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NOBODY influences 
LIKE A TEACHER

school yourself

7/14/2016

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The Biggest Obstacle Isn't a Reality:  It's a Dream
Here's the old model, the time-tested, incredibly persistent concept of "school:"

The teacher teaches the student.

It's simple, easy to understand, and has the ring of truth.  We say things like "he taught me so much!" or "I learned so much from her." The teacher is a vending machine, a talking textbook, a knowledge dispenser. We keep the wisdom and dole it out.
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what did your favorite teacher actually teach you?

As a teacher, I can tell you:  this model works-- less than half of the time. The days it works are sublime:  you lecture, digress, and expound. Your students sit in the glow of your brilliance, they eat it up, light bulbs go on, and the music of instruction plays like a street fiddler in the square. You make the magic.

But when that ain't working for you, when the students are bored, lost, or detached-- these are awful teacher moments.  Your students loll in the harsh light of your artificial sun, they list in their seats, darkness pervades, and the clatter of the lecture plays like a rusty chain on the pavement.
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We love a brilliant genius around whom the STUDENTS orbit.

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Anyone can teach anything, we think. 
it's a simple transaction.  

The Great Teacher Fantasy
Often, teachers of teachers claim to want to debunk this model.  The better part of professional development that I have seen in the last 10 years as a teacher seems to be grounded in the idea that the teacher should not be the "Sage On the Stage."  But I don't believe we actually want to debunk this at all.  When we talk about a great teacher, we often talk about this brilliant genius around whom the classroom orbits. 

This old model IS the problem, of course.  We love the fantasy that teaching is simply imparting wisdom. The best teachers are ones whose kids learn the most from him, we think.  

We live in a "Guru culture." To be a "great teacher," you just have to be a respected resource of knowledge or skills.  Anyone can teach, we think, as long as a person has content mastery.  Are you a great chef? Then you can teach cooking. Are you a professional baseball player?  You'd be a great coach. Are you a great surgeon?  You'd be a great science teacher.  We've even created our computer models around it.  Data is "downloaded" from an original source.  It's "copied." Knowledge is not mastered-- it's copied and pasted.

The ramifications are enormous. We have come to think of teachers as simply "info and skill distributers." Our whole student testing and teacher evaluation model is based on this presumption. Our cultural conversation about teaching isn't based on teaching; it's based on a fantasy of teaching.
What Teachers Actually Do
Student teaches herself.  Teacher teaches student to teach herself.

Our fantasies about being a great teacher hide what great teachers do. Great teachers don't teach anything; they teach learning. First time parents have no teachers. Nobody could teach Mick Jagger how to sing, Warren Buffet how to invest, Oprah Winfrey how to produce, Michael Phelps how to swim, or you how to do whatever it is YOU are good at.  Of course, teachers helped Mick and Warren and Oprah and the rest-- but no one taught them-- at least, not in the traditional sense. They taught themselves. Their mentors/teachers taught them (and you) not WHAT to do but, rather, HOW to do it.  As have all the great teachers in your life.

Heck, you taught yourself language.  How to walk.  Do you ever think about how your brain must worked for that to have happened?  For it to happen to everyone, everywhere, in every culture around the world?  Great teachers know that students HAVE to teach themselves. 
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Great teachers don't teach subjects; 
they teach learning.

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it's true in every field: 

your best manager, leader, or boss helped you understand and execute the work on your own. 

The fantasy model needs a real challenge, especially as our cultural and political conversations about good teaching begin to gain more and more traction. How can we attract great teachers when we don't even talk about what a great teacher does?

When on the job, the best teachers are barely there. They elegantly and efficiently drop in and out of the learning process. Doing this is complicated and requires extraordinary awareness. It's a profession that is all about "how," not "what." 

Great teachers aren't vending machines. They are catalysts, context makers, inspirers, models, and value multipliers.  

It's why I say teaching is like entrepreneurship: it's about engaging others in answering a question or solving a problem. It's why it's the most important profession in the world. Teachers impact every market and every other profession. How we think about teachers impacts everything.

