Sustainable Teaching Blog

Rigor Mortis

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:19:55 +0000

Rigor Mortis

In a country where the self-serve gas station seems a wonderful symbol for a pervasive approach to life, I’m not surprised that I get a lot of criticism for promoting schools that make room for the self of the student. “Kids today are already over-indulged, narcissistic and entitled,” say my critics. “They need to learn about the ideas of others, get outside themselves, learn about their culture.” Others scoff at the notion of allowing students to study what matters to them, what is emotionally relevant. Some laugh at the idea that high school students are intellectually curious or can possibly make good choices. One colleague asked with great contempt whether I would allow them to choose which elements of the periodic table appeal to them and to study only those.

It might surprise my critics to learn that I share their unhappiness with the epidemic of self-absorption that affects not just our children but a huge number of adults. Schools and parents need to take much more seriously the responsibility to develop social capacities in our young: empathy, compassion, respect and admiration, as well as guilt and remorse. I also believe that children need exposure to ideas and career possibilities that they might never have considered. If you spend all your time playing the piano, how will you ever discover your capacity or aptitude for math or science? Though I would like to see schools focus much more on the development of skills (reading, writing, reasoning, questioning, problem-solving, etc.), I also know content—knowledge—is essential. You can’t think like an historian if you have no knowledge of history; you can’t reason or be creative in a vacuum.

The problem is that my critics see school issues as either/or propositions. Either students contemplate their navels or they learn about the world. Either adults decide what is essential knowledge or students do. Schools either teach skills or teach content, and they damn well better teach content or our kids will bomb the SAT’s and AP’s. School can be either teacher-centered or student-centered. Either everyone meets the graduation requirements or anarchy rules. Either everyone gets two hours to complete the test or the test has no integrity. Either all seventh graders take Spanish or scheduling becomes impossible.

And what a surprise. Everyone knows which side of the dichotomy seems to win. We have created schools in the image of adults—their needs, their interests, their selves. Father knows best.

The justification for this all-or-nothing “thinking” is built in part on equating rigor and rigidity. Rigor suggests high expectations, encouraging students to do their best to improve their skills and understanding—all of which implies the flexibility to treat students as individuals by moving them from wherever they are when they arrive to a higher, achievable level when they leave. Unfortunately, when the needs and interests of the children are discarded, the individual nature of learning and achievement becomes standardized, and rigor gets all mixed up with meeting rigid, inflexible, universal expectations. Everyone wants rigorous education. We still genuflect to the sound of the word, but the synonym of rigor is now rigidity.

For decades, I have listened to tirades about the “loss of standards” whenever anyone looked as though she might step off the conveyor belt of rigid sameness. “What will our diploma stand for if Harry doesn’t have to take a foreign language?” “How can I give a fair grade to Mary if she is given more time on this exam? Doesn’t giving her more time penalize all those who finish on time?” “If I reduce the number of essays for Joe, how can I say he has completed my history course?” “If Jane skips a grade, she won’t have four years of English.” “If Beth goes off campus to study film for a semester, she’ll have to finish her requirements in summer school or take a PG year.” The sky is falling; the sky is falling.

The schools I envision are not built on foundations of either/or premises. It’s possible for students to study things that matter to them AND to meet requirements to explore and think about areas beyond their interests. Very often, one thing will lead to another. As most of us know, when answering genuine questions, people tend to move naturally and easily across the artificial boundaries of departmental thinking. But even if students are required to try new things, they are more likely to do so happily if more of their experiences in school have been emotionally relevant—are connected to their self.

It’s even more likely that students who have developed their own beliefs, who understand themselves and have found their own voice and who are self-confident will have a strong basis for opening themselves to the ideas and beliefs of others. Current research seems to suggest that compassion and empathy play out along the same neural pathways that we travel to develop our sense of self: “simulation of one’s own self is an important means to understand others” (Immordino-Yang, et al, 2009). So it seems possible to conclude that adult attempts to replace the developing self of a child with the adult’s self might stunt the healthy development of the child’s self and, consequently, the ability to empathize.

A barrage of adult opinions and beliefs can overwhelm and hobble the self of young people. Literature and psychologist couches are filled with the voices of people struggling to free their self from the chains of their parents’ suffocating expectations that they be someone else. Schools need to be much more careful to guide children as they develop a sense of self, not as an end in itself but to establish a more robust basis for understanding others. Understanding someone else is a whole lot healthier than being someone else. Schools can make room for the self of students AND move them beyond the self.

Education should not be about making young people clones or mini-me’s. The key to successful schooling is flexibility, allowing students to pursue their interests and searching for different ways to move them to try new things. Unfortunately, our schools seem modeled on the iron bed of Procrustes. I remember the first time I heard that story in the sixth grade. Travelers who stopped at Procrustes inn were given a one-size-better-fit-all bed. Those who were too long for the bed were cut down to size while those who were too short were stretched. As a child, I found the story both terrifying and idiotic. Who really cares whether everyone fits into the same bed? Sadly, I discovered that teachers and administrators do.

People are not the same. We all learn differently, care about different things, need different paths to reach different goals. Some respond to traditional schools and teaching methods, but many more do not. If learning, not teaching, is what matters, we need schools that reflect the rich variety of individuals who come to them. Rigorous standards and high expectations have nothing to do with rigidity and sameness. Chopping and stretching the self of the young just creates a lot of corpses.

(NOTE: This is the final posting for the Sustainable Teaching blog. Sustainable Teaching is closing its window.)

