We knew she was a big deal when one of the most
respected professors in our program told us that he aspires to be her
when he grows up. Since we all want to be him when we grow up, we listened to
what she had to say. I am not joking.
Liz Kolb, Clinical Assistant Professor at U of M, is the reason
I haven’t started investing in classroom accessories for the sole purpose of
collecting phones before class (and I think I have some clever ideas). She
challenged me to think differently about cellphone use in the classroom,
something I’ve been working hard to prevent. You see, my placement school has a
pretty clear cellphone policy. They use a stoplight to give clear boundaries:
red light = phones off/silent and out of sight; yellow = phone may be used for
educational purpose OR listening to music; green = students can use their
phones for whatever they like. Hallways and lunchroom = green zone; Main
Office/Counseling Office = red zone; Restrooms = red zone; Classrooms =
teachers’ discretion. In our classroom you get a warning (“put it away
JoLinda.”), followed by the teacher taking it away for the day (kept hostage in
a locked cabinet) with an email or call home to an adult in your life. If it is
just too difficult for you to stop texting during class, you’ll get a referral
which = in school suspension. We mean business. Eeek!
[For
the purposes of this post, I am deleting my (normal?) narrative about access
and equity related to technology. Although not all of my students have cellphones
or even internet at home, their parents have cell phones and have been given
the access information for a one-way texting program for our class. If you want
to see what I deleted feel free to ask, but you’ve probably heard it before.]
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| I'm including this ironically. Primarily because I miss the Chicago hipsters but also because I think my blog posts want less words / more pictures. |
There are so many great ways to think about how these
devices can enhance student learning and there is an easy way for teachers to
scaffold this in to our own practice… but out of class. Devices don’t have to
be used in the class; they can be used to keep the brain working while students
are OUT of the classroom. Imagine a summer during which your students are
getting a text each day of the week with something school related. Imagine a
summer when your students are thinking about history fun-facts, vocab words,
science facts, and math questions. Imagine a student who thinks about
schoolwork once a day during the summer. I don’t imagine this being a time for
direct instruction, but a reminder of knowledge that was built the year before.
We talk about prior knowledge all the time, in every class, but we don’t talk
much about what happens during those summer weeks that are unlikely to include
direct instruction. I want my students to get texts. I want their teachers next
year to notice and pass it forward by continuing the trend. I don’t want my
students to forget the knowledge we built together.
I don’t know where I will be working in a year, five years,
or twelve years from now, but I do know that people like Liz need to keep
challenging educators to think differently about personal technology. I have no
doubt that she will be reminding us to think about the best ways to educate
rather than just doing what everyone else is doing. I, for one, didn’t sign up
for this program to be like everyone else.
I signed up for this program to know the innovative, the research-based,
and the boundary-pushing practices being used my high leverage practitioners. I
came here to figure out how to push the boundaries. Liz opened the gate, now I
need to step through and find my path through this lush vegetation. Thank you,
Liz Kolb.
