Teaching Excellence

A Third Story about Coaching

2012-01-30T11:05:00.001-08:00

In my last post, I told twostories about coaching experiences. Here’s a third story.

After reading (and bloggingon) Atul Gawande’s New Yorker essay “Personal Best,” I wanted to experimentwith the species of classroom observation he calls “coaching.” So I asked Joe Quinn, a new member of ourEnglish Department, if he would be willing to conduct the experiment with me.

Joe wanted to try a new in-classwriting assignment. Having justcompleted a discussion of Stephen Crane’s story “The Open Boat,” his studentswere primed to think further about literary realism. Joe proposed the following:

Have class recall the various dimensions ofrealism, which Joe would list on the board.
Show a realist painting (“Gulf Stream,” byWinslow Homer).
Ask students to compose a single sentence, inthe realist style, describing something in the painting.
Ask for volunteers to read aloud their sentencesfor the group to evaluate.

I agreed to sit in on two consecutive classes (that is, group #1 of students would meet from 10:50-11:30 am, and group #2 would meet from 11:30-12:10). During the first class (group #1), Itook notes. Before the beginning of the second class (group #2), Isuggested that Joe tweak two specific things:

Whenstudents volunteer to have their sentences critiqued by the class, have eachstudent type that sentence for display on the SMARTBoard rather than read itout loud.
Startwith a single volunteer for the group to critique to establish a model for providingeffective feedback. Then break intopairs to practice providing that feedback. Then return to the large group for a last critique.

Clearly, neither of theserecommendations is earth shattering. What matters is that Joe and had a chance to receivefeedback after the first class and then implement changes in the second class.

In fact, not only did Joe makethese changes (and do so effectively), he even improvised a third change: afterthe one-on-one sharing, he said, “Would anyone like to nominate his partner’ssentence for the group to discuss? Theonly requirement is that you explain why you’ve chosen to volunteer yourpartner.” This was a clever way to getstudents to articulate their understanding of realism before passing thebaton to the large group.

This kind of “coaching” was trulyenergizing for me and for Joe. It makessense that this would increase adoption rates for improved pedagogies, but itseems to me that the real virtue lies in creating a process that framesclassroom observation as an opportunity for personal growth as opposed to a testthat has to be passed.

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

Two Stories about Coaching

2012-01-27T09:08:00.000-08:00

Two stories about coaching:

Coach #1

When I was a teenager, my AAUbasketball coach always devoted part of each practice to individual shootingdrills.

“Take 100 free throws,” he wouldinstruct us. “Keep track of your makes. Your goal is to hit 70 ormore.”

Every once in a while he wouldcome around and make a comment on your form, then move on to the next guy whileyou attempted to put his feedback into practice.

Coach #2

When I was in 7^thgrade, I was having trouble with my free throw shooting. My father, who was my CYO coach, invited a local high school basketball coach to help me out.

“Take 10 free throws,” coach #2 said, “andI’ll watch.”

When I was done, he put the ball in my hand and asked me to bring theball into the shooting position.

“Now stop,” he said.

He pointed to the positioning ofthe thumb on my shooting hand.

“Your thumb starts here, which isperfect. Your hands are in exactly theright spots at the beginning of your shot.”

Then he moved my arms up as if Iwere taking the shot.

“But when you get to the pointwhere you’re releasing the ball,” he said, “your thumb ends up pointingstraight ahead when it should end up pointing down. Do you know why that is?”

I had no clue.

“Because you’re using your thumbto push the ball, for extra force, but you really should only be using yourwrist and your other four fingers. Thethumb is only there to guide the ball, to keep it in the correct position.”

He held me by the elbow and wristand made my arm go through the motions so that I knew what it should look andfeel like.

“Got it?”

I got it.

He had me take 10 more free throws,but this time around, whenever my thumb pushed out, he would stop me and ask ifI felt it. Then I shot another 10 shots, and another 10, getting feedback from him every time. Before long, I was the onetelling him when I had misused my thumb.

Feedback is more useful when:

1. It’s specific.

2. The interval between performance and feedback is asshort as possible.

3. The coach (or teacher, or mentor, et al.) then observeswhile you try to implement the feedback in another performance.

What kind of coach are you?

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

Who Teaches This Stuff Anyway, Part 3

2012-01-08T22:00:00.000-08:00

The stuff I don't know about Twitter, HTML, designing web sites, etc., could fill many books. Though I don't need to know the majority of that stuff, some things would undoubtedly open new vistas on using technology to work with students.

But who's going to teach me?

The students, obviously.

Wouldn't it be interesting if teachers and students had regular opportunities to flip their roles? If you subscribe to any of the stuff in Tina Barseghian's "Mind/Shift" article on trends for 21st century learning, then you'll probably answer yes.

What if you announced, "Next Friday I need some of you to teach me how to use hashtags on Twitter" (or whatever you want to learn)?

In the short term, it might feel as though we are burning minutes that we don't have to spare, but the long-term return on that investment would be well worth it, both for us (efficiency, productivity, improved pedagogy) and our students (essential 21st century skills).

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

The Destroyer

2012-01-05T12:57:00.000-08:00

"The destroyer of weeds, thistles, and thorns is a benefactor whether he soweth grain or not."
--Robert Green Ingersoll

That quote, which just came through on my email, made me reflect upon the fact that schools often seem inclined to add programs without pruning those that no longer serve a purpose (or not enough of a purpose).

Isn't it worth asking--on a regular basis--what weeds, thistles, and thorns we can destroy in order to allow something else to grow?

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

Who Teaches This Stuff, Part 2

2012-01-02T12:37:00.000-08:00

If you have anything to do with the world of education, please read James Marshall Crotty's Forbes piece "Free Education for All." (HT to Basil Kolani for posting on Facebook.)

Crotty begins his piece with a reference to the demise of Kodak, which had all the reason (and resources) in the world to pay attention to the tectonic shift in from print to digital photography, yet did almost nothing.

If you read the news today, then you know that Kodak is about to file for bankruptcy.

Free education for everyone with an Internet connection is coming--and much sooner than we think. Just last month MIT announced that its going to increase the number of its free online courses (with modest fees for users to receive a certificate of completion).

But let's be honest: free "education" doesn't really mean a free "educational experience." It simply means that someone with an Internet connection and sufficient motivation can teach herself almost anything.

This would be bad news if "education" = "content." Fortunately, it doesn't. Even in a world where the content of an MIT education will be free, an education also consists of interpersonal skills and experiences.

Can't you see the commercial coming?

An iPad 2: $500.

A monthly Internet connection: $30.

Teaching your students to ask the right questions, to solve problems creatively, to challenge themselves, to develop a habit of mindful reflection and introspection: Priceless.

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

Who Teaches This Stuff Anyway?

2012-01-02T09:53:00.000-08:00

I recently had breakfast with Jeff, one of my best English students (ever). After a fine career studying creative writing and literature at Oberlin, he joined an e-publishing start-up that has doubled in size in the last year. The company's prospects for growth seem promising, and Jeff continues to take on more and more responsibility.

Which made me curious. "Let's say you have to hire someone right out of college," I said. "What would be the most important skills or competencies you would be looking for?"

His number one answer surprised me: How to write emails.

In particular, Jeff said that students should learn at an early age to:

1. use an email subject line to communicate as much information as possible. For example, instead of writing just "?" write "Can we change meeting from 12 to 1 pm?"

2. limit email responses to 2-3 sentences. If you can't boil your question/issue down to that space, then pick up the phone or go see the person.

For all of my former (and current) students who have joked about my obsession with concision...voila.

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

p.s.: If you haven't already read Chris Anderson and Jane Wulf's email charter, check it out.

Why Do Students Need to Dream?

2011-12-15T09:34:00.000-08:00

Because it helps them consolidate their learning.

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

Going Global

2011-12-08T19:32:00.000-08:00

I've come to believe as an article of faith that truly competitive high schools must take incremental but deliberate steps towards a global focus. So I was thrilled when a friend and mentor sent me a chapter from Curriculum 21: Essential Education for a Changing World. Titled "A Classroom as Wide as the World," by Vivien Stewart, the chapter lays out some crucial principles. Schools should:

Develop a profile of what Stewart calls a "globally competent" or "globally literate" student. Benchmark the success of your efforts at global education against this profile.
Develop existing faculty so that they can pursue international interests. This should include study and immersion opportunities.
Recruit new faculty who possess "global competence."
Train students to compete, connect, and cooperate with people around the globe. As a first step, enable students to develop relationships (and competitions) with peers at schools on the other side of the world. Skype, Google+, and other Internet tools make this simple.
Update curricula to reflect "global competence." This means: knowledge of other regions, cultures, economies, global issues; and the ability to read and converse in a modern foreign language.
Enable students to study abroad. This may mean attending classes for several weeks at a school in a foreign country, but it might also mean a language immersion experience with a host family.

Vivien Stewart's chapter is titled "A Classroom as Wide as the World," and I wonder if she was inspired by Emily Dickinson's poem #126, which begins "The brain is wider than the sky." If we can make our classrooms as wide as the world, then our students' brains will grow wider than the sky.

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

CXXVI

THE BRAIN is wider than the sky,
For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include
With ease, and you beside.

The brain is deeper than the sea,	5
For, hold them, blue to blue,
The one the other will absorb,
As sponges, buckets do.

The brain is just the weight of God,
For, lift them, pound for pound,	10
And they will differ, if they do,
As syllable from sound.

3 Questions about the Bottom 10%

2011-12-02T10:25:00.001-08:00

This article on what to do about under-performers just came to my inbox, and it prompted an uncomfortable but important set of questions:

1. Who are the bottom 10% of your faculty?

Defining "bottom 10%" is complicated, but for the sake of the argument let's say that we could arrive at some reasonably reliable way to identify the weakest teachers in a school. What then?

2. Do they know exactly why they're under-performing?

And the most important question:

3. What is your school doing about it?

There is a bottom 10% in every organization. That's not the same as saying the bottom 10% need to be fired. But the bottom 10% always needs feedback and an action plan.

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

Entrepreneurship

2011-11-30T06:57:00.001-08:00

Ever wonder if anyone can be an entrepreneur? Watch this 30 second video:

http://www.30secondmba.com/question/really-good-advice?video_id=61b9b59879549

Execution. That's all it takes to be an entrepreneur. Not the most creativity, certainly not an MBA. Just the discipline to execute an idea.

Of course, it's a little more complicated than that. You have to be willing to fail (and, if you do fail, you have to be willing to learn from that failure). And you have to have some baseline of resources and support, according to your project.

How many teachers in your school are entrepreneurs? How many students are entrepreneurs?

Now the really tricky question: does your school promote a culture of entrepreneurship?

Things are changing fast out there. We need more entrepreneurs...

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

Heisenberg's (Grading) Principle

2011-11-03T05:33:00.001-07:00

Cathy Davidson's Now You See It has me engrossed, not least because I'm responding to her ideas with enthusiasm and skepticism in equal measure. In other words, I'm completely engaged.

For now, I'd like to share this insight based on Davidson's experience assessing student performance in a Duke undergraduate course on collaborative, problem-based learning:

"Assessment is a bit like the famous Heisenberg principle in quantum mechanics: the more precisely you measure for one property, the less precisely you can measure for another. If you're looking for conventional achievement using conventional measures, then by definition you cannot at the same time be measuring by other criteria or measuring other qualities. In grading [my students] strictly on content based on papers and exams, I had failed to evaluate them on all the really amazing ways that they had contributed to a semester of collaborative research, thinking, and interdisciplinary teamwork--exactly what the course was supposed to be about."

What are you measuring when you assess your students?

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

Who Will Coach the Coaches?

2011-10-18T10:56:00.000-07:00

In the last eight years, Atul Gawande has performed over 2000 surgeries, the vast majority of which have involved his specialty, endocrine surgery. In his recent New Yorker essay, "Personal Best," he writes,

"As I went along, I compared my results against national data, and I began beating the averages. My rates of complications moved steadily lower and lower. And then, a couple of years ago, they didn't. It started to seem that the only direction things could go from here was the wrong one."

What did he do? He found a retired general surgeon to coach him. Almost immediately his performance received a boost.

Read the whole essay; it's fascinating to note the mechanisms by which good coaching works across disciplines as diverse as medicine, tennis, and opera.

As for teaching, a California longitudinal study reports the following:

"Workshops led teachers to use new skills in the classroom only ten per cent of the time. Even when a practice session with demonstrations and personal feedback was added, fewer than twenty per cent [of teachers] made the change. But when coaching was introduced--when a colleague watched [teachers] try the new skill in their own classroom and provided suggestions--adoption rates passed ninety per cent."

Let's review: when it comes to classroom methods, an in-service day will have either no material impact or a modest impact (i.e., if a practice session is included).

Gawande doesn't report data on classroom observations of individual teachers, but I would guess that unless a teacher plans ahead of time to pilot a new skill during an observation, then the observer's recommendations might have a similarly modest impact.

Gawande has averaged over 250 surgeries a year. How many days teaching (vs. giving a test, or attending in-services, etc.) does a teacher average? 170 a year? 160? 150? If a self-selectively competitive individual like Gawande acknowledges the need for a coach in spite of his considerable practice, you have to wonder: why would schools NOT provide coaching to their teachers?

There is, of course, the obvious reason: resources. Schools may have neither the time nor the money to invest in a coaching "program" (in which case I would say that the Board of Trustees ought to make it a strategic goal).

But Gawande points out some other reasons:

"Researchers from the University of Virginia found that many teachers see no need for coaching. Others hate the idea of being observed in the classroom, or fear that using a coach makes them look incompetent, or are convinced, despite assurances, that the coaches are reporting their evaluations to the principal."

I can appreciate these concerns. Teachers' egos are heavily invested in their work. For example, I solicited anonymous feedback from my Junior English students after the first few weeks of classes, a period that covered not only discussions of short stories but also substantial writing instruction. Every year I try to tweak my approach to optimize my methods, and I thought this year I had finally gotten those first few weeks right. And for the most part the students agreed. But several said that we moved through the stories too quickly, which in turn meant that they hadn't understand them as well as they had wanted. This had a carry-over effect to their first critical essay on one of those stories.

