You’d think the guy who is the world’s best golfer would have nothing new to learn about the sport. Yet every year, Nicklaus would go back to his teacher, Jack Grout, and say, “Teach me how to golf.” Grout would treat him as a novice golfer. They started with the absolute fundamentals: grip, stance, setup, alignment. Why? Here’s how Nicklaus describes it in his book, Golf My Way:

1. Get your own “teaching pro.” Jack Grout would likely be the first to admit that in a round of golf he’d probably have no shot at playing better than Nicklaus. That didn’t make him less helpful as a teacher. Even if you are the most experienced, most accomplished professional in your school, find a colleague whom you trust and respect to partner with you. Having another teacher to give you honest feedback, share ideas, and help you focus your attention on the essentials can keep your skills sharp.
2. Review the fundamentals. Just as Jack Nicklaus needed to start over every year learning how to grip the club, teachers ought to start every year reviewing the fundamentals of their craft. Revisiting things you may take for granted, like your teaching philosophy, basic classroom rules and procedures, and instructional design, will help you refine your technique. You may also recognize areas where you have taken shortcuts or allowed bad habits to creep into your teaching.
3. Keep up with the latest changes in the sport…and in you. Many changes happened in the golf world as Jack Nicklaus progressed through his career. Equipment improved and golf course design evolved. Advances in physiology helped golfers understand their swing mechanics better. Similar changes happen in education every year–and sometimes every week. Not only that, but your students are different. And so are you. To ignore all of those differences and assume that we can continue teaching exactly the same way we taught five or fifteen years ago is to do a disservice to our students. Stay current.
4. Practice. This certainly means something different for an educator than it does for a golfer. We don’t have the luxury of spending hours at the driving range and on the practice green tweaking our swing and our stroke. We are on the course every day, playing a match that counts. So we have to practice differently. Reflect every day on what took place in your classroom and what you want to do differently the next day to make it work better. Share with your colleagues things that worked well–and that didn’t. Blog regularly and read blogs. Build your professional network and contribute to the field.

Even though the start of the year is the logical time to take these steps, you don’t have to wait. Start tomorrow: what’s one thing you can do now that will make a bigger difference in your students and will make you just a little bit better than you were yesterday?

Curriculum today is very full. We do our best to stuff every little thing that may have some importance or relevance to a subject into the 180 day school year, and since it won’t all fit, we assign the rest as homework. Any teacher who has been teaching for more than a year knows that there is no practical way to complete the entire prescribed curriculum in one year, even if you take the tour bus approach and just point out the highlights to the students as you cruise by at seventy miles and hour.

I’m no longer convinced that the purpose of curriculum is to assemble in one place all the important “stuff” that a kid should know by the end of the school year. There’s too much that’s important anyway, we won’t all agree on which things are truly important, and the volume increases almost daily.

So what if curriculum instead were designed with holes, with a certain amount of white space? In visual design, the white space does a few things: it brings attention to the other elements of the design, it allows them to breathe, and it helps make them dynamic. Taking out some stuff and leaving more space in the curriculum can do similar things for the student.

Invite. Curriculum should first be built so that the student wants to engage with the content. It should be active, it should be interesting, it should be personal. Make it real and relevant. Start with where the students are. Connect to their interests and their worlds.

Inspire. Next the curriculum should motivate students to want to learn about the subject. The word inspire originally meant “to breathe into” or “to infuse life by breathing”. There is very little breathing room in today’s curriculum. Kids have no time to breathe in and reflect on their learning. They just have to cram it in and move on.

Ignite. Finally, the curriculum must light the fire. Leave students at the end of the unit or school year feeling like there is so much more to explore and so much deeper to go. If we ignite their passions and their natural curiosity, they will continue to pursue it on their own.

I remember so many times “discovering” a subject as a teacher that I thought I had no interest in learning about, but when I really engaged it (because I had to teach it), I found it fascinating and went on to study it on my own. I think a well-designed curriculum can do that for students.

Understand that I don’t believe curriculum can do this alone. None of these things can or will happen without an excellent teacher. Curriculum doesn’t live until students and teachers interact and engage it. But a strong curriculum will give the teacher the tools and resources to accomplish these things more easily.

