Education for doing and failing

The business world, the world where people work once they move  out of schooling, knows the value of “doing”- it’s called “experience”, and there’s no substitute for it.  Employers regularly complain about new hires out of school who can’t do anything. They can’t think, they can’t apply a principle if they “didn’t have a case study about that” — in short, they aren’t good at DOING.

In rethinking about what education needs to be about and how we can then go about achieving this two things always come to the surface.  One is that education needs to be conceived as more than the transmission of data/facts and second is that the means by which you go about doing it conveys as much as what you are conveying.  In other words, how you go about the  business of education says a lot about what you are teaching. In fact, the two are inseparable.

Want to teach engagement and creativity/innovation?  You have to give students the opportunity to ask their own questions, explore and discover.  Stop “telling”.  Figuring out what the good questions are will always be more important than finding  out the answers to any questions.  Yet, schools today still provide the question and send students off to find the answers.  “Innovators” in education today think they are making significant strides when they  provide iPads as a tool to find the answers.  This is what passes for thoughtful and “forward thinking” solutions to the education crisis.  Myopic indeed.  This is what happens when people who have not truly been “educated” are old enough to be in charge.

Of  course, “doing”, if we’re lucky, often leads to failing.  More about  that in the next post.

Read Full Post »

Schools and Skinned Knees

Educators can learn a lot from the parenting author Wendy Mogel. She’s a clinical psychologist who took what she learned from listening to parents and their children and has written two books that basically tell parents to “chillax”.

On the heels of the Race to Nowhere phenomenon, stories of helicopter parents, long lines to get children into the “best” preschool, parents vying for the preferred second grade teacher like it will matter for the rest of their 7 year old’s life, and so on…. Mogel tells it like it is: none of this matters.  She understands that the problems created by all this stressing out, for parents and their children, is just that: problems created, manufactured.  All could have been just fine if left alone.

Schools, teachers, educators of all sorts are complicit in this game, this destructive culture.  How often do teachers tell parents that it doesn’t matter  which  teacher they get?  Or that it’s okay if their child doesn’t get straight As?  Educators need to begin to deflate this myth.  We need to help parents appreciate that their children are not, as Mogel puts it, “your masterpieces”, nor are they a reflection of you.  Mistakes are what we learn from, where wisdom comes from; and our present culture of perfection and one-upmanship to get into the “few” good college spots is harming our children as well as presenting a picture of the world that is not real.

Mogel echoes the spirit of Ken Robinson when she tells parents that your children will be what they will be and that if your daughter or son is meant to be a baker it’s a waste of your time to try to make a doctor out of them.  More than just a waste: you’ll make both of you miserable in the process, turn them into unhappy adults who will, what?, make the world around them unhappy (because that’s what unhappy people do) and contribute more misery to the world.  Yes, there are a lot of dominoes that will fall if you try to make a doctor out of  baker.

Educators need to step  up with this message.  Let each child discover their own passions and skills and let them bring that best self to the world.  What follows then is amazing – isn’t that the world we all want to live in?

Read Full Post »

Stress, Emotion and Learning

The relatively new field of neuroeducation has made it clear that emotion plays a role in learning. Getting more specific, the field has shown that stress plays a role, a destructive role.

It turns out that stress prevents the human brain from developing optimally.  It does this by preventing neurogenesis from taking place.  Neurogenesis is our brain’s ability to create new neurons- brain cells.  If you grow up in a healthy and stable environment your brain is able to generate new neurons, which help you to learn.  Provide an enriched environment and you’re off to the races.  Stress takes you in the opposite direction of an enriched environment.

How does this inform the education paradigm-shift position?

Conventional environments create stress in students.  Whether it’s from the fear of failure and mistake making or the upcoming quiz, there are daily stressors for most students in a conventional environment.

The New Education Paradigm removes these stressors.  By placing the learner in greater control of her activities, by encouraging mistakes (in the spirit of risk-taking that is necessary to look for new questions and answers), by shifting to alternate modes of assessment, amongst other things, the new paradigm creates a rich environment that minimizes stress in the student/learner.  The result is a student who is not only motivated to participate and apply themselves fully, but a brain that is there to support them by creating the new neurons that they can then use to learn.

