Archive for July, 2009

Thinking in the Seams: Engaging Interdisciplinary Thinking

July 29th, 2009

It was ingenious. So much so that some listeners wished to be high school history teachers so they could “borrow” the analogy. Even though my first listen was is in a semi-awake state, I understood enough to be informed, entertained, and left wanting to hear it all again. What caught my ear and interest was an NPR interview with Marc Lynch, author of an article that explained world politics through the analogy of a rappers’ feud. The clarity the analogy brought to the more complex issue of foreign policy and “rogue” nations amazed me. It truly was ingenious.

Such analogies are products of what I call “thinking in the seams,” thinking that merges ideas from different disciplines to generate something novel and beneficial. Researchers use varying terms for such thinking—cross-disciplinary thinking, multi-disciplinary thinking, and interdisciplinary thinking—and define it as the use of frameworks from one discipline as “points of departure for discovering or confirming similar structures and relations in other disciplines.”1 It stitches together perspectives or modes of inquiry from two or more disciplines to explore ideas. It is thinking “in the seams.”

Creativity, innovation, and deepened understanding can result from interdisciplinary thinking. Despite these potential benefits, schools rarely cultivate the “mental dexterity” required for thinking in the seams.2

Many education systems emphasize departmentalization, especially as students progress through the grade levels. Each subject is taught by an “expert” who specializes in the discipline and who rarely, if ever, designs instruction that engages students in interdisciplinary thinking. Specialization, while valuable in some contexts, prevents interdisciplinary thinking.

However, specialization should not be confused with deep understanding of a discipline. In fact, deep disciplinary understanding can foster interdisciplinary thinking if the understanding includes the recognition of patterns within the discipline. Patterns play a critical role in enabling interdisciplinary thinking.

According to researchers, interdisciplinary thinking often follows a sequence of mental actions: relationships between ideas within a discipline are recognized→the relationships are recognized as forming pattern(s)→the pattern(s) are decontextualized/generalized→examples of the same pattern(s) are recognized in other disciplines→ideas from one discipline “overlay” with another, generating new ideas.3

How can we foster such thinking?

First, teach the disciplines through patterns. By using patterns as entry-points to material, teachers can connect students’ prior experiences to new content. This helps students construct deeper understanding of the content and alerts them to associations between major ideas.

Second, teach to understanding. Moving from simple recall to understanding is moving from being able to answer a trivia question to possessing “usable knowledge”—knowledge that “is connected and organized around important concepts” and “supports transfer (to other contexts) rather than only the ability to remember.”4 Engaging students in connecting new content and patterns fosters understanding.

Third, challenge students to recognize other patterns within new content. Challenge students to explore how else the major ideas may be organized, identify the new patterns that result, and to generalize those patterns so cross-disciplinary possibilities can be explored. (This is a process of thinking that will need to be delineated and modeled for students.)

Fourth, engage in interdisciplinary thinking with colleagues. Explore patterns within the material you will be teaching and see if any possesses potential for engaging students in interdisciplinary thinking. Work collaboratively to design instruction in which patterns from both disciplines can be used to encourage interdisciplinary thinking.

Finally, encourage interdisciplinary thinking by designing time for thinking “in the seams.” Designate a period of time (daily? weekly?) in which students reexamine material to identify potential overlays of two or more disciplines. One relatively easy way to engage such thinking is to identify analogies, explaining Concept A from Discipline A by referencing Concept B from Discipline B. As students develop and express such analogies, they reprocess the content from both disciplines, deepening their understanding of both. By structuring time for it, students recognize that you value such thinking. That understanding may motivate additional interdisciplinary thinking throughout the school day.

Several teachers have expanded their own capacity for interdisciplinary thinking and for designing instruction that fosters thinking “in the seams” through instructional design models, such as the Architecture of Learning, that emphasize patterns. Teachers find their own thinking about teaching and material changes as they work with such models. Changing our approaches to material can lead to improvements in our teaching. Personal growth and professional growth are not mutually exclusive.

Do rappers and foreign policy elements share significant similarities? Yes, and examining one can truly enlighten thinking about the other. Interdisciplinary thinking is an effective tool for understanding and interacting effectively with our world. And isn’t that part of what we seek to equip students to do?

  1. van Leer, O. in Perkins, D. N. (ed), Thinking: the Second International Conference (Philadelphia: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1987), 405.
  2. Ibid.
  3. Ibid., 407.
  4. Bransford, J. D., Brown, A. L., & Cocking, R. R., eds., How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1999), 9.

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Posted in Kevin Washburn, Marc Lynch, NPR, architecture of learning, cross-disciplinary thinking, interdisciplinary thinking, multi-disciplinary thinking

Reform on Learning’s Terms

July 26th, 2009

At a press conference announcing the “Race to the Top” initiative, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan pledged nearly $10 billion in federal grant money to public school divisions that can deliver on four assurances:

  1. Worthy divisions will develop more rigorous standards and assessments.
  2. Worthy divisions will monitor growth in student learning and use that data to identify effective teaching practices.
  3. Worthy divisions will identify effective teachers and principals, find ways to reward them, and find ways to improve or replace ineffective educators.
  4. Worthy divisions will reorganize or close failing schools.