Accomplishing this is the real challenge, of course. How do we create a curriculum that does these things? How do we anticipate where kids are when there are so many different varied experiences around the world? Perhaps this is an argument for purely locally designed curricula, but I’m not sure that’s practical. What do you think? How can we make this happen? Or is it just a fantasy that will never become reality?

In the 1970s, writing a report was like buying fast food. I remember writing reports on many topics in elementary school: Morse code and Iraq are two that specifically leap to mind. (When we were selecting our countries to report on, I picked Iraq because I thought it was cool that the name ended with a Q. Yeah, I know.) I selected my topic, went to the library, found a book, read it (or more likely, skimmed it), then sat down to write my own version. Report writing really wasn’t research then, it was more like retelling. Like fast food value meals, someone else had really done all the work of taking the information ingredients, processing them, and putting them together into styrofoam containers and paper cartons. All I had to do was pick meal #2 and consume it.

School today is still set up for our kids to be fast food knowledge consumers. State and federal governments have already done the work of selecting what kinds of things are on the menu. School districts and textbook publishers have already chosen the ingredients, developed the recipes, and prepared the food, ready to deliver to the students. And just like fast food, it all looks and tastes pretty much the same everywhere. A Whopper in Denver is identical to one in Philadelphia.

Simply being a consumer is no longer sufficient. In the seventies, kids (and most adults for that matter) couldn’t access information directly. We only had limited sources, and all of them had been preprocessed for us by others. Today, on the Internet, we can tap directly into the raw data. The problem is, many of us still just consume it the same way we used to. We’re getting fresh produce and meat, but we are eating it raw.

We must teach kids not how to pick a good value meal, but what do do with the ingredients they have. We have to teach them how to create their own meals. We’ll begin by following recipes, but we have to also teach them the principles behind the recipes, the thinking that went into creating them, and eventually how to develop their own recipes. They need to know how to select quality ingredients, and which ones go together well. They need to develop their palates so they can experience the enormous variety of ideas and relationships that exist in the world. This will involve skills like critical thinking and problem solving.

Even this isn’t enough, though. I believe we need to get kids out of the grocery stores and into the fields. Teach them not just to select the right foods, but to grow them. We need to give kids the seeds, the tools, and the techniques for becoming their own knowledge farmers, to create knowledge and share it with the world.

And of course, all of this means that teachers have to get out of their own value meals and learn how to shop, how to cook, and how to farm. I suspect that at least for a while we’ll all be learning these things just half a step ahead of the kids, but that’s okay. What matters is that we recognize that there’s a world of cuisine outside of the food court and that we’re willing to live there.

Let me just say up front that I know I’m &submit=Search" target="_blank">hardly the first person to address this topic, and I’m sure I won’t be the last. In fact, so much has already been written on the subject of student blogging that I’m not going to spend time here talking about the basic reasons or the how-tos of doing it. Others have done that better than I.

What I want to explore today are a few of my thoughts about why blogging is a particularly powerful tool to give to gifted students. Gifted students have some unique needs that blogging can help teachers to address.

Self-directed learning

Gifted students need frequent opportunities to explore their own interests and passions. In a curriculum driven by standards and packed full of content, there is little room for student choice. Even when teachers are able to compact the curriculum, there remains the problem of how to ensure students are doing meaningful work with the extra time that is given them.

Blogging can provide one solution to that. Student-written blogs can take many forms and be used in many ways. Whether students contribute to a classroom blog or create their own, whether the blog is built around a classroom project or it is more open-ended, the nature of blogging permits students to choose when, how, and how much to write.

As Dean Shareski points out, too, blogging is more about reading than it is about writing. Students can and should take time to read a great deal about what they want to learn before they write about it. The teacher can and should provide starting points for this reading, but the power of blog reading comes from students exploring on their own, following links within blog posts, reading other articles by the same authors, and looking for new connections and relationships.

Blogging also allows students the opportunity to spend time digging more deeply into a topic. Gifted students can become intensely focused on an idea, captured by its intricacies and implications, and by blogging about them, students are given room to play with those ideas informally and in their own time.

High level thinking skills

As long as I have been in the profession, teachers have been encouraged to strive for &hl=en" target="_blank">higher-order thinking in their lesson planning and instruction: activities like analyzing, evaluating, and creating. Despite this push, the majority of time spent on the majority of school activities today still revolves around the lower levels of thinking: remembering, understanding, and applying.