This is not a moral argument. It's an economic one. 
This article originally appeared in iBlogAmerica on January 20, 2013. Mike Kleba has revised and reprinted his article here.
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The Biggest and Quietest Movement in Education

4/12/2014

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Picture"Behold Alex's Cold Smoking Contraption" from HarmoniousHomestead.
"DIY" is really "TIY"
So I want to hardwire a lamp in the bathroom.  You know, like a real man.  My plan of attack?  Youtube.

You see, my dad didn’t show me how to hardwire anything.  Sure, he taught me how to put Jimmy Dean breakfast sausage in a bowl spaghetti.  He taught me that five Coors Lights is better than three.  He taught me that winning isn’t everything—but that it beats the hell out of losing.

But hardwiring a lamp? No.  So, back to youtube.  Or, if you prefer, what I call the "TIY movement." A movement so big, I guarantee you are a part of it and don't even know it.

#TIY Strong

Ask just about anyone under the age of 40 how to figure out how to change a showerhead, learn a guitar lick of a Rolling Stone song, or how to put filling inside a cupcake, and they’ll tell you to look it up on line.  

We call it DIY- Do It Yourself.  It’s an empowering idea, one that is about self reliance. It's also a bit punk rock-- "do it yourself" means "you can make it yours."  An enormous swath of the internet is dedicated to people showing other people how to do it yourself.  I think it’s biggest, least talked about movement in education today. 

And it’s got the wrong name.

We should call it “Teach It Yourself.”  It’s more fundamental than simply Do It Yourself: You have to teach it to yourself to do it yourself.  And that is what so many of us do when we need to do something we don’t know how to do.  It’s what I am going to do when I install this f#@$ing light in my bathroom. 

It's time for us to have a much better conversation about why DIY (sorry, TIY) is the best example of the “state of the art” of Education today.

The best of "DIY" is really just great teaching.

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Fishtail buns and advent calendars from OhtheLovelyThings.com
Instructions Make the Teacher

If there’s something teachers notice about the ubiquitous TIY instructions out there it's how good (or bad) the instructions are.  Because great think about instructions all the time- because great instructions allow people to teach themselves.

Anyone who has used an easy to follow instructional video or read a great manual (think workout plans or cookbooks), knows that these instructions can be great teachers, too. Great-instruction-givers allow us to invest in ourselves. It's schooling at it's most distilled:  education improves us.

The best of DIY is really just great teaching.  And, with the internet, its reach across age, gender, economic and social class, and geography barriers make DIY instructions the most powerful force in Education today.

Want to do what great teachers do?  Study what makes instructions easy to follow, efficient, inspiring, and delightful.  Look at the wide range of instructions available online and in books.  See how directions are put together, how words and images can be used to model and guide.  Now that's teacher training I could get behind.  Great instructions are encoded teaching.

For my teacher friends and teacher advocates out there: instructions cannot REPLACE teachers, of course.  Great instructions are the products and tools of great teaching.  And great teaching is teaching other people to teach themselves.

Now, the way to CREATE and DEVELOP good instructions is much more complicated, certainly. For one, it's about knowing and connecting with your audience (students). But getting into that right now will keep me from a delicious meal of breakfast sausage spaghetti washed down with a raft of Coors Lights.  

Just the kind of preparation I need to hardwire a lamp.

Images from and thanks to
the awesome blog http://harmonioushomestead.com/2013/08/07/homemade-cold-smoker/
and the fun site http://www.ohthelovelythings.com/2011/12/happy-friday-4-diy-projects.html
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    just a Fact:

    Teachers are injecting value into every corner of our society.

    Tweets by @mikekleba

    Mike kleba

    is the CEO and Chief Teacher Officer of DegreeCast. He's also a public school teacher  who lives with his wife and dog in Brooklyn, NY.

    RYAN O'HARA
    is the chair of the English Department at a school district on Long Island and was a high school teacher for more than a decade. He lives with his wife and three daughters in Old Beth Page, NY.

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Photos used under Creative Commons from James St. John, mayrpamintuan, quinn.anya, Kevin Doncaster