing it wrong” or “not getting it” and rely merely on pencil and paper?

I suspect this is just another way of calling for a more careful attention to the tools we use and the how and why of using them. A worthy call. But this will also point to the unending struggle between the practical and the ideal.

So, I’m genuinely asking: if you could set the bar, where would that bar be, and how would it stand in relation to the practical and the ideal? And given the constraints of time, how much would you rather teachers just don’t do versus attempt, only to execute poorly, at least at first?

Have I said anything? Have I missed your point?

I love happy endings.

P.S. “Appropriate use of music” can actually be nicely folded into literature standards– particularly when one is connecting lyrics to theme.

Hi Dina,

Asking students to identify lyrics that, in tone, content, or theme, complement another text and further asking them to defend their choices is one thing … and within the scope and mastery of a competent English teacher. But I think that’s different from discussing whether or not the “music” is appropriate. (And furthermore, the reason for asking students to perform that sort of exercise should be clear to them before they begin it.)

It’s important to clearly define what a “qualified teacher” is, but it’s also difficult and complex. In this area, though, I side with Dan (now that I better understand him): teachers should only attempt to “teach” and “assess” areas in which they practice and consider themselves to have some level of mastery. This is why, for example, English teachers who rarely write anything drive me crazy … how can they possibly help students become better writers if they aren’t constantly practicing and improving their own craft?

This is not to prohibit teachers from encouraging students to express their learning through methods beyond the teacher’s domain of mastery. Students need a chance to make sense of the world through the skills/disciplines/arts that best suit them. But encouraging or allowing students to develop a musical montage that, at least to them, helps express their understanding is different from requiring and then grading the merits of the musical choices … unless, perhaps, you’re a musician and the student is completing a project for music class.

Teachers should be masters of the disciplines they teach, but they should also value and respect the mastery of other disciplines enough to admit their lack of mastery, to value the exploration of those other disciplines by interested students, and to not insult those disciplines by assuming no real mastery is necessary in order to adequately teach and/or assess them.

Glad I could help stir the pot. When I made the original comment, I was thinking as a math teacher. But the thread of comments have me thinking about my “other” class.

The two incomplete thoughts seem fairly complete. I think I completely agree with #1. But for #2, is it enough for a teacher to merely help students with the technical aspect of digital storytelling and merely ask the student to justify her decisions.

For example, I have a video production class whose main objective is to get today’s announcements on TV. I am “the guy” for the same reason Greg Brady became Johnny Bravo…I fit the suit. I am no expert in production or design and don’t pretend to be, but I am not afraid to try things and tech doesn’t scare me. The best I can do is ask students to have a reason for doing everything they do. Or maybe not…maybe I just haven’t pursued an understanding of my own asthetic and need to do so.

So for a guy like me, who really doesn’t have the option to “rescue myself” because the next person to fill the suit probably wouldn’t even be asking the questions…where do I start to learn about helping students develop their own asthetic?

My incomplete thoughts:

1) Technology, itself, is an accelerant. It makes a good teacher better and a bad teacher worse. But what good does it do to direct a teacher with poor pedagogy to simply stop doing what they are doing? Singularity in approach is idealistic in expectation. It sounds good, but what impact will it have on helping a teacher improve?

2) I heard it somewhere and have been repeating it for a while: ‘To see a blog applied out of context, start a teacher blogging’.

3) Student creativity can be unlocked by the connection a student has with the TEACHER, not with the tool introduced or applied by the teacher. Missing out on the opportunity for an amateur teacher to unlock the creativity in a child seems to be high cost.

4) ‘But if my audience won’t know the difference, should I take the time to learn it?’ :: The world has innate truths that are perceived but not necessarily understood by ‘the common human.’ I am not beguiled by math, but there are truths in mathematics that, without me knowing it, impact my experience of watching, say, a movie. Not knowing should not keep me from being humbled by greater knowledge, nor should it stop me from wanting to teach what I know with my own limitations to others. Perhaps my limited observations of mathematics will one day unlock inspiration in a student or my own child.

