Take away the campus but put back the computer

The specter of contracting COVID-19 in schools caused us to close campuses. The computer became the most important tool in the toolshed. Discussions and plans are full steam ahead to open for Fall 2020. What about school should we keep or leave out? What are the best uses of our time and creativity to promote intellectual development and educational engagement for students?

I wrote a piece about this in March 2020 but now in June 2020, things have grown more puzzling. We also now have some months of experience teaching online.

It’s time to step on the gas for creating experiences and experiments where students develop projects in collaborative manners. As we approach top speed, we will no doubt see an expansion of the highway.

Classes could find their way to the curriculum. Perhaps consider engaging questions and engaging problems, either from students’ or teachers’ minds. Both the traditional and alternative are possible when the entrance into the work happens via another opening. If a family wants traditional outcomes, not a problem. If a family wants something else, it’s also possible.

What I would advocate is that schools help teachers to have their own engaging experiences as students — beyond ‘professional development’. I’m talking about restructuring how we think about ourselves and how we approach ‘doing work’ as teachers. We need chances to work on long term projects. Teachers need opportunities to naturally collaborate with other people. We need that excitement of creation as well.

This restructure alone will shift the work we do and how we see ourselves as creative intellectuals. Without this chance, teachers will likely do as they have done in the past. They may perhaps add on a new strategy or activity, but not really shift how they ‘do work’ in school.

In an ongoing reflective process, I reinvent myself and my work. Starting as a teacher in 1997, that’s a lot of constant change. Additionally, I can recall landmark experiences as a student that also shape my thinking. But what was it that allowed some of my teachers to make space for me and my interests? Under their tutelage, I cut a path to achieve beyond the traditional outcomes. How my teachers grew to have that comfort level, I’m not sure, but boy am I ever grateful.

In the Land of Corona, I have found the online format of class working well. It allowed me to easily focus more deeply on the process of students’ work. It also gave me a chance to easily help students become an integral part of a formative feedback cycle. Inside of a Zoom meeting, I can spotlight a student’s camera for everyone to see. The student can then discuss what’s happening and why it’s happening. Software helps facilitate these interactions. It’s far more difficult to do that in person and without a computer. So here is a good case for using a computer also in person!

We will need to increase Internet bandwidth and computer usage at all levels throughout the day. This is the moment to make the personal computer truly personal for all of our students. Give every child a high-powered laptop. We will need the kids connected. Doing so allows us to engage in the formative feedback cycle, build collaboration, and encourage project-based learning.

School can become a place of creation for teachers and students alike. If you show me a kindergartener, I will show you a student who can learn trigonometry. The traditional sequence does not confer a foolproof method. Teachers can reactivate their sense of wonder. Students can take more ownership of their learning. Perhaps campus life has gone missing, but school itself can change into something better than before.

Traditional School Pivot Due to COVID-19

by Dr. Bryan P. Sanders

The students are present, but where’s the school? Housing. Food. Clothing. Medicine. Computer. Internet. Education. It’s roughly in that order. Education can only really happen when everything else is in place.

School closures reveal the fragility of so many children in need every day. With the likelihood that most, if not all, children will be home for the unforeseeable future, some corporations and public resources are already helping to provide access to the basics. I hope that we reach every child in need.

So, let’s presuppose we can get students online in a warm, comfortable room with three square meals. We still have a major problem. Teachers’ carefully planned lessons were upended on short notice to switch to remote online learning.

We have a lingering assumption that the Internet is best used as a place to go and find resources for teaching and learning. But then what? Will students read an article or watch a video and then answer some questions? Will their answers be submitted, assessed, and turned into a grade in the gradebook? I anticipate we will see a lot of that as educators do their best to piece together their classroom lessons as packets to complete and implement curriculum guides.

What could we do instead? What should we do instead?

If we will encourage, allow, and support our students and teachers to find their rhythm and harmony amidst this most dissonant of times, we may rediscover what we already know about the importance of student interest (Dewey, 1913) and student behavioral, emotional, and cognitive engagement (Fredricks, Blumenfeld, and Paris, 2004). The well-respected and prolific educators who write erudite curriculum guides have never met my son, so they cannot possibly know when his mind is most receptive to the ideas presented in the order prescribed. And too many worksheets will deaden the learning experience.

The whole system just crashed. The four walls of the classroom disappeared and teachers have been forced to drop their current practices. Without any prior experience or background in this approach, the revolution, it seems, will be televised. A remote learning environment offers educators the perfect opportunity to individualize and differentiate instruction. To follow student interest. Engage them in the process of their own education. 

Truth is, we teachers have been struggling to combat and counteract the distractions from the Internet in our classrooms for a number of years now. This is a generation raised on social media, video games, and Youtube. And now we have to meet them on their turf. We’re busy trying to keep them occupied, and they’re busy trying to keep themselves entertained. In the midst of this national crisis we have an opportunity to pivot.

What is left when schools cannot meet? Interests and passions. Class never ends.

This generation has a lot to teach us about what it means to be online and have the Internet at our disposal. Many of them are already active and alive there. When we network and connect in person in the same physical space, we feel a presence, a dynamic, a vibe, and we use our collective knowledge and brainstorming power to think, do, and create.

During COVID-19 quarantine, the Internet is our network and our connection to each other; it is how we can feel a presence with each other when we cannot be in the same physical space; it is a direct conduit to share our collective knowledge, modify it, develop it, and create new products and projects. The Internet is far more than a place to go like your local educational curriculum store stocked with workbooks and pre-prints and laminates. Its power resides in its immediacy and its continuity. We can connect our students with ideas right away and collaborate in real time. We can find brainstorms that others have published, extend them, make them our own, and develop new concepts, projects, and products. Discover, join, amend, publish. Schools can change.

