Let’s talk about American Football.  For those of you still reading, let’s focus on what the professionals call “The Quarterback Problem”.

How would you choose an NFL quarterback?  They’re the most pivotal player on the field and it really pays to get the selection right.  Not only do quarterbacks earn up to $10 million a year but they can also make or break a season for an entire team.  With so many jobs and so much money on the line, developing a surefire way of determining success is vital.  

Guess what?  There isn’t a surefire way.  Dan Shonka (awesome name) has vast experience in the field, works very hard and analyses statistics and DVDs of players.  His job with an NFL team relies upon him making good decisions about which quarterbacks to choose.  A lot of money is on the line.  People’s careers.  People’s livelihoods.  If there was a surefire way of choosing a quarterback, someone with Dan’s experience would have worked it out.  

He can’t do it.

IQ tests don’t work.  Video analysis doesn’t work.  Analysing college level performance doesn’t work.  You cannot predict performance in this case.  The only way that you can tell if someone is going to be a good NFL quarterback is to let them have a go at being an NFL quarterback.

The same is true for teaching.  The only way to work out if someone is going to be a good teacher is to let them have a go at teaching.  This problem is even more dire than the quarterback problem: There’s no such thing as “college level teaching” before you get to “NFL level teaching”.  Teachers can arrive at their first job without having taught before.  Practicum (a supervised simulation) is a good start, but it’s not the same thing as being a teacher responsible for a class.  

There have been some attempts to bridge the gap, and they’re welcome because they address the issue.  Lifting the quality of initial teacher education is always a good idea.  I’d ask Mr Pyne how he plans to implement the recommendations made to him.  For example:

“Higher education providers select the best candidates into teaching using sophisticated approaches that ensure initial teacher education students possess the required academic skills and personal characteristics to become a successful teacher”.  

Sounds promising right?  “Sophisticated approaches”?  Everyone can agree with that.  The problem, however is that there’s no evidence that having a teaching degree, passing a test or looking good in a qualitative survey on “personal characteristics” affects your capacity to be a good teacher.  None.  Nil.  Nada.

Depressing, huh?  Despair not; some of the recommendations of the TEMAG report are actually pretty sensible.  They are focused on rigour.  They target ineffective tertiary practice and the lack of coordination between schools and universities.  More power to them.  I’d disagree with the focus on entry criteria and say that raising the bar for entry into the profession is a fool’s errand and will be a textbook case of managerialism.

Choosing teachers will always be always be too hard to reduce to quantifiables.  Some have suggested you have to try out four people to find one good teacher.  This is simply because the job is unquantifiable.  I hope this makes you appreciate the good teachers in your life even more.  In the mean time, I suppose we can hope that Pyne will fix the problems in pre-service teacher education.

Does Teaching Kill Creativity?

What do you want from your school?  If your school was a restaurant, would it be Aria, or would it be McDonald's?

My wife and I are fans of Aria.  The degustation menu is an experience like no other.  A group of passionate people, led by a visionary, have worked very hard to create something truly mind-blowing.

At Aria, freedom to innovate results in a sublime experience.  At McDonald’s standardisation rules.

If Matt Moran was a teacher, I suspect that he’d have left the profession long ago.  Standardisation dulls creativity.  It feels safe, but it kills initiative.  Programs that attempt to raise standards simply add paperwork.  The requirements are mind-numbing.  Do you want a teacher with a numb mind?

In Alan Moore’s 2011 book, No Straight Lines, he describes the outcome of this way of thinking on education.

“Government edicts describe in several educational courses not just the scope of the learning but the minute-by-minute, blow-by-blow instructions as to exactly how lessons are to be run.  If anyone is good at their job, are they going to want to work like that?”

If you stood behind Matt Moran, telling him how to cook, he would be pretty cranky (he’s a big guy, so I wouldn't try it).  If you do it to teachers, they become discouraged and move their creative efforts elsewhere.  Matt Moran, Jamie Oliver, Gordon Ramsay are all excellent cooks.  Their excellence is derived from their individuality and creativity.  Would you tell them how to cook?  Would you tell them to comply to a bewildering set of criteria that have little to do with their day to day work and have been shown to have no substantive benefit to the desired outcome?

Let teachers teach.  Provide them with resources and get out of their way.  Train them meaningfully and give opportunity to improve if there are problems.  

Incidentally, in preparation for this post, I typed “Why teachers” into Google.  Before I could type “quit”, Google suggested the word “drink”.

I have all the answers.

You know Sisyphus as the guy condemned to push a boulder up a hill for all eternity. Just as he gets it to the top, it rolls back down the hill. He returns to the bottom and starts again.  He does this forever.  

Insanity is repeating the same thing over and over and expecting different results.  I can't claim to have coined that gem.  Neither can Einstein or Rita Mae Brown, for that matter.  

I think about the USA and their military solutions.  I think about Australian politicians squandering the diminishing returns of voter trust on hollow rhetoric.  I think about my two-year-old son's tantrums.  Of these three examples, I expect that my son will grow out of his self-defeating behaviour very soon.

This all brings us rather neatly to the topic of peer coaching.  Peer coaching is very simple.  It's about perspective.  The challenges that you face might not be of any substance.  The way you're doing things might be the issue.  The solutions you've come up with might actually be the biggest problem.  A peer coach can think for you (we come up with solutions for others far easier than for ourselves), be objective for you (our regular colleagues often reinforce our limitations) and hold you accountable (it becomes real if you say it out loud and someone else is listening).