Looking at the assurances, I have to ask: is continuous quality improvement the same thing as innovation, or even change? Does it really cost $10 billion to assure the status quo?

First, the federal government wants to provide states with the money to develop new assessments based on common, internationally-benchmarked standards. These assessments and standards need to go beyond content or we tread water in curriculum and instruction. So long as we use a single measure like external test data to compare students, schools, systems, and states, divisions will allocate resources to teach to the test. If we’re going to stay locked in that mindset, then we’d best dramatically overhaul assessment in American education to drive changes in curricula and instructional practice.

What about paying for common performance standards and a common performance assessment to overlay state content standards? What about funding multiple assessment measures of different types?

What about funding a pilot that excuses participating divisions from yearly testing so they can teach to assessments more aligned with 21st Century Skills, like the NAEP math assessment or College and Work Readiness Assessment?

What about a pilot that excuses participating divisions from yearly testing and evaluates them instead on high school and 4-year college rates and the consequent changes they make to curriculum, assessment, instruction, scheduling, and community engagement in-house?

What about funding persistent online testing outside of set windows so students can test ahead or test until they demonstrate mastery?

How would you innovate assessment to close the gap?

Second, the “Race to the Top” grants ask divisions to close the data gap, measure student growth, and identify the teaching practices that cause growth. So how about paying for portfolio, project, and performance-based assessment pilots? Look at the College Success Portfolio from Envision Schools, or these projects from an Expeditionary Learning school as examples. Summative assessments like these and the formative measures leading up to them would both be information-rich for teachers making instructional decisions. They would also cause real change as divisions revamped professional development to support teachers in using practices like authentic engagement, entrepreneurship, and service learning. If schools permeated instruction with these practices, there would be a paradigm shift in education. Instead of being siloed in special programs or isolated in rock star teacher classrooms, these practices could be the national agenda, not an add-on to it or a field trip from it.

We already know that to ensure real learning, learning must be relevant to the student. Countless teachers take it upon themselves to design relevant instruction, but the way to make sure all teachers are supported in doing so is to make states assess for learning in ways relevant to students, their education, and careers.

The kind of information-era innovations called for by the Obama administration will not come from enabling all kids able to pass easily-scored tests or by testing kids on school work. The innovation the administration wants will come from adults who were habituated to academic risk-taking and open-ended problem-solving as children in schools where failure was seen as part of the engine of success, not as its opposite. To innovate products and services in the global marketplace, we’re going to need to support brave teachers modeling inquiry for our brilliant students and to administer messy “tests” with canny scorers. We should invest accordingly.

Secretary Duncan says he feels hope for transformational change in American education, but the four assurances of “Race to the Top” only assure that some schools and programs will improve at what they already do: preparing students to pass tests that in the near future will continue to vary in rigor and content from state to state.

This raises questions about merit pay, part of Assurance Three: “reward effective educators.” We have yet to adopt national standards, let alone national assessments; therefore, we are not ready to evaluate teachers fairly, nor should we begin differentiating their pay based on the results of different state tests with inconsistent levels of validity.

I completely support differentiating teacher pay when all teachers can earn increases by meeting benchmarks in their careers that are proven to correspond to teacher quality and student achievement, such as National Board Certification, and when school divisions provide financial support for teachers pursuing such certifications. Teachers should be able to earn pay increases based on a portfolio of professional accomplishments empirically indicative of their learned skills. This is akin to the knowledge- and skills-based pay approach. We should no more assess teachers on a single measure than we should students. There are too many inequities and dangers to catalog, in the notion of paying teachers more just for better student test results.

President Obama did recognize that it’s meaningful to move a student ahead in achievement even if the student doesn’t pass a test, but providing merit pay for student growth is a slippery slope. Imagine two students, both entering 3rd grade 2 years behind their peers in achievement. The first student has 2 ineffective teachers in a row, and then a fantastic 5th grade teacher who helps the student be on-grade-level by the end of 5th grade, still just a bit behind peers ready for 6th grade. Under the four assurances, perhaps this teacher would get merit pay for causing so much growth.

The second student, though, makes a little bit of progress with three skilled teachers in a row to finish on-grade-level at the end of fifth grade. However, he or she never grows a full grade level with any one teacher. Would those teachers each get a share of merit pay for catching the student up over three years, or none at all for failing to move the student ahead a full grade level in any single year? Are these teachers considered ineffective?

Money would be better spent in rewarding teachers for attaining a menu of meaningful professional accomplishments, rather than in paying an hourly rate increase on the basis of how many grade levels of growth equals an “advanced pass” on a state test. It would also be a real change to how the nation understands merit pay and would provide career paths for teacher-leaders that keep those teachers in the classroom.

The fourth assurance calls on superintendents to re-organize or shut down failing schools. This assurance echoes NCLB sanctions for schools that serially lag behind AYP. I am all for meaningful accountability, but I’m against using a single measure like state testing data to determine a school’s fate. I have more questions here than counter-points. If AYP goes by the wayside, what will be the measure of a school’s success? Will superintendents shake up staffing and appoint successful teachers to failing schools? What if those teachers fail, too? What’s the incentive for risk-taking? What are the incentives for letting a school fail? How much time will be granted for innovative programs to get past start-up jitters? If AYP doesn’t go by the wayside, what happens to schools that only have a 99% pass rate beyond 2014? Is the federal government awarding grants to divisions based on their willingness to shut down failing schools? What if a division wanted to charter a failing school to innovate? Can a division dodge the failing-school assurance by chartering failing schools for charter money? Will a division get grant funding for shutting down a failing school this year that wouldn’t be shut down by post-AYP/NCLB criteria?

