Just saw a tweet from budtheteacher who had this to say:
I will never cease to be amazed by folks who teach classes about blogs who don’t actually blog. Sheesh.
Maybe we should stop doing PD on how to use 2.0 tools in a classroom. It should all stay focused on teacher’s personal lives. Teach them how they can use these tools to strengthen some aspect of their life, or how to use them to just have fun. Let’s face it, if a teacher has no interest in using them personally, they probably won’t use them in class.
There is another reason, and one that I think is even more important. I tell my student teachers that they should always do any project that they are assigning to the kids for the first time with them. It is the only way to get into the head of the kids as they try to solve the problem posed in the project. With podcasting it is really hard to hear your own voice played back. It is really hard to let loose your deep thoughts with a voice you hate to the entire world. It’s really hard to talk into a mic with no one on the other side giving you all the physical and oral cues that one is accustomed to in a normal conversation. If you have tried it, you will approach podcasting in a whole different way with your kids.
With blogging you are all of a sudden writing to a potential world wide audience. If you are not a wonderful writing, the pressure in incredible. If you are a good writer you have no idea what I am talking about. You can never put yourself in my shoes, or get into the head of a student with a similar problem. At least I get to sit at home alone and write and I don’t have to sit next to Mr. Valedictorian as he writes another great post that will get 32 comments. It has taken me 8 months to become comfortable enough to just sit and spontaneously write a post — this is the first one. I will never grade a blog post. I would stop immediately if someone started to grade mine. I also know how much it sucks to not get comments and go and find those students who don’t have a following and leave a comment to let them know someone was there.
All lessons should start by connecting the concepts of the unit to a personal experience. That is how the brain processes and learns new things. Lets stop telling teachers that 2.0 tools will improve their kids performance, until we have convinced them that they will improves theirs.
6 responses so far ↓
Paul, Great post. You said it wonderfully. I think this goes back to Draper’s PD post a couple days ago. I taught my kids to blog because I saw how great it was working for me. The other day people were whining about the edublogosphere being a closed “cocktail party” and some guy was complaining about having something like “only 200″ readers after 3 1/2 months. I know how you feel to have nobody leave a comment. It seems that my blog hasn’t even been read 200 times in the nearly three years I have been blogging.
Thanks for your comments on my posts and others. You rock.
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Hi Paul!
Yes… I see! Teachers should continue the generation of blogging by teaching their students an so on! BLOGGING IS SO IMPORTANT!
Good ideas and reasons, people might go all crazy and say that Blogging is boring, but that is nonsense. I believe everyone should blog. Don’t you?
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Great post, great blog. Just added you to my feed reader. Thanks.
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Hi Paul,
While I agree with some of what you’ve said, I disagree fundamentally with the idea that we cannot teach a student to blog unless we blog ourselves. Why? Because blogging is not much different from writing, and I do not think that a teacher needs to be a great writer in order to teach writing. And research supports this. (See Gleeson and Plain, 1996, published in English Journal and Wess, 1981, Rhetoric Society Quarterly. There are others I recall reading many years ago when I researched this in teachers’ college, but I can’t recall them now.)
In fact, I don’t think a teacher needs to be able to “do” a lot of what he/she teaches. Think of some of the best coaches of sports teams you know — or the best coach of any skill that you can think of. Are they the best in their field, in terms of skills? Chances are, no. But they have great coaching skills. Yes, they probably know enough about the skill to understand how it works, but being a good teacher is about so much more than being good at what you teach. I’m thinking at this moment about a music teacher I had in high school, who was one heck of a talented performer – definitely the most skilled pianist I knew, but who couldn’t get us to sing or play worth squat — and he was frustrated by that, not knowing how to “get” us to do it. He was a great musician, and a terrible teacher.
Likewise, the best writing coaches I have worked with are not the best writers. Are they good? Yeah, at times. Do they know what makes writing work? Definitely. Are they full of encouragement, understanding, sympathy, and tips? Absolutely.
And so I don’t believe that a teacher needs to be a skilled blogger in order to teach kids to blog. Some experience, sure. But a teacher’s ability to create and foster fabulous bloggers does not rest on being a blogger herself.
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Thanks for pointing out a flaw in my post–I did not make it clear that a teacher had to have a good blog, or be a good writer. In fact when I was writing this I was not even thinking about the writing aspect of blogging. I was thinking simply about the feeling of exposing yourself to the world…of being totally vulnerable. A good writer, or even a bad writer who is a good teacher cannot experience that unless they do it.
Your example with the coach actually is all about what I am saying. Many times the worst players make the best coaches because they know what it is like to not understand something, but they do have experience playing the game. I think it is hard to coach a batter if you have never stood up against a fastball. It is hard to coach confidence in blogging, if you have never experienced the fear of blogging yourself.
You example about the music teacher is also a point I tried to make. If you have no fear in blogging, if you are a great writer, if you don’t know what it is like to people totally and completely worried every time you hit the submit button, then you might have a lot of difficulty getting inside the head of your kids and helping them through it.
“But a teacher’s ability to create and foster fabulous bloggers does not rest on being a blogger herself.” You are right, it rests on being able to look at the experience through the eyes of the kid. Hard to do if you don’t do it, hard to do it you are really good at it.
Thanks for the comment!
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