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.