Start the School Year Differently

On Monday morning, I returned to faculty meetings to begin the school year for the 8th time in my career. With that many opening meetings, I've noticed a fascinating trend: there's legitimate excitement and energy in the room and it always disappears entirely when the first administrator comes up to talk about operating procedures like discipline, honor code, scheduling and grading policy. Upon seeing it an 8th time, I had an epiphany; this is exactly how my first class goes when I force students to go through the course syllabus together.

I have always been told and I have always taught that teachers should embrace energy and excitement and harness it for learning and retention. So why would we start our school year with something that everyone would agree is not a best practice for teaching and learning?

So this year I'm going to purposefully leave out all administrative "stuff" (rules, course content, grading policies, etc.) from the first day. Instead, I'm going to host an activity where students have to think of what they want out of the class. I'll frame the course as broadly as possible and let the students talk about what they want to learn within that broad scope.

For example, in my Contemporary World History class this year, I'm going to post a map of the world, with the US taken out, and tell them that this is your playing field for learning this year. Anything that fits within that framework fits within the course content of "Contemporary World History." Imagine that blank slate for learning. I'm excited to see what the students come up with!

Here are some other questions I'm thinking about asking on day 1:

• 1) In general, what are you excited about for this school year? Why?
• 2) In general, what challenges do you think you'll face this year?
• 3) What did you learn this summer? How does that fit into the broad framework of this course?
• 3A) How will your other interests and/or previous knowledge help you to learn in this course?
• 4) What do you want to learn within the broad framework I provided for this course?  
• 5) Finally, how do you think I should go about teaching this subject in a way that will 1) make it relatable 2) keep you interested and 3) benefit retention and 4) enhance future pursuits

What Students Are Really Learning in High School

I had a student the other day say that the one thing he really learned in high school is how to manage five courses to get the best grades possible. What he means is that he wasn't working hard to learn, he was working hard to manage his courses to get good grades. Another student said, "Legit, my job in school is to get A's... I cry when I get B's." In other words, what students are trying to get out of school is a letter grade, not a learning experience, and that's a problem.

My students admitted this to me in the summer when I teach two new media/technology courses. Why the summer? Because my course hasn't been approved yet for the school year. In these courses, I've basically thrown the idea of "course content" out the window. Technically, I've outsourced it to the students. I teach students how to use the internet and social media as a means to learn the content of their choosing. In other words, I'm teaching passion based learning through social media. I'm empowering students to use the applications they love in ways that allow them to learn the content of their choosing.

In order to get students to embark on this journey of learning, I start with a discussion about the way that their high schools make them learn. That's where I heard the quotes with which I started this blog post. Once they admit they're tired of learning what teachers want them to, I say, "Fine. Prove to me that you can do better on your own." I believe in the curiosity of my students. And I believe that when they set their own goals they will be much more likely to meet them, not to mention they'll retain the information better when they deem it worthwhile.

Always fascinated by technology, teenagers quickly grasp the applications and social media tips and tricks that I teach. The reason I start with the applications themselves is because the moniker "digital natives" is a myth. Teenagers use a lot of applications, but they don't know how to navigate them efficiently or how to use them in the best ways to deliver networked learning. Efficiency is crucial on the web. Not only do I teach students how to use lists on twitter, but I also teach them how to use hotkeys to navigate quickly. Then it's up to the students themselves to add their interests to these applications and learn efficiently.

Next, I teach a few lessons about how the internet works and how it's changing in the 21st century. I cover a group of concepts that I call the "social internet economy." This consists of things like digital publishing, crowdsourcing, branding, SEO, data mining, and slacktivism. Essentially, I'm trying to make sure students understand the world they will inhabit when they get out of college. I'm also making sure that with their learning, they're also publishing something so as to form a digital identity. This pushes students to find a niche in a given interest that they can latch onto before they pick a major and start looking for internships. If they've been following this interest on their own since high school, they'll be so much more prepared to enter the workforce than their peers. Finally with an acute knowledge of the 21st century economy, I trust my students will be prepared to start their own brand (or even business) to help guide them through their young career.

I'm so proud of what my students have produced thanks to this course. They've taken this simple concept and run with it! If I could, I would never go back to teaching content the way I do during the normal year. I've had an epiphany and I hope others will see this the way I do... especially when I propose this as a semester course for next year!

My Golden Age in Teaching

An open letter to young teachers about teaching in a world of social media

Frequently, I have this scary realization that my best teaching days are waning. I'm 29, entering my eighth year of teaching high school students. What I truly enjoy teaching, with every opportunity I can find, is passion-based learning (and digital citizenship) through social media. For many years, I've reached students in their digital space and helped them use it positively, for learning; but with every incoming class, I fear that I'm losing touch with my students and they're losing touch with me in that same space.

As a "young" teacher, students feel comfortable talking to me about things their parents and other teachers just don't understand. And I can astutely explain to "older" teachers (and administrators) how students use their devices and social media pages and what impact that had on their lives. That's because I grew up understanding the digital divide between these "generations."*

I feel particularly lucky that growing up, I didn't have a cell phone until 17 or a smart phone until 24. I experienced high school without social media and I experienced college with only Facebook. When new products/apps arrived, I experimented with them and thought critically about them. This unique timeline has allowed me to understand the strengths and weaknesses of new social media applications with a perspective that younger digital natives don't yet posses.** Because of this pursuit, I can transition between the technophobes and the technophiles--the young and the old, if you will. Let's call educators my age "digital frontiersman"

I think my growth learning about and using social media provides important perspective to an incredibly controversial issue in education. While administrators debate being proactive or reactive with respect to phones and social media, I built a course designed around it. As parents create long lists of things their students can't do on their phones/social media, I've used it to empower passion based learning.

These past few summers teaching my new media course, I've had a particularly enlightening experience helping my students learn online. Nevertheless, I can feel my words having less of an impact on these children. They still agree with what I say about social media and cell phone use, but they don't act the same way they used to. That's because two things are happening at the same time: I'm getting older and losing touch with each class's nuanced understanding of social media, and my students are getting younger and losing touch with life without phones and without social media. While aging is inevitable, I'm not ready to give up the lessons that a digital frontiersman can teach a digital native.

Losing the frontiersman's perspective will corrode the bridge between the digital natives and the older generation. It'll hurt dialogue between individuals and generations and it will create an intergenerational disconnect. As a result, our digital natives will struggle to adapt to the world that existed before social media.

Digital frontiersmen watched social media change the our lives. We were forced to make the connection between the social and the professional. That's why we're better equipped to understand and teach social media (and phone use in general). When digital natives run the classrooms, they'll have to contend with the same issues, but they won't have the same perspective. Without that perspective, I fear students will live in a constantly distracted world and won't adapt to the professional workforce easily.

Let me conclude this post by saying that one does not have to be a "digital frontiersman" to teach social media to teenagers. As long as a teacher establishes himself as someone knowledgeable about the space and knowledgable about how teenagers use that space, he can always teach it.

I also acknowledge that this post contains many are generalizations. Plenty of teachers my age are not using their phones and social media for learning, just like how many older teachers have figured out how teens use social media and are using it themselves for learning/professional development.

I just fear that the impact of my example and my perspective wanes with every year and every incoming class. That's what inspired this post. But it won't stop me from staying up-to-date with what my students are doing online and providing my perspective on how they can learn and understand the world they will inherit after school.

*I do not mean to imply that older means a teacher or parent will not understand tech or social media.
**I don't usually use the term "digital native" because it implies that the the younger generation is good with technology--and most aren't. I use it here to talk about an age range, not a skill set