Range of Healthy Balance

When I was a kid, my parents told me that there was no such thing as a job description. "Whatever your boss asks you to do," they said, "that's your job description for that day. You should always be the best employee they have." Now, listen, they weren't advocating standing for abuse or doing things that made you feel morally compromised. They were just saying that you should always do your best to contribute to whatever team you were on and never to say, "That's not my job; someone else should do it."

Fast forward a few decades, and I find myself doing something rare - muting a phrase on Twitter because I couldn't believe educators were part of it. That phrase was "quiet quitting." For those of you who don't spend a lot of time on social media, let me explain what it means. Quiet quitting means doing exactly what you are contracted to do and not one iota more. That means no sponsoring a club unless it is specifically in your contract. It means no chaperoning dances or field trips. It means no staying after school to help tutor a struggling student. It means you come to school at your contracted time, teach your contracted classes, and go home at the end of your contracted day. It means you don't do any of the things that make you a teacher besides the actual act of teaching class. 

Do I understand why this happened? Of course I do. There are absolutely schools and districts who take advantage of their staff, working them to their breaking point and then just replacing them when they do. I'm not suggesting that anyone put up with that. But this is a coward's way out. Even the name implies that you know what you are doing is the equivalent of not doing your job at all.  Meanwhile, there is an attempt to make it sound virtuous - like you are protecting everyone in the future. In reality, the jobs you are refusing to do still have to get done, and someone will do them.  All you have accomplished is shifting responsibilities from your plate to theirs.

You absolutely need to set healthy boundaries about what time you are willing to answer e-mails and how many extracurricular activities you are willing to commit to. Of course, it is important that you have a life outside of school, so if you are grading until 9PM, something is wrong with someone's expectations. If you are going home at the end of the day and dissolving into a useless puddle, you are working too hard. Please don't think that because I am against one end of the spectrum that I am in favor of the other end.

What I am advocating for is an acceptable range - one where we model excellence to our students without compromising our own health. Because it is a range, there may be days or weeks that lean more heavily towards work - exam preparation week, for example. And there may be days when you have to say, "I'm showing a high quality science video because I couldn't finish grading yesterday afternoon and need the class time to do it today." In a range of healthy balance, you might sponsor a club, but you might limit how many times a month it meets. 

Quiet quitting is anything but quiet. It is about stamping your foot and throwing a tantrum to demand you be paid for anything outside of your contract hours, as though every item, duty, and meeting could be made a line in your contract. It's about going online to brag about how little you are doing and how the system won't keep you down.  A person with healthy balance takes a PTO day when they need some rest; a quiet quitter takes every single one just because they can and will squeeze the last one in during exam review if they have to. 

The quiet quitter isn't virtuous. They aren't making the system better. A person who wants to change things goes through a process, petitions their leaders, has difficult conversations. A person who goes on social media isn't getting something done; they are getting attention.  It's raising slacktivism to another level.

Teachers, as you return from break, you get to a bit of a reset. You can set new boundaries with your students, administrators, families, and yourself. Recognize every week is not going to be the same and every person is not going to be the same.  Find your balance range - not someone else's. 

