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The Environment of Achievement, Part 3

March 23rd, 2011

Hope. Humility. Determination. How do these characteristics contribute to an atmosphere of achievement?

The dictionary describes determination as a “firmness of purpose,” “perseverance,” “intentness,” “a state of indefatigableness.”

As with most tone-related aspects of the classroom, an atmosphere of determination begins with the teacher. I believe every great—and bygreat I mean not just instructive, but inspiring—teacher is him or herself a determined learner. An excellent professor I had in college beat this drum in almost every class: “The true professional never stops growing. He or she is always learning, always growing.” As Karen Cushman puts it, “…expertise is a process, not a product…”1

 

Why? Because being a determined learner keeps learning an ever-recent experience. And when we are engaged in learning, we experience failure. We experience the need for feedback. We experience the need to adopt and maintain a learning mindset. We engage in targeted practice. We maintain a passion for learning and a fresh awareness of how it benefits the learner. These experiences translate in two ways. First, as a learner ourselves, we better understand the needs of our students. Second, as we work to meet the needs of students, we are more likely to engage in methods and practices that we know to be effective, such as increasing instructive feedback during learning. By  consistently engaging in learning, we become more mindful of ways we can optimize student learning.

We can also help establish a classroom environment where determination can flourish. Here are a few ways I see this happening:

  1. The teacher targets practice according to individual needs. No one likes doing the same thing over and over just to complete a task. Certainly there are things in life that must be done according to a system just so they are accomplished (e.g., mowing the lawn). However, learning does not progress if activity is only directed toward what is already understood. In fact, if such activity deepens anything it’s a student’s resentment for “busy work.” Masterful teachers direct students to activity that will sufficiently challenge each individual while also keeping success in each one’s sight. Targeted practice helps students recognize a purpose in their activity, and that fosters motivation for completing it. When combined with instructive feedback, such activity taps into the brain’s perception of movement:

    Professor of biology James E. Zull suggests that providing teacher feedback triggers the learner’s sense of progress. This sensation ignites activity in the brain’s basal structures, neural regions associated with pleasure and reward. Such “active learning,” claims Zull, makes learning “pleasurable and effective for developing concepts and applications.”2

    Blanket activity, often the norm in many classes, does little to foster student determination in students. Determination is more likely to flourish when a learner can see purpose in activity and witness progress toward a goal. Since not all learners begin at the same point in learning, what they need to progress will vary.
    With her team of student researchers, Karen Cushman3 identified characteristics of “practice that gets the desired result of increasing mastery”:

    • It has an express purpose. Knowing why they are engaging in practice helps students direct their attention and actions.
    • It demands attention and focus. Without attention to what they are doing and the results, students will fail to process the data that will actually strengthen their learning. In other words, mindless practice is worthless practice.
    • It involves conscious repetition or rehearsal. Repetition is not the enemy unless repeating the actions does nothing but keep a student busy. Mindful repetition, in which the student frequently analyzes and adjusts his practice, leads to mastery.
    • It is geared to the individual. Helping a student attack a weakness prompts improvement.
    • It is not inherently enjoyable. However, feedback during practice helps students recognize its value. To summarize Daniel Pink4, authentic learning = meaning + feedback.
    • It develops new skills and knowledge. It is challenging enough to require true effort.
    • It applies to new endeavors. There is a recognition that meeting the challenge will enable the student to accomplish something more than is currently within reach.
  2. Relatedly, the teacher helps students notice their learning. Little feeds determination like recognizing results from effort. I once observed a middle school math teacher who understood the motivation and determination such recognition can generate. Each student had a file folder with a graphic representation of the various skills in the current unit of study. The skills built on one another until students would be able to solve complex problems that would require the combined use of the individual skills. As she observed evidence of mastery, the teacher would have the student pull out the file folder and fill in the next section of the graphic. As the students did this, they became aware of their progress, both of how far they’d “moved” from the start and how much closer they were to the goal. This simple tool helped each student become aware of progress without the burden of comparing with classmates’ achievements. With a goal clearly in sight and a way to track progress, these students were doggedly determined learners.
    This shouldn’t be surprising. As adults, we grow more determined when we’re given such awareness and feedback. For example, I’m a runner. I use a gizmo that tracks details of all my runs, such as my distance, pace, and total time. When I upload this data, I can compare it to all my previous runs and note my progress. No matter the results, noting my progress (and even lack of it sometimes) delivers a dose of determination—to run faster, farther, more faithfully, etc.

    Researchers often refer to this as something like the “gamer effect,” gamer being the player of video games. When you play a video game and reach the end of a challenge, you move on to the next level. You always know where you are in relation to the game’s ultimate challenge and conclusion. You can “see” progress. Seeing progress deepens determination.

Determination combines focus and intentional action. It is a willingness, even an eagerness, to engage in “practice that gets the desired result of increasing mastery.” A classroom where mastery increases can certainly be considered an atmosphere of achievement.
Hope. Humility. Determination. Are these the characteristics of my classroom and school?

Sources

  1. Cushman, K., Fires in the Mind (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010), 87.
  2. Washburn, K.D., The Architecture of Learning: Designing Instruction for the Learning Brain (Pelham, AL: Clerestory Press, 2010) 163.
  3. Cushman (2010), 71-85.
  4. Pink, D.H., Drive: The Surprising Truth Behind What Motivates Us (New York: Riverhead Books, 2009).

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Posted in Education, Kevin Washburn, teaching

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Using Groups Effectively: 10 Principles

January 4th, 2011

Confession: as a student, I usually hate group work. I know, I know. Having students work in groups reaps a bounty of benefits, including boosting students’ social skills and upping the number of “happy campers” in the classroom. Such findings filter through my thinking when I’m preparing to teach, so I do use group interaction, hoping that the promises from its advocates will be realized. Occasionally they are; often they are not.

I recently attended a conference session featuring Keith Sawyer. In addition to being a jazz pianist (a musical collaborator), Sawyer is an expert on the effectiveness of group efforts. His presentation focused on what has been and potentially can be accomplished through collaboration, but he hinted that just getting people into groups is not the answer.