Getting on Track

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 14:10:47 +0000

Getting on Track

Allen and Carol Smith seized an opportunity to spend most of a year in South America, particularly excited that their two young children could attend a local school and immerse themselves in a new culture and language. Prior to their return home, they spoke with the school studies office at a “good” independent school about the importance of having their children continue to study Spanish. And they ran into Policy.

The older child would have to take the same Spanish course as his classmates, regardless of his proficiency. He could speak Spanish with some of the Spanish-speaking students during lunch. That sounds likely. The younger child would have to take French. Those are the requirements; that’s the policy.

And that pretty much captures much of what is wrong with school. Despite all that we keep learning about learning, the fundamental structures and assumptions of schooling don’t change. Policies and practices are set up to facilitate the time-released flow of really important information from adults who know best to kids who know nothing. This is the way we do things. Efficiency, order, tidy schedules, requirements in five departments (and, grudgingly, the arts), grouping by age, assessments based on rewards and punishments, and rigidity rule. The needs and interests of adults provide the energy and set the goals while the students are assured they’ll come to understand the value of their studies when they grow up.

Periodically, the system finds it can no longer ignore some new finding about how learning actually takes place, and something is tweaked a bit, but the basics remain the same. Oh, look, students learn better from actual experience, so schools sprinkle some field trips among the lectures. Learning is improved by active engagement, so teachers break their lectures into “discussions” during which students get to construct the lecture by guessing the teachers’ answers to questions the teachers ask.

Someone suggests that fragmenting knowledge into specialized departments doesn’t really reflect how we come to understand the real world, so we get interdisciplinary studies. That is, two or three teachers from different departments take turns lecturing students in the same room—tag teams of lecturers, enabling, for example, a history teacher, an English teacher and an arts teacher to offer a piece of the Renaissance to students, who are then supposed to assemble the pieces. Ironically, the students are expected to become Renaissance scholars, not the specialized teachers.

The theory of multiple intelligences allows students to dance or sing their responses to literature and forces teachers to create lessons with visual, auditory and kinesthetic moments. Yet the assessments that really count continue to genuflect to the logical and verbal gods. Heretics are herded to the edge of the settlement where the “at-risk” and learning disabled gather.

And today, thanks to more research into learning and the brain, we recognize that individuals have unique profiles of cognitive strengths and weaknesses, so we have “differentiated instruction.” Bunches of students, still grouped by age and still in the usual classrooms with one teacher deciding what everyone will learn, are given different paths to reach the same goal—which is still the same old test or “standard.”

Differentiated instruction reflects this nutty hope that schools can remain essentially the same if they just tweak what happens in the classroom. Yet the research today offers fundamentally new ideas about how learning occurs, ideas that challenge old assumptions about learning. And it is these old assumptions that continue to determine what goes on in school. While differentiated instruction may acknowledge that people have different learning profiles and learn in different ways, it does not address the array of new discoveries and theories about learning, like those of Mary Helen Immordino-Yang. Here, for example, are just three of them:
• Emotion and thinking and learning may be inextricably connected.
• Thinking happens in the service of emotional/social needs and goals.
• Learning resembles a web of interrelated skills we develop over time in different ways depending on our individual experiences and our cognitive strengths and weaknesses.

These ideas collide with older beliefs that continue to provide the foundation of schools as expressed in policies and practices:
• Thinking and learning are essentially rational, unemotional processes.
• Thinking can be coerced.
• Learning resembles a ladder of separate skills that are built in a linear fashion in students who are the same age.

What the new discoveries suggest is that people learn best when what they are learning matters to them, when their studies are emotionally relevant and connected to their existing web of skills. But our schools have always operated on the assumption that young people will learn what matters to adults. The Smith boys have a real connection to Spanish as a result of living in another country, yet our traditional mind-set about schooling and, perhaps, the needs of the scheduling office blind us to the absurdity of insisting that one study French and that the other study Spanish at a level likely to bore him and to slow his learning.

What we need are schools that reflect a different understanding of learning. It’s time for a whole new system—new practices, new policies, new designs that reflect a new understanding that the needs of learners are more important than the needs of teachers and administrators and schedulers. Flexibility and connections to the lives and interests of the learners must replace rigidity and emotional irrelevance.

Everyone keeps talking about creating 21st century schools, yet many seem to think they can do that simply by fiddling with the current model. If you want to build a new high-speed railroad system, you have to scrap the old tracks and design new trains. Coming up with new styles of basically the same old trains running on the same tracks may satisfy those comfortable with the familiar, but it won’t improve transportation. Differentiated instruction isn’t going to meet the needs of the Smith boys.

Paying Attention

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 20:06:31 +0000

Paying Attention

Here’s a riddle: If there are no stupid questions, why are so many of them asked in schools?

Most teachers, especially on the first day of class, assure students that there are no stupid questions. The assurance has become something of a pious mantra—a soothing, politically correct sound that makes everyone feel good and creates a false sense of security. “Ah,” thinks the teacher, “my classroom is a safe environment.”

“Ahh,” says a student as she raises her hand, “what’s a stupid question?”

The teacher rolls his eyes, the other students laugh, and the year is off.

Nothing seems to drive teachers crazier than to be asked stupid questions. In faculty meetings, in parent conferences, in informal gripe sessions over lunch, teachers constantly complain about the amazing ability of Sam or Sarah to ask stupid questions that slow the class down or reveal an inability to understand the simplest concepts. Saying that Sam asks stupid questions has evidently become an acceptable substitute, a code, for what teachers used to say 30 years ago: Sam is stupid. Sam isn’t learning what I am teaching him, and I am furious because his not learning means either I am a bad teacher or he is a stupid student, and I need to think the latter or shoot myself.

