Topic: How are “Best Practices” defined, and how do we use them to improve the effect of teachers?

This week’s #edchat was a great example of why “two-part” questions are not always a good idea. The discussion was excellent, and high-level (as always) but there was much more said about the first part of the question than about the second. I have a couple theories as to why that is.

The first idea that jumps to mind is that people simply have a tendency to get caught up in whatever question gets asked first. We tend to assume that this is the most important part. After all, why else would it be placed at the beginning? Couple that with the fact that most people are not so good at managing their time during meetings and you have sort of stacked the deck against getting to the second part of the question from the get-go.

But the more I thought about it – and the more tweets I read – I realized that “Best Practices” is something of a hot-button phrase for a lot of teachers. Why? Because we’re always trying to tell teachers how to do their job.  Education is one of the most regulated industries in the world, and implicit in all these regulations is the message that “You’re doing it wrong.”

Gone are the days when we actually trusted our teachers. Actually, gone are the days when we actually trusted our experts. It seems like everyone with the internet thinks they know better than someone who has been studying (and practicing) their craft for their entire life.

I am sympathetic to the fact that teachers are probably fed up with hearing about the “best practices” of other teachers. They know that just because it worked for one person one time that it’s not guaranteed to work for them. Still, we also know that it’s massively beneficial to share ideas. That’s why we love the internet so much, right?

Well, that and funny cats.

I would have liked to see a little more discussion on the use of best practices to improve education, but I think we also know how to accomplish this. At least, anyone who participates in #edchat already knows it. Communication is key. Putting yourself out there to learn from (and to teach) others about teaching is how great ideas get spread and education gets better.

And that’s really all “best practices” are: great (teaching) ideas.

Main themes From the discussion:

• Just the word “best” is relative. Actually, almost everything is relative. But “best” is like… really relative… dude. Are we talking about best for that teacher? For that department? For that school? For the county? State? Nation? And what about timing? Are we to consider just ideas from this year or from previous years as well? When you look at “best” in this way, it’s easy to see how the discussion kind of got hung up on it.
• Defining “best practices” is even more difficult. Not only do we have the complication of the term “best” in the mix, but it’s also hard to pin down what should be considered a “best practice.” There were a lot of good quotes and one-liners in the discussion (as always, I encourage you to check out the archive of the full conversation), but it seemed like the general consensus was that “best practices” were things that worked especially well to teach a particular student or group of students something important. After that, things get fuzzy. But I think that general definition is more than enough. It works, and it doesn’t offend.
• Best practices are not always transferrable. This is a big one, and something that needs to be properly addressed when considering what kind of professional development role these “best practices” are going to play. Even if something worked wonderfully before, that is no guarantee that it will work as well (or at all) again. Teaching is a very dynamic profession. By that, I mean that it is constantly in flux. Students bring with them their own set of experiences, and that shapes what kind of lessons they will be open to. Clearly, we cannot look at “best practices” as something that can be pinpointed with ease and then simply spread it around.
• People want to know about best practices. Even though it seemed like a lot of teachers bristled at the term, it was also equally apparent that most participants in this week’s #edchat wanted to hear about them. They want the great ideas from the great teachers because they know that they are essential building blocks towards becoming great teachers in their own right. And I couldn’t agree more. Learning about what has worked for others is extremely important in advancing any field. As they say: “No sense in reinventing the wheel.”
• The best way to spread around best practices is… the internet. Well, maybe not exactly the internet. Or, to put it another way, maybe not just the internet. The real key is communication (as in solving the vast majority of problems). And the internet happens to be an amazing way to communicate freely and efficiently. Of course there’s social media and #edchat, but there’s also blogs, articles, and forums. The amount of information exchanged every day online is staggering. And it’s a great way for teachers to connect and learn from one another.
• The moral? Communicate more. Never stop learning. Don’t be that teacher who just reuses lesson plans year after year. Grow. Adapt. And always be willing to tell a fellow teacher about one of your great ideas (or listen when they tell you about theirs). This is how the field of education will change for the better. The question is: how do you get everyone involved in education to embrace this sort of open dialogue? It’s an important issue – and it also happened to be the #edchat subject for Tuesday evening. Hopefully they figured it out.

My favorite tweets from the discussion:

cybraryman1 ”Best Practice” = what works in a particular situation or environment. Remember it may not work for all, and not at all sometimes.

