Don't Forget to Breathe!

On the mornings when my AP Econ and Government class meets, we (almost always) take time to breathe.  We pledge allegiance and then we breathe for three minutes.  I tell my students to stop what they're doing, close their computers, put their cellphones away, stop eating and just stop and do nothing more than breathe and think.  They can think about whatever they want.  They can focus on their breathing like yoga breathing, they can plan their day, they can go blank and space out, they can close their eyes and relax.  The idea is to get them to understand that they can stop in the middle of their busy days and they can disconnect in the middle of their busy senior years.  They don't have to always go, go, go.  When we stop breathing, they can get back to their hectic schedules and lives, but for three minutes it's OK to stop.
Our breathing is part of a greater scheme to help my high-flying students manage the pressure of their senior year and keep their lives in balance.  On another level, I have my students list their classes from most important to least important with no ties.  They need to make a choice of one over another before they have to make that choice during the high pressure times of mid terms, finals, or AP tests.  The idea is to stop (yes, it's that word again!) and examine what they do and how they do it.  We look at their lists from time to time and we rearrange their priorities depending on how their doing in their respective classes.  The bottom line that I constantly emphasize to my students is that we can't be all things to all people and we can't give 100% to all of our classes.  We need to choose what is most important and then give that level of commitment and effort to what is most important.  We also need to be good with the classes that are less than most important.  Some students can get A's in all their classes, but that doesn't mean that they give 100% to all their classes.  The classes that are most important get the most effort and those that are less important get less effort.
As a teacher, I have to be good with that.  My classes are not the most important classes in all my students's lives and schedules.  The question I ask my students who are not giving their all in my classes is, "are you doing well in the classes that you're giving more effort to?"  If the answer is, yes, then they've done a good job prioritizing and are getting the results they should.  If the answer is, no, then we have a conversation about what is important to the student's overall academic goals and we rearrange his/her prioritizes as needed.
I also have to be good to make sure to take the time out of MY hectic class schedule to make sure this gets done, because if we take some time early, we will save lots of time and angst later when the time gets shorter and the pressure gets higher.
We also work on prioritizing what are their favorite and least favorite classes and getting them to remember to take advantage of what's fun and enjoyable to them.  We also list their extracurricular and family and work activities to see where school fits in with the rest of their lives.  Once again, the idea is to get my students to look at their lives and understand where the different important activities fit among each other and that they get the results they want and know why they get those results.
Finally, this is another attempt to build a strong personal relationship with each student and help him/her learn how to get where he/she wants to go and to build strong life skills as he/she learns the academic concepts in my class.
Don't forget to breathe!  Think about whatever you want, but disconnect and breathe, because you ALWAYS have time!