Why was Sisyphus pushing that rock?  He was being punished.  For hubris.  The one thing sure to get in the way of effective peer coaching is hubris.  We already have the answers.  Often before we know the questions.

Are you literate?

When I was at university studying composition, I had to write the music by hand. I'm left-handed, and the ink used to smudge as I moved my hand from left to right over the copy. To counter this, I had to guess how many bars I was going to fit on a line, do the first bar of each line and then go back and do the second bar and so on. This took a long time. It wasn't creative, it was simply what had to be done in order to communicate.

Computers came along and before long I didn't write music by hand any more. I now write faster, revise quickly and get automatic feedback. I don't know where my osmiroid is. I suspect I threw it away long ago.

I am literate. What is the essence of my literacy? Being able to write by hand? I don't really do that any more. Does that mean I'm no longer literate?

This is from Prensky: "Communicating using writing and reading is hard . . . What many people, particularly educators, often forget (or ignore) is that writing and reading – although they have enjoyed great success and primacy for several hundred years – are very artificial and unnatural ways to communicate, store and retrieve information... ...As a result, a great deal of our school time is devoted to training young people to use written media – first to decode the squiggles and then to extract meaning. And still, aside from our top-tier students, we are only marginally successful at it."

Prensky is saying what a lot of us are thinking. Handwriting is unnatural. It's good to learn but should it be a primary method of communication?

He goes on... "...a large part of our population has already switched to media easier than reading and writing for almost everything. ...Speaking and listening are much more ‘‘native’’ to the human brain. Now that we have technological alternatives, written communication, except in certain areas, is rapidly on the wane... ...This massive rejection of reading and writing – and substitution of other media – is, of course, not the case for the top 10-20 percent of our population (which includes almost all teachers.) But it certainly is true for the remaining 80 percent."

You can read the rest of Prensky's paper here.

The NSW BOS Syllabus for 7-10 English states: "Literacy is the ability to communicate purposefully and appropriately with others in a wide variety of contexts, modes and mediums. Different contexts require general and specific skills, knowledge and understanding as students compose meaning for themselves and others."

The focus here is on composing (making stuff up) and meaning (the essence of something).  It has nothing to do with handwriting.   When I think about my son, I want him to be able to communicate; to be understood and to understand. I don't know how he is going to do that, any more than my mum in 1975 understood how I would be doing it in 2012 (yep, I'm that old).

Technology in education means freedom. Freedom from having to write things longhand. Freedom from linear text.  Freedom from text as the only key to understanding.   Freedom from the one-size-fits-all classroom.  Freedom from the limitations and assumptions of the straight line.

Is technology the death of literacy?  Or has technology freed literacy from the bounds of pen, ink and parchment?

Distraction

Christmas is over. We had a Christmas tree in our house. It was covered in tinsel as well as blue and silver balls. My 21 month old son and I put the star on top. With it's twinkling lights, the tree was the most striking thing in the room, bound to be irresistible to an inquisitive toddler.

He has myriad toys in the same room as our Christmas tree. We insisted he not touch the tree. What do you think happened?

That tree resulted in many trips to the naughty corner (time out, for Americans and other foreigners). There are many reasons why we didn't want him to touch the tree (the baubles could break and injure him, stewardship of our son's understanding of personal property, etc) but it was inevitable that he disobey.

A big tree, in the middle of a space, more interesting than anything else, absolutely forbidden to touch. Remind you of anything?

The creation story is a rich allegory of human behaviour and can perhaps be applied to the classroom as well.

What do we mean when we say a student is “distracted”? Is distraction inevitable? Does technology create distraction, as many teachers say?

Saying that a student has become distracted means that they are not following the prescribed learning path. Prescribing a path for twenty or so students is limiting. It presupposes the needs of the student and that the teacher has godlike properties of pedagogical provision.

Recently, I've come to the conclusion that the person getting distracted is me.

The product of my distraction is vigorous lesson planning. I even prided myself on it. This year, I'm waiting until I meet my students and get to know the way they learn. I won't prescribe a theory of learning, technology or work schedule until they show me how they best learn. Even then I won't write the lessons. They can do it. I'll focus on feedback, facilitation and getting out of their way.

Following their passion in the classroom should be the default state for our students. How often do I factor this into my teaching?

Change

We all know change is a constant. Can the direction of change be controlled?

A very experienced teacher was anxious about using an online survey to gather feedback from her Stage 6 students. For Americans and other foreigners, Stage 6 is the last two years of high school in New South Wales. This teacher was afraid of what the students might write and how their feedback would impact her professional self-image.

She sent the survey. Six months later, these types of surveys are now an integral part of her teaching. She uses them to fine-tune her delivery and give the students ownership over the learning process.

She is no longer afraid of what the students write in survey responses.

There is a wider story. The school where she works hires an independent consultant to survey leaving students about their teachers. Various criteria are coalesced into a single percentage mark. The school considers anything below 80% to be of concern.

The teacher in question controlled change at personal risk. She is now well placed to thrive in an organisation which demands accountability.

A minister once told me that there are two things people hate. The first is the way things are. The second is change.

When suggesting technology integration, I'm often asked “why should I do this?”. There is a flavour to that question that is much more about culture and relationships than it is about a shiny new toy or the effectiveness of a LMS. Cultural/relational problems might just need cultural/relational solutions – not technological ones.