However, when I look at some of the typical questions that teachers call stupid, I’m not sure the label is accurate. The one that most irritates teachers elicits the “I just explained that; why weren’t you listening” response. Are you deaf? I used to become as frustrated as the next teacher by this sort of question until I heard myself ask one at a workshop I attended about the connection between learning and emotion. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang (neuroscientist from USC) explained this connection using an example from a math lesson, and I simply didn’t get it. Although I was paying close attention because I really wanted to understand the concept, it made no sense to me. So I said, “The connection makes sense to me when I think about learning English, but how does it work in a math class?” How embarrassing.

It took me a moment to realize that she had just applied the concept to math. I hadn’t heard her because the illustration didn’t register in any sensible way in my brain. I wanted her to say something else, something that fit my preconception or understanding of this mind-stretching new theory as it worked in my experience of teaching English. I wanted to find the mathematical equivalent of an empathic response to literature. I wondered how you elicit an emotional response to a quadratic equation, but Dr. Immordino-Yang was explaining an entirely different relationship between emotion and learning. Since then, I have constantly heard teachers in various workshops ask the leader to explain a concept she has just explained, and I have slowly realized that this sort of question commonly arises when people—adults or young students—are learning new concepts.

Of course, people also ask the question when they haven’t been paying attention, again just like adults at workshops. Our mind wanders when we are sitting and listening to lectures for long stretches or when we really aren’t particularly interested in the subject, even if we are trying our best to sustain an interest because the administration has insisted this professional development is good for us. So, rather than reflecting stupidity, the question can be an expression of a very understandable inner state of the listener and a clue to the ineffectiveness of the teaching method.

Another question that appears stupid is the off-the-topic question. You are going along explaining some vital concept like osmosis or transitive verbs, and you use a sentence to illustrate your point: “The bus hit the dog.” Jane’s hand shoots up. “Why don’t they have speed bumps in people’s neighborhoods like they do at school? That’s how my dog got killed.” Stupid? What’s stupid about a student’s making an emotional connection to something in the classroom? Perhaps we should look at the question as instructive: it provides some insight into what is missing from the lesson itself and into the depth of a learner’s need for some sort of meaningful connection to what she studies. I suppose it’s easier to look at Jane’s question as a sign of ADHD. The problem must be with the student, not with the lesson—certainly not with the whole system of schooling.

Or perhaps Jane’s question is interpreted as a third form of stupid question: the deliberate attempt to derail the lesson—the sort of tactic we attribute to the class clown. If, as Dr. Immordino-Yang suggests, thinking occurs in the service of emotional/social goals, the question reveals something about the needs of the questioner (perhaps her motivation in relation to her classmates) and, again, suggests that the lesson itself is emotionally irrelevant to her.

Surprise, surprise. We see the same sort of behavior in adults, in teachers forced to attend professional development workshops that they find irrelevant to their needs. Some disaffected teachers quickly become workshop clowns, while others tune out through text-messaging, reading newspapers, whispering with those in the next seat or correcting papers. It’s amazing that these teachers fail to make the connection between their experiences as students in these workshops and the student behaviors that upset them so much in their own classrooms.

Student questions are rarely stupid. They are really quite revealing, and what they often reveal is that what is happening in the classroom doesn’t matter to them. So perhaps it is the teachers’ questions that are stupid—their inability to engage, their roots in what interests teachers rather than what interests students. Perhaps what is stupid is the failure of schools to explore any genuine questions students have.

And they do have them. They have all sorts of questions about the world, about themselves, about what things mean and how they work, about the future and the past and other countries and government and relationships. They eagerly wrestle with issues and ideas that matter to them. One student said he enjoyed an opportunity in an after-dinner forum to discuss race relations “because it challenged a side of the mind that classes usually cannot touch and because it allowed me to talk with my peers about an important issue.” What a stunning indictment of the classroom.

But schools know best. Schools know what’s important. So, instead of dealing with—or even discovering—their questions, schools force students to slog through an endless drudgery of repetitive worksheets and the tedium of tests like the SAT’s composed of cute questions designed to trick students, tests of trivial and obscure factual details (“to prove they read the assignment”), ESP tests to see if students can guess what is significant to the teacher, tests demanding that students apply concepts they don’t yet understand or care about.

The answer to the riddle is that there are so many stupid questions in schools because so many teachers ask them.

The Valley of the Shadow: Part 2

Mon, 18 May 2009 20:26:49 +0000

The Valley of the Shadow
Part 2:
Risky Business

Of all the claims that schools make, the one lost in the deepest shadow is the assertion that “our students learn to take risks.” Risk-taking is meant to imply that students are able to move out of their “comfort zones” by trying new things—like befriending people from other cultures or leaping into new activities or, especially, enrolling in challenging courses and thinking independently. Schools that claim to encourage risk-taking imply that students feel safe enough to take a chance. Educators want to believe their schools are safe, so they say they are and convince themselves of their own mythology.

However, although many young people may take some social risks and try new activities (particularly when colleges encourage resume-building), my experience is that the vast majority resist intellectual risk. During the almost 20 years I spent overseeing students’ programs of study, it seemed that caution and fear tended to dominate their decisions about whether to take a course or not. Students interested in honors physics or a difficult history or literature elective frequently opted for the less demanding, less interesting course in which they knew they could get an A or B. Fear that the speed-bump C might slow their drive toward Bowdoin or Stanford trumped the desire to pursue a very real interest.

