I read recently that if you try to turn a galloping horse sharply, you'll probably wear yourself out and just make the horse mad. Instead, it was suggested that you gently guide the horse in the direction that you want, slowly influencing direction with a gentle touch.
For far too much of my career, I tried to forcefully turn the horse, when I wasn't trying to drag it in a direction it didn't really want to go. Sometimes it was an individual who was, in my eyes, "on the road to hell." Other times, it was the whole class. Fortunately for me, I got too old to fight the class.
Somewhere along my career I noticed that students acted far more appropriately when I had them doing something "fun": a hands-on science experiment, a Social Studies craft activity, or perhaps one of our musicals. The more I reflected on it, the more I began to realize that this was my hook. No matter what the makeup of the class in September, by December, they were, for the most part, with me. It was really simple.
Early in the year, we did lots of "fun" things. By "fun," don't think for a moment that I wasn't teaching. I was. I just made sure that everything was done in the most active mode possible. I wanted my students to get used to listening to and following my directions. They had fun if they did. They sat out if they didn't. They're smart. They figured it out on their own. The horse was getting easier to turn. Progressively, I could ask them to persist a little longer on the "hard" things like writing or reading textbooks, because they were becoming used to obliging my requests, and they knew that we'd do easier, more engaging things as well.
Patiently, over the year, I turned the horse. I never lost sight of where we needed to be in May for our annual tests. I always spoke the language of accomplishment. Personally, I kept data like assignment completion statistics to make sure we were making progress. I always told them where we were headed. Because they knew where we were headed, they allowed themselves to be led there. The results were a happier class, a happier teacher, and even happier administrators. We all won because we each got something that we wanted.
This year, I've had the opportunity to visit many classrooms. I see many variations on trying to drag the galloping horse in some direction or another. I'm so happy I got too old to fight the horse.
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Just Follow the Research
Following the research has always been a hobby of mine. No, perhaps "passion" is more correct than "hobby." No, perhaps "obsession" is closer to the real truth. It's silly, I've reasoned, to not look to research when the past 50-75 years have seen so much educational research. Tools and techniques have been refined to the point that it seems we should know everything there is to know about learners. Human motivation is powered by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. This supports the idea that commonalities of behavior should and do exist. The nature vs. nurture debate suggests that although we share some common traits, our early experience with the world has a significant leverage, moving us to be unique and always unlike our peers.
The book I'm currently reading, Einstein Never Used Flash Cards, describes how "leaps of faith" have been made from research. At the very least, these misinterpretations of research represent a detour from successfully guiding young people to a productive adulthood. One of the best known of these research-based "urban legends" is the notion that playing classical music will make for a brighter child. It was reported that research done on human subjects asking subjects to listen to classical music, Mozart, I believe, led to improved mental functioning on a set of lab tasks. Researchers took this specific result and generalized it to offer the idea that classical music improved brain functioning. People and businesses with a stake in that idea, grasped it and touted the idea as fact. Recorded classical music was sold as a brain builder for young children, even for the unborn! Businesses were told to play classical music to boost creativity and production. Later research challenged the earlier boosterish love affair with classical music. True, classical music seemed to have a slight short-time positive effect on people's ability to complete a manual task, but that effect seemed to last no longer than a quarter-hour. There was no reason to suspect ANY long-term effect on the brain.
It never makes sense to violate our sense of our own experience because an interpretation of a piece of research conflicts with your fundamental sense of what's right. Think of The Emperor's New Clothes. It also serves no child well to reject a premise because it conflicts with a popularly held belief. This means that when we read research, we have to embrace it with our whole brain, asking how it fits with our experiential data and where it conflicts. This is to say that, when it comes to people, a piece of research is neither "wrong" or "right." More appropriately, it fits or does not fit with our working "theories" of educational practice.
It seems to me that research is like a pattern. One looks at the actions of real people - children in this case - and then see if action matches proposition or not. If it does, perhaps we know something more about the way children act and why they do what they do. If the actions and theory don't fit well together, then, without immediately asserting that the theory is faulty, it's enough to say, "It doesn't apply here." Then, if one would like, one can attempt to reconcile the factual differences which make for a poor fit between theory and the real world.
The book I'm currently reading, Einstein Never Used Flash Cards, describes how "leaps of faith" have been made from research. At the very least, these misinterpretations of research represent a detour from successfully guiding young people to a productive adulthood. One of the best known of these research-based "urban legends" is the notion that playing classical music will make for a brighter child. It was reported that research done on human subjects asking subjects to listen to classical music, Mozart, I believe, led to improved mental functioning on a set of lab tasks. Researchers took this specific result and generalized it to offer the idea that classical music improved brain functioning. People and businesses with a stake in that idea, grasped it and touted the idea as fact. Recorded classical music was sold as a brain builder for young children, even for the unborn! Businesses were told to play classical music to boost creativity and production. Later research challenged the earlier boosterish love affair with classical music. True, classical music seemed to have a slight short-time positive effect on people's ability to complete a manual task, but that effect seemed to last no longer than a quarter-hour. There was no reason to suspect ANY long-term effect on the brain.
