Tag Archives: coaching

Back From The Cutting Edge

Been a while huh? You still there? How did you end up here after so long? Is RSS still a thing? I don’t know about you, but I haven’t read a blog post in almost six months. Have you? Did you follow the Twitter trail here? Are other people still blogging? Are you? Did I miss anything?

I am not even sure who you are, and to be honest, these days I am having a hard time knowing who I am, and what I am doing here. Blogging. Writing. Sharing. It has been so long since I did any of those things that I feel I have lost what it was I wanted to say when I started. Have I turned my back on whatever audience or community I spent so much time and energy cultivating? Do you care? Does it matter?

Yeah, I am and have been having a bit of an existential crisis since the end of the school year last year.

What have I been doing you might ask? I have been spending my time reading every Young Adult book I can get my hands on. I’ve been falling in love with #TCRWP (Reading and Writing Workshop), to the point that I even have grade eight kids writing in notebooks. Pen and paper old school. Pages and pages of it. And it feels great. I am hand writing charts on flip chart paper for goodness sake. And to be honest, I feel I am doing some of my best teaching in years.

What else? I spend some of my energy on the plants in my classroom. I’ve also been playing open mics in the hope that I will be able to sing a full set of songs without tabs and lyrics by Christmas.

Not sure how or why I fell into this new territory. There was no conscious choice to turn my back on ……What do I even call it? What exactly have I turned my back on? Is there anything at all to be named? My PLN? Blogging, Ed Tech? These labels seem so simplistic. Have I turned my back at all?

My thoughts have drifted I suppose and my priorities have shifted, but what really happened is that I have grown bored of my own shtick. Digital stories, sharing, sharing, sharing and networks– round and round left me dizzy, till I just had to get off the ride. I have forced myself to name what I value and why? In short, I know that I still value open networks and community learning. I still value expression and stories and the magic of the web. But what that looks like in my classrooms these days? Your guess is as good as mine.

Things have been feeling stale for me for a while. After a decade of being on the cutting edge, I need a break. Maybe, for the time being I need other people to be the innovators. I need some time to reassess what I value. What felt new and transformative when I started, feels stale and unimaginative.

This re-evaluation reminds me of the value of having people on campus who sustain the momentum when some of us lose it. Every school needs people on the edge, so that when the rest of us need to move back from it, they can push us back where we need to be. I’m talking to you Digital Literacy Coaches and Tech Facilitators. Thank you for the work you do, to keep the rest of us on our toes. So that when we hit a rut, like the one I have described, you can rejuvenate us and remind us of what we value that we may have forgotten.

Which brings me to Learning 2.014. Feels like I have gone full circle in the last decade. I feel like the doe-eyed n00b again this year. I am very much looking forward to seeing what everyone is excited about this year. I have no role to play at this conference other than open-minded learner. I am looking forward to having energizing conversations. I am hoping to creep back to the cutting edge, or maybe share the view from the way back.

Act of Love

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I am tried. Exhausted. Spent and empty. For some inexplicable reason, however, writing/blogging whatever you want to call it, seems to be the only activity that restores my energy. Let’s see where this train leads.

After four days of working as a Technology Facilitator, I jokingly asked my principal if I could go back to being a classroom teacher. He grinned, “No way man. You can’t go back once you have jumped into the rabbit hole.” Fair enough, so let me vent a bit. Things that are bugging me about my new job:

There is always something wrong. Every second. All day. Everyday. There are issues. And while it may be self-induced, I feel I need to solve them all. Right now. In addition to my own anxiety about the glitch in Gmail contact creation, people stop me in the halls to ask how to add a tab in their browser, or pull me over because their keynote isn’t working. The false mantle of expertise is heavy and often gets in the way of what is important– planning my units for my Grade 10 English class that starts next week. I am quite certain, this balancing act will be more manageable with time. I am excited to watch myself learning how to be patient and kind and open. I often find myself wanting to belittle how little some people know, it is shocking, but then I imagine them as if they were a kindergartner, or my daughter, and remind myself that I am still a teacher. The difference is that I have a whole new batch of students. Yes, they are grown college-educated adults, but they still need differentiation. They still need to be told they are doing a good job. That they will get it. That it is normal to be nervous about learning. This understanding makes the job worth it. Teaching adults is more complex than teaching kids in many ways. This complexity is helping me be the best educator I can be. It is reconfirming my understanding that teaching is a social experience, and it is about building and maintaining relationships first and foremost. Teaching is always an act of love and trust.

Having said that, I am tired of feeling as if I am the sole defender of all things digital. I sometimes feel that people are projecting their fear, frustration, and resentment with technology towards me. As if I am somehow responsible for their inability to navigate this changing world, or worse that I blindly believe that we are headed in the right direction, simply because I have chosen to explore what the digital world means to my life, my family, my students. Just because I enjoy investigating the digital age, does not make me blind to the necessity and wonder of the world beyond screens. I don’t like the assumption that I prefer to chat on a phone rather than a face-to-face conversation, or that I enjoy the anxiety that comes from being over connected. That I have somehow forgotten what it feels like to close my eyes and enjoy a passing breeze or the warm sunshine on my neck. Watching the giant bees penetrate the flowers on campus. As if technology could ever surpass the subtle beauty of a string of words on a page. I feel that when people see me, they only see a screen. Cold and metallic. I find it hard to express the breathing, stinking organic mess that operates the device they see.

