Easing back into the RW practice after some time away. . . . This quotation, from an article worth reading in full, is challenging me in all the right ways as I prepare to head back to the classroom next Tuesday.

As instructors, our challenge is to try and imagine how people learn who are different than we are. In all likelihood, most of our students are not going to learn, think, and engage in exactly the same ways that we do. Our goal is to try and be prepared, as much as we possibly can, for students who have different lives than we do. (Jenae Cohn, PhD, and Courtney Plotts, PhD)

H/T to Eric Hudson for sharing this, in my world, first.

I just read the first paragraph of A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, a book in which George Saunders presents and unpacks short stories “in which four Russians give a master class on writing, reading, and life.” The opening paragraph is so good that I stopped reading and immediately shared it with some of my colleagues, a former student, and now all of you. May you have someone in your life committed to helping you achieve your iconic space, to helping you become defiantly and joyfully yourself.

As you (may) know, the content in Klingbrief is not pre-arranged. Instead, it traces the zeitgeist of independent school education. What are educators reading and thinking about? Perhaps more important, what do they care about enough to read, think about, synthesize, write about, and submit to our editorial board? This month, you’ll find our typical random spread along with a tight focus on podcasts trying to help educators and students make meaning of the final days of 2020 and the first few days of 2021 — a dark and strange time in American (recent) history. The February issue is here, the archive is here, and the submission portal is here — all best viewed on a computer of some sort rather than a phone.

If you read Make Yourself Clear, you’ll know how much I love this visualization from the Twitter account of Andrew Wilkinson.

A decent sized part of my job most weeks involves writing. I’m often teaching writing, editing writing, or helping others develop strategies for communication that involves writing. A common question from most people, whether spoken or implied, is, will my argument succeed?

People hope to be correct. They hope to convince everyone with whom they communicate. And of course this never fully happens. Of course our arguments fail, at least a little, when they meet real ears, real minds, real hearts. A word is out of place, or worse, offends. A phrase is overly complicated and leaves a jumbled mess in the listener’s mind. Sound and meaning clash. On the diamond of language, there are so many ways to swing and miss. (For example, that last sentence. Its wrongness began when I didn’t specify that I was talking about a baseball diamond. As a reader, your mind likely went one way — perhaps toward marriage or at least toward jewels — until the image of swinging and missing jerked you back, like a curmudgeonly dog owner, toward my intended meaning.)

I call this process — of failure — the car buying theory of communication. The second you drive a new car off the lot, it loses value. The second you press send on an email, the second you begin speaking at a microphone, the second you publish a book, your intended communication begins to degrade.

But you’ve read Refreshing Wednesday before (all six of you), so you know there’s a silver lining, an invitation, call it a silver invitation because it’s Friday and the sun’s out. At the point of failure, at the point of the degradation of your communication, your opportunity as a communicator begins.

Talk and you’re going to learn about what people don’t understand. Write and you’re going to learn about what people fear. Propose and you’re going to learn about what people would prefer to ignore or the ways they are absolute geniuses at avoiding change or discomfort. Speak and you’re going to learn about people, in general, and your audience, in particular. Communicate and, best of all, you’re going to set the stage for something more important than your own outbound marketing, your own pushed notification, your own needs, your own knowledge. You’re going to set the stage for listening and learning.

The car loses value once you drive it from the lot, sure, but you get to drive it. You get to experience what it feels like to have actual wind in your actual hair. To move with someone from point A to point B to point C. These are good things, deeply human things.

I wrote this creative essay for some of my favorite people in ed. storytelling: Jessica, Ann, and Ari. Their vision is pure. Here’s a sound recording of the essay if you’re into that kind of thing. As you read, see if you can find the line from Robin Wall Kimmerer. I reveal it in the sources at the end.

A few months ago, I tweeted from the sideline of a soccer practice:

My son’s soccer coach just worked his team through the same play for 20 minutes. He then said, “that might happen once in the game tomorrow, but it could change the outcome one way or the other.”

I noted this scenario — publicly — because I thought it was a brilliant example of teaching. In a high stakes situation, you can only expect to be able to do the things you have practiced. Luck isn’t a viable strategy. I left the field seeing my own work in the classroom with a bit more clarity.

Again this week I had an experience where someone with a job title other than “teacher” reminded me of some very effective teaching practices — and pushed me to both consider and extend my own. For me, the lesson was heightened because it snuck up on me. I wasn’t expecting or looking for professional development. I was expecting to make ravioli from scratch.

