Cafe Conversations

One of the reasons I am excited to team-teach with Jeff is that he always pushes my thinking deeper and further and to make that thinking transparent to the students in our class.  When Jeff and I met for the first time, I visited his class and was so taken by how the students were able to just be in the moment. There was no sense of hurry or anxiety.  And that was so powerful for me.

He verbalized something I had noticed but hadn't really processed: that the cafe conversation approach accidentally created an "expert speaker" and four passive listeners instead of tables where everyone had something to say. And while we both agreed that we heard great things coming out of conversations, we definitely heard from you guys that it didn't lead to the kind of content understanding you had hoped for.  And I'm really grateful you said that. (Had you said that in my first few years of teaching, I wouldn't have been able to say that! One of the hard things I continue to work on is how to listen more and talk less. Keep holding my feet to that fire!)

Jeff and I also realized that we pedagogically took the activity differently in the two rooms. Jeff's groups lingered in fewer rotations.  I confessed to Jeff that my past career as a time-watching stage manager came out, and I pushed my room to finish each standard. On some level, Jeff opted for understanding; I went for "coverage." You'll see this fundamental tension when you go into your buildings: do we try to get to everything but do so thinly? Or do we linger, yielding deeper understanding of fewer things?

Meanwhile, I'm looking forward to my next conversation with the friend who suggested Cafe Conversations, so I can reflect with her about what we observed.

Here are some other things rattling around in my brain from yesterday's class. I definitely feel like we're on the precipice as a profession of refreshing how we look at ed tech now that the creation of tech-based works is so easy:

• Why was it OK for third graders to make a tech product (Happy Birthday videos to principal) that didn't connect to learning, but it wouldn't be OK for your older students? 
• Amazing how many people remembered Oregon Trail from their own K-12 experiences - and the mixed reactions we had to it.
• Issues of Facebook, friending students, and what Steve Dembo calls "your new permanent record" (e.g., future employers Googling you ... and what they find) are very much on your mind.
• Many of you saw that your teachers seemed ill-trained and ill-prepared to use technology effectively.
• Many of you observed ed tech use that was really an automation of pre-digital practices (e.g., word processing instead of hand-writing a paper). How do we move beyond automation to what I call (borrowed and adapted from Zuboff, 1989) informating? Making our technology adoption lead to more valuable instruction?

Thanks to all of you for keeping my mind hopping.  One sign of a good class of students is waking up the next day with my brain still whirring. (Another is not being able to sleep after an evening class.)