By Design: Please keep the toilet seat in the upright position!
Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008[This post is about questioning why we do what we do, so that we can do things in new, better ways. It specifically looks at design, differentiated instruction and assessment.]
I’m going to flush out an idea here and maybe even start a movement! 
If you want to sit on a dry toilet seat, then please make the upright/raised position the default toilet seat position!
By design, toilet seats should be spring loaded to lift slowly after the weight of a seated visitor has been removed.
Many times I’ve heard about Men’s inability to aim for the center of the toilet bowl, but having cleaned Women’s bathrooms in a restaurant before, I must say that we at least have an aiming mechanism! If the seat is not going to be sat on anyway… then why not lift it to make the target bigger? That is a statement equally valuable to Men and Women! By making the raised position the default position, we remove the laziness or poor rearing factors from causing unnecessary seat puddles.
I grew up in a house with three sisters and now live with my wife and two daughters… I’m very well trained to raise the seat, use the toilet and put the seat back down: Operant conditioning at its’ best!
The fact that I’m willing to do it, and the fact that ‘it has always been done that way‘, in no way makes it the best or most effective thing to do.
I think that schools are wrought with traditional ways of doing things, not because these are most effective, and not because of smart design, but simply because that’s what was done before.
This year I really want to look at what we do in schools and ask a lot of questions: Why do we do it this way? How can we do it better? What is the purpose of this activity? Does our approach meet our students’ needs? How do we know our students are learning? What results are we expecting to see? Can we get better results by doing this another way? Are all these steps necessary? Why is this approach effective?
It is time for some positive deviance! If you disturb the contents of a toilet, then you know what you will be called, but if you disturb or disrupt an ineffective approach or idea then you have the potential to be a true leader! Here are some ‘positive deviance’ guidelines from Surfing the Edge of Chaos:
1. Design, don’t engineer.
2. Discover, don’t dictate.
3. Decipher, don’t presuppose.
I like this ‘soft’ approach, but I also thing we need to stir the pot (rather than the bowl) a bit. We need teachers that do not go quietly into their classrooms and we need our edupunks to be educational leaders.
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Here are three areas that I will be looking at with ‘new eyes’… the eyes of a questioner and a learner looking to do things more meaningfully and effectively.
• Design: Are we teaching this? Why not? When we say, “Do a Powerpoint”, or “Make a video”, are we expecting students to just know how to design these well? Where do students learn these skills? We don’t say “Do an essay”, and expect students to understand how to do this effectively without structural guidance… why is a powerpoint or movie project any different?
• Differentiated Instruction: How are students demonstrating their learning? Can they demonstrate it in different ways? Is this a Powerpoint assignment? Or a movie assignment? Or can a student choose to meet the learning outcomes in a different way? What’s more important, the assignment or the learning? Is the assignment designed with ‘the end in mind’? Does the assignment allow for different students, with different needs, to demonstrate their learning in ways that are meaningful to them?
• Assessment: Are we counting marks or marking what counts? How much does esthetics or design count for? Is this enough, or is it too much? Does the criteria measure the learning outcomes or what’s easy to mark? Does the criteria measure what we told students was important about the assignment? Does the assignment measure what is important about the leaning? Are we adding up the marks or assessing the learning we see demonstrated?
Those are a lot of questions, but I think they are worth asking! We know very well that ‘the right questions’ help our students learn, and so it would follow that the same would apply to our learning.
My challenge now is to figure out when and where it is best to ask these questions.
I’m not going to be leaving my toilet seat in the upright position at home… there is no need to as I find it dry all the time, and I’m the only one that needs it up… but don’t be surprised if you are next after me to use a public washroom and you walk in to find a dry seat waiting for you in the upright position.
Background
