Greenhouse or Garden? Adapting Education Research

We all learned the scientific method in the fifth grade, so we all think we understand science.  (That's why people with no scientific credentials whatsoever feel free to go online and disagree with experienced experts.)  Here's the problem, what you learned in elementary school was, by necessity, oversimplified.  The experiments you did for your middle and high school science fair did not give you any sense of what it means to run a clinical trial or perform a longitudinal study.  It did not give you an understanding of how methodology or sample size influences the credibility of conclusions.  This is where educators find themselves in a time where we would like to apply good science but perhaps don't understand what that means.  The following is just some advice (i.e. meddling) from a brain research enthusiast with a science education background.

1.  Good science takes time. - I have been bothered in the past year to see how many seminars are being offered (some as early as April 2020) on "best practices in distance learning."  We haven't been doing distance long enough for there to be valid scientific research in this area.  The people putting on these seminars are presenting the same presentation they have been doing for years, throwing "in distance learning" onto the title, and using the desperation of educators to push the agenda they've had for years.  That is not only poor science; it is poor ethics.  We should stop rewarding them for it.  It would take more than one year of data to draw any kind of meaningful conclusion.  Most scientifically valid education research tracks student performance for several years, and the best ones track the same group throughout their entire educational career.  When you are looking for a valid source, look to see how long the participants in the study were tracked.  The longer, the better.

2. Good science involves large numbers.  - When I teach scientific validity to my 8th-grade students, I start with two important things, how to mitigate the impact of bias and how to recognize the difference between anecdotal evidence and experimentation.  Remember when we got chain emails with a story about someone's aunt being fatally ill from drinking Diet Coke and encouraging you to pass it along to ten other people?  You know nothing about the aunt's medical history or life habits, but you are supposed to boycott an industry and encourage your friends to do so.  There is still a widespread belief that MSG is bad for you, and that started with a prank letter to a medical journal.  I was listening to the radio one day when a study was being discussed, and I was fairly interested in the result until they said the sample size was 12 people.  I might as well just ask around amongst my friends and call it a study.  When you are looking at research, the first thing you should look for is the sample size.   It will look like this: n = 1000.  That is telling you how many subjects the study had.  The bigger the number, the more valid the result.  

3. Credentials matter. - In recent years, we have come to believe that my ignorance is as valid as your expertise because they are side by side on social media.  I have watched videos online made by college students and seen educators respond as though it is credible because it happens to agree with what they already think.  I have also watched educators argue with serious, experienced researchers because they couldn't let go of learning styles and didn't want to take the time to understand the difference between learning styles and dual coding.  Take the time to seek out legitimate researchers, not just watch a youtube video from the hottest edu-celebrity, even if he is dressed like a pirate (strike that, especially if he is dressed like a pirate).  One place to start is with John Hattie (although he is often misinterpreted and misused in the ways I addressed last week).  Another is Barbara Oakley because while she is not a researcher herself, she is excellent at communicating the research of others and cites credible sources.  Dr. David Rose is excellent if you are willing and able to digest a lot of data.  Pooja Agarwal is very practical in application.  When you find good people, allow them to recommend other good people.

4.  Don't just adopt.  Adapt.  -  Because education matters so much, we want a silver bullet that will work in every class.  Here's the problem.  Your classroom is different from mine.  Your discipline has different constraints than mine.  Your students may come from a different socio-economic condition than mine.  The ages of your students are different from mine.  Your comfort level with using certain tools is different from mine.  Science, when done well, is very narrowly drawn.  An experiment has exactly one independent variable, and the researcher has tight control over the conditions and context.  They even get to choose their participants.  The conclusions they draw are a result of that level of control.  In your classroom, you have some control over your conditions, but you have none over the background of your students or which students you have.  Does this mean we cannot apply scientific research to our classrooms?  Of course not.  It means we must adapt research to our context, not fully adopt what comes out of the lab.  The best analogy I have heard came from Dr. David B. Daniel, PhD.  He said educational research done in the lab is like growing a plant in a greenhouse.  You get to test one particular growth method while keeping the temperature, moisture level, light level, etc. constant.  Applying educational research in your classroom, he says, is more like growing a plant in your yard.  You can water, but you can't control the amount of rain or sun.  Animals may come along and attempt to eat your plant or poop seeds into the system.  Does it mean the growth method you used in the greenhouse is no longer useful?  No.  It means you may not see the exact same results, and you may need to adapt it to your conditions.  