When a gifted student is involved in blogging it is difficult not to incorporate higher levels of thinking. They are a natural part of the process. Blogging is far more than just writing about an idea. It involves much deeper connections, both literally and figuratively. A blogger must not only write but also seek out the connections with other ideas.

Even just being a good commenter [aside: this is something I need to do a far better job of myself] requires the blogger to analyze and evaluate the work of others. A worthwhile comment adds something to the conversation (more on this below) and doesn’t just make observations or cheer on the blogger, and that requires thinking and critiquing the content.

Interaction with like-ability peers

This for me is a particularly important issue. For very valid and worthwhile reasons, schools have reduced or eliminated many forms of ability grouping. Unfortunately this often has the side-effect of reducing the opportunities for gifted students to spend time with students of similar ability, a strategy with a great deal of research support.

It is a complex challenge for schools to create inclusive environments with integrity and still allow gifted kids the time they need to interact with other gifted kids.

Blogging expands the boundaries of the classroom and the school. As a teacher of the gifted, I worked in three buildings with students in many grade levels. Even with the pullout program, it was unusual for my students to get the opportunity to work with more than three or four other gifted kids at a time. To bring more kids together in a learning space, I developed a classroom blog where all of my students in all of my schools could interact and even collaborate on discussions and projects. Although it didn’t get far off the ground in the two months I was using it before I left the classroom to take an administrative position, the students and their parents saw the potential and embraced it as far as I was able to take it.

In a blog, grade and age differences are lost and students can engage in conversations not just with other kids in their school or district, but with students and adults around the world who have similar interests and abilities.

Authentic experiences

All of these add up to authentic learning opportunities. Reading and writing blogs is a real-world activity. Twenty-first century learning is about communication, collaboration, problem solving, and technology, all of which are integral to blogging. Students who regularly read and write blogs have the potential to develop relationships not just with students in their classes but also with experts in the fields they are studying.

No one approach or technique can solve every teaching dilemma, and none can work equally well for every student. Blogging can fill many roles, though, and provide many opportunities that would be difficult to create otherwise. Done thoughtfully, gifted student blogs can provide a tremendous return on the relatively small investment of time and energy.

Though it has taken me much longer than I planned to get back to this topic, I want to share with you today what I believe is an outstanding and probably very obscure tool that would be excellent for gifted students.

Think back a few years. No, further back. A little further. When home computers had memory measured in kilobytes, an 8-color monitor was high resolution, and disks were floppy.

The cutting-edge trend in computer entertainment was something called a “text adventure game.” Zork is the classic example of games in this genre, but there were dozens of them. They had no graphics and no need for a controller, because the entire means of interacting with the game was through text.

For those who have never played a text adventure, here is a typical sequence of moves you might see in one of these games (this is part of the sample transcript that was in the instruction manual for the original Zork):

West of House
 You are standing in an open field west of a white house,
 with a boarded front door.
 There is a small mailbox here.

>OPEN MAILBOX
 Opening the mailbox reveals a leaflet.

>READ LEAFLET
 (taken)
 "WELCOME TO ZORK!

ZORK is a game of adventure, danger, and low cunning. In it you
will explore some of the most amazing territory ever seen by
mortals. No  computer should be without one!"

[...later in the adventure...]

>APPLY THE BRAKES
The Frobozz Magic Go-Cart coasts to a stop.

Moss-Lined Tunnel, in the Go-Cart
This is a long east-west tunnel whose walls are covered
with green and yellow mosses.
There is a jewel-studded monkey wrench here.
A bent and rusty monkey wrench is lying here.

>TAKE THE WRENCH
Which wrench do you mean, the jeweled monkey wrench
or the rusty monkey wrench?

>JEWELED
You can't reach it from inside the Go-Cart.

>WEST
You're not going anywhere until you stand up.

>GET OUT OF THE GO-CART
You are on your own feet again.

>TAKE THE JEWELED WRENCH
Taken.

>WEST
Lumber Yard
This is a huge room lined with metal shelves. There are exits
to the east, northeast, and west.
There is a small cardboard box here.
Piled on one of the shelves is a supply of lumber.

>TAKE THE BOX AND THE LUMBER
small cardboard box: Taken.
supply of lumber: Your load is too heavy.