This piqued my curiosity, so I bought his book Group Genius. In it I’ve begun to find some answers to my questions: When are groups effective as means of learning? What tasks are better accomplished collaboratively than individually? How do you structure groups for optimal effectiveness and results?

Though his focus is on creativity, I think Sawyer’s insights apply to our use of groups to foster learning. Here are ten principles I’ve picked up:

  1. Flow matters. Flow is a term used to describe a state of high engagement in which thoughts run freely and progress occurs, often without group members being conscious of it. However, flow is like intrinsic motivation; it can’t be created on demand. The best we can do as teachers is provide a classroom environment that fosters flow.
  2. Conversation is key. Sawyer succinctly explains this principle: “Conversation leads to flow, and flow leads to creativity.” When having students work in groups, consider what will spark rich conversation. The original researcher on flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, found that rich conversation precedes and ignites flow more than any other activity.1 Tasks that require (or force) interaction lead to richer collaborative conceptualization.
  3. Set a clear but open-ended goal. Groups produce the richest ideas when they have a goal that will focus their interaction but also has fluid enough boundaries to allow for creativity. This is a challenge we often overlook. As teachers, we often have an idea of what a group’s final product should look like (or sound like, or…). If we put students into groups to produce a predetermined outcome, we prevent creative thinking from finding an entry point.
  4. Try not announcing time limits. As teachers we often use a time limit as a “motivator” that we hope will keep group work focused. In reality, this may be a major detractor from quality group work. Deadlines, according to Sawyer, tend to impede flow and produce lower quality results. Groups produce their best work in low-pressure situations. Without a need to “keep one eye on the clock,” the group’s focus can be fully given to the task.
  5. Do not appoint a group “leader.” In research studies, supervisors, or group leaders, tend to subvert flow unless they participate as an equal, listening and allowing the group’s thoughts and decisions to guide the interaction.
  6. Keep it small. Groups with the minimum number of members that are needed to accomplish a task are more efficient and effective.
  7. Consider weaving together individual and group work. For additive tasks—tasks in whicha group is expectedtoproduce a list, adding one idea to another—research suggests that better results develop when individual thinking precedes the pooling of ideas in a group setting. Researchers also suggest that alternating between individual and group work helps keep the work focused but not fixated—i.e., not limited to one aspect or detail of an idea or issue. (By the way, this weaving of individual and group interaction may be reason why technological or “electronic brainstorming” is often effective.)
  8. “Divide and conquer” ≠ collaboration. When groups assign members to specificresponsibilities for completing a task they undermine the thinking that collaboration can produce. Sawyer talks about creativity via collaboration as being “exponential,” meaning that it is constructed via conversation. One individual’s thought may inspire another group member’s insight, which in turn sparks new concepts for another. It is this emergent thinking that enables collaboration to accomplish what individual effort cannot.
  9. Think threefold. Group tasks that produce the best results often have three defining characteristics: 1) they are novel, something students have not done before, 2) they feature a visual component, something that can be represented in nonverbal forms, and 3) they are relational, meaning they require the combining of ideas or components to be accomplished.
  10. Be complementary. The best groups are composed of members who have enough familiarity with one another to be comfortable but who possess varied backgrounds and experiences. Again, because of how we typically use groups in classrooms, we tend to form groups around ability—if there is at least one “good student” in the group, we think something will get done. However, Sawyer suggests ability should be less of a consideration than diversity in experience. This can be challenging to accomplish but it’s worth considering when groupingstudents for collaborative tasks.

These insights have me rethinking groups, not whether or not to use them, but when and how to use them effectively. As with every aspect of teaching, using groups effectively requires mindful

planning and attention to more than who works with whom. As Sawyer summarizes, “Putting people into groups isn’t a magical dust that makes everyone more creative. It has to be the right kind of group, and the group has to match the task.”2

References

  1. Sawyer, K., Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 43.
  2. Ibid., 73.

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Posted in Collaboration, Education, teaching, Uncategorized

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Smart MOVES

October 18th, 2010

I’m convinced: our schools need to give fitness a place in the curriculum.

Let me clarify one thing. By an emphasis on fitness, I’m not recommending more or longer recess periods (though they may help), nor more or longer physical education classes (though, again, they may help). I fear some schools may reach these conclusions and implement changes without additional thought. Such an approach would be a mistake as schedule changes are only part of a good response to the growing body of research.

An emphasis on fitness is different from merely increasing unstructured play time or adding more days of dodgeball into the schedule. (Forgive me, PE Teachers. I know that many of you do not consider dodgeball to be a beneficial way to spend a physical education class. I’m speaking to the erroneous perception, not your work!)

Dr. John Ratey, who literally wrote the book on this subject, uses a school in Naperville, IL to illustrate an emphasis on fitness. During one physical education session Ratey observed, students ran a mile while wearing heart rate monitors. In addition to completing the distance, students focused on reaching a target heart rate and on improving their times recorded in earlier previous sessions. Ratey then explains this focus:

The essence…is teaching fitness instead of sports. The underlying philosophy is that if physical education class can be used to instruct kids how to monitor and maintain their own health and fitness, then the lessons they learn will serve them for life. And probably a longer and happier life at that. What’s being taught, really, is a lifestyle. The students are developing healthy habits, skills, and a sense of fun, along with knowledge of how their bodies work…[The] effects [of this emphasis] have shown up in some unexpected places—namely, the classroom.1

Sure, I’m concerned about the childhood obesity rate (estimates put the number around 23 million children in the US—more than thirty times the number during my youth). Being overweight influences movement, both physical AND cognitive, and it’s this latter impact that interests me.

Consider these recent findings:

Fit children possess more of the neural geography used in learning and thinking. For example, in-shape children have “significantly larger basal ganglia, a key part of the brain that aids in maintaining attention and ‘executive control,’ or the ability to coordinate actions and thoughts crisply.”2 (Executive function is “an umbrella term for the complex cognitive processes that serve ongoing, goal-directed behaviors,” including goal setting, planning, organizing and initiating behavior over time, flexibility, attention, working memory capacity, and self-regulation. It comprises abilities to plan for the future, control impulses, and make sense of incoming data.3) In a similar study, fit children possessed larger hippocampi—more than 10% larger— and scored significantly higher on tests of associated memory than their less fit peers. (The hippocampus is a brain structure associated with memory, both encoding and retrieval.) The researchers concluded that “interventions to increase childhood physical activity could have an important effect on brain development.” 4 In short, fitter children develop brains with the potential for better learning and thinking.

