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. 

Oh Yes, You Should Tell Them What to See

So, this supposedly profound thought makes it rounds on social media at the start of every semester. 

"The best teachers tell you where to look, but they don't tell you what to see."

Quotes should be considered in the context of an entire speech or written work. A quote I like might be in the middle of a hateful paragraph, making it less likable.  I quote I don't like might be mitigated if there was a foundation laid before it that makes the sentence more credible.  

I also want to take into consideration the other thoughts of the author before quoting them. For example, I don't want to quote Steve Jobs about how to treat employees, given his legendarily poor treatment of those at Apple. I don't want to forward a quote about leadership, only to find out it was said by Mussolini.  So, I thought I would look up the source of this teacher quote before criticizing it.  It's attributed to someone named Alexandra Trenfor. Try Googling her name, though.  All you find are links to the quote. She cannot be found, and the larger work cannot be found.  It's as though she arose from the mist to say this and then receded into it again.  

Since I can't find out if this sentence that I roll my eyes at might be mitigated by what surrounded it, I'm left with the sentence at face value.

This quote is stupid.  

In spite of it internet popularity and the applause it might get if you end a keynote speech with it, it is just wrong. Students look at thousands of things per day.  If I happen to point to one of them and say, "look at this thing," I have only begun my job.  The rest of my job as a teacher is, in fact, to teach them what to see.

I taught science for 25 years.  When I took students into the lab to carry out experiments, they were also meant to draw conclusions about the underlying features of what they were observing.  But as soon as I started to ask questions, it became evident that they had not seen the right things.

For example, I had a lab in which 8th grade students ran electricity through salt water, separating chlorine from sodium.  What they saw was bubbles coming from one wire and metal build up on the other.  If they left it running for a few minutes, they would also see the water turn green.  

When I looked at their observations list, they said things like, "One wire smoked."  No, no it didn't.  I actually needed to tell them what to see.  The didn't even notice the build up on the other wire because it was pretty subtle.  I needed to tell them what to see.

Even if the "smoke" had been an accurate observation, what would it have taught them about chemistry?  Electricity makes them smoke?  Well, that's just not true.  Leaving it a bit longer, would they have learned prolonged electrical exposure turns water green?  Because that isn't true either.  

As humans, we tend to look at surface features, which reveal little information.  "Tree leaves are green in spring and change color in the fall" is something I can see for myself, but I need a teacher to show me how to "see" chlorophyll. 

Observation alone leads to misconceptions and VERY wrong conclusions.  Ancient Greeks, for example, didn't have any understanding of projectile motion. They observed that when threw something at an upward angle, it eventually came back down.  They saw that, but the conclusion they drew was that the act of throwing imparted a substance into the object (they called it impetus) and that it fell when it ran out of that substance.  They observed sunrise and sunset and concluded that the sun moved; we now know that is caused by the earth's rotation. They attributed medical problems to fluid imbalances, which led to practices like leeching.

I'm not saying they were stupid. Considering their lack of background knowledge, equipment, or expectation of testing hypotheses, they made fairly logical conclusions.  But logical and accurate are not the same thing.  At some point, we realized that what we were seeing wasn't revealing the underlying architecture of what was happening.  Someone had to teach us how and what to see when it wasn't immediately on the surface. Why, when we have better methods and more knowledge, would we want to withhold that from our students and make them, effectively, ancient Greeks?  Why wouldn't we want them to build on all that came before instead of having to rebuild it?

So, I have my kids in the lab, seeing bubbles and color changes.  I have to ask questions to reveal exactly what they are seeing and then, crucially, tell them what else to see.  "What is in those bubbles, " I ask.  Almost every first answer was wrong, the most common being "electricity." I tell them that bubble always contain a gas and ask again.  Their answer was always one of three at that point - air, carbon dioxide, or oxygen.  Why?  Because those are the gases they hear about the most.  I remind them that this is salt water and ask what salt is made of in order to get them to recognize after much probing that the answer is chlorine. Especially science minded kids will sometimes say, "Is that why the water turns green?" but most have to be told that.  Then, we move to the other wire.  "Do you see this metal build up?  What might that be?"  You might think that we worked hard enough to get to the answer of chlorine that they MIGHT recognize that stuff on the other wire was the other element in salt, but if you think that, you would be wrong.  Their answer, almost always, was copper or iron.  Why?  Those are the metals they hear about most.  Then, came the big question - "Why does this happen?"  The first answer was always that water always conducts electricity. The second answer was always that sodium is a metal and metals conduct electricity.  

These wrong answers were given even though I had taught them that water is a very poor conductor and showed them videos about electrolytes when we talked about the dissolving of ionic bonds.  If I hadn't asked these probing questions so I could identify and correct their misconceptions, they would have left less educated than when they came in. If I had left them to see for themselves, they would have walked away believing that electricity makes wires smoke, turns water green, and builds up copper on a copper wire. 

We HAVE TO tell them what to see.

Renowned education researcher, Carl Hendrick, wrote this in a recent substack article:

"Examples without labels are merely noise. You must explicitly tell students what to pay attention to in each example. Don't assume they'll notice the right feature; direct their attention deliberately."

In other words, tell them what to see.  

Do it boldly and without apology, no matter what the disembodied name on the internet meme says.

Being a Whole Person

Note: I'm trying really hard not to write about current events, so this is a topic I've kept in the draft folder for a while. I just didn't want y'all to think I was unaware of the crazy in the world right now.

