Think RIght, Do Right, Love Right

"You can have orthodoxy and orthopraxy but not have orthopathy." - Lacrae

This is an education post, but I encountered this statement on the Russell Moore podcast in which he was interviewing Christian rapper, Lacrae, about the reconstruction of his faith after a time of doubt.  I was driving, so I had to repeat it over and over again until I got to a stoplight where I could write it down. He was talking about how Christians with solid doctrine (orthodoxy) and solid church practice (orthopraxy) often don't respond with the same compassion that Christ would (which he called orthopathy).

He was spot on about the Christian response to things, but this isn't the place for me to address that.  What I want to address is how this applies to education - particularly those of us in the evidence informed movement.

I do believe we have educational orthodoxy - right thinking about our desire to use research.  We should obviously want to find the best evidence to inform our classroom decisions and encourage others to do the same.  I believe we have educational orthopraxy - right practices based on the best evidence we could find. It is excellent that we have limited our displays, put our desks in rows, and engaged in direct instruction with checks for understanding. 

Where I think we need to be careful is with our orthopathy. Are we treating people who put their desks in pods as though they are less than we are?  Are we bothering to ask the reason why they put their desks that way? We should care if they do, listen to it, and be open to the idea that it might work for their kids in their classroom. If you know a teacher who still believes in learning styles, are you rolling your eyes and scoffing at them; or do you kindly explain the difference between learning styles and dual coding so they can understand why adding visuals is a good thing? 

It is easy in our age of instant information for us to think that everyone has access to the same knowledge that we have. But many people don't know what they don't know.  They are doing the best they can with what they were taught.  And if they went to education school longer than 7 or 8 years ago, they were likely taught learning styles, pods, and project based learning. I was taught 29 years ago that tests were about to become a thing of the past and everyone would have portfolios.  

Let's remember that teaching is a complex job with lots of expectations from multiple sources. If your administration is expecting project based learning, a teacher may not be in a position to insist on direct instruction.  Parents, principals, and professional development seminars are all making teachers feel demoralized by implying that no matter how good they are, they should be striving to get better.  Going online and celebrating something in their classroom should not be met with more "You're doing it wrong" messages. 

Evidence informed crowd, let's not be the mean kids at the lunch table.  Take the lead of Andrew Watson, who is simultaneous VERY well informed on the evidence AND one of the kindest people I know.  He meets questions about educational myths with understanding first, why the teachers believes what they do. He understands that they were likely taught those myths by trusted sources. He offers a new perspective or a framework in which to think about the topic. He present research for what it is, a dynamic field that we have to adapt in our own contexts. Before I ever met him, I knew him through the Learning and the Brain Twitter account, and one of my favorite things was that he would present a question like "Does X work?" with an answer like, "In some limited circumstances with the right conditions, yes."  Contrary to popular belief, that is what a science answer sounds like. 

So, let's climb down from our soap boxes and look at the context and motives of the people around us. Let's give them the grace we would want. Let's have orthopathy.

When is a Scaffold NOT a Scaffold

There are a lot of buzz words in education, each having their own moment. Depending on what year you entered the profession, you likely were trained heavily in one of them because "that's the direction education is heading." When I was in school, tests were soon going to be a thing of the past, and everyone would have a PORTFOLIO of their work! This never took hold as it was an obvious logistical nightmare for any school that tried it.  It attempted to make a come back in the digital age, but no college was interested in a student sending them a million work samples rather than a transcript, so it fizzled. Perhaps, your buzz word was learning style, differentiation, growth mindset, or project based. I'm not saying any of these is of zero value, but they didn't turn out to be the end-all-be-all of education either.

One that initially appealed to me when I first encountered it was GRAPHIC ORGANIZERS.  When I first learned about scaffolding, I my naive little mind thought, "Yep, this is how we're gonna do it. Students will be able to provide themselves with the support they need by rearranging their notes."

If you are unfamiliar with the concept of graphic organizers, it doesn't mean you haven't seen one.  A Venn Diagram is an example; so is a flow chart. It's any way in which information is arranged into groups visually. In fact, the initial appeal for me was the idea of having notes that were arranged thematically rather than in a linear fashion. 

And, these may have worked in some teachers' classrooms, but they didn't work in mine. Why? Because I didn't know how to teach them the best way to use them.  I provided blank copies of all kinds of organizers and told them to have out it. Graphic organize to your hearts content. Did I tell them what that meant?  No, because I didn't really know what it meant. I mean, I can make a Venn Diagram of things where there are clear overlaps and clear distinctions (e.g. the comparison between Christian school and church, comparing and contrasting the causes of the French and American revolutions), but that particular tool doesn't work for students who are learning the hierarchical structure of the court system (a flow chart would work better for that one) or the meter of poetry (AB structure has served us well).  

Do students know when a Venn diagram will work and when they should use a different organizer?  They won't unless we teach it to them explicitly. Most of us didn't.  We just provided these and hoped they would help. We told ourselves we were scaffolding, but we weren't. The equivalent in a real world scaffold would be walking up to a building with boards and ladders and hoping the person who needed the scaffold would figure out how to build one.