Childhood fitness also affects capacities that uphold and empower learning. For example, children engaged in regular fitness activity score higher on tests of self-regulation, an executive function that provides critical support for learning. Self-regulation is the ability to consciously suppress or delay responses in order to work for a higher goal. It predicts academic success better than IQ. It also better predicts GPA, standardized test achievement, homework completion, the potential for GPA gains during the course of a year, and even SAT scores. Self-regulation is like the support struts of a bridge; it is not the roadway to learning, but without it, an individual lacks the emotional and cognitive control that optimize learning.

Researchers have also discovered relationships of fitness and academic achievement. A recent study focused on students representing four different categories: 1) children who possessed high physical fitness levels in fifth grade and maintained those levels in seventh grade, 2) students who were fit in fifth grade but lost their fitness by seventh grade, 3) students who were not fit in fifth grade but were physically fit by seventh grade, and (sadly) 4) students who were not physically fit in fifth grade and remained not fit in seventh grade. In reading, math, science and social studies, the fit in fifth, fit in seventh group outscored their peers. The students who gained fitness between fifth and seventh grades had the second best scores. The students who lost fitness from fifth to seventh grades had the next to lowest scores, with the never fit group scoring the lowest. Researchers conclude that physical fitness actually shows up in academic performance.5 Schools minimizing physical education classes to spend more time on academic subjects may actually dampen the academic performance of their students.

However, not all types of fitness show similar results. Teenage boys with higher cardiovascular fitness outperformed their peers in intelligence, education, and even income as adults. The researchers from this study stress the importance of cardiovascular fitness: “In every measure of cognitive functioning they analyzed—from verbal ability to logical performance to geometric perception to mechanical skills—average test scores increased according to aerobic fitness.”6 Weight training alone did not provide the same effect.

What do we do with such convincing evidence—evidence that suggests the best tool to improving learning may be a pair of running shoes for each child? What do we need to change besides perceptions and schedules? Since physical movement seems to improve cognitive “movement,” how do we help our students get smarter by moving more?

I’m going to ponder these questions as I head out for a run. Anyone care to join either the run or conversation? Looking forward to your comments! For now, I’ll give John Ratey the last word:

The notion that [fitness can influence learning] is supported by emerging research showing that physical activity sparks biological changes that encourage brain cells to bind to one another. For the brain to learn, these connections must be made; they reflect the brain’s fundamental ability to adapt to challenges. The more neuroscientists discover about this process, the clearer it becomes that exercise provides an unparalleled stimulus, creating an environment in which the brain is ready, willing, and able to learn…”7.

References

  1. Ratey, J., SPARK: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2008), 12.
  2. Parker-Pope, T., Phys Ed: Can Exercise Make Kids Smarter? http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/15/phys-ed-can-exercise-make-kids-smarter/?emc=eta1
  3. Meltzer, L., Executive Function in Education: From Theory to Practice (New York: Guilford Press, 2007), 1.
  4. ScienceDaily., Children’s Brain Development Is Linked to Physical Fitness, Research Finds. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100915171536.htm.
  5. ScienceDaily., Students’ Physical Fitness Associated With Academic Achievement; Organized Physical Activity. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100302185522.htm.
  6. ScienceDaily., Fit Teenage Boys Are Smarter—But Muscle Strength Isn’t the Secret, Study Shows. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091207143351.htm.
  7. Ratey, 10.

Images

  • ‘Running Shoes’ http://www.flickr.com/photos/64015205@N00/46324600
  • ‘Morro Bay, CA High School Physical Education+class+-+teen+girls+run+up+and+down+the+Morro+Strand+State+Beach’ http://www.flickr.com/photos/72825507@N00/3253894179

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Posted in Education, instructional time, Kevin Washburn

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Emerging Trend: Superman Snubs the Justice League, Lex Laughs to the Bank

September 18th, 2010

NBC’s Education Nation confirmed their list of panelists for the upcoming education summit – none of whom are teachers and all of whom seem to take snaps from the same ed reform playbook. All except for the lone Randi Weingarten. She will play the role of Dissenting Voice in an ed reform narrative that is being ballyhooed across the nation. (Except where it’s not.)

It was important for event organizers to give Randi a place on the panel. The basic ed reform thesis, chronicled in the upcoming “Waiting for Superman,” begins with the idea that the school system & schools are broken, and that unionized teachers are where the faulty rubber meets the road. The trouble is, if the powers-that-be were to directly cast teachers as Lex Luthor their plan might backfire.

Who’s willing to place the failure of the American Education System on little old Mrs. Newton, teaching 2nd grade to generations of tots that loved her? That won’t sell well or bring in votes.

Enter unions stage left. Randi, as president of the American Federation of Teachers, has been a vocal critic of NCLB, RTTT, & the Fire-(Teachers)-At-Will squad of trigger happy reformers. As a teacher representative, she’s become the de facto Lightning Rod in the plot line that pits unions (as antagonists) against the great teachers the ed reformers (as protagonists) would deliver if only meddling teacher advocates would step aside.

For the NBC organizers, she needs to be a panelist in order to give the Gates’ League the whipping boy (girl) it requires.

The story goes like this: the unions enable the hordes of bad teachers who are responsible for keeping students from achieving. All the while the benevolent market forces of goodness & quality do their darnedest to right this wrong through superhero feats of privatizing, hiring & firing, and incentivizing teaching to the tests.

We are asked to buy into this plot-line and then jump to reformers’ same conclusions. Effectively, we are asked to leap these tall buildings, each in a single bound of reasoning:

  1. If we weigh the cattle more often, they’ll get fatter.
  2. Non-union teachers teach better.
  3. Charter schools = silver bullet against poverty & lack of parent involvement.
  4. Merit pay will be enough improve teacher “performance”. (A recent Vanderbilt study concludes otherwise.)

