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.

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.

The Motivation Success Cycle

Everywhere you look, there are resources for improving motivation.  Books, news articles, research studies.  You can have a whole career in motivational speaking.  Why, because we know that without motivation, there can be no success.  That doesn't necessarily mean all motivated people are successful because some are delusional about their abilities (think of those people in the first few episodes of American Idol who truly believe that the judges will regret their decision to not send them to Hollywood). But success and opportunity knock; they don't break into your house.  So, there is a lot of money to be made in helping people become more motivated.

But here's the thing . . .

Success breeds motivation.

We all know that motivated students are more successful.  But we often fail to appreciate that successful students are more motivated.  It's a happy little circle.  

It's probably not going to surprise you that I am about to use an example from the Y.  I have been having some motivation issues since October.  Not with going; I am always motivated to go.  I have struggled to push myself harder in my classes.  For over a year, I had been setting goals and improving, and then I hit a bit of a wall.  I just couldn't get any better.  When I went home and wrote my numbers in the tracking grid I had on the refrigerator, I was far from motivated.  In fact, I was demotivated.  

I didn't go out an buy a self help book or look up exercise motivational speeches on YouTube.  That may work for some, but I felt it was unlikely to help me get past this wall.  

I decided to take some time to appreciate exactly where I was.  I stopped tracking numbers for a while, knowing that just going and doing the workout was good for me.  I gave myself until Thanksgiving to just let things be what they were and not worry about it.  

This week, I started in my efforts to improve again.  I haven't yet sat down with a goal sheet or a grid, but in each class, I have said, "I want to increase my squat weight today" or "I want to average at least 16mph on the bike."  Is this back up where I was in the spring and summer - no.  Setting an unrealistic goal will no motivate because it will not lead to success.  These numbers are above where I was two weeks ago.  It may take a little time to get back up to where I was at my peak, but achieving these small successes will motivate me to get there.

How does this connect to education.  When students who have traditionally made good grades slip a little, they feel a sense of failure at a more profound level than your students who fail regularly.  They aren't used to it, and their instinct (as well as that of their parents) is to get them back up to where they were quickly.  Depending on the cause of the slip, that may or may not be possible.  If it resulted from night when they didn't sleep well or they had a cold on the day they took a test, then quick recovery is possible.  But, if they have slipped due to chronic illness, a long term absence, or an unidentifiable sense of demotivation, it will likely take time.  

That were the teacher comes in.  Give them a realistic sense of what is possible and help them set a goal.  "I'd like to make an A on my next test" will be demotivating if that isn't doable for them right now.  However, "I'd like to aim for 5 points higher on this test than I got on my last test" might be.  Perhaps they can get one excellent paragraph of an essay written or do four projectile problems in physics.  

Don't set the goal so easy that it results in meaningless success because that's not motivating either.  No one says, "Yeah for me because I walked to the mailbox today" (unless that was something they hadn't been able to do for a while).  But there is a sweet spot where it is motivating.  Just before an endurance song, I tell my cycle classes to set a goal that is "challenging but doable."  Succeeding at that kind of challenge improves what we view as "doable" and allows us to set bigger goals.

To sum up, if you want your students motivated in your class (especially those who don't think they "are good at it," you gotta get a few wins under their belts early on.  During the first week of class, set a challenge that they have to reach for but isn't out of their reach.  Then (and this is important from a growth mindset standpoint), don't just say, "Hey, look, it turns out you are good at this."  Instead, ask them what they did that enabled their success.  Encourage those actions for the future.  Point out each time they have a success, no matter how small it is, that it was the result of the work they did.

It's also helpful to remind them that growth is not a linear process.  There are twists and turns and ups and downs on your way to a long term goal.  While it may feel unpleasant, it is perfectly normal and part of what makes life so interesting.

Focus on One

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know that I spend a fair amount of time reading what other teachers post on Twitter.  I spend less time interacting with them, but I will sometimes jump in if I feel I can add something substantive to a conversation (I will not jump into an argument about things like grades vs. no grade, but I will try to encourage someone or offer perspective).  

