Confessions of a Basketball Geek

As a crafty veteran with 13 weeks of experience teaching in a 1:1 program, I realize that the thing that best prepared me to teach in this new environment was the experience I have as a basketball coach. I never realized how similar teaching World History and coaching basketball were before the implementation of our tablet program. The goal of getting kids to improve, reach their potential and achieve success has always been the same for both subjects, but the avenues to these goals have never been so parallel.

The ability to embrace change and search for the best way to do things is important if you want to keep your sanity in the ever-changing landscape of available technologies to utilize in the classroom. In my recent past, terms like Ning, Wiki, Slideshare, Twitter, X Timeline, Creative Commons, Flat Classroom and UStream were completely unknown to me. However, once I dove into the world of technology and gained some basic information, I could translate technology implementation into a basketball mentality that allowed me to keep a basic level of coherence in my mind as I learned. When someone told me Plurk was the new Twitter, I directly correlated this to how the Dribble Drive Offense is the new Flex Offense in basketball.  To stay on the front end of the learning curve, the ability to adapt to change in technology (and basketball) is necessary. What I have come to learn is that each of these new technologies provides an opportunity to enhance a portion of class; just like a new way to guard a Pick ‘n'  Roll is a way to enhance your defense in basketball. Every year in basketball, we try and incorporate new ideas to give us an edge over our opponent and now I find that same competitiveness in creating lesson plans with a focus on finding the best ways to get my message across to my students. Obviously, a bit of trial and error is necessary to determine what works for you. I have found that my personal quest to learn motivates me to find the best way to teach World History material to my students and to teach basketball plays to my players. I need to use the most current and most relevant methods available to me. This has helped me become a continual learner and my learning has enabled me to invigorate many lessons. It would be difficult to win games on the court by playing basketball the way I learned and played it years ago. I have had to advance my coaching because the game has advanced in order to provide my players every opportunity to be competitive. Likewise, it would not be fair to my students to teach them about World History the way I was taught years ago if I want them to be competitive in today's game of life.

One piece of technology that I have come to rely upon on a regular basis and believe has greatly enhanced my class is Ning. Ning provides the ability to use a blog to allow students to comment and provide feedback to each other in a public arena.  We embed other Web 2.0 artifacts into our Ning site as well. One of the greatest benefits of our 1:1 program is our ability to use a variety of tools to engage students. Students can blog, create discussion forums, and utilize visuals all in the same electronic learning space and have the ability to comment on each other's work and ideas.  This has raised the level of writing above what students achieved with my former methods of having students turn work in to me, the teacher, an audience of one, to evaluate.  It was a minor blow to my ego when I realized that many students cared more and put more effort into their writing when it was going to be read by their peers instead of by only me. My ego recovered when I quickly realized how this led to an increased quality of work and analysis.  Peer feedback has allowed students to provide more analysis in class and discover what is good and bad in their classmates work. The correlation to basketball is the use of film to show what is working well and what is not working so well. The fact that the content is archived is an added bonus, as you can see incremental improvements in specific areas of students' work. Having so much class work on the internet has provided a great deal of transparency to what we are doing in class.  In the same vein as getting crowds to basketball games to see if the players have improved from game to game and having articles and scores printed in the paper, much of our classes' work is available to anyone with access to the internet to evaluate if the students are learning.  I do think the direction of learning in this transparent fashion emphasizes not how much the teacher knows, but how much the students learn which is essential in creating a successful classroom environment.

I also have realized that, on a regular basis, when trying a new way to teach and enhance my material by utilizing technology in the classroom, I get the same feeling in the pit of my stomach as I do before a basketball game.  The thought I get is that I really don't know how things are going to turn out, but I have learned that the feeling of the unknown drives a quest for more knowledge and a better way to teach or coach. Legendary basketball coach John Wooden summed up this interesting desire to get more information to do your job better, that equates to both coaching kids in the classroom and teaching them on the court when he said, "It's what you learn after you know it all that counts."

Matt Hixenbaugh - Upper School History, Varsity Basketball Coach- MICDS