Day One in Calgary: Magpies and Hares

For a teacher to go back to school is always a good thing.

It's easy to forget what it feels like to join a class for the first time, to meet the teacher, to try to memorize names, to figure out about whether you've brought the right supplies, to worry about whether you'll be able to find the classroom and whether lunch and tea, yes, tea will be available.

Most importantly, it's easy to forget that, while for the teacher the focus is entirely on the course and the importance of the material, for the learner, everything is new and equally valid: the first day's readings, the location of the washroom, the fact that there are magpies and hares on campus, the need to figure out how to truck a load of groceries from Safeway to the strange little room in Hotel Alma ... all equally pressing, immediate and consuming.

(Looking ahead to September, I'll feel extra empathy for my students, particularly the ones who are new to the school, and particularly because for a self-conscious teenager all of this is so heightened. Which all goes to suggest that the first couple of classes in high school should tilt away from content in favour of letting the students breathe).

Looking at the course material on the first day of my doctorate in Educational Technology, it's also interesting to reflect upon the dominant message, and here I'm probably reflecting upon both the morning course, "Innovations in Teaching and Learning" and the afternoon course, "Inquiry and Technology" because another symptom of having just arrived is that everything blends together ("Which course requires a blog?" "They both did, but now the morning class doesn't it and the afternoon class does." "Who needs the article?" "What article?").

I am immensely gratified that, although the title of the subject area is "educational technology", the focus really isn't on the technology at all, but rather the deep learning that the technology facilitates. Part of me thought I'd spend time this summer figuring out how routers and wireless switches work and that I'd gain a new appreciation for the far reaches of Best Buy. But far from it. The heart of the program seems close to the Teaching for Understanding (TfU) program I took online from Harvard some years ago. The philosophy of TfU so impressed me that I try to follow it still, and tell my student teachers that it is, well, "the best way to teach".

One of the aspects of TfU that I think works well in my classroom is "the hook", the idea that rather than presenting each new text as the next on the list, the teacher figures out how to present the text as interesting, engaging, urgent. So when we look at Ibsen's "A Doll's House", for example, we start by talking about how the boys' and girls' lives are being lived out in terms of feminism, and we watch and discuss the fabulous Hanna Rosin TED talk (http://www.ted.com/speakers/hanna_rosin.html) on whether men are "the new ball and chain".

The difficulty I've had is in working out ways to tilt the study of the text toward authentic, understanding performances. While I can see that students learn best from doing, I lack the understanding to see (and maybe the time to figure out) how I can re-engineer my English classroom away from the tried and true. One of my hopes for the summer is that my immersion in educational technology research will allow me to understand how to create new, online opportunities for creative collaboration and deep learning.