Giggle

Permit me a short personal "giggle."  It amazes me that I find so much to say in this space.  My two-day-a-week schedule doesn't permit me to publish all of the pages I have written.  I encourage you to find your voice and publish your ideas as well.  You, too, may find that your passion exceeds the format.

Linchpin by Seth Godin

The following is a review I posted on Amazon, but wrote for both audiences:

I really wanted to like this book.  After all, who wouldn’t feel good when someone tells them that they could be - should be and are - an artist or a genius?  Such is the premise of Linchpin.  Beginning with that as a premise, Mr. Godin spins an argument for all of us to become indispensable in our chosen fields.  

Personally, I favor books with a strong research base and primarily inductive reasoning.  Given a relatively large number of studies, certain generalizations can be made with a reasonable level of confidence.  As a retired teacher, still committed to better understand all the factors which bear on achievement in life, Mr. Godin’s book attracted me.  Sadly, what I found was a deductive work with sometimes seriously lacking scholarship.

If we are all geniuses under the skin, Mr. Godin, postulates, then there must be some evil forces conspiring to prevent us from achieving our potential.  In the case of Linchpin, those forces are several:  the “old” American creed of hard work without complaining, a mind-numbing educational system, and our limbic brain.  Readers are even told that if they disagree with the major argument here, it’s the resistance of our “lizard” brain.  This made me think of the emperor’s new clothes.

The problem I have with many inspirational works is that they fail to recognize the complexity of people’s interactions with the outside world.  The educational system, my area of particular interest, for example, is not nearly as constricting as Mr. Grodin would have you to believe.  The individual’s interaction with the world at large is quite complex and depends heavily on traits possessed both through birth and early development, circumstances like family social class and community, and chance events.  Even Mr. Godin recognizes that some individuals who shouldn’t end up expressing their genius in powerful ways.

Though I agree that there is indeed genius in each of us waiting to be realized, I would urge individuals to do their homework before rushing out to show the world their artistic brilliance.  As a teacher, I’d certainly urge teachers to do their best to learn what actions on their part have the greatest impact on showing students that they are capable of great achievement.  There’s a very low likelihood that telling individuals that they’re capable of great things, but guiding them toward expressing it has potential… and a research base that can be learned.

Easy Day Starter

I’m guessing that most teachers have an assignment that begins the classroom day, allowing the teacher time to take roll and lunch count.  For me, it was Daily Oral Language.  I had transferred sentences which needed editing to my own masters so that one master lasted all week.  Students edited the sentences and then, when I was ready, we corrected them orally.  I suppose, as beginning assignments go, it was acceptable.  Based on my current reading, though, I have a different idea.

Later in my classroom career, I came to believe that many assignments in the classroom were, to the teacher, easy or “do-able” that weren’t necessarily so for all the students in the class.  You see, I think that we all fall victim to the notion that things which are simple to us are also simple to our students, when too often they aren’t.  If I’m correct about that, what should a teacher do to give students work that requires a bit of thought, but doesn’t defeat students.  Nearly 100 years ago Lev Vygotsky developed the concept of “Zone of Proximal Development” (ZPD) to go along with Piaget’s idea that a child’s development proceeds on it’s own pace.  The idea behind ZPD is that children learn best when the tasks they are given are near their current level of development and that task which are too advanced for a child’s current skills result in no permanent learning.  Add to this the knowledge from brain science that skills must be practiced at regular intervals to become permanent and I think we can see the requirements for good assignments.

What I propose for a classroom starter activity is to write a single “good” sentence each morning.  If the topic of the sentence is engaging and background knowledge appropriate for the age of the students, more than one objective can be met in the simple assignment.  What I propose is asking a daily question which must be answered in one sentence.  Were I assigning it, I’d probably draft a week’s worth of questions and hand them out on Monday so that students could read all the week’s questions and get their brains working on each of the ideas on which they’ll write.  Questions might be something like:  “What makes someone a friend?”; or “What could make school better?”  Experience would teach the teacher which questions are the most fruitful.  After the few minutes that it took for the teacher to take roll, the teacher could ask two or three students to read their sentences, and allow a few others who really want to read theirs.  By my experience, I’m guessing that the volunteers would be numerous.

Assessment would be twofold.  First, if a student read a sentence which was incorrect, a bit of immediate coaching could take place.  Second, at the end of the week, the teacher would have a concrete example of each student’s thinking, sophistication in expressing it, and ability to draft complete, and perhaps complex, sentences.  Having current examples of student work would allow the teacher to mentor all students quickly and one-on-one: the stronger students could be encouraged to develop new patterns of expression, while weaker students could be coached to improve on their greatest needs.

As I’ve reported earlier, all students need a deep well of common knowledge to think creatively and to enhance their learning.  Think of skills and knowledge like a pyramid.  As we grow and develop, it is on a base of broad background knowledge.  The sentence-writing would allow students to practice fundamental writing skills and to practice accessing their background knowledge in a creative endeavor.

Teach With the Test

Thanks to my current reading, I’ve developed a whole new perspective on testing.  I’m not talking about THE TEST particularly, but even that has been reframed in my mind.  What I am thinking of is more like what we usually call a quiz, but it is really quite structured.

It turns out that we forget a great deal of what we learn, 70% - 80% in the first two weeks, if we don’t do something with it to make learning more permanent.  When we retrieve previous learning, we strengthen the neural connections that make up that knowledge or skill.  Conversely, when we make no effort to retrieve a particular learning, the neural connections weaken and atrophy.  Research has shown that if we test ourselves over a series of intervals about knowledge that we wish to make permanent, the memory gets stronger and more resistant to loss.  Simply rereading the material has little effect.  It’s the recall effort that’s important.

So, if we want our students to really learn what we’re teaching, it’s important to quiz them on the material more than once, or, if the students are older, teach them how to test themselves on material that they’re supposed to be learning.  Actually, it’s quite easy to see how this works.  For example, a pilot has a huge amount of knowledge and skills that must be immediately available for both routine and emergency operation of an airplane.  Modern pilots spend a huge amount of time practicing in simulators, in essence, quizzing them on the skills that they must have at their immediate command.  They must certify and re-certify that they have command of those skills.  So it is with doctors, surgeons, race car drivers, and even baseball hitters.  The need for immediate unconscious response is the same.  Flash cards are a good example in education.

In the classroom, such quizzing in math might take the form of 4-5 problems given daily which probe both recent and slightly more distant lesson material.  I can picture giving the quiz, having students trade papers, quickly checking the work, then asking the pair to get together on any missed problems with the teacher available if the pair can’t figure out and correct errors.  In language arts, such quizzing might focus on simple skills, like writing complete sentences or demonstrating comprehension of a passage, repeated over and over again to make them habit.  The goal would particularly be to make foundation learning skills automatic.  It turns out that it’s quite impossible to think creatively until one has a background of knowledge and skills with which to create.  Testing can help students retrieve those skills and knowledge when they need them.