Everything we need to know about teaching is in an 80s movie

On a Saturday way back in 2014 I was honored to present the keynote address at the Michigan Connected Educators Un/Conference. Here are my thoughts I shared with the group. The message is pretty timeless in the sense that six years later I believe this message even more. I have now updated my original post from what I shared with the conference back in '14. It's all still true today.

I started teaching in January of 1995. Who I thought I needed to be in the classroom was a combination of Michigan's legendary football coach Bo Schembechler and Sgt. Hulka from Stripes...and to some extent it was required. I took over a fourth grade classroom for a retiring teacher who had taken every Monday and Friday off the entire first semester. When I had been there eight days, it was the longest stretch of consistency these kids had had all year.

I had high expectations. I was loud with very low tolerance. I expected my students to be exactly like I had been as a student, compliant. Do what I ask when I ask it with few questions...It wasn’t very fun for any of us. I wondered how I would ever endure 30 more years of this.

In 1998 I faced what I figured would be a “make or break” task. I would be teaching a 5-6 split.  I would have six 6th graders who all were academically gifted in one way or another and seventeen fifth graders who hadn’t been selected for the previous year’s 4-5 split, primarily due to academics. How was I going to tackle this?

What got me through it was the power of using project based learning with the sixth graders....primarily to keep them occupied while I tried to get my 5th graders ready for the state assessment....MEAP test. That approach overtook my teaching that year and by June all kids were working on all kinds of projects and learning together in so many ways. It also became one of my favorite years of my career. You can smile and cheer instead of bark and gripe when your kids are constantly engaged.

That small group of sixth graders always reminded of the kids in My Science Project (watch the whole thing on YouTube) and from there I discovered that everything we need to know about engaging kids can be learned somewhere in an 80s movie.

Lesson 1: What makes tech useful in the classroom. I present to you the ultimate piece of educational technology. Just watch this trailer and think about how this phone booth  from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure does exactly what we want our technology to do.  These guys have incredible access to primary sources and get to witness history.  It is total immersion in content. 

If you remember how the film ends, these two put on an amazing rock concert-like oral report. They had the tools to gather information and then presented in a way that expressed the learning through their skills as rock and rollers.

The next lesson is to value the time together. We can not monopolize the time.  Jeff Spicoli actually makes a great point in the following clip from Fast Times at Ridgemont High.  Mr. Hand shouldn’t be the only one having all of the fun...if we can call it that.

There is probably a better way to set up a "feast on our time" though...but to Mr. Hand's credit, he cared enough about Jeff that he even went to Spicoli's house to make sure his surfing student completed enough work to graduate. Time called Mr. Hand the "original No Child Left Behind Teacher".

Lesson 3: Kids love to the make stuff but it’s our job though to channel that energy into the right opportunities. Gary and Wyatt learned the hard way about being  responsible with technology. Okay....this 3d printer might trump the phone booth for top tech honors but we are still talking about technology being used educationally!  Weird Science brings one more thought to mind. Did these "two guys" grow up to be Brian Briggs and Ryan O'Donnell, the Bedley Brothers, Brad Waid and Drew Minock, or Kyle Anderson and Joe Marquez?

Somewhat related to #3 is that kids just love to mess with stuff. Even back in 1983 before anyone knew what hacking was, War Games featured some random teens monkeying with North American Aerospace Command (NORAD) and its super sophisticated computer the WOPR. Then in 1986 a kid who looked a lot like the War Games kid was hacking his high school attendance computer so he could go to the museum and a Cubs game. Poor Ferris. He asked for a car and got a computer. Talk about being born under a bad sign. But....he had Internet in 1986. That's not all bad. I wonder if David Jakes ever bumped into Ferris' principal Ed Rooney in any Suburban Chicago educational circles. Rooney could have learned a lot from Jakes. 