So, sacrifice the ignorant for the greater cause? I guess I’m not seeing how this malformed teacher gains such insight into their own practice to then, with their eyes now wide open, say, ‘I must stop!’

I completely get what you are saying, and agree with a good part of it. Too often I see lessons and projects that focus on the aesthetics of the tool (or product as a result of the tool) without looking deeply at what that project was designed to teach. But it seems the only advice offered:

Basically, if you aren’t 100% sure you can do something to push a learner out of the amateur feedback loop, then recuse yourself from the instructor’s role. Offer assignments, prompts, tools, resources, etc., but let the student evolve creatively on her own, without the influence of your own flawed judgment.

…is a path I can’t follow completely. Working in a district that is low economic, our students need every opportunity they can get to learn how to work with/interact with computers. I can’t sacrifice that opportunity to only those teachers that are ‘100% sure’. However, I will do my best to seek them out and help them move to a place where they CAN teach better – either by designing better rubrics focused on instruction or by increasing their skills in relation to the tool or project with which they are working.

“…to shove a few feeds in a reader or visit a few websites regularly…”

But, where do you start? I know you have a bunch of sites you visit frequently, but how does a novice even know which feeds to put in the reader?

I take it from your assertions Dan that you don’t agree with teaching from within Vygotsky’s “Zone of Proximal Development.”

I don’t think its necessary to be an expert to teach something, just more capable than the student. If the teacher can make the student as capable as their self what’s wrong with that?

We are talking basic knowledge, high school entry level survey style classes right? You don’t expect a high school student in math to be capable of mastering spectral theory just because you teach math. Likewise, I don’t expect a student making a movie for class to have to be on par with professional film makers, but I don’t see why assessing a student’s level of craft in relation to one’s own is in violation of the principles of teaching.

I would certainly think that you don’t have to be a professional to teach something. I don’t even think an English teacher needs to be writing constantly to teach a student to write an essay. Once you know the form and are familiar with it, you don’t need to be a novelist to teach the skill.

That’s like saying cross curricular instruction isn’t viable because teachers must be experts in everything before teaching even rudimentary skills in anything.

Send me to the firing squad. I’m no expert but I think I can teach anything I know a little in.

Dan
I get you point. But I happen to see the overabundance of resources as a limiting factor for one who doesn’t know how to filter out the junk to get to the good stuff–especially in an area where one has limited knowledge. It can be paralyzing at times. To be honest, I didn’t know what a ‘reader’ was until recently. I may be the only one on my campus who knows what an rss feed is. Trust me, I am not trying to blame time constraints nor am I trying to stay in the dark. Thanks for the input.

No doubt, expertise is preferable to amateurism, but is it a prerequisite to good teaching? Whatever happened for the desire to create renaissance men? Jacks of all trades? Amateurism has its place, especially when it broadens our horizons beyond disconnected specialization.

You keep talking about how the gears operate in the machine as a whole, but that actually requires more than field specialization. That requires big picture thinking which necessitates familiarity with a broad field of disciplines. That leaves little room for expertise in everything. At some point, there is going to be some amateurism.

I don’t need to be a published historian to teach history, but it doesn’t hurt that I can relate the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima with some basic isotope theory in chemistry. I’m no expert in science, but that’s where my amateurism comes in handy.

In the end, isn’t that exactly the idea behind liberal arts education?

I just want to bring the hammer down a moment and note my specific example of a teacher with a lack of media criticism background causing things to go awry:

http://numberwarrior.wordpress.com/2009/05/14/when-video-is-made-uncritically/

Just because I’m not the English teacher doesn’t mean I should encourage bad writing habits.

Dan,

I think you are misunderstanding what is happening in the relationship between technology and humans and education.