The "Easy" Teacher and the Paradox of Motivation and Anxiety

Every Thursday, I receive an email newsletter from Peps McCrae, called "Evidence Snacks." If you aren't enrolled, go do it now. They are short, and they are fantastic.  The one a week ago was about motivation, a complex subject that benefits all teachers and students.  There's a part that has stuck with me because it's a bit of a paradox. As a physics enthusiast, I love a good paradox. Here's the summary. If you are familiar with Growth Mindset, it will sound familiar.  If a student engages in a task and is successful, they will motivated only if they "attribute their success to their own effort, ability, and approach."  If they attribute that success to anything external (the test was easy, the teacher likes me, or luck), they have no reason to feel more motivated because those factors are not within their control. I know you aren't seeing the paradox yet because it wasn't in the email; it was in my mind. His newsletter was about motivation, and this post is largely going to be about anxiety, but the two are related, so let me walk you through my thought process. Teachers and schools are currently dealing with an anxiety crisis in students. If you look at the data on reported anxiety levels, it remains pretty flat up until 2012-2015, depending on age group, when it makes an upward shift. The graph then increases in slope in 2020 due largely to pandemic concerns.  What happened in the time between those years? The smart phone became ubiquitous.  It was invented earlier, but for a while, it was only in the hands of wealthier adults, mostly businessmen (remember calling the Blackberry a "crackberry" and people wondering whether President Obama would be allowed to use his?). Around 2012, we started putting them in the hands of 16 year olds so they could call their parents if they were in a car accident or had an emergency. Each year after that, the age started getting lower and lower and the anxiety in younger kids (sadly, not shown in this graph) started climbing. Schools can't really address the source of the problem (24/7 access to social media and constant distraction) because we don't control when students are given these things. We can make rules restricting their usage at the school, but that is only minimally helpful to the anxiety problem if they are on them the rest of the hours of the day and losing sleep as a result.  So, we look for other ways to reduce their anxiety - things we can control at school.   Maybe if we didn't give them homework, they would have some down time, so school start setting stricter limits on the assignments teachers can give. Does it help? No. They have test anxiety because they didn't properly prepare for it with deliberate practice.  Also, they don't tend to use their down time as down time. They either schedule something else or hop on their phone, exacerbating the problem. Maybe we include breathing exercises in PE. It certainly doesn't hurt, but it's effects are rather temporary. It doesn't result in much meaningful reduction of anxiety after the few minutes they have done it. Feel free to do it, but don't expect massive results. Maybe we should make the tests easier, so they feel more successful. Here's where Peps' newsletter came to my mind and created a paradox. (Oooh, if it ever becomes a thing, we have to call it the Peps Paradox.) Making it easier will make them less motivated, especially if they know we have made it easier.  The best way to deal with anxiety isn't breathing exercises (again, I'm not saying not to do them); it isn't to have lots of free time (anxiety lives in our heads and we tend to ruminate on it when we aren't doing other things); it isn't even a trip to the spa (nice, but temporary help at best).   The best way to deal with anxiety is to reflect on the success you have had overcoming difficult things. It reminds you that you are stronger than you feel you are. When you have one of those weeks where it seems like there is a test in every class, reminding yourself that it didn't kill you trains your brain to fear it less the next time. It helps to reflect on what made you successful - you studied with good techniques, you spaced out your study time over several days instead of cramming. You paid attention in class instead of playing games on your computer. If, according to the studies cited in Peps' newsletter, a student attributes their success on a test to the test being easy, they will not feel good about their success, and they will have no ability to reflect on their strength. Thus, motivation will not be increased and anxiety will not be decreased.  Teachers, don't misread me.  I am not saying to go out and overwhelm the working memories of students in the name of rigor. I am not telling you to be mean to them.  I am saying that, if you believe lowering your standards will help them with their motivation or their anxiety, it will not. Don't fall into the trap of thinking you can help by being an "easy" teacher. Continue to hold the same standards you did before, but then walk students through the process of reflecting on the fact that they CAN and DID do hard things.

Professional Judgment - Don't Trade It In

I sat in a conference with a parent who was known to be particularly difficult. You know the type, the one who challenges everything the teacher does, knows she is right, and sees no nuance. She had a copy of my most recent test and was challenging questions that I had gone over in class after the tests were graded because if I had, in her words "felt the need to reteach it, you must know you didn't teach it well the first time." While I think that would be a valid practice, it wasn't why I went over frequently missed questions. I went over frequently missed questions because I wanted to students to engage in a little metacognition. I asked questions like "Why did you think the answer was B?" and explained the misconception that might have led to that choice and explaining the thinking that led to the correct answer.

