Observations After Two Years Away From the Desk

I have just completed my second school year out of the full time classroom. Because of conference speaking, my edu-Twitter circle of friends, and substitute teaching, I still have the chance to observe the changes that are happening in education as not quite an outsider. Here's what I've noticed.

The post-Covid attendance and behavior issue is not getting better.

Before Covid, school attendance was always assumed. Kids may have faked an illness to get their parents to let them stay home for a day, or a parent may have decided their child needed a mental health day; but for the most part, kids came to school most days. Parents didn't plan a two-week European vacation during the school year and expect kids could just return and pick up with no negative impact. In the year after the pandemic restricted travel, we thought people were just itching to travel somewhere because they hadn't been able to. It turns out this thing that had once been a given (regular school attendance) was now viewed as optional in a way that did not re-stabilize after that first year. Because it is an issue of parental attitude, I don't know what the solution is, but kids cannot learn if they are not present. It doesn't matter how many videos they watch or the fact that they "make up" their work; it doesn't replicate being taught in the classroom (and wouldn't it be sad if it did?). Something's got to change to return regular attendance to the norm.

Just as attitudes about attendance changed during Covid, so did attitudes about behavior. I'm not saying everyone behaved perfectly before; they certainly did not. But, most behavior issues could be addressed with normal routines, procedures, and consequences. And, with a few notable outliers in each school, a call to the parents would result in improvement. Now, the parent is much more likely to accuse the school of gaslighting, demand to see video, or claim that the teacher "shamed" their child. Parents have difficulty understanding what behavior contagion looks like when there are 25-35 kids in a room. The resulting chaos makes learning impossible. Even experienced teachers with well established classroom management skills are finding it harder to keep control. May I recommend Tom Bennett's excellent book Running the Room. It reminds you that having an adult in charge is good for learning and good for the safety and security of students, and it is super practical.

Efforts at helping kids with anxiety are counterintuitive

One of the reasons behavior has gotten worse is that kids are more anxious than ever. This didn't start with the pandemic. The graph on self-reported anxiety remained at a relatively steady low/medium low rate until about 2012. While the angle of the slope did increase in 2020, the upward spike really started with the ubiquity of the smart phone in teenage pockets, not with the pandemic. Access to social media was 24/7, so there was no escaping the bullies or the FOMO, and healthy social time with friends and family was reduced. Normal teenage anxieties ballooned into diagnoses of anxiety disorders and 504 plans for schools.

We began attempting to address this before the pandemic with the implementation of Social Emotional Learning (SEL) programs. The theory was that if we taught kids breathing techniques and mindfulness, they would be better able to self-regulate. We taught lessons about empathy and kindness. We hoped all of this would reduce anxiety, but these lessons took time, which had to be created by removing something. What got reduced? Music, art, history, and science. Since reading and math get tested, they are usually safe, but sacrificing the arts for SEL was never going to reduce anxiety. Stand alone SEL lessons don't help anyway; those lessons should be weaved throughout during teachable moments, not taught in isolation.

So, what did we try next? Reducing the workload. Less homework should result in less anxiety, right? Easier classes should reduce the pressure and alleviate anxiety, yes? Eliminating writing standards to focus on student self-expression should serve as therapy, shouldn't it? All of that is well meaning, but it doesn't work because it's not how human beings are made. When we make classes easier, the unintended implicit messaging is "You can't handle this," decreasing their self image. When we eliminate homework to help with anxiety, their already anxious minds tell them, "Your teachers think you are weak." It has the exact opposite effect that we intend.

It's counterintuitive, but the best way to help a student deal with anxiety is to give them something challenging to do. Accomplishing things makes students feel . . . well, accomplished. Meeting a challenge makes them feel competent. When did we forget that there is satisfaction in a job well done? Doing hard things is the antidote to anxiety, not the cause of it. 

Schools are reckoning with the effects of EdTech

I'm going to admit to feel conflicted about this one. I was part of the committee at my school that adopted our one-to-one laptop program 16 years ago. I helped pick the tech and was a cheerleader for the pedagogy changes that came with it. So, when I read the research about the negative impacts of EdTech, I believe it, but I am also inclined to say, "We did some really great things with it."  And we did - especially in the first few years after adoption. Using the SAMR model, we had kids doing things and interacting with the world outside of the school walls in a way that wouldn't have been possible before. 

But the energy level required to keep up that level of great tech use was unsustainable in the end. So, they devolved into mostly digital note-taking devices (and distractions) with occasional good uses. Some schools are opting to eliminate their tech altogether, but that is, in my opinion, an overreaction. We have a tendency to swing the pendulum back to the other side rather than find the sweet spot between the two extremes. We want to still have those projects that require computers; we just don't want them to be sitting in front of them at all times. So, maybe we should go back to the carts of laptops that could be checked out when the lesson or project requires them. It would certainly cost schools a lot less than one to one programs, and much less time would be invested in computer hand outs, trouble shooting, and end-of-year collection. Just a thought.

Generative AI is a real problem - like even more than we anticipated it would be

I remember the first time I heard about ChatGPT, although I didn't know its name yet. It was fall of 2022, just one year after the endurance test that was hybrid teaching; so we were still exhausted and suffering from post chronic stress disorder (not a real diagnosis, but it should be). We were in a department chair meeting, and our principal said, "There something coming out that we're going to have to think about. It's a program that will allow students to ask for a report on a topic and tell it what level it should be at so it will sound real. And it will be harder to catch because you can't just Google some of the sentences and find it on a website." We all agreed that sounded terrible and wondered how the English department was going to handle that. Little did we know that it would affect so much more than essay writing. 

If you are reading this, you don't need me to tell you how quickly this spread. Some students view their chatbot as a friend and ask it for advice. Math homework is no longer an exercise in skill practice. Some have been so brazen as to take a photo of their test paper and upload it to an AI and let it take their exam for them. Lest you think the answer is to collect their phones on the way in, some teachers have posted that their students turned in a burner phone so that they could use their real phone during the exam. As with all new tech, there is a naive sector that says, "This will be fine. We'll just teach them to use it well." That didn't work with social media or phones, but here we go again.

I wish I had an answer to this, but I don't. So far, the best I have come up with is to build a time machine and go back to shake some sense into Sam Altman before he starts OpenAI, but I don't think that's the solution. 

I'm sorry for the negative tone here; it's just that there are some real problems to be solved. 

But I have a few reasons for optimism. 

• College students around America have been booing speakers who reference AI in their speeches. I'm not okay with the rudeness of booing a speaker, but I do find it heartening that the young are not fully on board with artificial intelligence. After the novelty wears off, students might crave real experiences. 
• There are groups called Do Hard Things clubs - started by students who didn't like the low expectations people had of them. They may not be the total solution to the anxiety epidemic, but they are certainly going to help.
• There are still a small number of students who will turn in cheating when they see it. 

Teaching is hard, and the developments of the past few years have made it harder. Graduation is either here or coming soon for most of you.  Rest well this summer. You have earned.

Sometimes The Answer's Right in Front of You - Ask Someone to Show You

I've been painting this week. The front door and the mailbox post were easy, but the shutters required more out of me, both physical and (as it turned out) mentally. Climbing the ladder over and over again with paint and a brush in my hands was only possible because of the good people at the YMCA, but the bigger challenge was figuring out how to paint the shutters without painting the windows.

The fronts of the shutters were simple, as long as I could balance myself on the ladder while using my hands to both hold the paint and do the painting. I had a plan for the outer edge, slide a piece of cardboard behind the shutter and then move it down as I descended the ladder and continued painting the edge. That worked perfectly. 

But what about the edge that meets the window? I can put the cardboard under the shutter there. And even if I could, I can't reach the far shutter from the ladder or see the inner edge of the near shutter. Given that it is less than half an inch wide, there's not a lot of room for error, especially if I can't get cardboard or tape there to protect the window. 