I was getting ready for class to start one day, when our Latin teacher came down to ask a question about math. It might have been about prime numbers, but I don't remember as he often had a math question he lingered over for a few months before finding another one.  As he walked away, I said to my students, "He says he has a 'crush on math' and comes down here to ask questions."  They looked befuddled as they said, "But he's the Latin teacher." I paused for a beat and said, "You should tell him that. After all, they don't let us like things we don't teach." 

I hoped that bit of gentle teasing would reveal the silliness of thinking that someone can only be interested in things that are directly related to their jobs. But that conversation also revealed something about how students view their teachers - as sort of one dimensional content delivery devices.

I'm not sure when it happened, but somewhere between my school days and now, we stopped valuing well-roundedness in students.  When I was a student, that's what colleges were looking for. I wrote many college recommendation letters highlighting that very quality. 

Then, there was a shift; they wanted to see "passion." Don't get me wrong - I'm all about being passionate. But I think their definition of passion and mine are different. In my life, passion looks like throwing myself into whatever I am doing. Whether it is listening to a sermon, making a yearbook, participating in a fitness class at the Y, or attending an exhibit at an art museum, I want to do as much as I can and learn as much as I can. That's how I have always defined passion for myself.

The colleges who were looking for passion seemed to think it meant singularly focused. Have one interest or cause and pursue it with all of your being. This was their expectation of high school students. I don't think I would qualify for scholarships now because they expect students to have built a life around one thing, starting a non-profit or business around that one thing. To them, being well-rounded appears to be unfocused or non-zealous.

I think that's sad, not just because it is the opposite of the way I am built, but because it comes at a cost. Helping student find something they are passionate about is great, but the implicit message is that they can only be passionate about one thing. Students who are passionate about engineering would benefit greatly from enrolling in art or theater. Talented musicians can find additional passions in the study of history or math. People are not ONE thing, and we aren't meant to spend our entire lives caring about ONE thing.

One of the reasons I chose to attend ORU, a school 1200 miles away in a state I'd never set foot in was their philosophy of educating the whole person - spirit, mind, and body. While I often questioned this motive during my graded 3-mile "fun run" each semester, I knew it was good. I liked taking general education classes and choosing to take classes outside my major because it was making me a more complete person. 

When my students balked at the idea of taking classes they "didn't need," I often said, "What if the only thing I could talk to you about was physics?  Would you like me at all? No, I would be insufferable." For that reason, I talked to them about books and art and plays and even what little I knew of sports. GRACE had a math teacher who also taught Irish Dance, a history teacher who also taught anatomy, and a science teacher who was into photography enough to become the yearbook advisor (that one is me). 

Being 3-dimensional whole people makes us more interesting, but those things also inform each other. If your passion is art, you will be better at it by understanding some chemistry. They aren't mutually exclusive. If your great love is history, you will benefit from learning how to analyze literature. If you devote yourself to people, a knowledge world languages and culture will enable you to serve them better. No knowledge is ever wasted. 

Most of the people we admire in history had multiple passions. Mendel, the father of genetics, wasn't a career scientist. He was a monk with a garden. His love for the Lord and his need for sustenance drove his interest in pea plants, and we still benefit from it.  Another monk, St. Francis, knew scripture well because, of course, he was passionate about them. But he was also an animal expert and a poet. Thomas Jefferson not only penned the American Declaration of Independence, he was an architect who played the violin. While we think of George Washington Carver as being solely focused on the peanut, he cared deeply about education and took his traveling classroom to farmers while developing methods of crop rotation because he understood soil chemistry.

Teachers, be passionate about the content you teach. It's important for students to see that.  But if you want to broaden their horizons, you have to broaden yours as well. Talk to them about things you are learning outside of your field. It will help you build relationships with them and will make them view you as more human, but it may also allow them to lead fuller and more joyful lives. 

It won't make the less passionate. On the contrary, it will make them passionate about more things.

Research Ed - Denver 2025 #rEDDenver2025

This is my fourth Research Ed conferences (3rd as a presenter).  One of the wonderful things about this conference is that everyone learns from everyone else.  Since you can't be here, I am taking notes for you to learn from as well.  (I can't provide notes on the first session since I am giving it, but you can go to my website www.thelearninghawk.com if you want the slides.)  Please recognize that these are notes taken in real time with little to no editing. They will be a mix of what the presenters said and my own thoughts. While I try to note the difference between those two things, I don't always keep up.  Please don't hold any presenter responsible for something you read here.

Keynote:  From Routine to Retrieval by Patrice Bain and Amber Haven

In 2006, she had an average classroom with average scores. Research was done in lab settings but not in real classrooms.  She met a couple of researchers who talked to her about memory.  She realized that teachers are taught how to teach, but few are taught how people learn.

Understanding the learning process is essential for making any kind of impact in the classroom.

Research needed to happen in classrooms that have the messiness that lab setting don't (intercom interruptions, fire drills, etc.)

"Knowing how to teach by understanding how students learn is a matter of instructional equity." - Jim Heal and Meg Lee

If we start teaching them how to learn in elementary school, just think how much better their high school lives will be.

"Children are more alike than different in terms of how they think and learn." - Daniel Willingham

(Personal reflection:  Students have been told that they all learn differently and taught to find their "learning style."  The reality is much more empowering because they only have to find out how to learn, not some mystical idea of how THEY learn.)

We have to put information in, but storage won't be robust without retrieval.  Retrieval strengthens storage.