She said that I should throw out any question missed by a large number of students, so I explained my process.  When I ran the tests through the scantron (which she also didn't like that I used), it told me how many students missed each question (one of the reasons I continued to use that type of test). If a question exceeded a certain number, I went to the question and the key and asked myself several questions.

1. Was the key marked correctly?  We do make mistakes, and if I marked the key incorrectly, I will immediately give everyone credit for that question.
2. Did I actually teach that this year?  Experienced teachers do pull up their old tests and edit them rather than creating new ones each time, and sometimes, changes to the calendar or interruptions to the routine mean I could have skipped something in class but forgotten to remove it from the test.  I would obviously throw that question out for everyone.
3. Was the question and answer list fairly worded? It doesn't happen very often, but every once in a while, I would be making the key for a test and think, "Was I half asleep when I wrote this question?  It doesn't make sense."  When that happened, everyone got credit for that one too.

If the answer to all of these questions was yes, then the question remained no matter how many of them got it wrong. This mom stopped me at the word remained and said, "Well, I imagine the students would have a different perspective than you do on that."  Of course they would. They were in the 8th grade, and I had been teaching for 15 years; we had a different perspective on EVERYTHING. It's their job to complain and pushback on anything they don't like, and it is my job to understand that what they want and what they need are two different things.  

I said to her, "I know they do, but I'm not going to trade 15 years of professional judgment built by experience to middle schoolers." That mom didn't speak to me for 3 months. (Oh, by the way, at some point during all of this, the dad popped up and said, "She didn't miss this question anyway, so we should probably move on." AARGH!)

In the age of populism, this problem has only increased. In the same way everyone was an armchair epidemiologist in 2020, everyone who reads an education blog is ready to challenge curriculum. They will sit across from someone with a PhD in curriculum design and say, "but this website says this book is better." We all (and I am including myself) decide we are qualified to counter arguments if we have done an hour of internet research. A man I encountered at the gym recently told me that he "know more than most doctors" because he read "five very long books" on nutrition and cancer.  He was saying this to a woman who has been seeing doctors at Johns Hopkins, Duke, and MD Anderson - three of the best cancer treatment institutions on the planet, but he thought he was qualified to overrule their judgment.

And now, as it always seems to these days, AI enters the discussion. Teachers everywhere are being asked to sacrifice their judgment to a machine.  

• Is the machine an expert on their subject? No. It's been fed a lot of websites.
• Does the machine know anything about their students? No. 
• Has the machine given an exam before? Of course not.
• Is the machine trained using only high quality sources? No. It is trained on every source - good, bad, and ugly. Right and wrong. Every source on the scale of credible to nutjob is represented in equal measure.

A friend of mine did an experiment with one of the AI platforms last week.  She put in her midterm exam and asked it how long it would take students to complete. She doesn't need to ask it this. She has given nearly the same exam (tweaked for the reasons discussed early) for several years, and she knows that the first student will turn it in somewhere around the 65 minutes mark and the last last student will finish it just before the 90 minute allotment is up). The AI told her it would take 90 to 120 minutes for students to complete it. The next day, she fed the exact same test into the same program and asked it the same question, and it said it would take an hour. 

Is this a hallucination (the cutsie name we give for when AI lies by making up crap that doesn't exist)?  No, it just doesn't know. And that would be fine if it just said so, but it won't. 

I'm not saying you should never seek out the wisdom of another mind, but it should be a mind that is at least as wise as yours. 

Students don't qualify; they simply don't know what they don't know.  A student once told me that the biology teacher next door to me was "asking questions that didn't need to be asked." I said, "I'm sorry, but your are a high school freshman; you aren't qualified to make that judgment. You don't know what needs to be asked." AI doesn't qualify either.  It is the digital equivalent of your worst friend - the one who thinks they know everything, never admits when they don't, and just guesses.  Think about that friend; do you go to them for advice?  Of course you don't; you know you have better judgment than that friend.

