Teachers: Does the current political climate upset you? Let's do our jobs better.

2008 was a great year to be a social studies teacher. The excitement over Obama’s candidacy and eventual win fueled an interest in government and history that made it easy to engage students. Students wanted to talk politics and understand how the system worked. We live- blogged debates together and turn out for our mock election was almost 100%. The message of hope and change connected with youth in a way that would be completely absent from any side in the politics of the last year.

The excitement over Obama’s win was fiercely opposed by a demographic that I neither quite understood or felt connected to. As the Tea Party movement began building in 2009, people like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh were whipping their followers into a frenzy over claims of tyranny, communism, and a variety of other charges. Obama was burned in effigy and appeared on protest posters in a Nazi uniform complete with Hitler stache. When Obama made a speech asking students to work hard and stay in school in September 2009, there was an outcry from the anti-Obama movement about the President’s “obvious” attempt to invade our schools and brainwash our students. I remember feeling particularly disturbed by that and felt that the PUSA deserved a certain level of deference. Lately I have been seeing the same level of ridiculousness from the other side and I find it more than a little hypocritical and troublesome.

If the current political climate upsets you, the good news is that you do not have to throw a brick through a Starbucks window or hold a sign in a crowd. You have already chosen a job in which you can make an incredible amount of difference. The key to doing that is to do a better job though. I don’t mean that as in teachers are not doing a good job and our education system is broken type of way. Nor does it mean that if you teach a certain way then everybody will be enlightened and we won’t have elections like the one we just endured. You as an individual don’t have that much power. It does mean that you have a responsibility to engage students in critically weighing ideas and using evidence to support conclusions. It is a lofty goal and we won’t achieve it by living in textbooks and following unimaginative curriculum guides. Engaging students in these ideas is possible and it is something that we all need to be better at.

Here are a few ideas to keep in mind:

Understand That Media Literacy = Literacy
The nature of media and the news has evolved a great deal since 2008. When Obama was voted into office, the iPhone was just over a year old and the iPad was still 2 years away. Facebook only had 100 million (3.5% of the current 2.79 billion) users and Twitter was in its infancy. The rise of the mobile app was just beginning but viral videos (mostly through YouTube) were powerful as evidenced by the return of Tina Fey as Sarah Palin on a show that nobody actually watched on Saturday nights. Memes in their current form were yet to catch on as a social media fueled communication phenomenon. The music industry had already been through its grudging CDs, Napster, to iPod/iTunes path to transformation with streaming set to change it even more. The movie/TV industry was just starting down a path that unfortunately has not killed Comcast yet. Most importantly though, the news industry was continuing its slow and painful decline that continues to leave us with a gaping detritus filled void of dubious information from questionable sources.  


What that means is our students are plugged into a dynamic and information rich environment, the impact of which we truly do not understand yet. Our job is to help them navigate and make sense of that environment and not to pretend it does not exist during the 7-8 hours a day they spend in school.

Literacy is the process of decoding and encoding the various forms of communication that we interact with. The connected world that we navigate bombards us with information that needs to be understood, prioritized, acted on, or discarded. Reading and writing remains the basis for that but we cannot expect progress if it is not practiced within the context of connectivity. If adolescents are coming to our classes that do not reflect (or at least acknowledge) the connected environments that they live in, then we are missing a great opportunity.

The most important skill we need to practice with students is sourcing. They need to closely analyze every source to determine where it came from, who created it, what the purpose is, and if there are potential biases or assumptions that underly the conclusions in it. The goal should be getting students to the point where they can determine if a source is a reliable source of information or not. They need to understand that all items in their social media feeds and Google search results are not equal. This should be scaffolded at first using teacher selected sources in the classroom but eventually we need to be assessing students’ ability to source in the wild world of the internet. In order to do this the classroom space should be dynamic and connected to reflect the outside world.

Embed Social Media in the Classroom Experience
Like it or not, social media plays a huge role in the lives of most of us. Choosing not to participate does not change the fact that politics and beliefs are impacted by it. You can dislike the content and tone of Trump’s tweets all you want but he has used it brilliantly to connect with and energize his base. A base, by the way, that loves that his tweets launch you into bouts of righteous indignation.

The use of social media in the classroom opens up opportunities to analyze the messages that are being sent out in a way that students most likely will not unless we train them to. Their use reflects the basic need for human connection but also exhibits the vulgar and lascivious nature of adolescent communication that has always existed. The problem is that nothing done online ever really disappears (even Snapchat) and we need to help them understand this. Engaging them in purposeful activities (KQED DoNow is one example) gives them practice in using it for good. Creating digital work and portfolios and having them share through various social media channels helps them develop a positive digital footprints. Students need to see exemplars of appropriate use and participate in the creation of content rather than the mindless interaction with and consumption of it. Think about that yourself the next time you are about to share or retweet a meme.

Is there a risk with using social media? Of course. Students will have access to uncontrolled space. That can be scary and there will be problems. That needs to be anticipated and planned for. If you are still questioning whether we should be using social media in the classroom then you are asking the wrong questions.

Stop Ignoring the Science of Teaching
The same people who demand that climate change deniers examine the peer reviewed evidence to support their conclusions often tune out when it comes to the science of teaching. When research is presented, the tendency of many teachers is to ignore it because it comes from somebody that is no longer in the classroom and has no idea how things work in real life. There are shysters and opportunists out there but the vast majority of educational researchers are doing legitimate work and we need to partner with them.

Read education journals, review current research, and stop dismissing those that do it. Do your own action research and share your results with your colleagues both within your building and beyond. Strive to utilize and seek to master proven instructional strategies such as the ones identified by Robert Marzano as high yield strategies. Your professional and reasoned judgement shaped through experience has value. As a group though we need to stop talking so much about intuition and feelings and start demonstrating results.

Engage Students in Discussion and Challenge Their Ideas
A good teacher is able to help kids master content and skills. A great teacher connects with students in way that makes them rethink their preconceived ideas of the world. Greatness is not achieved by letting ideas or your teaching style itself go unchallenged. Chances are if you are doing the above things then you are already doing this but it deserves to be continually re-evaluated.

One way way to challenge the status quo is through good old fashioned discussions. It is not good enough to accept black and white answers in the classroom. Political parties and those who affiliate with them are neither good nor evil. Those who want to cut government regulations are not tyrants and those who want to help the poor are not communists. When students dismiss ideas as stupid we need to probe the underlying assumptions both of the originator of the idea and those that are passing judgment on them. Chances are that different perspectives are guided by different but equally valid values and it deserves the investment in time to hash those out. Any time that we accept simple answers we perpetuate an us versus them mentality that is detrimental to civil discourse.

The Choices Program out of Brown University has an excellent lesson idea for exploring the values that guide our beliefs. Use it once to help students understand their own values. Use it again but have them approach it from the perspective of another person and you have the beginning of a great discussion.

Conclusion
It would be overly idealistic and naive to think that we as educators can resolve the rampant divisiveness and ugliness of the current political climate by what we do in our classrooms. We are in a position to contribute in a positive way though and as professionals we owe it to ourselves and our students continually be improving on the way that we address it.