I am sure, as always, I am over thinking and being too sensitive, but this is why I write– to sift through emotions and find clarity. Reflection should show us something right? It is still early days, but I feel like I am being pulled in many directions, not necessarily places I want to go. After a day of putting out a series of fires, I spent an hour in my classroom: moving furniture, blasting the Strokes, and putting up posters and quotes to populate and give birth to my new space. Tomorrow, I will find some plants; I am pricing a cheap guitar for the room , and next week I will spend time with some young adults who don’t expect much from me. We will laugh, get to know each other and begin to explore.

When I Say Jump…

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If you do not speak or read techaneese feel free to skip ahead to the next paragraph.

Will we find a plug-in that allows students the ability to customize their headers, but not have the ability to change the theme all together? Will we be able to figure out how to aggregate specific tags to post to several blogs? Can we subscribe to specific tags or categories? So teachers can subscribe to student blogs based on tags related to their classes not whole blogs? Will we get all the student Gmail accounts up and running by the end of next week? Will the Google Calendars work seamlessly like we planned. Will our server be able to handle the blogs next week? Will we find all the right plug-ins to make for an easy blogging experience? Will teachers understand what we are trying to do? Appreciate it? Enjoy it?

I am nervous. I am stressed. I am terrified. Two days into my new role at school, and I am realizing that things are different already. When you are a classroom teacher, what you do everyday really only affects you and your students, maybe your department, but as a tech facilitator suddenly your ideas, however brilliant they may have seemed at first, take on a much heavier feel. It becomes suddenly clear that they could crash and burn quite easily. It feels like everyone is looking to you for answers. Answers you may have uncovered minutes before. The pressure is already palpable for me. After two days. There are no students on campus and nothing has even been rolled out. Wow. I need to breathe and regroup.

A little context. I am only teaching three English classes this year and filling the rest of of my timetable as a tech coach (We are still writing the job description and title. I have already had a few people come ask me how to add folders in Mail or how to print. We hope to move away from the day-to-day help desk stuff and start looking at deeper pedagogical conversations that lead to shifts in teaching and learning. Will keep you posted.) The big initiative right off the bat for us this year is that we are moving away from a confined VLE and moving toward a system that is made up of K-12 WP blogs hosted on our sever, for teachers, students, and admin. We hope these blogs will act as portfolios as well as communication tools, discussion forums and more. We are building the system from scratch and as I mentioned before it is scary. We are also moving toward a Google Campus for access to Google Docs for back of the house curriculum creation and storage, as well as use of Calendars, Reader and Sites for a variety of things: student work, RSS, and document navigation among other things. It is scary.

Now that you have read the context, let’s spend a few lines on reflection:

The best part about learning is the not knowing. The guessing. The exploration. The trial and error. The failure. But suddenly when you are in front of a group of teachers who are looking to you to know what you are doing, learning feels like a waste of time. They need you to know this stuff. You have to know to teach right? What do you mean you don’t know how to do that? Then why are you in charge of teaching me?

What is lost is the sense that learning begins with not knowing. The one idea I hope to impart on people this year is that technology is not always a smooth path that will make their lives easier. That notion is a myth. It is ironic that we look to technology to make our lives easier, only to spend so much time and energy agonizing about how much of our time it saps. How many times have we watched some poor sap awkwardly stare about room as the very tool he/she was touting as life changing didn’t work? How many times have we been in that spot, “No I swear Google Docs will make this easier.” No one can log in. Tables act weird. Back to the drawing board. So why do we do it? Why do we spend so much time talking about technology and what it can or cannot do? Why have I chosen to try and convince grown professionals that learning about it will make them better teachers? That it will help their learning.

For the last two nights, I have laid awake in bed worrying. Worrying about some of the things I mentioned in the first paragraph, but when I wasn’t stressed about Themes and RSS on WP, I was thinking about why we choose to focus on technology when it isn’t always as easy as advertised. This is the analogy I came up with in my tired, sleep deprived brain:

We sell technology as a sprint. It is fast. Efficient. Breathtaking. It makes everything it touches fast, efficient, and breathtaking…but as we all know this is seldom the case. It is often frozen, loading, or crashing. It often feels more like a sprinter who can barely get out of the blocks, let alone finish a race. For me technology is more like a hurdle race. Or maybe a marathon. Or maybe a marathon with hurdles. And motes. With crocodiles. And hot lava. You get the point. Technology is not about ease; it is about obstacles. It is about problems. And understanding that when you have problems you often have solutions. The beauty of technology is overcoming obstacles. Critical thinking. Learning. Clearing hurdles. One after another. One step after the next.

image by studiocurve

I see value in technology for students and teachers because it teachers them, in a perfect world where they are not “trained” or spoon fed tutorials, how to identity problems and solve them. This is what I hope to get across to the teachers with which I work. Technology will break. It will fail. It is not a sprint. Maybe it won’t make your life easier, but damn it, you will learn some things about yourself. Your ability to be patient. To handle stress. To think critically under pressure. You will learn how to clear the hurdles with poise and precision, so that when it is time to sprint you will be all the more able.

Why may you ask, would any teacher in their right mind, with all their teacherly responsibilities, want to enter a marathon with hurdles and lava? Why do we ask our students to it? Why do we ask them to put themselves in situations that force them to learn?

See you in the comments…

(note: Sometimes technology can be a sprint. Sometimes it can be an amazing flight, but tonight I was mired in stress and I needed this. More posts coming soon, I am sure.)