This fear was supported by teachers and parents. It was not unusual for the hockey coach to let me know that one of his players should drop a difficult course “because the kid doesn’t need it; he’s going to be accepted at Michigan if he keeps his B- average.” Advisors and parents constantly swooped into my office at the first sign of struggle to persuade me to move a child to an easier course or a less demanding teacher—especially if the current teacher was a “hard grader.”

Pressure to get high grades is relentless. Aside from the messages they get from the college admissions process, students move through constant reminders of the tyranny of grades—honor rolls, awards, honor societies, cum laude designations, my-child-is-an-honors-student bumper stickers. Privileges are bestowed for high grades: passes to ski resorts, reduced car insurance, freedom from having to take exams or attend study hall, even permission to cut a few classes. Parents reward good grades with new cars or trips to Aruba. Where is the incentive to take a risk? Pity the poor schmuck who tried Organic Chemistry knowing he would struggle for a C. Too bad. No honors dinner for you. And you gave Harvard an excuse to reject you. Hello.

High school students can be pretty insightful about themselves, about their strengths and weaknesses, and one of the idealistic messages they get from schools is that they should work on the weaknesses, challenge themselves. I think we all know the sort of courage it takes to confront a weakness, and I wonder how many of us would find that courage if we knew our efforts would likely result in C’s and D’s on a permanent record that would determine our future.

For Andrea, the courage was absent until she entered a program that didn’t use grades: “I could focus on areas that I felt were a weakness and not feel anxious about earning letter grades. I was taking classes that I wanted to take and learning more because I did not have the added pressures of worrying about grades.” Andrea wanted to work on her weaknesses, and she had interests she wanted to pursue; once she was free of the fear of the grade, she could take the sort of risks she needed to take in order to learn.

Too many students do not experience school as a safe place. Although grades are central to their anxiety, they aren’t the only factors. Imagine how students go through their day. They move from teacher to teacher listening to criticism and the often public focus on their weaknesses. Classes can be like navigating a minefield of sarcasm and derisive laughter, from classmates as well as teachers. Sometimes, appearing stupid sets off an explosion of laughter; sometimes, appearing smart sets it off—especially if you are a female. Keeping very still and quiet become survival strategies. The halls are dangerous; the dining room is dangerous; locker rooms are dangerous. Staying close to a few friends, dressing like them, mocking those they mock are also survival strategies.

At admissions events or on parents’ day or at graduation, I listen to the veneer of fine promises being slapped over the reality of the school I know, and I marvel at our capacity for self-deception. Taking risks is not encouraged by the structures or practices or culture of schools. Taking risks of the sorts that schools know are essential to learning does not come easily or naturally to adolescents. While they may be masters of risky behavior in the worlds of sex, drugs and dumb-and-dumber peer pressure, they need to feel safe in a more adult world to experiment with becoming educated adults.

School people know this. They understand the connection between taking intellectual risks and learning. That’s why they claim to graduate risk-takers. It’s good PR. Much more difficult is the task of designing schools that eliminate the shadow that falls between the idea and the reality.

The Valley of the Shadow: Part 1

Mon, 04 May 2009 14:57:09 +0000

The Valley of the Shadow
Part 1:
The Emperor’s Clothes

In my experience, independent schools live in the shadow that falls, as Eliot put it, “between the idea and the reality … between the conception and the creation.” The glossy rhetoric of school catalogs generally far exceeds the reality of daily life. I suppose reality will always fall short of lofty promises—we are accustomed to dashed hopes and good intentions.

Visit school Web sites, check out the mission statements. Despite genuine efforts to distinguish themselves from each other, schools sound pretty much the same. Blah, blah, blah, life-long learners; blah, blah, blah, risk-takers; blah, blah, blah, creativity, mutual respect, integrity, independent thinkers, civic responsibility, service to others, self-discovery, scholarship. Such language is the academic equivalent of the political promise of a chicken in every pot.

Humans seem simultaneously drawn to exciting ideals and not really interested in the hard work and hard choices required to transform ideals into reality. Somehow, two things always seem to get in the way: Good intentions collide with self-defeating practices, and the implications inherent in ideals tend to be ignored. People seem particularly adept at believing that saying something makes it so.

A head at a very fine school spoke last May at graduation and told the assembly that the purpose of education is to answer the question “what is living for,” the question that he sees as “at the heart of a liberal arts education.” It was an inspirational talk suggesting that what the students had been engaged in for four years was a “rigorous process of scrutiny and inquiry” on a “quest for self-understanding.”

I have my doubts. My years in independent schools, including this head’s school, lead me to believe that the teachers had been working hard to meet the parents’ expectations for their children—teaching the stuff whereon dreams of ivy colleges are made. Reading the classics, learning the facts, memorizing the dates and the vocabulary and the formulas, getting high grades and SAT’s, racing through as many AP courses as possible, meeting requirements, filling time with sports and building a resume.

Here’s how one student summed up her schooling: “I think I figured out somewhere pretty early on that school was a game where the goal was to get the highest GPA with the least amount of effort. I don't know if this attitude was particularly conducive to learning, but it got me cum laude from an Ivy League university.” Differing perceptions of reality, I’d say.

I hate to admit it, but the majority of teachers and administrators I have known have not seemed particularly interested in answering even for themselves the question, what is living for. Although there were a few who cared deeply about some form of this question, these few tended to be more passionate about inculcating in their students the answer to the question than in having the students wrestle with the question itself.