The Path of Least Resistance Rarely Leads to the Remarkable

Once upon a time, a friend of mine gave me a quote, "the path of least resistance rarely leads to the remarkable."  I've unsuccessfully tried to find the genesis of those words, but as it had been cut out of a magazine, I suspect that it may have been copy from an advertisement.  Regardless of their origin, these words have always given me an extra boost when I get rewarded for an accomplishment with more or harder work.  These words have also given me strength when I confronted the frustration and struggle that comes with every significant achievement.
Each time I've cleared another hurdle, it quickly becomes time to do more or harder work.  I see it in academics and athletics all the time.  Every time a kid moves up a grade, they are asked to read and write better and solve harder math problems and contemplate more sophisticated scientific systems and critically analyze  more complex human conditions.  All of this increased rigor and expectations will show once again that the student has grown and advanced another level in his/her abilities.  When a team wins a playoff game, they are asked to play better teams to win the next round and progress to the championship.  That's how teams and athletes can say they've gotten better or become the best or become champions.  However, at the same time, I've also heard some in both worlds bemoan their being "rewarded" by being asked to do more and harder schoolwork or being moved up into competition with tougher opponents.  Isn't this part of the constant learning and improvement process?  Shouldn't we embrace the greater and tougher challenge?
Long before I came across my inspirational words, my dad used to take my brother and I (and eventually my sister) skiing at Squaw Valley in Lake Tahoe.  About 10-20 years before we skied there, Squaw Valley had hosted the Winter Olympics for the greatest skiers in the world.  We loved to see the torch and Olympic rings every morning we arrived there!  My dad wasn't one to shrink from the challenge.  Every time my brother and I would master a slope or a run, we'd move up to the next hardest run.  We'd fall down and struggle and get frustrated and throw our ski poles, but my dad would wait and coax us down the hill and then we'd go again, each time getting better.  There were times when I'd be hating my dad for "making" us ski the hard runs, but eventually by the time we were 13-14 years old, we were skiing the advanced and expert runs and we really loved the speed, challenge and accomplishment of it all.
My son and daughter played under 8 soccer this fall as I was my school's head varsity football coach.  The contrasts between our levels could not have been starker.  As my football team was playing our games explicitly to win, neither my son's nor daughter's teams won a game between them.  My football boys started the season 0-3 and really hadn't had a chance in any of those games. We then played the eventual section champion and finally stepped up to the challenge and played a competitive game, which ended up as another loss, but turned into a win the following week and we finished the season 3-3 and won our last game.  Whew!
In the balance, we were 3-7, but we kept playing and learned how to play better and began to learn how to win games by maintaining a high effort and level of focus.  We learned to push through the frustration and struggles and get better in spite of the setbacks we experienced.  We would not have improved so much had our games not been played to win.  We needed the extra pressure and the expectations and ironically the losses to spur us to continue to compete to get better to the point where we could compete and win.  We needed to continue to push our way down the path of greater resistance in order to learn what we needed to learn.
This past week, I met with the seniors from our team and had them fill out a survey on how they viewed the season, their coaches, and what they had learned.  After a few months of reflection, they had criticism and good suggestions on how we need to get better as a program, but for the most part, they also realized that they had learned through their struggles and frustrations and had grown and improved as people and teammates.  Through their efforts, they were able to look back and give suggestions to their younger teammates that they never would have given at this time last year.
My son and daughter by contrast were just playing to learn their new sport and how to be on a team.  They kept score, but each kid was guaranteed to play and only sit out for a specific amount of time.  However, they continually got better as they practiced the skills required to play their sport well.  It was only recently that either of them really realized that neither of their teams had won a game.  It wasn't an "oh well" realization, it was more of an astonished realization.  They couldn't believe they'd played that many games and not won one!  At the same time, neither was ashamed nor angry at the losses, but realized that they needed to play better in order to win.  Throughout the season though, they hadn't quit or complained and had continually gotten better.  Through their improvement, they had had lots of fun, but just hadn't won any games.
In fact, just recently, my son asked as we drove to his "spring training" for Little League if they'd win a game and I assured him that he would.  He asked if baseball was different from soccer in terms of winning games.  I told him it wasn't really different, but that they'd win games.  He asked how I knew and I told him I just knew, I'd been here before, and if he kept playing and getting better, he and his teammates would win games and that he'd have fun regardless.
We're back on the path and we're pushing forward and as long as we keep pushing, we'll find ourselves somewhere remarkable, but it won't be easy...