We need more than these four assurances to reform American education. Innovation doesn’t come from assurance. In fact, assurance is anathema to innovation. If what Secretary Duncan decreed were innovative, we wouldn’t already be assured of how the money is going to be spent. If success for all were already assured, we wouldn’t need to innovate. We do need innovation and we need it from classroom teachers.

United States Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra, our nation’s first CTO, recently implored our schools’ innovators to help him find them. That’s an assurance more inviting than any of Secretary Duncan’s. Help him, classroom teachers; share your ideas. Share them with your colleagues at work and online, with your principals, coordinators, directors, and superintendents. Spread your vision of learning and ask for what you need to make it happen. As your divisions compete in the “Race to the Top,” remember to start a dialogue with CTO Chopra and his office, as well. Get yourself the support you need in your classroom to change your own professional practice and ensure learning through genuinely reformative and relevant practices like authentic engagement, entrepreneurship, and service learning. Students can master any content through the skills needed for these endeavors, but no set of standards spread across separate disciplines will help them master those skills. Students need your help to facilitate the real, joyful work of learning.

Teachers: there’s energy in our country for real change, not just improvement. You are uniquely positioned at an intersection of students and learning, and networked by the technology and PLC-driven practices necessary to help each other with do-it-yourself instructional innovation. You can be the hub of students’ and teachers’ rediscovery of learning. We know what works; it’s difficult to do; we can help one another change our teaching. Advocate for your students, for yourselves, and for each other. Reform our schools on learning’s terms.

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Posted in 21st century skills, Arne Duncan, Chad Sansing, Innovation, Race to the Top, Testing

Edustat Reflection: The Nouns and Verbs of Reform

July 24th, 2009

Edustat Reflection: The Nouns and Verbs of Ed Reform

By Chad Sansing @classroots on Twitter

“#edustat singing right reform song,” @flemster via Twitter

Current state and desired state. The stuff and why the stuff matters. Nouns and verbs. Receiving and producing. Teaching and learning. Grades and learning. Access and achievement. School work and real work. Failure and aspiration. This year’s EduStat University sprung from the tension created by these pairings, as well as from THE question:

Can you call it “reform” if it’s not scalable for the entire system?

That’s a tough question, a gut-check question, posed by Andy Rotherham of Eduwonk and other attendees. Can we grow out programs like Expeditionary Learning? Can we make sure every teacher sees Marco Torres teach? Will national standards be performance- and mastery-based and assessed by portfolio? Are we ready to say, as an educational system, that despite the shortcomings of NCLB, we wouldn’t be looking at other sobering and compelling measures (like minority graduation rates from 4-year colleges) without it? Are we ready to admit that we’ve had 21st century skills for millennia, but haven’t begun to teach them systematically? Are we ready to act? That’s not rhetorical.

For educators, these questions reverberate. They are the essential questions in the backwards design of reform, the motivating discontents of our best selves, the questions that keep us wired, driving or flying home through the night from summer conferences. These are the questions we keep answering an hour later, the next day, the next week, revising and revising until we feel like we’re at the cusp of an almighty, transcendent apotheosis of educational practice that will forever change our students, schools, the fabric of our society and its view of teaching as a profession. It’s all so clear and compelling.

And then for us, the desperate mass of teachers, school starts. In the face of the system and its inhabitants – administrators, colleagues, and kids – old habits return. The pressures mount: peers, policies, tests, and that one kid you can never reach, the kid whom no one ever reaches. We revert to teaching as we have taught before, or as we have been taught before. We engage in our PLC work to improve the test scores that we’re encouraged to see as the ultimate measure of student achievement. We hold ourselves accountable to the system. We engage in school work right there in front of the kids. What are we teaching them? What are they learning from that? The student panel at EduStat said kids learn that the further you go in your education, the more grades matter, while learning matters less and less.

Say it with me: it’s not our fault. We have all worked with incredibly driven, dedicated people who make students’ achievement their first priority, but so long as we measure achievement by the current testing model, we’re hamstringing our colleagues and our kids. I wish I had the skills many of my peers and mentors have for improving student achievement. I also wish we were all expected to offer students more than the “hope” of passing a test.

So, how do we scale up reform? Well, how do you scale up engagement? Marco Torres said it’s our job to make sure kids want to come back the next day. How do you do that? How do we teachers accomplish such a feat without control of the big picture, the policy-level, budget-driven levers? Can we all equip our classrooms as filmmaking studios? Can we design the new school or addition to create flexible, social spaces for learning? Do we have the money on hand to bring in a program, a consultant, to push a new paradigm into our neighbors’ classrooms?

Yes and no. Like so much in education, reform exists in a quantum state. It is a systemic need, but it relies on individual action. Reform is an emergent, complex behavior that depends on teachers’ practice to move from noun to verb.

But how about this? How about we scale up student achievement in our classrooms? How about we find what really engages each kid instead of using those “standardized” tricks of ours that “engage” the “kids who want to learn.” Every kid wants to learn. As Tony Wagner said, our kids are motivated to learn, but they’re motivated to learn differently from us, as well as from one another.