This feedback stung. As a younger teacher, I would have become defensive or rationalized my methods. But I'm not a young teacher anymore, and when I put my ego aside, I have to admit that even when I strive constantly to improve, I'm still going to miss some things.

Students aren't exactly the same as coaches, but they share in common the ability to identify--and provide feedback on--things that fall in our blind spots.* This week I have begun implementing my students' feedback about spending more time on the stories we discuss. We'll see whether it works.

Coaching presupposes a deficiency; otherwise, we wouldn't need coaches. But if the process holds out the promise of a ninety per cent adoption rate of superior methods, shouldn't be we be willing to hear criticism?

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

*In this week's issue of the New Yorker, someone wrote in about an analogous situation for surgeons.

What Problem Does Your School Solve?

2011-10-16T19:34:00.000-07:00

"Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution."
--Clay Shirky

This quote appears in the Introduction to Cathy Davidson's Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn.

If you read that out loud, I'll give you a moment to catch your breath.

That subtitle seems designed to elicit skepticism. On the other hand, given the fact that I've created a Senior Seminar titled "Brain/Mind/Soul" and given the fact that Davidson's book apparently devotes considerable space to transforming education, I felt obligated to check it out. On the strength of her Introduction, I'm certainly going to keep reading.

But for now I want to consider that quote above from Clay Shirky. Why is Davidson quoting him?

As she goes on to say:

"My grandmother came to this country in steerage, by steamship, but when I look at the photograph of her standing tall and proud in her eighth-grade class in Chicago, surrounded by immigrants from other places, the schoolroom itself looks entirely familiar. Her classroom could be plopped down almost unchanged in any large, urban public school today. What's more, many features of that classroom and what she learned there were structured to help her adjust to the new industrial, manufacturing based economy she was entering. That economy, as we all know, has been transformed irrevocably by globalization and the changes wrought by the information age. If kids must face the challenges of this new, global, distributed information economy, what are we doing to structure the classroom of the twenty-first century to help them? In this time of massive change, we're giving our kids the tests and lesson plans designed for their great-grandparents."

In other words, too many schools preserve a problematic model because they know how to solve that problem. (Think of a room of thirty students sitting in perfect rows, facing the blackboard, while the teacher talks at them for forty or fifty or sixty minutes at a time. "Chalk and talk," as some teachers like to say.)

But as Davidson and scores of others have pointed out, the problem is no longer mass producing students who can work in an economy based on the industrial model. The problem involves, among other things, globalization.

So one more time: what problem does your school solve?

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

The Marshmallow Challenge

2011-10-13T20:21:00.000-07:00

Facebook has its uses. This evening I read "Bubble Boys," Chris Beam's fascinating New York Magazine piece about young code-writing hustlers in Silicon Valley. Their culture, which rewards "failing fast" and "iterating," made me think instinctively about teaching, so I posted the story's link on my Facebook. Within moments, my friend and fellow educator Basil Kolani had pointed me to "The Marshmallow Challenge."

I clicked on the link for Tom Wujec's TED talk about this design challenge, but after two minutes I had the impulse to stop watching. It seemed obvious where he was going: good teams start building right away while bad teams waste time figuring out roles, then trying to build the perfect structure in one shot.

I'm glad I kept watching. Wujec goes on to describe a twist he introduced during a Marshmallow Challenge workshop. He told 10 teams that the winning group would win $10,000 in software. The result? Not a single team managed to build a standing structure.

This seems counter-intuitive (or counter-cultural). Nevertheless, as Wujec says, "High incentives with low skills can actually kill performance."

Four months later, he issued the same challenge. The only difference, he points out, was that teams now understood the value of prototyping.

In other words, they learned that they could be rewarded for failing--provided they put that failure to proper use in the next iteration of their marshmallow structure.

There may be several applications to education here, but the one that comes most immediately to mind is evaluation and assessment.

If we want to reward students for learning from their mistakes--and we do want to reward this--how do we design a system of evaluation and assessment that encourages students to take risks? As Basil Kolani said on my Facebook wall, "We have our students devise solutions to problems, get feedback on it, self-assess, and adjust the product accordingly. It's not just tangible product-based work either: pieces of art, lab work, writing drafts, speeches, etc., all benefit from the iterative process."

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

Learning to Be Curious about Anger

2011-10-01T13:41:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I unwittingly performed an experiment in "Madness & Literature," my Senior English elective, when I administered a reading quiz.

It was a two-question quiz. Question 1 read, "I asked you to read Chapters 6-8 for today. How much reading did you complete?"

Out of 21 students, 4 said that they had done all of the reading; the remaining 17 confessions ranged from a blunt "none" to "up to page 99, just before the end of chapter 8."

But one student wrote: "Read through Ch. 6 Wed night, didn't have time for 7-8 last night due to Cold War paper and Econ half-test today."

That "due to" jolted me for two reasons.

First, I hadn't asked "How much reading did you complete and why?" So why did he and a few others attempt to explain their negligence? Guilt? Hope for leniency? The desire that I understand the context for their negligence? The simple assumption that I would want to know why?

Second, the student didn't write "due to poor time management" or some other reason involving self-blame.

As my simmering anger started to boil, I caught myself. True, the vast majority had not done all of their homework, which meant poor quiz grades for them and a severely limited class discussion for me.

But the intensity of my reaction made me wonder: was I missing something?

I went back to that "due to." Couldn't he have written, "due to the fact that you assigned too much reading"? Or "due to the fact that you hadn't quizzed us through the first two weeks of class, so I thought I could get away with not doing all the reading"? Or "due to the fact that I don't really like this book and I don't see why you assigned it"?

I'm not sure any of those is correct, but stopping to think about other possibilities allowed me to see that getting angry at the students was also an easy way to exclude myself from the picture.

Anger occasionally has its place in the classroom, but often it forecloses other opportunities.

So next time you get angry, ask yourself: are you content feeling righteous, or are you curious to know how that anger might lead you to be a more effective teacher?

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

Top 10 (Current) Articles on Educational Leadership

2011-09-23T13:30:00.000-07:00

For the curious andambitious, for those who care deeply about the power of an education to formstudents for personal, professional, vocational, and spiritual excellence--

Imagine you are goingto tear down your school, keeping only the mission. As you consider howto build the school again, how would these articles shape your vision for howyour school is going to live out its mission?

1. “WhoAre You and What Are You Doing Here?” by MarkEdmundson

One of the best reflections on the purpose of aliberal arts education I’ve seen. It’sabout forming the whole student—intellect, yes, but also the heart and thesoul—not just engineering “smart” kids.

2. "Whatif the Secret to Success is Failure?" by Paul Tough

What if good grades are just a side effect of a strongeducation? What if the real secret to asuccessful education lies in character development? In particular, students need to be givenopportunities to fail and recover.

3. “CornerOffice” with Andrew Thompson, by Adam Bryant

This is the world our students are entering right now:“[I]n the contextof being an innovative company, it’s really important that you don’t penalizefailure. In an innovative company, and particularly for a start-up company, youhave to take risk. So you have to have a very strong bias to action overanalytics, and for learning from mistakes and moving forward.” Also, teamwork is not just nice, it’sessential to success.

4. “TheBest School $75 Million Can Buy,” by JennyAnderson

Let me be clear that I am extremely uneasy with theidea of a for-profit school because I think there is an inherent risk to thecentrality of mission when profit is part of the equation. But on a conceptual level, I think Avenuesmodel for global education and citizenship should be a wake-up call. There is enormous vision at work here, atleast on paper.

5. “EducationNeeds a Digital Upgrade,” by Virginia Heffernan

In her review of Cathy Davidson’s Now You See It, a book on the brain science of attention, Virginia Heffernan writes, “[W]e can’t keep preparingstudents for a world that doesn’t exist. We can’t keep ignoring the formidablecognitive skills they’re developing on their own. And above all, we must stopdisparaging digital prowess just because some of us over 40 don’t happen topossess it. An institutional grudge match with the young can sabotage an entireculture.”

6. “Buildinga Better Online Classroom,” by Basil Kolani

Basil, a former colleague who was a year behind me inhigh school, is (for me) one of the most interesting educators thinking aboutdigital learning. In this piece, hesubjects himself to the online classroom as both teacher and student.

7. “Harnessing thePower of Feedback Loops,” by Thomas Goetz

Here’s one way to formulate the role of the teacher:to provide the right kind of feedback to promote each student’s learning. This article doesn’t talk about teaching, perse, but it’s impossible to read this and not come away with ideas about how toimprove your work with students.

8. “DoYou Suffer from Decision Fatigue?” by JohnTierney

Like the previous article, this one will challenge youto design better classwork, homework, and assessments.

9. “WhatDo Test Scores Tell Us?” by Gary Gutting

I remember many years ago getting into an argumentwith a colleague about “authentic assessment,” which our Principal andAssistant Principal were keen on discussing with the faculty. My colleague thought it was“Educationalese. Garbage. Meaningless jargon. Stop wasting my time and just let me do myjob.” Would it surprise you to learnthat this individual was one of the worst teachers I’ve ever known? Tests are only as good as the intelligentquestions that drive them.

10. “Most Likely to Succeed,” by Malcolm Gladwell

Do you have any influence over the hiring of teachers? Then read this.

________

Happy reading.

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

The Senior Seminar

2011-09-21T07:44:00.000-07:00

Just a quick post to let you know about a new blog that will report on "Brain/Mind/Soul," Regis' first-ever Senior Seminar. You can check it out here:

http://brainmindsoul.blogspot.com/

Although I will be writing the first couple of posts for that new blog, the students in the seminar will complete most of the remainder.

Enjoy.

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

20 Years of Gratitude

2011-09-11T19:02:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow I'll start my 15th year as a full-time teacher, but I actually began teaching during my senior year in high school for a year-long Christian Service project. So in a way, tomorrow marks the beginning of my 20th year as a teacher.

20 years doing anything might rightfully wear you down, yet at the end of every summer vacation I have felt exhilarated by the prospect of going to a place whose sole purpose is to facilitate the growth of students and teachers alike.

In "Who Are You and What Are You Doing Here," an exceptionally acute and powerful reflection on the purpose of a liberal arts education, Mark Edmundson quotes Randall Jarrell, who once said, "If I were a rich man, I'd pay to teach."

That is precisely how I feel.

There are plenty of things to think about as I prepare to enter the classroom again--a new crop of students, lesson plans, and Board committees, just to name a few--but what I can't stop thinking about is my gratitude for the opportunity to get paid to do what I love.

So thank you to the Jesuits and their lay colleagues who, next to my family, have had the deepest and most lasting influence on my character, my beliefs, and my aspirations.

And thank you to my colleagues at Regis and the other Jesuit schools around the nation. I am proud to call myself a Jesuit educator in large part because of the excellence of so many Jesuit educators I have come to know in my professional life.

Thank you, too, to my students over these 20 years. It is a cliché, but no less true for being so, that I have learned more from them than they have learned from me.

Finally, whether you're a teacher or a student, I hope that your efforts are marked by the magis--"the more." As Aristotle says, excellence is not an act, but a habit.

In other words, let's practice excellence in teaching and learning.

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

Why Success Always Starts with Failure

2011-09-08T20:09:00.000-07:00

In Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure, Tim Harford tells the story of Peter Palchinsky, an engineer in Tsarist, Leninist, and Stalinist Russia. In spite of the very real threat posed by speaking the truth to power, Palchinsky repeatedly told his superiors about the threats facing their centrally-planned economic projects. His research was treated as "political dynamite" and eventually Palchinsky was arrested and executed. Too bad for Russia, since Soviet leadership harbored "a pathological inability to experiment":

"Central planners decided what would be built, lulled into a sense of omniscience by having a map or a table of statistics in front of them. Such plans inevitably missed the messy complexities of the situation on the ground, and also produced far too little variation. Almost every apartment in Moscow had the same iridescent orange lampshade. In Magnitogorsk [where Palchinsky was sent to review one of Stalin's two biggest economic projects], there were two types of apartment, named 'A' and 'B'. They were the city's sole concession to variety.

"Above all, feedback is essential for determining which experiments have succeeded and which have failed. And in the Soviet Union, feedback was ruthlessly suppressed."

In retrospect, nobody should be surprised that a sclerotic economy eventually undid the Soviet Union.

What does this have to do with education? As technology and globalization continue to evolve at a geometric rate, schools must also evolve or face death by sclerosis. Tim Harford's book may ostensibly deal with corporate evolution, but the lessons seem perfectly appropriate for schools too:

"[F]irst, seek out new ideas and try new things; second, when trying something new, do it on a scale where failure is survivable; third, seek out feedback and learn from your mistakes as you go along. The first principle could be expressed as 'variation'; the third as 'selection'."

Which begs the question: how good is your school at experimenting?

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

Life Lessons

2011-08-31T08:58:00.000-07:00

I recently decided that I'm going to teach a 3rd Trimester Senior EnglishElective on espionage fiction, quite possibly just the Cold War novels of JohnLe Carré. To begin preparing, I bought a copy of Conversationswith John Le Carré, a collection of interviews spanning nearly fifty years. This exchange from 1969 particularly struck me:

Interviewer: You've been very successful; howrich have you actually become?

Le Carré: Firstly, if I knew the answer, I don'tthink I would reveal it. Secondly, to me anyway, it's absolutelyirrelevant. [...]

The truth is, you see, really that the equipmentwhich I need for my life is simply a pen and a pad of paper, the rest of theequipment is peace and money has provided me with that. The capitaloutlay is small. I don't think I'm awfully interested in happiness, thatis to say the kind of commercial happiness like long holidays in the Bahamas. What I do know is this--that when the writing is going well I don't careabout the money, and when it's going badly, the money's no consolation...

Le Carré has it right. We spend somuch of our lives working. Shouldn’t we love what we do?

Some of your students will never love thesubject you teach, but don't let that get in the way of finding out what theydo love, what they might be passionate about. Suggest article and booksfor them to read and movies to watch; put them in touch with professionals inrelated fields; ask how their extracurricular work is going. You couldend up sparking a lifelong passion.