These unproven assumptions need more than super breath to blow me over. I’m just not convinced that these measures will lead to more professional educators & greater access to quality learning environments for all students.

The Bottom Line Variable

But what if they are wrong?

What if the fear mongering and hyperbolized “broken” metaphors that the media outlets have bought-into & hyped are the machinations of private stakes and bottom lines, rather than deep insights into poverty, parenting & learning? (That’s not to say there are not deeply rooted problems that need transforming. But “broken”?! That seems a slap in the face to the thousands who work in our nation’s schools.)

On his site, How the University Works, Marc Bousquet brings this point to light:

I’d like to see a few more of us start to question the objectivity of The New York Times and Washington Post, both corporations with increasingly large hopes that profits from their education ventures will prop up sagging journalism revenues. The Post, which owns Kaplan and shocked readers by blatantly pushing Kaplan’s legislative agenda in print and in person is already an education corporation that owns a newspaper as a sideline.

What is curious is that even Fox & Friends has discovered what the Chamber of Commerce and the Washington Post knew a long time ago: The Obama/Duncan algorithm for improving our nations’ schools has a hidden variable — profitability.

Non-union teachers + prepackaged curricula + (test x test x test) = Corporate Bling Package

Standardizing content across the country simplifies what all teachers teach, making it easier to . . .

Increase class size and save moola on teachers (especially the union-free teachers in charter schools who get paid less & have fewer benefits), which frees up money for . . .

Buying curricula in bulk from major textbook companies (which are more profitable to produce in larger numbers) which will necessitate. . .

Buying tests designed specifically for those prepackaged curricula, which will be justified because it will help  prepare students for . . .

Super-sized multiple-choice assessments to determine if teachers are teaching, which will . . .

Earn testing companies stacks of benjamins for administrating & scoring those tests, and has the added benefit of . . .

Determining which teachers should be fired, so newer, cheaper teachers can be hired, and more curricula can be bought to raise scores.

The private sector’s opportunity to profit handsomely from this brand of standardization has stockholders salivating & lobbyists scheming. The Chamber of Commerce, at the behest of former FL governor Jeb Bush (whose younger brother, Neil, profits from NCLB & RTTT), has become a testifying standard anywhere education reform is on the legislative docket.

It all makes me wonder if ed reform is being driven by Superman, or Lex Luthor.

What if we are asking the wrong questions?

What if the propagandized central conflict, Unions vs. Good Teaching, isn’t the central conflict after all? What if it is just a sub-plot? What if the problem is much more complex than that?

What if the central argument, “Pay great teachers for student achievement and great teachers will flock to the classroom” doesn’t hold water? What if the actual teachers we want teaching and shaping our youth are not the ones attracted by promises of pay for performance?

What if wooing and keeping great teachers requires a different sort of honey altogether?

Unfortunately, no-one is asking what it takes to attract (and retain) the truly innovative educators who can provide the transformative learning experiences that transcend race, gender, and socio-economic status. It seems assumed that bonuses, based on centralized high-stakes tests, will be enough.

In a tweet-versation with RiShawn Biddle (@DropoutNation), an education journalist and ed reform advocate, I asked if the current slate of reforms was likely to narrow the curriculum and decrease educator autonomy. He replied that it would, that it was necessary.  This made me wonder what it would take to attract and keep the best and the brightest (the most ambitious and well educated among us) to the field of teaching. So I asked him.

His response?

They need more than a paycheck. They need an environment which allows them to utilize their skills in new and creative ways. In essence, they need autonomy and the flexibility to work in a professional atmosphere where they have latitude.

And therein lies our paradox. We want/need the best and the brightest to embrace teaching as a profession, but our brand of ed reform vinegar (high stakes testing, value added firing, & standardized everything) is a hook without a worm. It doesn’t attract and/or keep the very candidates we need flocking to our schools.

Superman & the Justice League

We seem to hope that by testing the kryptonite out of students Superman will arrive. However, him being faster than a speeding bullet doesn’t make him a silver bullet. We’ll need more than Superman if we aim to make meaningful, relevant, and lasting changes to our national school system.

We’ll need the entire Justice League in order to effectively address the central conundrums of transforming our schools into learning environments of equality where students are engaged, enabled, and empowered.

Our villains are many:

  • Poverty
  • Lack of parent involvement
  • Untenable dropout rates
  • Too few high achievers in the field of teaching
  • Overly specific centralized learning goals
  • Undervalued teaching profession
  • Inaccurate measures of teacher effectiveness
  • Overuse of high stakes assessments as a cure all
  • Elitism

To tackle these villains, we must recruit & engage every one of the Justice League heroes, many of whom are dedicated teachers who’ve been asked to stay quiet and do as they’re told for far too long.

The Justice League is supposed to be a collection of people banded together in mutual cooperation.

Too bad they’ve been left off of Superman’s panel.

Thanks a lot, Man of Steel. You could’ve gotten a teacher on the panel if you wanted. After all, with that cool x-ray vision thing you got going, you should be able to see through their shenanigans.

This post was originally published on Ecology of Education.

Justice League Image: OSU Department of Statistics
Lex Luthor Image: Prodigeek

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Posted in Accountability, Arne Duncan, Big Idea, Collaboration, Duncan, Edreform, Education, Education Reform, educational reform, Jason Flom, Merit pay, Michelle Rhee, NCLB, Schools, Teacher Evaluation, Teacher Pay, Teacher's Unions, Testing

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Let’s Banish Critical Thinking, Part 2: Learn

February 15th, 2010

Kyle examined his bookmarks. If he’d printed out all the information he’d found the paper would pile up to well over an inch high. Even though he’d been discerning in the references he noted, the information available was overwhelming and defeating, an obstacle that prevented Kyle from moving past the data collecting stage of his project. Whether he chose the traditional approach and wrote a paper or the technological option of a multimedia presentation, Kyle couldn’t communicate ideas he didn’t yet “own” himself, and the list of bookmarks represented more than he could ever apprehend.

