the conduit

Hi Stacy,
Thanks for your comments–I too have been coaching teachers using video. It sounds like the coaching sessions after the teacher viewed the video were very powerful. Thanks for sharing the notes on how you facilitated these meetings–I will try to follow your lead in some of my follow up sessions.

My video experience has been a little different. I have been recording 5 minute snippits of a class and then downloading the video to the teacher’s classroom computer immediately. I follow up with a Google form with the following questions:

1. What elements of your teaching were you most interested in observing in the video?

2. What comments do you have about your teaching regarding the elements you checked in Question 1?

3. What elements of your teaching were you pleased with? Why?

4. What elements of your teaching were you surprised by? Why?

5. What other elements of your teaching would you like to focus on as a result of watching the video?

6. How do you think viewing yourself teaching helps you as a teacher?

When teachers fill in the form, it automatically goes into a spreadsheet. I have collected about 7 of these so far, but as it grows, I expect to observe trends that will help provide focus for professional development and training.

I don’t want to diminish the changes that occur in adolescence but could it be that the difficulties experienced by this age group have a lot to do with how they are treated? Watch TV, read the news and look for the patronizingly knowing glances that adults share as they discuss the adolescent. Count how often young people’s behaviors or opinions are neutralized or dismissed as they are explained away through assumptions about hormones or brain development.  What would it take to give Adora’s hypothesis a chance–that we have much to gain from listening to young people?

The real game changing will be when publishing companies and resource creators come to understand the power of a device like this in every child’s hand. The textbook cycle in schools is incredibly expensive, and every time you buy a resource you realize you are buying into obsolescence. Subscription textbook services could make resource replacement an annual fixed cost for schools (with less guess work about when to replace outdated materials), protect revenue streams for publishing companies (we’re not going to get this for free, after all) while benefiting students with up to date (and instantly updateable)resources, rich, interactive media and embedded tools and links for teachers (standards and assessment materials). Again, Apple changes the game not by having the technology first, but by thinking about what the experience of interacting with technology can be like.

The signs of respect that young people are asked to demonstrate in the presence of their elders are a matter of civility; however, when they are demanded they represent the imposition of a supposed “natural” hierarchy. Behind that hierarchy is something like “respect your elders” but what exactly are we calling on young people to respect? If we don’t understand that it is the wisdom gained of experience that supported such a hierarchy embedding itself in our society in the first place, we fall into the trap of thinking that these signs of respect are natural in the sense of being “pre-established”. This danger ensues any time we think of a value as natural and we lose touch with its link to some aspect of our species’ survival. So young people will show you respect, but not because you demand it. We don’t live in an era that recognizes those authoritarian hierarchies anymore–you’re going to have to earn it.

LL: I appreciate your name choice but disagree with your lumping of inducing and seducing into the “less benign forms of leading.”
Now for the young children who are naturally excited about learning or the older young adults who have found their internal motivation and developed interests, a teacher does not necessarily have to induce or seduce.  I would argue that the teacher of the middle school child – particularly in the case of math teachers – needs to do a little harmless seducing to grab the child’s interest and motivate where motivation is not found in order to get to a place where we can get to your “benign” forms of leading.

RL:  I appreciate your reply but I am interested by the fact that after you disagreed with me you felt the need to qualify “seducing” with “a little harmless”–I think that proves my point about the connotation of the word.
What I really want to get into with anyone who “e-ducates” is the idea that in leading, we are expressing a certainty about knowing “the way”. This goes for the educational policy wonk in a government office, the teacher who corrects or the parent who complains. I think that in order to really foster democracy in education, we need to address this, discuss it, play around with it and make it a problem for ourselves. I think future democratic citizens will be best served if working out “the way” is something we do openly, consciously, inclusively and humbly and that they get exposed (and hopefully engaged) in the process.  Some days I’m going to be the expert but other days that might fall to someone else in the room. I hope as an educator to become the keeper of the values that allow that process to work itself out. I guess that means I’m still in charge, but in such a scenario I am in charge of the process not the outcome.  For this reason conducting has the nicest resonance for me–leading with.

LL: I certainly don’t want to Mary-Kay-Letourneau myself and publicly be known as the middle school teacher who encourages and insists on seducing her students BUT seduction has its uses.  Other than that, I can’t say I really disagree with you.  As a matter of fact I completely agree with you.

I think the question to how to make your ideas a reality is how do deal with a teacher’s ego.  Now I’m a humble sort and like to think that I can share the expert-in-the-room title with others.  I certainly have my own control issues but as a weekend spent with my sister shows they aren’t as severe as other’s.  But with educators we can be dealing with some pretty big egos and fairly intense control issues.  I think the key could be therapy.  I mean this in all seriousness.  We would all probably be better off if we were required to have regular therapy sessions about why we run the classroom we run.  Perhaps that is your job as coach.

I don’t want to get bogged down in etymology, and I don’t think that words have “original” meanings that are any truer or more natural than the way they are used today, but I do think it is important in our age of specialization to look back on words for lost or forgotten convergences. With that disclosure out of the way, we can look at why I titled the site “the conduit”.

Some time ago I looked up the etymology of the word education to find that it leads back to the latin root word “ducere”–to lead. So education shares things in common with conducting, conduct, introducing, producing, deducing or any old duct work that leads the way. Curiously it also shares with some less benign forms of leading–inducing, seducing, abducting. Anyway, this site is a place for thinking about education and so it is important to think about the kind of leading educators are doing and whether or not any of it is, or can be, benign. Most edifying in all this educational archaelogy is the idea that “education” comes from “ex” “ducere”–leading out of. Conducting on the other hand comes from “leading together”. Whether you view education as liberatory or conservative or some combination of the two, it is important to talk about this leading and what it leads to.