When computer graphics got better, computer games became more visual and never looked back. But a few people kept the concept alive, and today there is a thriving community dedicated to actively developing what is now called Interactive Fiction (often called IF). There are even people who do academic research into the theory and practices of IF and its applications.

What is exciting today about IF is that there are now free tools available for creating your own stories. Two of the most mature and actively developed are TADS and Inform. I am interested in the possibilities of using these tools with gifted students for a number of reasons.

First, students writing IF need to actively develop a variety of important skills that are particularly of interest to gifted educators:

• Design
• Logical reasoning
• Creativity
• Critical thinking
• Problem solving

What is especially interesting is that all of these skills are organically integrated into the development process. Students must think about the design of their geographical world and the design of their plot. They must anticipate many different actions and avenues that the player might take. They need to contemplate the subtleties of language and learn about the logic a computer uses to parse words and phrases into meaningful computer code. They need to plan and execute puzzles, and leave enough clues for the player to be able to solve them, but not so many that the solutions are trivial.

The best part: even young students have the capability to plan and build simple interactive stories using these powerful tools. So much of the complex programming is built into the system and the language that students can create functional, complete scenes with just a few simple sentences of text.

The possibilities and implications are far too extensive for me to go into more detail here, but the Inform site has an entire section devoted to teaching with IF. Peruse that a while, learn about how to download and play some games—there are many that are quite suitable for kids, including one that I’ve written myself (the reviews were mediocre, but finishing the project was to me a major accomplishment). What other ideas do you have about using IF in education? What possibilities does this raise? Share your thoughts in the comments.

It’s a line you’ve probably seen on ads for sports equipment:

But as Tony points out, simply handing a fabulous piece of equipment to a mediocre teacher doesn’t instantly transform that teacher into a star player.

On the other hand, there is a real reason that outstanding performers, whether they are athletes or musicians or computer programmers, seek out and use the highest-quality equipment: it elevates their ability to perform. Sure, Ted Williams could have hit brilliantly with a $10 bat. But he hit better with his custom-made, Hillerich & Bradsby 35-inch, 33-ounce blonde ash Louisville Slugger model W166.

Is technology in schools any different? What affects learning more, the pedagogy or the technology? Or is it the synergy of the two that makes the most difference?

Can giving them new tools spark a desire to learn in teachers who have stalled? Does the necessity of learning how to use the tool translate into better instruction and better learning in students?

I don’t have answers to these, and I’m not even as certain of my opinion on them as I used to be–which is part of the power of these conversations and the reason I appreciate following a variety of people with different viewpoints. What do you think? What has been your experience? I’m interested in pursuing this more, even as I delve into my plans for talking about what tools and methods will be useful for gifted education.

It is important for teachers to get feedback from knowledgeable observers. A good supervisor will help you elevate your practice, hone the skills that are already sharp, and identify the areas where you have allowed lax habits to seep in.

Even the best supervisors can only visit a few times a year. Having peers watch us work is helpful, but making that happen is often a logistical challenge. We could videotape the lesson and watch it later, but that too is often complicated and time-consuming.

We often forget the team of observers that is readily available: our students. Ask your students regularly to tell you how you are doing. They’ll tell you. In excruciating detail.

Even better, do what a colleague of mine did the other day, perhaps without even realizing what would result: Ask your students to teach. It was fascinating to watch as students took on the persona of the teacher, then walked around the room, shushing other children, gesturing, and explaining. We saw, in sometimes frighteningly accurate mimicry, the precise methods and mannerisms that the teacher uses on a regular basis.

If you really want to find out what you do well—and will dare to find out what you don’t—put your students in the front of the classroom.

When I first moved to Bucks County, I knew the major routes to get around the area. I could, by rote, drive from my house to my in-laws’ house. I could also drive from my house to the school where I worked. I could flawlessly and efficiently travel those well-worn paths and arrive promptly at my destination.

One day, I received a simple phone call from my wife: “My parents are making dinner for us tonight. Just come straight from school and meet us there.”

Not a problem. I left work at my usual four o’clock and with traffic arrived a little after 5:30 PM.

“What took you so long? Did you have a meeting after school?”

“No, I left as soon as I could.”

“But it should only take a half hour.”

“That’s impossible. It’s more than that just to our house, then another 40 minutes to your parents.”