Let’s face it: schools are not typically set up for rigorous inquiry; they are set up so students will meet fairly rigid requirements that will keep college admissions officers happy—basically, four years of everything (except the arts) culminating at the AP level. Who has time for even superficial scrutiny—or any other oxymoron? Speedy reflection? Deeply broad inquiry? Departmentalized interdisciplinary study?

Organizing a secondary school around a question like what is living for would be revolutionary, particularly if the school took seriously the need for students to design and begin their journey to their own answer. For example, instead of making information about content areas the center of learning, schools might have to teach students the skills they need for serious inquiry: questioning, analytic and creative thinking, reading, writing, speaking and listening, research, reflection, problem-solving, designing experiments and so on. Instead of graduation requirements in math and history, the diploma might reflect some level of skill mastery. Can you imagine the turf wars that would erupt if a school seriously considered a new basis for the diploma?

Or take another small but essential aspect of school life: think about the implications for using time if a school embraced serious inquiry as its raison d’etre. Maybe a gauntlet of 50-minute classes makes sense if teachers need to give students a daily dose of facts to ingest in five different subject areas, but what sort of time does a learner need in order to develop skills or internalize concepts? How much time does reflection or problem-solving take?

Idealism is valuable, and we need school heads who have exciting visions, who have high, bold expectations for students and teachers. My point is simply that the claims a school makes have real implications for how the school is designed and for how it goes about the business of learning and teaching. Sound and substance either harmonize or they don’t. If you say that the purpose of education is to engage in deep inquiry into philosophical questions about the meaning and purpose of life but everyone seems more interested in SAT scores and ivy colleges and whether the hockey team is any good and learning means memorizing what the teacher says, well, all you’ve got is noise.

People seem to be masters of self-deception. They are quick to believe the hyperbole in which they dress reality and, as a result, are no longer able to see reality at all. When challenged, when someone suggests their reach has exceeded their grasp, there is hell to pay. Leaders need an accurate sense of the world—a good reason to make sure that school heads spend much more time immersed in what is going on in the classroom, their own and their colleagues’. Surely, we can weave rhetoric and reality into a fine garment that everyone can admire.

Guerrilla Teachers

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 13:19:09 +0000

Guerrilla Teachers

“Something’s not right here. What is it?” asks Krista stepping back as she works through one of the problems that her tenth grade math students have put on the white boards around the room. She looks at the numbers as students shout suggestions.

“OK,” she says, “so 16x to the sixth is the variable expression for the area, and what happens when we plug in 5? Why isn’t Karen’s answer coming out right?” A cacophony of suggestions, all of them focused on possible errors Karen has made, and Krista stands quietly looking at the numbers.

“Oh, wait,” she says, stabbing at the board with her marker. “What if Karen is right? Look, look. What do you see here? I made an error. My arithmetic is wrong.”

“I knew it,” shouts one of the boys, who is followed by a chorus of “I got it right.”

Krista turns to them. “So why didn’t you say so? Why did you assume I was right? I make mistakes, but you just assumed the teacher must be right, didn’t you?”

Krista works hard to get her students to think like mathematicians, to understand the importance of making errors and to begin to trust their own powers of reasoning—to question authority.

Down the hall, Meghan, a Latin teacher, encourages her students in the same direction. “Kids seem to do much better with concepts and ideas when they have to figure them out on their own and put them into their own words.” So she has her students teaching gerunds and the gerundive to each other. “It's very interesting to listen to the kids talk about grammar concepts in their own words. Often, they make discoveries or come up with ideas that are advanced and complicated. I think the class went quite well, and I was pleased to hear two grammar topics being discussed in six different ways.”

Upstairs, Laura turns off the lights and asks her English students to close their eyes and recall something that frightened or delighted them as children, something to rekindle a strong emotion from childhood. Then she asks them to imagine what sort of animal this emotion might resemble, and they move on to create descriptive poems about these animals in preparation to read Dickinson’s “Hope,” “a thing with feathers.”

“I recruited their emotions to get them in the right mindset to address the ideas in the poem. Then I had them try to do the same things Dickinson had done in the poem so they would be less intimidated by the poem itself. They would have done the same thing on their own already and would have some understanding of what she was trying to do in her poem. Then I had them read the poem and try to understand it, analyze and interpret it.”

Across the campus in the science classrooms, Michael is having his students “design and carry out an inquiry-based lab on enzymes.” Jim has taken his chemistry students off campus to a local stream to analyze the degree of pollution and determine its sources in preparation for meeting with the town’s conservation committee.

These efforts to help students think like scientists, writers, mathematicians, linguists, historians, artists reflect the work of hundreds of other good teachers all over the country in all sorts of schools. They are the veterans, old and young, of decades of struggle to reform these schools, to graduate skilled students who can think creatively instead of parrots whose short-term memories are sufficient to meet the meaningless challenges of state standards or the SAT’s. These are teachers courageous and honest enough to admit the failures of the deadening lecture-regurgitate traditions of schooling and intellectually alive and curious enough to search for better ways to promote real learning.

These teachers battle a system that is big, relentless and inflexible. Outnumbered, they have fought an often lonely war against a failed system supported by the fear and laziness of colleagues who resent change. They have devised strategies to outwit those administrators who have no real understanding of learning, who don’t read or think about the research of cognitive and neuroscientists and who aren’t in the classrooms—some of whom even admit they have no real interest or strengths in academics. Occasionally, these teachers have been fortunate, able to join forces with one of a few visionary school heads willing to take on college admissions offices, the testing industry, parents, and the institutional zombies who cling to their turf and are protected by unions or tenure.

