One Student - Many Influences

This weekend, GRACE held our annual senior dinner.  I'm pretty sure I write about it every year, and I may share the same insight each time.  That is because each year, I am grateful that students have more than one teacher in their lives.

At our senior dinner, each student is spoken about by a teacher who signed up specifically for them.  Because we are limited to 200 words, each speech must cut to the heart of the matter, reflecting the character of each student.  While I love giving my own speeches, what always impresses me are the speeches of other teachers about students that I teach as well.  I get to hear stories about them that make me smile and some that reinforce what I already know.  But, the ones that always strike me are the ones that tell me something I didn't know about that child.  A student who is driving me crazy has a teacher who sees perseverance in them.  A student that I may view as a clique leader is seen by another teacher as a loyal friend.  The same may also be true in the reverse.  I may find a student delightful that another teacher would have described as foolish.

This night always reminds me why it is so good that students have more than one teacher in their lives.  Back in the days of the one-room schoolhouse, when students had the same teacher from kindergarten through high school, they only learned one philosophy of the world, one view of education, and only had one voice recognizing who they were.  While there is much that is flawed in our current system, I maintain that it is good for students to have as many as 45 teachers in their K-12 school experience.  That's 45 voices speaking into their lives about who they are and what their potential is.  While some of those teachers will not see the promise of that student's life, others will.  While that child may not respond well to the teaching style of one teacher, another teacher will spark a love of math or reading or art or history that will last a lifetime.  

A student doesn't have to experience education in one way.  Some teachers allow students unlimited retakes, instilling a sense of grace in a student that may inspire them to do more with that second chance.  Other teachers are strict about deadlines, teaching students the importance of following through on commitments.  A student needs both of those lessons, and they cannot get them both from the same teacher.  Some teachers are focused on making learning fun; others teach students that something doesn't have to be fun to be valuable.  These are both great things for students to experience.  We sometimes sacrifice common sense on the altar of consistency, but students need to see that adults can have a variety of philosophies and still respect and love each other (because they are, for sure, not seeing that on social media).  As we approach teacher appreciation week, appreciate that teacher that challenges your student in a way others have not or makes them see things differently than other teachers have.  Honor the teacher that makes your student uncomfortable because they have to change the way they think.  

A few years ago at a Learning and the Brain conference, Dr. David Daniel delivered a keynote in which he talked about the art of applying the science of learning to our classrooms.  He said, "Don't run from complexity.  Honor it."  

Teaching students how to adapt to people with different views honors the complexity of education, the complexity of students, and the complexity of the world.

Warming Up - A Short Suggestion

Here's another post based on things I've observed at the gym.  

All exercise classes start with a warm-up.  This is true whether it is a "thrive" pilates class, meant for senior citizens (which I learned after being 25 years younger than the average), or a butt-kicking spin class with Stacey A.  When it comes to our bodies, it is understood that we cannot go from the street to the red zone without some transition time. Doing something easy for five minutes allows the following forty to be more efficient.  Without the "sacrifice" of those first few minutes, we wouldn't be able to push our bodies to do more in the rest of the workout.

Do we understand that when it comes to our minds?  Because of our limited class time, we sometimes expect students to dive into the deep end as soon as the bell rings, thinking we can't afford to "sacrifice" any of our valuable time.  Perhaps, our students would benefit from the same kind of warm-up time for their brains that we would give their bodies.  Starting class with a couple of basic recall questions related to the deeper thinking we want them to do would be helpful in making their thinking more efficient.  By bringing the basic facts to the surface of their working memory, we might actually be able to push their analysis, synthesis, or evaluation abilities to do more in the remaining minutes of the class.

It's worth a try.

Risk, Reward, and Student Ambition

GRACE Christian School has put on many amazing plays over the years.  Some were funny; some were dramatic.  Some told historically accurate stories; some were pure fantasy.  During the hybrid year, we had a radio play requiring almost no set; we have also recreated Narnia and the Secret Garden.  This weekend, I saw what may be our most ambitious effort yet.  A cast and crew of nearly 50 staged Disney's High School Musical.  

This play was a risk for everyone.  Our music program is growing, but it is still relatively small.  Some of the kids on that stage had never acted before but had sung with a choir.  Some had acted, but only in straight plays with no music.  For the crew, a musical production requires more light changes and sound cues than other types of plays, so they have to be truly on top of things.  Because High School Musical is such a popular movie, the audience (every show was to a fully-packed house) knows every lyric to every song.  The potential for error is high. 

When the risk of failure is high, the reward for success is high as well.  That's why we do it.  As I sat in the audience yesterday, I saw students who could tell they were pulling off something amazing, and they were enjoying every second of it.  Acting allows students to do and say things they wouldn't in their real lives.  One of the kindest students in the world gets to enjoy playing the conniving Sharpay.  A serious student can experience what it is like to be goofy.  During the final moments of "We're All in This Together," grinning students came into the aisles and invited people to stand up and dance and sing with them.  It was fabulous.