Teachers, trust yourself.  Seek advice from those whose judgment you trust. Incorporate their input into your thinking.  But don't trade in your professional judgment to anyone or anything with less wisdom than you.

What's Your Plan?

Welcome back from Thanksgiving!

If you a secondary teacher in most American schools, you are probably shifting your attention to wrapping up the semester and exam preparation. For some of you, exams will take place before Christmas, and for others, it will be one of the first things you do after returning from break.

Either way, it is time to start preparing students. They need to training in the art of preparing for something a few weeks away while simultaneously accomplishing the things they need to do today. And if your students are anything like mine were, they resist it pretty hard. A student once complained to me that "no adult has to plan for long term and short term at the same time."  I asked her if her parents went grocery shopping every day. She looked at me like I was crazy and said, "Of course not." I told her that meant her parents were having to think about both dinner tonight and what they might need for the rest of the month while they were shopping. I was also the yearbook advisor at the time, so I asked her if she thought I only took photographs the week before a page deadline.  Again, that would be crazy. I had to plan my days (what games I would attend, who I needed to track down to get another shot of) each day and week because there would be a deadline in December where those pages needed to be finished. 

In short, independent planning for both the short term and the long term is a life skill that will serve you from now until you die, so it's a little bit important, student resistance not withstanding. Their resistance doesn't make for a losing battle, just one you need to start early and keep emphasizing throughout the year. 

So, how do you build independence in students? In my study skills class, I handed out a paper calendar and had them fill out the big dates (exams, known test dates, etc.) as well as the things that were specific to them (athletic practice, play rehearsal, choir performance). I wanted them to get a realistic view of the limitations of their time.  Then, I asked them to realistically plan for where they could fit study time in for the exam. "But that's still 2 weeks away," one of them said. "I have this test to study for before then."  I reminded them that the entire reason we were doing this was to allow them to plan for both. Obviously, the days before that test should have their study time focused on those chapters, but they should also fit in about 20 minutes making flashcards or working on their study guide for the exam in that same class.

Recently, I was listening to the Good Faith podcast, and there were two guests who talked about anxiety prevention and building independence in young people.  They were  Kara Powell of the Fuller Youth Institute and Sara Billups - Author of Nervous Systems. They both referenced Lisa Damour, so I may be misattributing what any of them said to one of the others.

Sara Billups, I believe, discussed empowering kids while also guiding them, starting with three words - "What's Your Plan?" She said starting this way communicates to them that they have the ability to make a plan and is motivating. It doesn't mean you won't have to help them adjust an unwise plan, but if you start with the plan they made themselves, they will resist less. It also gives you a place to start from in guiding them to build independence. After they have told you the plan, you can say, "Why do you think that is the best thing to start with?" or "Do you remember that you have a volleyball tryout that afternoon? Are you sure you will have the energy for what you have planned after that?" Kara Powell recommended asking more questions than making statements. Statements feel like being dictated to, which we all naturally resist. Questions feel like we are choosing something. Even if the end result is the same, the second builds independence while the first reinforces dependence.

I recently interviewed the mom of three of my former students for a book I am writing about study habits. She said, "Looking back on it, I wish I had sometimes let them follow through on a less than wise plan so they could tie the consequence to the choice." It's natural for adults to want to prevent a negative consequence they can see coming. And, of course, if it is something major, we should - you don't let your child learned not to play in traffic using the method of natural consequences. But if the result is one failed quiz or one day of miserable exhaustion from staying up too late, it might be worth the investment. (This, by the way, is another example of adults balancing the short term and the long term together.) 

Growing up isn't easy. And, let's face it - not all adults have mastered it either. Helping kids navigate the process of becoming independent learners and functioning adults takes time, effort, care, and patience. It also takes teamwork. 

The Best Way to Learn?

During the first two years of my career, I frequently had the experience of stopping mid-lesson and saying, "Oh, I get it now." My students were a little shocked to find out I might not have gotten it before.  "No, no," I said, "I've been teaching you HOW to do it correctly, but I just put together WHY it works that way." I'm not sure if this made my students feel any better about my competence.