It never makes sense to violate our sense of our own experience because an interpretation of a piece of research conflicts with your fundamental sense of what's right. Think of The Emperor's New Clothes. It also serves no child well to reject a premise because it conflicts with a popularly held belief. This means that when we read research, we have to embrace it with our whole brain, asking how it fits with our experiential data and where it conflicts. This is to say that, when it comes to people, a piece of research is neither "wrong" or "right." More appropriately, it fits or does not fit with our working "theories" of educational practice.
It seems to me that research is like a pattern. One looks at the actions of real people - children in this case - and then see if action matches proposition or not. If it does, perhaps we know something more about the way children act and why they do what they do. If the actions and theory don't fit well together, then, without immediately asserting that the theory is faulty, it's enough to say, "It doesn't apply here." Then, if one would like, one can attempt to reconcile the factual differences which make for a poor fit between theory and the real world.
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
The Right to Fail - The Right to Learn
My love of the so-called "standards movement" has waned lately. I see it as a political, rather than educational, movement. Many years ago, now, I supported the idea because I could see in my teaching environment that both expectations and achievement at a grade level varied dangerously. This led to both teacher and student frustrations as student moved through the system with widely different educational experiences. I still favor a system of teacher grade-level "goals" and some form of testing to assess student progress relative to those goals. What I don't support is the widespread paranoia among educators to push up scores by any means possible.
There is considerable evidence that the brain needs lots of failure before it becomes "smart." What I mean by that is that the conscious brain is a very small part of the active functioning of the brain. Like it or not, we all need to experience both success and failure in and area, and the time to reflect on both, before we develop anything approaching expertise or wisdom.
Perhaps the best example of the opportunity of gaining wisdom through failure comes from the airline industry. As reported in How We Decide, between 1940 and 1990, no matter what rules and legislative reforms were enacted, the percentage of plane crashes due to pilot error remained at about 65%. Then, in the early 1990's two things changed in the way pilots were trained. First, pilots had access to flight simulators, allowing them to practice what they had previously studied only in the classroom. Not only did they practice, but their trainers WANTED them to make mistakes. Both successes and failures were rigorously debriefed. Second, the philosophy of cockpit management changed. Previously, pilots were the authority in the cockpit. Pilots, working alone, made errors which could have been avoided if the wisdom of the entire flight crew had been utilized. A new decision-making strategy was employed with great success. The strategy is so effective that it is being copied in other high-stakes decision situations like surgery. Less than 30% of all plane crashes are now attributable to flight crew error.
I see children as hurried in the educational environment. More time is being put into the topics which are tested. Old standard techniques, not necessarily supported by science but feeling somehow comfortable to "experienced" educators, are being trotted out again in the effort to push up test scores. While talking differentiated instruction, meaning that each child gets the instruction they need, the reality is labeling and tracking, discredited techniques from days gone by. A few are "accelerated." Many are labeled as somehow "less than," and drilled to bring them up towards standard.
There's a wonderful book, The Year of Miss Anges, by Kirkpatrick Hill. It tells the story of a teacher in a remote one-room schoolhouse in Alaska who truly tailors her "curriculum" to the special talents of her students. It is so much closer to what I now see as education, real education. I once read this book to my fourth grade class. I was curious to learn their response to the book. At the conclusion of the book, I asked my class for their response. Predictably, they said that liked it, that it was a good book. Attempting to go deeper, I asked what made Miss Agnes different. One of my students responded with a dagger-like sentence: "She's a good teacher." I took that personally, and I took it as a challenge. For me to be a good teacher, I too had to learn to educate the people with whom I worked every day.
There is considerable evidence that the brain needs lots of failure before it becomes "smart." What I mean by that is that the conscious brain is a very small part of the active functioning of the brain. Like it or not, we all need to experience both success and failure in and area, and the time to reflect on both, before we develop anything approaching expertise or wisdom.
Perhaps the best example of the opportunity of gaining wisdom through failure comes from the airline industry. As reported in How We Decide, between 1940 and 1990, no matter what rules and legislative reforms were enacted, the percentage of plane crashes due to pilot error remained at about 65%. Then, in the early 1990's two things changed in the way pilots were trained. First, pilots had access to flight simulators, allowing them to practice what they had previously studied only in the classroom. Not only did they practice, but their trainers WANTED them to make mistakes. Both successes and failures were rigorously debriefed. Second, the philosophy of cockpit management changed. Previously, pilots were the authority in the cockpit. Pilots, working alone, made errors which could have been avoided if the wisdom of the entire flight crew had been utilized. A new decision-making strategy was employed with great success. The strategy is so effective that it is being copied in other high-stakes decision situations like surgery. Less than 30% of all plane crashes are now attributable to flight crew error.