Scaffolding is important. In fact, it may be one of the best things we do as teachers of novice learners. Providing a chart, a formula sheet, or even a graphic organizer might get students past the hurdle of an overloaded working memory. In the same way, play rehearsals start while actors still have the script in their hands, learning complex skills often starts with supports from these sorts of tools. 

But the tools aren't scaffolds if we don't tell them how to use them. If I had a student a periodic table, he is holding a useful tool, containing, as my friend Jenny once said, "all the world's knowledge of a sheet of paper." But I can't expect him to use it if I don't explain what atomic numbers are and why atomic masses are shown with decimals. If he doesn't understand families vs. periods, he will not be able to use the table to determine valence electrons or number of energy levels. A blank Venn Diagram means little if I haven't told students when and how to use it. A sheet of polyatomic ions is only helpful to students who know what polyatomic ions are and how to recognize equations that have them.

A TOOL IS ONLY AS USEFUL AS OUR UNDERSTANDING OF ITS USE!

Teachers, before you adopt the latest thing, ask yourself if you can properly explain it to students. Until you can, it doesn't matter how good a thing it is. Don't use it until you are ready.

The Purpose of School

When searching Google, you know how the algorithm then brings up "similar questions"?  Does anyone ever find those helpful?  I never have, although I am sometimes amused at the idea that people ask Google personal questions that have no definite answer.

Anyway, I was searching something this week, and the proposed "related question" was.  Who invented school and why? I clicked on it and never really saw the answer because more questions arose, including "Why is school 12 years?" and "What is the purpose of school?"

And that got me thinking. School is one of the few things in our culture that we ALL do in some form.  Collectively, we invest billions of dollars, millions of hours, and much mental and emotional energy into this one thing. So one would think we would have a shared cultural understanding of its purpose.  Yet, you don't have to be a teacher long to know that is not true.  Parents have a different understanding of its purpose from students, and both have a different idea of its purpose than many teachers.  Not all teachers agree about it either, which leads them to approach methodology differently. So, I thought I would explore some of the major ideas and their implications this week.  

To be clear, education is more complex than any one of these could cover. I'd argue that there is a place for some of each. The following is only meant as an exploration of the pitfalls if you hold strongly to one idea and neglect its deficiencies. 

Career Preparation

I had a students early in my career that was clearly going to be a musician.  This wasn't an unlikely ambition; he was absolutely going to be a musician. So, he didn't see value in learning chemistry. After all, he wasn't going to do that for his job. Convincing him that it was good for his brain to learn it anyway was a big task.

THE GIST: The purpose of education is to prepare you for the job you will have as an adult. Since we don't track kids early in the US, a modified version of this might be that the purpose of education is to prepare you for a range of likely career paths.

This view is probably the one I heard most from students and their parents. Some teachers think this way too. But, historically speaking, it's a fairly recent development. Ancient schools weren't about job training. They weren't even about future schooling. Jobs were often determined from birth as people usually did what their parents did (e.g. farming families), so job skills were taught at home by the people best equipped to pass on their expertise. Schools were for the things that couldn't be learned elsewhere.

PRO: I'm glad that there is overlap between what you learn in school and what you will one day use in your job. It's great that you don't have to learn everything from scratch  

CON: Many students don't know in middle and high school what they want to do.  While some kids have overriding passions at a young age, many do not. Having a wide range of school class allows them to explore and find interest in things they might not previously know they could have. (I didn't know I liked physics until I took it.) Also, jobs have a nasty habit of changing. Very few people work in the same career for their entire lives, so if that was all you learned in school, you would be in a pickle. But most importantly, if that was all you learned, you would be unbearably dull. I used to ask students, "What if the ONLY thing I could talk about was physics? How many friends do you think I would have?" They all agreed that it was good I had learned about a lot of other things.

Inculturation

In spite of its similar sound, this is NOT just a fancy word for indoctrination. I want to say that up front because there is a hateful view of teachers right now from the far right, accusing them in strong terms (using words like "evil" and even "demonic" to describe "every single one of them") of pushing their own agenda and grooming kids. 

THE GIST:  What I mean by the word inculturation is teaching things that are deemed valuable in a culture. There are some things that varies parts of our society has deemed appropriate for all of its people to know. In this view, the purpose of education is to provide all members of the community with a base level of knowledge that the community expects.

We see this frequently.  Every day language includes allusions to books because we assume that everyone has read them. Certain idioms take it for granted that you know there are two people in a tango or that two plus two is four. People who immigrate to other countries are sometimes amused or lost by certain figures of speech by modes of expression that aren't used where they are from. While a lot of people like to go online and claim they don't use algebra in their every day lives, we have also decided that algebraic thinking is valuable enough to teach it to every adolescent. Some things are considered universal within a group.