I had thought about it a fair amount. My mom and dad had both suggested things. Nothing was the right answer.

Then, I was walking with my friend, Meagan, to our class at the Y. I was in the middle of this story when she simply said, "Do your windows not open?" 

Of course, that's the answer. Of course it is. Stand on the floor inside my house and lean out the window. I can see and reach the inner edges of both shutters. Of course that makes the most sense.

Yet, it would have never occurred to me. I was too close to see it - literally.

This sometimes happens in your classroom. You have a part of your curriculum that seems to be a sticking point every year, but you can't figure out how to explain it differently. You have a project that isn't quite what you want it to be, but you don't have a solution for making it better. You have a nagging behavioral issue that tends to be a problem for you repeatedly.

Teachers, especially middle and high school teachers, often have an independent streak built by the fact that we stand alone in front of students all day long. We usually believe we can solve most any issue ourselves. But just as I was too close while standing on a ladder to view the shutters from a different perspective, you may be too close to the issues in your classroom to see obvious solutions.

So here's my advice. Spend some time during the summer talking to someone. It could be another teacher or an administrator, but it doesn't have to be. You may have a friend who can give you the teaching equivalent of "Do your windows not open?" and make a solution immediately clear. 

School leaders, you can help your staff with this as well. GRACE did this one year as part of our orientation meetings. Rather than an "icebreaker" (which, by the way, no one likes - ever), we were assigned to groups and told to bring an issue we were having. I brought a project that just wasn't producing the results I had hoped for.  In just a few minutes, I was given two fresh ideas that would help me to improve that project.

One thing that I feel was critical to the success of this group was that it was not a department meeting. Don't get me wrong; I adored my department, but the success of this came from the different perspectives each person in the group had. Other science teachers would have been locked into the same ideas I was; we would have all been too close to see the solution. The ideas I ultimately adopted from that meeting came from an English teacher and the Spanish department chair. They were able to see it in a way I couldn't. So I recommend mixing these groups.

If you want to improve some part of your process and feel stuck, ask someone to point out what is right in front of you.

They Behave (Only) For You

A few weeks ago, I asked this question on Twitter. "For those who use 'relationships' as their classroom mangement strategy, what do you expect to happen when I come in as a substitue?"

For me, a person without a blue checked account, these are pretty high engagement numbers, and it seems I struck a nerve with some. The responses I got came in two themes.

1. Nobody actually does that. Several people tried to tell me that there is "literally no one" who uses relationships as their primary strategy. I never typed it, but the response in my mind was, "Bro, do you even Twitter?" I mean, I wouldn't need to be on Twitter to know that many, many teachers use this strategy because I was alive and conscious during my career and met many teachers who believed this was the only way to go. But, you can't be on Twitter for long without seeing what a widespread belief this is. If someone expresses dismay at the behavior of students, the first and most frequent response will inevitably be to blame the teacher for not forming relationships with them. By the way, no one ever gives that poor teacher practical advice on how to do that or what it looks like, so they are left thinking they just have to be the fun teacher, leading to more chaos in their classrooms.
2. Their relationship with me will benefit you. This was the most common response by far. With minor wording differences, they all said, "Because they respect me, they will respect you and behave for you the same as they would for me." And, my Lord, what an adorably naive take this is on what happens when you are absent. If that were even a little bit true, I wouldn't have needed to post the question in the first place. Let me assure you that, no matter how much they like you (which is not the same thing as respect), they behave differently when you are not there. I don't blame the students for this; it's completely age appropriate. But you, adult friend, are crazy if you think every sub can't tell who uses the "relationships as management" strategy. You have taught them that they only have to behave for someone they have a relationship with, and they don't have a relationship with most subs.

And that last part is actually the bigger issue I want to address. When you make this your classroom management strategy, you are actually teaching them something bigger and not at all beneficial for their lives outside your classroom. You have taught them that the only time good behavior is when they have a positive relationship with someone. And that may seem like a good idea if you are only thinking about them in terms of your class, but they will carry this attitude to other contexts. And carrying the attitude that they only have to do things for people they like will not serve them well outside of the school.

In their lives outside of the school building, there are many rules and few relationships. They will go to a public pool, where rules are posted, and the lifeguard doesn't play hacky sack with swimmers to build a relationship first. They will shop in stores where basic civil behavior is expected without the cashier getting down on their level and calling them by name. At some point in their lives, they will be pulled over by a police officer; and they will not be well served by the attitude of "I only obey the people I like who also like me" that you have instilled in them. 

I'm not suggesting that you become an ogre in your classroom; I wasn't. I'm not even saying that relationships don't matter; they do. But, they shouldn't be the basis of your classroom management strategy. What should be? Routines, procedures, and rules with predictable consequences. That's what it means to manage behavior, and it doesn't depend on anything mysterious.

I mentioned earlier that every sub can tell who uses relationships as their strategy. We can also tell who has consistent routines. The students in those classrooms don't exhibit perfect behavior; they are still kids, after all. But they come in knowing where to look for information and engaging in the opening routine from force of habit. Routines are so ingrained that they do them without thinking about them. Squishy feelings about relationships are inconsistent and transient. 

If they behave for you, but that doesn't translate to behaving for anyone else, you haven't taught them good behavior. 

ResearchEdd NYC 2026 Raw Notes

 As the title suggests, these notes are raw, unedited, and blended with my thoughts in addition to what the speakers are saying. If you read something you don't like, it may be my interpretation and not their meaning, so don't hold anything against them.

Keynote 1: Using the Science of Learning to Rebuild Students' Learning Power: A Pathway to Equitable Academic Outcomes by Zaretta Hammond

What is the relationship between equity and cognitive science?

She was a writing teacher:  "Math gets you into college. Writing keeps you there." So, if you are a sound reader and writer, you are going to struggle in college. She wanted students to recognize their own errors in their writing. That led her to learning science. That eventually led her to write Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain. 

Equity is reduing the predictability of who succeeds and who fails and cultivates the unigifts and talents of every student, regardless of race, color, or zip code. 

In the age of AI, it is more important than it has ever been for student to learn how to learn and think on their own. Without those skills, they are at the mercy of the tech. They will not be ready to evaluate information.

Her next book, Cognitive Redlining, discusses how kids in lower income schools are disadvantaged by the trends in instructional practices. Cognitive science can reduce inequity by working with student brains. Rosenshine's principles of instruction are valid and wonderful, but they have kept us focused on teaching rather than learning.

"How do we leverage the science of learning to help students master the craftsmanship of learning?"

Design principles for craftsmanship

1. Only the learner learns - students' brains must be active (this is not the same as engagement or fun; it's about their thinking with cognitive flexibility)
2. Content must be processed and remembered in order to be retrieved. Retrieval practice is at the end of the information processing cycle. (SHE JUST QUOTED KEVIN WASHBURN!!)
3. Learning requires cognitive friction - Productive struggle is real, but it has to be productive. You have to get them to the place where the struggle can be productive, not just set them off to flounder. This leads to learning for understanding rather than assignment completion. We should not over-scaffold, or they won't become independent. (If you picked up a baby every time they stumbled or lost their balance, they would never learn to walk.) If scaffolds are never removed, they are not scaffolds; they are crutches that lead to dependence on the teacher.

We are "personal trainers" of students' cognitive development. If a personal trainer asks you to do 5 push ups, and you can only do 2, they don't jump down and do the other 3 for you. They give you some water and tell you to get back to it.

One off strategies do not help; these must become routines that are automated. New mental models must be developed. There is a human side of change; recognize that the first attempt will be messy like the first pancake and work that into the evaluation system.

Session 1: Getting Ahead of Behavior: Lightning Fast Behavior Moves by Zach Groshell

Let's face it; behavior is not improving. We have to do something.

