Stragery Smorgasborg

A note of explanation about the menu

I was using the thinking strategy Ponder-Understand-Believe ("PUB", alternately known as Ponder-Understand-Belch, and affectionately referred to by researchers as Pitcher-Uv-Beer) and had a few thoughts.  One was that while the strategies described in section 2 of Making Drinking Viable, er, Making Thinking Visible were quite delicious, I was consuming them far too quickly for proper digestion.  I didn't cleanse the palate, between courses, and all the capitalized thinking words were starting to run together.  I decided to fall back on that tried and true college coping mechanism, which is to say to myself, "I'll keep this book.  I'm sure I'll reference back to it for the specifics of the strategies at some future date."  For now, I needed to focus in on just a few choice morsels.

With the food metaphor in mind, the next thing I thought of was that I needed to find an angle, something to hang my thinking hat on when I sat down to write.  Since we were instructed  to talk about three strategies, and there were three sections, and I was thinking about food, I thought of a three-course menu.  So I Explored Google to find some images. I got a lot of menus from people's weddings. Which made me Wonder, "What is the most commonly served entree at American weddings?"  I Think it is probably Chicken Cordon Bleu.  If you asked me "What Made You Say That?" I would probably cite the Evidence of the images I found, as well as Connect To Prior Experi…whoops, wrong book.  Well, I've been to a lot of weddings, and been served Chicken Cordon Bleu several times.  I think we can agree, my Claim should be accompanied by a flashing Yellow Light. 

Anyway, as the Generate-Sort-Connect-Extend concept map in my brain grew, I also realized I was looking for a format to write in that would help me to make my interminably long posts a little more…palatable in length.  The idea of the menu fit nicely, so I drew a mental line connecting those two thoughts.  I also thought it might be a fun exercise to try and make some of our textbook material sound like it was Created by a Master Culinary Craftsman (don't call him a chef) using only the finest Locally-Sourced Australian Vignettes of Soul, with short descriptive phrases that use the words "oak" and "caramel notes" at some point.  And "smoky."  There definitely needs to be something smoking.

Which led me to my last connection--the idea of synthesizing a lot into a little is partially the point of Chapter 6, "Routines for Digging Deeper."  One particularly appropriate strategy described in that chapter is the Sentence-Phrase-Word routine, which was adapted from the Text Rendering Experience used by educators affiliated with the National School Reform Faculty.  I've adapted it here using the Chamberlin Variation, which was first developed by Joel Huettig on October 17th, 2016 at 6:21 pm MDT.  The Chamberlin Variation of the SPeW routine uses the student's own words, rather than taking them from the text.  Additionally, the students also choose a Video, Image, or Gif (one of each) to make additional metaphorical connections.  Now, I will SPeW your dinner menu.  My apologies if it is only half-baked.

*I forgot to comment on the actual menu I chose to use above--after all those cordon bleus, this menu was so completely and somewhat absurdly different that I had to share it.  And in all honesty, it sounds kind of fun. I really want to spear some venison with a hand carved tree branch.   I also want to dial that phone number the next time my kids turn their noses up at dinner.

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Primero

Compass Points

A dish better served in print than on video, this routine will have your 

head spinning as you savor the extravagant excitements, wonderful worries, caramel-noted needs,

and smoky suggestions.

Parents like it too!

Reconsider

via GIPHY

Synthesazo

CSI: Color, Symbol, Image

"Morning Mist" might mean more metaphorically than a million muttered meandering musings.

I use CSI in this blog!?

Differentiation

"Deeper" Dish Pizza

Circle of Viewpoints

The Lord of the Rings from the viewpoint of Sauron, an oliphant, an orc, and a resident of Rohan.

Then with a book on contemporary Afghanistan.

Irony?

Dessertivo

Conclusion

All joking aside, while I had issues with the idea of "trademarking" the thinking processes we all do every day, I've learned that the power in identifying and isolating those processes can be quite profound-- paradoxically, perhaps the key to unleashing a person's latent potential proclivities for powerful perception is to harness unbridled curiosity and creativity within a meaningful and purposeful routine.

To clarify, "PUB" thinking was only a joke.