How do we scale up engagement in our classrooms? In teaching about schooling by design, Jay McTighe said to start small, with the people already doing the work. So start small.

Start with yourself and maybe a trusted colleague or Twitter friend. Stop thinking about what’s engaging, and look at what engages the students. What media are they using? What learning are they doing outside school? As Wagner and Torres said, ask which skills students turn off during the school day, that they could be using in your classroom. Build with inquiry in mind. Find which of Schlechty’s dimensions of engagement work and use them regularly. Read Sullo on what motivates these students. Design your classroom space so there’s a campfire, cave, and watering hole – areas for instruction, reflection, and social learning (via Bob Moje, VMDO architect). Stop measuring yourself against what good teaching looks like and consider what learning looks like. Students want to produce and collaborate; don’t stick to lessons and rules that get in the way. Create structures that promote inquiry and provide students with chances to show you what they learn. Facilitate students’ learning; don’t deliver content or teaching.

Or start ever smaller. Pick a goal – a lesson, a unit, a class – and ask yourself what it would look like if you and your students related to one another as human beings learning together instead of as teacher and students. Engage students in human relationships and you will learn how to make class relevant to them. The work you provide, the rigor, will reflect how positively you view every child, and the kids will read your passion and care through your work. EduStat student panelists were very frank: students can tell how the year is going to go in your classroom in the first 5 minutes. With that in mind, what should your room look like, how should the learning be designed, and how should you relate to your students? What kind of learning will make them want to come back the next day? Find your vision and act on it; persist and revise and accept some failure as a necessary part of positive change. Work with your administrator so you both understand the nuances and larger context for your vision, then agree on measures of accountability on both sides.

Most importantly, ask your students to do real work. There’s no more powerful sign of your willingness to form positive relationships with all your kids than trusting them to create work affirmed and evaluated by an audience beyond your classroom. Whether your class follows the Expeditionary Learning model and crafts a publishable field book of local habitats, or produces a series of history podcasts or plays for third-graders, make your students accountable to real-world measures of success. Connect the stuff and why students are doing the stuff. There is evidence everywhere of students mastering standardized content through authentic work on the ‘Net and in our backyards. We can do this.

Yes, we can reform education in our classrooms; no, we can’t scale it up on our own, but it takes individual action to cause change. Imagine if we held ourselves accountable for our classrooms and for working regularly and intentionally with peers engaged in the same work. Imagine class roots reform. On our teams, in our grades, in our schools, we have enough influence to make learning better for kids, and our students’ expectations of learning will change and follow them from class to class, influencing what they ask of others and making them less satisfied with the status quo, including the status quo of the work they do just to get by or to get an A.

The reform song is written; it’s time we started singing – accepting as fact that the first time we sight-read it, we’re going to be off-key. The song isn’t anything without the singing, and we won’t ever build a choir if we don’t start practicing our parts.

Let us know how you and your colleagues are reforming classroom practice this year to connect kids and learning at school. Please follow and contribute to a conversation on authentic engagement on twitter with the hash-tag #AE.

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Posted in Andrew Rotherham, Chad Sansing, Education Reform, Edustat, Jay McTighe, Marco Torres, NCLB

Introducing the Purview Project

July 23rd, 2009

Check it out…

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Posted in Purview Project

Beyond Ovals and Pencils: Thinking in the Disciplines

July 22nd, 2009

Only the sound of #2 pencils carefully blackening tiny ovals could be heard. On one side of the room sat high school seniors, AP history students. On the other, working historians. All were taking the same test—an assessment that demanded typical school-oriented items: names, dates, events.

When the #2 pencils were put down and the answer sheets were scored, the results surprised the researchers. Many AP history students outscored the historians. In fact, some of the practicing historians knew answers to only a third of the questions!

Round one: students!

The second half of the assessment didn’t require #2 pencils. Researchers presented a collection of historical documents to the two groups. The documents made competing claims that had to be identified, sorted, and interpreted. The historians dove in, excelling at the task and even energized by it. The students were stumped, unaware of how to even start. Though they knew their facts, the students could not form interpretations or reach conclusions when given historical material.1

Round two: historians!

The second half of the assessment required thinking within the discipline. It required historical thinking, not factual recall. Faced with this challenge, the students were stumped. According to Howard Gardner, such results are not surprising: “Most students, including those who attend our best schools and receive the highest grades, are not able to explain the phenomenon about which they are being questioned. Even more alarmingly, many give precisely the same answer as those who have never taken the relevant courses and…never encountered the concepts relevant to a proper explanation…[they] have accumulated plenty of factual or subject matter knowledge, but they have not learned to think in a disciplined manner.”2

If we’re not equipping students to function beyond a multiple choice test, are we really educating them within the disciplines? I realize I’m not the first to ask this question, and I do recognize that factual knowledge plays a role in constructing understanding.

I’ve sat in numerous conference session where presenters admonished us to “engage students in thinking,” and then offered their preferred “tool” for making such activity happen in the classroom.

I always leave these sessions feeling like I am missing something. The generic approach to thinking seems to fit in some disciplines much more naturally than in others, and it seems like I often just ask for more information rather than engaging students in different ways of thinking. I never feel like I know what to teach so my students will know how to think.