The "putting out fires" model is exhausting for teachers and interferes with student learning.

They can't learn anything they aren't paying attention to.

Inattention and attention are contagious - fidgety behaviors spread, so do leaning forward behaviors

How to get ahead of it (adapted from Doug Lamov's TLAC)

1. Give clear directions - clear, umambiguous, sequenced, posted visibly
2. Be seen looking - swivel, tiptoes, hands cupped around ears - exaggerated body motions to show that you are looking and listening
3. Narrate the positive - state what is going right - "Kate, that's what I'm talking about." Acknowledge and praise the things you want to see continue.
4. Correct with the least invasive intervention - nonverbal first, "All means all" reminders to the group, anonymous individual corrections ("Back of the room is almost there" or "Waiting on 2, waiting on 1. Thank you." Then, private individual correction (This is not your go to; it's after other things don't work and after you have everyone else working on something). If nothing else has worked, quick public individual correction (whispered name).

Non-verbal behaviors can be clear and subtle without getting into a kids space and being overbearing.

Will this solve all of your behavior issues? No.  But it will create a better culture in which you can address those.

Session 2: How Can I Help - Using the Science of Learning to Help Students Study by Beth Hawks

I have no notes on this session for obvious reasons, but you can find my slides on thelearninghawk.com

Keynote 2: Knowing What to Do When You Don't Know What to Do: Becoming an Expert Teacher by Nidhi Sachdeva

Did her research with Paul Kirschner 

When something unexpected happens in your classroom, what do you do?  How do you know what to do?

Sully - Miracle on the Hudson - When the bird strike took out his engines, he had 208 seconds to decide what to do before the plane would crash. His expertise guided his decision making when the situation exceeded the checklists and the protocols.

Teachers make 1200-1500 spontaneous decisions every day

The best teachers benefit their students for at least 3 years after they stop teaching them. The effect is the most profound on those most disadvantaged. Expert teachers close the achievement gap because gains are made by everyone, but those who have been disadvantaged will make more gains more quickly.

What is an expert teacher? In some fields (chess, sports, business), there are measurable objective data points to establish rankings. This is less true in education. Much of our impact is not measured in test scores, and a lot of it shows up far after they leave our classrooms.

We need to know how to spot an expert teacher because we cannot develop what we cannot name. 

• Deep content knowledge
• Have fundamental knowledge and understanding of how we learn
• Masters in pedagoy and and instructional tools
• Classroom management
• Ability to adapt
• Create explicit, engaging, equitable, and successful learning environments

Both science and craft

• Science: Deep understanding of theories and principles
• Craft: Practical insight that comes from experience

Five Building Blocks of Teacher Knowledge and Skills

1. Domain Knowledge - You cannot teach content that you do not deeply understand, what examples will illuminate and what examples will mislead, what is coming next
2. Cognitive Psychology - understanding how memory works, how understanding is strengthened, how instruction can support or overload the learner, how novices and experts process information and solve problems differently
3. Didactics - Knowing how to teach your subject is the bridge between content and cognition. "A butterfly forgets that it was once a caterpillar." Translates knowledge into something learnable and usable. Knowing calculus and teaching calculus are two different things.
4. Tools - Be critical and selective users of technologies and instruments, whether textbooks and mini-whiteboards or visualizers and EdTech tools. Beware of the innovation illusion; newer isn't always better. Ask the question, "Does this serve learning?"
5. Pedagogy - How we relate. Underpins instructional decisions and shapes the teacher-student relationship, ensures a positive classroom environment. Without this, the other four building blocks are tools without conscience.

The craft of teaching is accumulated wisdom about content, students, curriculum, and pedagogy.  It's wisdom in action. 

The science of teaching should happen during a teacher's initial preparation. The craft happens through continuous professional development as they teach. Best case scenario: New teachers have the science, but not much craft yet (That's assuming the science is being taught well in colleges).

Developing expertise comes from 

• Experience - learning on the job, helps you develop quickly early, but tends to plateau without the right conditions
• Organized professional development - workshops, courses, conferences, coaching programs - provides inspiration, but tends to prioritize exposure over practice
• Deliberate practice - consciously and systematically improving instruction through repeated practice

Deliberate practice is not routine repetition and isn't accomplished just by teaching more lessons. It is highly structured, purposeful, and effortful with a specific focus for improvement, including feedback and immediate repetition to incorporate the feedback.

Deliberate practice needs a specific goal, not vaguely worded hope. (The difference between a New Year's Resolution and an actionable goal.)

Sully's 40 years of deliberate practice, experience of emergencies, and time spent BUILDING expertise allowed him to act rather than panic. Teachers need schools to provide protected time for practice and feedback, coaching cultures rather than just evaluations, and leaders who value and model improvement.

Session 3: I planned to attend a session, but I decided to catch up with Andrew Watson and talk with Zach Groshell and Gene Tavernetti instead.  This was the right decision, but it means that I, sadly, have no notes for you.

Session 4: “Kids Do Well When They Can”: Misconceptions About Neurodiversity and How You Can Remove Barriers in the Classroom by Kristen Simmers and MB Spencer

Kristen's brother was born without a corpus collosum. He was seen at school as a kid who couldn't, while they saw him at home as someone who very much could. Her sister had no diagnosis until she was an adult, and she was just labeled as difficult. She is now an ER doctor.  MB was a regular classroom teacher with a high number of special needs students. She realized that the primary delivers of special education services had no special education training. 

Neurodiversity is an umbrella term that incorporates ADHD, autism, Tourette syndrome, OCD, dyslexia, and many others.

Neurodiverse conditions are differences in brain wiring. They will have mismatched skillsets; they may struggle in one area but excel in another. The labels are inconsistent, so you can't make assumptions about all kids with autism based on one kid you knew with autism (or any other condition). It's not uncommon for a person to have a great vocabulary and be highly verbal but have poor performance in writing. They might have high math reasoning and low math performance.

Dyslexia - Every civilization has spoken language. Speaking disorders are rare. Reading is an artificial skill. We are not biologically wired to do it. Learning it is incredibly complex and involves many areas of the brain working together in milliseconds. The brain repurposes some of your facial recognition skills to create letter recognition.

Stanislas Dehaene's research is leading toward subsets of dyslexia, 

• phonology based
• grapheme phoneme conversion
• visual code for letters (letter position, mixing nearby words)

Autism - moving away from the spectrum description and making it more of a wheel. Students have different positions in different areas on the spokes of the wheel.

ADHD - Executive function dysfunction

Neurological in origin, asynchronous development of skills

Not about attention or hyperactivity but about executive function (kids generally have trouble with EF). The name came from what were able to see rather than the cause. This leads to problems with self-regulation, self-awareness, self-evaluation, and motivation.

There is a different motivation structure than a fully developed brain. The part of the brain involved doesn't finish developing in most humans until 25. Don't make this an excuse - "They can't do it because their brains aren't fully developed yet." Rather, take advantage of the fact that this is the time of highest neuroplasticity, so it is time to harness that.

For most of us, a balance of rewards and consequences determine our actions.  ADHD brains seek dopamine and fail to predict consequences. They seek out things that are interesting, novel, challenging, urgent, or playful because those things produce dopamine. Sometimes, their argumentative nature happens because conflict produces dopamine.

Everything that is helpful for neurodivergent kids is good for ALL learners. 

Diagnoses happen when it impedes your life. Don't diagnose yourself just because you have a quirky behavior.

Practical Strategies

Recognize variability. They will not all respond exactly the same way to instruction or interventions. Research doesn't give a recipe; it gives ingredients. 

Audit your physical environment for sensory issues, managing choices, visual scaffold, a strength based emotional climate, and explanations of the "why" when it comes to rules.