Publish

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Author's note:  After posting this, I realized in my first course contains an error.  When I referred to "better in print than on video," I believe I was actually thinking about the Explanation Game.  I had watched the video of that routine first, and thought that it was nice enough, especially considering it was demonstrated in a kindergarten class.  However, when I read about it in more depth, I thought much more highly of it.

I had skimmed over the Compass Points, and again wasn't totally enamored with it, in part because my son had just finished a geography unit and learned all about "Never Eat Soggy Waffles."  Mixing up the mnemonic at this point in his life might permanently skew his sense of direction!  However, like the Explanation Game, once I read about Compass Points in more depth, I gained a new appreciation for it.  Thus, my one word description "Reconsider" applies to both.

Another reason I use this blog to post--I can go back and edit!

Note to Future Self:  This article contains some more great thinking routine ideas:

http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/top-teaching/2016/10/5-ways-foster-creativity-students-and-why-you-should#.V_5Xym9oAat.email

Visible Thinking

A little music: Telegraph Road, Mark Knopfler

"Then came the churches, then came the schools, then came the lawyers, then came the rules."

Funny how Knopfler plugs "schools" into that line.  Well, not funny, really.  But probably appropriate.  If you stick to negative connotations with the above mentioned institutions, you probably don't think about thinking for yourself, let alone thinking visibly.  The ten commandants, the rule of law, and school curriculums don't invite thinking as much as they do a legalistic adherence to the letter of the law.   The ultimate summative test lies at the pearly gates, and we practice for that in front of judges, and in front of test proctors.

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In the Calvin and Hobbes comic, Hobbes asks the essential question: "Why do we care?"  Clearly, they don't care, so they generate a reason to care, in the form of creating a geometric representation that, if they fine tune it long enough, might come out to tangibly represent the equation "6 + 3" in a way that has true meaning.  They are resisting the impulse to spit out the legalistic interpretation of what those squiggly lines mean, as decreed by the lawyers and scholars and priests in days gone by.  Is Calvin being difficult and intentionally obtuse, or is he actually thinking on a higher level?  "Why" does 6 + 3 = 9?  Why not 8?  How does it work?  And why, indeed, do we care?  

I would suggest that what Calvin is doing is exactly what is described in "Making Thinking Visible," on page 29: 

 This means we need to draw on our understanding of what thinking is and the types of thinking we seek to foster so that we can name, notice, and highlight thinking when it occurs in class: recognizing a student who puts forth a new point of view, offers up a nascent theory or conjecture, proposes an explanation, makes a connection, sees a pattern, and so on.

The comic is "ah-ha" funny, not just "hah-hah" funny--Calvin is that student.  Conveniently, it seems as though mathematics instruction has become all about not just showing your work, but about showing and explaining the thinking behind that work.  It is comforting to realize that just as there is a push to integrate curriculum, the various pedagogical methods we've been learning in different subjects can be cross-pollinated as well.  How do you teach a social studies lesson using the science-based 5E method?  I don't know, but it is just as important to find a way to "Engage" students in social studies as it is in science; at least when teaching the Smoot-Hawley tariff.  Not sure what "visible thinking" looks like in Language Arts?  Well, we know a lot about what it looks like in math, so that is a good start.  It looks like a right triangle.

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I might be a high school English teacher right now, if not for a fateful intervention by the universe.  With the birth of my first son seven years ago, I reluctantly dusted off my English degree and decided to put it to use.  With a one year Graduate Program, I would be granted a certificate to teach secondary school.  To get in, there were but a few minor hoops to jump through.  One of the prerequisite classes was titled "Educational Technology 202."  I needed to either take it, or pass out of it by way of a test.  Not having time or the desire to take the class, I opted for the test.  How hard could it be?

In time, I deduced that the test would assess my skill at using the three main components of Microsoft Office:  Word, Excel, and whatever the Database program is.  From experience, I knew that if I (or anybody else) had an authentic task to accomplish with one of those tools, I could figure it out, through trial and error and probably a hefty dose from the "Help" menu.  So I didn't worry too much.  I practiced a bit with the Office suite I had access to, which didn't happen to be the most up-to-date version, and then went and took the test.