Initiatives such as the Purview Project are beginning to explore these gaps between “ought to” and “how to.” This is exciting! We may finally identify what to teach so students know how to think within each discipline.

As all good responses do, these initiatives prompt new questions, such as: What are the general characteristics of successful thinking within a discipline? While not intended to be exhaustive, allow me to suggest four possible traits.

First, thinking successfully within a discipline requires deep familiarity with the discipline’s major concepts. Ever seen a commercial where an individual is surrounded, 360°, by words? That’s how I envision the successful thinker within a discipline, surrounded by concepts that are so familiar he can reach out and grab those needed within the moment. He owns the concepts and can use them beneficially. He can illustrate major ideas with examples drawn from the discipline. For example, when a decision requires a careful consideration of structure and function, the scientist may recall and consider cell anatomy, the historian—forms of government, the writer—nonfiction paragraphs. Each would not only understand the decision to be made but also relate it to discipline-based concepts. These concepts can then inform their thinking, possibly leading to better decisions.

Second, thinking successfully within a discipline includes the ability to organize ideas in a wide variety of ways, and in so doing, discover new connections between concepts. For example, we’ve all experienced history taught sequentially. Every textbook I’ve ever used, both as teacher and student, presented history with sequence as its primary structure. But what would happen if we thought of major eras or movements (e.g., the Civil Rights Movement) in different schemes, such as organizing events from most to least influential? or those that involved the greatest number of participants to those that involved the least? Would we find correlations between number of people involved and influence? Would we return to the sequential organization and notice an ebb and flow of significant and common events? What new patterns would we discover? Such thinking empowers new perspectives that can initiate breakthroughs in understanding and generate new knowledge within the discipline.

Third, thinking successfully within a discipline is demonstrated by responding to circumstances with relevant ideas. For example, a historian may raise a simple question: “How did we get here?” She may then attempt to retrace the events that led to the current situation. However, this look back involves more than picking and ordering obvious happenings. Influences will be recognized, entrances and exits of critical contributors will be noted, causes and effects—even indirect examples—will be identified. The historical thinker looks broadly at the past, knowing that influences may never appear in the actual events. Recognizing such influences can illuminate solutions to problems, guidance for decisions, and effective ways to proceed through the current circumstances.

Finally, thinking successfully within a discipline includes recognizing limits of the discipline. Jonah Lehrer makes this point in his book How We Decide. An understanding of basic economics can help us make many choices, such as which of two potato peelers is the better value. However, it cannot help us choose the strawberry jam that tastes the best. In fact, trying to apply numerical reasoning to select the best-tasting jam often results in choices that are ultimately unsatisfying.3 Economics is a valuable discipline, but its usefulness does have limits. Every other discipline possesses the same characteristic, and successful thinking will not try to force the discipline into arenas where it lacks utility.

Obviously, knowing facts, no matter how numerous, does not equal successful thinking within a discipline. If we’re committed to equipping students to function within the disciplines and to use the valuable thinking represented in the disciplines, we have to do more than prepare them for tests requiring #2 pencils. I’m looking forward to initiatives like the Purview Project informing and guiding our thinking and practice.

Next up: musings on cross- or multi-disciplinary thinking.

  1. Bransford, J. D., Brown, A. L., & Cocking, R. R., eds., How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1999), 146.
  2. Gardner, H. Five Minds for the Future (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2006), 21.
  3. Lehrer, J. How We Decide (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2009).

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Posted in How People Learn, Howard Gardner, Jonah Lehrer, Purview Project, thinking

Conspiracy Theories: Patterns, Teaching, and Thinking

July 17th, 2009

The human brain loves patterns so much it can take random puzzle pieces and construct seemingly coherent, if wildly implausible, pictures. “The CIA stockpiled lederhosen in case of an Alpine leg virus epidemic, causing the severe shortage of appropriate menswear for high school productions of The Sound of Music.” See? Random pieces strewn together to create a wild yet coherent picture—a conspiracy theory.

While interesting and entertaining, conspiracy theories reveal important principles for teaching, learning, and thinking.

The brain constructs meaning via patterns, even occasionally imposing patterns to make meaning from random data. As John Medina explains, “We…are terrific pattern matchers, constantly assessing our environment for similarities, and we tend to remember things if we think we have seen them before.”1 Patterns provide a gateway to prior experience, and prior experience provides reference points for constructing new understanding. “Patterns are paths for memories to follow,”2 explains Judy Willis. When patterns fail to emerge from sorted data, the brain either ignores the data or imposes a pattern on it—hence, conspiracy theories.

Researchers suggest teachers should develop students’ pattern-recognition capacities: “The idea that experts recognize features and patterns that are not noticed by novices is potentially important for improving instruction…One dimension of acquiring greater competence appears to be the increased ability to segment the perceptual field (learning how to see). Research on expertise suggests the importance of providing students with learning experiences that specifically enhance their abilities to recognize meaningful patterns of information.”3 Judy WIllis agrees: “Education is about increasing the patterns that students can use, recognize, and communicate. As the ability to see and work with patterns expands, the executive functions are enhanced. Whenever new material is presented in such a way that students see relationships, they generate greater brain cell activity (forming new neural connections) and achieve more successful long-term memory storage and retrieval.”4

By using patterns, the brain is able to connect ideas from disparate disciplines. The conspiracy theory in the opening paragraph features ideas from government, virology, economics, and musical theatre. Sure, the example is ludicrously wild, but it demonstrates the brain’s capacity to weave tapestries with threads from different spools. As the mind perceives patterns within a discipline’s content, it can seek, and often find, the same pattern within other disciplines. This enables the overlaying of one discipline with another, the identifying of connections between the disciplines, and the emergence of new ideas that combine concepts from multiple disciplines. A new tapestry is woven with thread from different spools.