Yesterday, there was a sadness to teacher Twitter that's hard for non-teachers to understand.  We have just finished two of the craziest weeks of the pandemic (which is saying something) because Omicron has caused so many students to be virtual and teachers to be absent; subs are short, so there's a lot of covering for each other.  I had responded to someone with weird priorities who wanted some kind of awards to have something "to show for her career" and claimed her friend had won an Emmy yesterday (even though the Emmys were in September, so I haven't figured that out).  Anyway, one of the people who responded to me said she feels "demoralized and depressed."  Another said he had a "powerless feeling."  It all added up to we are exhausted. By exhausted, I don't mean tired.  Tired can be cured by a three-day weekend and a few good nights of sleep.  By exhausted, I mean depleted.  Teachers are used to pouring out, but we usually get refilled by a variety of things.  The last two years (two months from today will mark two years since the first day of virtual schooling) have required a lot more pouring out and included a lot less refilling.  What Twitter showed yesterday is that a lot of us are running on empty.

What occurred to me as I read all of this was that these feelings aren't new.  They are just more widespread and chronic than they have been in the past.  Before the pandemic, there might be one or two really demoralized teachers in the building, and those around them can lift them up.  Anyone who has been teaching for a while can tell you that you will have a bad quarter or a semester that makes you want to quit.  I have even had a year where I thought, "I just don't know how to do this well anymore."  The difference now is that the feeling of depletion is so widespread and has been going on for so long that it is hard to remember that this isn't our normal life.

So here's my advice.  Find an experienced teacher and ask them what they do when they feel demoralized.  They have been through it before, and they have developed coping mechanisms (I'm not talking about self-care; I'm talking about real strategies).  Here's what I shared with the teacher on Twitter who responded to me about feeling demoralized.

There is probably one student in each of your classes that seems "with you."  She is the one that makes eye contact.  He's the one who hangs around after class to ask a question or tell a story.  When you are feeling depleted, that kid is your bucket filler without even knowing it.  While you are teaching, focus on that kid.  Pretend you are teaching him and don't care about whether anyone else gets it (Of course, you do care.  This is just a mental exercise).  Make that kid the reason you don't just assign reading and go sit at your desk.  It is less overwhelming than thinking about big things we cannot fix.  As that student responds, you will get a little refilling of the energy you've lost.  When he stays after to share something, your momentum will increase a bit.  It doesn't take effect in one class period, but it does work (at least for me).  After a couple of weeks, you will find you have some of your motivation back.  

February is coming, which is often a time when we all feel a little low.  This year, we are starting it after a particularly difficult January caused, in part, by people who insisted on spending Christmas break as though we weren't still in the middle of the pandemic.  It's going to be hard, so: 

• Support your colleagues.  Spend time with them in whatever way you are able.
• Hang onto the notes or drawings kids might give you.  When you feel depleted, take them out and read them and have a good cry.
• Pray for your administration.  They are tired too, and we tend to forget that.
• Focus on one student.
• Every once in a while, show a video.  It won't harm their future if you only do it occasionally.
• Realize that you are not in control, and do what only you can do.

Be Nice to Teachers in February

Today is March 1st.  Thank the Lord, we survived February.  For twenty-one Februaries, I have not been able to articulate what makes it the hardest month of the school calendar, but it is.  One would think that it would be December or May because of exams and holidays, but it isn't.  It's February.  If you have teacher friends in your life, ask them what February is like.  I call it February Fever.

 I can't explain it for everyone, but here's my best explanation for my own fever. 

I am in the heart of my curriculum.  It's not an introduction or a wrapping up.  Because of this, students are the most in need of help.  My eighth grade is just starting to experience that math is the language of science. 

I am either beginning or wrapping up a project in all of my classes.  For my 8th grade, they turn in their NASA essays on the Friday closest to Presidents' Day; my physics students begin their Free Choice Project presentations on the Tuesday after Presidents' Day.  Theoretically, that is supposed to mean I don't have to do lesson planning for physics while I am grading the NASA essays.  What it really means is that the day I finish the essays, I begin grading the physics projects.  It is also when I introduce Global Solutions in physics.  I imagine that this item is true for most teachers.  I went into the library on Thursday and found three teachers of Freshman with the media specialist hovering over an organizational chart, planning the Manor Faire.  The teacher next door to me has just collected the second draft of lab reports on plant growth, and his anatomy students finally finished cat dissection last week.  One of our English classes finish the Voices Around the World reading and gallery during February as well.  It's not that we all try to do these things at the same time.  It's because third quarter is the time when we have taught enough to start doing activities that require a lot of time and knowledge.

I am a yearbook teacher, and the deadline structure puts deadline 3 (always the hardest one to meet for some reason) in the second week of February and our final deadline during the second week of March.  That means most of February involves ad placements, tracking down new students who weren't here for picture day, making sure all the photos are tagged so we can meet our coverage goals, and having the pages with all the names and portraits proofed several times (and, still, we don't catch them all). 

