Testing, testing…is this thing on?

8.28.11 By Frank Swoboda

Before starting my new life as a BTR resident, I asked one of my favorite teachers what he would do differently in his own preparation, if he were starting out now. His advice: “Get comfortable with technology.” I have been thinking about that a lot for a number of reasons – not least of which is that I am not a technology person. I have lived without a TV since 2003, I only recently got Internet in my apartment, I don’t own an iPod or iPad or i-Anything, and I hate Facebook. So why am I blogging?

During our orientation in July, Lynne Godfrey (BTR’s Director of Clinical Teacher Education) dropped a phrase that has stuck with me: “We as teachers need to make our practice public.” Teaching has traditionally been a black box – a teacher taking her or his students into a room and closing the door. As much as this may shut out unwanted intrusions and distractions, it also disconnects the classroom from the larger community, the teacher and students from the administration, students from their peers in other classes, and teachers from one another.

Today, education is receiving more public attention, both support and scrutiny. The challenge to us as educators is to take advantage of that attention to lay a foundation for sustained engagement between schools and society. The more teachers open up to policymakers and community leaders, the more we can call on them to support education. We teachers can also open up to and learn from each other. BTR asks us all to purchase a digital video camera so that we can record and critique our own teaching, get feedback from our peers, and analyze what other residents are doing both to get ideas for “what works” and to see concrete examples of areas where we can all improve. (A note: the last camera I owned involved film canisters. For me, a Flip camera is like a ride on the space shuttle. Oh, wait – the space shuttle’s out of date, too, now? Sigh.)

The downside of opening up our teaching is, of course, the potential for embarrassment. What I can euphemistically call “areas we can all improve” are, in the moment they are happening, also known as “colossal honking failures.” Teaching is hard and intense work. In our Foundations of Teaching course, our instructor cited a statistic that a teacher makes 1500 discrete decisions each day. Even with the best training and most reflective practice, it is not humanly possible that all 1500 decisions will be “right” or “good.” And, especially in a profession that has historically been low status and relatively underpaid, who wants to actively invite the public to watch you fail? No wonder classroom doors were shut all those years.

But we need to be ready to fail so that we can be positioned to improve. “Fail early” is what Jesse Solomon (Executive Director, Boston Plan for Excellence-Boston Teacher Residency) told us on our very first day. The earlier we fail, the earlier we will build our successes. This is also critical if we are going to model achievement for our students – if we want them to explore and take risks, we have to take risks and admit failure ourselves. If we want them to dust themselves off and try again, to work harder and better, we have to show them this in everything that we do.

In that spirit, here I am – a committed but recovering Luddite – trying my hand at blogging. Two months in, my BTR experience has been thought-provoking and enriching, and I want to open up my reflections and hear back from other residents, teachers, friends, and members of the wider community out there. And I’m forcing myself to get more comfortable with technology. Not just because it can be a resource for my students and my teaching, but because I’m not familiar with it – because it will be challenging, and because I don’t know what I’m doing.

So, my first self-critique: this is blog post is too long. But my hope is that by making my failures public, I can push myself to improve, the way that we all want our students to push themselves to improve. Because that’s education.