According to Howard Gardner, such a “synthesizing mind” is now a “core competence”: “The ability to knit together information from disparate sources into a coherent whole is vital today. The amount of accumulated knowledge is reportedly doubling every 2-3 years. Sources of information are vast and disparate, and individuals crave coherence and integration.”5

Students who do not perceive patterns miss opportunities for beneficial interdisciplinary thinking: “In their English classes, young persons may learn how to write effective prose; but if they fail to transport at least part of those lessons across the hallway to history class or to biology lab assignments, then they have missed an opportunity to link compositional strategies. Adolescents may be exposed to causal reasoning in their physics classes; but if they draw no lessons about argumentation in history or geometry class, then this form of thinking needs to be retaught.”6

How, then, do we teach to foster multi-disciplinary thinking? I hesitate to suggest thinking like a conspiracy theorist, but to a degree, that’s part of the answer.

Consider an earth science unit—volcanoes, earthquakes, mountain formation, etc. As the teacher explores the content’s details, a few “conspiratorial” questions can help:

  • What are the major ideas in this unit?
  • How can I “connect the dots”—what are the relationships between those ideas?
  • What succinct, general statement communicates the relationships?

With the previously mentioned unit, the teacher may notice that internal forces/changes and external forces/changes are prominent ideas. How are these dots connected? Internal forces can influence external changes; external forces can influence internal changes. Succinctly? The internal (or inside) can affect the external (or outside), and the external can affect the internal.

Now, as the teacher teaches the material, she frequently references the pattern and engages students in thinking about how the material illustrates it.

Take another look at the pattern. Can you think of other places, other disciplines where the same pattern can be seen? How about characters in literature? Do internal forces (beliefs, values, motives) affect external elements (actions, dialogue)? Do external forces (character, events) affect internal elements (beliefs, values, motives)? Do the internal and external ever mingle and cause mutual change in other disciplines?

Instruction that emphasizes patterns creates opportunities for cross-discipline thinking. Concepts and skills get transferred (Constructing a geometric proof can help me write that persuasive essay), ideas merge to enable critical thinking (The inner turmoil at Company X seems like the pressure build-up along a fault line, which leads me to predict…), and new analogies empower “well-motivated leaps” (If I envision the website as a real estate agent’s showing of a new house…).7 With access to information on a constant and meteoric increase, knowing how connect data from disparate sources and disciplines—how to use patterns to recognize and use interdisciplinary connections—becomes equally constant and meteoric in its increasing necessity. Thinking a bit like a conspiracy theorist, connecting concepts into coherent patterns, can help us structure our teaching in ways that increase student ability and potential for interdisciplinary thinking.

  1. Medina, J., Brain Rules (Seattle, WA: Pear Press, 2008), 82.
  2. Willis, J., Research Based Strategies to Ignite Student Learning (Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2006), 15.
  3. Bransford, J. D., Brown, A. L., & Cocking, R. R., eds., How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1999), 24.
  4. Willis, 15.
  5. Gardner, H., Five Minds for the Future (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2006), 46.
  6. Ibid., 64-65.
  7. Ibid., 66.

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Posted in Education, Howard Gardner, John Medina, Judy Willis, conspiracy theories, cross-disciplinary thinking, earth science, interdisciplinary thinking, learning, patterns, synthesis

Dueling Dichotomies of Technology: Autobots & Decepticons

July 16th, 2009

By Jason Flom, Ecology of Education

Pop Quiz

(Complete the following sentence with the answer you think is better than the others):

Technology is

  1. Good.
  2. Bad.
  3. Indifferent.
  4. Transformative.
  5. All of the above.

If you picked 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5, you’re right! Congratulations! Nice work!

By itself, technology is neither good or bad. In fact, when sitting on a shelf collecting dust it is relatively neutral, indifferent (at least for now). However, if being steered by whim or intent, it transforms into something else — a transformational catalyst with the potential for positive or negative impacts on the world.

What’s more, once we start using technology to solve our problems with technology, we travel a slippery slope that can only lead to Optimus Prime.

Regardless of the where it leads, technology is here to stay. Case in point: In numerous fake studies conducted in my imagination around the world, when given the option between 1. Refrigerated beer or 2. Having to see Rush Limbaugh romp around in a fig leaf, most people chose refrigerated beer.

However, there is a more sinister (if accidental) division separating the world from itself — access to resources and technology.

While keeping Rush fully clothed is good for the planet, keeping pace with the rapid increase in technological advancements without equalizing global access may not be. Our insatiable appetite for the latest and greatest techno gadgets may well prove to set the stage for an epic battle between the Autobots and the Decepticons. (And just to be clear, we in the developed world are both.) Paradoxically, access is both the good and the bad.