It takes effort, but I encourage you, as an educator, to educate yourself.  Find credible researchers with good methodology, and then adapt their methods to your classroom.  Some of them will be, surprisingly, tried and true methods you have been using for years.  You will just get to do them with more confidence, knowing you are backed by good science.  Some of them will contradict things you have thought were valuable.  For example, did you know that highlighting what you read has a negative impact on your ability to retain the information?  Those will enable you to change the advice you give to your students so that you can provide them with better support.  Find a couple of books you can read this summer or begin following a researcher's blog next weekend.  Start adapting their findings to your garden, and you will find that you are generating good results.

Education Research - More Than the Headline

A few years ago, I heard a strange story that was supposedly based on scientific research going around.  People were saying that scientific research had proven that dairy companies intentionally added chemicals to cheese to make it addictive.  This raised red flags in my mind (and not just because I love cheese) because nothing about that sounded like credible scientific research.  Scientists don't tend to use words like "intentional" in official publications.  I looked up the paper this story was based on, and it bore no resemblance to the story I was hearing.  The paper detailed, not a scientific experiment, but a survey.  Its purpose was to find what might contribute to the compulsive eating of some foods.  The word addictive wasn't even used in the main paper, but in one footnote, detailing that what a survey participant said.  They asked people to tell what foods they ate when they were happy, sad, bored, etc. and looked for trends.  Not surprisingly, pizza and macaroni and cheese were at the top of many people's lists.  The conclusion of the scientists was that foods high in fat and starch were more likely to be foods that were eaten compulsively.  This result was not shocking or correctly reported.

Setting aside that this is one of the dumbest studies anyone has undertaken, my point is that people who knew nothing about science reported that cheese was addictive, and people who read that headline added that it was intentionally addictive.  Like a game of telephone, what little scientific validity this survey began with was completely lost by the time the story got to me.

Wondering what this has to do with education?  Let me tell you about one that has likely entered your classroom.  

I don't allow students to listen to music with earbuds when they are working on things in my class or study hall.  I have a variety of reasons for this, from wanting students to be present in their own lives without isolation to my knowledge of working memory and how song lyrics interfere with the retention of knowledge.  Students then start telling me that "studies show" that listening to music while studying helps you.  They are referring to a study from 1993, which came to be known as The Mozart Effect.  The problem is, like the cheese report, they are not basing their argument on the actual research.  If you look u the Mozart Effect, you will find a very different story than "listening to music helps you study."  First, the research ONLY included Mozart, not music generally.  Second, they played Mozart for the studies participants for ten minutes BEFORE assigning tasks to them, not during the task.  Third, they only tracked creative solutions to problem-solving, not memory-based tasks.  Of course, what got widely reported was "Music makes you smarter," and there are classroom teachers who weren't even born when the study was done still referencing it as though that's what it said.  Never mind that there have been about a dozen studies since then saying that music with lyrics interferes with memory-based tasks, especially when listened to through headphones.  Most people are either too lazy too look past the headline, or they are unqualified to interpret the published research.

I recently had a conversation with the moderator of the Learning and the Brain Twitter account.  I love the things he posts because they don't shy away from things with nuance.  They ask questions like, "Does cold calling on students increase class engagement?" and then give answers like, "It turns out, depending on class climate, the experience level of the teacher, and methodology . . . kind of."  I love that.  People have this weird idea that science leads to all-encompassing answers to every question it addresses, and Learning and the Brain isn't afraid to say, "Hey, wait, context matters." This is an especially good essay on the importance of context.

Does this mean we can't apply scientific research in our classrooms?  Of course not.  Next week's blog will be about how to adapt scientific educational research to your practice.  What it means is that we have to do our homework.  We have to look at the method of research, not just the conclusion.  Science, when done well, is narrow in scope.  It tests one independent variable and draws nuanced conclusions based on the conditions of the experiment (another reason why the cheese article was stupid - sorry, I'm a little bitter about that one).  Applying it to your life is even more complex.  Don't run from that complexity.  Embrace it.  Embrace it by reading the full paper, not just the headline.  Embrace it by being willing to tell a student they are interpreting the data incorrectly.  Embrace it by knowing yourself and what you can and cannot apply in your classroom, school, or district.  