His teacher expected evidence of his learning, but Kyle lacked the know-how that could enable his success. Kyle was a successful student in traditional classrooms, but he did not know how to learn, especially when he was responsible for the process.

As teachers we tend to focus on our teaching and assume students know how to learn. It’s a natural perspective—we teach, students learn. Focusing on learning can seem misdirected because what we’re going to do in the classroom demands our immediate concern—it’s what we describe in the required lesson plans. However, failing to focus on student learning capacity produces the predicament Kyle faced: expectation without enablement.

I suggested in the previous post that we examine thinking as a target. “Memorize” formed the target’s outermost ring.

Learning represents a movement toward the target’s center and beyond mere recall. In fact, we’re moving from a relatively straightforward process (rehearse→remember→recall) to more complicated combinations of processes.

Learning often involves four core processes, or four “states” of thinking. (Thinking is more fluid than the term states suggests, but this simplification can help us understand its flow.) Through experience, the brain gains raw sensory data. During comprehension, the brain sorts, labels, and organizes the raw sensory data. Through elaboration, the brain examines the organized data for patterns, recalls relevant prior experiences, and blends the new data with your experiences to construct understanding. During application the brain practices using or expressing the new understanding. There’s much more that could be said just about these core processes (an entire chapter of The Architecture of Learning explores these in depth), but allow me to move on and introduce a related idea.

The influential book 21st Century Skills: Learning for Life in Our Times argues for a greater emphasis on “Learning and Innovation Skills.” Such skills, explain authors Trilling and Fadel, “are the keys to unlocking a lifetime of learning and creative work.”1 We should increase instruction in the skills of learning, not just guide student learning of core subject matter. In other words, we need to place more value and emphasis on teaching students how to self-teach (or self-learn). We need to teach them how to engage learning’s core processes; we need to teach them the thinking skills that enable self-directed learning.

As we explore learning’s core processes in detail, a myriad of related skills emerge. Here’s a partial chart I’ve compiled. All these skills either contribute to a core process or engage a combination of learning’s core processes.

Going deeper, learning to learn becomes even more interesting (or complex, depending on your perspective), but what we can actually teach comes into focus.

For example, a group of educators in Philadelphia took part of the very first skill (identifying, clarifying, and phrasing questions) and discussed, “What is the range of this skill? What do its initial steps of development look like? What would its fullest expression look like?” After we grappled with these concepts, we considered when instruction for each step might begin and where it might mature to mastery. Here’s what evolved:

As we saw this potential scope emerge, the group became excited. For the first time, many of them felt they knew what to teach to equip students to think critically. (I know, I used the term I’m advocating we banish!) My response, and what I still believe, is that we identified, at least in part, the skills we could teach that would equip students to learn independently. Learning is not separate from thinking but dependent on it:

What we know results from what and how we think. Researcher and critical thinking expert Diane F. Halpern explains:

Knowledge is not something static that gets transferred from one person to another like pouring water from one glass to another. It is dynamic. Information becomes knowledge when we make our own meaning out of it…[We] create knowledge every time we learn a new concept.

Educator Laura Erlauer agrees, explaining that thinking processes “allow the brain to thoroughly understand the new concepts and internalize them into meaningful memories.” Learning is a product of thinking.2

Where does that leave us? Here are a few possible conclusions:

  • Learning is more than memorizing. It engages cognitive processes (comprehension, elaboration, application) that extend beyond rehearsal and recall. Learning is powered by thinking, and learning provides new material for thinking. (As one commenter on the last post put it, you have to have something to think about.)
  • Teaching students how to become learners requires helping them develop these cognitive processes and their associated skills/sub-skills.
  • The associated skills possess “steps” of development that provide more specific direction for what we can emphasize in the classroom.
  • Teaching these skills should be our priority. Everything else, such as the specific topics we teach, should be the material students learn through practice in using these skills. In other words, these skills should “drive” the curriculum. That does not mean we do not teach the traditional disciplines, but that the traditional disciplines are a means to the desired end of equipping self-directed learners.

I realize this leaves plenty of unanswered questions, such as:

  • What are the developmental steps for all the other skills?
  • What about problem solving? creativity? reasoning?
  • How can we “cover” the mandated curriculum while teaching students the skills to become self-directed learners?
  • How does teaching students to become self-directed learners aid achievement as measured on standardized testing?
  • Are there approaches we can use that would engage students in utilizing these skills while becoming knowledgeable of new subject matter?

I’ll address some of these in future posts, but honestly, I don’t have answers to all of them. It seems current educational mandates and structures hinder good answers to some of these critical questions (and produce the very problems Kyle faced). Changing direction likely requires a rethinking of current emphases and structures.

But then you probably already knew that.

References

  1. Trilling, B. & Fadel, C., 21st Century Skills: Learning for Life in Our Times (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009), 49.
  2. Washburn, K.D., The Architecture of Learning: Designing Instruction for the Learning Brain (Pelham, AL: Clerestory Press, 2010), 186).

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Posted in 21st century skills, architecture of learning, Authentic learning, Cognition, comprehension, critical thinking, Education, elaboration, k-12 education, thinking

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Here’s a Thought: Let’s Banish Critical Thinking

February 4th, 2010

I’ve been thinking about thinking lately, and I’ve had it with critical thinking. Note the italics. I’ve had it with the term critical thinking, not the actual practice. From a recent immersion in thinking-related research, I’ve concluded that critical thinking is like the weather: everybody talks about it but few do anything about it.

No arena bandies the term about as widely as education. Few conferences fail to include at least one session devoted to the topic, and book vendors at these events hawk the latest tomes dedicated to it. Educators seem to agree on the need for students to learn to think critically, but that seems to be the end of their consensus. Ask three different educators for their definition of critical thinking and you’re likely to get at least four different ideas, and at least half of them will include a nod to Bloom’s Taxonomy. Somewhere in our history, many of us were convinced that if our questioning climbed a ladder and we called on students whose names we wrote on popsicle sticks and pulled randomly from a styrofoam cup, we were teaching students critical thinking.