For the places that have the latest technology, it has transformed the way people interact with information, problems, and perhaps most importantly, with each other. In fact, the last 10 years of technological developments have already begun to reshape how we look at learning and the future of learning. More and more research is pointing to the positive impact technology can have in shaping learning environments and outcomes.

For places that do not have access to technology, the gap separating them from the rest of the world is expanding. The divide between the haves and the have-nots grows exponentially.

The problem is that few elect to be the have-nots. In another series of fake surveys in my head I found that most people did not want to be poor, famished, and living without many of the modern conveniences that we in the richest nations take for granted.

With the global digital divide a stark and sobering reality for many around the world, those with access are not waiting idly by for the rest of the world to catch up.

And for good reason. Besides being able to watch Jon Stewart at our leisure, technology enables us to see what possessions people other than our neighbors have, allowing us to covet and demand luxuries we didn’t even know existed. (But that we absolutely must have.)

We see. We want. We get. We toss. Repeat. Often. The more the better.

The trouble is that the have-nots also want those things too. (Alright, that isn’t the problem, exactly.)

The real problem between the Autobots (technology’s transformative potential in fostering communication and collaboration) and the Decepticons (technology’s transformative potential in how we prioritize our needs vs. wants), is sustainability. Let’s face it, many of the resources we depend on are relatively finite. There is simply not enough for everyone to have everything.

And here’s the hard pill to swallow: we who use technology in hopes of making the world a better place — we are as much a part of the problem as those who use it for ill.

Check out this quick and easy Footprint Calculator. It gives the results as the number of Earth’s it would take if everyone lived the same. As a point of reference, we’d need 4.3 Earths if everyone lived like me. 4.3 Earths! Uh-oh! Am I Megatron?

There’s really no way around it: our frantic pace of advancement and acquisition will one day reach a point of where our increased demand will meet decreased yields — of oil, metal, minerals, and/or places to dispose of it all.

I’m not suggesting we abandon ship, don robes, all become possession repudiators and battle against any form of transformer. Far from it. We need transformers (aka: innovation) in order to grow and lessen inequalities the world over.

I am suggesting we prepare students for thinking critically, asking questions, working together, and building the skills that matter most for dealing with the problems that I helped (and am helping) to create. For every problem technology solves, another is created. And the world that is coming, is not the world that was or even the one that is now. Things change. Students need to be prepared to learn and adapt, and to be effective agents of change.

We, as educators, need to see beyond the textbooks, the standards, the assessments, and even the technology to the greater world beyond. Tony Wagner of Harvard Graduate School of Education, in his new book, The Global Achievement Gap, makes a compelling case for survival skills that our graduates will need to survive in a new globalized economy.

I think Kelly Hines had it right to suggest that when we think about quality teaching “It’s Not About the Technology”. However, I also think Kelly Hines had it right to wonder, “Or Is It About the Technology?”

When it comes to teaching, learning and collaboration, interactive technology has already proven itself to be a paradigm shifting catalyst whose impact has only just begun to transform education and global culture. We should be ever mindful, however, of seeing it as the silver bullet, the Autobot without a Decepticon counterpart. Students need to be prepared to utilize technology without becoming beholden to it. However, the iPhone and its ilk are so woven into the fabric of our society that we can expect the ripples of its invention to extend far into the future. Even if it all were to crash now. (Which I hope it doesn’t. I’m really looking forward to the next Ironman installment.)

Image 1: GWJokes Image 2: Wiki Commons Image 3: Tim Doyle
You can follow JasonFlom on Twitter.

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Posted in Autobots, Decepticons, Digital Divide, Tony Wagner, Transformers, technology

TMI! Information Overload and Learning

July 6th, 2009

“Too much information—TMI!”

More than just a retort when conversations turn personal, TMI also describes a common student experience. When one period of steady information flow follows another, the rising data tide does not lift all boats. It overwhelms them.

We can maintain a quick and steady pace when we enter information into a database or spreadsheet, simply pushing “return” or “tab” to move to the next entry, but the brain is not a computer. It has limits. Data funneled endlessly through the senses prevents the processing required for learning.

What do students’ brains need to do to construct new learning? Let’s listen in as the neural “Data Manager” oversees the processing…

Okay, we got incoming data here. Everyone look alive!

Get that bit there and put it with the other that’s like it. Those two bits there, move them to the right. Move those others across the room to that grouping there.

Is that it? Do we have all the data? Okay, let me get up to the observation platform to see what we’ve got here. Hmm, okay. Put this label on that grouping there. And give that group to the right this label. That last group needs this label.

Okay, let’s see what’s really going on here. Seeing some patterns! Get the librarians searching for past records with these patterns.

Got something? Great. Let’s overlay it with this new data.

A-ha! The new data is like this past experience in some ways. Get the insights to the consciousness office and tell them to hit the “Give a lift” button! We’re constructing understanding right now!


Obviously no such director exists for cognitive activity, but the processing illustrated by the imagined “Data Manager’s” actions do reflect the brain’s approach to constructing new learning. Incoming data gets sorted and labeled as the brain engages in comprehension. The sorted and labeled data reveals emerging patterns that trigger recall of similar past experiences as the brain engages in elaboration. These cognitive processes empower learning.