Now, if only we can get the prime movers in “industrial education” (new term) to catch up to  the science of the day, maybe we can begin to help more students sooner.  In the meantime, check out Montessori schools – they’ve understood this implicitly for decades.

Read Full Post »

deep into learning

“Yes, I know that… I just can’t explain it”.  Ever heard this? Ever SAID it?  If you “can’t explain it”, you DON’T know it.  Very simple.  It’s one of the reasons why writing things down in your own words is so valuable: it’s a test of your understanding.  When writing you have to use complete sentences, which are complete thoughts.  If what you are writing about is clear in your mind you can do this fairly easily.  If you have a weak grasp of your material the words will not flow,  or they will be vapid and vague.

There is significant research which delves into this area painstakingly.  It looks into what takes place in our mind, in our psychology, when we “think we know”.  It asks “what is going on in a student’s mind when they study and sense that ‘this is familiar to me’ and so moves on with a sense of knowing and thus being prepared?”  It turns out that familiarity is no indicator of understanding and so leads the learner away from further work on the topic prematurely.  Then you take the test (yes, the test!) and find you didn’t do so well despite “feeling like you knew the material”.  This also helps to begin to explain why there is often such poor ability to apply knowledge: that true test of understanding.

It turns out that in order to build understanding you need to do certain things in your mind: you need to actively think about the material.  This is the key.  Actively thinking means “turning over ideas”, it means “seeing how this content relates to other content”, it means helping your mind to integrate ideas.  THIS is what learning is.  And sadly, our schools do very little of this because they are geared towards memorization and regurgitation- not meaning making.  (You can read further about this claim here).

Once again, it is clear that if education is doing what it needs to do, namely, prepare young people to be able to live their lives successfully and contribute to society, then they need to learn with deep understanding.  We need schools that allow this to take place, which means a lot more than sitting and listening.  We need schools with ACTIVE LEARNERS.

Read Full Post »

an emerging model

Slowly, as we look at how learning takes place – what the nature of learning is, we see a new model emerging.  As we follow the principles that are becoming clear – allowing student interest to determine work, allowing students to move forward when they are ready to – we see that the traditional classroom of yesterday and today does not allow for these things.  We see that what makes sense based on how learning happens is not what our schools weer modeled on.  This is why we’re changing the education conversation.

Recently I presented a small glimpse into how some of this might work (see post here) .  There’s much to be said to make clear how a classroom would work and the retraining that will be required in order for teachers to learn how to facilitate this new arrangement.  Fortunately much of this is already being done at some schools around the world. Following a different model of education, these environments have been emerging in rich and poor countries and have been shown to be successful across cultures.  They allow for student-lead interest (and still get all the work done!), they follow each student’s pace of learning so as to maximize the “fit” of learning and they reveal high student satisfaction.  I’m speaking of the Montessori schools.

These, it turns out, are not just “pre-schools” but extend into and through the elementary years, all the way to high school in some areas.  There’s much to be said here, but suffice it to say that a model already exists that incorporates the “how” of human learning.

With the rage that’s only growing about traditional schools, as depicted in a number of recent and soon-to-be released documentaries (Race to Nowhere, Waiting for Superman, The Cartel ) it is abundantly clear to a growing number of people that the “system” is broken and flawed.  We owe our children something better, something real, something based on the nature of learning and the nature of humanity.  Let’s put aside our special interests and pet projects and pursue what is actually, demonstrably, best for children (NOT for test scores, but for children).

Read Full Post »

interest-based class model

So I’m researching something else today (STEM programs) and I come across this report talking about “reinventing schools for the 21st century”.

Guess what you find in that report?   “Educators can’t truly deliver 21st-century instruction in schools that reflect Industrial-Age designs, with rigid schedules…. and fixed boundaries between grades, disciplines, and classrooms…”

I’m thinking “this sounds familiar”.  Maybe the ideas written about in this space aren’t so foreign.  Wouldn’t that be nice.