Power Tools:  Retrieval, Spacing, Interleaving, and Metacognition

Retrieval:  Pulling information out

Spacing: Revisiting retrieval over time - It interrupts forgetting, strengthening memory

Interleaving:  Comparing and contrasting similar items

Metacognition: Discriminating what you know from what you don't

Students spend most of their day shoving information into the your brain. It's hard to organize it or reflect on it unless you retrieve it.  It's like organizing your closet by finding an item and putting it on a shelf.

"When students consistently find themselves in a predictable learning environment, they can let their guard down to engage." Mitch Weathers

Routines are the best way to reduce anxiety in all students, but especially those who are prone to high anxiety.  They know what they are supposed to do, and they know what happens next. Transition times become less chaotic. 

Cognitive Load Theory is important because finding the sweet spot where students can process information impacts their learning dramatically. Can you drive smoothly in England where you don't know where you are going, have a car with the wheel on the other side, are on the left side of the road, and have to use roundabouts.  That is cognitive overload.

Don't be afraid to face your desks forward and reduce the amount of stuff on your walls. 

Working memory is limited (4-7 things that require focus) - How can you lessen their cognitive overload?

(Personal Note:  I see the chunking example with letters all of the time.  I would like to see it with actual content at a conference.)

"Background knowledge allows chunking, which makes more room in your working memory, making it easier to do something with that information." - Daniel Willingham

Scaffolds are not meant to be permanent, but they need to know when you are going to remove them so they have a chance to build proficiency in the task.  Everyone should have the same final goal, but scaffolds can be different to meet the needs of students.  "If everyone has a scaffold all of the time, it's not a scaffold. It's your lesson plan."

Atomization - breaking down complex concepts into small pieces.  When teaching weather, break it down into each of the variables that affects the weather before putting it back together.

Direct Instruction is teaching directly, but it is not a lecture. There should be instructions for students to do something (turn and talk, choral response, whiteboard answers, etc.) every two minutes.

Dual coding - provide images alongside verbal information. Have kids "sketch and tell."

Seek evidence. Don't blindly accept.

Rethinking Intrinsic Motivation by Andrew Watson

I was a little bit late to this session because I couldn't find the room.  I may have missed something important.

Intentionally Provocative Questions: 

Why don't student learn fractions with the same joy that they learn the names of colors or animal sounds. (Why is school demotivating?)

Why do schools teach things that aren't intrinsically motivating?

David Geary's Evolutionary Theory - Our species is unlike others in that we have to learn. Other animals are born ready to go without much teaching. A turtle is born ready to turtle.  

We learn things that help with avoiding predators, getting food, or allow us to successfully reproduce. Those things are biologically primary.  Learning animal sounds are obvious in their benefit to helping us avoid predators. Calculating the area under a curve does not fit into any of those categories, so it is biologically secondary.

Because we want our students to learn biologically secondary things because they are culturally valued, we need social institutions to make sure we teach them these things.

Back to the Intentionally Provocative Questions: 

Why don't student learn fractions with the same joy that they learn the names of colors or animal sounds. (Why is school demotivating?) You are intrinsically motivated to learn biologically primary things but not biologically secondary ones.

Why do schools teach things that aren't intrinsically motivating? The point of a school is to teach things that students are not intrinsically motivated to learn.  If they were naturally motivated to learn it, we wouldn't need to teach it to them.

Teachers are often scolded for not fostering intrinsic motivation, but that you should actually foster realism. 

Self Determination Theory - 

Six motivational states - Amotivation, 4 kinds of extrinsic motivation, intrinsic motivation

Amotivation - Absent

External and Internal Extrinsic Motivations - Internal extrinsic motivation does help students learn more, but external extrinsic motivation does not.  Internal extrinsic motivation is valuable but not enjoyable.

Intrinsic Motivation - Internal - Enjoyable

Example:  Some people truly enjoy exercise (intrinsic motivation). Others do it because they know it is valuable, but they don't enjoy it (internal extrinsic motivation)

You cannot move someone to intrinsic motivation, but you can move them from a motivation or external extrinsic motivation into internal extrinsic motivation (teaching them to value it even if they don't enjoy it) with:

- Autonomy

- Relatedness

- Competence

Any one strategy can had different effects on different students, at different moments, with different content.

Popularizing the 3 Box Memory Model: by Rob McEntarffer

I was late to this one too. I spent too much time talking to Andrew about his topic after his session.

Teachers and administrators must have a learning theory that matches reality. It must predict the outcome of teaching decisions.  No matter how much you believe in it, if it doesn't result in learning, you shouldn't use it.  Operating under an unrealistic learning theory gets in the way of learning.

Are you using this model to help making teaching decisions? Or are you just throwing things at the wall to see what sticks?

Personal Reflection:  To make a model stick at your school, you must have a few teacher "influencers" to keep using the same language with other teachers as well as students. They need to own it, adapt it to your context, and be enthusiastic about it with others.  

The pendulum swings from emphasizing content or skills every few years.

Get the people who know about things and those who are affected by it talking to each other.  In universities, the people in the education department don't ever talk to the people in the psychology department.  Sometimes, there is an educational psychology department, and they don't talk to the other two either.

It's imperative to ask "What is working?  What didn't work?" every time you implement something new. 

Why Students Forget and What You Can Do About It by Marcie Samayoa

I am very excited for this one.  I've been following Ms. Sam on Twitter for years. I'm amazed at how tiny she is.  

You have a great day in class. Everybody is engaged and with you. The next day, you ask them a question, and you just get an empty stare.

Showed the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve. You forget a lot of content quickly.  Even a few minutes shows a high percentage of loss unless there is effortful practice. Each act of spaced retrieval results in less forgetting. 