I don't know if I've ever been more frustrated and angry in an academic setting in my life.  The test would ask you to execute a task--say, insert a a specific table in a specific place.  If you clicked the wrong button, you got a strike.  Three strikes and you miss the question, and move on.  I failed miserably, and was quite bitter about it.  I certainly wasn't inspired to go and take a semester-long course that would teach me how to use a computer program that would be obsolete in another year or two.

 But more importantly, I was turned off by the whole notion of the test.  It didn't measure my thinking at all.  If  I needed to create an Excel spreadsheet for the purpose of keeping grades, I think I, like anybody else, would have figured it out. Eventually.

Thus was my teaching career so easily thwarted.  Make no mistake--I let it happen.  Failing that test was not an insurmountable obstacles, but is was a significant enough roadblock to make me reevaluate where I was at in life, and what I wanted.  I realized I didn't want to teach high school English for one thing.  So, it was a test, of sorts.  And in a way, I did pass.

Fast forward six years, and I found myself in school pursuing an Elementary Education degree.  And Edtech 202 was still a requirement.  Yes, we created a spreadsheet on the second or third day of class.  Together.  No, I could not whip out a mistake free spreadsheet right this second.  But the class was about a lot more than building spreadsheets, and it turned out to be one of the more enjoyable classes I've ever taken.  In the process of attempting to understand, if not master, a variety of technological skills, I was allowed the freedom to think my way through authentic problems as I created a lasting portfolio of artifacts.  You can view it here, but if you are reading this blog, you are already seeing some of the fruits of that class.  I write my reflections in this blog in part to keep my technology skills from rusting.

Another reason I am using a blog to record my reflections is that it feels slightly more authentic.  The blog is getting published for the whole world to see, and even if, as is likely, no one does read it, posting it as a public blog raises the stakes, not only with what I write, but how I present it.

EdTech 090

A third reason I like using Google Blogger instead of Blackboard, is it doesn't time me out when I get up to go ponder on things, or cook the kids a grilled cheese sandwich, or swat one of the ubiquitous flies roaming around our house this time of year.

*Please enjoy this re-creation of something I did when I was little, as I clumsily fill this whitespace I created by inserting the image in the wrong place to begin with.  In my case, I inserted a croquet hoop in an outdoor 220 volt socket.  Luckily, I didn't learn about completing circuits that day.



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We were assigned the first chapter from Howard Zinn's "The People's History of the United States" in my Social Studies methods class.  He describes his purpose:  

I prefer to try to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slave…of the rise of industrialism as seen by the young women in the Lowell textile mills, of the Spanish-American was a seen by the Cubans… (10)

And so on.  He continues to say on the next page:

If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win.  I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past's fugitive moments of compassion rather than  its solid centuries of warfare. 

 The authors of "Making Thinking Visible" describe a way to engage students, to make learning more authentic.  Page 32 details a technique used by a teacher in which she engages her students by asking them to not only think about the story, but about the "other story."  This seems an awful lot like what Zinn is talking about, which is more than just a nice bit of symmetry between two of my classes.  For me, it ties into both the second quote from Zinn, as well as the above one.  He is talking about not just doing better in school, but a much bigger picture--making the world a better place.  And it also ties into the Toffler quote.  The "learning illiterate" are already all around us, hopelessly caught in a negative Facebook feedback loop.  They don't know how to think for themselves, wouldn't know visible thinking if they did see it, and probably can't conceive how a tree is literally composed of thin air.  O.k. just air.  

Asking those tough questions about the "other side" will lead to discussions about Zinn's perspective on history, and if you credit his sources, you have to rethink your meaning of Columbus day.  You have to, as Toffler admonishes, "unlearn" that construction paper Santa Maria you made in second grade, and the Pilgrim hat you made out of a square and a rectangle and glued together.  And then learn again, from a broader, more nuanced perspective.  In doing so, you might see parallels to modern times, and ways to apply that learning.  It is about more than unlearning iOS 9.6 and learning 10.1, although to function in today's society I guess that is almost a requirement.  It is not about a version of iOS (or Microsoft Office) at all, it is about the ability to learn.  I didn't pass that technology test then, and I wouldn't pass a similar one now, but I could have figured out how to build a spreadsheet then, and I still can.  But can my students?  How do I know?