The report goes on: “measures of learning must include thoughtful assessments of a student’s ability to apply and demonstrate knowledge in complex situations”.  INDEED!  One of the parents in my office last week, a high school math/science teacher, was bemoaning the lack of thought, creativity and ability to apply concepts to a new situation.  Moving beyond memorization and regurgitation.. there’s a goal.

Mirroring my comments yesterday about having long, open time periods for student-lead interest-based work, this report notes that ““it is even more important that class time be elastic. Instead of assigning a certain amount of time for teaching one subject per day, teachers need the flexibility of bigger and more adjustable time slots to truly impact learning.”  This is wonderful. The sad reality, though, is that the time lag to get quality ideas into real classrooms is FOREVER, and further, once you take a good idea and pass it through the sieve of collective thinking (various departments, committees and other sundry groups) you end up with something to put into application that hardly resembles the original fine idea.  The result is that the shabby approximation that is put into practice won;t actually work well, because it’s a watered down approximation, and so it gets tossed out as a silly idea to begin with and we go back to what we were doing.

Here’s hoping that the voices calling for fundamental change ( see this: fundamental change ) will grow loud enough and big enough that maybe the good ideas will actually make it through with enough of their substance that goodness will emerge.

(The study also talked about integrating technology into the classroom even more and of blurring the lines of the “classroom” so much that virtual learning spaces be integrated.  This is fine at some levels, surely not at the elementary and middle school levels.  The report can be found here: reinvent schools)

Read Full Post »

the role of interest in learning

Based on the post describing the conditions for optimal learning, lets explore what a school should look like.  We’ll take the position that schools don’t exist and we’re trying to create one based on what we know about learning (I know, crazy idea, right?)

Interest.  Let’s start there.  Interest is, quite simply, HUGE in learning.  If you’re not interested there’s nothing anyone can do to force you to learn.  That’s because there’s a physiological piece involved.  Your whole body, lovely integrated system that it is, participates in learning: hormones, enzymes and other chemicals are activated/release based on your emotional state.  Interest is an emotional state.  Think of when you suddenly hear a new piece of music, your ears tune in and your whole being is suddenly “awake” with interest in what this is, who’s playing, etc.

You can’t fake interest.

When your interest level spikes you are primed for learning.  It’s like “brain glue” or something.  Seriously.  Learning is highly facilitated when you are sincerely interested in the thing you’re working at/on.  If you really want to learn how to tune your car engine or learn how to play tennis, then you’re fully “present” when someone is showing you what you need to know.  Imagine the reverse.  Imagine having to learn something that you really couldn’t care less about…. yeah, nothing going on.

Back to school (tis the season…).  If our new model is to accommodate interest-oriented learning, what will it look like?

For starters, the learner has to be able to decide what s/he is going to tackle at any given time – the younger the student the more essential this is.  Older students, for example, can choose a selection of courses (like in college) and then follow a “set for them” schedule because they selected the courses based on interest and so can tune-in to that specific interest when it’s time for Psych 101 or calculus 2.  The younger child, say a 7 year old, can’t do this.  The younger child really needs to be able to self-direct throughout the day because he hasn’t developed the ability to control his intellect sufficiently.  Between the ages of 6-12 or so the student really isn’t going to be able to manage their interest the way a college student is able to.  High school – you’re getting there.

So, for elementary school we need a model that allows the child to be able to select what to work on throughout the day. The problem here is that this means doing away with what we know as the traditional classroom structure of “teacher at the front of the class”.  It means that you’ll have many different things going on at the same time because, you  guessed it, not everyone is going to have the same interest at the same time.

OMG – disaster!  chaos!  Well, not so fast.  Let’s slow down and see how this could possibly happen. Tune in for that….

Read Full Post »

“Creativity”… education’s grail?

Let’s start with what it is.  Creativity in this context is the ability to see what has not been seen, to imagine what is possible but has not been imagined, to innovate.

This is why “creativity” is constantly coming up in the media with respect to industry, education and “job skills”.  As reported recently in a Newsweek story, ” The necessity of human ingenuity is undisputed. A recent IBM poll of 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the No. 1 “leadership competency” of the future.” ” Leadership competency.  You get that?  This is not about art classes, not that there’s anything wrong with those.  The point is that creativity is what we do as people and it’s being stifled out of us.