Give Your Brain a Break

I had something planned to write about this week.  I know I did.  I spent time thinking about it and pre-writing in my head when I was out walking last week.  I cannot, however, remember what it was.  I normally post on Sundays, but I didn't post yesterday because when I sat down to write, I couldn't remember what I was going to write about.  I thought perhaps I would remember by this morning, but it hasn't happened.  Yesterday, my mom and I spent some time with my 94-year-old granny.  She has said a number of things lately that we believe is remembering things from months ago but believing they happened this week.  You may have found difficulty in recent weeks, searching for the next word you want to say or remembering what you had planned to do next.  We are all a mental step behind where we are accustomed to being.

Part of the reason for our mental slowness is the imbalance of neurotransmitters that come from social distancing.  Some of it is due to the diet many adopted during the pandemic as it did not include the nutrients that were good for the brain and did include ingredients that are bad for cognitive function.  If you aren't making a concerted effort to get some sunlight, your brain will be affected as well.  If you have noticed a more profound drop in the past few weeks than the rest of the pandemic, it is likely your brain is also suffering from the impact of world events on your mental function.  Even if they are not impacting your life directly, if they are in the back of your mind, they are taking up space in your working memory.  That lowers your ability to hold as many other things in your mind at once as you usually do.

So, what can we do?  I addressed some strategies back in April in my post about isolation as a single person.  Here are a few ideas.

Eat right - It's time to stop using the pandemic as an excuse to eat trash.  You know what you are supposed to do, and you are an adult who can make decisions, so make better ones.  In particular, for your brain, you need vitamins E and D and Omega 3 fatty acids.  You can supplement if you have to, but it is always better absorbed in the context of food and natural digestion.

Get some exercise - You don't have to reorganize your life to put in an hour-long, extra-strenuous workout.  I'm talking about going for a walk.  Take a lap around the outside of your house.  The mental break, fresh air, and vitamin D inducing sunlight will help your brain function.

Put your phone down - I know everyone has grown to think of their phone as a part of their left hand, but it doesn't have to be.  The non-stop scroll of news and social media posts about the news are keeping it in your working memory.  Set a time boundary (half an hour in the morning or one hour in the evening, scrolling during lunchtime - whatever works for you) on your exposure to news.  Reading the same story over and over again makes your brain respond as if the event were happening over and over again.  You aren't more informed.  You are more anxious, and it is bad for your brain.

Challenge your brain - Do something to keep your brain exercised.  I do a daily crossword puzzle.  You might want to read a chapter of a book and do Sudoku.  It doesn't really matter what it is as long as it provides a good amount of challenge for your brain, keeping it stimulated and working.  When you are trying to remember something, don't just Google it right away.  Give your brain some time to try to remember it.

Cut yourself (and others) some slack - I'm an organizer and a planner, and I try to teach my kids to organize as well.  It's an important part of equipping them for life, so I am have always held them to due dates and deadlines.  I take their late work, but there is a penalty, because I don't believe I am preparing them for adult life (where bills have late fees and there are consequences to submitting applications late) if I don't hold them accountable for when something is due.  I am, however, cutting them way more slack during this time.  Because I know we are ALL having trouble with our working memory, I am not penalizing them for something being late by a day, and I am reminding them more if things are missing.  I am giving less penalty for late submissions than I used to.  The EduTwitter mob would find it horrible that I am assigning anything with a deadline.  I believe they are wrong.  Preparing them for adult life is still important, even in a pandemic, and sending them the message that it isn't is likely to lead them to the conclusion that they won't have an adult life.  While I plan to return to more strict policies in the future, it is only fair to show everyone around us an extra measure of grace.

Now that you have finished this post, put your phone down and go for an outdoor walk.  Your brain will be glad that you did.

Intellectual Honesty

In my teaching career, I've seen these two scenarios play out more than a dozen times.  