Which is another way of saying that greatteachers don't just offer lessons in Algebra or History or Spanish. Theyoffer life lessons, too.

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

"No Silver Bullets," Part 3

2011-08-25T08:25:00.000-07:00

The following comes from my colleague (and former teacher), Tony Conti, a long-time Theology teacher at Regis High School. He writes in response to Tim Nowak's questions about treating "mission" like a silver bullet, and in response to my reaction to Tim's concerns.

"Tim Nowak suggests in his piece that mission statements onlyrepresent the tip of an iceberg when it comes to the realization of excellencein education. Christian Talbot adds to the discussion when he says that clarityin mission contributes to the vision’s 'asymptotic' realization--not so much ofthe written statement though, but of the vision that inspires the mission inthe first place.

For a school such as Regis, it is essential to celebrate thevision of Ignatius Loyola--which is a Christian vision, identified with thefaith vision of Christian/Catholic discipleship. Not to explicitly celebrate and invite othersinto this communal vision threatens to render any current mission statement asmerely an ideology and as such subject to the powers and principalities ofinstitutional politics and short-sighted reform, rather than to the life-long commitmentsof a community of participation which both Tim and Christian would surelysupport.

Mission statements come and go, as they ought to, dependenton the community that articulates them. Thecommunity itself bears the burden of both the vision and the mission and eachperson’s participation and leadership is needed in order to sustain what noindividual is capable of: the commitment over time to a vision of love andservice in imitation of a Jewish carpenter who died and rose again for the lifeof the world."

As a follow up, I asked Tony to describe what it looks like, from his experience, when mission becomes "ideological." He wrote:

"Mission slips into ideology when it:

no longer serves the vision which inspires it.
is used to maintain an institutional statusquo in the face of changing contexts.
is cynically used to manipulate behaviors orto stifle creativity and innovation.
serves the interests of individuals and theirneeds over the interests and needs of all.
acts contrary to the history and tradition ofthe community which inspired it.

The community--that is, the faculty--is established, is maintained, and is able to flourish because of the Mission. A mission statement is necessary,though not sufficient, for Mission to be realized; the community fleshes out theMission in each particular instance, independent of--though not without--thewritten formulation.

The question that hierarchy needs to answer is relateddirectly to mission itself. If leadership conceives of its position as top-downonly, then it is opting for a purely power relationship over the community. If,on the other hand, leadership sees itself at the center of the community--animating,challenging, and guaranteeing the integrity of the communal processes--then itserves the Mission as a participant rather than as an observer."

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

Emotions Spread Learning

2011-08-19T11:34:00.000-07:00

Maybe this WSJarticle by Jonah Lehrer explains why the most effective teachers alwaysseem to find a way to connect intellectual content with emotionalexperience. Didn't your best teachersexplain History, Biology, even Math by referring to powerful emotionalexperiences or by telling compelling and dramatic stories?

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Robert Sabatelli (1940 - 2011)

2011-08-10T05:38:00.000-07:00

The man who first inspired me to be a teacher died a few days ago.

I vividly remember sitting in Bob Sabatelli's American History class as a fifteen year old sophomore. We were discussing Stephen Ambrose's Rise to Globalism, and "Sabu" (as he was affectionately known by everyone, students and peers alike) was enjoining us to "Go to the text!" and to interpret what we found there. His enthusiasm catalyzed the energy of everyone else. The classroom crackled with energy.

This is what I want to do, I said to myself. I want to be a teacher.

When I returned to Regis as a faculty member, I learned that not everyone loved his passionate and playfully aggressive persona. But the vast majority of his students felt transformed by his teaching.

Yesterday I was talking to a fellow alumnus who told me about the way Bob "lifted up on his shoulders" (my friend's phrase) two of the quietest members of the class. One student was bright but had enormous trouble expressing himself.

"Richard! Richard! Keep going!" Sabatelli would say. "You have incredible insights, and the more you practice talking, the better you're going to get! Your classmates don't even understand how much you're helping them right now!"

But don't take my word for it. Read the testimonies here.

I'm sad that Bob is gone, but I'm grateful for the influence he had on me and so many others. When it comes to excellence in teaching, what more could we want?

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

"No Silver Bullets," Part 2

2011-08-09T13:28:00.000-07:00

I want to begin my response to Tim Nowak’s reflection, which I titled “No Silver Bullets,” with a brief anecdote.

I’ve spent part of the summer researching schools for my daughter. Because she’s multiply disabled, these arehighly specialized schools with strong mission statements. Recently, I was on a school tour with theprincipal when a commotion started a few doors down thehallway.

“How dare you do that!” a woman shouted.

The principal strained her smile even wider as she continued to tell meabout how well-equipped her school was to deal with my daughter, who can’ttalk, or walk, or even feed herself.

Incredibly, the staff member’s voice grew even louder, thick with rage. “What’s wrong with you? Don’t you ever do that again! What’s the matter with you, doing somethinglike that?”

The principal continued to talk over this woman’s shouting. I couldn’t believe it: why wasn't she excusing herself to reprimand the staff member who considered “What’s wrong with you?” an intelligent question to ask a multiplydisabled child?

Maybe the staff member was having a bad day. I’ve seen my share of them as the father of a disabled child. Still, that doesn’t excuse her behavior.

Thankfully, this is the only time I’ve witnessed such a flagrantviolation of a school’s mission to nurture and care for disabled children. But it does illustrate one of Tim’s key concerns:a strongly worded mission statement “doesn’t intrinsically instill a sense ofmission among team members.”

True, a strong mission statement does not guarantee success, but failureis guaranteed if a school does not have a strong mission statement.

Why?

Mission is the DNA of a school. It lays out the basic code that should lead (in theory) to the“expression” of certain genes.

But just as genes are influenced by the external factors, a school’smission—its genetic material—is influenced by its environment. That is why a school’scharacter not only begins with mission, but a school's leaders must conscientiously emphasize mission,every day. (Hence my belief that theprincipal giving me a tour failed when she didn’t immediately correct her staffmember’s behavior.) Because the fact is, when you walk by aclassroom, or observe a team practicing in the gym, or eavesdrop on astudent-teacher conference, you’re going to see how the DNA of that school’smission is really expressed.

Mission must operate at a strategic level, too. For example, there should be a structure in place (usually a committee of the Board of Trustees) for a board members, administration,and faculty to ask, “Does our curriculum match our mission statement?” If a school claims to be offering a collegeprep curriculum, but its course offerings look remedial, the problem should be obvious. But sometimes things change incrementally—oneclass here, another offering there—and before you know it, your curriculum isno longer congruent with your mission. Strategically, it’s imperative for schools to conduct aregular and thorough review of its programs (academic, extracurricular, alumni,etc.).

So here are some concrete suggestions for making sure that mission islived out—“expressed” in the language of Genetics—on an institutional level:

1. Hire for mission.

This is the mostimportant thing you can do. In therecruitment and hiring process, you must screen candidates for mission. For example, have they taken the time toresearch your school’s mission? Can they discuss it intelligently? Andsince past behavior best predicts future behavior, find out whether they beeneducated in and/or worked at schools with similar missions, or have engaged inother activities that are consistent with your school’s mission.

2. Develop faculty for mission.

The best teachersdesire challenge, they strive for growth, they crave meaningful work. Therefore, an administration shouldregularly look for opportunities (or find funding to approve requests) todeepen each teacher’s sense of connection between work and mission. One teacher might benefit from attending alecture at the Metropolitan Museum on Caravaggio so that she’s evenmore enthusiastic when she teaches her History classes on the Counter Reformation. Another teacher might have a great idea aboutimproving participation in Student Government, but needs the administration’s support (and perhapsmoney). And so on. If you’ve hired the rightpeople, the next step is to help them animate their passions to be lifelong learners andenergized educators.

3. Fire for mission.

As Tim pointed outin his reflection, institutions will always have "dead wood." Firing people should never be easy, but ifsomeone clearly rejects your mission or consistently fails to bring themission to life, everyone would be better off if he found another place to work.

4. Make your school’s mission highly visible.

I dream of renovating Regis’front lobby. Right in the center let's place a marble slab engraved with the school’s crest and, beneath that, the school’smission statement.

I also dream of commissioning students in the Photography club (not to mention talented alumni) to take photographs inspired by differentpieces of our mission statement. Let's frame those images + words and hang the art in the hallways andclassrooms.

Every school should also have a blog devoted to telling stories about the mission is being lived out (again, by the various stakeholders of a school). These stories are not just fodder for public relations; they reflect the truth about whether we're being true to our mission.

These are just three of many waysto raise the profile of what you claim you’re all about.

5. Use different parts of mission as year-longthemes.

School leaders can select parts of amission statement for special focus in a given school year. One sentence (or even phrase) might serve asthe touchstone for professional development days, student assemblies,advancement work with alumni and donors, etc.

6. Regularly review programs to ensure they areconsistent with mission.

Where there is not 100% congruence (andthere never is, since perfection is an asymptote), set benchmarks andcommunicate progress regularly. Everyschool should have a blog (see #4 above) to describehow the community is moving towards its goals.

***

Will all of this guarantee that each and every member of thecommunity will become Mr. Chips? No. But if you don’t start here, the people who are yourMr. Chips won’t stay for very long.

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

"No Silver Bullets"

2011-08-06T11:47:00.000-07:00

Below is a reflection on my beating the drum about mission as the antidote to things like the Atlanta and Philadelphia cheating scandals. This piece was written by Tim Nowak, a former student.

"Havingworked for not-for-profit organizations, I’ve learned that a strong statementof mission doesn’t preclude an institutional stall toward excellence.

A pristinely defined mission,vis-à-vis any governing document (e.g. the Constitution), still requires acodification of detailed expectations, and—of course—the resources to live outthose expectations.

Mission alone, then, is not asurefire remedy to the education malaise. Fortunately, I don't think that'swhat you, Christian, meant.

I certainly don't take you for aone-word ideologue (you’ve always made me explain myself)—but the way you putit suggests that there are, in fact, silver bullets in the education wars. Andthat’s a problem: there’s too much friendly fire in the fight for reform. Mission.Incentives. Intelligence. Creativity. Motivation. Accountability. Achievement.Charter Schools. Markets. These are encompassing concepts with various shadesof grey; it’s hard to lay a claim of transcendence to an entire gradient ofpossibility.

The bottom line: While noorganization is unprincipled, few seamlessly refract their ideals throughday-to-day business. It’s very easy to unroll a blueprint and marvel at thedesigns. This definitional mission, however, doesn’t intrinsically instill asense of mission among team members. Simply, there are no guarantees withmission.

I’ll presuppose that there arepeople solely tethered to their salary; they need to be counseled out of theirprofession. Unless persuaded by sizable evidence that suggests otherwise, Idon't find it compelling, however, that an impactful number of teachers, staff,and executive team members have a disdain for meaningful success.

Nonetheless, there’s still adisconnect—between the placard on the wall and those who wish to live by it. Humandevelopment professionals (i.e. educators, disabilities services support staff,healthcare providers, et al.) require a reliable substrate on which they canget their job done. Too often, these professionals are left without thesystematic supports to live the mission.

Although our expectations ofcatalytic work have risen drastically over the years, resources have dwindled.Even the most motivated staff members need budgets to be aligned. Grammarschool teachers find themselves asking parents and guardians to donate tissuesat the beginning of the school year. Frankly, why is merit pay still part ofthe discussion?

Organizations need the bread andbutter stuff, and then a move toward implicit incentives. Working laptops and smartphonesenable staff to communicate; online networks increase the sharing of knowledgeand classroom strategies; social workers allow teachers to focus on theclassroom, rather than the serious, but external, issues facing students. Don'tbe mistaken: pumping more resources—manpower and tech—into organizations is notgoing to change the status quo if they don't support the blueprint, so in away, mission does matter.

But, too often, the energy directedtoward operationalizing mission is an unsustained stimulus, an aberration ofthe organization’s life cycle.

Case in point: In pursuit of“Educational Excellence for the 21^st Century,” my K-12 public schooldistributed Apple laptops to middle school and high school students—as well asteachers—every October. As the years went on, the technology fell intodisrepair. And unfortunately, the initial transmuted mission withered insofaras sustainability remained unaddressed. A one-to-one laptop program wasinnovative. But why wasn't it sustainable?

At the end, the laptops becamedeadweight. Sadly, cracked screens are one thing mission can’t repair.

Organizations adapt to theircircumstances. In this era of resource management, people learn to live withwhat they have—that’s inevitable. Broken laptops didn't stop our learning. Nevertheless,it’s important to invest in ingenuity. My K-12 had the right idea—the teachers,curriculum. Where were the Foundations to support them?

Herein lies the problem withmetrics: they really only test output. Paradigms need to shift. Inputs matter,the structural supports matter. Teachers can embrace cura personalis all they want—but they need the parallel,systematic, and tangible supports, beyond a covenantal commitment tocurriculum. Is there such thing as a Jesuit institution with an ailinginfrastructure?

If a teacher evaluates her classand realizes they would benefit from an engaging after-school tutoring club:(1) provide the teacher with what she asks for (e.g. books, volunteers); (2)recognize her work (merit pay—heck, I said it!).

Naturally, students will do betterwith improved inputs. And, if they don’t: (1) ask questions (e.g. what worked,what didn't work, how do we improve, given internal and external factors?); (2)collaborate with other professionals (e.g. mentors, school counselors, andsocial workers).

The education disputations make mewonder whether rhetorical questions are ever asked in ed. policy. Does the NYCDepartment of Education (DOE) really think that amorphous school districts andfluid “networks” provide stability, or the semblance thereof? Does the DOE alsothink that a failure to evaluate students with learning disabilities is asolution to the implosion of special education? Are charter schools—and theresultant “ed. Markets”—going to drive success?

If anything, all human developmentsystems need to work with what they have, from the ground up. Philanthropicgroups, for one, need to cut the red tape tied to their resources (e.g. stopbirthing new schools and bolster the ones that already exist). Generosity oughtto have no agenda save that of enabling the professionals—and converting thecheaters—to live the mission."

