I think it is safe to say that I am in “that” part of my doctoral studies -- three years in, past the point of no return, and exhausted -- and I can’t help but think that where I would like to be in five years is on a beach somewhere with a drink in my hand. But self-indulgent thinking aside, I do have a professional endgame in mind, which I will gladly share.
 
I love being a classroom teacher, and five years from now, I still plan on being one. When I started grad school, a number of my colleagues asked me if I really wanted to be out of the classroom… so soon. I was 28 when I started at USF, and thirty-something seemed awfully young to “retire” from teaching. Honestly, I was a bit frustrated hearing, person after person, that a doctorate would make me over-qualified to be a classroom teacher. (There’s such a larger conversation to be had about teacher preparation and standards for teaching and public perception of the qualifications required to teach, but I’ll leave that for another day.) So much has changed since I was last in graduate school. LCD projectors have replaced overheads, student laptops and tablets have dated the single computer lab, and tools for online communication and collaboration have liberated teachers from lesson planning for students working together in a face-to-face only environment. When the whole world of the classroom looks and feels differently than it did in 2008 when I last graduated, it would seem that it makes sense to re-consider what teaching and learning can -- and should -- look like. I’m back at USF in large part to undertake that process of investigation, to reconsider my own pedagogy and help push along others in the field toward more relevant curriculum design. If that’s part of my aim, then the classroom is the exact place I should be in five years. Plus, it’s where my professional heart is. I just can’t get enough of those teenage rapscallions.
 
And, although I struggle to imagine working entirely outside of the classroom, I also struggle to imagine my professional life existing solely within the four walls of the classroom. For the past few years, some other intellectual need has been drawing me out. Early on in my teaching career, I was introduced to the moniker “reflective practitioner,” and since then, I have aspired to become one, and a good one at that. I know I want to have one foot in the classroom, in practice; but, I also know that I would like one foot in spaces of reflection and research where I can refine my own teaching and promote best practices in our profession, especially around multimedia design and learning. So far, that has taken the form of writing for a practitioner audience around technology integration in the curriculum, and supporting teachers at my own school and others who are making the transition into 1:1 teaching and learning. I anticipate in the not-too-distant future that the “reflective” part of reflective practitioner will also include teaching about digital pedagogy and multimedia design at the graduate level and writing for other researchers as well as for teachers.
​ 
And don’t tell my husband, but I already have an idea brewing for the next book...

This summer, I spent some, shall we say, quality time with what I've come to affectionately call the Mayer Bible (aka: the 900+ page tome by Rich Mayer called the Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning), mostly in anticipation of a doctoral course I'm currently taking on multimedia instructional design, but also to better understand a medium I use often to communicate with my high school students. I do a great deal of multimedia work with my students, especially as a means of supplementing their reading instruction. Sometimes, my support of students comes in the form of a video think-aloud; other times it is a podcast with an accompanying PDF; and others still it is an excerpt of a novel with its corresponding selection from an audiobook. In delving into the Mayber Bible, I started to rethink my reading instruction practices, wondering if my methods were ineffective (Well, that’s not totally true. I started to rethink absolutely everything I have ever done that relies on multimedia instruction...and judged myself).

Multimedia Take-Aways (so far):
​ A few things stood out to me as worthy take-aways for future instructional design: First, that students -- all students, not just “visual learners” -- learn best through a combination of words and pictures rather than words alone. Second, that the information we give students needs to be integratedso that words and images show up as close to simultaneously as possible. Third, if we want to expand the (fixed) capacity of the working memory, we need to carefully present our information in two modes: visual and auditory, but must be careful not to give redundant information, or overload one channel in our dual-channel sensory memory.