Anytime I share this story, people adopt a truism, assuming it to be a given. "Well, the best way to learn something is to teach it," they say. Education is full of these statements that people assume to be self-evident. But when I started learning about research into the science of learning, I had to investigate, not only what things work, but why. When you learn some principles of how the human brain works, you come to realize that everything is more complex and filled with nuance than you ever imagined.

Consider, for example, this tweet using this idea for a sports related skill. If a coach wanted a college athlete to learn a new skill, would he send that student to a middle or high school and have them teach that skill.  Of course not. He would show them how to do it (either demonstrating it himself or showing them film). He would then have them perform the skill while providing feedback until it became automated.  

Apply the same notion to a person learning a musical instrument for the first time. Would any piano teacher say to a student, "Now that you have had one lesson, it's time for you to teach one of my younger students"? It is easy to recognize the absurdity of this idea when we apply it to this type of skill, right. 

Still, this is the kind of malarkey being fed to classroom teachers throughout their degree and in professional development sessions. Get off the stage; have the students lead; have them teach each other. Then people post graphics that look "science-y" because they arrange them into a pyramid shape and attach numbers to them. You see it with Maslow's hierarchy of needs and Bloom's taxonomy, which I have addressed on this blog before. I've seen it in non-academic contexts, which I addressed here.

Yesterday, Bradley Busch, who I adore and whose books I have shared broadly, quote tweeted this learning pyramid (whose numbers are too tidy to represent any real science). As you can see, it claims teaching others will give you a retention rate of 90%! That would be amazing if it were true. But I love Bradley's comment, "As a rough rule of thumb, don't rrust any pyramid when it comes to learning or psychology."

"But, but . . ." I can hear you saying, "You started this blog with a story of learning something by teaching it." Thanks for remembering that, but if you go back and read it again, you might find it is a bit less straightforward than that.  You will see that I was teaching something I already knew how to do.  In fact, I was teaching something I had learned in high school and had been doing throughout college, writing chemical formulae.  Teaching it solidified my understanding of the deeper reasons for the techniques, but it would have been an absolute mess if I had tried to teach it to them while I was a high school chemistry student learning it for the first time.

There are some in the evidence informed world who think we have to throw out all techniques that are not explicit teaching. As a science teacher, I do know that other techniques have value when implemented well as part of an environment based on explicit teaching. I advocate for using other techniques sparingly and judiciously, with an understanding of the cognitive science principles behind the techniques.  When it comes to students teaching others, I think there are three things that are important to consider - retrieval, summarizing, and thinking about meaning.