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

30 second test

2011-08-03T16:35:00.000-07:00

Dan Pink proposes this 30 second test to determine if your boss is a jerk, but we can easily adapt this to the classroom.

Students, ask your teachers to draw an E on their foreheads. I'm willing to bet that the ones who draw it so that you can read it properly are better than the ones who draw it as if only they were looking at it.

Teachers, think about this test every time you design a lesson and every time you start a class.

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

The Problem with Metrics, Part 2

2011-08-02T16:04:00.000-07:00

Because it's too easy to attack a culture of testing,I want to come back to what matters most in an education: the formation of theentire person, not just his intelligence (and certainly not just his testscores).

In the last couple of years, Adam Bryant's"Corner Office" feature in the Sunday NY Times Business section hasbecome one of my favorite reads. Remarkably, executives acrossindustries offer fairly consistent responses about what leadership means,what they look for in new hires, how they spend their time, etc. And that consistency should catch the attention of teachers looking to educate future leaders.

Bryant's most recent interviewwith Peter Löscher, CEO of SiemensA.G., is representative. I have no doubtthat Löscher is a very bright guy, but he doesn’t attribute his success—or the successof others—to mere intelligence. Instead,he identifies teamwork, trust, empathy, and openness to growth (“evolution”) asthe really important qualities for leaders in a successful corporation.

Of course schools have to educate forintelligence. But that’s only one pieceof the human puzzle. Does yourcurriculum reflect that reality?

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

The Problem with Metrics

2011-08-01T19:14:00.000-07:00

Does it surprise anyonethat Philadelphia—anywhere, really—has its own unfoldingcheating scandal that mayrival Atlanta's in scope?

Dan Ariely, a professor ofbehavioral economics at Duke and author of TheUpside of Irrationality, has explained the crisis of testing culture in themost logical, common-sensical way in his blog post "Teacherscheating and Incentives."

He begins by recounting acorporate CEO’s story of messing up incentives for his employees by tying bonuses to the (over) measurement of one out of many important factors. Sure enough,employees focused most of their energy on a factor that accounted for maybe 10%of their actual contributions to the company. What’s worse, they were willing to do anything—including sabotagingtheir peers—to get their bonuses.

Ariely goes on to point outthe connection to an educational culture that over-measures test scores:

"[I]magine that in this very complex [educational] systemwe introduce a measurement of just one, relatively simple, criteria: thesuccess of [teachers’] students on standardized tests. And say, on top of that,we make this particular measurement the focal point of all evaluation andcompensation. Under such conditions we should expect teachers to over-emphasizethe activity that is being measured and neglect all other aspects of teaching[...]."

I’ve quotedSasha Dichter before and I’ll quote him again:

1. You can only measure a subset ofthe things that matter

2. We end up convincing ourselves thatthe things we are able to measure are a good approximation of the whole

3. But they might not be

Tests matter. Grades matter. But they don’t matter more than anythingelse. What does? Mission.

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

*Although Ben Horowitz, venture capitalist extraordinaire, did not compose this blog post to critique testing mania, he says essentially the same thing about over-measuring that Ariely says.

Educate for Leadership, Part 2

2011-08-01T18:18:00.000-07:00

Perfect times to do "study" abroad: summer and last third of senior year.

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

One Way to Educate for Leadership

2011-07-17T18:58:00.000-07:00

In my last post, I said we need to stop treatingleadership as a scarce resource. Whom does it benefit when we tellourselves that students occupy a place on a bell curve, in which only the top10% can really be leaders?

Here's one idea for being explicit andconscientious about developing leadership in students: get students to studyabroad before they graduate.

There are plenty of logistics to confront, butan ideal structure would include:

The destination would require students to speak a language they are already studying. Students would take a pledge to speak only that language unless they are writing emails or making phone calls home.
The study abroad period would last two or more months.
Students would not be required to "study" at the local high school. Their form of "study" would be language/culture immersion.
When possible, students would supplement their language/culture immersion by teaching English as a second language.

What does this have to do with educating forleadership? I like to think that leaders:

Take appropriate risks.
Understand the importance of a global perspective.
Are curious to know what it feels like to be a minority (of sorts).
Understand that failure is inevitable, and that figuring out what comes after the failure is far more important than the failure itself.
Ask for help.
Build rapport with strangers.
Stretch themselves beyond the breaking point.

The most exciting thing about an initiative likethis? Students who have come to see themselves as "average" (orworse) at taking tests or doing homework would discover that they're a lot moretalented than school has led them to believe.

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

If You Can't Find a Leader Right Where You Are...

2011-07-13T19:13:00.000-07:00

I've talked about Chris Lowney's Heroic Leadership before, but here's a little anecdote from one of his visits to Regis to talk about his book.

Standing before 130 Juniors, Chris said, "I'd like to do a little thought experiment. I want us to come up with a list of leaders. Who here can name a leader? Any leader at all."

Within moments, students had produced a familiar roll call: Ghandi, Martin Luther King Jr., JFK, Mother Teresa, Jesus (Regis is a Catholic school, after all), and several others.

"Isn't it interesting," Chris said, "that nobody here mentioned the name of someone in this room? I'm also going to guess that when I asked you to name a leader, few--if any--of you thought of yourselves."

It's like a twist on an old Zen koan*: If you can't find a leader right where you are, where will you find one?

I'm thinking about this because of "The Start-Up of You," Tom Friedman's column in today's NY Times. It's a short step from Friedman's concerns about a national shortage of adaptability, entrepreneurship, and resilience to questions of leadership--by which I primarily mean a sense of mission and an ever-evolving vision of how to enact that mission.

We tend to equate educational excellence with strong content knowledge, strong skills, strong performance on assessments.

But in a genuine education, something else subsumes those things: the formation of the entire student, not just her intellect.

Yes, educate for content, skills, and performance. But also educate for leadership. Be explicit and conscientious about getting students to think about, articulate, and live out what they believe.

As Friedman's article suggests, we can't afford to believe that only a handful of students are going to be leaders. In other words, we can't afford to treat leadership like a scarce resource.**

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

*"If you can't find happiness right where you are, where will you find it?"

**In my next post, I'll suggest at least one way to move in this direction.

What's Darwin Got to Do With It?

2011-07-10T23:59:00.000-07:00

Each year, my Juniors discuss Anton Chekhov’s short story “A Doctor’s Visit,” which contains a reference to Darwinism. “In a short phrase,” I like to ask, “what is Darwin’s theory of evolution?”

The first response is typically “survival of the fittest.”

“OK. What does 'fittest' mean?”

The first student to raise his hand typically says something like, “The strong survive.” Before long, another student will point out that Natural Selection actually privileges adaptability over mere strength.

The acceleration of change in the 21st century makes adaptability all the more crucial for schools. As Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod have shown (repeatedly), “shift happens.” This is version 4.0...from 2009. Imagine how much more the world has changed since then.

What’s Darwin got to do with it? To be adaptable, schools need more people like Fisch, McLeod, my former colleague Basil Kolani, and other educational technology strategists. At the same time, schools need everyone--administrators, teachers, students, parents, alumni, et al.--to meditate regularly on mission. A school's values must drive adaptation, not the other way around.*

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

*My favorite book on this topic: Chris Lowney’s Heroic Leadership, about the Jesuits’ history of surviving and thriving for 500 years by pairing entrepreneurship with mission and values.

The Atlanta Cheating Scandal

2011-07-07T18:07:00.000-07:00

HT to Pat Blanchfield for passing along these local reports on Atlanta's cheating scandal:

http://clatl.com/freshloaf/archives/2011/07/06/the-nine-most-depressing-details-in-the-aps-cheating-report

http://www.ajc.com/news/investigation-into-aps-cheating-1001375.html

How ironic that many schools have made test scores a primary metric to prove better learning, yet the very same system requires thinking of students not as individuals who are learning, but rather numbers on a balance sheet of test scores.

One solution? Each school (or district, or state) ought to have a mission statement that focuses on the development of each individual student. (Think about it--how absurd would it be for a school to cite test scores in its mission statement? "George Washington High School is committed to raising student performance on standardized test scores by 5% each year...")

Then make that mission statement the center of your culture. Talk about it at every appropriate opportunity. Put it in classrooms. Carve it into marble in the front lobby. Engage your students with it, creatively if possible (e.g., ask your Photo Club to create a photojournal capturing the mission in images). Do all of that, and it ought to be pretty difficult to think about cheating your students out of the formational experience they need and deserve.

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

Teacher Evaluations, Part 2

2011-07-03T11:43:00.000-07:00

In my last post, I framed the problem of teacher evaluations in terms of conventional wisdom—“To evaluate teachers effectively, we must observe them X number of times…”—and concluded that

five observations over the course of the year are radically insufficient.

True as far as it goes. But instead of asking how many times teachers deserve to be evaluated before their contracts are renewed or cancelled, we ought to ask a different question:

How much feedback will enable that person to succeed?

Five pieces of feedback are not enough. I’m not knocking those formal observations; feedback from experienced educators is crucial (though I hasten to add that the usefulness of that feedback is directly proportional to the speed with which it is discussed). But many schools can't afford to spend time and money observing teachers much more than five times, to say nothing of twenty or thirty times.

So what is an inexperienced teacher to do?

If he is devoted to his craft, he ought to seek feedback from his students as often as possible.

This need not be onerous. (In fact, too much feedback can be counterproductive.) At the end of most lessons, save 3 minutes, hand out a half sheet of paper, and ask students to write down one thing that helped them learn and one thing that got in the way of their learning during that lesson. Do your best to get them to focus on specific behaviors (of the teacher, of a classmate, of the student herself). Periodically use the first few minutes of class as a focus group to explore some popular responses.

Your administrators may never suggest that you solicit regular feedback from your students, but that shouldn’t stop you from taking the initiative to seek it.

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

Teacher Evaluations, Part 1

2011-07-02T18:45:00.000-07:00

Teacher evaluations have (rightly) become a central preoccupation in 21st century American education. Sam Dillon's recent NY Times piece, "Teacher Grades: Pass or Be Fired," highlights this. Mr. Dillon has reported on a number of things worth discussing at length, but I want to focus on two related data:

"Ratings for [most of DC's public schools'] 3,600 teachers are determined mostly by five classroom observations annually [...]".

And:

"These five observations combine to form 75 percent of these teachers’ overall ratings."

Let’s say a teacher sees an average of five classes a day. And let’s assume that teacher has regular classroom contact time (vs. test-giving, guest speakers, field trips, etc.) 150 days a year. That gives a teacher 750 class meetings to hone his skills. Yet he is primarily being evaluated on 0.7% of his work.

What does it say about us that we are willing to use such a meager sample to draw conclusions that determine tenure and termination?

In the end, it comes down to a question of resources: how much time (which is to say, money) does your school spend on observing and mentoring teachers? And when time (i.e., money) is tight, do you throw up your hands or do you find a work-around? (More on this in Part 2.)

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

A Sleep Experiment

2011-05-19T18:00:00.000-07:00

How much sleep on an average night do high school students get?

Reading Maggie Jones' "How Little Sleep Can You Get Away With?" in the NY Times Magazine prompted me to ask the question. The study she details suggests that 8 hours of sleep is optimal. Substract even just one hour from that and brain function begins to dip in a simple 10 minute task. By the time you get down to only 4 hours of sleep, things look ugly.

Of the 77 students I surveyed, the average amount of sleep on a school night (Monday - Thursday) was 6 hours.

Here are the total results:

9 hours = 1 student (lazy or incredibly good at time management?)
8 hours = 5 students
7 hours = 12 students
6 hours = 35 students
5 hours = 20 students
4 hours = 2 students
3 hours = 2 students

Think of it this way: if your students are passive for any 10 minute block of time in your classroom and they're getting less than 8 hours of sleep a night, they're almost certainly going to be missing a chunk (or more) of what is going on.

We're not likely to improve our students' sleeping habits, but this study may underscore the need to switch tasks every ~10 minutes so that the brain is forced into refocusing.

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

"The Danger of Praise"

2011-05-16T12:32:00.000-07:00

I've written on praise vs. feedback before, but this blog post by Gary Antonick captures the issue well with a great experiment:

A bunch of kids were given some fairly easy math problems. At the end, half the kids were told, “You must be really smart.” The other half was told, “You must have worked really hard.”

The kids were given another set of problems. These problems were a little bit harder. The kids who were initially told they were smart did very poorly. Of course. “Oh! I can’t do these. I must not be really smart.” They shut down and did miserably.

The kids who worked hard had the opposite reaction. “Wow. These are tough. But if I work hard, maybe I can figure them out too.” Then they did them.

There was a vastly significant difference in performance. All because of five words. “You must be really smart.” One shot of five words. Once.

No coach would be satisfied to tell her players, “You’re really talented basketball players!” and expect that was enough to help the team improve.

No teacher should be satisfied with an analogous approach in the classroom.

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

"A Better Way to Teach?"

2011-05-13T11:50:00.000-07:00

From "Science NOW" (hat tip to my friend Amitava Mukherjee for sending this along):

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/05/a-better-way-to-teach.html?ref=hp

If it's common sense that students learn better when they're interested and engaged in the process (vs. passively listening to a lecture), why don't more teachers change their classroom approach?

I'm sure there are many reasons why teachers may resist changing their lessons, but here's one practical reason: it would require time, energy, and research to create new lessons.

For practical purposes, Principals should build time in to the school calendar (e.g., via in-service days or via plenary faculty meetings) to give teachers time to work on changing individual lesson plans so that they center on student problem solving and immediate feedback as opposed to lecture and delayed feedback.

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

"I Can't Do Math..."

2011-04-21T05:38:00.000-07:00

What if it were possible to eliminate the bell curve in Math classes? I shared this article with Kieran, a former student and current Math teacher. I was going to blog on the article, but Kieran’s response says it all:

“We classify math differently from other areas, and Bornstein's example of literary vs. ‘numeracy’ is great. Somehow, it's okay to not understand math.

But in reality, math is a ladder like any other subject. You can't write a successful five paragraph essay until you understand how to write a sentence, and while students are often forced to do the former without fully grasping the latter, they only truly understand a certain rung when they have mastered those below it.