Multimedia Applied to Reading Pedagogy
 So, where does that leave me? Honestly, a bit confused. As you can probably tell by now, I’m seriously focused on (writing my dissertation on) multimedia worked examples and their efficacy as a teaching tool for supporting differentiated reading instruction. So, what happens when I’m reading a passage aloud while students follow along in their books? Or, what happens when a struggling student plays a chunk of an audiobook while reading along in his copy? In each of these cases, the working memory has to simultaneously process and integrate disparate sources of information (two different forms of words). So, wouldn’t that be a breach of the split-attention principle? A violation of the multimedia principle? Does this principle apply equally to students with low and high prior knowledge? How do I reconcile the theories with the practice, as anecdotally, the lessons above seem to work well for many (the majority) of my students. Is it because they are all novices, and the expertise reversal effect hasn’t taken hold yet? What is the right course of action to take in this scenario, and why?

Good Teaching
 Questions aside, perhaps what I appreciate most about the context for the Mayer Bible (presented in the opening chapters, most especially in Chapter 6) is the value placed on “Good Teaching.” The authors remind teachers that the effect of teaching with technology is about the teaching, not the technology. Technology might equip a teacher to do things she couldn't do before, but the reason it works isn't because it's on a screen, but rather, because it is well designed. Mayer calls on us to focus on crafting quality learning experiences for students. I love that message.

As an English teacher and as a writer, I have spent much of my adult life deconstructing what makes for a good story. Each year in February, as my sophomores dive into The Great Gatsby (which is, in my opinion, one of the most finely crafted pieces of literature ever created), I get excited all over again to walk the halls of Gatsby’s mansion, to sit down for an awkward cup of tea with Daisy bedecked in lavender and pearls, or to watch Nick bumble his way through a series of over-the-top, parties. Every year, I wait with expectancy to rediscover the essence of the story: the human vulnerability, and the quest for personal growth and change. Somehow, after studying this novel for ten years and counting, Gatsby never disappoints.

Lucky for us, we are living during what feels like nothing short of a storytelling renaissance. Recently, a number of creative types have been expanding on what it means to expertly tell a story -- from TED talks on “framing the story” with Pixar writer and producer, Andrew Stanton, or novelist/art aficionado Tracy Chevalier, to highly addictive podcast series like Serial. Beyond the classic genre of narrative fiction, writers, musicians, and visual artists alike have taken to finding new ways to hook an audience: through multimedia. We consume hours of podcasts, photo essays, online radio, viral videos, blogs, screencasts, web essays, and the like, each week, and often find out about our next story “fix” through social media sites like Twitter or Facebook. Much like Gatsby, the draw for these stories is the “essence”: the moment of metamorphosis in which a character transforms, an ideology changes, a vulnerability is exposed. That “human context,” as storyteller Peter Aguero describes it, allows for connection between the storyteller and the audience. Chevalier suggests that humans “are wired...to tell stories. We tell stories all the time about everything;...we do it because the world is kind of a crazy, chaotic place, and sometimes stories, we're trying to make sense of the world a little bit, trying to bring some order to it.”

While the human context piece -- that promise of connection of that possibility for personal growth as a result --  draws us in, what keeps our attention is the way in which modern day multimedia storytellers have been designing their stories. Multimedia design is particularly important for academic storytelling, in which the teachers need to give the message -- the lesson -- the best possible chance at “sticking.” Rich Mayer, professor of psychology at UC Santa Barbara and arguably the authoritative voice on multimedia learning, outlines the technological nuts and bolts of what makes for an effective multimedia story in his Handbook of Multimedia Learning (2014). He calls on instructional designers (instructional storytellers, if you will) to bend technology to support the learner’s cognitive processes rather than bend the learner to “serve technology” (16). In its most basic form, this means acknowledging that people learn better from words and pictures together than from words alone. Specifically how instructional designers de-clutter their presentations to streamline the story is a much longer discussion -- but one I will likely take on in the coming weeks.

To me, the most exciting part of all of this is where the artists’ and theorists’ ideas intersect. Regardless of the medium, the media, or the message, the most important aspect of an excellent story is the extent to which it appeals to the listener. Is it audience-based? Human-centered? Contextualized? If it can consistently do these things, it just may be Great.