DrSmartEd I agree with @cybraryman1 with the use of “best.” We are teaching classrooms full of individuals and one size does NOT fit all!

stumpteacher For me, best practice is doing what’s best for each individual learner in each individual situation.

drdouggreen @passionateaboot The term best implies there is nothing better. Bad term. It also makes admins look foolish as teachers know better.

alainphaneuf Best practices as opposed to better? There are indeed some practices to avoid, no?

peter_lydon Best practice cannot mean “best teaching.” It must mean “best learning.”

mr_isaacs I think ‘best practices’ is a term used for the sake of discussing what works – enlightening for professional development.

mikevigilant @ShellTerrell But see, I feel that Best Practices is a subtle way to standardize everything for everyone–let’s all do it “best” way.

tomwhitby @ShiftParadigm We are victims of a measure and model mentality. The need to package & replicate education.

cybraryman1 RT @JasonFlom: Best Practices are like writing rules. Good to know and employ. And valuable to break — at the right time for the right reasons.

mikevigilant Is best practices just a more formal way of saying “good ideas?” If you think of BP as a wiki, anyone can contribute their ideas, but too many see Best Practices as a locked-down, formal website.

cybraryman1 RT @TestSoup: The definition of Best Practices is “great ideas.” These are to be shared, with understanding that they might not always work.

mrlove314 @mikevigilant There should be a ‘clearinghouse’ for those types of things, where teachers could put their best practices out for everyone.

ShellTerrell Webinars are a great way to learn about effective practices! Here are a few archives http://t.co/zXObbetI

ShellTerrell More effective practices from #rscon3 presentations! http://t.co/3ToBcgVE

To follow the complete discussion, look for the full archive here.  They’re usually posted up by the end of the week.

Looking to discuss #edtech in depth? Check out the LinkedIn group: Edutech Trends, Visions, Passions.

###

New to #EdChat?

If you have never participated in an #Edchat discussion, these take place twice a day every Tuesday on Twitter.  Over 400 educators participate in this discussion by just adding #edchat to their tweets. For tips on participating in the discussion, please check out these posts:

• Edchat: Join the Conversation
• Using TweetDeck for Hashtag Discussions

More Edchat

• If you would like to join others in transforming the discussion into action, please feel free to join the Edchat group on the Educator PLN ning.
• Jerry Swiatek does an incredible job of posting each archived transcript on the #edchat wiki created by Steve Johnson. This way you can look back at your favorites!
• Find previous summaries here on this blog – see #edchat category on right sidebar
• Follow other Edchatters and make sure you are on this Twitter list if you participate in #Edchat!
• Read summaries of the 7pm EST/1 am CET Edchat discussions.

Challenge:

If you’re new to hashtag discussions, then just show up on Twitter on any Tuesday and add just a few tweets on the topic with the hashtag #edchat.

What do you think? Leave a comment! We would love to hear from you.

guest written by Wim Coleman of Chiron Books.

In my last two posts, I hinted at how storytelling—especially improvisations and scripted scenes—can be used to teach almost any subject. Here I’m going to make some specific suggestions about a widely-taught work of literature.

Say you’re teaching Hamlet to your English class. Your students, of course, approach the play with dread. After all, “Shakespeare is so hard!” Well, I’ve edited and contributed to 11 educational editions of Shakespeare’s plays, and I don’t see any reason why this should be true. The problem is often a simple lack of pre-reading work. Students aren’t prepared to approach Hamlet’s daunting opening scene with its shivering guards spouting lots of exposition while the old king’s ghost silently comes and goes. They know nothing of the world they’re about to be plunged into.

This is where it helps to have your students write or act out prequels. First, give them enough information to understand the circumstances that precede the beginning of the play:

• Claudius has murdered his brother, Denmark’s old King Hamlet, by pouring poison into his ear while he was sleeping in his orchard.
• Claudius has hastily married Queen Gertrude, the late king’s wife.
• Claudius has been crowned the new king.
• Young Hamlet, the old king’s son, has returned from school in Wittenberg to attend both the funeral and the wedding.

This background could serve to write a whole new play. But let’s focus on just one scene: King Claudius proposing marriage to Queen Gertrude. Divide your students into groups of three or four. Each group will write a short script or prepare an outline for improvisation; two members of the group will act out their scene, playing Claudius and Gertrude. Assign each of the groups one of these variations:

1. Claudius and Gertrude have been having an affair since before King Hamlet’s death, but Gertrude knows nothing about the murder.
2. Claudius and Gertrude have been having an affair, and Gertrude is aware of the murder.
3. Claudius and Gertrude have never had an affair, and Gertrude knows nothing about the murder.

Each of these scenarios is possible; indeed, critics, directors, and actors have been trying to choose among them for centuries. And obviously, these variations open up widely different interpretations of the play itself—the motives behind its characters and what they do. As your groups get to work, wander among them and drop all kinds of hints and suggestions, taking care to pose them as questions:

• Did Gertrude and Claudius marry out of love or purely for political reasons?
• How much did Gertrude love King Hamlet, if at all?
• Does Gertrude love Claudius, or does she fear him?
• If Gertrude doesn’t know about the murder, is it because Claudius has cunningly deceived her, or because she is in a semi-willful state of denial?
• If Gertrude does know about the murder, was she Claudius’s accomplice, or did she find out about it after the fact?