Resource binders should be available.  Visual cues in their workspace will help them be ready. Don't let them start work until their workspace is ready. Notetaking guides and templates are good scaffolds. Printed copies of the notes are not. They need to write whatever they can. 

Panel: Thinking About Implementation Outside NYC by Zach Groshell, Meg Lee, Ian Kelleher, and Lynn Gaffney

Q:  Can you explain more about the mix of the science of learning and the practical craft?

A:  Zach: Developing teachers in the science of learning is a lot like developing professional athletes. Current NBA players are better at basketball than their coaches, but they still need coaching. Teachers can be well versed in pedagogical knowledge, but they may need coaching in the implementation. It isn't imposed; it's collaborative.  Meg: We need to look at what the science of learning can do for children first, but adults a close second. Balance what we want for every learner with the recognition that teaching is really hard and getting harder, so we can have teachers put down the things that aren't working well (if differentiation isn't working, let them stop).  Lynn:  We haven't been working in an evidence based profession, but that is changing. 

Q: What are three science of learning strategies that have been criminally underused?

A: Lynn: Spaced retrieval. Meg: Both students and adults need time to process deeply. Give more wait time deliberately.  Zach: Focus on design, not just delivery. Train a few people in your school to recognize whether the design of materials use evidence based principles or not.

Q: If you could wave a magic wand and have one thing appear in every classroom, what it would be?

A: Meg: Ian Kelleher's most recent writing about AI.  Lynn: Zach should appear in every classroom.  Zach: Explicit instruction in every classroom

Q: It's better to learn from other people's mistakes than your own. Are there any science of learning principles that are being misused?

A: Lynn: A lot of districts see science of learning as an add on, just another new initiative. Zach: Recognize that coaching is needed, not just one day PD sessions. One day sessions are great for inspiration, but there need to be habits developed in systems.  Meg: People are overwhelmed with a whole lot of strategies without an understanding of the whole picture. Then, teachers don't know how to apply strategies fluidly or across contexts. 

Q: Meg says, "You can wait out a roll out." How does it look to have brain science just incorporated into the fabric?

A: Meg: You can't just have "the year of the brain" any more than a dentist can have "the year of the tooth." You need to incorporate teacher expertise and wisdom, not just lay science of learning on top of lesson plans.

Q: What can you remove of replace in current school structure:

A: Lynn: Remove hand raising; replace with mini whiteboards.  Zach: Principals are following marching orders, even when they conflict with what their teachers are doing. Leadership needs to stand up and say, "It's just too much. We've divided our attention too much. Let's just focus on the essential pieces." Meg: Ask how organizations are spending time and resources, teacher time, student time, and tools that just have a sticker slapped on it that says "research based." Develop a "baloney-ometer."

Q: Who is your academic crush?

A: Lynn: Carl Hentrick, Zach Groshell, Gene Tavernetti, Mike Shmalker, Doug Lamov, Patrice Bain, Karen Chenowith. Zach: Marcy Stein (his college professor and member of Project Follow Through), Meg: Teachers with blogs or who speak at events like this or go on podcasts to talk about what is happening in their classrooms.

The research informed instruction community is altruistic, slightly crazy, love teaching, and love their kids and teachers.  Reach out to them, and enjoy more of their content.

FInishing is Less Intimidating that Starting

I've been working on a crochet project for several weeks now, and I've noticed something about myself I did not know. 

When I need to decide where to stop, it is not ever at the end of a row. I finish the row I am on, then turn and do several inches of the next row.  This part was not surprising; I knew I did that.  What was new to me as the reason. I had always told myself that I did this to prevent stitches from pulling out at the end of the row, but it is just as likely they will pull out in the middle. 

What I realized about myself this morning is that the reason I like to end on a partial row is that it is less daunting when I pick it back up the next time. I've already started this row; no all I have to do is finish it. It's a little psychological motivation game I play with myself, but I think it reveals something larger

Finishing is less scary than starting. 

Maybe it's the power of inertia. Maybe it is easier because you have a visual representation of what is left. Maybe it has to do with procrastination. I don 't know.  But I do know that starting something is more challenging than picking up where you left off.

This makes intuitive sense. Starting a race is difficult, but once you are running, you can usually keep running (unless it is something crazy - like an ultramarathon, requiring a different kind of endurance). Writers know the white page problem; it's daring you to create something from nothing. But once something is there, you can ride the flow of your thoughts. The heaviest weight in any workout is the front door of your house.

What could this mean for classrooms?  Perhaps, we can employ this psychology for projects, homework, and writing assignments. If math allow enough time at the end of a class period to do one of the problems they have assigned for homework and then say, "Okay, finish this tonight," perhaps it will be easier for the student to motivate themselves after dinner. After all, they only have to finish what they've already started.  Perhaps an English teacher can walk students through the first sentence of a paragraph and then say, "You're off to a good start. Keep going." 

For long term projects, we can teach students to use this trick as well. We are pretty good at helping them break work into chunks, but what if we said, "Don't finish at the end of the chunk. Either stop a little early or keep going into the next chunk a little ways"? Might it be easier for them to start the next session.

At a session of Learning and the Brain a few years ago, Dr. Jessica Minahan recommended putting a bar of squares at the top of a homework page (ten problems = ten squares) and then telling students to fill in a box each time they finished a problem. It provided a visual representation of how much they had already done and how much there was left to do.  She compared it to the loading bar on a computer; it's nice to see that there is only 20% left. 

Psychological tricks may sound goofy, but they do often help. I play a similar game with myself every Thursday morning at work. After scanning in the first wave of exercisers who are in line when the Y opens, my next job is to fold a cart heaped with towels. There are two sizes of towels, and I always start with the big ones first. It allows the volume remaining in the cart to drop quickly. After I reach the rim of the cart, I switch to small ones for a little while because the incoming class needs more of them. Then, I switch back to large ones for a little while, eventually just taking them in whatever order they come. 

Does any of this make towel folding quicker?  Nope. It takes the same amount of time no matter what order I fold them in, but it does change how long it feels. Seeing that volume drop quickly at the beginning make it feel like finishing this won't be so bad. 

And sometimes, that's all it takes to get a job done.

Can't You Just Talk to Them?

There is a new rule at my gym.  Well, actually it's not a new rule. It is a new policy of enforcement of a previously existing rule. IF people sign up for a class and then don't show up for it (or cancel their reservation within two hours of the class time) five times in a 30 day period, they will be locked out of making reservations for 14 days. 

It is causing, as I am sure you can imagine, some angst among members.  As with most organizations, the ones who are feeling angst about it will likely never have to worry about it because they are not the problem. 

So, I have spent a couple of weeks talking people down from the ledge. I am mostly clarifying misconceptions - "No, it's not three times ever; it's five times in a month." and "Yes, you are still welcome to come if there is space; you just won't be able to reserve a spot."

About 90% of the people I explain things to end up feeling fine about the rule, even commenting on the graciousness of the policy.

Until Tuesday afternoon. A classmate of mine (who will be in no way impacted by this change) was complaining about it. I thought I could help her see the reasonableness of this by explaining some of the abuses of the system that required a need for the enforcement, canceling up to 25 times in two weeks. She was not having it.  

• "Well, that was just one person," she said.  
• "Oh, my no. It was not. It was widespread enough across the system that this was needed to be     fair for those who play by the rules," I replied.
• "Well, why do we need to sign up at all?  Why can't it be first come first served, like it used to be?" she said.

And that's when I realized that she doesn't understand that other people have a different experience than she does. 

• Some can't get here 30 minutes before class starts to claim their spot because they are coming from work and fighting traffic. 
• Some abuse the system, preventing others from getting the benefit of their membership.

I said to her, "I don't think you are recognizing that different people have different constraints."  

Her reply was, "I can't imagine that there are enough people that this needs to happen.  Can't they just talk to those people who are a problem?"

