Growth Spurts

Last week, I wrote about the growth that comes from small but consistently applied effort. This week, I thought it would be a good idea to address the fact that, while the effort applied may be consistent, the results might not be. They may appear as "growth spurts" that baffle both the child and his or her parents. With a little knowledge of science, you can help them connect the dots.

Have you ever tried to start a fire with the "rubbing two sticks together" method? It's not as easy as it looks on TV. It takes a long time of applying force at exactly the right angle and speed before enough energy is built up to bring the small pile of dry leaves (or whatever you are using for fuel) to reach the activation energy for that reaction. Something that has been smoldering for several minutes suddenly bursts into flame. With some selective time edits, film makers make it seem like it happened quickly; but it didn't because it couldn't. Your arms simply could not apply the amount of force needed all at once that would be required to make it happen quickly.  It requires a steady building of energy to finally reach the tipping point.  (Conversely, you cannot accumulate the needed energy over a very long period of time, so you can't take breaks.) On the uphill side of the slope, it would be easy to give up, thinking, "Well, this isn't working, so why should I continue?"

I take a weightlifting class at the Y.  Occasionally, I attempt to add 5 pounds to the bar and see if I can get through a set with an increased load. If I can, does it mean that I am 5 pounds stronger that day than I was during the previous class?  Of course not. It means that I had been progressively building strength throughout the past couple of months. On a graph, it would look like a sudden spike, but if it were possible to add half a pound at a time, I might see a smooth curve in my growth.

While the brain is neither a muscle nor a combustion reaction, some similar principles will be evident when students begin making change. Small, progressive action applied consistently over time might not show small, consistent improvement. A student might apply great study techniques that don't show an improved grade on their very next test. That's likely because there was some foundational knowledge that they did not acquire in the past when they were using ineffective techniques. I wouldn't expect to take a weightlifting class using proper form today would mean that I could add ten pounds tomorrow; I know that will take time. But we tend not to apply that same type of thought to cognitive work.  We think if we change our study habits today, our grade will improve tomorrow.  But the reality is that, just like the muscles in your body, your cognitive muscles need time to grow and adapt too. 

Why is it important to be explicit about this?  Why should we talk to students about recognizing that the apparent growth spurt actually comes from longer periods of sustained effort?  Won't it be obvious to them that success comes from improved study habits?  Well, no. As humans, we are are really bad at recognizing cause and effect relationships, especially when there is a slow, slightly invisible nature to them. If a student does make an excellent grade on a test, they (and their parents) are likely to attribute that to something they did on the day of the test or the night before. Perhaps, my sleeping position the night before made a difference; perhaps cramming really does work. Maybe, it's what I ate for breakfast.  Then, you have a student who, like a baseball player who won't change his socks during a winning streak, thinks they have to eat oatmeal every test day rather than recognizing the slow and steady combination of habits that led to that good performance.  

When a student does well, the wise teacher should congratulate the efforts they have been making and the strategies they have been implementing and the habits they are developing.  That's what it looks like to develop a growth mindset. It's not just about using the word "yet" every time you get the opportunity; it's about teaching kids the power of growth through sustained work. 

So, when you see growth that appears quick, remind them that a lot of work led up to that. It wasn't the grade fairy that decided to bless their paper today.

The Power of Small, Consistent Effort

Last week, I did something big. 

I mailed in my last house payment - 9 and a half years ahead of schedule!

Did I just get a massive salary bump?  Nope, I'm making about half of what pulled in when I was teaching. Did a rich uncle die and leave me an inheritance? No, as far as I know I have no wealthy distant relatives (or close relatives). Did I win the lottery? Not a chance - literally -  because I don't play the lottery, so my chances of winning are 0.0% (just slightly below the 0.0000000034% it would be if I did play). 

So how did this happen? Because of the best advice I've ever followed, and it wasn't even given to me.  I happened to be at a birthday party where I overheard Bob, a financially savvy man giving advice to a younger man, whose name I do not know, who was about to buy his first home. He said, "Never pay only the amount it says on the bill. Always pay something over. Sometimes, it may be more. Sometimes, you may be rounding up, but whatever you can do over in any month will save you a lot in the long run."  I thought that sounded reasonable and have applied it to every loan I've had since.

For 19 years of that time, I was on a teacher's salary.  While I was doing pretty well in the 19th year, the first few years of that time were slim. I was still in credit card debt at that time, so the amount I had to put over on the mortgage payment was small. Once the card was paid off, I was freed up to add more while dealing with some other costs. When my car died and had to be replaced, and I had to lower the amount I was paying over on the house again. At times when I got a tax refund, I was able to put more on it.  When I left teaching 18 months ago and started my job at the Y, I was thankful I had savings to pull from. But I never made a single payment that was only the minimum. Even if the amount over was, as it once was, $8.51, I knew those small amounts would still add up.  And they did.

"This is supposed to be an education blog," I hear you saying. "What does this have to do with education?" Well, thank you for asking; I'm glad you always do when I have seemed to stray from the point.

Some students have a long way to go when it comes to scholarship.  Perhaps, they stopped paying attention during online learning and have yet to figure out how to re-adapt. Perhaps, they stay up too late at night on their phones and come to you in a less than optimal state of alertness. Perhaps they haven't had to study in the past or have gotten by until now with ineffective techniques. 