PRO: Fitting into culture smooths almost every interaction you have as an adult. Your ability to fit expectations will help you socially, and it will make you more likely to interview well for jobs. 

CON: Culture isn't static. Viewing education solely in this way would create a rapidly changing curriculum.  Also, there are many people in any civilization who do not agree with certain aspects of that culture. Parents with diverse beliefs will naturally push against teachers who inculturate. This is not fair to kids who are just trying to learn and are now in the middle of a battle between their two primary authority figures.

Personal Expression

I'm going to approach this one differently because of how I encountered it.  

I saw the question "What is the purpose of school?" asked on Twitter one day, and I was surprised at how many teachers said their job was to help students "tell their story" or "use their voice."  I assume these were humanities teachers because that is not how we view our jobs in the STEM world. I found it interesting in a disturbing sort of way. And then, I found my level of disturbance interesting, so I had to do some thinking. 

Certainly, the teaching of chemistry won't help kids tell their story, but the teaching of art will.  I want both of those things in school. Age probably matters here too. It bothered me to think of this being the view in an elementary school phonics lesson, but I would probably think it was great in a junior year poetry lesson. 

So after lots of thinking, here's where I landed.  I do not believe the PURPOSE of schooling is personal expression, but I do think it might be a positive side-effect of schooling. If you have gained the skills to write clearly, solve problems, analyze data, and synthesize ideas, you will likely be able to express your own story in a way others will be able to benefit from. 

But I would be disturbed to think that is THE REASON we are here. 

Human Development

In the same way weight lifting isn't about where the weight goes, it's about strengthening the muscle so I can lift something equally heavy (or heavier) later, education is about strengthening the mind. 

THE GIST: Learning things makes us better at learning the next thing. Learning a wide variety of things makes it easier to engage in multiple types of thought processes. The purpose of education, in this view, is brain training.

PRO: If you hold to one of the other views, this one will help. Once you know how to learn, learning things for jobs, culture, and personal expression will all be easier.

CON: Teaching from this view means having a wide variety of general education courses. Students will end up taking things they are not motivated by.

I'll admit my bias here.  While I think there is a little bit of each of these present in the purpose of schooling, if I had to pick one, this would be it.  All learning is valuable. School should improve us as people. We should leave a class with more knowledge than we entered. We should better able to think, better able to problem solve, and better able to communicate than we would if we had reached the same age without schooling. We should grow dendrites and myelinate neurons. We should prepare students to be life-long learners.

This is a more wonky post than I usually write, so I don't really have an application point for you as teachers. It isn't necessary that you choose one of these, but deciding your purpose in the classroom on any given day (and it could change with different lessons) will help you make decisions about lesson planning, what to include or leave out when you are running short on time, and even the pedagogical methods you choose.

Classroom Noise is Context Specific

Warning: This post is a little more rambling than intended. As often happens, I was working out some thoughts through my fingers. But I also wrote it at noon on a Thursday, when I had gotten up at 3:15 to go to work. If any of it seems really weird, please blame it on that.

Last Sunday, I showed up to church, as I do every week and 8:45 for the 9AM service. Instead of the usual off duty police officer directing traffic as I crossed Peace Street, there were two fire trucks.  Instead of people walking toward the building, there were people gathered in the parking lot. Instead of chirping birds, there was the unmistakable sound of a fire alarm.  

No worries. Everything is fine. There was a technical issue in the system that tripped the alarm, but it couldn't turned off by the firefighters, and the alarm system people were 40 minutes away.  My sweet pastor stayed calm as he attempted to develop a Plan B, but he finally recognized that there wasn't going to be one. Even if we attempted to have church in the parking lot, he said, "I can't compete with the fire alarm." He didn't want people focused on the sound, not the sermon (which was excellent, they live streamed the 11:00 service).

Later in the week, Carl Hendrick started a little bit of a hubbub on Twitter by posting a link to his blog post "Is a Noisy Classroom a Thinking Classroom?" As is always the case with Carl's blog, this post is a nuanced and thoughtful exploration of the idea that noise is more productive than silence when it comes to teaching and learning. 

As is always the case on Twitter, the response was anything but nuanced and thoughtful. The teachers who hate compliance ironically insisted that other teachers comply with their opinion that student voice is THE MOST IMPORTANT THING in education. And don't let this shock you, but many commenters had not read the article and responded only to the title (I'm sure that's the first time anyone has done that one Twitter). 

Anyway, as I was reading all of these posts about noise, I couldn't help but think about the cancelled church service.  When John said he couldn't compete with the alarm, it was because he knew people wouldn't be able to think about his words while something else filled, not just their ears, but their working memory. I also thought about my own classroom as both a full time teacher and as a substitute and how there are times when I need students to hush and concentrate on what I am saying and other times when they should be talking through the assignment. I also came into the profession at the time the idea of a the noisy classroom was being push hard, principals saying they wanted to hear kids voices as they walked by your classroom because "whoever was doing the talking was doing the learning." This is a sentence I could easily believe if I didn't know better since I have talked out loud to myself since I was a toddler, and I sometimes don't think something is real until I have heard myself say it out loud. 