• Retrieval is one of the most powerful activities our brain has. I love learning interesting facts, and I really enjoy telling people about facts that I have learned. When I share, people frequently ask how I remember all these random things. Until a few years ago, I didn't know.  I thought I just remembered things because I liked knowing them. After I started learning about the science of learning, I realized why remember all of this trivia. The penny dropped the day after I learned why we say uppercase and lowercase when referring to capital and non-capital letters. (If you are interested, it is because, during the time of type setting, the blocks with capital letters were kept in the top drawer - literally the upper case). I heard it on the radio one evening, and I thought it was amazing; so the next day, I told all six of my classes about it. I told other teachers about it.  I told anyone who would stand still and listen to me tell it. Over the course of several days, I must have retrieved that piece of information seventeen times. I remember things because I tell people things. In spite of the recent disdain for drilling, coaches, theater directors, and music teachers will tell tell you they work. Cognitive scientists will explain why - retrieval myelinates the nerves required to remember information or perform a task. When we teach, we retrieve previously learned knowledge. It's not the act of teaching that is helping you learn; it's the retrieval (at least in part) that is helping you remember.
• Summarizing is a skill that you likely learned in late elementary or early middle school. It's the basis for a good book review, decent story telling, and critical to note taking. It's also something your brain does while you are learning. As a teacher speaks, the student brain unconsciously sums up the gist in order to figure out where to store the new information by figuring out how it relates to what they already know - their schema. Because it is an unconscious process, we often don't know if the brain is doing it well. I can't tell you how many times a student has said, "So, you are saying . . ." followed by something I was definitely not saying. But I've also had some students finish that sentence with a brilliant rephrasing that made it more clear for everyone. My favorite one was "So you are telling me that everything is mostly made of nothing" after a detailed explanation of the distance between the nucleus and the electrons in an atom. Teaching others forces us to take this often unconscious process and engage with it on purpose. It's not the act of teaching that is helping you learn; it's the summarizing that is helping you work what you have learned into your existing schema.
• Focusing on meaning is, according to Daniel Willingham, the best way to aid your memory. After reading his book Outsmart Your Brain, I started telling my students to slow down with their flashcards and ask, "Why is this the answer?" and "Why isn't it a different answer" and "How does it connect to other things in this chapter?" while retrieving. Focusing on meaning gives the brain something to hold onto.  When I was learning to write chemical formulae in high school, I could get it right by following the process. When I was teaching students to do it, I had to focus on the underlying chemistry behind the process in order to explain the rules, which led to my moment of clarity while I was explaining. If a student asked a question, knowing the underlying chemistry was essential to giving them a quality answer.  It's not the act of  teaching that is helping you understand; it is the focus on meaning of what you know that is required to teach it.

What can you, as a teacher, take away from these three principles if you want to use the technique of students teaching for learning in your classroom.

1. Timing is key - If you are going to have students teach other students, it is important that they not do it too early in the learning process. It should be after they have mastered the fundamental concept themselves. I had a project in which students taught, but they had almost three months of research and practice on their topic before they got up to present (and I promise you that we could all tell if they had not).
2. Heavy guidance - Students will not summarize and focus on meaning naturally, so you have to require it from them if you want them to learn from the activity. Make them summarize their lesson either verbally or in writing. Give them feedback on whether their summary indicates a proper understanding.  During the preparation process, ask them questions that force them to think about meaning. Have them rehearse their speech with a volunteer and instruct the volunteers to ask the types of questions students ask.
3. Reflection - Reflecting on our learning is the most neglected part of the learning process. After students have presented, ask them questions about the content and the process to help them consolidate their understanding.

Doing this well is time consuming. If you decide to engage this technique, make sure it is worth the investment. What's the opportunity cost - i.e. what else could your students be doing with that time? If you decide it is worth doing, make sure you are ready to provide the guidance, feedback, and reflection involved in doing it well.

Thanksgiving 2025 - Holy Trinity Anglican Church

Each year at Thanksgiving, I write a post about an educator who inspires me. I've written about the teachers of my childhood, my colleagues, the GRACE administration and parents, my group fitness instructors at the Y, and Learning and the Brain. 

This year, I am particularly grateful for my church, Holy Trinity Anglican Church in Raleigh, and most especially for its rector. His fancy name is Rev. Dr. John W. Yates III, but he's my pastor, John, and I could not adore him more.

Fair Warning:  This post is going to be longer than normal. There is some background information, and I want to tell the story in detail. Get some coffee and settle in.

A little background on me. I grew up in church.  I don't mean I went every now and then. I mean I grew up in the church building. My family was there, at minimum, 3 times per week - more if there were youth activities, drama practice, handbell or choir performances, etc. I also attended a Christian school from kindergarten through 9th grade and went to a Christian university. So, I've been hearing sermons since my ears were forming in utero. And, Roland Harrell, the pastor I had during the most formative of those years, was intelligent, thoughtful, organized, and prepared.  We used to joke that he could pull a sermon out of a comma in the middle of a sentence. He kind of ruined me for all other preachers. It took me a while in college to settle on a church for that reason. In Tulsa, a city FULL of churches, there was no preacher that lived up to Mr. Harrell.