Because of the confusion all these preconceived notions create, I propose that we stop talking about critical thinking and instead just think about thinking. To that end, I’ve started referencing a different model. Imagine thinking as a target. As any marksman knows, the center of the target is where you aim if you want the best result. However, though the center of this target represents the ultimate goal, the outer circles are not without value. Let’s examine the first of these outer circles: memorize.

Wait, don’t stop reading! I know memorizing lacks the flash and appeal of the target’s other circles, but our brains do indeed memorize information, sometimes without our consent. For example, I know every lyric to the 70’s classic but somewhat mind-numbing “Funkytown.” I never intentionally sat down and used flash cards to learn the lyrics. They just got stuck in my head, which is one way to define memorizing. We memorize when things get stuck in our heads, on purpose or otherwise.

When educators talk about memorizing, it’s usually with a scowl on their faces and the taste of battery acid on their tongues. Memorizing is so beneath us. We don’t have students memorize anything. Everything we teach is meaningful. It’s all the others—teachers who teach other disciplines—who make students memorize unnecessary information. We’re above such an approach. We climb questioning ladders and pull popsicle sticks, for pete’s sake!

But let’s be honest. Despite the fact that most everything factual can now be found quickly via technology, some information still possesses its greatest value when it’s memorized. At its best, memorizing enables efficiency in thinking and acting. For example, knowing how to spell the words critical and thinking saved me plenty of time in developing this post. If I didn’t know instantly how to spell most of the words I use in writing, I’d probably have far less to say. (I know what you’re thinking: that’d be a bad thing?) Can you imagine trying to compose any significant passage of writing if you had to stop and check your wireless device for the correct spelling of every word?

I once had an experience that provides a picture of what this might be like. My wife and I love going to the theater for live performances. One time, just before the curtain was raised on a new drama, the announcer spoke via the public address system: “Today the role of Countess Calista will be played by Jane Smith, script in hand.” Apparently the lead actress and her understudy were unavailable. Sure enough, Ms. Smith waltzed onto stage with “script in hand,” and read her lines throughout the performance. It was disjointed and distracting. So much so that I can’t even remember the name of play, let alone what it was about. Memorizing has its place, even when technology that can provide the next line or correct spelling exists.

However, at its worse, memorization becomes merely testable material that lacks any use beyond the end of an instructional unit. With such material, its measurability is often its sole benefit, and it’s a benefit for the teacher not the student. Unfortunately it seems that many schools would rather aim for this outermost circle, decreasing the likelihood of hitting any part of the thinking target. But if we aim for and even hit this outermost circle, we have problems. Memorizing, while valuable when engaged selectively, has its limits.

First, students who only memorize remain subject to dogma’s sway. Parroting is evidence of memorizing, and a student who has highly developed memorizing capacity without equally developed processing abilities will tend to repeat the ideas of others, often without understanding.

Second and relatedly, students only equipped to memorize tend to accept without question. Such individuals tend to take the words that fall from the mouths of people they like and repeat them whether they are true or not. Since they lack the ability to process the ideas the words represent, accepting and repeating those words become the individual’s way of “thinking.”

Third, individuals who rely solely on memorizing as thinking cannot entertain or even understand conflicting ideas. That which they’ve memorized becomes their sole reference, so anything new must conform with the previously memorized information.

In short, merely memorizing severely limits an individual. So, while hitting the outermost circle represents one element of mental activity, always aiming there produces individuals I don’t think most schools and teachers would claim as their intended outcome. We need to consider the inner circles (and we will in future posts) and actually teach students the cognitive skills associated with them. Popsicle sticks and questioning variety alone won’t get us there.

Let’s think about thinking—teaching it, increasing it, developing students who actually can do it—but let’s leave our confusing dance with critical thinking behind.

Top Image: ‘la linea della vita, nichilismo’ http://www.flickr.com/photos/32347849@N08/3269623518

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Posted in Bloom's Taxonomy, critical thinking, Education, evaluate, learn, learning, memorize, reason, target, technology

Gulag politics or spending for the future – our choice

January 9th, 2010

cross-posted from Daily Kos

Gulag politics. The idea of locking up your opponents. In the old USSR it was political opponents and critics of the Communist regime. Perhaps it seems inappropriate to use that term here, in what is supposedly a democratic republic. But consider this:

With 1 out of every 100 Americans – more than 2.3 million – now behind bars, the United States imprisons far more people – both proprotionally and absolutely – tha any other country in the world, including China. Representing only 5% of the world’s population, America has 25% of the world’s inmates.

Those words are from a book by Linda Darling-Hammond (which I will review in the near future titled The Flat World and Education: How America’s Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future. The application of the term “Gulag politics” is courtesy of Derrick Jackson, who writes

It is a good bet that the United States has frittered away a decent chunk of our former global advantages with gulag politics.

I will examine that column, as well as Bob Herbert’s, in which he warns will happen if we do not address the crushing financial burden of the states. It’s related, scary, and our future hangs in the balance.

Darling-Hammond is a major figure in education policy. Now holding an endowed chair at Stanford University, she was a close adviser to Obama during the campaign, and was the favorite of many of those with whom I associate in educational policy circles to be the Secretary of Education, if for no other reason that besides being a well-known writer and policy expert, she actually taught school. Current National Teacher of the Year Anthony Mullen recently wrote in his “Road Diaries: Teacher of the Year” blog, in a piece titled Teachers Should Be Seen and Not Heard, about his experiences at a recent conference with three governors, a professor and others describing how schools need to be redesigned. Eventually the moderator asked Mullen what he thought. The response?

Where do I begin? I spent the last thirty minutes listening to a group of arrogant and condescending non educators disrespect my colleagues and profession. I listened to a group of disingenuous people whose own self-interests guide their policies rather than the interests of children. I listened to a cabal of people who sit on national education committees that will have a profound impact on classroom teaching practices. And I heard nothing of value.

“I’m thinking about the current health care debate, “I said. “And I am wondering if I will be asked to sit on a national committee charged with the task of creating a core curriculum of medical procedures to be used in hospital emergency rooms.”