And so on; the possibilities are just about endless. The idea is to provoke as rich a variety of possible scenes as you and your students can think up.

Some resulting scenes might be disappointing. Perhaps one group won’t get much further than to have Claudius ask, “Gertrude, will you marry me?” and have Gertrude reply, “I will, Claudius.” Don’t be too hard on groups that fall short like this. With some luck, you’ll get one or two scenes that are striking, even disturbing. I can imagine some fairly inventive students arriving at the following variation:

Claudius proposes to Gertrude on bended knee. But Gertrude has been suspicious of him since her husband’s mysterious death. She questions him cautiously, trying to find out if he was Hamlet’s murderer. Claudius won’t confess the deed, but turns menacing. He tells Gertrude that she must marry him and make him Denmark’s king—or she might face her husband’s fate. She marries him out of sheer terror and dares not question him further.

Of course, other scenes might paint very different pictures—for example, Gertrude utterly free of suspicion, a grieving widow innocently comforted by Claudius’s proposal of marriage.

After performing their prequels, students will be better prepared to read a play that is celebrated for its layers of ambiguity, its depth and mystery. They can review their scenes while reading the play. They may want to change their assumptions about what happened between Claudius and Gertrude during that fateful proposal, based on evidence that Shakespeare supplies (or doesn’t supply) in the text. A key moment is young Hamlet’s ruthless verbal assault on his mother in Act 3, scene 4, which is loaded with suspicions about what Gertrude knew and when she knew it.

A prequel is only one option for enriching your students’ experience with this play. There are also possible sequels (How does Fortinbras fare as Denmark’s new ruler?) and even “midquels” (Just what happens during Hamlet’s offstage adventure with the pirates in Act 4?).

I hope it’s obvious that my suggestions about Hamlet can be applied to just about any dramatic or fictional work. Right now, my daughter is reading William Golding’s Lord of the Flies in her English class. I’ve got my own ideas about how classroom storytelling could explore Golding’s theme of humanity’s innate savagery. Do students agree that marooned boys would inevitably lapse into brutality? They might select key moments from the novel and act them out so that they turn out differently, testing whether their own narratives are more or less plausible than Golding’s. Certainly, a sequel about the rehabilitation of the surviving boys would be interesting and informative.

In my last post, I mentioned using stories in History classes. I’ll write about that in my next post, after the holidays.

About the author: Wim Coleman is a playwright whose works have won national awards and have been presented in New York and Los Angeles, and he is an award-winning poet. He has also been a teacher, and has degrees in Theater, Literature, and Education. He usually writes in collaboration with his wife, Pat Perrin. Together, they have well over 100 publications. They publish independently for young people through ChironBooks. Wim and Pat lived in various parts of the United States before spending thirteen years in San Miguel de Allende, where they created and administered the San Miguel PEN Scholarship Program for at-risk students. They also adopted their daughter, Monse, there. All three of them now live in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  You can learn more about Wim and his work at his website.

Topic: What is the purpose of education now and going forward?

This week’s #edchat was truly a test of one’s ability to read quickly and tap out Twitter replies even quicker. I think that’s because the topic was so broad that everyone wanted to weigh in instead of sitting back and commenting only every once in a while. I know that I saw a lot of new and unfamiliar names this week, suggesting that either a lot of people signed on for the first time in months or that there are generally many participants that don’t talk as much as they did this time around.

Either way, it’s fine by me! Honestly, I think as many people should participate in #edchat as possible. It might make for a more confusing and disorganized discussion than we had even this week, but as Tom Whitby pointed out to me, the real value of #edchat comes after – on the blogs, in the water-cooler conversations, and as the continued sense of motivation felt by those teachers that participate.

Sometimes we forget that the value of something goes deeper than the thing itself. I know that I was guilty of that this week. I was getting frustrated that this week’s #edchat didn’t seem as beneficial as the other ones in which I’ve participated. But I realized that that didn’t really matter. For one thing, value is subjective (meaning some may have thought this was the best #edchat ever), and for another, I was forgetting that the value of #edchat is as a conversation starter (not as the conversation itself).

Of course, there is still one thing that bothered me about this week’s #edchat, and that’s how quickly it changed into a discussion of why standardized testing is bad and how poverty affects what teachers can reasonably be expected to accomplish. Both of these issues are important, to be sure – and I can certainly understand how they would be hot-button issues for teachers in this day and age. But do we really need to talk about them every week? I don’t know. Perhaps we do.