Critical Thinking from the Classroom to the Job Site

Of my most valued skills that I learned in my undergraduate studies at Occidental College, the most important was to think critically.  I learned to do this in the classroom, in conversations with professors, in my own studies, on the football field, and dealing with my schoolmates.
What is critical thinking?  I think of it, in it's most basic sense, as problem solving, the analysis of the problem, the searching for a solution, and the decision on the course of action, and the implementation of the solution.
I always ask my students "how" and "why" questions in order to get them to think critically as to how and why things happened in the past, how and why they're happening now, and how and why they may happen in the future.  I don't want them to tell me what, when, or where.
They always ask me if my AP US History class is a "names and dates class."  I invariably give them a resounding "NO!"  I use an especially deep voice for emphasis.  In history, we have to understand, analyze and explain, not just regurgitate "facts."  I always get snickers when I tell them we have a four letter word that begins with "F" and that word is, "fact."
We need to dig deeper and gain as good of an understanding as we can in order to gain anything from a study of history or any of the social sciences.
As a teacher, I'd like my students to be great critical thinkers.  I would like them to know the answers to questions like, "How did the cotton gin transform the cotton industry and affect the growth of slavery?" or "Was the Civil War inevitable?  If so, why?  If not, why not?"  In our projects, we are forever having to solve problems, create solutions, and communicate the results of the process.  In fact, we can use rubrics to judge the critical thinking involved in a project like this one from the Buck Institute for Education, Critical Thinking.  Another way of thinking about critical thinking is moving higher on Bloom's Taxonomy and getting toward analyzing, evaluating, and creating.
So, back to critical thinking and how it moves from the classroom to the job site.  I ran into a great little series of videos from Soomo Publishing the other day.  Soomo are the people who put out the great US history videos, "Too Late to Apologize" and "Bad Romance."  If you're a US history teacher, you should definitely use those videos in your class!  Soomo is a publishing house that builds online textbooks and other educational resources.  The videos I liked are as follows, "Critical Thinking on the Job," "Critical Thinking on the Job: Problems,"  and "Critical Thinking on the Job: Decisions."  These videos follow three men on their jobs, one is a mechanic, one is a restauranteur, and one is a sound technician.  I love this series for two main reasons, they follow people who are constantly running into and solving problems, and none of these jobs require higher degrees.  They require training and experience, but no PhD.
The workers seem to enjoy their jobs, but are constantly thinking on their feet and solving problems.  They each have their own processes to reach their solutions, but they each know what they are, and they each use them to discover the root of each issue and then figure out a way to come up with an answer to their question.
Lately in my Econ/Gov classes, I have been asking my students to build personal budgets and then balance them.  They were also asked to develop a tax plan for a fictitious country.  In each case the students were posed a series of questions and problems they were asked to answer and solve and they all grappled differently with developing their answers and solutions and many more times than once, I told them my standard mantra, "If you don't learn anything more in this class than how to answer this question, you will be fine in the future."
No my classes are not "names and dates classes!"  They're critical thinking classes.

Criticism and Judgement How and Why

Last week I got a thoughtful article from The New York Times via Twitter, Giving Feedback That Works.  It was aimed at business people who evaluate and give feedback to their underlings.  The writer, Tony Schwartz, did a great job of highlighting the concerns about the vulnerability of the recipient as well as the idea of whether the employee goes into fight or flight mode, and finally how the focus of the feedback views the criticism. He also explained how an evaluator can overcome these obstacles.  As a teacher and a coach, I tell my students and players that my job is to judge them and help them get better, which is one place where this excellent article fell short.
Schwartz wrote about how criticism can make people feel vulnerable as they're being told of the their shortcomings and how this may make them either push back against the critique or move away from it, fight or flight.  He also wrote of the perhaps diametrically opposed viewpoint of the employee toward the judgement being handed down upon them.  All of these hurdles can be taken down by thoughtful evaluators.
However, one main issue that wasn't addressed was the motivation behind the judgement and criticism and that is to help the recipient get better.  If both the judge and judged agree and trust in the idea that the goal is improved performance, many of Schwartz' issues can be easily overcome.  However, the evaluator needs to make sure that the employee or student or player never forgets that improvement is always the goal and that individual betterment will help the business, class, or team as well as the individual.
In the end, is the goal improvement?  If so, we need to make sure that the employee, student, or player knows that first and foremost upfront.  This takes consistent and regular effort toward building a positive relationship between the boss and employee, teacher and student, player and coach.  We also need to make sure that the recipient is clear that both parties know that criticism is hard to receive, but that both parties are invested in helping the person get better and moving beyond the criticism.  Finally, we need to make sure that both parties see the issue from as close to the same perspective as possible.  If that's the case, then the critique is much more likely to be received in the best possible attitude for improvement and that's why we're making the judgement and giving the feedback in the first place, right?  We can work our way through the minefield of obstacles in the effort to give feedback and help the employee, student, or player get better, which in the end is everybody's goal.