Despite the intolerable slowness of change against the forces of inertia and vested interests, there are signs that reform might finally achieve escape velocity. More and more teachers are attending workshops on learning, teaching and the brain. More are trying out new ideas in their classrooms. Partnerships among college education departments, neuroscience and K-12 schools are forming. And most important, supported by a growing body of research, teachers like Krista, Meghan, Laura, Michael and Jim are becoming more confident and venturing outside their classrooms not only to share their successes with their colleagues but to take leadership positions in their schools.

It’s about time. Innovative, imaginative teachers deserve the support of real systemic change. They deserve a break from guerrilla teaching. Perhaps as they become the system, they will finally change the system.

Attitude Part 3: Whatever

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 15:01:01 +0000

Attitude
Part 3:
Whatever

The third factor that separates successful students from failures is the “whatever” attitude toward school, the attitude that school is something that just happens to you and you have no control over anything. It’s the attitude of the victim or of prisoners, those whose lives are directed by others. They wait until the class, the school day, the school year end and then get on with “real life.” What they learn instead of how to think or read or write are helplessness and passivity. They are made to attend class; they are given grades; they are required to take courses. Whatever.

The problem here is that these students feel no connection to school. History and science have nothing to do with who they are or what they want. In fact, history and science are impediments to what matters to them and excite only animosity or boredom. Intellectually, students with this attitude are inaccessible.

Teachers can shout and threaten or cajole and woo, but the best they can hope for from this population are good behavior and the illusion of learning. To get the sort of vitality and genuine engagement teachers want, schools simply need to change.

People, including young people, become intellectually alive when they care about what they are learning, when they are able to pursue their interests, when they are learning about themselves and the world they live in, when they have created a link between education and their life. Whether or not schools share responsibility for creating the whatever attitude, they perpetuate it, so it seems reasonable to look at school designs to see how schools might create conditions that stimulate attitudes more conducive to learning. Gina’s experience suggests one strategy.

Gina was a bright student, an interesting combination of what passes for success in school and a “whatever” attitude. “I think I figured out somewhere pretty early on that school was a game where the goal was to get the highest GPA with the least amount of effort. I don't know if this attitude was particularly conducive to learning.” But her grades were very good. At the end of her junior year, she decided to try the independent studies program that Paul and Amy joined (see parts 1 and 2). This was her experience:

“[The program] was scary for me, especially at the beginning, because it didn't have the direct ‘effort in = results out’ equation that I'd learned in the past. The idea that I had to evaluate my own success rather than just fooling teachers was scary. The idea of one big, blank year ahead of me, for me to fill as I wished, was quite terrifying. … What did it teach me? To be well organized. To motivate myself. To take risks. To dare to do things a little differently. To write. To trust myself. To look at the trees instead of staying on the path of a career. … [It] opened me up to the idea that there are other routes than the linear path from point A to point B.”

Gina was not some sort of oddity. She was a bright girl with a whatever attitude who played the game and learned very little in school-as-usual except how to please her teachers. It wasn’t until the school released her from confinement that her attitude clearly changed and she learned in the more meaningful way we like to pretend is reflected in good grades and docility.

A few years ago, Richard Light, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, made a similar discovery about meaningful learning that he published in a book called Making the Most of College: Students Speak Their Minds. It was based on a ten-year study of successful and unsuccessful students at Harvard. In the book, Light stressed the importance of involvement in extracurricular activities.

Here’s what he said in response to a Newsweek interview about that emphasis:

"Students who are involved in extracurriculars are the happiest students on campus and also tend to be the most successful in the classroom. They find a way to connect their academic work to their personal lives. For example, I spoke to a young woman who was a ballet dancer in high school. She joined the college ballet company, but she kept getting stress fractures, and noticed that many of the other dancers were having the same problem. She began to wonder why and she decided to explore that in her coursework. That decision changed her life. She took science classes. She applied for a research grant. When she graduated, she applied to medical school to become an orthopedic surgeon. Her whole education was so much more meaningful because it connected to her life. If students can apply what they are learning to their real life, they are more engaged and tend to get more out of it."

Responsibility for creating this link between learning and life is the student’s, not the teacher’s. Good teachers and good schools will create the circumstances, the environment, the permission, that foster this connection, but only the student can create the connection.

So that’s it—three attitudes that prevent learning and three factors that may be the most essential to success in high school and college: a recognition of the need to learn; intellectual vitality that comes from students seeing themselves as students and from wanting to learn; and connecting education to life. What separates the successful students from the unsuccessful is not intelligence. It is the difference in the degree of motivation and engagement. It’s their attitude. And it’s the attitude of their school.

Attitude Part 2: Too Cool

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 18:50:51 +0000

Attitude
Part 2:
Too Cool

The second factor that distinguishes successful students from the failures is the degree to which people see themselves as students and feel a sense of pride in being a student. Successful students don’t just need to learn: they want to learn. They are intellectually alive and curious, and they believe they can learn. They also aren’t ashamed to be seen studying; they aren’t ashamed of achievement.

Sadly, in our schools, just as in much of American society, too many young people don’t see themselves as students. Too many take no pride in the essay they write or in developing an understanding of the Civil War or in solving a problem. Books put them to sleep instead of exciting their imagination or intellect. Too many believe they are stupid and convince themselves they can’t learn. For them the classroom is a dungeon of failure and humiliation. Too many find studying not cool. They flock together terrified that someone might call them “geek” or “nerd.”