#5 is a concept that took me a long time to get my head around. That inconvenient truth is that in the classroom you cannot use the same approach or lesson design for every kid. You have to diversify your instruction according to each kid's needs. No 80's film better exemplifies this than The Breakfast Club. The principal in the film, Mr. Vernon,  required them to each write a 1000 word essay about who they thought they were. Here is the essay Brian ended up writing for all of them.

He is exactly right. Let us never forget that every student is a complex human being and we need to foster development of their whole being.

Final lesson: It's not about you. It's about creating the right environment where kids can thrive. But, that doesn't mean you still can't be right in the middle of the learning fun. Robin Williams in Dead Poet's Society comes immediately to mind but I also give a big nod  to Bill and Ted's guide Rufus and quite possibly the coolest teacher ever captured n film, Mark Harmon's character Freddy Shoop from Summer School. 

Get in there and dig around with the kids just like Dean Shareski told us at MACUL back in 2014,

"It's not good enough to be the guide on the side anymore. Be the meddler in the middle."

It's been 25 years in the making for me but along the way teaching has become a lot more of an excellent adventure and a lot of a less bogus journey. All I needed to know about teaching is in the movies of the 80's. 

Four things I learned from a week with crummy Internet

The new week is off to a great start primarily because we have had great Internet service at school...last week, not so much. According to our tech consortium, the problem was in some faulty hardware.

Having no Internet may have wreaked havoc on my lesson plans but I did learn a few things.

1. We really have outsourced many parts of our brains as I have heard Kevin Honeycutt mention several times at conference keynotes. Little things like how to correctly spell "discrepancy" were a lot harder to find without the luxury of a few quick key strokes on the web. 


2. Cloud storage is miraculous...when it works. Without access to Google Drive last week at times we were trapped in time. Kids wanted to work on projects but without access to their original documents they had nothing upon which to build. When it was up and running today students seamlessly accessed Google Drive to retrieve, update, and save work.


3. The Internet is an invaluable step forward in human history. Our third graders were researching games children played outdoors and were completely dead in the water without the Web. We were surrounded by books but none had anything to do with pioneer games. Our last resort was the encyclopedia and it offered nothing in the "games" entry or the "pioneer" entry. Had we been writing a report about 2002 Chile, we might have been in business.


4. Children really lack perspective on how it wasn't very long ago that our world did not have instant access to immediate knowledge. As a plan B in a 5th grade class, I did my best to trace the evolution of personal computing, especially in education since Jobs and Woz built the first Apple in the garage. One girl seemed completely befuddled that there was any reason to own a computer prior to the Internet.
   
   "What did you do with it if you couldn't look stuff up? Just play games?"
   
   "Pretty much, " I replied as I looked back at the start of my career where Number Munchers, Oregon Trail, and Carmen San Diego were the pinnacle of integration with a little Bank Street Writer thrown in as differentiation.

The bottom line is that we live in an amazing time and right or wrong we have become dependent on being connected. It was actually good for the kids to experience the outage and maybe not take the connectivity completely for granted. Internet access really has become something we expect as common place as electricity. I am very lucky to teach in a district that has made long term investments in insuring we have great connections and access. I know a lot of teachers and kids aren't so lucky. Hopefully they will be soon.

Being a Connected Educator is my teaching life support system

I can hardly remember what teaching was like before social media. Twitter runs on my laptop all day long through Tweetdeck. My contacts are organized by education, local, friends, news, and sports. It is a constant stream of ideas, reflections, and life experiences.

Every day I get a list of links and new apps to try. I have instant answers to teaching's seemingly un-answerable questions. All I have to do is ask. I try to give back as much as possible by sharing techniques and resources I find helpful and offering up the occasional "don't bother" on websites that seemd promising but bombed with the kids. Bob Sprankle was one of the first educator I followed as I got connected. He talked way back in the day about "Professional Learning Network currency", essentially the idea that the more you contribute the more you will benefit.

Take a look at this video featuring many edtech all-stars as they better explain how impactful being connected can be. Get connected this month at connectededucators.org.