So, I was thinking a lot this week about the question of whether a noisy classroom is a thinking classroom.

If you have met, me you will not be surprised by my conclusion - the answer to the question "Is a Noisy Classroom a Thinking Classroom?" is . . . "It depends."  It depends on the type of thinking expected and on the quality (and quantity) of the noise.

Type of Thinking Expected

I once had a group of 9 students who were sitting stone cold silent in my classroom.  I don't mean it was kind of quiet. I mean it was a graveyard level of quiet. I said to them, "Y'all are creeping me out.  Why is it so quiet in here?"  They acted like I was crazy for suggesting that they should be talking . . . in class.  But there was a reason their silences was surprising - they were supposed to be working on a group project together.  Since they had not yet settled on a solution to the problem they were attempting to solve, I expected to hear suggestions and discussions of whether or not those suggestions would work.  Instead all of them were claiming to be "researching the problem."  I could see their computer screens, so I knew they weren't actually researching.  This was a case in which silence was not golden and was not a sign of internal thinking.  It was a sign of students who didn't want to work at that moment.  In this case, a noisier classroom would have shown more thought than a silent one.

However, there are times when this is not the case. I was recently substituting in a math classroom.  Students had been given math problems to solve as retrieval practice, and it could only be retrieval if they did it on their own, using their own brains. About a third of the class started talking about fantasy football.  About a third started talking to each other about how to do the problems. The final third was attempting to work on the problems on their own, but it was difficult for them to tune out the other conversations.  If one of those principals from the 90s who expected to hear student voices as they walked by bothered to enter the room, they would have known that this was not productive noise. It was noise that was preventing the objective from being achieved by most of the students in the room.  In this case, the sound of silence would have resulted in more thinking.

Zero teachers have ever said, "Let's have a noisy exam because that will show more thinking," but there is an equal number of zero teachers who have said, "Silence in the lab!" unless there was an emergency where instructions needed to be heard. A quiet foreign language classroom might indicate lack of learning as you would expect speech, but it might also indicate that they are reading in that language and need quiet to process the syntax. Context matters in many education discussions, and this is certainly one of them.

Quality of Sound

Most experienced teachers can quickly discern the difference between productive and unproductive sound, but it is hard to describe.  When it shifts in the middle of class, they know.  It isn't a super power; the two just sound different.  And it ins't necessarily about the decibel level.  It's about what the sound . . . sounds like.  Sorry, I know that isn't the most helpful sentence, but I can't think of another way to put it.  

There are sounds that happen during dissection labs that are good, like  "Hey, hand me that scalpel" and "Do I cut this way?" There are sounds that are bad, like "Ouch." and "Oh, no, I shouldn't have cut there." Those are pretty obvious, but you can also tell without hearing words when the conversation has shifted to evening plans and tv shows and sports. I don't know how to explain it, but it has a different tone.   Teachers can tell the difference between those tones in the same way moms can differentiate a baby's hungry cry from his full diaper cry.

Quantity of Sound

Even productive noise can become unproductive when it reaches a threshold level. I'm not sure I have research to back this claim up, but I think loud noises or noises that occur closer to ones head take up more space in working memory. My purely anecdotal example of this occurs regularly during my job at the Y.  There is music playing in the lobby all of the time.  Which is fine until I need to concentrate. If I answer the phone and someone with a thick accent asks me a question, I have to turn the music down to process what they are asking. When swim team practice ends and a gaggle of loud, wet kids enter the lobby all at once, I have a hard time carrying out even relatively routine tasks. You might think this is just because I am middle aged, but I experienced it when I was younger as well.  In my junior and senior year of college, I was a janitor in an arena. None of my maintenance tasks during an event required high levels of concentration, but some of them became very difficult when a loud band was performing. A few times, despite my youth, I opted to wear earplugs, just so I could perform relatively simple tasks.  If the fire alarm at the church had been half the volume, John might have been able to hold our attention.  

Education isn't simple:

Okay, I know I've wandered around a bit here (I did warn you up front). My point is this.  A noisy classroom is sometimes a thinking classroom, provided that the quality and quantity of noise match the expected type of thinking for the assigned task.  A quiet classroom is sometimes a thinking classroom if the silence is needed for concentrating on complex or individual work.  Trying to cover something as complicated as education with a blanket statement that should apply at all times is a fool's errand.

Education isn't simple enough to have one answer to most questions.  Most questions are context specific. There isn't an answer that covers all situations, so decide at the lesson planning stage whether or not this is a quiet day or a productive noise day. Then communicate to your students what that means and what you expect to hear or not hear. 

Oh Yes, You Should Tell Them What to See

So, this supposedly profound thought makes it rounds on social media at the start of every semester. 

"The best teachers tell you where to look, but they don't tell you what to see."