A new teacher is hired.  The students decide she is cool.  They are enraptured, and she can do no wrong.  Mistakes are forgiven.  Best intentions are assumed.  Inappropriate actions are overlooked.  

A new teacher is hired.  Students decide she is horrible.  They put a target on her, and she can do nothing right.  Mistakes are amplified.  Worst intentions are assumed.  Fully appropriate actions are complained about for days. 

A few years ago, during lunch duty, a small group of students walked up to me and said, "Do you think it's okay for a teacher to . . . "  I've been teaching long enough to recognize this ploy.  The students give you only the information you would need to agree with them, and then they can say you are on their side.  (By the way, most of the time, students don't even know this is what they are doing.)  Rather than agree or disagree with the action, I said, "How would you feel about this if Miss Smith (not her name) did it?"  They said, "It's not Miss Smith.  It's Mrs. Jones (also not her name)."  I told them that I knew who they were talking about from the beginning, but that wasn't my question.  My challenge to them was to imagine how they would feel about the very same action if was taken by a teacher they like.  The girls in this group were willing to engage with me, and they said, "I guess we would think Miss Smith was trying to help by giving us practice before a test."  That's exactly what they would have assumed, and they would have been right.  "Is it possible," I said, "that Mrs. Jones is also trying to help you?"  While they never grew to like Mrs. Jones, I hope that this conversation helped them assess their teachers' actions in a more intellectually honest way.

Reading social media for the past five years has felt like the opposite of this conversation.  I am, of course, talking about politics, but it applies more broadly.  If a celebrity you like makes an off-color joke, we claim he was taken out of context or he meant well or was too young to understand the mistakes he was making.  If a celebrity we don't like makes the same joke, we jump on the cancel them hashtag so fast we make it trend.  Teachers on Twitter will excuse horrifying tweets from an Educelebrity they follow, but when someone they don't like says the most innocuous thing about education, they press the caps lock button, find their hand-clap emojis, and light them up.  

The only infallible person is Jesus, and your favorite political leader is not Jesus.  He may do some things right, but he is a fallen human being who does a lot of things wrong.  It's okay to admit that.  It doesn't mean you have abandoned him or that you are disloyal or that you aren't a good member of your political party (which is not something we were ever intended to be loyal to in the first place).  The guy you don't like isn't Satan, and he doesn't do absolutely everything wrong.  Acknowledging one or two positives about him will not weaken your stance on political issues.  If anything, it may strengthen them because you won't come off as a mindless follower.

When the President met with Kim Jong Un in the first year of his term, he came back with a very weak agreement, trading in military exercises on the border for very little in return.  There were people in my timeline that acted like he had created world peace when they would have lost their minds if President Obama had come back with the same deal.  When the President moved the Israeli embassy to Jerusalem, there were people acting as though he had just set off WWIII when they would have cheered Clinton if he had done it.  No one stops to ask themselves how they would feel if someone else had done it or what they even think about the issue itself.  The motto, "If my guy does it, it's great.  If the other guy does it, it's horrible." is not the way adults should operate.  

People are going to have strong opinions on every issue, and I am no exception to that.  I am not asking anyone to abandon their beliefs.  I am asking that we approach each event and issue with a degree of intellectual honesty that we have not been exercising.  Do you agree with what was done, regardless of who did it?  Does the opinion of a person sway you more than your moral compass.  If so, you may be engaging in idolatry.  As adults, we set an example for kids, and right now, we are setting a pretty bad one.  

What I Hope They'll Remember

Most of us have, for better or worse, vivid memories of our middle and high school years.  And, we went to school in precedented times, comparably rather dull compared to what my students are experiencing.  Tomorrow, I return from Christmas break.  Contrary to popular opinion, dropping the ball on the 31st didn't change anything (I promise this is my last slam at New Year's until next year).  I will return tomorrow with my mask in place, walk through the temperature scanner, meet in social distanced department meetings, and plan for more hybrid teaching.  Last school year, it was the final quarter that was upended by COVID, but this year, it influences the entire academic year.  Our students will remember this year, telling their kids and grandkids what it was like to live through the COVID pandemic.  I hope what they remember will be formative of their character.  Here's what I'm hoping for.