Well, tell me you've never led a large group of people before, ma'am. Those two sentences revealed so much that I have seen, mostly in my education career, but also in any large organization.

1. What you can imagine is not the same as the reality of what's happening. Those who tend to follow rules believe that most other people do too. This, friends, is not the case. We live in a culture where a large minority believe rules were made to be broken or that specific rules don't apply to them if they can justify their reason for breaking them.  People who hold a strong opinion about an issue have trouble understanding why anyone would see it differently. Our lack of imagination about the minds of others prevents us from recognizing an experience other than our own. She couldn't imagine this to be a widespread problem; but I've seen the data, so I know that it is.
2. Talking to the problem person rarely solves anything. Students who misbehave in school rarely stop because the teacher or principal has a private chat with them. The recent popularity of "restorative discipline" has resulted in little behavior change. And that's with students who have relationships with school staff and classmates. Imagine how little it will help with adults who don't know each other.  People who speed or run red lights regularly will not stop because a cop pulls them over and gives them a good talking to. There may be a very small percentage of people for whom a conversation would effect change, and those are the people who rarely break the rules to begin with.
3. Consistent consequences (even small ones) change behavior. I have solid memory of a time when almost no one wore a seatbelt. PSAs about danger did little to help. Changing the law helped some, but a lot of people knew they weren't going to get pulled over most of the time. What did change behavior? Car manufacturers installed a tone that goes off if you don't put your seatbelt on. That's not an onerous punishment, but it an annoying consequence of not buckling up. Most importantly, it is consistent. It happens EVERY time you don't buckle your seatbelt. I don't know anyone (and this could be my lack of imagination, I admit) that keeps driving while listening to that annoying beep. Friday, I buckled a bag of soil into my car because that stupid alarm wouldn't stop! This policy has grace built into it, but when you hit five strikes, technology will take over so that there is a consistent consequence. 

Tom Bennet talks about small and consistent consequences in his great book, Running the Room. It's about classrooms, but it isn't hard to see how it could apply in any organization with people, from gyms to churches to civil law. Thank people when they do something right; be predictable about consequences when they do something wrong.  

No, you can't just talk to them.

All That Is - Seen and Unseen

Note: The beginning of this is going to sound like it is a post about Christianity. While this blog does sometimes veer into religious meddling, that's not what this post is.  For any of my readers who are not religious, hang in there until the end. My thoughts were prompted by the Nicene Creed, but the post is about education.

Each Sunday in church, I recite the following:

"We believe in one God, the Father Almighty,
Maker of heaven and earth
Of all things, seen and unseen."

Last week, there was an odd tension when it came to watching the news. The potential war crimes our nation might be about to commit in Iran made me want to crawl into a hole somewhere off grid, but during that same time period, we were watching mankind return to the moon, going farther than we had been even with Apollo and seeing things we had previously not seen with human eyes. 

The earth is big and close, and what is happening on it looms large in our vision. Rightly so. We are called to love our neighbors here and to steward our resources. 

When missions like Artemis II are in the news, the always vast universe becomes bigger in our thinking. Seeing pictures that included the moon and the earth together should inspire wonder in even the most jaded of souls (unless you are weirdo who still thinks we are faking it, but I assume most of those people don't read this blog). And NASA did something awesome this week that didn't get as much attention. They re-established contact with Voyager II.

But here's the thing. That's just the part of creation that is "seen."  

There is also much that is unseen. Poet Christina Rossetti asked the famous question, "Who Has Seen the Wind?" and then goes on to describe evidence of that which cannot be seen. As a chemistry teacher for over two decades, much of my life was spent describing things that no one has seen with their eyes - atoms and the things that make them up determine what we can see, but we cannot yet see them. And let's not even get started on dark matter, the unseen substance that we believe fills most of space.

You want to get even weirder? About 99% of an atom is empty space. There's nothing there. One of my past 8th graders had to walk it off when she realized that "everything is mostly made of nothing." But that nothing is really important because, if it weren't that way, our density would be too high for us function, eventually collapsing in ourselves like a black hole.

My point is that the seen is such a small part of what is that we almost cannot fathom the reality of all that exists. Even the people who have expertise in the unseen acknowledge how hard it is to understand. Neils Bohr famously said, "If quantum mechanics hasn't profoundly shocked you, you haven't understood it yet."

I promised this was going to be about education, so here's the connection: 

Students are made up, as we all are, of parts that are seen and unseen. We focus a lot on what we can see. And of course we do; it's the part we can see. We can see a student's physical state and behavior - clean or dirty, disturbingly thin, polite or rude, engaged or daydreaming. 

But that's not all there is. There is also the unseen. We can't see their motivations, their thoughts, their feelings, or their blood sugar levels. We can't see the fight they had with their brother in the car or the fact they are nervous about an upcoming job interview. But those things are as much a reality as wind or atoms or dark matter are in the composition of nature.

I'm not part of the "unmet needs" crowd that thinks we should excuse all poor behavior while we look for what it communicates. We have to address what is seen in students because it is the only thing we can address. 

But, it's good to keep the unseen in mind. Might there be an unseen that is affecting what we see? 

Does the unseen excuse poor behavior that we see?  No, but it might help explain it. Does it affect the consequence we impose? Not necessarily, but it might change the demeanor we have when imposing it. 

Just some stuff to keep in mind as we near the end of the school year.

Making Choices - And Living With the Consequences

"This school should stop giving so much homework. The kids are just too tired at the end of the day." said a mom to me on the sidelines of a soccer game in which her son was playing and was, in fact, team captain. Our school had done a lot to reduce the homework load of students for two years and had come to what I thought was a very reasonable place, so it was surprising to hear this, especially as this mom was also a school employee who knew the efforts that had been made in this area.

As she continued, she talked about the mission trip he was about to go on and how much work was involved with that as he was one of the group leaders. When she mentioned the name of a teacher, it was one who taught AP classes; so I asked, "How many AP classes is he taking?" The answer was four!

This high school junior was taking four advanced placement classes, leading a mission team, and serving as captain of the varsity soccer team. No wonder he was tired at the end of the day. He had made too many good choices. 

Time is like money. Once if you have spent it on one thing, you no longer have it to spend on something else. Unlike money, you can't borrow time and pay it back later. And you can't earn more; we all have the same amount.

So, the choices you make about how to spend your time matter. 

All choices matter. And all choices, even good ones, have a mix of positive and negative consequences.

The thing is, we tend to want the choice without the consequence. We want to say yes to ALL of the things we'd like to do without regard to those consequences.  

If we have a hard time with this as adults with some experience in time budgeting, imagine how little our students understand it. 

That's where adults have to offer guidance ahead of the choices and allow them to experience the consequences of that choice.

This mom had given some guidance ahead of the decision, but she decided that, since all of the roles were good things, she would let him make the choice to do all of them. This is hard when guiding students because it isn't a choice between right and wrong; it's a choice to limit multiple rights.  He was encouraged to be the captain of the soccer team by a coach who didn't know that he was also leading a mission team DURING soccer season. When he said he wanted to take four AP classes, teachers and counselors said, "Maybe take three or even two. Which ones do you feel the most passionately about?" His parents said, "They all sound good. Do them all if you want to."

The problem was that she then wanted the teachers of those classes to adapt to his lack of time. "Don't they understand that he needs to sleep?"she said. I bit my tongue and continued to take the pictures I was there to take, but I wanted to ask her what she thought the homework load of four AP classes plus two honors classes would be. I wanted to say that he could have been on the soccer team and the mission team without being in leadership. 

This is the time of year when students are making a lot of choices for next year. They are choosing class  schedules, but they may not be thinking about the other things that will arise. As we have conversations with them at lunch and after school, it is a good time for us to remind them that time must be budgeted.