Quotes should be considered in the context of an entire speech or written work. A quote I like might be in the middle of a hateful paragraph, making it less likable.  I quote I don't like might be mitigated if there was a foundation laid before it that makes the sentence more credible.  

I also want to take into consideration the other thoughts of the author before quoting them. For example, I don't want to quote Steve Jobs about how to treat employees, given his legendarily poor treatment of those at Apple. I don't want to forward a quote about leadership, only to find out it was said by Mussolini.  So, I thought I would look up the source of this teacher quote before criticizing it.  It's attributed to someone named Alexandra Trenfor. Try Googling her name, though.  All you find are links to the quote. She cannot be found, and the larger work cannot be found.  It's as though she arose from the mist to say this and then receded into it again.  

Since I can't find out if this sentence that I roll my eyes at might be mitigated by what surrounded it, I'm left with the sentence at face value.

This quote is stupid.  

In spite of it internet popularity and the applause it might get if you end a keynote speech with it, it is just wrong. Students look at thousands of things per day.  If I happen to point to one of them and say, "look at this thing," I have only begun my job.  The rest of my job as a teacher is, in fact, to teach them what to see.

I taught science for 25 years.  When I took students into the lab to carry out experiments, they were also meant to draw conclusions about the underlying features of what they were observing.  But as soon as I started to ask questions, it became evident that they had not seen the right things.

For example, I had a lab in which 8th grade students ran electricity through salt water, separating chlorine from sodium.  What they saw was bubbles coming from one wire and metal build up on the other.  If they left it running for a few minutes, they would also see the water turn green.  

When I looked at their observations list, they said things like, "One wire smoked."  No, no it didn't.  I actually needed to tell them what to see.  The didn't even notice the build up on the other wire because it was pretty subtle.  I needed to tell them what to see.

Even if the "smoke" had been an accurate observation, what would it have taught them about chemistry?  Electricity makes them smoke?  Well, that's just not true.  Leaving it a bit longer, would they have learned prolonged electrical exposure turns water green?  Because that isn't true either.  

As humans, we tend to look at surface features, which reveal little information.  "Tree leaves are green in spring and change color in the fall" is something I can see for myself, but I need a teacher to show me how to "see" chlorophyll. 

Observation alone leads to misconceptions and VERY wrong conclusions.  Ancient Greeks, for example, didn't have any understanding of projectile motion. They observed that when threw something at an upward angle, it eventually came back down.  They saw that, but the conclusion they drew was that the act of throwing imparted a substance into the object (they called it impetus) and that it fell when it ran out of that substance.  They observed sunrise and sunset and concluded that the sun moved; we now know that is caused by the earth's rotation. They attributed medical problems to fluid imbalances, which led to practices like leeching.

I'm not saying they were stupid. Considering their lack of background knowledge, equipment, or expectation of testing hypotheses, they made fairly logical conclusions.  But logical and accurate are not the same thing.  At some point, we realized that what we were seeing wasn't revealing the underlying architecture of what was happening.  Someone had to teach us how and what to see when it wasn't immediately on the surface. Why, when we have better methods and more knowledge, would we want to withhold that from our students and make them, effectively, ancient Greeks?  Why wouldn't we want them to build on all that came before instead of having to rebuild it?

So, I have my kids in the lab, seeing bubbles and color changes.  I have to ask questions to reveal exactly what they are seeing and then, crucially, tell them what else to see.  "What is in those bubbles, " I ask.  Almost every first answer was wrong, the most common being "electricity." I tell them that bubble always contain a gas and ask again.  Their answer was always one of three at that point - air, carbon dioxide, or oxygen.  Why?  Because those are the gases they hear about the most.  I remind them that this is salt water and ask what salt is made of in order to get them to recognize after much probing that the answer is chlorine. Especially science minded kids will sometimes say, "Is that why the water turns green?" but most have to be told that.  Then, we move to the other wire.  "Do you see this metal build up?  What might that be?"  You might think that we worked hard enough to get to the answer of chlorine that they MIGHT recognize that stuff on the other wire was the other element in salt, but if you think that, you would be wrong.  Their answer, almost always, was copper or iron.  Why?  Those are the metals they hear about most.  Then, came the big question - "Why does this happen?"  The first answer was always that water always conducts electricity. The second answer was always that sodium is a metal and metals conduct electricity.  

These wrong answers were given even though I had taught them that water is a very poor conductor and showed them videos about electrolytes when we talked about the dissolving of ionic bonds.  If I hadn't asked these probing questions so I could identify and correct their misconceptions, they would have left less educated than when they came in. If I had left them to see for themselves, they would have walked away believing that electricity makes wires smoke, turns water green, and builds up copper on a copper wire. 

We HAVE TO tell them what to see.

Renowned education researcher, Carl Hendrick, wrote this in a recent substack article:

"Examples without labels are merely noise. You must explicitly tell students what to pay attention to in each example. Don't assume they'll notice the right feature; direct their attention deliberately."

In other words, tell them what to see.  

Do it boldly and without apology, no matter what the disembodied name on the internet meme says.