Retrieval strengthens memory, enhances transfer, and always outperforms re-reading.

When you are doing a review, you should ask students questions that they have to answer without using their notes or book. You can't and shouldn't review everything from the previous lesson; you should figure out what they have learned in a previous lesson that connects to today's lesson and have them retrieve those. (If you are going to teach about isotopes today, you need to have them retrieve things about the periodic table and atomic structure, but you don't need to cover electromagnetic radiation that day.) This automatically works in space and interleaving.  Don't take more than 5-10 minutes of class time to do this.

Make sure students know retrievals are not quizzes or tests.  They aren't being graded on them; this is purely for the benefit of their memory.

I want to be in Ms. Sam's chemistry class.

Science or Snake Oil? How to Tell the Difference by Holly Lane

It is lamentable that graduates from schools of education are not trained in how to find education research or how to evaluate it for themselves.  

We are bombarded with snake oil in the field of education. There is a lot of garbage, and if you don't have the tools do distinguish good from bad, you will end up using a lot of garbage because there is just so much more of it out there.

We don't have an FDA in education. You can sell anything you want and claim that it is based on science.

Every program currently sold that is related to reading claims that it is based on "the science of reading." Social media makes it even worse by amplifying popular but non-scientific programs. 

Because there is so much misinformation, there is still a huge gap between research and practice.

The scale of evaluating evidence (1 is the lowest quality)

1. Anecdotal
2. Expert opinion
3. Case study 
4. Correlational study
5. Quasi-experimental design
6. Randomized control trials
7. Systematic review
8. Meta-analysis

Indicators of effectiveness

• Statistical significance
• Effect size - How many standard deviations above the mean is the experimental group compared to the control group

Indicators of trustworthiness

• Publication source
• Research Journals
• Practitioner Journals
• Magazines and blog (no vetting)
• Books 
• Commissioned reviews usually go through substantial vetting.
• Research handbooks usually have knowledgeable editors
• Commercially published - some are gold, and some are garbage

Teach How Students Learn by Gene Tavernetti

This is the third conference I've been to with Gene, and I have had breakfast with him twice, but this is the first time I've gotten to attend his session, so I've been looking forward to it all day.  His book Teach Fast has been referenced by three other presenters today.

The instructional paradox:  Learning is complex! But we must simplify instruction.

FAST Framework:

Focused Adaptable Structured Teaching

Focused - Eliminating extraneous load

Adaptable - One lesson structure for all content areas

Structured - Follows the same order for each lesson

Preview - accessing prior knowledge from long term memory and/or provide relevance (relevance doesn't mean "to their lives." It means relevant to the lesson.

Learning Objective - deconstruct the standard into learner friendly language that is still academic, what is the new learning today? (Have students read it as a choral response)

Review - Sub skills necessary for the lesson in the same way they are about to use the information

Explain the Key Ideas - Definitions embedded in the context of the concepts, procedures, etc. This is the "what" of the lesson.

At this point, the fire alarm went off in the museum. We didn't leave, but it slowed us down significantly.

Explain Expert Thinking - This is the "how" of the lesson. (You should model two times. If there is only one, there is no pattern.)

Gradual Release of Responsibility - I do, we do, you do - You have already modeled 2 times. Then, they do it with your guidance and questions. Then, they can practice.

Closure 

Independent Practice

We remember best what we learn first and last. The bulk of instruction should be first.  Then, do inline practice in the middle of the lesson. Do a closure at the end to engage in retrieval practice at the end of the lesson. 

Use Techniques Thoughtfully

I know it has been a while since it was on TV, but recently, I decided to re-watch Project Runway on Amazon Prime.  I have one general takeaway and one that is relevant to education.

1.  Tim Gunn is a national treasure. Protect him at all cost.

2.  In every challenge, the designers had to make clothing, but models obviously needed shoes, bags, and jewelry to go with the outfit while they walked down the runway. Somewhere in each challenge, Tim Gunn said the following line, "Use the accessories wall thoughtfully." 

If they used the wall but not "thoughtfully," they were usually called out by the judges for styling errors.  "The dress is cute, but these shoes made her look like a mom on her way to lunch." or "That bag just took all the youth out of your design."  They had used the resources that were provided to them, but they had not chosen them well or used them in beneficial ways.

Because your mind probably works like a normal person's, you are likely saying, "I thought you said this would be relevant to education."  Okay, here it is.

As teachers, we have access to an overwhelming number of techniques.  I can teach any point of curriculum with direct instruction, video resources, websites, lab experiments, projects, and on and on and on.  I have many ways to "style" my lesson.  Because there are so many options, it is important that I choose my techniques thoughtfully.  

I must sit down with my objectives and ask myself, "What is the best way to teach this? How will the content make the most change in their long term memories?"  It may be that having students create a video in which they act as reporters who are telling people about a historical event or scientific discovery is the best way for them to learn about that event, but it might not be the best way to have them learn about Newton's first law of motion or a geometry proof. In that case, the "accessory" is getting in the way of the "garment." 

Teachers, if we are honest with ourselves, we will admit that we are pretty excitable people.  We like the shiny new things that come our way, and we want to use them. I'll never forget the spring we learned about Kahoot.  Every teacher used it for every test review.  By the time we got to May, kids would groan if I said to login to Kahoot because they were so tired of using it (even shiny new things get tiresome if we overuse them).  

I'm glad we are excited, it's a profession where excitement is contagious.  But we must also be thoughtful.  We must ask ourselves, "Is this technique the best way to teach this content or do I just want to use it?" If so, save it for next week or next month or next semester. Using where it fits best will elevate your lesson; using it for the sake of using it will confuse your students.