Another of Bornstein's examples perfectly demonstrates this: adding and subtracting signed numbers. If I had to guess, over 50% of the 9th grade class I student-teach did not understand the mathematics behind this simple arithmetic, which means I've often had to explain it with monetary terms or a number line. Only the students who grasp this can begin to understand mathematical expression and equation manipulation—pretty much all Algebra I is.

This paragraph that struck me most:

‘The foundation of the process is building confidence, which Mighton believes should be the first goal of a math teacher. Confidence begets attention, which begets rich learning. “I’ve never met a teacher who will tell you that a student doesn’t need to be confident to excel in school,” explains Mighton. “But I’ve never seen a math curriculum that follows the implications of that idea rigorously.” Math is well-suited to build confidence. Teachers can reduce things to tiny steps, gauge the size of each step to the student and raise the bar incrementally.’

Every math teacher should strive to create such an environment (through rigorous lesson-planning and a true understanding of the content). In this sense, the ideas behind Jump Math are actually fundamental (and non-proprietary) aspects of teaching and learning that should exist in every classroom.”

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

Bad Teaching is Actually Good Teaching

2011-04-19T11:51:00.000-07:00

OK, that's not really true. But consider this quote from Benedict Carey's "Come On, I Thought I Knew That!":

“In one experiment, researchers found that participants studying a difficult chapter on the industrial uses of microbes remembered more when they were given a poor outline—which they had to rework to match the material—than a more accurate one.”

By the way, Carey writes consistently fascinating articles on the brain and mind for the NY Times, and this one is no exception.

Two simple but important take-aways:

1. For those who cheat: You’re even dumber than you may think. Why? Because “overconfidence […] develops as a result of the brain’s natural tendency to find shortcuts—and to quickly forget that it used them.” Sure, you may feel great about the grade you get on the homework you completed by relying on the answer key, but as a result you’re going to overestimate your abilities to answer those questions later without the aid of an answer key. In short, overconfidence without ability tends to end in embarrassment.

2. For those who don’t cheat: Study with classmates who will test you. Also, make outlines from scratch. And when you make those outlines, use hard-to-read fonts for the key content. As psychologist Daniel Oppenheimer says, “you can’t skim material in a hard-to-read font, so putting text in a hard-to-read font will force you to read more carefully.”

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

Face Time

2011-04-17T19:01:00.000-07:00

About a decade ago, a consultant came to Regis and asked us to consider life for our students in the year 2020.* He put forward one idea that was greeted with spectacular hostility and derision:

"In the year 2020," he said, "you may still have a physical campus, but students will spend a good chunk of their 'class time' at home, at satellite locations, or anywhere else they get can get online and connect to your network."

Ten years later, his prophecy doesn't sound terribly ridiculous.

The more I think about the issue, the more I suspect that schools of the future will come in two essential forms: those in which most student-teacher face time takes place online and those in which most student-teacher face time takes place in person.

Are you ready for both kinds of school?

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

*Not to be confused with "In the year 2000..."

How do we train kids to deal with teachers?

2011-04-04T09:21:00.000-07:00

From Seth's Godin's blog post today:

The problem?

"We train kids to deal with teachers in a certain way: Find out what they want, and do that, just barely, because there are other things to work on. Figure out how to say back exactly what they want to hear, with the least amount of effort, and you are a 'good student.' "

The solution? Godin frames this in terms of what businesses should aim at, but note my substitutions in red:

"If your boss [teacher] is seen as a librarian, she becomes a resource, not a limit. If you view the people you work [learn] with as coaches, and your job [schoolwork] as a platform, it can transform what you do each day, starting right now. 'My boss [teacher] won't let me,' doesn't deserve to be in your vocabulary. […] The opportunity of our age is to get out of this boss [teacher] as teacher [boss] as taskmaster as limiter mindset. We need more from you than that.”

I know so many incredible teachers doing this every day. Now the question is, how do we get every teacher to shift his approach? Only once we reach a critical mass point will students trust us when we tell them we want to see them grow as complete individuals, not factory workers producing widgets for the factory owner.

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

Failure

2011-03-21T18:31:00.000-07:00

My fortune cookie this evening: "Failure is the tuition you pay for success."*

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

*According to Google, Walter Brunell--not the local Chinese restaurant--is responsible for this pearl.

What's an education for?

2011-03-16T17:52:00.000-07:00

"Ad ingenium faciendum, toward the building of character, is a phrase I recently heard. To me, it is the essence of an educational experience. Struggling, succeeding, trying again and having fun within a nurturing but competitive environment built character in all of us, including every black graduate of Duke."

That's a snippet from "Grant Hill's Response to Jalen Rose" (hat tip to Martin Bell and Antoine Munfakh for posting on Facebook, where I first saw this). Read the whole thing.

Good teaching may aim to build a better technocrat.

Great teaching aims to contribute to the total formation--intellectual, but also moral, emotional, spiritual--of the human being. Grant Hill proves that.

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

Measuring Performance

2011-03-11T11:26:00.000-08:00

In any school, there are two timeless questions:

How do we measure student performance? How do we measure teacher performance?

Sasha Dichter's most recent blog post should give us something to consider:

“So what was the measurable impact of….?”

Of course this question matters a lot, a ton, the most maybe.

The catch is that we fail to fully appreciate three truths:

1. You can only measure a subset of the things that matter

2. We end up convincing ourselves that the things we are able to measure are a good approximation of the whole

3. But they might not be

Maybe we should make a new rule: don't talk about the things we can measure until we first talk about the things that matter most.

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

A Question of Design

2011-03-03T17:54:00.000-08:00

When you line up your students' desks in straight rows, what are you telling them without saying it?

When you cluster your students' desks so that they face each other in groups of three or four, what are you communicating to them?

When you arrange your students' desks in a semi-circle, while you stand at the board near the opening, what message are you sending?

When you ask students to sit in a closed circle, while you stand outside it, what are you preparing them for?

Lesson plans are great, but unspoken communications often matter more. Just remember: you're designing those messages whether you know it or not.

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

Motivation

2011-03-01T07:44:00.000-08:00

I recently exchanged emails with a former student who is interested in teaching. When I asked him what he perceived to be the greatest challenge of the classroom, he wrote the following:

"I think the biggest challenge, specifically with English classes, is that some students simply are not interested by the coursework. [...] There are works with historical or linguistic importance whose value necessarily will not be apparent to a young student. For example, discussing the evolution of American social mores is a valuable outgrowth of assigning The Scarlet Letter, but it does not make it any easier for a fifteen year old to read and discuss. It is incumbent upon an instructor to demonstrate that value while encouraging the students to persevere through sometimes difficult material. There has to be more value for a student completing a reading assignment than the possibility of a quiz."

What's motivating your students to complete their assignments?

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

Transaction vs. Interaction, Part 2

2011-02-03T12:55:00.000-08:00

I'm just getting around to reading David Brooks' New Yorker piece on "the new sciences of human nature," and it seems to me that he has something to contribute to the debate begun in the comments section of my last post about "Transaction vs. Interaction."

In his discussion of a person called Harold, Brooks writes:

One of Harold’s key skills in school was his ability to bond with teachers. We’ve spent a generation trying to reorganize schools to make them better, but the truth is that people learn from the people they love. In eleventh grade, Harold developed a crush on his history teacher, Ms. Taylor. What mattered most was not the substance of the course so much as the way she thought, the style of learning she fostered. For instance, Ms. Taylor constantly told the class how little she knew. Human beings are overconfidence machines. Paul J. H. Schoemaker and J. Edward Russo gave questionnaires to more than two thousand executives in order to measure how much they knew about their industries. Managers in the advertising industry gave answers that they were ninety-per-cent confident were correct. In fact, their answers were wrong sixty-one per cent of the time. People in the computer industry gave answers they thought had a ninety-five per cent chance of being right; in fact, eighty per cent of them were wrong. Ninety-nine per cent of the respondents overestimated their success.

Ms. Taylor was always reminding the class of how limited her grasp of any situation was. “Sorry, I get distracted easily,” she’d say, or, “Sorry, sometimes I jump to conclusions too quickly.” In this way, she communicated the distinction between mental strength (the processing power of the brain) and mental character (the mental virtues that lead to practical wisdom). She stressed the importance of collecting conflicting information before making up one’s mind, of calibrating one’s certainty level to the strength of the evidence, of enduring uncertainty for long stretches as an answer became clear, of correcting for one’s biases. As Keith E. Stanovich, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, writes in his book “What Intelligence Tests Miss” (2009), these “thinking dispositions” correlate weakly or not at all with I.Q. But, because Ms. Taylor put such emphasis on these virtues and because Harold admired her so much, he absorbed and copied her way of being.

If we learn best from people we love (or at least respect), then transactions just aren't going to cut it.

It puts me in mind of something once said by Rev. Joe McShane, SJ, President of Fordham University: "When a student comes to see you, you have to prepare yourself by saying, 'This student is the most important student at Fordham.' And when the next student comes to see you, you have to say to yourself, 'THIS is the most important student at Fordham.' And when the student after that comes to see you, you have to tell youself, 'Now THIS is the most important student at Fordham.' "

It's easy to be transactional with students, but it's better to be interactive.

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

Transaction vs. Interaction

2011-01-31T11:25:00.000-08:00

I found myself angry as I graded a recent assignment. I had asked students to edit recently graded critical essays.

"You will receive 2 quiz grades for these edits," I told them. "And as an extra incentive, if you received anything below an A-, you may rewrite this essay for your next critical essay, so these edits might prove especially valuable."

The majority of students ended up doing either an incomplete or a sloppy job. In other words, they had wasted their own time and mine.

I resented the idea of sacrificing class time to explain to the students how they had not worked hard enough. Besides, two (low) quiz grades would encourage them to take their work more seriously next time. And I sure didn't want to spend even more of my own time grading redo's.

My instinct was to treat the whole issue as a transaction. Teacher assigns work. Students do assigned work. Work is graded and returned. Transaction complete.

But if they didn't redo the work, how could I be sure that they had really learned to remediate their weaknesses?

Another idea occurred to me: while some of them had clearly blown off the assignment, hadn't others edited the wrong things or edited in the wrong way? Even if none of them had asked questions while they worked on the assignment, was is possible that I had made incorrect assumptions about their motivations (to do a thorough job) or abilities (to do a good job)?

Often teachers and students seek transactions.

A teacher says, "Let me get this assignment graded and returned so I can put numbers in my grade book."

A students says, "Let me get this assignment done so I can focus on other work [or play]."

But transactions aren't generally fruitful unless they're accompanied by meaningful interactions.

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

P.S.: After letting my students know that I was unhappy about their efforts, I added that I felt I was also responsible for the outcome. Then I asked them to redo the assignment. I'm not happy to spend more time evaluating the edits and I'm sure they're not happy to be redoing them. But I am confident that the interaction will yield a better transaction.

More on Subjective Assessments

2011-01-07T18:12:00.000-08:00

After writing the previous post, I happened to come across this quote from Oliver Sacks:

"She had done appallingly in the testing--which, in a sense, was designed, like all neurological and psychological testing, not merely to uncover, to bring out deficits, but to decompose her into functions and deficits."*

Students are not learning machines. They are human beings. If the only thing you ever want to know about a student is his functionality with skill X and his deficits with content Y, then you're missing the forest for the trees.

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

*From "Rebecca," in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.

Not all A's are created--or awarded--equally

2011-01-07T08:23:00.000-08:00

Few topics inspire such emotion as grades and GPA. According to Tamar Lewin's article in the NY Times, UNC is going to join the ranks of colleges that will add contextual information to transcripts. Why? In short, not all A's are created--or awarded--equally.

Andrew Perrin, a sociologist at UNC leading the charge to revise the school's grading system, offers a representative point of view when he says, “Anything that uses G.P.A. is unfair, because a given student can be penalized or rewarded in grading just because of the mix of professors or the strength of the schedule. Some instructors grade harder than others. Some courses are harder than others, and some departments are harder than others.”

When it comes to grades, especially what they mean to the outside world, these are all fair points.

But I found it telling that no one in the article talks about the connection between grades and learning. And there certainly is no discussion of grades as pedagogical means as opposed to scholarly ends (that is to say, marks on a transcript).

Do we really expect grades to operate as perfectly objective evaluations of how much content knowledge a student possesses? For that to work, assessments would need to be designed with absolute objectivity. But that's a fallacy. Subjective teachers by definition design subjective assessments, even when it comes to Math and Science.

But seeking absolute objectivity misses the point. Yes, content matters, and therefore relatively objective grades matter. But motivation and personal growth and intellectual curiosity matter too. If grades are denuded of their capacity to influence these latter qualities, we'll end up with a nation of technocrats but no leaders.

It's not just about the grade you got or the grade you deserved. It's also about what you learned and how much you grew.

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

When Censorship Is a Good Thing

2011-01-04T07:55:00.000-08:00

Take 30 seconds to read this article by Keith Staskiewicz* on a new and censored edition of Huckleberry Finn. (HT to Kyle Mullins for posting it on Facebook.)

In short, the "n"-word is going to be replaced by "slave."

There is a real opportunity here: any teacher worth his/her salt would have to notify the students ahead of time, "Every time you see the word 'slave,' you should be aware that Twain had written 'nigger,' and the editors censored it." You would end up with at least one great class discussion about whether changing that word changes the essence of the novel. And I guarantee that that conversation would continue in the cafeteria, the hallways, and online.

Also, Mr. Staskiewicz suggests that the censorship might make the book available to kids whose parents or school districts had kept it out of their hands. If that's true, and if teachers smart enough to do the above, then this censored edition will actually have produced a method to defeat the ignorance that has kept the book de facto censored for some many decades.

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

*Full disclosure: Keith is a former student of mine.

Overcoming Grading Biases

2011-01-02T10:24:00.000-08:00

It's the last day of the Christmas Break and I have just finished grading a huge batch of essays. I've talked about this phenomenon before, but I think it bears repeating...

Several times when recording grades, I would begin by writing a relatively high grade. Then I would think, He's a good writer, but he's not that good. And I would begin to lower the grade a little.

I've learned by now that those are signs that I have to put down the pen and ask a different question.

