The essay Puzzling it All Together synthesizes the many topics and courses my education at Michigan State covered, and develops a narrative of how they interrelate. At the beginning of my journey it seemed as though each class was an isolated and independent class. As I advanced through the curriculum the interconnection of each course revealed itself forming a cohesive puzzle.You can access PDF copy of this essay here.
Nathan Kleinschuster
Synthesis Essay
3/10/2018
Putting all the pieces of your education together is like assembling a puzzle. The natural way to put together a puzzle is to start with the outer edges and work your way inward. It’s easy to identify the outer pieces but after that things get muddier; more abstract. There are times when it seems like none of the pieces match or some are even missing. Much like higher education, puzzles require patience, persistence, and fortitude. When I first announced to friends and family that I decided on educational technology for a master's degree they were puzzled, yet supportive. They did not see how educational technology and music education fit together. In all honesty, I was not quite sure either; but just like a puzzle, now that I’m fitting in the last few pieces the final picture is becoming clear.
Integrating technology into my classroom was initially an act of survival. My first year of teaching was not going well. Organization and discipline in the school were not going well. My coworkers were “dropping like flies” and daily substitutes were taking their place. The traditional view of education, the very same teaching methods that took me from kindergarten to college, were failing hundreds of students. I reached out trying to grab onto anything that worked. By chance I blundered (or maybe even pushed) into electronic music composition; structured via specific learning goals and open ended projects. It was not until almost a year later that I discovered that what I grasped by chance was a part of a movement. It was even longer before I began understanding why what I was doing was working, or how it fit into a global movement.
The maker movement seemed silly to me at first. A bunch of people “discovered” that kids like to make cool things using the latest technology. “This is no different than those toothpick bridges we made back in shop class” I thought. The Adapting Innovative Technology to Education class at Michigan State University (MSU) laid the groundwork for teaching within the maker movement. We also learned that there was so much more to the movement then just building stuff. Equally important were the ideas of sharing and playing. Makers (of any age) need to productively play with their tools and share what they develop with the outside world. In order to provide time for my students to play while maintaining the structure they needed to learn; I needed to throw out my tradition and learned view of what teaching looked like.
The Counseling and Educational Psychology (CEP) class, Teaching Students Online, equipped me with the tools I needed to develop and drive my transformation from a 20th to a 21st century teacher. Teaching Students Online changed how I looked at my job description. I’m no longer a teacher but a facilitator of learning. Instead of standing at the head of the class dictating each step of every lesson, I learned to utilize Learning Management Systems (LMS) to restructure brick and mortar classes into virtual communities. This restructuring has many advantages, especially in “maker” style classrooms.
Google Classroom, my preferred LMS, does the preparation work of structuring assignments and instruction. I generate online content much in the same way other teachers create paper worksheets. Students learn new curriculum through homemade instructional videos embedded on Google Classroom and all the work they complete is submitted online. Google Classroom and my role as a facilitator of learning gives me the freedom to support my scholars with individualized attention.
Without a doubt this has been the greatest shift in my (admittedly short) pedagogical career. I recognize that my students thrive when they are given free reign to work toward a goal in their own way. Some choose to complete each project following the order I recommend through Google Classroom. Others prefer to jump head first into their work and only refer back to the resources I provide online when they get stuck. Either way, what I really want most is for my students to develop into independent and self-motivated problem solvers.
The ability to learn new skills from written and video resources is extremely important. In the era of YouTube dominance almost any skill can be learned online. I experienced this first hand in CEP 810 Teaching Understanding with Technology. I needed to learn a new skill for a project using only YouTube tutorial videos as a source. This radically changed the way I approach instruction in my classroom. The most important skill my scholars can develop in my music class is the ability to learn from and utilize a resource with little outside help. I want the kids in my class to be able to follow and extract information from the instructional videos I create. This skill will serve my students for life regardless of what the world or the newest technologies can throw at them. Before enrolling at Michigan State University, I was always taught to emphasize and assess the outcome. I have shifted my priorities and no longer focus on the end result of my student’s work. Instead I place the greatest importance on the learning journey they walked to complete the project.