Anyway, on to the main themes and the list of my favorite tweets. As I am viewing this week’s #edchat as the beginning (or perhaps a continuation) of the conversation, I am mostly going to focus on some of the excellent questions raised and ignore most of the (sometimes equally excellent) 140 character responses. So I highly encourage you to take some time and read through the archive of this week’s chat, once it’s up.

Main themes From the discussion:

• The purpose of education is… education. Can education (or learning) be an end unto itself? Maybe; maybe not. One thing is certainly clear, though. The purpose of education should be the education itself. It shouldn’t be about anything else, like testing, job training, etc. That other stuff is just that: other stuff. It has its place, but it’s not the stuff of proper education. The emphasis of proper education should always be learning. Why? Because success at anything requires one to never stop learning about that thing (and perhaps many others, too!).
• This question has many answers. Of course, it must be pointed out that the purpose of education is not something that can easily be nailed down – especially not on Twitter in under 140 characters! (Makes me think of that famous phrase by Marshall McLuhan.) Every educator who participated this week had something to say in answer, and most of them were right on the money. And that’s okay. Education doesn’t have to have the same purpose to all people at all times and for all occasions. In fact, it definitely shouldn’t.
• One must consider who is asking the question. If I ask you what the purpose of education is, as someone who blogs about education, you might give me a very different response than if a principal who just gave you a lecture about standardized tests asked you. Or a parent who wants to know why you’re giving his kid so much homework. Or a taxpayer wondering why he pays so much money for public schools when he sends his kid to private school. And on and on and on. Truly, perspective is important when considering this question. That’s something of a disclaimer.
• Are “school” and “education” synonymous? Now we’re getting into the real meat of the discussion. I believe it was Berni Wall that asked the question, “Do we really need schools?” In other words: “Can education happen better outside of schools (as we currently know them)?” The general consensus seems to be that there are many, many improvements to be made, but that we shouldn’t throw out the entire institution simply because it isn’t perfect. Nothing is. I think this is sage reasoning. As tempting as it is to look at all the necessary reforms on the docket and decide instead to start over from scratch, I don’t think that’s the best way to help students. Which is, after all, the goal, right? To help students.
• Educational goals are evolving over time. This is another meaty issue, and one that is nicely illustrated by fact that this discussion happened over Twitter. Let’s say, hypothetically, that we had stumbled across the ultimate goal of education; that we had firmly nailed it down. Even if we had, in a few weeks it would be almost entirely gone and forgotten, remembered only on a few blogs (like this one) and in a few teacher’s jumbled memories. Twitter itself is transient, just like education. Education is here to help students live in (and change, hopefully for the better) the world around them. Because this world is a dynamic one, education must be as well. That puts a lot of pressure on educators. Fortunately, there are some truly great ones out there.

My favorite tweets from the discussion:

elanaleoni @pernilleripp wrote a great blog on the purpose of #education. In her words: “It is to learn.” http://t.co/FWrDslil

weisburghm Goal of education for whom? For the students? Community? Parents? Future employers? Nation? World?

davidwees Who should decide the goals of education? Is it industry? Private interests? Educators? Parents? Students?

tonnet Is the purpose of education to just graduate professionals?

CrudBasher Perhaps rhetorical: If everyone has different idea of purpose of education, can one system fit all answers?

tomwhitby The goal of education is different from what it was 10 years ago. Problem is, most educators come from that era. It can be daunting.

weisburghm Is education FOR the students or TO the students?

drdouggreen @jdavis43 A lot of what happens in schools is done for the comfort of the adults.

MrTwyman5 Maybe another question should be what is NOT the purpose of education and to what extent does policy prevent that?

MertonTech Is education for the society or for the individual?

tomwhitby 10 Ways School Has Changed… http://t.co/1jFc8nSN

rliberni @jrichardson30 Education is much more than a just a process. It has many guises — is it possible to define?

tomwhitby If we are creating life-long learners with great self esteem, is that a measurable commodity by graduation?

rliberni Do we really need schools?

cybraryman1 Learning takes place everywhere and at all times.

weisburghm As a parent, I wanted the education system to help my kids lead happy lives that help others.

tomwhitby Here is a goal http://t.co/vpZiauz7

To follow the complete discussion, look for the full archive here.  They’re usually posted up by the end of the week.

Looking to discuss #edtech in depth? Check out the LinkedIn group: Edutech Trends, Visions, Passions.

###

New to #EdChat?