But TMI floods the brain with data, preventing comprehension and elaboration, and thus, preventing learning. Jonah Lehrer suggests the danger of too much information is “it can actually interfere with understanding.” Why? Because the brain has a do-it-yourself attitude toward learning.

As teachers, we think through material when we plan its delivery. But students’ brains need to engage in that same process to learn for themselves. In short, we process the new material to teach it. Students must process the information similarly to learn it. As Daniel Willingham, author of Why Don’t Students Like School?, explains, “Good teachers design lessons in which students unavoidably think about the meaning or central point” [emphasis added]. Thinking cannot overcome TMI, but TMI quickly overwhelms thinking. In short, TMI prevents learning while unavoidable thinking promotes it.

When you stop informing and engage students in thinking, you empower learning. In other words, you truly teach.

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Posted in Daniel Willingham, Jonah Lehrer, Kevin Washburn, TMI, comprehension, data manager, elaboration, learning, teaching, thinking

10 Principles for the Future of Learning

July 5th, 2009

(This post, written by Jason Flom, is cross-posted on Ecology of Education.)

I daydream the future of schooling will include a teacher like this. (It’s too late for me, I know, but I cross my fingers for the sake of my daughter.)

Yoda aside, who better to daydream the future of learning with than the good folks at MIT? With minds on the front edge of theory, application, and innovation, they’ve shown prescient leadership in harnessing and shaping the emerging trends between technology, media, and learning.

Thanks to funding from the MacArthur Foundation, The MIT Press has published a series on digital media and learning (with open access electronic versions), which they describe this way:

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning examines the effect of digital media tools on how people learn, network, communicate, and play, and how growing up with these tools may affect peoples sense of self, how they express themselves, and their ability to learn, exercise judgment, and think systematically.

In their report, The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age, Cathy N. Davidson and David Theo Goldberg investigate the internet’s transformation of shared and interactive learning. They suggest the following 10 principles as “fundamental to the future of learning institutions”.

(The principles in bold are unedited. The corresponding quotes were extracted from their explanation of the principles.)

1. Self Learning

Self-learning has bloomed; discovering online possibilities is a skill now developed from early childhood through advanced adult life.

2. Horizontal Structures

Given the range and volume of information available and the ubiquity of access to information sources and resources, learning strategy shifts from a focus on information as such to judgment concerning reliable information, from memorizing information to how to find reliable sources. In short, from learning that to learning how, from content to process.

3. From Presumed Authority to Collective Credibility

Learning is shifting from issues of authoritativeness to issues of credibility. A major part of the future of learning is in developing methods, often communal, for distinguishing good knowledge sources from those that are questionable . . . We find ourselves increasingly being moved to interdisciplinary and collaborative knowledge-creating and learning environments in order to address objects of analysis and research problems that are multidimensional and complex, and the resolution of which cannot be fashioned by any single discipline.

4. A De-Centered Pedagogy

In secondary schools and higher education, many administrators and individual teachers have been moved to limit use of collectively and collaboratively crafted knowledge sources, most notably Wikipedia, for course assignments or to issue quite stringent guidelines for their consultation and reference.26 This is a catastrophically anti-intellectual reaction to a knowledge-making, global phenomenon of epic proportions. . .

Instead, leaders at learning institutions need to adopt a more inductive, collective pedagogy that takes advantage of our era.

5. Networked Learning

The power of ten working interactively will almost invariably outstrip the power of one looking to beat out the other nine.

6. Open Source Education

Networked learning is predicated on and deeply interwoven into the fabric of open source culture.29 Open source culture seeks to share openly and freely in the creation of culture, in its production processes, and in its product, its content. It looks to have its processes and products improved through the contributions of others by being made freely available to all.

If individualized learning is largely tethered to a social regime of copyright-protected intellectual property and privatized ownership, networked learning is committed in the end to an open source and open content social regime. Individualized learning tends overwhelmingly to be hierarchical: one learns from the teacher or expert, on the basis overwhelmingly of copyright-protected publications bearing the current status of knowledge. Networked learning is at least peer-to-peer and more robustly many-to-many.

7. Learning as Connectivity and Interactivity

The connectivities and interactivities made possible by digitally enabled social networking in its best outcomes produce learning ensembles in which the members both support and sustain, elicit from and expand on each other’s learning inputs, contributions, and products. Challenges are not simply individually faced frustrations, Promethean mountains to climb alone, but mutually shared, to be redefined, solved, resolved, or worked around—together.

8. Lifelong Learning

It has become obvious that from the point of view of participatory learning there is no finality. Learning is lifelong.

9. Learning Institutions as Mobilizing Networks

Network culture and associated learning practices and arrangements suggest that we think of institutions, especially those promoting learning, as mobilizing networks. The networks enable a mobilizing that stresses flexibility, interactivity, and outcome.

10. Flexible Scalability and Simulation

Networked learning both facilitates and must remain open to various scales of learning possibility, from the small and local to the widest and most far-reaching constituencies capable of productively contributing to a domain, subject matter, knowledge formation and creation. New technologies allow for small groups whose members are at physical distance to each other to learn collaboratively together and from each other; but they also enable larger, more anonymous yet equally productive interactions.

Image: Wordle

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Posted in Cathy N. Davidson, David Theo Goldberg, Jason Flom, MIT, MacArthur Foundation, technology