Creativity is not some luxury that has to be pushed out of our classrooms in favor of “math & science” and more computers.  It’s the very thing that allows us to be any good at applying math, science and any other discipline.  In fact, research shows that “The correlation [of a psychology creativity assessment] to lifetime creative accomplishment was more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ.”  This means that we need to pay more attention to allowing childhood creativity to develop and blossom.

I must repeat that this does NOT mean breaking out more pasta and buttons to paste, and surely does not mean making more Thanksgiving hand-turkeys!

What it DOES mean is cultivating a culture where creativity is the norm of daily functioning.  This is so at odds with how traditional classrooms function, that it brings us back to prior posts on the need for REVOLUTION, not reform, in education.  We need more open-ended questions, more student-lead exploration, etc.

Yet, what we hear is: “Overwhelmed by curriculum standards, American teachers warn there’s no room in the day for a creativity class.”  A creativity class! This is why we;re so far from getting it right – we think it’s a special class!  Word is slowly getting around.  The Newsweek story reports that “Real improvement [in creativity training] doesn’t happen in a weekend workshop. But when applied to the everyday process of work or school, brain function improves.”

And we can also read there that “those who do better in both problem-finding and problem-solving have better relationships. They are more able to handle stress and overcome the bumps life throws in their way. A similar study of 1,500 middle schoolers found that those high in creative self-efficacy had more confidence about their future and ability to succeed. They were sure that their ability to come up with alternatives would aid them, no matter what problems would arise.”  This IS the point, yes?  Creativity is what we do as human beings, it’s our optimal mode of functioning.  Yet for years traditional schools have done everything to drive it out of students.

Once again…. it’s time to change the education conversation. It’s time to really shake up what goes on in traditional schools.  Grail, indeed.

Read Full Post »

failing to self-direct

Is it really such a nuanced concept?

I fail to see why it remains so difficult for educated people to grasp not only the value of students, indeed people, being self-directed, but also of simply grasping what it even is.  A New York Times story from about a week or so ago (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/business/11digi.html?src=busln) reported on middle school students and their ability to waste time on a computer.  The story focused on research revealing that with the great push to put computers into homes of those who cannot afford them, and an internet connection, the academic performance of these students actually declined after the introduction of the computer.  The premise was to “level the paying field” by giving the “advantage” of a computer and the internet to children who otherwise would be missing out.  The experiment failed.

What was also noted, however, was that “when devising ways to beat school policing software, students showed an exemplary capacity for self-directed learning. Too bad that capacity didn’t expand in academic directions, too.”  This comment inadvertently reveals just what self-directed learning is all about: the interest and motivation of the learner.  The students act with self-direction when trying to subvert the school’s internet “protections” because they want to get around them with great interest.  Why don’t these students show the same ability with their academic work?  Really?  You have to ask that question?  The way the academic work is presented (disconnected and abstract) it has no hope of gaining the students’ interest.

Why is this so difficult to understand?

Yes, self-direction is the much sought after remedy for much of what is failing in traditional schools.  But you can’t get there without understanding that it rests on personal interest and motivation.

Read Full Post »

Middle School Meltdown

Hey, you know – we’ve got a problem on our hands.

Someone clever said to me a while ago, “if you don’t get adolescence right, you end up with a dismal adulthood”.  Look around at the middle aged adults you know and this seems to ring true.  Adolescence is our time to figure certain things out, it’s our time to define ourselves.  Mess that up and the rest is at risk – seriously.

We’ve got to crack the middle school nut.  There are some non-traditional programs out there, pushing the limits, making innovative changes… we need to study these and replicate them because some things have been figures out.

Adolescents today get little respect.  They are ridiculed, misunderstood and made the scapegoat for many social ills.   This is wrong-headed.  Adolescents become – they are not born.  They become what we encourage them to become. Think about that.  The issues in middle schools, and high schools, goes far beyond this.  But we need to change some fundamental things.  Let us begin by asking “who is the adolescent?”.

Read Full Post »