Fast forward to my adult life. I had been attending a well known church downtown Raleigh for quite some time. I never really got plugged into it, though. I was briefly in a community group, but it didn't stick. It's a big church where it is easy to be pretty unknown. Maybe I needed that for a while, but in late 2022, I started feeling that it was time to move on. I don't have anything bad to say about that church; there's no dramatic story. I just had allowed myself to become stale. I was mostly anonymous, showing up on Sunday morning to listen to the sermon and that was about it. Because it was non-denominational, doctrine was very much de-emphasized. If asked about specific doctrines, they would say, "We hold some things in a closed hand because they are essentials. We hold everything else in an open hand because Christians can respectfully disagree on those."  I am on board with that philosophy. I grew up in a Pentecostal church and a Baptist school and went to college at ORU. I taught in a Christian school with a multi-denominational population. So, I am accustomed with respectful disagreement amongst faithful people, but at this church, we didn't get a chance to respectfully disagree; I couldn't tell you if I disagreed with them or not because they never talked about them. (I'm not even 100% sure I know which issues they might put in each hand.) So, I wasn't growing at church. I went to church for those last few years because I am a person who goes to church, not because I was contributing to or taking anything from it. I got my doctrinal development from podcasts. I knew this wasn't right, but inertia is powerful; so it took God moving in my heart to get me to think about looking elsewhere.

But in November 2022, I didn't feel like I could leave yet. I had committed to a two-year giving initiative, and we were only near the end of year one. I didn't want to break my commitment, and I still believed that what I was giving to was a good thing. I didn't want to make my home somewhere else only to say, "I'm sorry, I can't give here for a year because I'm still giving over there."  So, I decided to wait until after Christmas of 2023 and then start looking for a church home, where I could grow, serve, give up any sense of anonymity, and stay until I died. 

Okay, here's where God has a sense of humor because He knows what is coming and we don't. During the fall of 2023, He started nudging me out of the classroom, something I had never remotely considered.  You can read that story here. Everything in my life was about to change as I went from very stable income and a predictable school calendar to the unknown of hourly work, writing a book, and the attempt to build a consulting business. When I made my last payment to the giving initiative, I thought, "Really, God? I know I said this was when I would leave, but . . . NOW?  Do I just not have enough change coming in my life?" But I knew there was a reason this needed to happen, so I made a list of local churches and began visiting.

The first church I visited was definitely not it. I posted about it on Facebook, prompting one of my friends to send me a "What were you thinking?" message. I was thinking I needed to go to church this week, and there was one on this corner; but don't worry because I'm not going back. On a walk to a kickboxing class with my friend Meagan, I said, "I will visit however many it takes; I want to find the place I can stay forever, and it may take time to find that place." She suggested that I visit Holy Trinity Anglican Church, saying, "I think they have the things you are looking for."  This was, word for word, the same thing she said when she suggested I take a tour at the Y, so she's wise about knowing what I am looking for.  

My first visit was interesting. I sat about halfway back in an aisle seat. After a song and prayer, when I sat back down, I was blinded by sunlight coming in through a very large window. I got up and moved, feeling very conspicuous (although, that's just the Spotlight Effect - no one actually noticed). Having attended very few liturgical services in my life, I felt a little awkward about kneeling and responsive readings, but I also  liked the sense of ceremony and connection to everyone else in the room that came from it.

Then, John got up and preached the sermon (start at 22:00). It wasn't long, but it didn't need to be. It was powerful. It was about loving your enemies and blessing those who curse you, which feels countercultural in our current climate. After putting it in the historical context of Jesus' audience, John shared a story about a time his dad, who he clearly loves, was betrayed by a friend and told how he responded. I was impressed by the vulnerability it took to share this obviously painful story, so later that week, I found his email address on line and thanked him. I ended the email with, "I don't know much about Anglican practices. Is there a resource you could point me to?" I thought that, if he answered at all, he would send a link to a website. He wrote back a lovely response and said if I would send my mailing address, he would mail me a book called Anglican Essentials (for which he had been a contributor). There's so much about this gesture that appealed to me:

1. If it is possible for books to be a love language, they are mine. This, friends, is the way to my heart.
2. It is unusually kind. Copying and pasting a link would have gotten the job done. It took time and care to put the book in an envelope, put the appropriate postage on it, and mail it to me.
3. It shows that he cares about scholarship - both his and mine. I didn't know it yet, but he is a Brainy Smurf. I've since heard him talk about pursuing his degree as "thinking I could scratch an itch only to find out it was poison ivy; everything I learned just made me want to learn more." This is basically my life as well (minus the advanced degree). 

The next week, as I approached him, he said, "You're Beth?" I wondered if I just looked like someone with questions, but he had gone to the school website in my email signature, so he would recognize me. Again, a kind act that took some time. He suggested another author that morning. I was talking to my friend Elizabeth, who had been on a similar journey with moving from a large non-denominational church to small, Methodist church recently. As I told her the story, she said "Wow, you found your people."  This was made more evident a few weeks later when he expressed, in passing, an interest in theoretical physics and specifically string theory. It was my turn to give him a book. When I gave it to him, I told him it was my favorite book about string theory, and he told me that made me a special kind of nerd. 

Done. Sold. This is my church. If, after only 5 weeks of knowing me, you knew that I would consider it a compliment to be called a nerd (and a special kind of nerd at that), you get me.

Every other member of staff has been wonderful. Claudia sought me out after seeing me for a couple of weeks in a row and told me she could help if I had any questions. I've learned well from the sermons of Tripp, Caleb, and Jason. The vestry is full of friendly people who are intentional about connecting. I am not anonymous as I sit around the same people each week and chat with them before the service. There are opportunities to serve, so I am now on the altar guild and have recently been added to the reader list.

What God knew when he started prompting me to move churches was something I didn't know.  I was about to lose something I had taken for granted, the intense Christian community I had experienced at my job in a Christian school for 21 years. Even though it wasn't right, I had "gotten away with" treating church the way I did because I attended chapel, teacher devotions, and a prayer meeting weekly at school.  That's not happening in my current role, and God knew I was going to need a pastor who I wanted to listen to, often going onto YouTube later in the week to listen again. He knew I was going to need a pastor who was patient with my constant communication. (Because he became so important to me so quickly, I send him way more emails than a reasonable person should, and he is gracious in answering them.) God knew that I would come to love liturgy, finding the repetition of the creed and certain prayers each week more meaningful than I imagined. He knew I was going to need sermons that sometimes feel like they are just for me.  God knew I was going to need Holy Trinity Anglican Church in Raleigh.

This may not seem like the most "education-y" of posts, but John is a gifted teacher. I have learned more in the past 22 months than I had in most of my adult church life. Teaching matters here, and I could not be more thankful for that because that teaching has been a gift to me - and one that I really needed more than I even knew. In a meeting with Claudia, I mentioned something about one of John's responses to me, and she said, "Yes, we really like to think here, and he leads that."

So this year, I'm giving thanks to God for Holy Trinity Anglican Church, generally, and the gift of John Yates, specifically. I sometimes wish I had found you sooner, but God blessed me with you at exactly the time I needed you. Thank you for everything.

And thank you to Meagan for being the kind of friend who knows what I need.

Growth Spurts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Power of Small, Consistent Effort

Last week, I did something big. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Think RIght, Do Right, Love Right

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When is a Scaffold NOT a Scaffold

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Purpose of School

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

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

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

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

Career Preparation

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

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

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

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

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

Inculturation

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

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

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

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

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

Personal Expression

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

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

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

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

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

Human Development

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

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

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

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

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

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

Classroom Noise is Context Specific

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Type of Thinking Expected

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

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

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

Quality of Sound

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

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

Quantity of Sound

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

Education isn't simple:

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

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

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.