We Need Problem Solvers! (Students, Fellow Teachers, and Myself Included)

Last week I toured the Midwest and ended up in Phoenix as I gave a series of seminars to teachers on how to use technology better in social studies classrooms.  One of the main themes I wanted the teachers to follow was the need to help our students and ourselves learn to solve problems.
Early in the session, I showed the teachers the following video on Learned Helplessness (after the opening ad).  Once upon a time, I had learned the concept of learned helplessness, but this advertisement gave me a completely new view on the concept and galvanized my desire to help our students and ourselves avoid such absurd and in reality not so absurd situations.
Over the course of the week, I gave a series of uneven presentations and got a series of uneven evaluations from the teachers.  How could I avoid this inconsistency?  How could I solve this problem?  No sooner had I posed the question of how to develop problem solvers, than I faced it myself.
Just as I had been trained in schools, through my experience in private enterprise and years on the football field, I realized I needed to analyze the problem and break it into its component parts.  I realized  that I needed to put myself into the shoes of the teachers who attended my sessions and view myself from their perspectives.  What were they looking to learn and was I delivering that?  How were my points being delivered and received?  Were my points clear and concise and delivered sharply?  Was I overdoing one aspect and underdoing another more desired aspect?
My analysis forced me to reflect on my structure and delivery, as well as the underlying tenets and beliefs inherent in my seminar
I walked myself through the different aspects of my presentations and realized that I needed to clarify the structure and delivery of my content.  I needed to strengthen my transitions, while also explicitly introducing and closing the points I wanted to make.  I also needed to add more interaction between the teachers and the concepts I wanted them to examine.  I needed to move through my points more sharply and more quickly and explicitly to keep the teachers on point as well helping them learn more concepts.
My presentations will be better and the teachers will learn and think more while taking more away with them as my structure, transitions, and points will be clearer.
As I had posed a question to the teachers, I posed it to myself.  The teachers, students, and I will all benefit from the result.  In the end, I believe it is this cycle of problem solving and constant improvement through reflection and analysis that is the bedrock of good teaching and I felt good to be a part of that process.  We will all learn how to get ourselves off the escalator!

Minarets, Mariposa, Yosemite, Wawona, North Fork Field Trip and More

Let's get out of the classroom!  Let's go see local US history!  Let's go see the local native history and the local settler history and the Gold Rush history in one day!

That's what we said last year and it was great and this year was better.

First, we had a driving question-- How does this trip and the history I learn affect me and my understanding of history locally and nationally?

Second, I had a better understanding of how the trip would go.

Third, we had a documenter who will take our experiences and put them to video.

Finally, we set out to build a Teaching with Historical Places lesson plan.  The National Park Service has a great set of teaching resources centered around the National Register of Historical Places.  When I first came across these lessons, I looked for Yosemite and found there were none for one of the oldest National Parks in the United States.  We are going to use our experiences and other web resources to build a lesson for our field trip so other teachers and students can benefit and learn like we did even if they learn nowhere 

Our route can be found here:  Minarets, Mariposa, Yosemite, Wawona, North Fork Itinerary.  

We left school at about 8:45 and got to the Mariposa Court House at about 9:45 and we toured the oldest continuously used courthouse west of the Rockies.  From there we headed over to the Mariposa Museum and History Center for a one hour tour of the exhibits illustrating Gold Rush and settler history and John C Fremont inside the museum.  After that, we drove up the Merced River to the Yosemite Museum and got there right about Noon.  We spent about an hour and a half checking out the great exhibits illustrating Yosemite's Native history as well as the geological and natural history of the Valley in the Visitor's Center.  Last year we took a stroll through the Valley with a great self-guided tour, but it was raining and time was running short, so we headed up the hill to Wawona and the Pioneer History Center.  We toured the houses of the 1800's and early 1900's to gain a better understanding of what the settlers went through back in the day.  From there we headed down to North Fork and the Sierra Mono Museum.  We got there just after 4:00, which meant the museum was closed, but we took the great self-guided path behind the museum to see how the Monos viewed and used the local plant life.  After about a half hour, we got back in the cars and drove back to Minarets where we arrived at 5:00 on the dot!