Those of us who have a relationship with students have both an opportunity and an obligation to guide their thinking. Don't just say, "Yes, you would be great at AP History and Bio and Calculus, so you should take them all."  Instead say, "I know you also like to do theater.  Are you going to have time for three hours of work after rehearsal? If not, maybe, you should take regular history instead of AP." You can remind them just how many basketball games there are in a season and advise that the spring mission trip for their church will involve a lot of planning during the same time frame. Maybe they could go on the trip without being a team leader. Life involves making choices among multiple good things, and it is a good time to practice that with support.

You can't decide for them, but you can help them think through the consequences of their choices and ask them if they are prepared to live with those consequences. 

Book Review: Learning Habits by Richard Wheadon

Are you a parent who wants to help your child become successful in school?  Are you a teacher who sees kids dependent on machines or you for studying and you want them to feel the satisfaction of being an independent learner? If so, put Learning Habits by Richard Wheadon on your summer reading list and start the next school year off strong.

I first encountered Richard at a ResearchEd conference last year. He's passionate about learning, optimistic about the future of teaching, and delightfully British. While the accent doesn't come across on the page, everything else does. 

The first thing I appreciate about this book is that he diagnoses the problem - kids use ineffective study techniques and are demotivated when those don't lead to success - but he doesn't stop there. He asks the next question. "Why do they use ineffective techniques?" Kids don't study poorly because they want to fail. They don't study poorly because they are lazy. If that were the case, they would look for the techniques that give the most benefit with the least amount of time invested (Re-reading the chapter does just the opposite). 

They use ineffective techniques because the effectives ones don't FEEL effective in the moment. One of the talks I give at conferences address this exact thing. I compare it to weight lifting. At the end of my BodyPump class at the Y, I don't feel stronger; I feel like I might not be able to hold my arms up long enough to wash my hair when I get home. Yet, the very thing that is making me feel weak in that moment will cause strength later because of the response of my muscles to stress. Retrieval practice makes kids FEEL dumb in the moment because they have trouble remembering the answer to some questions. But, it is that very stress that will stimulate the neuron growth and myelination that will make their learning stronger for the future.  

Wheadon addresses something most study books do not, the tricks our brains play to give us mental shortcuts. There are a myriad of biases, heuristics, and self-gratification techniques that get us through our days without having to think about every single thing. That is fantastic news for daily life because it saves mental energy, but it can interfere with your learning when we operate unaware of them in academic pursuits. By giving examples of those, he provides ways students might overcome them.

This book is evidence based and well-sourced (in case you want to follow up and read the studies for yourself). It is realistic in its explanations and understanding of real classrooms. At the end of each chapter, he summarizes the main points and gives questions for reflection, so you and a student could sit down together and make plans based on what you read in each chapter. 

And that's the best part of this book.  It's actionable. Putting Wheadon's advice into practice will help you develop the habits to be more successful in school and in all of the learning you will have to do as an adult.

Untangling the Knots (or Better Yet, Preventing Them)

My nephew and his wife are expecting, so I am in the midst of a crochet project for the baby. As any needleworker knows, there is a point in each skein of yarn where there is a tangle. It's not the fault of the crafter; it's a design flaw in the way yarn is produced, which is why it happens every time. Caught early enough, it's an amusing few moments of trying to figure out which direction the yarn is facing, but more often that not, it isn't found that early; and it tightens into a stubborn knot. 

I had one of those this week, and it was particularly gnarly, containing multiple catch points. As I pulled from one direction and pushed in another, I kept saying to the yarn, "I know there is an origin to this knot somewhere, but I just can't see where it is."

There were points where I could loosen it just enough to make a little progress on the project, but I knew I would eventually pay for that.  Loosening it in one spot tightens the knot further down the line, but that's a problem for later me to deal with as I want to feel like I can move forward now.

Eventually, though, the piper must be paid. I got to a point where I had to fight with the yarn. Cutting it is an option, but I am determined to out-stubborn the yarn. I'm a little sister, so I don't give up easily. After half an hour of fighting with it and a few under-my-breath curses at the manufacturer, I did eventually free the yarn.

This happens in our classrooms too. The knot, in this metaphor, is a misconception. Caught early, misconceptions are easily corrected, but we don't often know they are there until further down the line. At some point, a student surprisingly stops making progress. We try to keep going, but the confusion only seems to tighten. The invisible misconception is preventing the student from going any deeper into the content because they keep running into wrong thinking. 

When this happens, it is important to track down the center of the knot. Back up to the beginning of the explanation. Re-explain step one and ask some questions. If they are good there, move on to step 2. At some point, you find the tangle and can fix it. After that point, the student says, "Oh, I get it now.  This is much easier now." 

But of course, this only works if we take the time to find and out-stubborn the confusion. Depending on how far down the line you have gotten from the initial hiccup, this could take serious time.

Some knitters are proactive.  They begin their project by unspooling the skein of yarn and winding it into a ball. It takes time and doesn't look like progress, but it ensures they find the tangles early when they easy to unravel and allows the project to proceed smoothly. 

In your classroom, you can't untangle the knots ahead of time. Some of them came to you from a previous class (much like the yarn comes with an inbuilt problem), but you don't know what they are.  Some arise during your teaching because you know what you said, but you don't necessarily know what they heard.  So you can't necessarily prevent the tangles entirely, but you can take steps to prevent them from tightening by using formative assessment. Pausing your lesson to check for understanding can feel like it is taking time from your lesson, but it saves you time in the long run.

There are a lot of ways to check for understanding, but the way we commonly do it, asking a question and then calling on a student with his or her hand up, is probably the least effective. You probably aren't finding the knots because students who raise their hands are usually confident they will be right. The misconceptions of the quiet go unnoticed, and the knots tighten as you move forward. 

In my class, the use of a mini-whiteboard by every student simultaneously was the game changer. I could get an answer from every student in the amount of time it took me to scan the room. When six out of twenty four kids had the same wrong answer, I knew I had found a tangle. It was a simple fix as I asked, "Did you put that because you thought . . . ?" When they answered yes, I said, "Okay, I can see why you thought that, but it is is actually . . ." It's not the only way, but I do recommend finding a method that allows you to get an answer from ALL students.

The thing you DON'T want to do is to keep going in the hopes that the knot will untangle itself.  This almost never happens. Deal with it now or deal with it later, but you will have to deal with it.

Lessons We Should Have Learned From Lockdown - But I'm Not Sure We Did

Six years ago today, I was at school, but my students weren't. 

Two days prior, we had learned that we would be transitioning to a virtual learning environment as part of the "slow the spread" phase of the Covid-19 pandemic. The IT team was entering every class into the student Google calendars to create as little friction as possible for them to join.  Teachers were learning to share our screens and brainstorming how we might still "see" students while we were doing that (turns out you can can use your projector as a second monitor). Students were at home, half nervous and half excited by the newness of all this.  

We then taught 40 days fully virtual and two years in a hybrid situation (only the first one was officially that, but let's not kid ourselves).

We learned so many things - much of which I blogged about at the time and on last year's anniversary.

There are also things that we should have learned, and based on what I am hearing and seeing in the world, I'm not sure we did.

Screens are not replacements for teachers - It's harder to learn from a screen than it is from a live person. I'm not saying there aren't some high quality videos and online courses out there. But a video can't make eye contact with you. It can't see a confused expression on your face or sense the squirminess in a room. It can't tell when your working memory is overloaded or know that you aren't absorbing well because you missed breakfast this morning. More importantly, it can't adapt to any of those things.

For all the years I have taught, administrators have told us to get away from "lecturing" and make lessons more interactive. Whether they were talking about high quality direct instruction or discovery learning, they directive was that it shouldn't just be the teacher delivering information in one direction. Video is the ultimate in one way delivery. I'm not suggesting we never use them, but they are supplements, not replacements.