If you have never participated in an #Edchat discussion, these take place twice a day every Tuesday on Twitter.  Over 400 educators participate in this discussion by just adding #edchat to their tweets. For tips on participating in the discussion, please check out these posts:

• Edchat: Join the Conversation
• Using TweetDeck for Hashtag Discussions

More Edchat

• If you would like to join others in transforming the discussion into action, please feel free to join the Edchat group on the Educator PLN ning.
• Jerry Swiatek does an incredible job of posting each archived transcript on the #edchat wiki created by Steve Johnson. This way you can look back at your favorites!
• Find previous summaries here on this blog – see #edchat category on right sidebar
• Follow other Edchatters and make sure you are on this Twitter list if you participate in #Edchat!
• Read summaries of the 7pm EST/1 am CET Edchat discussions.

Challenge:

If you’re new to hashtag discussions, then just show up on Twitter on any Tuesday and add just a few tweets on the topic with the hashtag #edchat.

What do you think? Leave a comment! We would love to hear from you.

guest written by Wim Coleman of Chiron Books.

To continue my thoughts on narrative in the classroom, I’ll begin (appropriately) with a story.

When I was a college sophomore theater student, I belonged to a small acting group called ETC—The Educational Theater Company. Our job was to put on scenes in classrooms all over the college campus (and sometimes in nearby public schools) at a moment’s notice. Most of the work requested from us was predictable—scenes from classic plays, readers theater performances of fiction and poetry, all that sort of thing. But occasionally, we’d get an assignment that was obviously meant to stump us.

For example, an English Comp instructor asked us to come into his classroom and perform a piece about footnotes, informing students fully about style, format, punctuation, etc. The instructor chortled when he made the request. I’m sure he came up with other plans for that class period, doubtful that we would even show up.

But we surprised him and ourselves, using no media except our own bodies. We created a madcap sketch that portrayed self-creating footnotes, full of slapstick conflict. To be honest, we stole liberally from the late comic genius Victor Borges’s mimed and vocalized “phonetic punctuation.” The result was hilarious—and informative. Our sketch was no substitute for The Chicago Manual of Style or The MLA Handbook, but students left the classroom with an enriched understanding of footnotes—and refreshed by hearty laughter.

Our “Footnotes Sketch” became a campus hit. Instructors in all departments demanded that we perform it several times a week—somewhat to my chagrin, as my brilliant portrayal of Tom Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie went largely unrequested. ETC wasn’t easily stumped after all.

This anecdote, though true, may seem rather fanciful and digressive. It is. It’s also dead serious and to the point. Nietzsche wrote of “the seriousness one had as a child, at play.” That’s exactly the spirit I’m here to pursue. My point is that storytelling can enrich any topic in any discipline or class subject—at least I like to think so.

Can such methods be used to teach, say, math? I’ll pass over this question quickly. Math was and is my worst subject, I’m ashamed to say, and I’ve never tried to create any storied teaching materials for it. Nevertheless, I’ll toss out an idea and see if it has any legs.

Say you’re teaching basic coordinate graphing. Mightn’t the x-axis and the y-axis be portrayed as living characters, perhaps with strong disagreements about the data they’re trying to present—not just the raw information, but its meaning? Mightn’t their conflicts be dramatized through dialogue and physical action? And what about the points of data that go into the graph? Are they easily herded and arranged there, or do they put up a bit of a fight? And how can they first be drawn out of hiding?

I’ve never created any storytelling materials about biology either, but I’d like to give it a try. The natural world is rich in stories. The recent passing of the great biologist Lynn Margulis brings one readily to mind. Margulis’s major breakthrough concerned the origin of eukaryotic cells—highly complex cells with nuclei, as opposed to simpler prokaryotic cells such as bacteria. The appearance of eukaryotic cells was a major event in evolutionary history, allowing multicellular organisms like ourselves to eventually appear. But how did eukaryotic cells come to be? Such an evolutionary leap seems to defy imagination.

Margulis’s theory was beautifully simple—and if I may say so, poignantly moving. Once upon a time primeval, two simple prokaryotic cells met. One became engulfed by the other. But instead of mutual destruction, cooperation ensued, and the two cells learned to serve one another. Over millions of years, this process led to eukaryotic cells. Margulis’s idea (which itself seemed all-too-fanciful at the time) bore empirical fruit. Mitochondria and organelles are now recognized to have originated by such a process.

What a drama, eh? And why not stage it in a biology class, either as a scripted sketch or an improvisation? The two cells are characters. They collide and one becomes entangled in the other. They both panic. Can they survive this entanglement? They both fear strangulation. No strangulation ensues, and panic turns to paranoia. The outer cell fears that the engulfed cell will act as a deadly parasite, while engulfed cell fears being digested whole. They make peace and soon realize that they have something to offer one another. The surrounding cell can offer protection, while the engulfed cell can serve as a power source—a primitive mitochondrion. They continue through their lives, much stronger and fitter than before, chatting excitedly about what their union may mean to their progeny down through the ages.

