Challenges for 21st Century Educators

I teach 9th grade science in the Central Bucks school district in southeastern PA.  In my 13 years of experience as an educator, I've taught every grade from 7th to 12th, including biology, geology, astronomy, ecology, physical science, oceanography, and evolution.  

As a teacher, I feel pretty spoiled.  I get to teach great kids in a pretty affluent area, surrounded by an awesome science department.  My school district is the third largest in Pennsylvania, and we have over eighty science teachers between our five middle and three high schools!  We all meet as a department at least a couple times a year, and the majority of the time we have together is spent discussing, sharing, and collaborating.  Everything really is a team effort, and we all continually bounce ideas off each other so we can refine our own activities and teaching methods. 

Including myself, there are about fifteen teachers who just teach 9^th grade science.  So when we meet as a grade level department, we still have a relatively large group of teachers, and therefore a ton of ideas to share.  The reason I feel so fortunate is not just the number of competent, talented science educators I have access to on a regular basis, but moreover, the fact that we are so willing to share our lessons, activities, assessments, just about everything really.  If one teacher finds a great lab activity and revises it to make it clearer and more effective for our curriculum, she is more than willing to email everyone a copy on the spot.  Better still, we have a database of resources, found, created by teachers, which is maintained on a Microsoft OneNote collaborative notebook.  No one is possessive of his or her creations, and the rising tide lifts all boats.  Our former science coordinator had a wonderful outlook on his role in inspiring teachers to continually improve and try new things:  to get the most out of anyone, give them autonomy and lots of opportunities to share ideas that work.  People are more open to taking risks and try new ideas when they aren’t required to do so.  It is this collaborative spirit that has made our science department so strong and diverse. 

Aside from this in-person network, I haven’t thus far established much of an online presence.  In fact, I am a bit of a social media recluse.  I don’t have a go-to forum that I use regularly, although I have a friend in California who I communicate with throughout the year so we can “geek out” on science teacher stuff.  Often, however, I seek out rich science content online especially through a few YouTube channels that I subscribe to, namely Veritasium, SmarterEveryDay, SciShow, and Vsauce.  The quality of the content these channels produce is amazing to me, and in the last few years especially, they have been instrumental in helping me come up with new ways to present ideas to my students as well as just allowing me to dig deeper into the science itself, thereby increasing my own understanding.  Furthermore, they provide a great outlet for students to be inspired by science in ways that I might not always be able to show them in the classroom setting.  For just one example, check out “The Spinning Tube Trick” from Derek at Veritasium.  It’s a great demo that gets kids to think and then encourages them to come up with their own explanations and try them out before finding out the solution.

There are not many blogs I follow regularly, but one that I do like to check in on is called WaitButWhy.  The brainchild of Tim Urban, this is the absolute ultimate in long-form blogging.  His posts are sometimes rambling and random (not to mention they often take literally hours to read—a single post, that is!)  The topics he addresses are all over the map, and he goes months between posts, so this is not your traditional blog.  Actually, Urban just published his first post in over a year, and I don’t doubt that it took him most of the past year to actually write the thing.  But his writing style, dry wit, and the quirky perspective he brings to every subject he tackles makes his blog something truly special—special enough, in fact, that he attracted the attention of one Elon Musk, and was later asked to do a TED talk on the art of procrastinating (actually, he spoke about procrastinating in his preparation for said TED talk).  

I think one of the biggest challenges that educators face today is competing in the marketplace of ideas and getting students to slow down, and actually THINK.  My generation (I’m 36) is probably the last generation to even remember a pre-internet world, and to even be able to compare what we now think of as Web 2.0 to the original “World Wide Web”.  The middle school students I teach have never known a world without wifi, YouTube, social media, DVR, Amazon, Netflix, Wikipedia.  It's easy to lose site of this fact when trying to teach students about, say, the rock cycle.  But we really need to find as many inroads into their world in order to reach our students and get them to value not just the easy access to whatever technology they have or want, but the ongoing quest for knowledge and the learning process itself.