We should encourage students to take risks.  Plays provide that opportunity, but our classes can too.  We should provide opportunities for them to stretch beyond their current abilities.  We should give them chances to try something big, knowing we will be there to support them if they fail.  In our chemistry and physics classes, for example, we have a project called the "free choice" project.  It's pretty much what it sounds like.  Students choose their own chemistry or physics related topic, work either alone or in groups, and explore it in whatever way they would like.  Most students play it fairly safe, which is fine; but when a student says they would like to do something especially challenging,  I encourage them to try.  Sometimes, it is successful, and sometimes, it is not.  A few years ago, a student asked if he could build a rail gun.  We talked through the obstacles involved and discussed where he might seek out the expert assistance he needed (because it was definitely not me).  We planned for success, knowing it was unlikely.  While he never launched a projectile, he put in more hours and learned more physics than anyone who has ever done this project.  I told him at the end that I would rather he aim high and miss than aim low and succeed.  This year, a student said he wanted to send something into space.  He showed me what he had in mind.  My only question was, "Are your parents going to be okay with you spending this kind of money?" because the balloon and helium setup were expensive.  The weather was uncooperative, and his first attempt on a weekend didn't work.  He wanted to try again, so his dad checked him out of school that Monday, and I gave him an extension on the presentation.  

The results were epic.  This screen grab from his video shows just how high he got his Lego man to go.  I mean, you can see the curvature of the Earth!  He was excited to do his presentation to the class, and you could tell in the video how excited he was to launch it and find the payload after having tracked it to the place where it landed.  

When students collaborate to construct a medieval manor, grow plants they can eat, make their own fireworks, solve a problem they didn't think they could solve, or even just have a week with too much packed into it,  there is a chance for failure.  Some parents and teachers avoid that because they don't want students to feel bad during our current epidemic of anxiety and depression.  But the best antidote to those things is achievement.  Feeling good about an accomplishment results in confidence, and it strengthens the neurological pathways between reward and ambition, which makes future ambition more likely.  Even when failure does happen, if we properly support them, their brain benefits from the recognition that failure wasn't death, which has a neurological benefit of its own.

Every day can't be high-risk / high-reward days.  Some days aren't fun (and that's an important lesson too).  Some days have to be about gathering facts and amassing knowledge so you have something to be ambitious with.  But where you can work it in, giving students an opportunity to stretch themselves is a good idea.  It doesn't have to be on the level of sending something to space; it could be tackling a challenging piece of writing or trying a math problem in an unconventional way or taking on an interesting artistic challenge.  Providing them with opportunities to fail or succeed on whatever level we can will build their confidence and result in growth. 

  

Working Out and Working Memory

I joined the YMCA about a month ago.  While I know how obnoxious it is to talk about your workouts at the gym all of the time, I keep seeing things that align with education and cognitive science and can't help but make these connections.  So, I'll try to do it sparingly, but you should expect that there will be more posts making the connections between fitness classes and academic classes.

The first thing to jump out at me at indoor cycling classes was the power of social norms, but I'll write about that some other time.  The one that has struck me over and over again is the connection to working memory.  For those that don't know, working memory is what you can hold in your conscious mind simultaneously, and for most of us, it is about four items.    

I've taken spin classes from five or six different instructors, and while they all have a slightly different approach, one thing they all talk about is form.  You get a better workout if you have your body positioned correctly and use your muscles in the correct way.  But problems can arise when these instructions are delivered in a rapid-fire way.  "Hands light on the handlebars, elbows bent, shoulders relaxed, abs tight, not hunched over, feet horizontal, legs moving in a smooth circle" is a lot to process at once.  By the time I get to the direction of my feet, I've forgotten that my elbows are supposed to be bent.  One day, this will all be one chunk in my mind, labeled "riding posture," but it isn't yet.  A better approach might be for those teachers to focus on the legs and feet at the beginning and then wait until after the warm-up or after the first song to address your upper body.  This might sound weird, but a poster on the wall with a picture of a rider in proper form or some basic reminders like "elbows bent, feet flat" could be useful as well.

Academic teachers, we can learn from this.  When you deliver instructions, do you say a lot of them quickly?  If so, it is unlikely that students remember the first or second step by the time you get to the last step.  Better to give only a couple at a time, letting them get those down before you deliver the next ones.  Or perhaps you could project the instructions, so they have something to refer back to when they have forgotten what comes next.  For those who teach young kids who have not yet learned to read or English language novices, a picture of what you want (seated student with a pencil, a sheet of paper, and a calculator) would be helpful to their working memories.  The picture is also easier to remember and doesn't require your presence or repetition the way verbal instructions do.