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The NPR article discusses a way: "strip away the stiffness of adulthood and plug people into their innate creativity."  But I'm an elementary teacher, so I don't have to worry about the "stiffness of adulthood," (be careful of taking that our of context) do I?  

I do, actually.  Where do you think that rigidity comes from?  That cute little Pinterest project above is an example of creativity, and visible thinking--by the person who originally created it--but not for the innumerable adults and children who have struggled to recreate it.  The 2nd grade diorama, built to specification, becomes the 5th grade essay about bridges.  Indented sentences, a topic, supporting details, and a conclusion; all cut and pasted to perfection.  And completely devoid of voice or life.  How can you see a student's thinking, when it looks and sounds identical to a picture found on Pinterest?
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I hit a turning point last semester.  Simultaneously, I was taking the Writing Instruction literacy class, observing in a fifth-grade, and writing my letter of application to the Teacher Education program.  In class, we were learning about the Six Traits + One of Writing, a topic conspicuously absent from my Creative Writing degree program.  One of the things I came to realize about my writing was that "Organization" as I had been thinking of it was a lot broader than I'd imagined.  I thought you were either organized--you wrote from a linear outline--or you weren't.  I realized that I spent a great deal of time "organizing" my thoughts, and that the actual writing, when it was good, came much easier after I'd done so. But I wasn't very good about making my organization visible, because it didn't fit that linear, Roman-numeraled outline.

At the same time, I was observing a fifth-grade student as part of the writing class.  I gave her a survey, looked through her notebooks, and interviewed her.  And then I "analyzed" a piece of her writing, supposedly an example of her best, that her teacher had provided me.  It was a stiff, adult-sounding informational bit about a bridge in Australia.  I read about a few dry facts, but I didn't see anything of the student in that paper.  Nothing that reflected how she talked about reading and writing in our interview, except maybe what she thought I wanted to hear her say.  And there was nothing in that paper that was reflected in the stack of recreational reading books she had stacked on her desk.  This could have been any piece of expository writing by any fifth grader in the world.  The only thing I learned about that student was that she could probably look up facts on Google, patch them into an outline, and paste them into a report.

Meanwhile, I was trying to write my own essay, on why I wanted to be a teacher.  I'm 42, and I've written a lot of application, life story-type essays.  I kept writing in a certain voice that I thought would be pleasing to a certain audience I imagined in my head, and I kept managing to turn a life I am rather proud of, warts and all, into a stiff, boring and lifeless essay.  And then I happened across this Venn diagram.  I'd never seen it before, or if I had, it hadn't resonated.  It was the perfect way for me to organize my thoughts visually, and it became the structure for my essay.  It enabled me to write in my voice.  And it didn't hurt when I realized my audience was teachers.  I was writing about being a teacher, to teachers.  Rather than write what I had dreaded reading in all those high school English papers--stiff, lifeless, "guess what the teacher is thinking" (page 31, Thinking) essays, I chose to write what I  would want to read, if I were the audience.  Maybe it sounds silly, but it was quite liberating.  I found my voice.  I realized that even throughout my undergraduate career in the Creative Writing program, writing fiction, I had been "guessing" about what I thought the teacher wanted to hear. It is exhausting trying to think, and write, other people's thoughts.

I carried what I'd learned from writing that paper over into another class, an online literacy class with 40 faceless, and unfortunately mostly voiceless, students.  After a couple of rounds at the discussion board where I literally answered the instructor's prompts, double-checked that I had an adequate number of citations, and whatnot--and honestly not generating much discussion at all-- I said fuck it.  If nobody is reading this, I'm going to just write what I really want, how I want.  My reflections got longer, and much more personal, and I was much more proud of them.  I like to think you could "see" my thinking, flawed though it might be, rather than "see" me patting the author's on the back and nodding my head.  And I got good grades on them.  Alas, they still didn't generate much "discussion," but that is probably another story.