Being a Whole Person

Note: I'm trying really hard not to write about current events, so this is a topic I've kept in the draft folder for a while. I just didn't want y'all to think I was unaware of the crazy in the world right now.

I was getting ready for class to start one day, when our Latin teacher came down to ask a question about math. It might have been about prime numbers, but I don't remember as he often had a math question he lingered over for a few months before finding another one.  As he walked away, I said to my students, "He says he has a 'crush on math' and comes down here to ask questions."  They looked befuddled as they said, "But he's the Latin teacher." I paused for a beat and said, "You should tell him that. After all, they don't let us like things we don't teach." 

I hoped that bit of gentle teasing would reveal the silliness of thinking that someone can only be interested in things that are directly related to their jobs. But that conversation also revealed something about how students view their teachers - as sort of one dimensional content delivery devices.

I'm not sure when it happened, but somewhere between my school days and now, we stopped valuing well-roundedness in students.  When I was a student, that's what colleges were looking for. I wrote many college recommendation letters highlighting that very quality. 

Then, there was a shift; they wanted to see "passion." Don't get me wrong - I'm all about being passionate. But I think their definition of passion and mine are different. In my life, passion looks like throwing myself into whatever I am doing. Whether it is listening to a sermon, making a yearbook, participating in a fitness class at the Y, or attending an exhibit at an art museum, I want to do as much as I can and learn as much as I can. That's how I have always defined passion for myself.

The colleges who were looking for passion seemed to think it meant singularly focused. Have one interest or cause and pursue it with all of your being. This was their expectation of high school students. I don't think I would qualify for scholarships now because they expect students to have built a life around one thing, starting a non-profit or business around that one thing. To them, being well-rounded appears to be unfocused or non-zealous.

I think that's sad, not just because it is the opposite of the way I am built, but because it comes at a cost. Helping student find something they are passionate about is great, but the implicit message is that they can only be passionate about one thing. Students who are passionate about engineering would benefit greatly from enrolling in art or theater. Talented musicians can find additional passions in the study of history or math. People are not ONE thing, and we aren't meant to spend our entire lives caring about ONE thing.

One of the reasons I chose to attend ORU, a school 1200 miles away in a state I'd never set foot in was their philosophy of educating the whole person - spirit, mind, and body. While I often questioned this motive during my graded 3-mile "fun run" each semester, I knew it was good. I liked taking general education classes and choosing to take classes outside my major because it was making me a more complete person. 

When my students balked at the idea of taking classes they "didn't need," I often said, "What if the only thing I could talk to you about was physics?  Would you like me at all? No, I would be insufferable." For that reason, I talked to them about books and art and plays and even what little I knew of sports. GRACE had a math teacher who also taught Irish Dance, a history teacher who also taught anatomy, and a science teacher who was into photography enough to become the yearbook advisor (that one is me). 

Being 3-dimensional whole people makes us more interesting, but those things also inform each other. If your passion is art, you will be better at it by understanding some chemistry. They aren't mutually exclusive. If your great love is history, you will benefit from learning how to analyze literature. If you devote yourself to people, a knowledge world languages and culture will enable you to serve them better. No knowledge is ever wasted. 

Most of the people we admire in history had multiple passions. Mendel, the father of genetics, wasn't a career scientist. He was a monk with a garden. His love for the Lord and his need for sustenance drove his interest in pea plants, and we still benefit from it.  Another monk, St. Francis, knew scripture well because, of course, he was passionate about them. But he was also an animal expert and a poet. Thomas Jefferson not only penned the American Declaration of Independence, he was an architect who played the violin. While we think of George Washington Carver as being solely focused on the peanut, he cared deeply about education and took his traveling classroom to farmers while developing methods of crop rotation because he understood soil chemistry.

Teachers, be passionate about the content you teach. It's important for students to see that.  But if you want to broaden their horizons, you have to broaden yours as well. Talk to them about things you are learning outside of your field. It will help you build relationships with them and will make them view you as more human, but it may also allow them to lead fuller and more joyful lives. 

It won't make the less passionate. On the contrary, it will make them passionate about more things.

Research Ed - Denver 2025 #rEDDenver2025

This is my fourth Research Ed conferences (3rd as a presenter).  One of the wonderful things about this conference is that everyone learns from everyone else.  Since you can't be here, I am taking notes for you to learn from as well.  (I can't provide notes on the first session since I am giving it, but you can go to my website www.thelearninghawk.com if you want the slides.)  Please recognize that these are notes taken in real time with little to no editing. They will be a mix of what the presenters said and my own thoughts. While I try to note the difference between those two things, I don't always keep up.  Please don't hold any presenter responsible for something you read here.

Keynote:  From Routine to Retrieval by Patrice Bain and Amber Haven

In 2006, she had an average classroom with average scores. Research was done in lab settings but not in real classrooms.  She met a couple of researchers who talked to her about memory.  She realized that teachers are taught how to teach, but few are taught how people learn.