I see children as hurried in the educational environment. More time is being put into the topics which are tested. Old standard techniques, not necessarily supported by science but feeling somehow comfortable to "experienced" educators, are being trotted out again in the effort to push up test scores. While talking differentiated instruction, meaning that each child gets the instruction they need, the reality is labeling and tracking, discredited techniques from days gone by. A few are "accelerated." Many are labeled as somehow "less than," and drilled to bring them up towards standard.
There's a wonderful book, The Year of Miss Anges, by Kirkpatrick Hill. It tells the story of a teacher in a remote one-room schoolhouse in Alaska who truly tailors her "curriculum" to the special talents of her students. It is so much closer to what I now see as education, real education. I once read this book to my fourth grade class. I was curious to learn their response to the book. At the conclusion of the book, I asked my class for their response. Predictably, they said that liked it, that it was a good book. Attempting to go deeper, I asked what made Miss Agnes different. One of my students responded with a dagger-like sentence: "She's a good teacher." I took that personally, and I took it as a challenge. For me to be a good teacher, I too had to learn to educate the people with whom I worked every day.
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Do No Harm
A basic tenet of first aid training is, "do no harm." Doctors live by this dictum as well. It's a shame that teachers and parents don't get a daily morning e-mail reminding them of the very same plea. Doing harm is the unfairly easy for those of us who contact kids daily. I'm not saying we do so daily, only that we work in an environment that puts us innately at risk.
We are, in the end, emotional creatures. We associate a feeling with most everything that we experience. Typically, brain research tells us that we feel first and think second. In our highly paced lives and in the modern classroom, it's common to be in "reaction mode." That is, it's way to easy to act first and think later. It's not hard to see how this can lead to snapping out actions which hurt young people.
We imagine ourselves to be rational, though. Worse yet, we assume that children have a rational development equal to ours. They should understand our explanations, our rationalizations. They should understand our shortcomings. It would be nice. Evidence seems to be to the contrary. Kids experience us and they retain those interactions with the feelings that are associated with them. Steven Glenn likened it to a sort of "bank account." If we have enough positive deposits, we can afford an occasional negative withdrawal without jeopardizing the relationship.
Late in my career, I retrained my brain to respond to emotionally charged situations with kids with the Jim Fay stock response, "...bummer." It gave me a space to think. It triggered my thinking brain to take control before I shoved a foot so deeply down my throat that there would be no way to extricate it. "Bummer," was not, actually, the only stock response, but it was the most reliable. That there were other was driven home to me when a student gave me, as an end-of-the-year gift, a book he'd created of, "Mr. Howell Sayings." Last week, doing a presentation to many of my former students, I twice asked them what I would have said in a particular situation. They nailed it both times. Stock phrases for parents and teachers are not perceived as insincerity. They are first and foremost, a way of teaching. Second, they protect one's poise so that those focused individual things that must be said can be said with an appreciation of the situation, rather than emotional darts. I say get them, rehearse them, and use them frequently. They'll lead to greater closeness and you'll "do no harm."
We are, in the end, emotional creatures. We associate a feeling with most everything that we experience. Typically, brain research tells us that we feel first and think second. In our highly paced lives and in the modern classroom, it's common to be in "reaction mode." That is, it's way to easy to act first and think later. It's not hard to see how this can lead to snapping out actions which hurt young people.
We imagine ourselves to be rational, though. Worse yet, we assume that children have a rational development equal to ours. They should understand our explanations, our rationalizations. They should understand our shortcomings. It would be nice. Evidence seems to be to the contrary. Kids experience us and they retain those interactions with the feelings that are associated with them. Steven Glenn likened it to a sort of "bank account." If we have enough positive deposits, we can afford an occasional negative withdrawal without jeopardizing the relationship.
Late in my career, I retrained my brain to respond to emotionally charged situations with kids with the Jim Fay stock response, "...bummer." It gave me a space to think. It triggered my thinking brain to take control before I shoved a foot so deeply down my throat that there would be no way to extricate it. "Bummer," was not, actually, the only stock response, but it was the most reliable. That there were other was driven home to me when a student gave me, as an end-of-the-year gift, a book he'd created of, "Mr. Howell Sayings." Last week, doing a presentation to many of my former students, I twice asked them what I would have said in a particular situation. They nailed it both times. Stock phrases for parents and teachers are not perceived as insincerity. They are first and foremost, a way of teaching. Second, they protect one's poise so that those focused individual things that must be said can be said with an appreciation of the situation, rather than emotional darts. I say get them, rehearse them, and use them frequently. They'll lead to greater closeness and you'll "do no harm."
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