I am reminded of an episode of Craig Barton's podcast "Tips for Teachers."  Guests on his show bring 5 tips to share, and one said, "My first tip is, only look for tips if you need them."  In other words, if something is working, don't go looking for ways to change it.  If you are struggling to teach a specific concept, it might be time to seek out a new technique.  If the method you are currently using works, don't just change for the sake of change.

Now, I just can't help but circle back to Tim Gunn and say: "Teachers, make it work."

What You Think You See

Seeing is Believing.  Is it?  Is what we see always representative of reality?

In my day job, I sometimes stand at a desk where people are expected to scan their membership card as they enter the building. If you forgot your card, we can enter you another way; but everyone must be admitted through the system.  

One morning, I was at the desk when a woman was digging through her bag for her keychain (didn't she just get out of her car with her keys in her hand?) while someone else walked by me on her way to her yoga class.  While the first woman didn't say anything out loud, I could see her facial expression, wondering why she had to dig for her card while this woman walked on by.  What she didn't know was that this woman had, in fact, scanned in a few minutes earlier. She had gone down the stairs and realized she had left her water bottle in the car. Since we both knew she had already scanned, it wasn't necessary for her to do it again.  But without that piece of knowledge, the card searcher had only what she saw to inform her attitude and incorrectly interpreted what she saw using incomplete data.

This is more common in your life than breathing.  I'm not being hyperbolic.  You only breathe about 20 times per minute, but you interpret incoming sensory data hundreds of times per second. Literally everything that happens in your mind is an interpretation made by your brain.  As I used to tell my science students, eyes and ears are data collectors, but seeing and hearing only happen when your brains interpret that data. 

• This is why you can perceive the room spinning when you are dizzy even though that is obviously not the input your eyes are receiving. It comes from the brain trying to put together inconsistent data from two different sources - the still spinning fluid in your ear's semicircular canals and the input from the eyes.  The brain trusts the ear more and tells the brain to see something that the eyes are not seeing.
• This is why people can hallucinate voices that are not actually present. Their brain is making an interpretation of something that is not consistent with reality. Their ears are not actually hearing anything, but their brain is.

Yet, we all put great faith in our own interpretation of things. That's a feature, not a bug.  We have to do it. If we doubted everything we were seeing and hearing every minute of the day, we would crack up.  For the brain to perfectly process everything would take more time and energy than makes sense for it to use.  So, it takes short cuts.  It fills in gaps in data through interpolation and extends interpretation beyond the data through extrapolation.  

So, we can't stop to question ALL interpretations.  But we should question some of them.

This is an education blog, so let's take it to the classroom.  Is it possible that we sometimes misinterpret student behavior?  When that student who is always out of his seat without permission, do we take the mental shortcut of assuming that EVERY shift he makes in his chair is about to be a rule violation? Do we hear the first half a question and assume we know what the student is asking?  Do we see a kid in the hallway and assume she is skipping class because she has done so in the past? Kids who have been trouble makers in the past have often complained that they don't feel like teachers will let them grow and change because of their past behavior.  Do they have a point?  Do we over-interpret their actions because our brains are taking a totally normal mental shortcut?

How about your colleagues.  Do you make assumptions, not just about the action you see them doing but about their internal life?  Do you assign motive based on your past history with them?  Do you assume they are short tempered because you see them snap at a student without knowing the week long history that led up to that moment?  Do you know the whole story, or do you tell yourself a story?

I had this conversation recently about a man who was very irritated with his boss.  He was using some strong terms, like "bait and switch" during our conversation.  I had to say, "Okay, slow down" and walked him through this way of thinking.  There are three things happening here.

1. Facts
2. Feelings about facts
3. The interpretation of the facts as they are processed through your feelings.

The facts were real. He was accurately relaying the story of WHAT had happened.  His feelings were real.  He was rightly irritated by WHAT his boss had done. It's that third part where things get fictional. His brain was going beyond what he knew to be true in order to construct a story. It was filling in the gaps of what happened with WHY they happened, leading him to assign motive that was almost certainly not accurate. His boss is not a manipulator or a liar, so the term bait and switch was unfair. If he were processing the facts through a different set of feelings, the story he was telling himself would be far different.

Part of what makes teaching difficult is how many pieces of data we have to interpret and how little time we have to reflect properly.  We often react quickly to our rapid interoperation simply because there isn't time to slow down.  My encouragement to you would be to slow down as much as you are able to, knowing it might not be much.  

• That extra second before responding to a child might make a difference in your relationship with them because it might give you just enough distance to assume the best rather than the worst.
• That extra minute it takes to remind yourself of what you know for sure about your colleague might prevent weeks of awkward interactions with them.
• Taking a few class periods before answering a parent email will allow you to answer in a more tactful way. It is much better for them to experience a delay in your response than for them to experience the response you would give while your blood pressure was still high.

I've strayed a bit from the point here, so let me close the circle.  What you think you see isn't always representative of reality.  It's worth asking if you know the whole story. If not, hold your own certainty in check, and be open to changing your story after you know more.

The Power of Habit

There's a popular saying that says, "When you know better, you do better." 

Do you?  I mean, is that always true?

I remember saying to students, "You know better than that" an awful lot.

And it's not just kids.  I'm guessing you have had experiences where you knew a better way, but you kept doing something the way you had always done it.  I have a couple of recent examples.