First, a teacher’s true job (not the NCLB agenda) is to nurture the child’s learning ability and skills. The idea that the teacher should master every medium is last century’s paradigm.

The mediums change far too frequently to waste your time. But this doesn’t mean that you should bury your head in the sand or throw up your arms in despair. If a student knows more than you then learn from them and let them teach others.

Teachers need to be learners themselves and learning today is not at all about memorizing facts but about skimming, assimilating, and re-evaluating information *all the time*.

These days the technologists who remain vital are not experts and not generalists but rather techo-existentialists. The mantra is learn what you need for NOW and let it go – chances are it will change by the time you need or use it again.

So teachers – instead of teaching to tests – need to become multi-media experimenters. They need to demonstrate how the raw becomes cooked so that the learning process is exercised in ways that promote continuous improvement and sophistication of thought and taste.

A few years ago I encouraged our teaching staff to start blogging about what their classes were doing. I was told that they weren’t “trained”. I couldn’t believe it. I said, “Do you know English, how to type, and how to get to a blogging url? – What do you think you’ll be doing, preparing for a spacewalk?”

This idea that there’s a right way to create content is so wrong that I don’t know where to start. Our times require teachers who are self-propelled learners – not sheep or 20th century union belligerents.

Not only has the democratization of media content improved the availability of information and media, it changes the definitions of quality, ownership, art, and intelligence itself. And that will happen with your students as well. They will redefine the standards by their own experimentation.

Teachers have to give up on being judge and jury of quality and learn to become agents of learning development in which the quality of the by-products is secondary to the effect it has in promoting that student’s intellectual, social, and personal development.

For example, I recently was working as a software engineer in a major manufacturing environment and had a conversation with a senior engineer who was shaking his head. He was doing so because the latest CAD/CAM versions no longer relied on uniformly mathematically trained engineers. The program worked better with engineers who were spatially gifted. In other words, sculptors.

These days compilers will gladly swallow really bad programming code and scrub it under the covers to produce world-class compiled code. programs no longer are written for the smartest people, they’re written to accept the flaws of normal people and enhance their productive output.

Education is still selling this “we have to compete globally” nonsense when it no longer matters.

So teachers need to accept their insecurities in not being masters of this stuff and just use it. The stuff knows you don’t know and its okay.

– krasicki

Dan:The rhythms of editing, the structure of a story, the establishment of character, the persuasive essay, none of that has changed in centuries. (Millenia?)

I disagree. We are seeing wholesale changes in the way information is being processed, in the volumes of information that we all have to process, and in the very manipulation of information. It is only in schools that we see teachers making the claim that there’s a ‘right’ way to do such and such. In the real world, everything is being re-invented and often. And few things are sacred or fixed.

For example, check out Google’s latest announcement; Waves. This is a technology that obsoletes and reinvents email, documents, language processing, editing and collaborative information sharing that is human language neutral (And more).

And it takes no genius to see that teaching and learning will never be the same as well.

http://tinyurl.com/GoogleWaveIntro

Another example is the reinvention of tabs from the traditional typewriter convention to an intelligent digital alternative.

http://nickgravgaard.com/elastictabstops/

Or this short story:

http://imgur.com/9on89.jpg

The problem with educators is that they were taught and believe that being slow and methodical and putting together five year plans is the way things work. That’s way not true anymore.

The point you may be missing is that I agree with you in that “we shouldn’t expect our teachers to be experts in every tool”. In fact I don’t think experts are what we want at all. We need teachers smart enough to move with the times and the technology by freeing themselves of the idea that the schools can afford training that doesn’t exist, tools that teachers need to be aware of because the kids are using them, and so on.

Teachers need to know lots of tools but not necessarily every tool within a genre (say, movie-making). You are correct it is not about the tool but it very much is dependent on using a tool rather than not.

The human condition is cybernetically enhanced, like it or not. To deny kids this extension of the human experience is unforgivable.