The question should not be, "Is he that good a writer?" (Or "Is he that bad a writer?" for that matter.)

The question should be, "Did he do a good job with the various elements of the assignment?"*

I don't know whether many teachers want to admit it, but we do have grading biases, some conscious, others unconscious. Haven't you ever heard a kid say, "Well Mr. So-and-So just doesn't like me"? Maybe you've said that yourself about a teacher.

Overcoming grading biases is one of the hardest things to do, but for the sake of our students' education and formation, it's also one of the most important things teachers need to do.

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

*Rubrics obviously can be helpful, with some caveats:

a) They can be useful for the Humanities, depending on how they're deployed (see b), but I suspect they're more helpful in Math and Science, where the criteria are more objective.

b) We have to be careful not to allow rubrics to seduce us into rigid thinking about quality--that is, we can't forget that the sum of the parts is not equal to the whole. For example, I use a three-part rubric for critical writing: Structure, Development, and Quality of Expression. It would be a mistake for me to assign a value to each of those three categories and then merely average them together to get the final grade for an essay. Which is why it's perhaps misleading to say I "use" the rubric. Rather, I keep it at the forefront of my thoughts when evaluating writing, but I don't literally have a sheet of paper on which I'm making separate annotations.

c) As an adjunct to b, I would add that because grades are pedagogical devices and not ends in and of themselves, rubrics seem limited to me because they don't generally provide for growth (or decline) in a student's learning...though I suppose a teacher could build that into a rubric.

The Attention-Span Myth Part 2

2010-12-28T19:56:00.000-08:00

(Click here for "The Attention-Span Myth Part 1")

Here is the key to Ms. Heffernan's argument:

"And so polemicists of various stripes continue to calibrate the effect of technology on attention spans. But I'm surprised that anyone ventures so far into this thicket of sophistry. I get stuck much earlier in the equation. Everyone has an attention span: really? And really again: an attention span is a freestanding entity like a boxer's reach, existing independently of any newspaper or chess game that might engage or repel it, and which might be measured by the psychologist's equivalent of a tailor's tape?"

I agree that attention spans are not genetically or ontologically determined "entities" in the mind that can be measured with absolute objectivity.

But from what I can tell, an attention span is like every other human virtue: something that grows with cultivation or withers with neglect. Things like "newspapers" or "chess games" might facilitate the cultivation or withering of one's attention span, but they don't singularly determine it. If that were true, there would be no such thing as mindful meditation.

It's not clear to me that Ms. Heffernan would agree, since she devotes most of the rest of the piece to the idea of a double-helix of attention span and object, an effort that even leads her to take a flame-thrower to some strange straw men. For example, she points out that "In Moby Dick, Starbuck tries to distract Ahab from his monomania [...]." Why would we ever equate the pathology of monomania with the virtue of focused attention?

But let's dispense with the theoretical and address the practical:

What happens when a student sits down to read 30 pages of a novel for English class, or to complete twenty Algebra problems?

The student with a developed attention span knows to shut off his cell phone and get as far away as possible from a computer or a TV.

And what happens when that same student has to write a five-page History essay?

He probably doesn't open a web browser. That might be seductive, but it won't help him write the paper. In fact, precisely because it's seductive--because it seems to compel his attention--he will avoid it.

I don't often observe such strong attention spans in students. Instead, I see students punctuate their "work" by checking text messages, looking at fantasy sports stats, or reading Facebook status updates. Such distractions are partly why I now devote considerable class time to drafting and editing essays--it's essentially a way to teach students the virtue of eliminating extraneous demands on their attention.

You may not be able to take a picture of a strong attention span, but you probably know it when you see it.

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

The Attention-Span Myth

2010-12-28T19:18:00.000-08:00

When our son was a year and a half old, he had blood work done to make sure his immune system was developing appropriately. A week after the tests were run, the phone rang at 8 pm. It was the immunologist. He talked at length about the levels of our son's antibodies, where they fell in relation to the normal ranges, what a normal growth curve looked like, etc., etc.

I was so dizzy I could only get out, "So what does that mean?"

"Well, Mr. Talbot, it means that according to these numbers, he probably will need a lifetime of transfusions to provide him with a proxy immune system. The medicine is very good these days. You used to have to go to a transfusion center for several hours every month, but now there are injection-based alternatives that you can administer at home."

"I'm sorry," I said, " I still don't understand. What exactly is wrong with him?"

"I can't say this with 100% certainty, but according to the numbers I'm looking at from his blood test, he has something called CVID. Common Variable Immuno-Deficiency."

Ends up the immunologist was wrong. Fortunately he was humble enough to refer us to the global expert* on CVID who eventually confirmed that our son does not suffer from that crippling disorder.

In theory--according to the numbers--our son was gravely ill. But his clinical picture was entirely different; he had not exhibited any of the symptoms of CVID. In fact, his pediatrician** nearly had a conniption when he heard that the immunologist had made such a claim.

A strange way to start a blog post on education, I know, but it was the first thing that came to mind when I thought about illustrating the difference between theory and reality.

I mention this because it seems to me that Virginia Heffernan makes a persuasive theoretical argument in her NY Times Magazine essay, "The Attention-Span Myth." But her argument doesn't match up with my "clinical" impressions of high school students. In fact, her argument doesn't match up with my impressions of my peers. The BlackBerry--aka CrackBerry--twitch is almost more common among adults than it is teens (although I concede that teens may simply be more skilled at disguising it when they look at their phones).

More to come...

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

*Because we feel enormously lucky and blessed to have been put in touch with her, and on the off-off-off chance that someone reading this might know someone with CVID, you should know that this doctor is Charlotte Cunningham-Rundles from Mt. Sinai in Manhattan. Not only is she a brilliant thinker, but she is also an incredibly compassionate doctor.

**Again, because we feel lucky to have landed with a great pediatrician, I feel compelled to recognize Dr. Richard Flyer, of Verona, NJ. He and his colleagues Dr. Rizwana Khokhar and Dr. Paul Sirna helped us navigate one of the most terrifying things we experienced as parents.

Correlation, Causation, and Feedback

2010-12-22T19:03:00.000-08:00

This morning, my advisees* and I had an interesting conversation about video games and censorship. I asked whether video games should be protected under the 1st Amendment if someone can prove that video games cause violent behavior. They objected vociferously, and we began to discuss the fact that people often mistake correlation for causation.

For some reason, that conversation gave me a flashback to a class I taught two weeks prior. I had brought in my FlipCam and set it up in the corner of the room to videotape the class. I guess I did a terrible job, because the FlipCam is now broken, but in a sense it doesn't matter--just the very act of putting a videocamera in the room amplified my awareness of my teaching and of student behaviors.

Did putting a video camera in the corner cause me to become more aware of pedagogy? At the time, it certainly felt that way, as if the very act of seeking feedback has the potential to make someone a better teacher.

But after this morning's conversation about video games and violence, I wondered: was the video camera merely correlated to my heightened awareness? In other words, if someone is naturally inclined to seek feedback, perhaps that person is also naturally inclined to find ways to improve, even when there is no external pressure (like a video camera) to do so.

All of which led me to a final, more practical question: if tomorrow someone installed a video camera in your classroom and taped every moment of every class, what would your teaching look?

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

*The guys of 3B-2 deserve a shout-out for carrying on an intelligent and fascinating discussion.

Even Bad Teachers Are Good Teachers

2010-11-30T16:36:00.000-08:00

I once heard of an Ivy League English professor who assigned an eight page paper. When the student got it back, there were no comments except the following: "Interesting insights. Well written, but not really what I was looking for. B-."

I once heard of a college prep Math teacher who would stand three inches from the blackboard, his back to the class, while he solved problems with one hand and erased with the other as he went along. "This was how my Math teachers taught me in college," he said, "so if you deserve to be here you're going to have to learn this way too."

I once heard of a History teacher who assigned book reports on texts published in the mid-20th century. Sometimes students would ask to write on newer, more interesting books, but he almost never approved such texts. If the students reviewed their books according to the teacher's taste, they received good grades, but if they reviewed the book in another fashion, they didn't do quite so well.

All of which proves that even bad teachers are good teachers.

Even a bad teacher can teach you that you even if put in hours of work writing a paper, you shouldn't expect any more than two lines of feedback. Why don't you just give him what he's looking for and save you both the trouble?

Even a bad teacher can teach you that because he had to suffer through terrible pedagogy, so should you. Why don't you just suck it up? That is how the world works!

Even a bad teacher can teach you that it doesn't matter if you want to read something contemporary and more to your interests. And don't bother thinking for yourself, either. Just write down what he already thinks about the book, and life will be so much simpler.

Whether you like it or not, you're teaching something every moment you interact with a student. The question is, are you really teaching what you think you're teaching?

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

When the pupil is ready, the teaching appears

2010-11-21T19:12:00.000-08:00

"When the pupil is ready, the teaching appears"

A former student once sent me a thank you email that read: "You taught me how important it is to be disciplined about my writing and to think critically about what I'm reading, instead of looking for the 'right' answer. I didn't take those lessons seriously then, but now that I'm about to graduate law school I have a new appreciation for your approach."

Do we really understand the extent to which we may influence--for good or ill--the course of someone's life? We may think we failed to help a student only to learn that years later our teaching has taken root.* As the proverb says, when the pupil is ready, the teaching appears.

It calls to mind the conventional wisdom that teachers used to matter because they were the possessors of knowledge, which they disseminated to their students.

I'm not sure that was ever really the case--Socrates, for example, doesn't do a whole lot of lecturing in the Dialogues. But even if it were true that teachers were valuable because they communicated the important stuff that students needed to know, it seems less true with every passing year.

Instead, I'm convinced that teachers are most valuable when they teach students to think for themselves; when they teach them not just to ask questions, but to ask the right questions.

Then, when a dilemma presents itself, for the student has learned to think for himself and to ask the right questions, the teaching will appear.

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

*It's equally true that students who excel in our classrooms may plateau early in life, if our contact with them is limited to intellectual formation. Another reason why teachers ought to form the whole student, and not just his intellectual capacities.

What is a Teacher Worth?

2010-10-28T10:47:00.000-07:00

Apparently Texas A&M thinks it knows the answer, as Daniel Hamermesh points out in his post on the NY Times Freakonomics blog.

This reminded me a of a recent conversation I had with a teacher from another a private school in the Northeast.

"I've been there for more than 15 years," he said, "but I can't help but feel that the administration considers veterans a drag on the school's bottom line. Compared to new teachers whom they can hire at the bottom of the salary scale, we're expensive to retain."

This strikes me as a naive calculation. If nothing else, having veteran teachers (who are presumably excellent teachers) will translate into more (and bigger) donations from alumni who are grateful for the education they received. After all, they're not donating to a school because they thought the cafeteria food was really good.

But more importantly, it is corrosive to an educational institution to reduce a teacher's value to a dollar figure. How depressing to think that human transactions boil down to nothing more than money.

The truth is that we add value--real, but intangible value--to the lives of our students when we inspire in them a love for a certain subject. Almost none of your students will become English teachers, but some of them may get involved in editing, copy writing, or public relations. And they may love their careers because of the love of English that you cultivated. (I know, that's a self-serving example.) How do you measure the value of discovering a profession that you find truly fulfilling?

And the truth is that we add value--real, but intangible value--to the lives of our students when we take the time to ask about what they're interested in, what they hope to do with their futures, why they happen to look distracted or depressed on a certain day, etc. How do you measure the value in helping students to discover and cultivate their most authentic selves?

As Oscar Wilde said, a cynic is one "who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing."

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

Student Insight of the Week

2010-10-28T09:41:00.000-07:00

I recently started discussing Othello with my Juniors. As a prelude to understanding the antagonist Iago, I said this:

"One of the reasons Iago is so brilliant is that he almost never tells flat-out, bald-faced lies. Instead, he prefers to plant the seed of a lie. Then he lets the other person water that seed and give it sunlight. So even though Iago hasn't technically told a lie, he has still managed to convince someone of a lie."

A student called out, "Just like Inception."

As a matter of fact, yes!

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

Can Handwriting Make You Smarter, Part 2

2010-10-20T19:47:00.000-07:00

More on why writing by hand may boost learning...

From Bill Carew, Regis' resident Biology PhD:

"[The article's conclusions are] not surprising when you consider how large that part of the brain is which controls hand actions. The area controlling our toes and feet movements for example is about the same size as that area controlling the thumb alone. When you consider how many small muscles are involved in the writing process (thumb+fingers+hand and wrist) it makes sense that using these over just pressing a button results in 'better writing.' Google Korbinian Brodmann for more info. Interestingly, the size of the brain involved in tongue movement is about the size of that controlling our feet."

And from Pedro Acosta, Regis' resident polyglot:

"The Chinese always have valued prodigious memories, and they always have required children to write characters by hand. When I started learning Chinese characters in 1976, there was no computer software available for typing characters, Even the cards for Chinese materials in the Library's Card Catalog were written by hand. I always have required my students to be able to write characters by hand from memory, a practice which is discouraged in some college Chinese programs (such as the one at NYU). Frankly after hearing one of the professors from that school making a comment on this topic, I was surprised to hear him say that Chinese characters 'are just too difficult for Americans to write by hand, since they write everything on a keyboard anyway.' I do not subscribe to his way of thinking.

“My Chinese teachers always valued the need to write characters by hand and even accepted research papers that were handwritten. I encourage my students to write essays by hand and most of them do. Even those who prefer the software must be able to write Chinese characters by hand on tests and quizzes. Clearly the Chinese have intuited the connection between handwriting and memory for as long as they have been using characters, which is at least 3,500 years. That is quite a mnemonic aid for a script that has 48,000 characters!"

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

Can Handwriting Make You Smarter?

2010-10-17T12:08:00.000-07:00

Many years ago, I read a Paris Review interview* with former British poet laureate Ted Hughes. Speaking of a children's writing competition that he judged for thirty years, Hughes blamed word processors for the diminished quality of submissions. Hughes claimed that in his experience, handwritten work was "psychologically denser."