The strange little man cocks his head and, suddenly, the fly on the wall has everyone’s attention.

“I realize that most people would think I am unqualified to sit on such a committee because I am not a doctor, I have never worked in an emergency room, and I have never treated a single patient. So what? Today I have listened to people who are not teachers, have never worked in a classroom, and have never taught a single student tell me how to teach.”

Perhaps that selection from Mullen seems like a distraction from the topic of this diary. It is not. Those of us who teach understand we cannot continue to cut our spending for education and expect to effectively educate our children, especially those most in need of our attention, those who if they do not get our help are far more likely to wind up as part of our penal system, and not contributing to our economy and our society. In effect we will be treating them as the Soviet Union treated their political prisoners – lock them up and forget about them.

Let me try to explain my understanding.

States are in economic crisis. Bob Herbert’s column, Invitation to Disaster, takes us through the scale of the crisis. Immediate disaster was staved off by the stimulus, but that money will be running out.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has pointed out that if you add up the state budget gaps that have recently been plugged (in most cases, temporarily and haphazardly) and those that remain to be dealt with, you’ll likely reach a staggering $350 billion for the 2010 and 2011 fiscal years.

The impact of this will be heavily felt in education:

Without substantial new federal help, state cuts that are now merely drastic will become draconian, and hundreds of thousands of additional jobs will be lost. The suffering is already widespread. Some states have laid off or furloughed employees. Tens of thousands of teachers have been let go as cuts have been made to public schools and critically important preschool programs. California has bludgeoned its public higher education system, one of the finest in the world.

Of course, as Herbert points out, education is not the only area which will suffer. But let me point this out: states are severely cutting the money they give to local school districts at precisely the same time the tax base of the localities has collapsed as a consequence of the housing disaster. Teachers will lose jobs, class sizes will grow, electives and services will be cut. And even if this is only for two or three years, for younger children that could be crucial as it undermines their gaining the foundation for long-term educational success, and for older children they will not gain the knowledge necessary to be prepared for college. Of course, the college issue might not matter, as state schools see their support cut from financially distressed states, and as increasing number of students need financial aid for themselves because their families are under financial distress. The combination is effectively eating the seed corn of the future – theirs as individuals and ours as an economy, a society, a nation.

How does this relate to my use of the term Gulag? Jackson’s column is titled Common sense on prison, education funds, and is occasioned by Gov. Schwarzenegger of California this week proposing a state Constitutional amendment that would prohibit spending more on prisons than on education. The Governor

said that in the last 30 years, prison spending increased from 3 percent of the state general fund to 11 percent while higher education spending declined from 10 percent to 7.5 percent.

“Spending 45 percent more on prisons than universities is no way to proceed into the future,’’ he said.

Jackson provides data similar to that I encountered in Darling-Hammond’s book:

Nationwide, the Pew Center on the States says prison spending rose six times more than spending for higher education in adjusted dollars from 1987 to 2007. The national federal and state prison population nearly tripled in that time, from 585,000 to 1.6 million. Including local jails, the United States had 2.3 million people locked up by 2007. This is more than the 1.5 million inmates in more-numerous China and 2 1/2 times more than third-place Russia.

He has written on this issue several times, and reminds us

New York State went from spending twice as much on universities in 1988 to spending more on prisons than higher education in 1996. President Clinton’s push for national service was dwarfed by a $23 billion 1993 Senate crime bill that spent twice as much on boot camps than national service and $3 billion for prisons but only $1.2 billion for job training and drug treatment for nonviolent offenders.

Allow me to return if I may to Darling-Hammond. She notes that the money states spend prison costs are eating into funds they would otherwise spend on early childhood education,

an investment that has been found to dramatically increase graduation rates and reduce participation in juvenile and adult crime.

We squander our human capital, first by not educating, and then by paying to incarcerate, many of those locked up lacking the education and skills to contribute to our economy.

The implications of these social choices for our national well-being are enormous. Dropouts cost the country at least $200 billion a year in lost ages and taxes, costs for scial services, and crime. With only three potential workers for every one person on Socialo Security in 2020 (as comparted to 20 workers for every retiree in 1950), having one-thrid on the noprodeuctive side of the equation will understmine the social compact on which the nation depends.

We know that one major contributor to our burgeoning prison population is a set of drug laws that are inequitable, and fall disproportionally on the poor and minorities. Jackson explores that, and notes that Massachusetts Attorney General and Democratic gubernatorial candidate called such laws crazy. He concludes his column like this:

It is refreshing to hear a Democrat like her and a Republican like Schwarzenegger say that our criminal justice priorities are insane, with education always getting the strait-jacket. It is the first step out of the asylum.

Is the term”gulag” inappropriate? I think not. Perhaps those locked up, often repeatedly, in our penal system are not political prisoners the way those in the Soviet Gulags were. They are certainly at least political footballs. And they are removed from society – often permanently, with the loss of the right of vote, being barred from many occupations. Increasingly we have charged young people as adults, meaning their records do not get expunged. We permanently bar those with drug offenses from many federal benefit. We thereby increase the percentage of our population that we exclude from the full benefits of a society for which in many cases we have failed to prepare them with proper education.

And because prisons are expensive, and too many will still demagogue the issue crime, our expenditures for our penal system continue to escalate at a time when the funds for government as a whole are plummeting, with a consequence that we further cut education, thereby contributing to a future increase in crime – a real Catch 22.

There are other ways. As it happens I am also reading a book by a college friend, Mark Kleiman, on a different approach to the issue of crime. I will when I can also offer a review of When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and LEss Punishment.

Perhaps is is Serendipity to encounter the columns by Jackson and Herbert at the same time I am reading the books by Darling-Hammond and Kleimann. Perhaps I might have eventually made the connections among them anyhow, who knows?

What I do know is this: we face some stark choices. We are going to have to decide what really matters to our future. If our answer is punitive, increasing the use of the penal system rather than attempting to avoid having to incarcerate people in the first place, we will find ourselves on a path that is not only financially unaffordable, it should be morally unacceptable.

