It all started during my days at EPISD when Margaret Johnson, our fearless elementary Science facilitator would send us to workshops at the Butterfield Trail location, which was a conference room attached to a small warehouse that collected old books from the EPISD libraries that were slated to be shredded. I was a young teacher with very little pocket money who was always looking for a deal because most of my extra money was spent at Eraser Dust, the local teacher supply store, to buy such lovely items as inspirational teaching posters, bulletin board borders and cute pencils and erasers that could be given as prizes for students. I had a beautiful classroom, but empty bookshelves and since I was only in the middle of my Scholastic book point scheme to purchase a classroom library for my students, I had slim pickings for my students to choose from. Now there are many ways to score books for your classroom, one is to hock books for Scholastic, another is to be part of a book adoption committee so that you can get access to free samples from book companies, but none of those angles could score me the prize possession of every American classroom since the day the classroom was invented, and that was, A SET OF ENCYCLOPEDIAS. You couldn't really buy them because they were too expensive, the library only had a couple of sets on hand, so it was hard to share them with the entire school, so you really either had to inherit a set or buy one at garage sale, and I was too busy raising two girls to go about raiding garage sales to find one.
Why encyclopedias? Well, what if little Johnny asked the question why is the sky blue? Could I answer that question off the top of my head? The answer now is yes, but back then no, and I didn't want to squash his curiosity. You see, to a teacher, when a kid starts asking questions and getting excited about whatever it is you are learning in class, you don't want to stop that momentum. Having a set of encyclopedias would mean that every time a kid asked a question, I could send them to the encyclopedias and they could look up the question themselves. This teaches kids to A. not be afraid to ask questions, B. learn how to research answers and C. be in charge of their own learning. All things I wanted for my little independent thinkers.
I learned to appreciate encyclopedias from my parents. When I was a kid growing up, we didn't have much money. My parents were working full time jobs and going to school, however, they did find a way to make payments on a set of World Book Encyclopedias when the salesman came to the door. Even though Brittanica was a bit higher level, World Books were in color, and some volumes even had plastic overlays so that you could look at different layers. My favorite was the parts of a frog as though it were being dissected! Cool stuff. My brother and I spent hours perusing through them especially when we asked our parents a question that they couldn't answer. I loved our set of World Books. But what does this have to do with dumpster diving?
My friend Marlana and I were at this workshop at Butterfield, and during the restroom break we spied workers in the back of the warehouse putting books through a shredder. In fact we saw dumpsters full of books being shredded. We snuck over to the shredder area and asked what was going on. "Well ladies," the manager said, "we shred these books that were pulled off of the library shelves because they are no longer in use at the school libraries and they need room for new books that they are purchasing. Some of these books are outdated, some never checked out, but we have to shred them because the funding they were purchased with will not allow us to give the books away after they have been used for the school." Marlana and I looked at each other in dismay. Here we were new teachers with no books for our classroom, and here there were dumpsters filled with books about to be shredded. The warehouse manager saw the look on our faces, took us aside and said, "I tell you what, we are about to go on break. I can look away from this area and if a few books from these dumpsters just happen to make their way into a teacher's car, I wouldn't know any better, and besides, its just going back into the hands of kids."
At first, we just thumbed through the top of the pile to see what we could find, you know, too lady like to imagine ourselves in a dumpster, but the next thing you know, Marlana and I are waist deep in books and that is when she said, "look I found ENCYLOPEDIAS!" It took a while to fish out two complete sets of World Books out of the pile, but she and I drove home that night with encyclopedias and boy were we excited!
I put the set of encyclopedias on the middle shelf of my classroom, displayed proudly, much like they were in my living room as a kid. The students were excited to have them, especially when I showed them the overlays with the frog. Every time we had a question that needed to be answered, I sent the student who asked to the set of Encyclopedias. Most of the time we could find the answer there, and if not, we went to go ask the librarian to help us find the answer.
Okay now lets forward 14 years later to my workshop that I am leading. We are studying some terrariums that we built and I ask the teachers to, without giving them any articles or books, research the animal's native environment, life span, food and behavior. "How are we going to do that?" the teachers ask. "Use your phone" I say. Yes, in the years that came after that fateful day of dumpster diving, the sum of all knowledge can now be "googled" on a device of the size that can fit into your pocket. Anyone can become an independent learner, because questions can be answered quite quickly with a touch on your phone.
We were talking about having kids do independent research with open ended projects at the end of a unit. I'm talking about how sometimes the best learning comes on the fly through discussions and research. Our standards can be written as project based learning activities, and through these activities we let our kids become independent learners. It's easy right? A teacher raises her hand and says, I can't get into the computer lab any time I want to, there is a schedule. I don't have a lot of computers in my classroom, we don't have iPads. Our school policy is not to use our phones.
I tell them the story about how I dumpster dived just to get a set of encyclopedias for my students. I ask them, "how can we deny the sum of all human knowledge to our students when they have it at their fingertips?" Concerns about being able to control the device came up. What if they text instead? What if they go to inappropriate sites? "Set rules" I say, "don't allow the research if the device is abused, but here is the deal, the human brain is naturally curious. Our brains are hot wired to ask questions and seek answers, to learn. Most of the time, a person will be on task with research because they want to know the answer."
We continued with the workshop. The teachers were able to research the animals. We reported out and had an amazing time. We even used Kahoot to review the standards that we learned about the in the workshop.
The following week the teachers asked the principal to change the device rule at their school so that kids could research with cell phones.
And that is how dumpster diving led to using cell phones in class.