Such a sketch can do more than merely illustrate this model, known as endosymbiotic theory. Margulis controversially claimed that her discovery challenged the Neo-Darwinian assumption that all evolutionary advances come from an endless struggle for survival. As Margulis and her son Dorion Sagan put it, “Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking.” The classroom sketch may stir a debate as to whether Margulis was right, or whether the endosymbiotic origin of eukaryotic cells actually shows good old-fashioned Survival of the Fittest in action.

To sum up a bit…

Classroom stories may be assigned either individually or in groups. The stories themselves may take the forms of written narratives or dialogues, dramatic improvisations, or rehearsed scripts that can be read at students’ desks or performed in front of the classroom. These days, I’m especially excited about videos. Kids have video cameras even in their cell phones, and many computers these days come with editing software.

In my next blog, I’ll suggest classroom story ideas in subjects that I’m closer to: Literature and History.

About the author: Wim Coleman is a playwright whose works have won national awards and have been presented in New York and Los Angeles, and he is an award-winning poet. He has also been a teacher, and has degrees in Theater, Literature, and Education. He usually writes in collaboration with his wife, Pat Perrin. Together, they have well over 100 publications. They publish independently for young people through ChironBooks. Wim and Pat lived in various parts of the United States before spending thirteen years in San Miguel de Allende, where they created and administered the San Miguel PEN Scholarship Program for at-risk students. They also adopted their daughter, Monse, there. All three of them now live in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  You canlearn more about Wim and his work at his website.

Topic: What changes could be made to the present management structure of education to make it more effective for educators?

This was another #edchat that I was prepared to basically sit by the sidelines for – not because I had lost interest but because I feared that I would have nothing to contribute (not being an educator). Luckily, there’s always so much going on with #edchat that it’s almost impossible to sit by the sidelines unless you are firmly committed to keeping your mouth shut even when you might have something useful to say or a good question to ask.

I think a certain amount of conflict between employees and management is unavoidable.  Management is tasked with making do with limited resources (and in the education world, those resources seem to keep getting more and more limited all the time) while teachers are tasked with educating our children the best way they can. The same dichotomy exists in any business. The employees are expected to perform while the management is expected to keep costs as low as possible. It’s a balancing act.

Unfortunately, this balancing act becomes slightly more important when we’re talking about a child’s education instead of a firm’s profit margins. And when you consider that public education budgets will likely take a hit as federal spending inevitably slows down in the US, striking the right balance between teacher needs and managerial decisions will only get more difficult.

Enter Tuesday’s #edchat discussion. In essence, it was asking how we can work to improve the relationship between teachers and administrators so that a school’s scare resources can be allocated most efficiently and so students won’t suffer from the inevitable budget cuts. At least, that’s my take on things.

Main themes from the discussion:

• This is a highly subjective discussion. No doubt, this one was going to depend mightily on what school and what district we’re talking about. Every school is different. Some teachers seemed like the came to this #edchat with a list of complaints and demands ready and waiting. Others seemed to be relatively pleased with the balance that had been struck between them and their administrators. Considering how many administrators participate in #edchat, I was surprised at how civil the discussion went.
• Administrators need to do a better job including teachers in their decisions. I think this one is a common complaint. How often have you complained that your boss “just doesn’t understand” or that he “doesn’t remember what it’s like” to do your job? This is a universal concern, even though (in most cases) administrators and management have to move up the ranks (meaning they have done your job). Still, it is a valid point. Sometimes administrators make decisions that are unrealistic. Optimally, these get changed down the line once they see that they won’t work, but all that trial and error could often be avoided if they listened to teachers from the get-go.
• Administrators need to be reminded what it’s like to be a teacher. There were some administrators in the discussion that said that they filled in for absent teachers regularly. That’s awesome, but it’s all too rare, apparently. Many, many teachers echoed the same sentiment: that administrators needed to experience teaching for themselves as often as possible so they could be more sensitive to their needs. And if actually stepping to the front of the classroom isn’t an option, they should at least observe (not evaluate) from the back frequently.
• Teachers need to be made aware of what administrators are dealing with. The flip side to the issue of administrators forgetting what it’s like on the front lines is that many teachers simply have no idea what kind of pressures an administrator is under. These come from all angles, ranging from tight budgets to calls for higher scores on standardized tests to expanded support for sports and extracurriculars. Everyone wants theirs, and it’s the administration’s job to figure out how to deliver it all. That’s tough work, and teachers need to appreciate that.
• Communication and involvement is key. Bottom line. You can’t expect to have a good relationship between teachers and administration if both sides think the other is screwing them over or not appreciating their work. Teachers and administrators need to work together. It’s not rocket science; it’s not a new idea. But it also isn’t easy. Unfortunately, it has to be done. There are children’s futures at stake here. I even heard a few educators calling for more parental involvement in school management, which is a nice idea but would need some fleshing out.
• The problem might be the people instead of the management structure. Perhaps the reason that this issue is so subjective is because it’s not that the management structure is the problem. Maybe it’s the people that are the problem. This begs the question: what can be done to attract better people to school administration? Also, how can we improve those administrators that we already seem to be stuck with? Job security is pretty big in education. (Should it be?)
• The worst administrators (and teachers) are those who stopped learning. This, again, I think is a rather general rule of thumb. All of the most interesting and effective people I have ever known are people that never stopped learning. When you stop learning, you stop improving, and then you inevitably get left behind. So, logically, the best way to improve administrators (and teachers) is to encourage them to keep learning. This also meshes well with the idea that communication is key, because when you communicate you learn.
• We might be focusing on the wrong thing entirely here. What if the problem is not with management at all but with the overall educational system that we have in place? If that’s the case, then focusing our energies on reforming management might all be a waste of time. This is definitely something worth pondering.