“Um, no, dear. There’s a more direct route.”

Turns out I had driven a half hour south only to turn around and drive a nearly parallel route back north to their house. If I’d just gone east instead, I wouldn’t have had to sit through that light four times.

The problem wasn’t that I didn’t know how to get there. I didn’t get lost, I didn’t get confused. I did what I knew how to do. The problem was that I only knew a very specific path and had no idea how the various routes related to each other or where my destination was related to my starting point.

Learning the route is easy. Learning the whole map is hard.

It is a great temptation in teaching to teach students the route instead of the map. It’s faster, simpler, and more often than not produces the right results.

We can’t give in to that temptation, though. I recently taught a lesson about estimation to a group of fifth grade students. They had memorized a multi-step procedure for transforming a number into its rounded version. I quickly discovered, though, that like the students could do little more than mindlessly play back the recording of the algorithm. Many of them got the steps confused, or missed some, and since they had no idea how the process fit into the greater picture of what they were trying to accomplish, they didn’t recognize that there was a problem. When I asked them to explain what rounding was for, for the most part, their answers were along the lines of, “To get a rounded number.” Several committed the common error when asked to estimate a sum of adding the two original numbers then rounding the answer. Most used the words “rounding ” and “estimating” interchangeably.

All of this could have been avoided if the teachers in second, third, and fourth grade had taken the time to build an understanding of the function and purpose of estimation, to explain that rounding is just one tool in the estimating toolbox, to build in number sense and develop mental models of what is happening when we round. Before introducing the algorithm.

As I found out the hard way driving to my in-laws’ house, the shortcut is only shorter when it is used in the proper context.

Here’s an interesting idea for a quick classroom activity that has potential for many discussions. This could certainly be applied in many different ways to students at all levels.

Begin by taking kids to this site: http://whereiwrite.org. It is a small site with one purpose: to showcase portraits of authors (they all happen to be in the science fiction genre) in the spaces where they do their writing.

A few thoughts come to my mind as I scan through the pictures:

• Nearly every space is a work space. Creativity isn’t about flashes of inspiration. It’s about doing. And effort.
• Almost every writer surrounds him– or herself with books. Dozens or hundreds of them. Writers read. A lot.
• Writers are ordinary people. They have pets. They even have stained glass thingies hanging in their windows.

I think there’s a great lesson for students, especially reluctant writers.

Some other ideas for follow up activities:

• Have students share photos of their writing spaces and talk about them
• If you could create a better space to write, what would it look like? Why not create it?
• How could we design our classroom space to make it better for doing our work?

What do you see in these photos? What questions would you ask of your students about these pictures? What else do they tell you about what writers do and how to be one?

Because my job requires me to teach several different topics to several different grade levels every day, I frequently experience the professional equivalent of being a particle accelerator at CERN; two ideas, tiny and unrelated, swirl around at ever increasing speeds until, somehow, they collide, creating a spray of new ideas and insights.

One of these collisions happened on a recent day when I was teaching my fourth grade gifted class about Egyptian hieroglyphs immediately after a fifth grade math lesson on equations with variables. While explaining to my students that the Egyptians often wrote hieroglyphs out of order, and that some of the symbols represented sounds, some ideas, some were simply modifiers or amplifiers, and some had different interpretations depending on the other symbols around them, I realized that this is exactly how our mathematical symbol system works.

One of the frustrations that I have when teaching math is that students tend to read from left to right, and often when they get to something that hangs them up, they just stop there and try to figure it out. The problem is that beyond the most elementary number sentences (2 + 3 = 5), this approach doesn’t really work. In fact, it is essential for students to learn that sometimes you read from right to left, sometimes you read from the middle out, and sometimes you have to piece different parts together in seemingly random order until the whole equation makes sense.

Just as reading instruction has to be centered around the meaning of the text, not just the surface features, math instruction has to be about problem solving not just computation. But the language of math is a tool for problem solving.

I know I’m not the first to recognize that mathematics is its own language, but I’m now wondering if it might be wise to explicitly teach math the way we teach reading. How far can (or should) we take the parallel? Would we end up with a math equivalent of “phonemic awareness”? What about figurative language? Subtext? What might a math curriculum look like if it were written by reading specialists instead of mathematicians?