I have one instructor who described a working memory scenario without realizing it.  She said, "Can you stay at 90 RPMs?  Not go above it or below it but stay at it?  Can you stay at the point where it is just hard but not your maximum?  When you are at maximum work, you are less likely to quit, but when you get down to where you are working hard but don't have the mental distraction of all-out effort, you are more likely to quit."  What she described as "the mental distraction of all-out effort" really means full working memory.  When you are working right at the limit of cognitive load, you don't have the mental space to think about what it would take to quit or pay attention to the clock.  When you have backed down to 85% of your maximum, you have freed up the space to wonder about how much longer you have.  

This is instructive to academic teachers as well.  Some people use cognitive load theory to assert that we should make things easier for students or reduce the rigor of our classes.  That is not, however, what the theory implies.  Understanding cognitive load and working memory should help us to identify the perfect level of load.  There is a sweet spot where we keep our students working RIGHT AT or just below their maximum capacity.  If we are too far below it, they have the space for their minds to wander and consider quitting because it is uncomfortable.  If we are above it, they are incapable of sustained work, and they give up.  Learning, at its best, is difficult but not impossible.  

I'll talk more about working memory and cognitive load in the future, but for now, let's remember the lessons from working out and find the best ways to deliver instruction at the right level for our students to learn.

Explicit Expectations

Several years ago, Challenge Based Learning was a buzzword in educational circles.  The idea is a nice one.  Allow students to use their knowledge to solve a problem.  And if that is how we all used it, I would be an enthusiastic supporter.  Sadly, many teachers implemented it with a different philosophy - students don't need knowledge because they can look it up.  So we started presenting students with challenges they couldn't solve because they didn't have the prerequisite knowledge.   Their cognitive load was reached quickly, and the results were disastrous.

I do believe, however, that teaching kids problem-solving skills is a good idea and that applying knowledge to a problem they are capable of analyzing is valuable.  So, rather than throw out CBL altogether, I have tweaked and modified a project over the years to achieve those goals while still working within the way their brains work.

I've written about my Global Solutions project in previous posts (part 2), and the project gets tweaked every year to make it just a bit better.  The gist is this.  I assign groups of students an area of the world that has significant problems that can be addressed with a knowledge of physics and engineering (By the way, this is the last project of the year; so they should have a fair amount of knowledge acquired).  They are then assigned to study the resources of the area and propose a solution that is feasible, sustainable within the context of the area, and doesn't require government intervention.  

Back when I was using the "rules" of CBL, I was extremely vague.  The whole idea was that I shouldn't know what they would do.  It was their challenge to solve.  The problem is that no one operates well that way.  Imagine going into a meeting at work and being told "solve a problem" with no parameters, no understanding of the obstacles, and no understanding of what your boss expects.  You would be understandably frustrated and complain about your boss or ask him a million questions in an attempt to figure out what you were meant to do.

Does that mean we should abandon the entire idea of challenged-based learning?  No.  It means we should not follow the weird parts of it - the parts that were developed with the idea that a teacher should only be a facilitator, having no expectations or input.  We can still have kids solve a problem, but we can also teach them the prerequisite knowledge first, provide them with clear success criteria, and discuss the pros and cons of their proposals.   

This year in physics, I have a class that really likes to riff on silly things.  (I'm sure you have never had a class like this, but they exist.). These boys throw out something like "Well, there would be less food insecurity if we took the Thanos approach."  I remind them that our head of school and principal usually attend this forum and ask them to picture presenting the idea of killing half the population to them.  I call this time "getting the bad ideas out of the way first." It is all well and good for one brainstorming session; I even find it quite entertaining.  For a while.  Two weeks ago, I was listening as the kids were talking (and I couldn't respond because I had laryngitis), and they were still throwing around silly ideas when we are too far into the project for that to be a good idea.  So this week, I said, "Okay guys, it's been funny, but I'm not giving up class time for this anymore.  Now, it is time to buckle down and look for real answers; I think some of you need to take another look at the instructions.  Here's what I want you to have accomplished by the end of the period.  You are going to fill out an exit ticket at the end of class, so you should probably look at the questions now."  It was amazing the difference that made.  They worked for almost the entire period, and they came up with ideas that can be developed into great presentations.  They decided who would have each responsibility in the group.  They accomplished more in that 40 minutes than they had during the entire run of the project thus far.

Free exploration works when a kid is interested in an idea and going from link to link without a plan in mind because there isn't a standard he is trying to meet or a timeline on which to accomplish a task.  He's just learning what he wants to.  But that is not the reality of classes or jobs.  When it comes to those, it is important that we provide some clear expectations and either provide or expect them to create a timeline for their work.  We need to give guidance and expertise, or they will not arrive at the place we want them to be; they'll wander around in a field.  We could call it Guided Challenge or something that communities that we need to put them on the right road with a map.