My favorite tweets from the discussion:

saraallen91 @cybraryman1 I think that entirely depends on the administration at each school. Our admin really listens & supports us as teachers.

cybraryman1 The key point is including teachers (students and parents) in the process.

mrdglhs Administration should be required to be in classrooms observing (not evaluating) 1/2 day per week. Helps them see needs first hand.

apospirit Have all people relaying the same info –> not be in conflict with one another. I’ve heard some teachers/admins learning conflicting things in different training programs.

tomwhitby Getting buy-in from teachers for policy changes would be a nice touch to leadership.

DrThomasHo We have the means to take our story directly to the community & do NOT need admins to do it for us. They do it so badly anyway!

weisburghm Community, parents, administrators, and communities must work together to improve education. Nothing works in a vacuum.

MertonTech What roadblocks are teachers hitting that would spark a change in management structure?

mrlove314 @fliegs If teachers don’t want real feedback then they must not be doing something right.

davidwees What I would like to change about education structure is not the management structure, but the learning structure.

jdavis43 @davidwees @mikevigilant It amazes me how many teachers quit learning.

davidwees @TestSoup The administrators I’ve worked under with whom I’ve been most impressed have all been learners.

tomwhitby The revolving door for administrators often allow things to fall through the cracks without follow-up or consistency.

tomwhitby I have always thought it would be interesting to have all admins take substitute teacher positions for a few days each year.

mikevigilant Another good thought: RT @delta_dc:@geraldaungst Perhaps the consensus position is that trust is required from all parties.

rliberni RT @tomwhitby: @geraldaungst If Admins respect and support their teachers, teachers may offer more leadership than admins pay them for.

whittclass RT @tomwhitby: Education administrators need more staff consultation and leadership and less control and reactive policy directives.

To follow the complete discussion, look for the full archive here.  They’re usually posted up by the end of the week.

Looking to discuss #edtech in depth? Check out the LinkedIn group: Edutech Trends, Visions, Passions.

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New to #EdChat?

If you have never participated in an #Edchat discussion, these take place twice a day every Tuesday on Twitter.  Over 400 educators participate in this discussion by just adding #edchat to their tweets. For tips on participating in the discussion, please check out these posts:

• Edchat: Join the Conversation
• Using TweetDeck for Hashtag Discussions

More Edchat

• If you would like to join others in transforming the discussion into action, please feel free to join the Edchat group on the Educator PLN ning.
• Jerry Swiatek does an incredible job of posting each archived transcript on the #edchat wiki created by Steve Johnson. This way you can look back at your favorites!
• Find previous summaries here on this blog – see #edchat category on right sidebar
• Follow other Edchatters and make sure you are on this Twitter list if you participate in #Edchat!
• Read summaries of the 7pm EST/1 am CET Edchat discussions.

Challenge:

If you’re new to hashtag discussions, then just show up on Twitter on any Tuesday and add just a few tweets on the topic with the hashtag #edchat.

What do you think? Leave a comment! We would love to hear from you.

guest written by Wim Coleman of Chiron Books.

When it was suggested that I write a guest post for TestSoup about bringing narratives into the classroom, I was immediately thrilled. Then I was daunted.

My wife, Pat Perrin, and I met in Los Angeles in 1986. By the time we got married the next year, we were already collaborating full-time as writers. We’ve been writing together ever since—novels, plays, poems, and many, many different kinds of educational materials (we’ve both been teachers). Through more than two decades of collaboration, we have been obsessed by one single overriding theme: the vital importance of story.