I have been going to the same YMCA for over two years.  I had been turning on the same street for a long time.  A month ago, I realized that I could avoid an awkward and potentially dangerous intersection if I turned one street earlier and met up with the other street farther west.  I tried it, and it is objectively easier and safer.  Yet, I still find myself sailing right past that street if I am not making a conscious effort to remember. 

When I learned to set up memberships during training for my job, I must have missed a small step on the first screen where other family members are entered on the membership.  I didn't even know it was there as I have been regularly scrolling down to the "Continue to Order Entry" button for 12 months.  That meant going to the order after it was completed and adding a spouse and/or children after the fact.  I thought it was strange, but because I didn't know another way, I assumed it was the only way to do it.  I just thought the system was a little wonky.  A few weeks ago, I saw a co-worker doing it as a step of the set up and said, "Wait, you can do that before you place the order?"  She showed me where it is on the first screen, and I said, "Well, you've just saved me a ton of time."  At some point, that knowledge will save me a ton of time, but it hasn't yet.  I've processed quite a multi-person memberships since then, and I've only used the better way for about half of them.  I usually realize it just after I've hit the button and can't go back and think, "Crud, now I've got to do it the hard way!"

Why? Because the habitual way of doing it has a well-myelinated pathway of neurons (you will sometimes hear it called "muscle memory.")  The new way has some weak connections being made, but I have to do it that way a lot more times before those pathways are stronger.  Until turning the new way becomes automated, I will likely still find myself mindlessly passing the better street and the better button sometimes.

That's the power of habit. We engage in habits so often that we often aren't conscious of the fact that we are doing them.  Smokers who are trying to quit must actively try not to light up at certain times, not because they have a burning desire for a cigarette but because they are in the habit of having one at that time.  If you drive a car with the gear shift in the center console, you will find your hand going there even when driving a rental or borrowing a car from a friend. And, I can't count how many times I have walked into a room and hit the light switch during a power outage.  It's not that I am dumb enough to think the light is going to come on; it is that habit is automated, taking less energy than logic.

Teachers, harness the power of habit.  All over America, the school year has either already started or is soon to start.  Start instilling habits today!  Do the same thing over and over with them on day one. Make "This is how we do this in here" the norm. 

• Walking in and looking at the board for bellwork or announcements should be second nature by next week.
• Capping the marker immediately after writing an answer on their mini-whiteboard should be done without thinking within a day or two.
• You have to overcome their impulse to hop up as soon as the bell rings now, or you will be fighting it for the rest of the year (because that one is already habit, it's gonna take a minute).

Once something becomes a habit, they almost can't help themselves. It's going to feel annoying during the first two weeks, but it will save you all kinds of energy for the rest of the year.  Invest that time. You will be glad you did.

Just Share Your Peaches

This time of year, Matt, my weightlifting instructor at the Y, comes into every class for several weeks with a bucket full of small peaches and offers them to everyone who will stand still.  He and Steven have quite a garden, yielding not only peaches, but okra, blackberries, peppers, and a variety of other produce.  They eat and freeze and preserve, but they have more than they can use, so they give what they have to friends, spreading joy and nutrition to those around them.

As usual, I hear you saying to your screen, "What in the world does this have to do with education?"  

Legitimate question. Peaches are being used here as a metaphor for the things you have "grown" in your career.  If you are an experienced teacher (at least in the U.S. - I'm not sure what the lesson planning is like elsewhere), you have created a ton of things during your career.  From a simple but well-crafted physics problem to a complex project, you have produce, and you likely have more than you can use.

In the school where I taught for 21 years, sharing was the norm.  If someone was going to teach the same thing you were, you did some planning together and shared some resources in common.  When Jenny, our chemistry and AP physics teacher went part-time after having a baby, and we hired another chemistry teacher, Jenny handed over a flash drive with her entire folder and invited her to use it at will. 

Because it was the norm at GRACE, I thought it was standard practice everywhere.

Like all naive takes, a little time on Twitter disabused me of that notion. There are teachers all over that platform who are proudly selfish about how they won't share the resources they created unless they are paid for them. They are the same teachers who talk about "quiet quitting" and never doing anything out of contract hours, so it isn't super surprising that they would hoard their resources too.  What is surprising is the number of "You go, girl. Stand your ground." responses they get from others. We've turned selfishness into a virtue, apparently.

Listen, I'm not saying you have to give away absolutely everything.  You can be on Teachers Pay Teachers.  I am too. 

There are sometimes good reasons not to share.  I once asked a seventh grade teacher to please not do the same demonstration I was going to do with them in 8th grade. There were two reasons for that: 1. She was only doing it because it was fun; it didn't actually demonstrate any of her content.  2. The value it had in my content was the mystery because it was counterintuitive, and it would lose that if they had already seen it.  If the demonstration had fit her content better than mine, I would have let her have it, and I would have come up with something else.  You may have a truly good reason not to share some things.  But, if your reason is just, "I made it, so you can't have it unless you buy it," you might be in the wrong profession.

Experienced teachers, there are new people in your building this year.  They need what you have.  Remember what that was like?  They need peaches.  They need okra.  They need blackberries.  They need resources, and you have more than you can use.  

Remember that the goal is student learning.

And share your dang peaches.

Embracing Weirdness in Students

When I was a kid, the bed time routine usually involved my mom giving my stuffed animals voices.  At some point on most nights, I would say, "Mom, you are so weird." She would respond, "That's okay, you like weird."  This was a statement, not a question.  It was like she decreed that I like weird.

And, so, I do.