I hope students will remember teachers who did not panic.  There's a professional line between being authentic with students and sharing things that are not good for them.  My personal rule is, "A student should not go home worried about me."  When the pandemic hit, teachers felt a variety of things.  Some feared contracting the virus themselves or bringing it home to their families.  Some worried about their students whose home situations were not ideal.  Some were worried about the impact of virtual learning on the education of their students.  We were all sad that we wouldn't be able to connect with our students in the normal ways.  I don't know what every student saw from their teachers, but one of the things I am most proud of at GRACE is that we shared emotion, not panic.  Our students saw us cry, but they saw us wipe those tears, pick up our markers, and keep going.  They saw us put on our masks and do our best  I hope when they are adults who encounter difficult challenges that they will do the same.

I hope students will remember that teachers did everything they could to help them.  A thousand decisions have to be made every day in a normal school year, but I am usually confident in those decisions.  During pandemic teaching, I made a lot of decisions that I had no way of applying my experience to.  I tried to let my students know that whatever the result, I would find a way to make it fair.  Overall, I think we came to a good place, in the best interest of the student, while holding to the integrity of our classes.  Where we stumbled, we admitted it, apologized, and worked together to make it right.  I hope when they are adults who make mistakes that they will do the same.

I hope my students recognize that they can handle more than they think they can.  Stress is not fun, and there have been very stressful days, both in the spring during lockdown and in the fall during hybrid teaching.  I have sometimes sounded heartless to others when I have said things like, "Crying doesn't make you (or me) right."  I'm not.  I don't like to see my kids in tears, but I know that you don't teach grit, resilience, growth mindset, or any other kind of character development if you make decisions based on emotions, yours or theirs.  Chronic stress is unhealthy, but bouts of stress are actually good for you.  You go into a situation believing you cannot do it, then do it, and come out on the otherside realize you are stronger than you had imagined.  I hope when my students are adults, and they encounter times of stress, they will remember that they are strong persevere.

I hope my students will remember to be kind to people in need.  In normal times, we sometimes have the tendency to either look down on people who use government and charitable resources or pity them in a way that depersonalizes them.  We rarely imagine that it could be us at any time.  There were many people who lived perfectly normal lives pre-pandmic, paying their bills each month, carrying a little debt, but never worrying about whether they would be able to afford groceries.  When everything shut down in March, those same people didn't know how they would make it until May.  I was blessed to keep my job, but it was eye-opening to realize that you never know when you may be the one in need.  I hope my students will grow up to be people who give to charity and help their unemployed neighbor and do whatever they can to help.

Most of all, I hope my students will remember the people who stepped up.  The first that come to mind are nurses and doctors who cared for COVID patients.  Despite grave physical risk to themselves, they walked into hospital rooms and cared for patients.  We don't yet know what mental and emotional toll this will have on the medical profession in the long term, but dealing with patients who cannot have their loved ones with them and seeing a relentless amount of death while hearing member of the public refuse to do their part is going to have long term effects.  Grocery store checkers don't get paid much.  It's an entry level job, often done by high school students.  None of them took the job, thinking that it would one day be dangerous, but my grocery store has been open every day of the pandemic.  Add to that list delivery drivers and postal workers, whose service we literally could not have lived without.  The scientific community stepped up.  The development of MRNA vaccines at this pace is just short of miraculous.  These people worked round the clock, under pressure, and did an amazing thing.  Hiccups are happening with distribution, as they are bound to, but even with those stumbles, we are witness scientific history from regular people who stepped up when needed.  I have seen people from every walk of life step up, from textile who sewed masks during the PPE shortages to engineers who figured out how to make ventilators more efficient to people who put stuffed bears in their windows to provide joy for children to the news media who did their jobs while being called vile names to the Chic-Fil-A employee who still tells me it is her pleasure to serve me waffle fries.  I hope my students will remember that they can step up from wherever they are, no matter what kind of job they have.  I hope they will remember that people find creative ways to help and will do the same.

I know they are going to remember some things I wish they didn't.  They'll be able to name the people who didn't step up.  They'll remember the santizer hoarders and the toilet paper shortage.  They'll remember things that weren't fair and how frightened they were.  But, I hope, they'll chose to focus on the memories from which they can learn so this time won't be wasted.