What is even worse – as our prison population continues to expand, we are cutting the services in those prisons that could education and rehabilitate first-time offenders.

I think Jackson’s term “Gulag politics” is appropriate. I think we need to address this issue. I know we cannot address this issue if states, which in many cases cannot have unbalanced budgets, do not get additional assistance from the Federal government, which can.

We face some critical choices. Our future as a nation may well depend upon our decision.

What do you think we should do?

Peace.

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Posted in Bob Herbert, Derrick Jackson, Education, Education spending, Kenneth Bernstein, Linda Darling-Hammond, Mark Kleimann, prison spending, state financial crises

Authors, Illustrators, and Teaching: Part 1

October 1st, 2009

Authors and illustrators recently challenged my thinking about teaching.

The National Book Festival is an annual event held on the Mall in Washington, D.C. This year my wife and I attended for the first time. As I listened to various children’s authors and illustrators, I was struck by how much relevance the ideas they communicated had for educators.

First up was Charles Santore. Mr. Santore has illustrated several well-known children’s books, including The Camel’s Lament and versions of classics, such as the poem “Paul Revere’s Ride” and the fantasy The Wizard of Oz. He also illustrated this year’s National Book Festival poster.

Because he moved from advertising illustration to children’s literature, many of Mr. Santore’s comments contrasted the two. For example, in illustration, Santore explained, you have to synthesize all the ideas into one, attention-grabbing illustration. However, in illustrating children’s literature, the artist can attend to pacing, even drawing “quiet” pictures that allow the reader to pause and ponder.

This pacing, giving the reader time to imagine and think, mirrors a pace the brain needs for optimal learning. Often called “down-time,” the brain needs to process new content in manageable chunks.1 A teacher who lectures for 45 minutes straight promotes less learning than a teacher who presents information for 10 minutes, engages students in processing new material, and then resumes presenting information for another brief period. To learn, the brain needs to pause and ponder—it needs the story of learning to include “quiet” illustrations.

Up next was one of my favorites: Nikki Grimes. Miss Grimes has authored several of my favorite children’s books, including The Road to Paris. With gifts in both poetry and prose, Miss Grimes captivated the audience with a colorful, poetic journey through several of her works. I cannot explain this sufficiently to help you appreciate it. She used poetry to introduce a color and its affective associations, then illustrated the concepts with passages from her writings. She created a hush in the tent and no one wanted her to stop.

What does this have to do with teaching? It made me think about how little thought I often give to my actual presentation of information. Sure, I think long and seriously about the activities I use to introduce or engage students in processing new information, but Nikki Grimes put that kind of thought into how she actually presented the information.

Hmm, how could I simulate this? Could I combine communication forms to better articulate critical concepts for students? Would a poetic journey through the Pythagorean theorem promote better understanding? One thing is certain: by challenging myself to consider the approach, I’d think more deeply about how I would actually explain the concept, and that would likely improve the words and phrases I used to teach it.

Finally, for this first of two posts, we heard and observed illustrator Kadir Nelson. Without exaggeration, Mr. Nelson is an artistic genius as evidenced in all his books, including the recent Testing the Ice.

A quiet individual, Mr. Nelson let his pens do most of the “talking.” He called two children up to the stage and recreated one of his illustrations with the children filling the roles of the original characters. Two young girls became Jackie Robinson and Yogi Berra, and their faces lit up with excitement and recognition. He actively involved the children, taking their minds to the scene he wanted them to imagine. Wow! In one illustration, he captured an entire narrative—a narrative to which two young girls could emotionally connect.

Narrative is a powerful teaching tool. Stories frame experience. Mark Turner suggests stories are actually fundamental, organizing structures: “Parable is the root of the human mind—of thinking, knowing, acting, creating, and plausibly even of speaking.”2 Neurologist and author Alice W. Flaherty agrees, suggesting metaphors, such as stories, contribute to memory formation and understanding:

…metaphors are cognitively useful because they rephrase an abstract concept in more physical terms. This engages the cortex with its visual, auditory, tactile, and olfactory maps, and the limbic system with its emotional charge…[Metaphors] create a sense of understanding by an analogous mechanism. By giving abstract concepts tastes, colors, smells, and emotional resonance, metaphors fix them in our minds and make us feel like we understand them.3

The human mind frequently thinks in terms of stories, communicates in stories, and converts new learning into stories. By framing experience, stories provide a structure for exploring and making sense of experience. Can I structure any of my teaching as narrative? Again, just challenging myself to try will likely improve my teaching.

Pondering pauses, poetic presentations, and narrative frames can inspire and inform my teaching. What I learn from authors and illustrators can become personal professional development if I’m willing to accept the challenges their ideas present.

In Part 2, insights from authors Sharon Creech, Kate DiCamillo, and illustrator Jerry Pinkney.

  1. Sousa, D., How the Brain Learns, 2nd ed., (Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, Inc., 2001).
  2. Turner, M., The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), i.
  3. Flaherty, A. W., The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 230.

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Posted in Charles Santore, Education, Kadir Nelson, Kevin Washburn, narrative, National Book Festival, Nikki Grimes, teaching

What Marketing Taught Me About Education Improvement

September 28th, 2009

I spend a lot of time looking to the field of marketing and branding as a source of ideas, insight, direction, and inspiration. Marketers and education have more in common than you would think. What follows is a list of reasons why I think marketers could improve education.

Why Marketers could improve education

Marketers are concerned with creating ideas that are memorable.

Marketers are forced to be creative and innovative.

Marketers are expert users of data and statistics

Marketers want to reach people and impact their thinking

Marketers are expert at using current and emerging technology

Marketers try to reach people and communicate their ideas in creative and innovative ways

Marketers are very much results driven.

Marketers are passionate.

Marketers seek to inspire.

Marketers are expert at anticipating and understanding global trends.

Marketers seek to create the future, not just react to it.

Marketers understand their biggest asset is their employees’.

Seth Godin said, “Your marketing changes the way people act.” Don’t we try to do that in education? So the key question is: Who is having more success, marketing or education?

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Posted in Education, Ideas, Marketing, Rob Jacobs

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