Which is a good thing.  Because the plan for me for 25 years was teaching middle school.  Not only do you have to be a little weird for that, you also have to like the weirdness you see in others.  You are going to have a boy who sits with one foot up in the desk and leans over until you think he'll fall out of the chair. You are going to have a girl who draws cartoons of animals with human legs (which looks more disturbing than it sounds). You are going to have students who burst into song in the middle of class and those who can't be cajoled to speak with any kind of incentive.  

When we think of school stereotypes, we typically think of the categories from The Breakfast Club - athlete, princess, nerd, bad boy, and weirdo. But the truth is, most kids are a category of one.  

And that's because we are individuals, not types.  For all of the money and air time that is dropped on personality testing, from Myers Briggs to Enneagram, they have little more validity than horoscopes and Buzz Feed quizzes. People in the same generation do not think the same way.  All members of a race or gender are not identical. I can tell from sitting in faculty meetings that not all teachers have the same view of things.  We are each individuals, born with certain gifts, raised in different environments, encouraged to develop different skills, taught to value different qualities.

In short, we are all weird.

And that is a good thing. God uses whatever makes you weird to fulfill His purposes in the world. He put you where you are with the strengths and weaknesses you have because there is someone who needs that aspect of your character to build them up. When you look at Scripture, every person God used in a significant way was unusual. Noah was a drunk. Abraham and Sarah were far too old. Moses stuttered. David was the family runt. And I'm convinced the apostle Peter had ADHD. 

Even if you aren't a person of faith, you have to be able to see that the world has only ever been changed by those who are willing to go against the flow and change the way things are done.  Suffragettes stood against the status quo, often putting themselves in grave danger, to get us the right to vote. The Civil Rights movement was built entirely by those who insisted on doing the unexpected, from sitting at the lunch counter to marching across a bridge to kneeling at the beginning of an athletic event. Nikola Tesla stood in opposition to the smartest men in his field, including the powerful force that was Thomas Edison. Galileo stood against the norm as did Malala Yousafzai. William Wilberforce worked himself to death opposing what was to make the world better. You can bet he would never have uttered the words, "It is what it is." 

Weird is good.  Weird brings change. We must embrace the weird in each other and in ourselves.  

I am not advocating that we all develop into people so strange that we can't operate in culture. We won't have influence that way because there are systems in which things get done and rules that have to be followed. Wilberforce was only successful in the abolition of the slave trade because he worked within the legal system. Civil Rights activists did more than create spectacles; they worked to make slow changes in the law. Tesla made connections with financial backers by proving his ideas weren't as crazy as they sounded. While weird is good, it is only useful if you can function in society.  So balance matters.

I've been thinking a lot about my Granny for the last couple of days.  She was delightfully quirky, and the stories told at her funeral reflected it. She played practical jokes on her family and called friends on their birthdays just to sing to them (and let's just admit that she wasn't going to join the choir). She often called the pastor in the middle of the week to tell him he should get a tape of his sermon and listen to it because it would bless his heart. People cried at her funeral, but they laughed a lot too. Dear God, please let me be weird like that.

Teachers, school is getting ready to start. You are about to meet some weird students, weird parents (maybe even weird colleagues).  Some of them want to hide their weirdness while other will put it on full display. Take the time to recognize what aspect of their character is unusual and useful and help them develop and mature those qualities. Help them to pursue those gifts that will make them influential, not in spite of their differences but  because of them. But also teach them the value of social norms and show them that living within the rules of society is possible while still maintaining their quirkiness. If they combine those things, they will have influence on those around them (and for some, even farther) and have great joy while doing so.

Student Accessible Language

In my preparation to lead a Livestrong group at the Y, I was required to take a few group fitness instructor certification courses.  In one of them, there was a well-meaning but insane piece of advice - "Use the medical names for bones and muscles. Don't say 'hips;' say 'pelvic girdle' instead. Don't say 'shin;' say 'tibia.' It will make you sound credible." Before I get into the education connection here, let me just say if you have to resort to a technique to sound credible, you aren't credible. 

Meanwhile, actual group fitness instructors rarely do this.  They use imagery to help their members know what to do. Greg, a cycle instructor, doesn't say, "align your tibia with the vertical post of pedal shaft" or "keep your transverse arch parallel to the floor" because he knows that would not only make him sound ridiculous, it also wouldn't be at all helpful to members trying to keep good cycle form.  Instead, he says, "It should feel like you are scraping gum off the bottom of your shoe." Everyone can imagine that and benefit from it.  Dana teaches Barre, where alignment from head to toe is important to prevent injury. She explains everything in detail once, but after that she says, "Zip up your body suit." And just like that, everyone is able to see if their alignment is correct in the mirror.  These are examples of language that is accessible to the learner rather than feeding the ego of the instructor.

Teachers, have you taken a look at your state objectives?  If you have, you know they can be more difficult to interpret than contract legalese. Here's one from the NC Chemistry curriculum.  "PS.Chm.4.3 Use mathematics and computational thinking to analyze quantitatively the composition of a substance (empirical formula, molecular formula, percent composition, and mole conversions)."  Y'all, I taught chemistry for ten years, and this is a crazy sentence. For one thing, computational thinking is mathematics, and you can't analyze something quantitatively without those, so there are few redundancies here whose purpose seems to be only to make the sentence longer.  Also the examples cover several chapters of material, so you can't possibly use this for one lesson.  Given that many school require the objective to be written on the board, you are going to have some confused and frightened students if you just throw this up at the beginning of your lesson.  If were teaching chemistry now, I would write, "Write chemical formulas for ionic compounds" because that is the level students can comprehend and explains what we will be doing TODAY.  