Why do I say we haven't learned that lesson?  Because in spite of all of the negative consequences, I still see "implement virtual instruction" in school improvement plans. It was one thing to have that on your website before Covid, but if I were a parent, it would make me choose a different school. I have sat in meetings with people who think the solution to limited instructional time is for teachers to make video and assign them for asynchronous learning. And, of course, there are those who think AI is the solution to everything; we get naive with every new piece of tech. While I grant that AI may be able to adapt based on performance, it will not be able to diagnose the reason and address that. 

External motivators matter - For years prior to the pandemic, one of the raging debates on EduTwitter was about whether grades motivated students. As with most things, we were having a binary argument on something that doesn't have a binary answer. There are some students who are highly motivated by grades. Those of you who have seen my font like handwriting may know that my first "bad grade" was in penmanship, and I made sure that would never happen again. Others couldn't care less about their grades, but they do care about what the grades get them (getting into college, eligibility to play a sport). There's not a yes or no answer on something with a spectrum of attitudes.

However, a comparison of schools during lockdown showed one thing - not having grades was definitely demotivating. My school continued to take attendance, give assignments, give tests in whatever way we could. And we graded those assignments and tests. (We were likely a bit more lenient in the grading than we had previously been, but we were still grading.) Public schools in my county did not grade - that is to say, the grade couldn't go down. So, if a teacher graded something and it kept the student's grade the same or increased it, they put it in the gradebook.  Otherwise, they didn't count it. They told kids they should still attend class for the sake of learning, but . . . class attendance in those schools plummeted to nearly zero, and very little was turned in. One boy I know attended two of his classes because he needed to get his grade up and knew they would give easy work so he could, but he did not attend his other four because he "already had an A and it couldn't drop." (NOTE: This is NOT a criticism of those schools. It is my personal policy not to judge the decisions made by any school during the spring of 2020 since exactly no one knew what the right the thing to do was.)

Why do I say we didn't learn this lesson? People are pushing "no zeros" policies again. A kid doesn't turn something in; he gets a 50%. I objected to this the first time around, writing a letter to the editor of my local newspaper, if that tells you how long ago it was.  Their logic is that a zero is too hard to recover from; mine is that something hard to recover from should motivate you to turn something in. I don't want a generation of workers believing that doing NOTHING is the same as doing half of their job. We have people pushing feedback only assessment without grades attached. I'm not saying it can't work, but our culture would have to change dramatically for that to succeed.

I'm not saying it has to be the exact grading system we use now, but without some kind of external motivator, many, if not most, students will not work. Let's be honest; how many adults would go to work without a paycheck, no matter how much we love our jobs? External forces motivate much of what we do for most of our lives. Why would we believe students would be any different?

Attendance is critical - You can't learn things you don't attend to.  Teaching yourself is nearly impossible, even with high quality resources. You can probably get some surface stuff, but you can't see nuances if you don't have the background knowledge to notice them. There are certainly isolated examples to the contrary, but for the vast majority of students, they need to be taught. That means school attendance matters. Students who had sporadic attendance during the pandemic could make up their assignments, but they didn't learn the material; they checked the box on doing something.

Why do I say we didn't learn this lesson? We are in an attendance crisis in America. Based on some of the educators I'm connected with on Twitter, they are in the same crisis. This thing that was always a given - kids go to school on school days - became optional. SOME parents now plan trips without regard to the school calendar and leave it to the teacher to figure out how to teach their child upon his return. Kids stay home when they have a minor headache (I'm not talking about migraines, just run of the mill, pop-an-Advil headaches). They are then surprised when the student doesn't do well on their tests because "she made up her work." This isn't just a school problem. People are calling out of their jobs more now than they did in the past too.

I don't want this post to sound entirely negative. There are definitely some tools and techniques we took out of the pandemic that remained helpful. Go back to the beginning and use those links to see some of the positives. But there are things we should have learned that we just didn't. And we need to consider that so that we don't just keep sleepwalking through low attendance, meaningless grading, and people who want to replace teachers with screens.

Growing Requires the Right Conditions

I had an azalea that died in my front yard.  I don't just mean it didn't thrive.  I mean it died - doornail kind of dead.  All that was left was a stick. When I dug it up to replace it, it had some roots still attached.  For some reason, I decided that meant I should let it have a go in the back yard.  I dug a whole and plopped this dead stick into it.  That was 7 years ago, and this year, has bloomed twice - profusely, so many blooms that you almost couldn't see the green leaves anymore. 

I took this picture 3 years ago, but it doesn't do it justice. 

It turned out the front yard was not the right place for that plant, but the spot in the back yard was. I started calling that spot "the Lazarus spot" because the plant had been raised from the dead. Two years ago, I was given the most beautiful hydrangea plant I have ever seen.  It was the deepest blue and fullest potted plant I've ever had the pleasure to have in my house.  It started wilting after a few months because they aren't really meant to stay potted, and I thought, "No problem. We'll plant it right next to the azalea in the Lazarus spot." To my horror, the beautiful hydrangea did not revive there; it died and has not returned.

This photo was taken just after I put it in the ground, when it seemed it could be saved. It couldn't be.

What's the lesson here?  The spot wasn't perfect. It was just perfect for that azalea. It didn't work at all for the hydrangea.

Schools are built for the majority of children. Just as most plants have similar needs for the range of water, drainage, and sun exposure, most kids have similar needs that can be met by the regular school system.

And, just like some plants need more water or less direct sunlight to thrive, some kids need fewer choices or more individual attention to thrive. They might benefit from a different placement - an alternative school, a small Christian school, a military academy, or homeschool might be the right choice FOR THEM.

Because humans love to oversimplify, when a student finds success in an alternative placement, we credit the placement.  We decide that model must be the best one since it reached "even that kid." We assume that model would be good for everyone. Let's build all schools with that model.

But life is just more interesting than that.

If all kids went to a military academy, some of them would come out traumatized. It worked great for the kid who needed that much structure to thrive, but the average kids would collapse under the weight.  Send some kids to an alternative school with a lot of choices about what they do, and they will fall apart. They need more structure to function and freeze up with indecision when given too much choice. Some families homeschool beautifully, and their kids move through curriculum both quickly and deeply; other kids are placed in front of a math video and learn little (I know because I have taught those kids when they returned to school, and they couldn't do basic algebra as high school juniors). 

Education is not a one-size-fits-all situation.  Even within a household, you might have a son who functions well in your local public school while your daughter needs the individual attention that can only come from homeschooling. 

The mistake we make in the school system is to either try to alter the kid to fit the typical environment or alter the environment to fit the kid. That is not sustainable in a system as large as schooling.  What we need to do instead is match the kid and the environment so that azaleas can thrive in one place while hydrangeas thrive in another.

That Mr. Beast Video - I Have Thoughts

YouTube celebrity Mr. Beast dropped a video this week that has EduTwitter all . . . well atwitter. He isn't the first one to do this. I remember being required to watch and respond to a video posted by a punk in a hoodie telling us that knowledge didn't matter in the age of Google about 15 years ago.  That one fizzled quickly, but this one is different for a number of reasons. I have thoughts - lots of them, so get some tea and settle in.

First, let's address who Mr. Beast is. When I called him a YouTube celebrity, I was understating it.  At 468 million, he has the most subscribers of any channel on the site, and he has the third most followed TikTok account. He is especially popular with high school boys because much of his content consists of the stunts and challenges they enjoy; many of his challenges are philanthropic, so their parents don't mind that they watch him. He's been posting for over 20 years, which is longevity in any field, but is insanely long for the internet world. All of that only matters in this discussion because his reach is wide, and his influence is high. When he speaks, his followers listen. 

So last week, he decided to use his immense platform to criticize educators. I'm not saying there is nothing to criticize - far from it. Ask any teacher what could be better in education, and they could give you a TED talk without preparation. 

