Watertown 1 to 1

A teacher walked into my room yesterday and, without any prompt from me, said, “You think I’m a dinosaur, don’t you?”

“What do you mean?” I asked. And he went on to say that the session I hosted about social networks and the seminar I held on millennial learners imply that the “tried and true” teaching methods some have been using for decades are somehow outmoded.

I explained to my colleague that I never intended my presentations to be taken as personal criticism. I politely explained that studies and personal observation suggest that the teens in our classrooms today are in fact different from those who were there 10 or 20 years ago. But are the adults in the same classroom dinosaurs? I don’t think so.

First consider this about the dinosaurs. T-Rex, the king of the dinosaurs, roamed the face of the earth for around 20 million years. Twenty million years isn’t too bad! Maybe classroom teachers will be as lucky. More importantly, however, there are fundamental differences between humans (of whom teachers are a subset - contrary to what some students might say) and dinosaurs.

I’ve read that climatic changes caused the extinction of a species that couldn’t adapt to change. But humans are amazingly adaptable. We can live and reproduce in the harshest, most varied environments imaginable. We can walk on the surface of the sun-cooked moon and swim with the manta ray in the ocean deep. We can even carve out fairly productive lives on the snowy plains of South Dakota.

What evidence do I see of teachers in my school adapting to the learning styles of the so-called millennial learner? Consider my friend the history teacher (renowned for his abilty to make history a story that his student want to hear) who provides time for collaborative movie making projects. Or consider the English teacher (who defends a teacher-centered classroom lead by a wise and learned instructor) who has his students creating wikis on novels and short stories. Finally, don’t forget the teacher who has her students using Ning to create a social network centered on Romeo and Juliet. Each student has created an alter ego based on a character in the play. There is even a “I Hate the Capulets” network that some of her students have started.

These are just a few of the many examples I’ve seen in the last two days. No, we aren’t dinosaurs. We are adapting. But the adaptation isn’t accidental and its not happening because I or the administration is imposing it. I think its happening because teachers want to be better teachers. I doubt dinosaurs thought much about self-improvement.

One last thing to consider about the dinosaur: their evolutionary descendants today are the birds. So the songbirds I hear on a quiet summer morning, the beautifully colored tropical birds that inhabit the tropics and all the other birds that soar above the earth are what became of the dinosaurs. There’s a metaphor in all of this, I think. Maybe you can find it.