Regardless of the changes they need to make, they cannot make them all overnight. They can start going to bed earlier, but it is going to be a minute before that results in noticeable change because their body must adapt. And some may need to back up their bed time by 10 minutes per night in order to make it work because trying to back it up two hours all at once will just result in tossing and turning. It might take more than one test for newly acquired study techniques to show improvement.  They may only be able to sustain 10 minutes of focused attention during studying and need to make it 12 next week and 15 the week after that.  

The human brain resists change because it worries you might die if you deviate from the status quo. And, it really resists big changes that happen fast.  So, encourage your students not to take a New Year's Resolution approach to improvement. Encourage them to change one thing until it becomes normal and then take on another.  These small but consistent efforts add up over time, but more importantly, they are sustainable in a way that big, sudden changes are not. 

This is bigger than one student or one test. Small, consistently sustained improvements eventually result in good habits.  Good habits eventually result in more self control. More self control produces better character. Better character contributes to a more responsible citizenry. You see where I'm going. These things that seem so small in our students as individuals ultimately make the world better for everyone. 

And you, as teacher, get to be part of that with your own small, consistent effort in the lives of your students.

A Note for the First Year Teacher as we Head into November

Hello first year teacher.  It's November. You have finished your first quarter and are heading towards the holiday season. I'm going to ask you some questions whose answers I already know.

Are you tired? Yes, of course you are. You've been putting all of your physical and mental energy into the last three months.

Were your kids chaotic because Friday was Halloween? Yes, of course they were. It's good that they'll do most of their sugar loading over the weekend, though.

Have you had a demoralizing parent conference? Probably so. It may be the only profession where they expect you to be just as skilled in your first year as you will be ten years later. But I hope you have had an encouraging one too.

Have you had a demoralizing conversation with an experienced teacher? Probably so. Some of them are burned out but aren't aware of it. But I hope you have had a lot of encouraging ones too. 

Being new to anything is hard. You don't have routines and past experience to help you shortcut your thinking, so your working memory is at capacity most of the time.

The good news is:  It gets better.  Some of it takes a while, but I promise it does get better. 

• Some things get easier quickly, as you learn the names of students and get more comfortable with your daily routines.  
• Some things get better incrementally as you are better able to notice oncoming issues and head them off at the pass. You learn better classroom management techniques and employ them with more deft. You develop more efficient grading routines.
• Some things take a few years. Hold on for year three.  That's when you will realize that your content and pedagogy are firmly under your feet and you think less about them while you are teaching. That's when you are able to more fully engage with the students and fluidly teach at the same time.

The most important difference is that you will grow in confidence as you gain experience. After 25 years of teaching middle and high school, I was fully aware that there were things I didn't know and there were still things to learn, but I also knew when I was right and when it was okay to insist that students do what I wanted them to do. That's likely something you spend a lot of time questioning now, but you will spend much less time stressing over that as you gain experience.

If you change contexts, it might start over again - a little.  Teaching in a new school or taking on a new discipline means having less assistance from your habits and long term memory. But, you will hold your pedagogy knowledge and be able to catch on to new things more rapidly.  About 18 months ago, I began teaching indoor cycle classes at the YMCA. When I first started, I was constantly miscueing times and having songs end before I was done. I'm a sub, so I often attempt to mimic the instructor for whom I am subbing, but I have finally developed a style of my own.  Last Monday night, on the way out the door, one of the men who has been in many of my classes said, "She's getting harder," to which a lady replied, "I think she's just more confident that she was a year ago."  They were both right. Because I am more confident, I know how hard I can push a class (while still making the point that they are allowed to do whatever they want to) and when a break might be needed.

Thank you for choosing this profession, especially right now.  If you are in your first year, it means that you were a high school junior or senior during lock down and choose to major in education in 2021.  2021 - the hardest year experienced teachers ever had - and you choose to enter the profession then!  Good for you.  

Hang in there. View this year as an investment in your future years. It's an exhausting profession, but it is also an extremely rewarding one. Contrary to advice you may have been given, don't avoid the teacher's lounge; just find the right people in it. Befriend an experienced teacher (not one of the burned out ones, find someone who still has enthusiasm) and learn everything you can from them.  Don't be afraid to ask for help or admit when you don't know something. Whatever mistake you just made, someone else in your building has made it too, and they can give you advice about how to fix it.

Rest well during Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks. Don't be surprised if you get a little sick on the first days of the break; it's like your immune system knows you have time now. Occasionally, take a break by letting something take longer to grade than you want it to or by satisficing (making it good enough to suffice). Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. 

And keep telling yourself that you are learning this year, so you can teach in future years. 

Think RIght, Do Right, Love Right

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When is a Scaffold NOT a Scaffold

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Purpose of School

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

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

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

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

Career Preparation

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

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

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

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

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

Inculturation

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

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

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

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

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

Personal Expression

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

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

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

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

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

Human Development

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

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

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

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

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

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

Classroom Noise is Context Specific

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Type of Thinking Expected

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

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

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

Quality of Sound

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

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

Quantity of Sound

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

Education isn't simple:

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

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