But Mr. Beast is an outsider. He graduated from a small Christian school in NC and then dropped out of college in 2018 to study virality - what makes a video spread like wildfire - on his own.  He is public about his lack of desire to have children. So, when he speaks about education, he speaks as someone who has not been inside of a classroom in almost a decade. Someone pointed out that he has built ten schools, and, to his credit that is true. But it's not the same as knowing something about education. A person who builds a church doesn't know how to be its pastor.

His basic premise is that teaching hasn't changed in over a hundred years.  "Why," he asks, "are we still being taught the way our parents were taught when everything else has moved on?" He claims that when he was in school, a teacher just read out of a textbook. He then goes on to suggest that kid would be better taught by videos because a lot of complex information can be delivered in a short period of time. 

I want to be as kind as I can to Mr. Beast because I think he was probably well intentioned, but he was wrong about so many things in such a short video. Let me unpack a few things here:

1. Your kids are not being taught the same way your parents were. They just aren't. I taught for 25 years (including ALL of the ones when Mr. Beast was in school) in three different schools, both public and private, and education changed dramatically during that time - some changes were for good and some were not. As Tom Bennett said, "Any parent who has helped their kids with their math homework recently knows that kids are not being taught the same way they were." 

Tech access alone has changed things; when I began my career, I made an appointment to take my kids to the computer lab to use Google for research. By the end of my career, AI was making its push. And, I promise you Mr. Beast's parents weren't using either of those things when they were in school. There were also multiple swings in education philosophy during the 25 years I taught. The pendulum swung from STEM focused to arts integration in every class, from explicit rubrics to free form exploration, from phonics to whole language and back to phonics again.  

Mr. Beast MAY have a had a teacher who read aloud from a textbook. He was in a tiny school in NC, which currently has an enrollment of 287 in K-12; so ten years ago, they may not have had the resources to do any more than that. Since he is using a sample size of ONE, it would be hard to say that applies to the whole field. 

2. Tech has changed. Brains have not. One of my favorite responses to the Mr. Beast video addressed a basic fact he clearly doesn't know (maybe he would if he hadn't dropped out of college). The way brains learn doesn't change with the technology of the world. 

"There is no neurological reason we should be taught differently. Our brains work exactly the same way our grandparents' brains did." While neuroplasticity is real, it creates only minor differences in our brains - strengthening some connections while weakening others. It does not change the basic architecture of our brains. We all learn basically the same way - encoding through our senses, spaced retrieval coupled with feedback, rinse and repeat as needed. The encoding may come from a variety of sources, from live teacher to video to book to podcast, none of it sticks without the retrieval and feedback process (more on that in the next point). 

Change is often good, but not ALL change is good. A change that makes the picture on your TV better is good; but it is still basically TV - we aren't going to say we need television reform and dramatically change the way we film just to say we have changed with the times. 

The truth is that we would likely be better off if we were learning more like our parents learned. The push for discovery learning turned out to work against the brain rather than with it. Some were successful, but the most disadvantaged kids just became more disadvantaged because we overwhelmed their working memories. Projects and labs are great, but they are reinforcements for explicit teaching, not replacements.  

3. No, you cannot absorb and retain the information from a video in 20 minutes.  One of the points made by Mr. Beast is that there are a lot of high quality videos that we can use for learning. He's not wrong about that part. He references Mark Rober, but there are many good sources - Kahn Academy, Veritasium, Crash Course. I have used and loved them all.

But here's where Mr. Beast got it wrong.  He said, "You can learn complex topics in 20 minutes in a way that's engaging, fun, and you retain it." Complex information can be PRESENTED in 20 minutes, and you can CONSUME information in 20 minutes, but you cannot LEARN it in 20 minutes. As I said earlier, there is a cycle of retrieval and feedback that are needed to retain information.  I consume a great deal of content.  I listen to podcasts, read books, read blog posts, and, yes, I watch videos. If I retained all of the information in the things I consume, I could rule the world. But the truth is that most of it passes through my consciousness and then back out. I might remember one very interesting point, especially if I found it interesting enough to tell someone about it the next day (retrieval) and have them find it interesting enough to engage with me in conversation about it (feedback), but I will have a temporary and superficial understanding at best if all I do is watch the video. The idea that videos are engaging is ludicrous; there is nothing more passive than watching a video. It's even more passive than a live lecture, which we have all been encouraged to eliminate. Entertainment is not the same thing as engagement. Engagement requires interaction, which videos do not provide. Engagement is a means to an end, but it is not the end. Learning requires engagement, but engagement alone is not learning.

Videos are great as supplemental tools, and I used them frequently. They were super helpful in science teaching because they animated processes. They were good review tools because students could hear an explanation that was similar to but slightly different from mine. But they are not a replacement for quality instruction from a human. Education has been, at its core, a social experience since the Garden of Eden, where God came and walked with and talked with Adam. This is why I don't believe technology is going to replace teachers (even AI).

4. Mr. Beast is the beneficiary of the very thing he is criticizing.  This is where I want to be as charitable as I can with Mr. Beast because I don't think he knows. It's so easy, once you have learned enough for learning to be easy for you, to forget what it is like to be a novice. He may well be able to watch a video on a topic that interests him and that he knows reasonably well and retain something new. A 7th grade math student who is learning a concept for the first time does not have that base. 

Mr. Beast benefits from a strong knowledge base already being in place from his years of schooling (even if he had a teacher or two who only read from a book) that allows his working memory to not be overloaded when taking in information from a video. He has a schema of knowledge from decades of school as well as professional learning to connect new learning with. A freshman year biology student who is encountering Latin roots for anatomical terms for the first time is building that schema, but she doesn't have it yet. Butterflies tend to forget that they used to be caterpillars and think that, since they can now fly, those younger than them should be able to as well. (I'm not sure if that metaphor worked, but hopefully you know what I'm saying.)

At 27, Mr. Beast is old enough to have lived in a childhood where screen time was still considered something we should limit. He would have had some video time but not the constant stream we have now. Because he wasn't engaged by video non-stop in his childhood, he had moments of boredom that trained his imagination, and it was that training that allows him the success he has today. But he doesn't know how to look back and see what got him here. 

Teachers, you are not beholden to a 27 years old YouTube influencer. Do what you know is right. Do what you know works. If you don't know what works, we live in a golden age of books on the science of learning. Start with Why Don't Students Like School by Daniel Willingham or Learning Begins by Andrew Watson. If you want to dive really deep, take a look at How We Learn by Stanislas Dehaene. Form a relationship with a teacher in your building who has been at it long enough to see the fads come and go and return to the basics of quality instruction. Don't give in to the idea that "newer is always better" as our culture seems to have. You are there to teach, not to do the latest thing.

The Post Teachers Need in February

It's February, y'all. It's hard to explain why this means teachers are exhausted more than any other time of year, but they are. So, I'm going to keep this post short and happy.

Getting through the February doldrums requires you to have something positive and future focused to think about.  

So here it is.

Look at your students. They are not the same people you met in August.

• The boy who needed his schedule to be re-printed on the first day of school because he kept losing it is now helping a new kid find his way around.
• The girl who wouldn't wear her glasses or contacts and then used "not being able to see the board" as an excuse for poor attention is now focused and listening.
• The kid who failed your first two tests is working hard and pulling a solid C.
• Someone who came in at the beginning of the year saying, "I don't like math" has found the idea of limited infinity fascinating and now realizes math is more interesting than they thought.
• A new kid who was quiet and separating from the group at the start of the year is now laughing with her friends in the lunchroom.
• The kid who couldn't stand you at the beginning of the year dislikes you less now. (Let's face it, these aren't all going to be 180º turns.)
• All of your students are working more independently than they were at the beginning of the year, and they all have acquired content knowledge. Even the one who is failing tests has learned SOME things.

Think about your room. What progress can you notice and find joy in as you get through the last week of February?