Understanding the learning process is essential for making any kind of impact in the classroom.

Research needed to happen in classrooms that have the messiness that lab setting don't (intercom interruptions, fire drills, etc.)

"Knowing how to teach by understanding how students learn is a matter of instructional equity." - Jim Heal and Meg Lee

If we start teaching them how to learn in elementary school, just think how much better their high school lives will be.

"Children are more alike than different in terms of how they think and learn." - Daniel Willingham

(Personal reflection:  Students have been told that they all learn differently and taught to find their "learning style."  The reality is much more empowering because they only have to find out how to learn, not some mystical idea of how THEY learn.)

We have to put information in, but storage won't be robust without retrieval.  Retrieval strengthens storage.

Power Tools:  Retrieval, Spacing, Interleaving, and Metacognition

Retrieval:  Pulling information out

Spacing: Revisiting retrieval over time - It interrupts forgetting, strengthening memory

Interleaving:  Comparing and contrasting similar items

Metacognition: Discriminating what you know from what you don't

Students spend most of their day shoving information into the your brain. It's hard to organize it or reflect on it unless you retrieve it.  It's like organizing your closet by finding an item and putting it on a shelf.

"When students consistently find themselves in a predictable learning environment, they can let their guard down to engage." Mitch Weathers

Routines are the best way to reduce anxiety in all students, but especially those who are prone to high anxiety.  They know what they are supposed to do, and they know what happens next. Transition times become less chaotic. 

Cognitive Load Theory is important because finding the sweet spot where students can process information impacts their learning dramatically. Can you drive smoothly in England where you don't know where you are going, have a car with the wheel on the other side, are on the left side of the road, and have to use roundabouts.  That is cognitive overload.

Don't be afraid to face your desks forward and reduce the amount of stuff on your walls. 

Working memory is limited (4-7 things that require focus) - How can you lessen their cognitive overload?

(Personal Note:  I see the chunking example with letters all of the time.  I would like to see it with actual content at a conference.)

"Background knowledge allows chunking, which makes more room in your working memory, making it easier to do something with that information." - Daniel Willingham

Scaffolds are not meant to be permanent, but they need to know when you are going to remove them so they have a chance to build proficiency in the task.  Everyone should have the same final goal, but scaffolds can be different to meet the needs of students.  "If everyone has a scaffold all of the time, it's not a scaffold. It's your lesson plan."

Atomization - breaking down complex concepts into small pieces.  When teaching weather, break it down into each of the variables that affects the weather before putting it back together.

Direct Instruction is teaching directly, but it is not a lecture. There should be instructions for students to do something (turn and talk, choral response, whiteboard answers, etc.) every two minutes.

Dual coding - provide images alongside verbal information. Have kids "sketch and tell."

Seek evidence. Don't blindly accept.

Rethinking Intrinsic Motivation by Andrew Watson

I was a little bit late to this session because I couldn't find the room.  I may have missed something important.

Intentionally Provocative Questions: 

Why don't student learn fractions with the same joy that they learn the names of colors or animal sounds. (Why is school demotivating?)

Why do schools teach things that aren't intrinsically motivating?

David Geary's Evolutionary Theory - Our species is unlike others in that we have to learn. Other animals are born ready to go without much teaching. A turtle is born ready to turtle.  

We learn things that help with avoiding predators, getting food, or allow us to successfully reproduce. Those things are biologically primary.  Learning animal sounds are obvious in their benefit to helping us avoid predators. Calculating the area under a curve does not fit into any of those categories, so it is biologically secondary.

Because we want our students to learn biologically secondary things because they are culturally valued, we need social institutions to make sure we teach them these things.

Back to the Intentionally Provocative Questions: 

Why don't student learn fractions with the same joy that they learn the names of colors or animal sounds. (Why is school demotivating?) You are intrinsically motivated to learn biologically primary things but not biologically secondary ones.

Why do schools teach things that aren't intrinsically motivating? The point of a school is to teach things that students are not intrinsically motivated to learn.  If they were naturally motivated to learn it, we wouldn't need to teach it to them.

Teachers are often scolded for not fostering intrinsic motivation, but that you should actually foster realism. 

Self Determination Theory - 

Six motivational states - Amotivation, 4 kinds of extrinsic motivation, intrinsic motivation

Amotivation - Absent

External and Internal Extrinsic Motivations - Internal extrinsic motivation does help students learn more, but external extrinsic motivation does not.  Internal extrinsic motivation is valuable but not enjoyable.

Intrinsic Motivation - Internal - Enjoyable

Example:  Some people truly enjoy exercise (intrinsic motivation). Others do it because they know it is valuable, but they don't enjoy it (internal extrinsic motivation)

You cannot move someone to intrinsic motivation, but you can move them from a motivation or external extrinsic motivation into internal extrinsic motivation (teaching them to value it even if they don't enjoy it) with:

- Autonomy

- Relatedness

- Competence

Any one strategy can had different effects on different students, at different moments, with different content.