Towards the end of the semester, I was tasked with writing a couple of papers, using APA format.  I didn't even know how to do that, and would have failed a timed test had I been given one, but guess what?  Thanks to the Purdue Owl, and a pre-formatted Google Doc, I was able to figure it out.  If someone wanted to argue with my premise here, I suppose they could say I could adapt to the APA style because I was already familiar with the MLA style from ten years ago, and that I'd probably written a really nice bridge essay full of outlined facts back when I was a fifth grader.  Maybe they're right.  But at what cost?  Losing my voice for 30 years? The real challenge is finding a way to let my voice shine through the formatting; if you're not taught how to find your voice--show your thinking--when you're young and flexible, how is it going to be any easier when you're an adult?

Which takes me back to that fifth-grader, who had already begun to "guess" at what the teacher was thinking.  I think of it as teaching theater.  Are we teaching students how to memorize one particular role?  Or should we be teaching them how to be actors, giving them tools that make them capable of adapting to any number of roles?

 Are we confusing formatting with scaffolding?  Am I?  I don't know. Maybe Jack Handey was right:  "Sometimes I think the so-called 'experts' actually are experts."

*I can't find a Saturday Night Live video of that particular quote, but I did find one of Handey reading an excerpt from his book, where he gives us a sort of example of "visible thinking."  Enjoy this comedic respite.


 


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There had gotten to be too much white and black on my workspace.  (At least there had been, on an earlier draft, before I inserted the video.)  Anyway,  I needed to doodle something, as Barry encourages in the NPR article.  I took a walk, and when I came back, I was ready to doodle.  Barry would probably consider it a cop-out, but rather than draw my own images, I use the whole internet as my doodle-pad.  For this I typed in "tree of life images."  I'll save you the trouble, if you want to see all that I had to choose from, and from that you can perhaps glean a thing or two about me, as you ponder the one tree image I did choose.  Or you can just make your own meaning from this image.  Take in all you know about everything, trees and sunlight and nutrients and that job you had climbing trees and the tree house you had in that cherry tree as a kid and that tree in the Shawshank Redemption that symbolized hope, perseverance, and rebirth to you, and how both that tree and the cherry tree have since died but hope hasn't and neither has the joy of climbing trees, and keep on going until you need a breath of air…then you think some more about that image of the tree of life on the back of the tree company t-shirt--the Celtic image, and you think about when you were so into Celtic music like Enya, and her song Lothlorien, named after the Elvish forest in the Lord of the Rings, and how everything seems to come back to that epic journey, that quest to cast the Ring into Mt. Doom…more air...

I've studied photosynthesis formally at least three times in my life, in sixth grade, early in college in Plant Science (there was something neat about the C4 pathway and corn, but what was it…) and again later in college in Botany, which I took mainly because I was chasing a girl at the time who was also taking the class...  At no time did I picture a tree being made of thin air, the way I did when Drori pointed it out.  I knew it--I could point all the way back to that diagram I made in the sixth grade, how the carbon dioxide in the air was being converted through the process into the carbon we see in the tree, and that we eat as carbohydrates.  I even knew that burning the tree, or fossil fuels, released that carbon back into the atmosphere.   But I don't think I understood it the way I do now, as I walk down the street, trying to imagine the gaping holes around every tree that would needs be there if trees were mostly made of nutrients.  They are made most of air!

I've seen towering ponderosa pines grow on the side of rocky cliffs--how did they "pull" nutrients out of solid rock?  They didn't of course; they reached up and pulled it straight out of the sky.

In that, Drori gives us the perfect metaphor for making thinking visible.  Our ideas are like air, and the tree is the result of mixing those ideas, that carbon, with sunlight.   The tree is us, our visible thinking. When a tree is stunted, we think, oh, it must need more nutrients.  We can see nutrients, we can see soil.  That much we can do, so we shovel manure on it and wonder when it still doesn't grow.

What the tree needs is sunlight.  And we, the teachers, are that sunlight, correct?  Showering down the sunshine of our knowledge, energizing the photosynthesis of learning--synthesis, that highest pinnacle of Bloom's hierarchy.  

Perhaps not.  I think sunlight is the motivation to learn in this metaphor, and we teachers are but the breeze that parts the trees, the sudden gale that springs up and drives away the clouds and then is gone just as suddenly, the hand that lifts the grass to expose the seedling to the light.  We are not manure spreaders.  Are we?