Being an athlete is cool; belonging to the popular crowd is cool; rebellion or cynicism is cool; partying is cool. You can see or hear the pride young people feel in these identities. Much less frequently, you run into young people whose pride comes from their identity as scholars, though many of these students only reveal their identity in private to their teachers—scholars in the closet, hiding because they don’t want to seem odd to their peers.

Learning requires people to become involved—in questions, problems, ideas, knowledge. Like athletes, students have to care about what they are doing. Athletes who don’t care sit on the bench and are either ignored or berated by coaches. Students who don’t care sit at their desks, either ignored or berated by teachers. But whereas people more readily accept that detached athletes are responsible for their failure to learn the skills and strategies of hockey, people tend to blame teachers for the failures of detached students to learn the skills of writing or thinking.

It is true that to the degree that schools and teachers fail to create conditions conducive to learning, to the degree that schools and teachers kill any enthusiasm or curiosity young people bring to school, responsibility falls on the adults and the system. But the fact remains that you can’t learn if you don’t see yourself as a student—if there is no pride in being a student.

So trying to get non-students to learn math, to understand the concepts and internalize them and make them their own, is fairly hopeless. Someone might be able to teach math to such a person in the sense that you can teach a parrot to repeat words that it doesn’t understand. But I am talking here about learning, a goal that is often lost in the preoccupation with testing and coverage.

Fortunately, every teacher has some real students scattered about a career, so it’s easy to recognize the wonderful ring of engagement in the voices of those who are truly learning, the ring that distinguishes them from the dullness of the others. Amy was such a student, another who discovered the scholar in herself when she was able to control her own learning. Here’s what she said:

“When working on a collection of short stories for my [independent] program, I really cared about the result. It was mine--not something that everyone was churning out in one fashion or another. I felt ownership and pride and was inspired to go the extra bit, as it was personal. … I could get a start on what it really was I wanted to do in my ‘real life’—I could pursue a passion. … I learned that you don't wait for permission or a firing of the start gun to begin your passion—you just do it—and you are what you do. And it can change—there is no strict path to get where you want to be. No trail to follow—you make it up as you go.”

Shakespeare wrote, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” He suggests that attitude controls perception. We can’t control the attitudes young people have about school or about themselves as students. They feel what they feel. But we can influence their attitude. We can create the conditions in which their thinking develops. Amy hated school until she found her way into learning—which suggests to me the need for more flexibility, more variety, less rigidity, so that students can blaze their own trails.

A hundred years of dogged devotion to current conditions haven’t resulted in changes in attitudes toward school. Come summer, it’s still pretty much “no more teachers, no more books.” But for Amy, summer was a continuation of school—more writing, more learning, more caring about what she was doing. And those who read her stories in the lit mag or who attended her readings thought she was very cool.

(Note: Look for the third attitude in the next posting.)

Attitude Part 1: Knowing It All

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Attitude
Part 1:
Knowing It All

As a teacher, I spent many sleepless nights wondering about the difference between successful students and unsuccessful students—students who learn and those who don’t. Now, it’s not very fashionable to think this way. We are supposed to believe in a romantic, democratic, no-child-left-behind approach to education: all children can learn. In addition, our attitude to school is increasingly consumerist: More money will produce more learning. Since schools seem constantly to get more money (ever-rising taxes or tuitions), any failures to learn must be the fault of teachers, not the students.

There is no doubt that good teachers are essential. Being a happy idealist, I also believe all children can learn. But a thousand years in a classroom have convinced me that not all children will learn and that any student can defeat and destroy even the best teacher. Students ultimately determine whether learning will occur. Let’s face it: even Yale produces its share of dolts.

So, let’s look at the students. Instead of the usual whipping boys—teachers, home life, unions, tenure, television, computer games, economics, racism, class—let’s just look at three of many factors that separate the failures from the successful students, three attitudes that students bring to the classroom and that they control.

The first is the Professor Jowett factor. Professor Jowett is the subject of an old, anonymous poem:
   I am the great Professor Jowett:
   What there is to know, I know it.
   I am the Master of Balliol College,
   And what I don’t know isn’t knowledge.

Several years ago, I was invited to be guest director at a college in southern California. It was there that I really became conscious of the Professor Jowett factor. Several of these college theatre majors seemed convinced that they already knew everything there was to know about theatre. They had come from high school theatre programs in which they had been stars. As a result, they assumed they had nothing left to learn. It was difficult and not much fun to direct them, for they resisted anything new. Students who come to the classroom with this attitude, whether in high school or college, cannot be taught. Those who think they already know everything cannot and will not learn anything.

What identifies these students is their outrage when they are not cast in a show or when their grades tumble from their former A’s to C’s or D’s—their outrage at the unfairness of it all. And, of course, the sound of their outrage brings their parents and, increasingly, their lawyers. “Sally has always been so talented in math.” “Johnny’s last teacher said he was an excellent writer.”

The implication, of course, is that the present difficulty must be the result of the failure of the teacher, not that the student is being taken to a higher level of learning, not that the practices and expectations appropriate for the eighth grade must be redefined and elevated for the tenth grade, and certainly not that young people (just like the rest of us) tend to want to repeat behavior that made them stars at the earlier stages of their development. Making the situation worse has been our society’s desire to worship at the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Self-Esteem.

You just can’t teach people who are convinced that they know everything and are good at everything. To learn, people must acknowledge the need to learn.

So what’s a teacher to do? Well, the first thing is to recognize the obvious: learning is a shared responsibility. Creating successful students is not the sole responsibility of the teacher, so teachers should resist the tendency to don the hair shirt when struggling with students who feel no need to learn.