So how to write a single post about bringing narrative into the classroom? I don’t think I can pull it off. It won’t do to just write about how to use stories without first getting into why. So I’ll write more than one post. I’ll devote this first one to Pat’s and my story-centered worldview, hinting at what it has to do with education.

To jump-start me with this post, Pat suggested that I take a fresh look at the first book we published together, PragMagic (Pocket Books, 1991). In it, we distilled a decade of reporting that had appeared in Marilyn Ferguson’s Brain/Mind Bulletin, a newsletter that had become a clearinghouse for all kinds of research and discoveries in science, health, creativity, psychology, social sciences, and education. Our job was to take all this information and turn it into a whopper of a self-help book. Our emphasis throughout the book was upon story: How can this or that piece of information be used to enrich the story of your life?

I hadn’t looked at the book for a long time (we’ve written lots of others since then). I peeked into the first chapter and noticed a section titled “The Power of Story.” There I found a quote by psychologist-educator Renée Fuller, the creator of the Ball-Stick-Bird phonics program:

“Making stories may, indeed, be fundamental to human thinking. The ability to comprehend a story—that is, to grasp meaning within a given context—may be more basic to human intelligence than anything measured by IQ tests. The need to make our life coherent, to make a story out of it, is probably so basic that we are unaware of its importance.”

Yes, our thinking exactly—except Pat and I would take it even further. We must learn to value even fictional narratives for the insights they can offer. Indeed, it is possible that few, if any, of the stories we live by aren’t, to some extent, fictions.

Around the time Pat and I were working on PragMagic, we also had the privilege of collaborating with cognitive philosopher Daniel C. Dennett on an experimental essay/story called “Media-Neutral,” which eventually appeared in our first novel The Jamais Vu Papers (Harmony/Crown, 1991) In it, a fictional character discovers that he’s a character in a book. Desperate to understand how being fictional affects his life, our character goes to Dennett for advice. “Media-Neutral” was great fun to work on, and Dennett threw himself into his therapist-philosopher role wholeheartedly.

Now, Dennett has taken flack over the years for his assertion that the human self is an “abstraction.” What! Doesn’t this mean that the self doesn’t exist? Not at all, Dennett has explained. An abstraction is a kind of fiction, certainly, but it can have real consequences in the world. Dennett likens the self to a center of gravity:

“A center of gravity is just an abstractum. It’s just a fictional object. But when I say it’s a fictional object, I do not mean to disparage it; it’s a wonderful fictional object, and it has a perfectly legitimate place within serious, sober, echt physical science.”

When you consider, say, what it would take to tip a chair over, you’re thinking, consciously or not, of the chair’s center of gravity. The center of gravity might be a fiction of sorts, but its effect upon the chair is plenty real. The self, suggests Dennett, might be described as a “center of narrative gravity.” I won’t try to explain that concept here; I doubt that I could! Just note the word “narrative.” Consciousness and the human self are outcomes of imaginative storytelling. We can’t get away from stories—indeed, fictional stories—for a single microsecond of our lives.

So we must tend well to our stories. In our memoir/essay “A Mexico of the Mind” (anthologized in Solamente en San Miguel, Windstorm, 2007), Pat and I offered this reflection:

“Storytelling, like all art, like life, is an act of learning—of finding out. We are mistaken to assume that stories of transformation are only about transformation, mere illustrations. Instead, they are transformation itself, acts of practical alchemy, with the power to alter the reality of every receptive person they touch. (That’s why we must learn to recognize a hate-based tale in any garb, and admit that nothing holy feeds on pain.) As we live our stories and tell them, we learn what they are about … and they change … and they transform.”

Taking all this into account, “using narrative in the classroom” sounds almost redundant. The classroom is filled with selves, and therefore with stories. It’s easy to visualize the classroom as a setting where a grand drama unfolds, where all those stories come together in a sweeping narrative. The issue, really, is what “subplots” you, as a teacher, can bring to this overarching story. How can you consciously and deliberately use stories to enhance your students’ learning?

In my next post, I’ll start getting down to brass tacks about that.

About the author: Wim Coleman is a playwright whose works have won national awards and have been presented in New York and Los Angeles, and he is an award-winning poet. He has also been a teacher, and has degrees in Theater, Literature, and Education. He usually writes in collaboration with his wife, Pat Perrin. Together, they have well over 100 publications. They publish independently for young people through ChironBooks. Wim and Pat lived in various parts of the United States before spending thirteen years in San Miguel de Allende, where they created and administered the San Miguel PEN Scholarship Program for at-risk students. They also adopted their daughter, Monse, there. All three of them now live in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  You can learn more about Wim and his work at his website.