The Internet allows entrance into perpetually growing libraries and storehouses of projects and information. Teachers and students can use the connectivity of the Internet to make, do, and create, rather than fill in blanks, answer scripted questions, respond to obvious prompts, or repeat exercises with slightly different information.

Schools have fantastic mission statements. Go back to those for guidance on the learning objectives we have for our students. If we want critical thinkers and problem solvers who are compassionate to others, we should question how much we “worksheet” them instead of engaging with them. This goes for teachers as well. Let’s engage the teacher as a learner, particularly with how to master the computer.

Computers in the classroom have offered potential for students and teachers to break out of their traditional practices. The earliest teaching machine created by Dr. Sidney Pressey in the 1920s had a handful of buttons and was a mechanical device designed to emphasize correctly answering questions. Over the years, the primitive teaching machine became the powerful computer of today, and we are still struggling to know what to do with them.

When we view the computer mostly as a way to more quickly deliver reading material, take a quiz, grade a quiz, and input grades for families and administrators, we overlook its versatility. When we view the computer mostly as a way to type and send out documents, we overlook its complexity. Computers are powerful brains that we can control with programming language. The thinking we can do with computers by programming them is limitless.

The teachers who do not know how to code can learn right alongside the students. Tynker, CodeAcademy, Code.org, MakeCode, the list goes on. There are many programming platforms already online for every age and stage. Programming can also happen inside of Minecraft: Education Edition for an immersive experience. Taking control of one’s computer is an important power that teachers and students all need. Programming intersects with every content area and is an essential literacy for all of our teachers and students. Teachers never have time to learn these skills. This emergency presents us with an opportunity to do just that.

We are already deciding about postponements of state testing, prom, and graduation. The CDC has already published considerations and recommendations for school closure as long as twenty weeks. There are millions of students wondering what we are going to do as we try to make school feel meaningful and safe. This is our opportunity to show them that we are just as adaptable as they are.

We have tremendous work ahead to provide daily services for children. Also reconfiguring how we “do school” will not be simple, but it is possible by rethinking how we work, what work we do, and why we do it. A collaborative and flexible approach will not only lead the way in revisioning schools to finally prepare our children for the 21st century, but can breathe new equity and access into our programs. We can reassess and change each day. Teachers have always been on the front lines. Now, more than ever, we need their intelligence, bravery, and creativity.

Dr. Bryan P. Sanders is a Doctor of Education and career classroom teacher working in Los Angeles. He can be reached here: https://about.me/nayrbgo

Minecraft. Because Why Not. Teachers, Let’s Goooooooo

I have been playing Minecraft for many years. I instantly fell in love with the game. It has the retro feel that I love since I grew up in the 70s and 80s immersed in computers and technology. As a teacher for over twenty years, I have been working with many technologies in the classroom and Minecraft is one of the best ever.

Teachers do not get a lot of time to play. I don’t mean video games or games — I mean just play, free space to roam, experiment, test, experience, try things for the sake of trying them and seeing what happens. Play. True play.

Many teachers have families, other jobs, complex situations of all kinds, and the free time that play requires just isn’t there. Doesn’t happen in graduate school, teacher preparation programs, during the work week, or really even on the weekends. Maybe some teachers have some free time to play, but I will safely assume that most do not.

There is the crux of my argument and purpose in this post: teachers need free time to play. Teachers need to play.

I built barriers but also a way to travel.

For the past year or so, I have befriended a wonderful educator and fellow Minecraft enthusiast, Stephen Reid of Immersive Minds. He lives in Scotland and I live in Los Angeles. We were working on a Minecraft project together with Becky Keene — I have never woken up so early for a conference call that was pure fun!

The experience provided me with a spark of inspiration and a new perspective into work and play and gaming and collaboration and global digital citizenry. It was a small window for me into what I think many people have already discovered is possible in this new Internet era. My only fault was that I had not yet done it! I was work work work working in the classroom and trying (and failing) not to work on the weekends and in the evenings. Teachers really do not get a break, even after so many years. You cannot sit back and put the class on auto-pilot because it has to change and evolve with time and with the students you serve.

So when do teachers get to truly develop as teachers outside of working? What new ideas could they encounter if left alone to play together? How could that experience and those ideas enter the classroom? What impact could it have on students and their experiences as learners?

I found diamonds tonight!

Stephen Reid and I recently were tweeting at each other because I wanted to hang out with him. Again, he lives in Scotland, so we have a Minecraft survival world accessible via Internet where we can work and chat and explore and create together. In just a few hours, not only did I find diamonds and put together a set of iron armor inside of what will soon be a tremendous cobblestone fortress, but have already begun to allow myself the freedom of play and wonder.

When we were in the game, Stephen and I were text-chatting about what to do with this Minecraft server and how it might be a place for educators to come and play and build and explore and create together. I’m not certain that such a place exists already, but if it does, we could use a few hundred more!

And if Minecraft isn’t your thing, and you’re sure because you have tried it, maybe there are other digital collaboration platforms that you can work on in real time with people on the other side of the planet. The idea is just to play and experiment and try things out and see what comes of it — simply because we can. Not to get famous. Not to get rich. Not to achieve some predetermined outcome.

Play. Because why not.

I really like cobblestone and tunnels.
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