Tech Camp (#CCSTech17) was held June 20-21 at GCHS. Several of you were there as participants, and three of our Social Studies colleagues presented: Gaundi Allen, ACMS, Angela Westmoreland, PFMS, and Cris Higginbotham, PFHS. We caught up with Cris "Higgie" Higginbotham to discuss her approach to teaching and how digital technology plays into her classroom. "Ms. Higgie's" classroom has been featured on this blog before, but in this conversation we got to talk more about her total approach to student learning and achievement.
Jonathan Frantz: What would you say is your overall "philosophy of teaching?" How do you approach planning your instruction?
Cris Higginbotham: First off, technology has to enhance the actual learning. It's not "this cool tool for this, and that cool tool for that." It has to enhance the learning. Sometimes bells and whistles are tempting, but you have to step back and make sure the bell and the whistle actually add something to it, and doesn't just sit on top looking pretty.
JF: Okay, but then why bother using tech at all?
CH: Students need it. They're going to go into a world where technology is relevant and important. College admissions look at the student's web presence: do they have a website, do they have a blog. Employers do the same thing. So if you're not teaching kids how to have a creditable web presence, you're doing them a disservice.
Look, tech is in everything we do now. There are very few things that you don't need tech to do.
JF: So what do you ask them to do with technology?
CH: It's really more about what I don't do, and that is, I don't allow them to use technology to take notes, to do the basic stuff. Instead, it becomes the product. They can take a picture of a diagram if they need to, but they have to write it because brain research shows they need that to learn.
JF: Do you find that your students are good with the tools you use?
CH: The thing is, this is why technology is important for us to do in the classroom: I have juniors and seniors who don't know how to attach a document. They don't know the difference between a share link and a URL. They don't actually know how to do what they need to be able to do. If we don't teach them, who's going to do it? How are they going to learn?
JF: What would you say to colleagues who don't know this stuff themselves? I can imagine readers asking themselves "Wait, what's a share link? What's a URL?" What would you say to them?
CH: It's time to learn. The day of "kids know how" is gone. Kids today are actually less knowledgeable about professional use of technology. When I gave an assignment to find a "cool" way to present, the kids came back with PowerPoint. Kids might have lots of access to technology, but they don't know how to use it to produce. They don't know how to use it in education. They don't know how to use it professionally. They don't know how it works.
Students now are digital consumers, not producers.
JF: I've noticed that you're all about student products. Why is it important for kids to be producers? Don't they just need to get down the important information we give them?
CH: They shouldn't. It goes back to brain research: If you can't take what you've been given and turn it into something new, explain it in a different way, or use it in a different context, you haven't really learned it.
Take today: I went into a session [at Tech Camp] and learned about a website I didn't know about. But if I don't do something with it now, I'm not going to remember it. What you do with it is part of the learning process, just like taking quizzes is part of the learning process.
I really pushed my American II kids this semester. Everything they learned, they had to create a product. They complained the whole time: "Again?" But every one of them passed that test: two "Bs" and all the rest "A." And the "Bs" were high.
JF: That's fantastic. The deeper processing that comes from making products rather than just taking notes really sounds like it pays off. So how would you say your philosophy of learning impacts your approach to how you teach history?
CH: We're working in American History II -- all of us teaching it at PFHS -- we're working to write discussion questions instead of notes, to make it more discussion-based, almost Socratic. We've already finished the first unit. They do a reading, online or in print. Then they get a list of discussion questions for the entire unit and it's their responsibility to attempt all the questions before they come to class. Where they answer the question, there's a column on the side for them to link a document to the question, so they're supporting their answer with some source. So then when I put the "presentation" on the board, their answers to the questions become the notes. We merged presentation, discussion, reading, and primary sources into one cohesive learning task.
As far as the sources, each group gets a stack, and they divvy them out. Whatever documents a student gets, they have to become the expert on those, but every student has access to all of them. Then we do activities that involve all the primary sources.
The point is, for every unit, there's a core set of primary sources that all the discussion and learning is centered around, and then they produce a product that shows their understanding of that learning.
JF: Sounds amazing! Thanks for your time, thoughts, and all you do for our students.
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