Specifically, my family had signed up for “a cooking class where chefs and farmers from Agriturismo Constantino [would] teach participants how to make ravioli from scratch with ingredients found locally in the Calabria area.” At exactly noon on President’s Day (a day off from school), we connected to Zoom and heard the chatter of the Italian language mixed with English phrases and the clanking of chef’s tools. And after some quick introductions and orientation, we were up to our literal elbows in mounds of soft flour and dripping eggs. Exactly, in other words, where we wanted to be.

Looking back, it was clear that the chef wasn’t trained as a teacher. He forgot to think ahead a few times, forgot to tell us to get the water boiling or that we would need to convert some ingredient measurements. His skill and intuition and ability to improvise in the moment, no doubt, worked against some teaching basics: breaking down and presenting steps, articulating hidden or seemingly obvious knowledge, uncovering the uncommon parts of common sense. To butcher a bad phrase, those who can do, often can’t teach.

But, again looking back, that wasn’t quite right. Our chef turned out to be an especially good teacher in three particular ways.

1) Anticipating and heading off errors

As he led us through the recipe, the chef often stopped to predict our mistakes and redirect us. At one point, for example, just as we were about to set our dough aside, he told us we would probably need to add a little water to the mass to prevent it from drying out too quickly. A few steps later, right as I had dropped a blob of filling into a ravioli shell, he said, “some of you will just drop the filling onto the shell, but you want to roll it into a hard ball first. This will help it stay together when you put it in the water.”

We need teachers, of course, because the path to knowledge and skill acquisition is sometimes hidden or counterintuitive. You either have no idea where to walk or have to be told that what feels like the right way is actually the wrong way. A good teacher is there to point to the path, to walk with you until you’ve picked it up, and to watch with great interest as you begin to move on your own, maybe somewhere the teacher has never been.

2) Offering feedback at critical moments to ensure things are “up to spec”

At one point, the chef said, “now show me your sauce.” My daughter lifted our pot up to the camera and waited. When the chef looked at ours, he said, “it’s too thick. Add more milk.”

My daughter was disappointed. She wanted to impress this guy — a genuine Italian chef. But she had such a clear path forward, such a direct line to the improvement she sought, that she didn’t dwell on the tiny shame that pinked her cheeks. She added more milk, stirred the sauce, added a bit more, and then went back to the well for more feedback.

By this point, I was paying more attention to the teaching at hand than the ravioli. This chef had a standard in his mind. It wasn’t personal — he knew, through long research, what kind of sauce a ravioli wanted to swim in. Your sauce either had the right consistency or you had to make some kind of adjustment to bring it closer to spec. It didn’t matter if you were forty-something or eleven. If you were in the kitchen, you were worthy of feedback. The chef kept things moving, kept things light, but never took his eye off the gap between where his students were and where they needed to be.

3) Connecting with each and every student

I also noticed that, when transitioning to a major step in the process, the chef wouldn’t move on until he checked in with every student. He went student by student, calling them by the name in their Zoom frame, and made us show him our dough, our filling, our sauce, the final shape of our raviolis. Every student, and every student’s work, was seen, acknowledged, paid attention.

Miraculously, we were also “on the clock” — few tasks are as time bound as cooking — and the chef had a big event at the back end of our smaller event. He may have rushed a step or two in the process, but he never rushed past a student.

Bonus

So here’s where I’m a little envious of the chef from Calabria: the meaning and relevance of his lesson was literally baked into it. He ended class by making us eat our own cooking for homework. If our process worked, we had a great lunch. If our process was flawed, our lunch would follow suit. In my house, our ravioli was a bit chewy; the dough was too thick. We made a note on the recipe before tucking it into our favorite cookbook. Next time, we’ll cut the recipe with some 00 pastry flour and work the rolling pin more industriously.

As for my teaching, my note to self is more challenging and less certain: How can I design lessons that produce student work that has relevance and meaning for students? How can I help my students eat their own cooking and update their own recipes in response?

Here’s Tsedal Neeley, a Harvard Business School professor who studies global, virtual workforces, in conversation with Kevin Delaney. I like that she differentiates between “digital tool usage issues” and “etiquette” and refuses to compromise on the latter.

[When] people send an email, it could be even an FYI email—you better acknowledge it, in a remote environment, and say thank you. ‘Got it. Thanks.’ It’s something so small, but it conveys that I hear you. I see you. I appreciate it. To send out emails, or some emails, people have labored to generate it. And there’s no acknowledgement for it. It’s a big fail. It’s okay in an in-person environment where you see people. You’ll run into them, you’ll have lunch, you’ll have meetings. But in a remote environment where you hardly see people, that is unacceptable. Some people say, well, I can’t handle saying thank you. And to all these people: if you have digital tool usage issues, then that’s a whole other problem. But our etiquette has to be different in a remote environment in order to instill confidence in others.

Source: How to Succeed with Remote and Hybrid Work