I consider an advanced student in my class to be someone who doesn’t easily get thrown off track by relatively minor failures, yet is able to recognize them and not make excuses for why they have occurred. If failure is not an issue, it’s like exponential learning.

It’s not surprising that self-confidence seems to equal more positive risk taking. That’s why, when I give feedback to students, I try my best to stress the positive in their work or behaviour. It’s an essential ingredient if you want to become someone that adapts to change quickly; optimism. When describing next steps, I try hard to be as practical as possible as well. To be honest, that’s one of the hardest parts of the job. It takes a lot of energy to be doing assessment like that every day. I often question whether I’m doing it well.

What do you do to foster a positive outlook in the people you work with or teach?

I showed this in class the other day in a discussion around how you can get good at making people pay attention to your message when creating media. My students, unsurprisingly, were mesmerized by the clip. And then one precocious thinker in my class asks me, “But, Mr. Lee, does media try to keep our eyes on the ball or the gorilla?”

It just blew me away. I love it when students ask questions the teacher can’t answer. What do you think? Is it the ball or the gorilla?

Lucy is almost 15 months old. She’s chunky, juicy, and has dimples that you can fall into. I was sitting on the couch after a typically awesome but tiring day when she grabbed the stool and started putting on her little demonstration.

I’m sure it’s very easy for you to see the sheer pride in Lucy’s face and body. We never trained her to do this, nor suggested it in any way. So if you’re like me, analogies for the process of learning are likely flowing through your brain like so many pints of Guinness in a Dublin pub.

The main connection I instantly made was to our conversations around student motivation and feedback. In the many great debates we have around this topic (extrinsic/intrinsic, rewards/punishments, badges, etc.), I feel we have a tendency to simultaneously overcomplicate and oversimplify the matter. Overall, I feel we need to resist the urge to turn it into Republicans vs. Democrats, because it’s when we become too sure in our stance that we walk down the road of confirmation bias.

What I see in Lucy is a need to

a) challenge herself

b) accomplish things she is inately compelled to pursue, and sees people around her doing

c) have a shared celebration of those accomplishments.

Which leads me to consider what a celebration or acknowledgement of an accomplishment entails. In our house, if our little baby gets excited about being able to stand by herself on a stool, we clap along with her and shout various affirmations. Is that praise? Is it feedback? Do we give babies different kinds of feedback than we do to our teenagers? Is she motivated intrinsically or extrinsically?

I’d love your thoughts on this. What other analogies do you see in Lucy’s video?

Stay tuned for an accompanying post in which I reflect on the extent to which culture impacts our notions of ‘punishment’ and ‘reward’.

Overheard in my classroom the day many sites went #blackoutsopa:

Boy 1: Dude, did you hear about the Google page today?

Boy 2: Ya, it’s so cool. Booooo! SOPA!!!

Girl 1: What’s SOPA?

Boy 1: The government wants to stop us pirating movies ‘n’ stuff.

Girl 2: WHAT?!?! Boooooooo!

Boy 2: Ya, I need to pirate stuff!

Are there more difficult teachable moments to enact than Wikipedia going black? As Clay Shirky reminds us, SOPA and PIPA are less about piracy and more about democracy. For my students, however, it’s challenging to take the conversation meaningfully in that direction. They don’t perpetually juxtapose a world of share, send, download, and upload  with one where we sat on a couch waiting for an old white guy to tell us about what was happening in the world. They don’t know that latter world. It’s a History Channel episode.

The ability to pirate video, audio, and gaming content means a lot to them, however. Want to see a group of kids collaborate like a pride of lions stalking buffalo? Ask them if they know how to get movie x or game y for free.

Yes, it’s so important that we engage students in learning about CC licensing, intellectual property, and the ethics of the internet. And, yes, most young people today are grossly ignorant about these issues. But, no, the best way to do this is not by wagging one’s finger like so many Just Say No educational videos. And, no, it’s not the kids that are the problem.

All of us adults are conveniently looking the other way when we pretend that swiping the credit card for the hardware is the end of the transaction. We’re also turning our glances when we say we are against downloading the Harry Potter movie yet will work that Xerox machine in the copy room until you can cook an egg on it.

Now, to get off my own soapbox and back to that teachable moment…

Do you know what made it a lot easier to have a discussion about SOPA and PIPA in my class? The fact that my students post regularly to the internet, comment on one another’s work, receive comments from the far reaches of the globe, remix work, share links, and honour CC licensed work.

I asked the students how they would feel if their ability to do all of things was restricted, or even taken away, without debate or a tribunal of some variety. The room went silent for a minute which felt like an hour, but we proceeded to have a rich discussion about democracy without ever mentioning the word itself.

I know they still care much more about whether the next Eminem song will get on their iPods, but at least we were speaking about something we really know, not just have heard of.

You may be able to stop people from sharing their creations, but you can’t unlearn the power of the act itself. Stop SOPA and PIPA.

Anyway, I was trying to lead this wonderfully enigmatic lot in a backchannel discussion deconstructing oral presentation skills. It was like pulling teeth. Here’s what they wanted to chat about instead.

Do I swell with pride seeing that my students care that much about Radiohead? You’re darn right I do. Was that my plan for our lesson and use of the tool? Nope.

If you want to have a class where kids have a certain degree of control over the whats, whens, and hows of technology, especially in regards to the mobile variety and social media, don’t freak out when they start having arguments about how much “[Coldplay is] a suckyer [sic] version of Radiohead”. We all have our frigid Canadian Friday mornings.

Now that we’ve settled that, let’s get to the really important stuff. Is it Coldplay’s “Trouble” or Radiohead’s “Karma Police”? Vote in the comments below.