Turns out Hughes may have been more correct than he knew. Check out Gwendolyn Bounds' fascinating Wall Street Journal article on the connection between writing by hand and stronger neuronal connections.

If it's true--and intuitively it makes a lot of sense to me--then teachers, especially teachers of young children, should be finding ways for students to write by hand as much as possible.

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

*Bravo to the Paris Review for making their 50+ years of interviews available free online. HT to a Matt McGough (@mttymcg) for tweeting that tidbit.

Teaching to the Student

2010-10-13T19:08:00.000-07:00

Most teachers have heard of differentiated learning, but when I stumbled on this blog post by Seth Godin, it made me realize that the phrase "differentiated learning" just throws jargon at a simple problem: different students want to do different things. And what they do will determine what they learn.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure this out in my Junior English class. Like every other English teacher, I have kids who write exceptionally well and others who don't feel confident with all of the basics. (And of course there are always kids who think they write well because they write a lot of words.)

My solution the last few years? After the first essay, I invite the stronger writers to write more sophisticated essays and recommend that the weaker writers rewrite essays. After all, they're not competing with each other; they're competing against themselves.

So forget about teaching to the test, or to the curriculum, or any other inanimate thing.

Teach to the student.

Who Owns the Problem?

2010-10-07T12:39:00.000-07:00

Before we know it, Parent-Teacher Conferences will be here. Karl Fisch has an interesting recent post on the topic. While I'm not entirely sure that students ought to be present in every instance*, I do like his idea that students ought to answer some basic questions (see below), and that those answers be shared with the teacher and the parents in advance of the meeting.

When I shared this post with Kristin Ross, my Assistant Principal, she offered an excellent insight: "I like the idea of putting the effort on the student side of things, and encouraging their thoughtful involvement. As we say in counseling cases: the person who is doing the most worrying/talking is the one that owns the problem. Often in the case of tough parent/teacher meetings the adults do this, not the student."

Karl Fisch suggests the following questions to help the student begin to own the problem (or, alternatively, the success):

Has class met your expectations? Why or why not?
What’s going well for you?
What’s challenging for you?
What could I do as your teacher that would help you be more successful?
What could you do as a student that would help you be more successful?
Is there anything your parents can do to help you be more successful?
Is there anything else you think your parents should know about this class or about how you are doing in this class?

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

*I once worked in a school where students were required to attend these conferences. They often were exercises in ventriloquism: either the parent had cowed or coerced the student into saying what the parent wanted to hear, or else the student knew how to say the right thing (from the teacher and the parent's point of view) and get out of there as soon as possible. To be fair, we didn't use any prep questions as Fisch suggests, so I would be curious to know whether this system works in other schools.

What's in a job?

2010-10-05T20:11:00.000-07:00

What if it were your job not just to teach Math, or History, or Spanish, or Chemistry?

What if it were also your job to discover the hidden or quiet passion in your students? And what if it were your job to help each student cultivate that part of herself?

A former colleague once remarked to me, "My job is to teach my subject. If kids want to find themselves, they can join an extracurricular."

But teaching isn't only about doing a job. It's also about living a vocation--a vocation to help your students find their most authentic selves, to cultivate their most authentic passions.

How do you begin to know what embers flicker in your students? And how do you fan those embers into flames?

In other words, how are you getting the job done?

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

(Inspired by a TED talk by Sir Ken Robinson)

Why be a Buddhist when you can be a Buddha?

2010-10-02T18:01:00.000-07:00

"Why be a Buddhist when you can be a Buddha?"

--Lama Surya Das

When I came across this quote, I thought about a conversation I recently had with a student. He's applying early to Dartmouth, and I agreed to write his college recommendation.

"Hypothetically, if you were to get wait-listed at Dartmouth, what other schools would you consider?" I asked.

He named several excellent institutions--Holy Cross, Boston College, UVA, Vanderbilt, Wake Forest, Duke--all of which struck me as great fits for him.

"Have you also considered Georgetown?"

He explained that he had determined it wouldn't be the right school for him, but then hastened to add, "I know you went there and everything, and it's a great school--"

"Hey, you don't need apologize," I said. "as much as I love Georgetown, I don't recommend it to everyone. Regardless of what I think, ultimately only you can make that decision. It has to be the right fit for you."

True educators are not in the business of indoctrination. We should aim to know our students as well as possible, and to help them to know themselves as well as possible; that way, when the time comes to make pivotal life decisions, students can choose from a place of freedom rather than coercion or manipulation.

In other words, students shouldn't want to become clones of us. They should want to become who they are, deep down inside.

As Lama Surya Das says, "Why be a Buddhist when you can be a Buddha?"

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

Under Pressure

2010-09-26T12:14:00.000-07:00

My school works on a trimester system. Given the length of trimesters and the need for mid-trimester progress reports, there simply isn't enough time for every teacher to administer a sufficient number of evaluations in a reasonably spaced out manner. The result? "Hell weeks" (as the students call them), which occur just before the mid-trimester and just before the end of the trimester.

So I was pleased to read Jonah Lehrer's article "Under Pressure: the Search for a Stress Vaccine" in Wired magazine. (Hat tip to Jamie Stark for pointing me to it.) The entire article is fascinating, but what most concerns me is the connection between stress and learning.

We all know that fear can be a powerful short-term motivator. But exercised over time, fear and its cousin stress erode our ability to learn. Here is a simplified version of what happens to the brain:

1. Too much stress enlarges the amygdala.

2. "This swelling comes at the expense of the hippocampus, which is crucial for learning and memory and shrinks under severe stress," says Lehrer.

We're never going to eliminate stress for students. In fact, students need to learn to manage a certain amount of stress if they want to succeed in the workplace and in their personal lives. When I played AAU and high school basketball, my coaches always had us practice free throws when we were most tired so that we learned to manage the physical and psychological stress of the 4th quarter. Shouldn't we also teach our students to navigate the stress of "hell weeks"?

According to the article, here are some strategies:

Make friends. As Lehrer writes, "Social relationships are a powerful buffer against stress." Teachers and parents sometimes (and rightfully) complain that certain students are excessively social. But others are insufficiently social. We should seek ways to connect these students to their peers.
Cultivate a habit of reflection. I've written about this several times before in the context of an over-stimulated mind and the connection to genuine leadership. But reflection--even short periods of reflection--can reduce stress and anxiety.
Get enough sleep. Again, Lehrer writes that "even a single night's sleep [...] triggers an automatic spike in stress hormones." In addition, it's also widely believed that regular REM sleep is essential for the brain to consolidate and synthesize the learning that takes place while someone is awake.
And students can get more sleep by practicing time management. According to the article, the deepest source of stress comes from "subordination"; that is, feeling we cannot control our fate. Students who manage their time well don't have to worry about cramming for a test or writing an essay the night before it's due. It's seductive to think, "I only have five minutes, so what's the point of starting my reading for tonight? I can't get through the whole thing." True, but if you use those five minute to read two pages and later on use ten minutes to read another few pages, pretty soon that large reading seems a lot more manageable.

Unless this becomes a Brave New World, stress is here to stay. And if you want to influence your students beyond taking standardized tests, helping them to manage stress is a good place to start.

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

Catch Them Doing Something Right

2010-09-23T05:08:00.000-07:00

I love reading books on effective business management and leadership because they almost always have some application to the classroom. One of the best is The One-Minute Manager, which includes a section called "Catch Them Doing Something Right." The premise? It is far more effective to provide feedback focusing on behaviors you want to encourage vs. behaviors you want to discourage.

That's also the premise behind "the inverted classroom." In his blog Dan Pink says this of Karl Fisch, a high school Math teacher who has flipped the traditional homework-classroom dynamic:

“Instead of lecturing during class time and assigning problems as homework, he’s flipped the sequence. He now records lectures on video and puts them on YouTube for the students to watch at home at night. Then he spends class time working on problems with students.”

If you can get students to watch the lectures outside the classroom (perhaps a very big "if"), then you'll free up class time to observe students practicing, which means that you'll have the opportunity to catch them doing something right.

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

Praise vs. Feedback

2010-09-22T19:41:00.000-07:00

For better or worse, I have a reputation for being the hardest grader in the English Department at my school, and many of my students begin Junior year fretting about their ability to write or conduct a close reading well. So I've taken to emphasizing one thing more than any other:

It's all about practice.

Too often kids are told, "You're really good at writing!" or "You have such brilliant insights into the text!" These are pleasant things to hear, but at best positive praise offers a short-term ego boost. At worst, it communicates that the student ought to continue to excel even though the teacher hasn't explained why the student excels in the first place.

It's also worth pointing out that such positive praise can imply to under-performing students that they simply weren't born with a certain talent. If that was how you interpreted the message, would you really try much harder?

I'm not saying praise is bad. But it's a lot more powerful when it supplements feedback.

Feedback identifies a specific behavior that the student can recognize and therefore control. "You're really good at writing" is a lot less useful than "Your use of a transition phrase here helps the reader to see the connection between the quote and your insight."

That's why I emphasize practice to my students. Virtually no one is born a naturally good writer or literary analyst. But when students realize that they can control certain behaviors through practice, they can grow into strong writers and close readers.

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

Add Value

2010-09-21T18:25:00.000-07:00

You can get through all of your lesson plans, you can return assessments in a timely fashion, you can prepare your students for the SAT and AP exams...

But if you're not adding value (thank you Seth Godin), then in the end you've just been giving each student a fish to eat every day, not teaching her how to fish.

It's relatively easy to teach someone the right answers--to the test, to the essay assignment, to the lab report. It's a lot harder to teach her how to ask the right questions.

And yet knowing how to ask the right questions may mark the difference between a student who knows how to pursue her passions and a student who is just clever enough to find a safe--but ultimately unsatisfying--job.

They may only be your students for this year, but add value now and they'll continue to grow long after they've left your classroom.

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/
______________________________

This post is dedicated to Frank Ambrosio, who continues to teach a new generation of students that The Divine Comedy (among other things) is not just a great story, but also an essential tool for understanding ourselves and for asking the right questions.

Are you a good boss?

2010-09-13T18:44:00.000-07:00

At the end of an English class this morning, I overhead two students:

"You ready for Spanish?"

"I don't know. You think she'll give us a quiz?"

My first reaction: Why weren't they still talking about my class? Hadn't we just had a really sharp discussion?

My second reaction: Get a grip. Junior English is not the center of their universe.

This morning's experience dovetails nicely with Dan Pink's latest blog post and interview about Robert Sutton's Good Boss, Bad Boss. Here's the gist: when people (think teachers) assume positions of power, they focus more on their own needs and less on the needs of their subordinates (think students).

Students have lives--quite frenetic lives--beyond our classrooms. I might want my kids to plow through 40 pages of reading on a certain night, but do I also know--and care--that the next day their Physics teacher might be giving them a test, their History teacher collecting an essay, and their Foreign Language teacher giving a quiz?

That's not a rationalization for watering down curriculum or letting kids blow off assignments. The key is that when a teacher has high standards, students have to know why that teacher expects them to do so well.

Last week some students told me that I had a reputation as the toughest grader in the English Department. My response? "Most of you aren't going to major in English in college, but no matter what you do, you're going to need to be strong writers. Business emails, lab reports for academic journal, a public relations pitch for new business--they all require superior writing skills. So I want you to leave my class ready to succeed at whatever you do."

To put it another way: Pink's interview with Sutton is a nice reminder that good management involves taking the time to be as interested in our students' needs as we are in our own.

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

What's Your Frame?

2010-09-07T11:53:00.000-07:00

What frames all of your teaching?

Is your ultimate goal to teach a certain skill set?

Is the ultimate aim of your English class to make sure your students know how to structure an argument, then compose a grammatical, logical, persuasive essay based on that argument?

Is the ultimate aim of your Math class to make sure your students know how to derive sine and cosine? To factor quadratic equations?

These are goals, to be sure; but are they the ultimate goals?

Think about this quote, from Daniel Pink's blog today:

“[The programming language] C++ is now an international language. If that’s all you know, then you’re competing with people in India or China who will do the work for less.”

--Catherine L. Mann, Economist, Brandeis University

If your school is educating future leaders, it has to do more than impart skills and content knowledge, because that way is a race to the bottom.

So think about it one more time: what is the ultimate goal that frames all of your teaching?

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

"The Learning Shift," Part 2

2010-09-05T19:49:00.001-07:00

Take time to read all of Nancy Freiberg's "The Learning Shift" in Georgetown Magazine (second half here), but consider these two quotations:

"Michael Wesch [a cultural anthropologist] of Kansas State University has spent years studying how new media are shaping contemporary society and culture, and is considered an international expert on the topic. Wesch said that up until today’s generation, some people felt insignificant and anonymous. But as new technologies such as Facebook, blogs and YouTube emerged, that dynamic changed, he says, and led to the more participatory society we have now. Wesch calls this a 'culture of participation.'"

"The whole notion of teaching and curricular enterprise needs to become intrinsically experimental and to ensure that classrooms are places where active engagement is the norm."

--Prof. Randy Bass, Director, Center for New Designs in Learning & Scholarship, Georgetown University

I came of age before the Internet, and I instinctively recoil at the idea of my classroom becoming experimental to mollify my students’ desire for a “culture of participation.”

But if I want to be a truly effective 21^st century teacher, I have to be willing to examine that gut response. Does it reflect a conditioned response? Does it reflect a fear of change? Does it reflect a certain condescension, the voice that wants to say, “When they're older, these kids will understand why my classes were lectures...”?

In other words, does my instinctive recoiling say more about me than it does the enterprise of teaching the 21 century student?

This doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing proposition. We don’t have to reconstruct every single lesson around the idea of student-centered, “intrinsically experimental” work. But as the new school year approaches, it might be fruitful to ask yourself, “In the first week of classes, can I shift my approach in just one of my lessons so that it centers on student experimentation and participation?"

Better yet, ask your students. Because the age of the industrial model, where all the students sat in rows and listened (or daydreamed, or doodled, or slept) while you talked are over.

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

"The Learning Shift," Part 1

2010-09-05T19:49:00.000-07:00

"The Learning Shift." That's the title of an article in the current issue of Georgetown Magazine (the second half of the article is spread out over pages in this section).