Students seem to be suffering from their own version of February fever.  In North Carolina, this the time of the worst weather.  We get a tiny amount of snow, usually in February, and a ton of rain.  Even when it isn't raining, the sky is overcast for most of the month.  Winter sports are ending, and spring sports are about to begin.  Some colleges issue "early" acceptances (which you can pretty much read now as "regular" acceptance because I think more students do it at this time now), and that leads to several weeks of battling seniors feeling like they are done.

February also seems to be the season for Friday night activities.  Two Fridays in a row, I have attended fundraising dinners for both the camp and the school I work for.  This coming Friday is the school play. 

Please understand that I am not complaining about any of this.  I have the best job on the planet, and I want to do all of these things.  My point is this.  If you know a teacher, be especially nice to them in February.

Reflections on Student Engagement with John T Almarode

The Learning and the Brain conference is an overwhelming experience.  That’s not a complaint.  It’s the best professional development I’ve ever participated in.  It’s overwhelming in the way a magnificent artwork is overwhelming, just too much to take in.  It’s overwhelming in the way meeting a beloved public figure would be overwhelming, just wanting to remember every part of the moment but also knowing that you won’t.  I have attended this conference twice now, and I have come away both times with the same mixture of feelings.  First, I feel mostly affirmed that much of what I and my colleagues are doing is in line with how student's brains work.  Even though much of it has been developed through trial and error or intuition, we seem to have done a lot right.  Second, there are some changes we need to make to some of our practices.  Holding those two thoughts simultaneously weighs down my luggage on the trip home.

The only way I have found to deal with the sheer volume of information I get from this conference is to reflect on parts of it a little at a time while I figure out how I might like to apply them.  Since this blog is for me to reflect and process my thoughts and let you read them if you wish, I’ll be dealing with those here for a while. They might come out in weekly posts or I might post several over the course of a few days.  Who knows?  If you just want straightforward notes (with a few personal thoughts because that’s how I take notes), you can find them at these three posts (Friday, Saturday, Sunday).  These posts will be both more and less than the notes.  More because I will be working out my own thoughts but less because I will likely choose small parts to reflect upon.

The first one that I will tackle is the one I think might be easiest to implement.  It was a session on creating engagement in your classroom and how to design engaging tasks.  The session was given by John T. Almarode.  If I believed in spirit animals, I would want him to be mine.  He is a quirky, fun, sassy Southerner who so obviously loves his job that you can’t help but be drawn in, and what you are being drawn into is valuable, smart, research-based information that you enjoy learning.

This session could be broken down into these sections:

1. Assessing the level of thinking students are at so that you can teach them one level above that.
2. The characteristics of an engaging task
3. Differentiation of lessons to provide equity to students

I am going to focus this post on that middle section because I think it is the one I can start implementing immediately.  The other two will require more time to make some design changes in my lessons.  I may blog about those as I deal with them as well, but here’s a good place to start.

According to John Almarode, there are 8 characteristics of engaging lessons.  This list was developed as the result of observations made in 20,000 classroom observations.  This is a credible sample size, and the methodology is strong.