Beyond getting out of the classroom and getting home on time, why was this a beneficial day?  

On the most basic level, we were able to gain a better understand the geography of the foothills of the Sierra Nevada and Yosemite.  In eight hours of driving and touring we went from about 1500 feet in elevation at Minarets to about 2200 feet in Mariposa to 4000 feet in Yosemite Valley over 8000 as we climbed out of the Valley back to about 4000 in Wawona to about 2500 in North Fork.  

We also gained an understand of the distance of our drive.  We travelled about 170 miles in about four hours of driving.  One leg of our drive from Yosemite Valley to Wawona took us about 45 minutes, but would have taken us eight hours if we'd taken a horse-drawn wagon like the one we saw on display in Wawona.

We also saw a glimpse of the reality of our ancestors both Native and settler.  We saw the tools, the dwellings, and the clothing that our predecessors used.  We learned that they were busy just doing the day to day chores that kept them living.  We have a better understanding of who they were and what they did.  

On all of these levels, we will dive much more deeply as we build our lesson plan and as we move forward in US History.  We will reach back to our experiences and compare them to how people lived in different place and at different times.  Now we have much more than just our own experiences to compare our history to.

I hope this experience will give my students a better idea of how their ancestors lived and how that affected how history unfolded as to who was elected president and what were the issues of the day.  We also hope to be able to help others from across the world do the same with our lesson plan.  Keep your eyes open for it!

Twitter, Rural Schools, and PLN's

How do I get help when I'm the only teacher in my school who teaches my classes or subject?  How can I help others and share ideas when no one else in my school teaches what I teach?  The answer is Twitter!
I have two other social studies teachers in my school and as much as I love working with them and sharing resources, they don't teach the classes I teach.  When I'm looking for new ideas, I have to look outside my school and this is why Twitter is so helpful.  Also, when I find something really helpful, I can return the favor through Twitter.
My wife is in the same boat, but she's new to Twitter.  She has had great Professional Learning Networks at her old schools, but now she's on her own.
My advice to her basically mirrors a previous blog post I made, How and Why I've Grown to Love Twitter.  She needs to start in a direction she understands and can see what she's getting from Twitter.  For instance, I liked Twitter as a newsfeed from major news outlets that provided me with a steady stream of topical current events subjects.  Since then, my understanding and use of Twitter has grown exponentially.
Here's a helpful link I found last week on Twitter, of all places, Seven Ways to Get More Out of Twitter.  I like most of the suggestions, but I always hesitate when I see the subject of followers or following others.  I feel that you can have too many accounts to follow and can get inundated with tweets that you'll never have time to read, but at the same time, as you get to know Twitter better, there are all sorts of ways to find what you want in your tweets or out in the Twittersphere.
I have found that the bottom line with Twitter involves checking it regularly, but not obsessively.  I spend 10-15 minutes every morning checking my Tweet Box and I also look into some of my best sources and see what they have tweeted since I last checked, but then I get on to whatever I'm working on.  Later in the day, I may go back and search more particularly for a specific answer to a question I have.
I also have found that you get what you give.  When you join in a conversation and/or share a resource, you will find more and better Tweeps (people on Twitter) to follow who will have all sorts of different ideas, perspectives, and resources of their own.
In the last year, I have started slowly on Twitter and have since embraced it, but only lately have I begun to see how as a rural teacher, Twitter has become a lifeline toward the outside world.  I can interact with other likeminded teachers, who are geographically isolated, but connected through Twitter.
Are you a rural teacher, who uses or would like to use Twitter?  If so, let me know how it's going.
Here are a few Twitter resources and guides:

• Starting with myself, here is my Twitter handle, @MrKellyIII.
• Then, what is Twitter and how does it work? How to Twitter (if it's too small, click on it)
• How and Why I've Grown to Love Twitter
• 22 Ways to Use Twitter for Learning Based on Bloom's Taxonomy
• The A-Z Dictionary of Educational Twitter Hashtags
• Seven Ways to Get More Out of Twitter