I love the cover design. Notice how "teach" and "learn" are wedged between "delete," "shift," and "alt." If our schools are going to thrive in the 21st century, faculty and students alike are going to have to delete some of our old approaches, shift others, and find fresh alternatives.

More on that in "The Learning Shift," Part 2...

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

Second Impressions

2010-08-29T19:01:00.000-07:00

In my last post, I took to task my first department chair for a rigid sense of the rules. While that experience exemplified the culture of that school, it actually contradicted the rest of my experiences with that department chair. Because I'm grateful to him, want to highlight my "second impressions" in the form of some lessons I learned from him:

1. Observe teachers as often as possible and provide feedback as soon as possible.

My chair observed me nine times that year. Each time he presented me with a typed report within a day of the visitation so that both his and my memories were fresh. This made it easier to correct my weaknesses, and it also provided me with the positive reinforcement to keep doing the good things I was doing.

2. Successful teaching has a lot to with atmosphere.

My observation reports always began with comments about the atmosphere: Were the windows and the door open, and the ceiling fans on to circulate air? Did I move around the classroom to help maintain attention? Did I regularly change the appearance of the room?

Why did my chair put these sorts of questions before content? If, for example, the room was stifling, my brilliant comments wouldn't matter, because the students would be in a stupor and unable to pay attention.

3. Turn potential character flaws into strengths.

Early on my chair drew attention to my demanding nature. But he was not suggesting that I ease up, or tell more jokes, or do something else out of character. Instead, he wanted me to realize that being naturally demanding in the classroom obviously sprang from a place deep inside me. Rather than fight it, he said, leverage it. To paraphrase him: there are drill sergeants that soldiers hate and there are drill sergeants that soldiers love. The difference is that the second kind of drill sergeant genuinely wants his soldiers to succeed, and his soldiers know it. It's ok to be challenging, as long as your students know you're invested in their success.

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

First Impressions

2010-08-26T19:12:00.000-07:00

As the new school year approaches, I'm reminded of my first day of full-time teaching.

Students and faculty arrived on an unbearably humid August morning. An hour before students began to trickle in, I was in my classroom arranging the bulletin boards, writing on the blackboard, and shaping the desks into a perfect Cartesian quadrant.

Not backbreaking stuff, but without air conditioning I was already sweating through my shirt. I had spent the previous two months as a paralegal at a white-shoe law firm*, so I was exceedingly professionally dressed for a 22-year old. Ruin my new suit? Make a terrible first impression? Not a chance. I slipped out of my suit jacket and hung it over my chair.

As I was finishing my work, my department chair entered the room. In silence, he gazed at my efforts: bulletin boards with poster-sized biographies of literary figures; a blackboard with my name and the topic for the first class; a neat stack of paperbacks on the corner of my desk.

Then he looked at me, his eyes travelling from my shoulders to my waist, then back to my shoulders.

"We never take our jackets off here," he said.

I gave a little laugh.

"I know, it's just that it's so hot, I'm already sweating through my shirt, and I don't want to ruin my jacket. Never let 'em see you sweat." I snapped at my suspenders for emphasis.

He shook his head. "No, I don't think you understand. We never take our jackets off here."

End of discussion.

I had known about this school long before I started working there. But that felt like my first genuine impression of the place, an impression dominated by what was left unspoken.

Students are always filling in our silences, and at that moment I felt like a reprimanded student. So in my first impression, here's how I filled in the unspoken parts:

Rules matter more than anything else, and we don't make exceptions.

That is, you don't matter as much as our rules matter.

I don't mean to suggest that my department chair meant that; in fact, I suspect not, since in most other regards he was a spectacular mentor. All the more reason why his institutional mindset at that moment disturbed me.

Something else--something ultimately more important--also hung in the air.

Why?

Why were we never to remove our jackets?

I would have asked, but it seemed better to follow the rules than to question them.

Don’t we want new students and new faculty to understand why we do things the way we do them? Don't we want cooperation more than compliance?

If you're a veteran teacher, you may be returning to the classroom ready to re-root certain habits. By explaining the reason for certain rules, you will begin to establish rapport.

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

*I experienced a similar rebuke at the law firm. One morning I arrived wearing a blue button down shirt. An associate stopped me in the hallway.

"It's summer, so you can probably get away with that, but you should really stick to white shirts."

"Why?"

"This is a white-shoe law firm."

In spite of a decent education, I didn't know what that meant.

"It means you dress conservatively."

"Blue shirts are not conservative?"

The associate smiled. "It's simple: just stick to white."

Reflective Leadership in the Digital Age

2010-08-25T06:19:00.000-07:00

The potential upside for e-textbooks is enormous: searchability, pop quizzes, group note-sharing, teacher highlighting, and a really light backpack, just to name a few perks.

On the other hand, as I've noted several times recently, research is showing that the brain needs a break from excessive stimulation if it is going to consolidate learning into long-term memory and comprehension.

Tactical questions matter: Would e-texts be more convenient? Cheaper?

But tactics proceed from strategy. So we need to ask strategic questions: How are we affecting our students' learning by moving to digital books? How are we affecting our students' formation as reflective individuals by equipping them with devices that allow them to occupy every "micro-moment" (discussed in the second link above)?

Here's what I see: there's no undoing the digital Pandora's box. Sooner or later, all schools are going to be using some form of e-readers for most of their classes. So rather than treat this as an either/or situation--"Either we adopt e-texts or we keep them out of our school"--maybe we should think about this as a both/and situation--"How can we leverage all the value of e-texts and also make essential to our educational program the development of a habit of quiet reflection and introspection?"

I can't think of even one genuine leader who hasn't cultivated a habit of reflectiveness. If we want to educate for leadership, these strategic questions matter.

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

They Lied to Me, Part 2

2010-08-24T19:06:00.000-07:00

A couple of people commented that the valedictorian cited in my last post was essentially a whiner.

I do agree that most schools cannot cater to students' every whim. It would be problematic for a high school to exempt students from Math courses because the students complain that are never going to factor polynomials or determine the sine or cosine of an angle in "real life."

Still, let's try to put the best possible interpretation on the valedictorian's speech; rather than cast her as a whiner, let's ask ourselves about the source of her frustration. At one point she calls herself and her peers "slaves." It's easy to dismiss that as adolescent hysteria, but what if that was her genuine perception of her experience?

As someone with a Master's degree in Psychoanalysis, I'm plenty familiar with the concept of transference. Maybe this valedictorian was just transferring her unconscious feelings toward autocratic parents onto authority figures at school.

But...

Maybe she really did sit through classes in which she and her peers were essentially told, "Don't waste valuable class time asking why we're doing this stuff. It's on the [AP, SAT, state exam, etc.] Just learn it."

Maybe she really was educated in an industrial system that dodged individual attention in favor of economies of scale. I once worked in a school where I taught 40 students at a time. I was told that if I wanted smaller class sizes, I must necessarily also want a smaller paycheck. If that's what the teachers were being told, how do you imagine that trickled down to the students?

Here's the flip side:

The last few years I've become fanatical about concision. At the beginning of the year, my students think it's some pointless English teacher rule. Sometimes I go so far that my students worry for my mental balance.

But when I tell them that in the "real world" their bosses are going to want business emails that are as concise as possible, they perk up. Even better, when they see how concision makes their writing crisper and clearer, they realize that I'm not pushing concision as some arbitrary rule.

One final thought: I wonder if the valedictorian had a faculty mentor to help her with her speech. My guess is no. I mention this because it seems to me that, at its best, an effective education alchemizes our strongest adolescent instincts into mature perspectives. But for that to happen, you need teachers who are interested in their kids as much as their subjects.

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

"You know, they lied to me"

2010-08-23T19:11:00.000-07:00

For the last decade, I have taught a Senior English Elective titled "Madness & Literature." Some texts have changed, but one piece has been a constant: the 1993 film Falling Down.

In the movie’s final confrontation, Bill Foster, the antagonist (or is he the co-protagonist?--one of the film’s interesting questions) says, "I helped build missiles. I helped protect this country. You should be rewarded for that. But instead they give it to the plastic surgeons. You know, they lied to me." *

It’s not hard to imagine Foster as the valedictorian of his high school class. Buttoned up, ultra-serious, competitive, and obviously a brainiac, Foster must have excelled at taking tests. He must have excelled at completing his homework. He must have excelled at following instructions.

But “they lied” to him.

Did “they” include his teachers?

I have this in mind because a friend recently sent me this valedictorian speech, to which I reacted with ambivalence.

On one hand, like Bill Foster in Falling Down, the valedictorian seems to be shouting, “They lied to us! Doing well in school isn’t going to help you in real life!”

On the other hand, she threatens to throw the baby out with the bath water. As it just so happens, learning how to conduct a close reading, learning how to do basic algebra, learning how to construct and articulate (orally and in writing) a coherent argument--these things are pretty useful in real life.

Maybe we just need to do a better job of showing why our curricula are relevant. And maybe we need to be open to the possibility that what we have taught for the last ten years or five years or even one year might not speak to this year's students.

Of course, we'll only know if we seek feedback from our students. At least then they won't think we're trying to lie to them.

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

* Prendergast, the (other?) protagonist, replies, "Is that what this is about? Is that why my chicken dinner is drying out in the oven? You're mad because they lied to you? Listen, pal, they lie to everyone. They lie to the fish. But that doesn't give you any special right to do what you did today."

High School: Unplugged

2010-08-16T18:05:00.000-07:00

One of the most formative features of my high school experience was the commute. Getting to school took two hours, door-to-door, an hour and a half of which I spent on the Metro North, from New Hamburg to Grand Central Station. The morning commute was never more than an extension of my night's sleep, but during the afternoon, as my train coasted ten feet off the Hudson River, I sat quietly and reflected for uninterrupted stretches.

When was the last time you had an hour of reflection time built into your day?

If you're like most people, probably never. But even if someone said to you, "Every day you can spend one hour in quiet reflection," would you be able to unplug?

Your brain might just need it. I've talked in this space before about the urgency of retreats, and Matt Richtel's recent article in the New York Times highlights the underlying neurological basis.

Read the whole article, but for now consider these two snippets:

[The researchers] are thinking about a seminal study from the University of Michigan that [...] indicates that learning centers in the brain become taxed when asked to process information, even during the relatively passive experience of taking in an urban setting. By extension, some scientists believe heavy multitasking fatigues the brain, draining it of the ability to focus.

And:

Working memory is a precious resource in the brain. The scientists hypothesize that a fraction of brain power is tied up in anticipating e-mail and other new information — and that they might be able to prove it using imaging.

“To the extent you have less working memory, you have less space for storing and integrating ideas and therefore less to do the reasoning you need to do,” says Mr. Kramer [one of the researchers profiled in the article].

If your students need quiet time for reflection--if teachers need quiet time for reflection--what are we going to do about it?

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

Study Abroad

2010-08-16T15:30:00.000-07:00

Would you send your child to a school where almost every student chose to spend a few weeks or even a month studying or performing a service project abroad?

Recently I've been talking to former students who spent weeks and sometimes more than a month abroad, either for study or to perform Christian Service projects. In every case, they have described the experience as profoundly maturational.

Sharpened language skills are only the most obvious benefit. More importantly, these students have reported an increased sense of independence, an openness to other points of view, and a greater comfort level with taking (healthy) risks. Don't we want to foster these qualities in young leaders?

It seems to me that any school that wants to develop 21st century leaders ought to do everything possible to enable its students to spend time abroad.

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

You Haven't Taught Until They Have Learned

2010-08-09T13:19:00.000-07:00

The June death of John Wooden, UCLA's legendary basketball coach, occasioned a number of reflections on the man. Above all, he was characterized as the consummate educator.

My dad, my first and best basketball coach, gave me a copy of Wooden's Pyramid of Success as soon as I could dribble. But that was my sole exposure to anything specific about Coach Wooden-as-teacher. And while I joined my faith to my father's faith in that Pyramid, Wooden-as-coach always seemed more mythological figure than earthly teacher.

So I was pleased to discover a 1976 study (revisited in 2004)* that analyzes Wooden's teaching excellence.** By sheer coincidence, I also stumbled on Daniel Willingham's article on effective praise. Both studies emphasize the same point:

Effective teaching involves identifying and giving feedback on specific behaviors.

Or, as Willingham puts it, "Praise should emphasize process, not ability."

Why?

1. Students know that they can control behavior, whereas not every student feels he was born with ability. (And, in a related vein, not every student believes he can change his level of ability). Ever heard a student say, "I'm just not good at Math" (or any other subject)? That's because he has been conditioned to focus on natural ability rather than cultivated behaviors.

2. Praising process--or specific behaviors, as Wooden appears to have done 75% of the time--gives the student something concrete to focus on. "Good job!" or "Nice effort!" or "Well said" may be effective in the short-term, but generalized praise won't help a student to reproduce (or improve) certain skills. By contrast, "Excellent use of the text to support your insight" should focus and reinforce a desirable behavior.

I haven't read all the scholarship on this, but it seems to me that we ought to distinguish between praise and feedback: praise targets the ego, whereas feedback targets behaviors.

The next time you find a student struggling, ask yourself: has he not learned? Or have I not taught?

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/

______________________________

*See: Tharp & Gallimore (1976). Basketball's John Wooden: What a coach can teach a teacher. Psychology Today, 9(8), 74-78 as well as Gallimore & Tharp (2004). What a coach can teach a teacher, 19752004: Reflections and reanalysis of John Wooden's teaching practices. The Sports Psychologist, 18(2), 119-137.

The 1976 article and its 2004 follow-up are not available online, but here is a synopsis of You Haven't Taught Until They Have Learned: John Wooden's Teaching Principles and Practices, a book written by one of the original authors.

**According to the synopsis above, Wooden taught English before he became famous for coaching basketball.

Here's a question...

2010-07-30T17:33:00.000-07:00

Do you know whether your students think that you really want them to succeed?

I'm not asking whether you want them to succeed. You probably wouldn't bother reading this blog if you didn't care about your students' success.

I'm asking about student perception: do your students believe that you want them to succeed?

How do you know?

http://teaching-excellence.blogspot.com/