Popularizing the 3 Box Memory Model: by Rob McEntarffer

I was late to this one too. I spent too much time talking to Andrew about his topic after his session.

Teachers and administrators must have a learning theory that matches reality. It must predict the outcome of teaching decisions.  No matter how much you believe in it, if it doesn't result in learning, you shouldn't use it.  Operating under an unrealistic learning theory gets in the way of learning.

Are you using this model to help making teaching decisions? Or are you just throwing things at the wall to see what sticks?

Personal Reflection:  To make a model stick at your school, you must have a few teacher "influencers" to keep using the same language with other teachers as well as students. They need to own it, adapt it to your context, and be enthusiastic about it with others.  

The pendulum swings from emphasizing content or skills every few years.

Get the people who know about things and those who are affected by it talking to each other.  In universities, the people in the education department don't ever talk to the people in the psychology department.  Sometimes, there is an educational psychology department, and they don't talk to the other two either.

It's imperative to ask "What is working?  What didn't work?" every time you implement something new. 

Why Students Forget and What You Can Do About It by Marcie Samayoa

I am very excited for this one.  I've been following Ms. Sam on Twitter for years. I'm amazed at how tiny she is.  

You have a great day in class. Everybody is engaged and with you. The next day, you ask them a question, and you just get an empty stare.

Showed the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve. You forget a lot of content quickly.  Even a few minutes shows a high percentage of loss unless there is effortful practice. Each act of spaced retrieval results in less forgetting. 

Retrieval strengthens memory, enhances transfer, and always outperforms re-reading.

When you are doing a review, you should ask students questions that they have to answer without using their notes or book. You can't and shouldn't review everything from the previous lesson; you should figure out what they have learned in a previous lesson that connects to today's lesson and have them retrieve those. (If you are going to teach about isotopes today, you need to have them retrieve things about the periodic table and atomic structure, but you don't need to cover electromagnetic radiation that day.) This automatically works in space and interleaving.  Don't take more than 5-10 minutes of class time to do this.

Make sure students know retrievals are not quizzes or tests.  They aren't being graded on them; this is purely for the benefit of their memory.

I want to be in Ms. Sam's chemistry class.

Science or Snake Oil? How to Tell the Difference by Holly Lane

It is lamentable that graduates from schools of education are not trained in how to find education research or how to evaluate it for themselves.  

We are bombarded with snake oil in the field of education. There is a lot of garbage, and if you don't have the tools do distinguish good from bad, you will end up using a lot of garbage because there is just so much more of it out there.

We don't have an FDA in education. You can sell anything you want and claim that it is based on science.

Every program currently sold that is related to reading claims that it is based on "the science of reading." Social media makes it even worse by amplifying popular but non-scientific programs. 

Because there is so much misinformation, there is still a huge gap between research and practice.

The scale of evaluating evidence (1 is the lowest quality)

1. Anecdotal
2. Expert opinion
3. Case study 
4. Correlational study
5. Quasi-experimental design
6. Randomized control trials
7. Systematic review
8. Meta-analysis

Indicators of effectiveness

• Statistical significance
• Effect size - How many standard deviations above the mean is the experimental group compared to the control group

Indicators of trustworthiness

• Publication source
• Research Journals
• Practitioner Journals
• Magazines and blog (no vetting)
• Books 
• Commissioned reviews usually go through substantial vetting.
• Research handbooks usually have knowledgeable editors
• Commercially published - some are gold, and some are garbage

Teach How Students Learn by Gene Tavernetti

This is the third conference I've been to with Gene, and I have had breakfast with him twice, but this is the first time I've gotten to attend his session, so I've been looking forward to it all day.  His book Teach Fast has been referenced by three other presenters today.

The instructional paradox:  Learning is complex! But we must simplify instruction.

FAST Framework:

Focused Adaptable Structured Teaching

Focused - Eliminating extraneous load

Adaptable - One lesson structure for all content areas

Structured - Follows the same order for each lesson

Preview - accessing prior knowledge from long term memory and/or provide relevance (relevance doesn't mean "to their lives." It means relevant to the lesson.

Learning Objective - deconstruct the standard into learner friendly language that is still academic, what is the new learning today? (Have students read it as a choral response)

Review - Sub skills necessary for the lesson in the same way they are about to use the information

Explain the Key Ideas - Definitions embedded in the context of the concepts, procedures, etc. This is the "what" of the lesson.

At this point, the fire alarm went off in the museum. We didn't leave, but it slowed us down significantly.

Explain Expert Thinking - This is the "how" of the lesson. (You should model two times. If there is only one, there is no pattern.)

Gradual Release of Responsibility - I do, we do, you do - You have already modeled 2 times. Then, they do it with your guidance and questions. Then, they can practice.

Closure 

Independent Practice

We remember best what we learn first and last. The bulk of instruction should be first.  Then, do inline practice in the middle of the lesson. Do a closure at the end to engage in retrieval practice at the end of the lesson.