The same is true of unnecessarily complex vocabulary.  Do you need to use the word hydrodynamic? You might; it depends on what you are teaching and how old your students are.  But you might be better served by the words "fluid motion" (or with really young students, the world liquid will probably do).  I stopped reading a book once because the author was more interested in showing off her vocabulary than she was in readers learning from her work. 

Is there a time when it is appropriate to use more complex language.  Absolutely.  It is when doing so serves a purpose. Going back to the group fitness examples, it would absolutely make sense to teach class members the term pelvic girdle if the movement you want them to do involves 360º of motion.  Then, you are prompting the imagery of a girdle, something that surrounds the entire area, not just the left and right motion of the hips. When doing back focused exercises while weight lifting, we sometimes work a few different muscles during the same song, Matt will sometimes bring focus to whichever muscle we happen to be working with that exercise as an act of clarity.  When we are working the latissimus dorsi, he uses the name and says, "you know, like a shark's dorsal fin."  In that case, knowing the name is helpful for remembering its location.  That's a thoughtful use of the scientific name, not a pretentious act of "gaining credibility." 

As a physics teacher, the difference between velocity and speed matters.  In regular life, it doesn't.  When I taught 8th graders that there is no such thing as cold, only the movement of heat in our out of a substance, I told them, "This matters a lot in science, but please don't be the person who responds to someone saying it is cold with, 'Actually, it is less hot' because you will sound like a nutcase."  

If you have ever been on an IT help call with someone who uses all the jargon and treats you like you are dumb for not understanding it, you might have some empathy with your students. When teaching students, use the technical language that matters (and explicitly teach them what it means), but use your speech to make your content more accessible, not less. It doesn't matter how great your lesson was if you used so much lofty language that they can't understand it.

Don't Be Afraid of Weeds in Your Classroom

Question:  What's the difference between a plant and a weed?

Answer: Intent

If I dig a hole and put a seed or seedling in the ground and work hard to make it grow, it's a plant.  If it pops up on its own and grows without (or in spite of) my intervention, it is a weed.  

The bed in this picture is usually the place where I grow tomatoes and cucumbers, but this year, the spring got away from me. I never planted anything. Yet, the bed is completely filled with these lush, beautiful Chamberbitter.  I haven't watered them, fertilized them, or touched them in any way; yet they have grown thicker and hardier than any plant I have ever worked hard for, and I think they are quite beautiful.

A few years ago, I cut down a mulberry tree.  Apparently, the birds who once perched in that tree had dropped a few berries because, within weeks, this Nandina bush sprout from the base of the stump.  (The mulberry insists on attempting a comeback, so you see branches at the bottom that I do cut back, but I've done nothing to the Nandina itself because I love them.)

I hear you asking what this has to do with education, so here it is.  You also have plants and weeds in your classroom.  No, not the kids. (Although . . . maybe, no that's not what this post is about.)

The "plants" consist of the content you have planned, the curriculum and standards you intend to teach.  The "weed" is the learning that volunteers itself.  

Now, listen, I am an intense lesson planner. When asked to describe my classroom management strategy in self-evaluations, I start with "teach from bell to bell."  Class time is too limited a resource to squander, so I have a brisk, content filled plan.  I believe strongly in well-planned and paced direct instruction.

But, I also have space that allows curiosity to be satisfied.  A few years ago, one of my 8th grade boys told his English teacher how proud he was of himself because he could always "get Miss Hawks off the subject." The teacher he was talking to smiled and said, "No, you can't. She knows exactly how much time she can afford to give up to answer your questions." And she was correct. I knew how much time was left in class and how much I had left to do that was essential.  I would entertain his questions for that amount of time and then say, "Okay, we've got to get back to this now."

After teaching for a few years, I started recognizing the same questions being asked every year.  When I was teaching about how our ear processes the vibrations in the air (we call them sound waves) into something our brains can interpret as tones and words, students were also interested in why our ears pop on airplanes and why some people of more ear infections as kids than others and what tubes do.  These were natural connections to the ear, and they were curious. So, I started working time for that into my lesson plans.  When we did physics problems about rotary motion, they sometimes had questions about dizziness. Again, it makes sense those questions would come to mind while we talked about spinning.

So, how do you work time for that into your plan?  Interestingly, you can accomplish it by over-planning what you are going to do with your "plants."  If I can teach a physics concept adequately with three examples, I plan to do four,  That way, if the questions arise, I have one that I can give away without losing quality instruction.  If "weeds" sprout up in third period but not sixth period, I have a fourth example to do with them.  If a particularly interesting question got asked in first period, but no one in second period thought of it, I might attempt to lead them to it by saying something like, "Some people often wonder . . . " or "You know what I wonder about sometimes?" 

Newer teachers, it can be a little scary when "weeds" invade your well-landscaped plan. It's also harder for you to know if you are over or under planning. (Nothing took me longer to learn than how long something would take to do.  I would think I had a 50 minute lesson planned, and it would take 20 minutes or 3 days.) But, when students are curious, you don't ever want to squash it. Give it a few minutes.  If you feel they are trying to lead you off the subject, say, "I will take two more question - you and you - and then we are going back.  Feel free to come back after school or email me if you want to ask more."  The ones who are truly curious will take you up on that.  

I named this blog "On the Rabbit Trail" because I love when learning happens spontaneously.  Sometimes, like the Chamberbitters and the Nandina in my yard, the weed I didn't intend to grow is still quite beautiful.