Okay, friends. It's time for a presentation intervention. In Power Up, Jen and I write: "We’ve all experienced death by PowerPoint. (They are called bullet points for a reason, right?) Let’s do our part as educators and teach the world about effective presentation design. Few of our students are going to match the polish or hours of practice that professional speakers achieve, but they can still understand the basics of choosing thoughtful images and not filling their slides with text" (150). A logical place for us to start is by modeling what effective presentations look like every time we fire up the LCD projector and cue up our slides. But, where do we start? With research, of course! I've been doing a lot of reading lately from Rich Mayer's Handbook of Multimedia Learning, (which is a tome if I've ever seen one. It clocks in at some 900+ pages!) and from Garr Reynolds' Presentation Zen Design, and have synthesized five key take-aways that any teacher (or any presenter, really) can use to avoid Death by PowerPoint. Check it out:

We are officially knee-deep into summer. July tends to mark the transition out of the slothful period of recovery from the previous school year into the inspired period of optimistically planning the next school year. It is during this phase that I sunk into reading Ken Robinson’s latest book, Creative Schools.

Many educators know Robinson from his popular 2006 TED talk, “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” which has been viewed more than 33 million times. Some of us have even had the good fortune to attend one of his keynotes at an educational conference (I saw him a few years back at NCTE and still chuckle over some of his witty one-liners). Yet, somehow overlooked is his longstanding record as an educational researcher, writer, and reformer. He has been “in education,” as it were, for 40 years; he holds a PhD in Education, was a professor of Education at the University of Warwick, UK, and has written countless articles and books on cultivating creativity in schools. Heck, in 2003, he was even knighted by the Queen of England for his service to the arts. Suffice it to say, Sir Ken is an authority on transforming education. 

In Creative Schools, he addresses the paradox of teaching and learning in a standards-obsessed system that touts a desire to mold unique and creative students. Through a series of case studies of educators and institutions that are transforming the way that they “do school,” Robinson makes the case for bold and courageous change. “The challenge,” he writes, “is not to fix the system but to change it; not to reform it but to transform it. The great irony in the current malaise in education is that we actually know what works. We just don’t do it on a wide enough scale. We are in a position as never before to use our creative and technological resources to change that.”

Robinson’s opening chapters acknowledge that now is a time of great tension within the education community: tension between teachers who would sooner do anything except “teach to the test” and Washington bureaucrats who are embarrassed by the consistently low rankings American students score on international exams; between traditional teachers who question the rush toward technology in the classroom and their colleagues who think that understanding how to employ technology with purpose is a prerequisite for meaningful participation in contemporary society; between the antiquated arrangement of our public schools as the last remnant of an industrial factory model (complete with division of labor and factory-reminiscent bells) and a workforce that demands imagination and ingenuity.

These tensions have had a deleterious effect on the status of education today. Robinson contends: “Most industrial processes generate huge amounts of waste and low-value by-products. So does education. As we’ve seen, they include dropping out, disengagement, low self-esteem, and limited employment opportunities for those who don’t succeed, or whose talents are not valued in the system.” The solution to these problems (or perhaps more accurately, the solutions) is the focus of the remaining chapters of the book.

At the heart of Creative Schools is a call to action, hollered from the rooftops of schools that are doing something very right. He highlights the innovations of alternative learning environments like the North Star center and Minddrive, as well as the good work of leaders who transform learning within an existing system, like Dr. Laurie Barron of Smokey Road Middle School and Richard Gerver of Grange Primary School. He deconstructs what works at places like High Tech High School, a charter school in San Diego, where one of the first things to go were the bells. And he leaves readers with a lingering sense of purpose, established from even the first pages of the book: “Revolutions,” Robinson argues, “don’t wait for legislation. They emerge from what people do at the ground level. Education doesn’t happen in the committee rooms of the legislatures or in the rhetoric of politicians. It’s what goes on between learners and teachers in actual schools. If you’re a teacher, for your students you are the system. If you’re a school principal, for your community you are the system. If you’re a policymaker, for the schools you control you are the system.” 

As far as I’m concerned, that strikes me as best news in this book. Because it’s summer, I’m pumped, and that’s a system I can change.