One incredible learning journey I took within the greater masters in educational technology (MAET) puzzle involved tackling a “Wicked Problem.” CEP 812 Applying Educational Technology to Practice presented a host of common problems in education which have no easy (or existing) solution. Witnessing the overall failure of my school to be successful, I was drawn to the “reinvent everything about teaching” group. This group formed a think-tank composed of four educators from different content and age groups. Through collaboration we confronted what was promised to be an impossible task head on. The multi-faceted solution we developed to reinvent teaching included classroom design, creativity in questioning, and my developing understanding of LMS. Without the support of my colleagues and the wickedness of this challenge, I’m not sure if I would have started assembling the different puzzle pieces of my education into a coherent whole.
Tackling the “wicked problem” helped me realize that my developing methods to facilitate education were just bits and pieces. Intrigued, I dug into theories discussed in previous classes. Piaget’s Constructivism and Papert’s Constructionism both covered in CEP 811, Adapting Innovative Technology to Education, functioned as the theoretical backbone of introducing the maker movement in schools. This backbone is supported by the Technology, Pedagogy, and Content Knowledge (TPACK) Framework introduced in CEP 810 Teaching Understanding with Technology. These theories justify inquiry based learning and allow for the “play time” necessary for successful making. TPACK views technology as an integral tool for learning, not an outside or foreign source of teaching. Although I was unaware of it at the time, the introductory Master of Arts in Educational Technology (MAET) curriculum was laying the theoretical base I would need to defend my developing practice.
I decided to further my understanding by researching the academic outcomes of blended learning in CEP 822, Approaches to Educational Research. In my undergraduate program, I tended to hold my nose when asked to complete academic research. I felt that there was a disconnect between “best practices” on a piece of paper and how it translated into the real world. Many well-learned educators don’t know what it Is really like to be in the trenches. To my surprise, we actually discussed this divide in class. The disconnect I had long felt revealed itself to be a commonly held belief among teachers in our country. I knew that at some point I would be challenged to defend my practices and did not want to be caught unprepared.
I found the research in CEP 822 to be different from research I had completed previously and also more applicable to my career. In the past, I had simply dug through academic papers to find passages I could quote in an essay. Instead CEP 822 drove me to become curious about a specific topic and educate myself on that topic. The alternative research process used in CEP 822 forced me to be open minded when selecting sources. The digging for quotes I did in my undergraduate program biased my research to only find information that would support the main idea of my paper. Although this was discouraged in CEP 822 I found myself innately more open minded while researching. I genuinely wanted to learn more about a topic and therefore had no preconceived biases towards specific findings.
Although I understood the theory behind my teaching method and believed that it was a more effective reinvention of traditional teaching; I did not know how to gauge its impact on my students. Quantifying and assessing academic outcomes is difficult in music education. Once you move beyond the basics of theory, accomplishment in music becomes highly subjective. I don’t have the resources or expertise to organize a high level research study standard in pedagogy academia. Instead I was able to repurpose a solution from a surprising source; a course from my serious game design certification. MI 841 Understanding Users introduced new research and report methods that are not commonly used in the education industry. The ethnographic research techniques we learned focused on developing a profile of an “intended user” and how that user reacts to my product’s design. These techniques are often used by understaffed usability departments in the private business world and are therefore more direct and manageable than the massive academic studies common in education. For this reason I can use the Understanding Users process to gather feedback on how my “users” (students) interact with and respond to my teaching. When creating new content for my class, I can target specific learner profiles and think of how that user will interact with my lesson design.
Pushing the last piece of a puzzle into place is exciting. Knowing that the struggle is over and you fit every part snuggly together elicits a strong sense of accomplishment. You may feel silly for ever doubting that you could do it; for ever thinking that a piece was missing. In time, all of the frustrations will become a memory. It’s great to finally be able to sit back and enjoy the picture that you worked so hard to assemble. Even though you knew what the picture would look like the whole time because it was displayed on the front of the box, it is still amazing to watch the transformation take place right in front of you. The difference between puzzles and education is that the picture you put together from your education is a snapshot of your future, it has not been displayed on a box, I am not sure what my picture will look like when I finally fit in that last piece at the end of this semester. What I do know is that each piece of my education will undoubtedly make the portrait of my future, regardless of it being in education or another field, brighter. No matter what image forms on the front of the box, I am confident that the journey has been worth the hours spent fitting the pieces together. Whatever career I pursue, my experiences and thought provoking discussions in the MAET program have prepared me to excel.