1. Clear and Modeled Expectations - Imagine the frustration you feel at a faculty meeting if you are given a task and told to get started, but you aren’t really clear yet on what you are supposed to do.  Now imagine that happening at least once a day.  A lot of the misbehavior in classrooms comes from student frustration with not being sure what they are supposed to be doing.  If you want an engaged classroom, you have to be clear about what they should do. Be clear about what the target looks like.  
2. Emotional Safety - Your classroom must be a safe place to learn.  Students must not be allowed to laugh at someone giving a wrong answer or make fun of them.  That is not, however, the only component to emotional safety in your classroom.  It also means having the means to recover after having made a mistake.  Is there a way to get feedback, revise their work, and do better?  (Don’t get crazy, y’all.  I’m not talking about retaking summative assessments. I’m talking about daily tasks and work-in-progress check on projects.)
3. Personal Response - Students, if you haven’t noticed, care a lot about their own opinions.  That’s not unusual.  We did and do too.  Can students bring their own perspective into a task?  If so, they will be more likely to be engaged in it.
4. Sense of Audience - Have you ever had a job where you had to look busy?  It’s more exhausting than actually being busy.  I had a job once where I got done with the daily tasks by about 3pm, so if the phone wasn’t ringing much, I had little to do for the remaining two hours.  If my boss saw that, he would give me “busy work.”  Making a graph out of data was something I was happy to do if we were going to use the graph to analyze advertising trends, but we weren’t.  He was giving me the graph task so that I wouldn’t be sitting at the desk waiting for the phone to ring.  I started making up interesting and productive tasks for myself just to keep this kind of nonsense from happening.  The educational equivalent of this has to be doing something just to get a grade for it.  Students want to know that the task is valuable to someone other than the teacher.  If there is a way to provide a real audience (parents coming in to hear a speech, other students or staff members to ask questions about the project you did, or bringing in a community member that works in the subject area of the task), please make a way to do it.  
5. Social Interaction - The adolescent brain is developmentally social (See Inventing Ourselves by Sarah-Jayne Blakemore).  They will learn more if they can tell someone else what they know.  This can be as simple as think-pair-share.  It can be as complex as finding an expert to present their findings to.  At least once per task, your students should be explaining their thinking to SOMEONE.
6. Choice - I do not mean completely free choice because that is dangerous and not educationally sound, but where you can work in limited choice, you will get more engagement and better work.  Create a menu of ways students can choose from to show their work.  (You can write a song, record a podcast, or draw illustrations showing the trig identities.)  You could give them list of topics to do a project on.  (You can learn about electrochemistry equally well by studying batteries, electroplating, or electric eels, so let them choose which one they want to learn about.)
7. Novelty - The human brain craves familiarity, which is why we watch TV re-runs and listen to old songs, but it also craves novelty, which is why seek out new restaurants.  Sometimes, when we find something good, we use it too much.  (When GRACE teachers discovered Kahoot, kids got sick of reviewing for every test in every class with it.) Just because something is good doesn’t mean you want to do it 180 days in a row.
8. Authentic - Authentic doesn’t have to mean that it is actually happening.  (This was good to hear because I have had trouble trying to connect everything to actual situations and feeling guilty about it.)  It doesn’t mean real-world.  In fact, you may not want it to be.  If you have a student whose home life is that of an alcoholic parent who has to get their siblings ready for school, you don’t want to ask them to write about something fun they do with their parents.  It means it COULD happen.  John Almarode's example involved an elementary ecology project.  The teacher had given students the assignment to create an imaginary creature and then figure out what habitat it would have to have. (Now, I do have to say I think that might be a fun creative writing or art assignment because of the imagination it involves, but it wouldn’t be a great ecology project the student isn’t learning about real ecology.)  Instead, give them a project in which they are zookeepers who have to choose an exotic animal and design a zoo habitat that will keep that animal alive in the climate where you live.  That’s authentic without being real-world.  

If you are thinking that there is no way you could have all 8 of these every day, take a deep breath.  You are right.  You can’t.  The point isn’t to get them all every day.  The point is to work in as many as you can where you can.  What the walkthrough data revealed is that having at least three of these will result in 87% sustained engagement (and the first two should already be a normal part of your practice).  Having only 2 of them resulted in (are you ready for this) only 17% engagement.  Isn’t that crazy?  Just the difference in one of these items makes that big of a difference.  By the way, having only one of them results in zero engagement.  

This seems overwhelming, but if you have created a positive classroom climate, you should already have #2, and if you are a teacher who cares enough about your practice to read educational blogs, you probably already communicate clear expectations, so #1 is a given.  Working in one or two more of these should be the first thing you do when designing new projects.

As I sat in this session, I tried to think of the topics I have the hardest time making engaging.  As much as I love the periodic table, it isn’t the easiest thing to get 8th-graders to love.  There aren’t a ton of hands-on ways to teach it.  At the end the session, I thought, “Well, I’ve identified a problem, but I still don’t have a solution.”  During the next morning’s keynote, it suddenly clicked. I think I got it.  I can put in novelty and social interaction by having the kids be elements and move (oh, yeah, in another session with Marcia Tate, we were encouraged to have students move) according to properties.  Something along the lines giving each child an element to be and making the room the periodic table.  Determine if you are a metal or non-metal and move to the part of the room where you should be.  Raise your hand if you have low electronegativity.  Who has the highest electronegativity (one of them will have to be fluorine)?  Who has 8 valence electrons?  I’m still working this out in my mind, but I think it could be a great way to make some of what I am doing more personal (and Marcia Tate also encourages role-playing as a technique).  If I put the elements in a google doc and let them each choose the one they want to be (but remove it from the list because we can’t have two of the same element), then they will also have choice.

As John had us do at the conference, turn to your neighbor and say, “We can totally do this.”