Part of Something Larger

 I've been teaching about the history of NASA this week, and I was reminded of this story from 1962.  John F. Kennedy was touring what would later be called the Kennedy Space Center, and he introduced himself to a man carrying a broom.  "What do you do here?" he asked this man who was clearly a maintenance worker.  "I'm helping put a man on the moon, Mr. President," was his reply.  This man understood that he was making a contribution larger than himself.  In order for NASA to exist, someone had to empty trashcans and sweep up messes and unclog toilets, and the million other things janitors do to keep a building in operation.

The longest-lasting architectural project ever undertaken was the construction of the Cologne Cathedral in Germany.  Construction began in 1248 and was not completed until 1880.  While there were years where no work was done, that's 632 years from start to finish (continuously for the first 200 of them).  Imagine how little progress a mason must have felt he was making while laying bricks in those first few years.  He wouldn't see the spires rising into the sky, drawing people's attention upward as they worshipped the Creator.  He wouldn't have seen the incredible stained glass windows that communicate Bible stories to people who couldn't read.  He would not have seen the heavy doors through which people would pass into this artistic masterpiece.  He would have seen the bottom few layers of stone and needed faith to recognize that he was part of something bigger than just his part.  Generations of bricklayers and glass makers and lumberjacks and artisans would be a part of this massive construction.

As teachers, we have to hold this same mindset.  While it may not be on the scale of a Moon landing or a gothic cathedral (or who knows, maybe it is - someone taught those people too), we are making a contribution to the lives of students and their families and the other people they influence.  We are not, however, the only ones involved in this building project.  They had teachers before me and will have teachers after me.  They have family members and church workers and scout leaders and friends participating in the building of their lives.  We may not be able to see the people they will eventually become, but if we recognize we are part of something larger than ourselves, we will make decisions differently.  We will do our work with excellence when we recognize the foundation we are laying for someone else to build on.  

Keeping that in mind might help you persevere when grading gets tiring and lesson plans feel tedious.

  

Change for All Because of the Few?

A few weeks ago, I was in a meeting where a policy change was being discussed.  One of the members of the meeting said, "If we are going to make a change, it should be because it will benefit all or almost all students.  We should not design a policy around the few who will take advantage of the current system."  This obviously reasonable idea is not as universally accepted as you might think.  Most would probably agree with the sentence if you posed it to them, but in practice, they design most of their policies around a few exceptions.

This week, I've been following a fascinating discussion on Twitter about homework that illustrates this idea.  There may be no more divisive topic in education than whether homework is a good or bad thing.  The research is unclear because the different designs of various studies and types of homework will allow you to claim research is on your side either way.  If you hate homework, you can go pick the study in which students were asked to memorize nonsense syllables or color in a worksheet for the sake of having something to do at home and find that it didn't result in increased achievement, giving you permission to say, "See, research shows that homework is bad."  If you want to defend homework, you can find the study that was carried out under ideal conditions with perfect questions that don't reflect classroom conditions in any way, giving you permission to say, "See, homework is critical."  If you consider that we have been using this tool for decades, it is worth examining its purpose and use because there are some who resist change and others who believe in change for no other reason than the belief that newer is always better.

Well, this week, education blogger and host of the podcast Progressively Incorrect, Zach Groshell, decided to host a Twitter conversation on the topic of homework and homework bans.  Now, Zach has a Ph.D. in instructional design and works as an instructional coach, so he has both experience and expertise in this area, but on social media, that doesn't matter.  The structure of social media means I can assert that my ignorance is as valuable as your expertise; so despite his best efforts, the conversation didn't remain one of professional debate about research or how to design meaningful learning experiences as homework.  It devolved into name-calling and emotional rants.  Zach's main premise was that, in addition to homework's function as retrieval practice or extended learning, it was a form of free communication with parents about what is going on in their child's classroom and a tool for parents to assess how their child is doing. I confess that these were not points I had ever considered, but it does make sense that after ten minutes of going over vocabulary words with their 3rd-grader, a parent would know what was being covered in class and know if their child was struggling with those concepts.