At the same time, teachers can work to help students to discover this need, which often emerges from two general sources: a deep interest or a goal. Most young people have interests, whether strictly academic or not. Even those whose interests seem confined to sex, drugs and rock and roll can build a bridge to the classroom, as long as the classroom is flexible and the teacher recognizes that the problem is the student’s.

The same is true of goals, which can include pleasing parents, getting into college, finding a job—even escaping from school. At bottom, young people want what we all want—to feel competent, respected and alive—and teachers can awaken the need to learn by tapping into what matters most to each of them and helping them connect that to school.

Paul’s story provides a dramatic illustration. A bright, disaffected honors student, Paul might easily have appeared to have had all the answers. He had met all the graduation requirements a year early and felt “finished” with school. During his three years of high school, his main interests had been marijuana and finding the path of least resistance to a diploma. Despite the good grades, he hadn’t learned much. What he wanted were autonomy and separation from school, and he found these in a unique independent studies option that attracted him initially as “an exercise in sloth … the easiest and most enjoyable path I could follow to fulfill my graduation requirements.” He built his program on his interest in writing and became a reporter for a local newspaper, free from all but an English class and an elective.

“As my program morphed due to my various experiences with writing, I became more interested in the journalistic aspects and motivated to pursue those with greater discipline and vigor. In the second half of the year, I spent the majority of my time pursuing journalism rather than creative or critical writing as I found its schedules and deadlines added structure in combination with near complete independence. I was rewarded with publishing one or more columns in every issue under my own name. I was treated as an adult employee, working on every aspect of the paper in addition to just writing. I found that aspect to be most beneficial to my self-esteem.”

Paul’s attitude didn’t leave him open to learning anything in a regular classroom, and no teacher was going to change that, but the flexibility of the school resulted in a meaningful educational experience. Without flexible schools and teachers, young Jowetts won’t be taught; they will choose to stay behind.

(Note: Look for the second attitude in the next posting.)

Which Way to Go

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 15:30:39 +0000

Which Way to Go

Here is Alice, lost in Wonderland and seeking direction from the Cheshire Cat:

“Would you tell me, please, which way to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the cat.
“I don’t much care . . .” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t much matter which way you go,” said the cat.
“But so long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation.
“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the cat, “if you only walk far enough.”

Perhaps your experiences with leadership in schools have been more fortunate than mine, but this exchange captures what I imagine as the inner dialogue of most of the school leaders I have known. By school leaders, I mean all levels of leadership from head to toes. Most have no sense of which way to go because they have no real destination in mind, nor do they even care much about the destination. They simply hope to get somewhere, which they will manage to do if they walk far enough—if they hang on to the job long enough, doggedly plodding on.

Several years ago, Head X had to leave campus for a few days to raise some money. He had no assistant head, so he left a teacher he liked in charge with this instruction: “If anything comes up, just do something. It doesn’t really matter what.”

Most school leaders are slightly more subtle. They have adopted the clichés of vision-speak and take every opportunity to sound as though they have a destination—lifelong learning, risk-taking, getting outside your comfort zone, service, community, the guide-on-the-side vs. the sage-on-the-stage, student-centered, independent thinking, discipline with dignity. But when it comes to making actual decisions, it becomes clear that vision-speak is simply sound divorced from substance. Deliberation and decisions are ad hoc, quickly cast adrift from any guiding principle or vision suggested by the clichés being spouted.

Here is a typical decision: The Curriculum Committee is meeting—a collection of school leaders such as department chairs, assistant head, directors of this or that. The issue is whether to require high school juniors to take six courses for one term so that the arts can have more access to the students. It is April, almost time to publish next year’s course catalog, and in various ways the school has spent several years, including this one, talking about the absurd course loads, especially for juniors—the amount of homework, student exhaustion, the fragmentation of the curriculum, depth vs. breadth, the frantic schedule, the need for reflection. Not one syllable of the current vision-speak suggests that six courses make sense. But, well, the arts teachers are unhappy, and we’re only talking about one term, and we will carefully study the effects and reassess the entire curriculum and schedule next year, and let’s all be friends. So, of course, we decide the juniors will take six courses, and Head Y is silent, busy walking far enough to get somewhere. Four years later, the juniors are still taking six courses.

Like George H. W. Bush, most (not all) school leaders seem baffled by “the vision thing.” And the thing about vision is that it articulates an actual destination—outcomes that heads want for their schools, that department chairs want for their teachers, that teachers want for their students. Principles are involved, and these principles have real implications for what happens in a school. The principles must inform decisions.

If a school claims to believe that young people need to become independent thinkers, there are real implications for how teachers teach, how students might be involved in shaping their schools, how adults and students relate to each other. If a school claims to believe young people need to be creative, it’s not enough to require some arts courses. Nurturing and teaching creativity have to be embedded in every course, in every department. And if a school believes in graduating scholars instead of water bugs, then requiring six courses and moving students through a gauntlet of frantic fifty-minute speed-dates with teachers may not be the best decisions.

We need school leaders—heads and deans and teachers—who know where they want to go: leaders discerning enough to distinguish between the emptiness of vision-speak and the substance of sound principles, leaders who have the integrity to make really difficult choices consistent with these principles. And we need schools made up of leaders courageous enough to work together to create a shared vision of education. The alternative is more of the status quo: the chaos of rudderless ad hoc decision-making—decisions that reflect not an intention to create a better school or department or students but more mundane preoccupations: expediency (the path of least resistance), fear (primarily of litigation and losing a job) and a craving for affection.

As Alice says, “It would be so nice if something made sense for a change.”