Musings from a Not-So-Master Teacher

When I was first beginning as a teacher, the lady said, "Check out Fred Jones. He's really good. So is Lee Canter for another side of discipline. But personally, I'm all over Harry Wong." I was the only one in the room who laughed. Could an educational guru really have a name like Harry Wong? In response, I read Harry Wong and borrowed a few practical ideas. I thought, at the time, that it was a crucial book that would change my vocation forever. I was wrong about Wong.

A few years later, I read a book called "The Wisdom of Crowds." The book is scattered with various stories of research experiments and small anecdotes from a person who definately seems to live more of the urban/upper class Manhatten lifestyle. (For some reason books like "Wisdom of Crowds" and "Stumbling on Happiness" and "Tipping Point" always have stories that make me feel that the author is wearing a sports coat and sipping wine in a stodgy restaraunt). I didn't think much of the book, but I am realizing how much it has changed my teaching methods.

Yesterday, after analyzing the causes of the Great Depression, students predicted how the events would change society. From there, each group pasted their Google Document into one larger class Google Document. I then allowed groups to delete only the ones that were duplicates and re-organize the information into categories. Like a libertarian paradise, the class was able to self-organize and the finished result was an outline stronger than anything I could have ever created.

Students predicted random things, "Literacy might decrease when kids have to find new ways to make money for the family. Or it might go up when they quit working on a farm and have to move to a city" or "There would be a new push to get off the gold standard again." Others posed questions, "Would it lead to higher levels of domestic violence? Or would families grow closer instead?"

I am about to take computers out of teacher classrooms. Instead of asking, "Do you want to keep your computers?" I will be asking, "If you still need your computers, write a one paragraph rationale on why you use the computers, how often you use them and how it changes your instruction." This simple act of frame is a skill I learned from "Wisdom of Crowds." So is the concept that it is better to make something a default rather than an option. In other words, I am better off saying, "We'll take the computers unless you need them" rather than "Send me an e-mail if you don't need them."

What I am realizing is that there are some great lessons from social psychology and sociology that never trickle down into the Harry Wong, education-as-a-recipe books.