What I most noticed, though, was that the theme of the negative responses was about the exceptions.  "What about students who have jobs?" and "But my dyslexic child's experience is . . ." and "How dare you assume all parents can help their students."  I was impressed by Zach's ability to remain engaged in the conversation (I would have muted it pretty quickly) and to respond rationally and calmly to comments that would have raised my blood pressure and brought out my inner snark.  His most common reply was, "We shouldn't remove a tool that is valuable for most because of exceptions; we should design ways to support the exceptions."  He suggested ways to support those for whom homework was not a valuable tool that were doable and scalable because he has experience in this area, but that only brought about accusations of burdening teachers.  One of his replies was particularly interesting because it tackled the idea that just because something feels equitable doesn't mean it is because if we eliminated this tool, the wealthiest would replace it by hiring tutors for their kids while those who couldn't afford that would have stopped receiving it for free.  He also brought up the idea that lowering the standard being met by the top performers will only look like it is closing the achievement gap, giving us a false sense of progress.

That part of this conversation took me back in my mind to a time when "teach to the middle" was a commonly heard phrase.  The idea was that you had a range of students in your class, so you had to design your teaching around the center.  Thankfully, I don't hear that much anymore because it is kind of crazy; it means you constantly chase a moving target depending on what the range in your particular class is.  This is why standards exist.  You should teach to the standard and then provide help and scaffolding for those who struggle to meet that standard.  What we should be saying is, "Teach the best and support the rest."

Around midnight, Zach thanked everyone for the conversation and provided a link to resources on how to design good homework policies, showing far more grace than I could have.  I hope people will respond to his grace by considering what he said rather than just being defensive about their own ideas.  I hope they will consider whether we should design policies around the exceptions or whether we should decide what best meets our goals.  I hope people will consider designing valuable homework rather than submitting to the two extremes of "ban for everyone" vs. "homework for homework's sake."  I hope teachers will use their professional judgment about whether to grade an assignment rather than feeling they must grade them all or grade none of them.  I hope people will resist making a change for everyone because of a few but will embrace giving the few what they need.

Reflections on Learning and the Brain 2022 - Engaging Lessons

My raw notes are posted earlier on this blog, but they don't do much for me unless I mush it all together in my head to summarize and synthesize.  With that in mind, this is the fifth in a series of my own reflections of some sessions.  This is the last one, and it is very practical.  This is from the presentation of Dr. John Almarode, but he liberally references others, so the book you see pictured here is not his but one that he recommended.

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If you are a teacher of more than one year, you know we have an engagement problem going on with students.  You might know that if it is your first year as well, but you have nothing to compare it to.  If you can compare pre-pandemic, mid-pandemic, and post-pandemic classes, you know that we have lower engagement now than in any of the other two times.  It's weird, right?  One would think that we would have observed the lowest engagement during the fearful, hybrid, masked, socially distanced time, but one would be wrong.  This year, the one that should be "back to normal" is the one where we are struggling.  I wrote a little about this in my post on Chronic Stress Recovery, so I won't repeat it here.  But the point is, students are disengaged for a number of reasons, but teachers are also so tired it is hard to implement the tools we used to have for increasing their engagement.  So, we need some simple things from research that we can use to help our students engage.

Let's start with clarity.  Teacher clarity combined with student clarity has massive potential to increase student achievement (effect size 0.84 and 0.75 respectively), but it will also increase engagement.  Both students and teachers should be able to answer the questions:

• What are they learning?
• Why are they learning it?
• How will they know they have learned it (success criteria)?

We have all been in meetings or professional development seminars where we didn't know what we were supposed to be doing, and we definitely checked out until the leader came near our table when we bluffed some vague answers.  Is it surprising our students do the same if they don't know what they are learning?  I've also been asked to do tasks where I knew what to do but found it absolutely pointless.  I worked in a real estate company where I was meant to collect data and put it into a bar graph.  While it wasn't a difficult thing to do, I was not at all motivated to do it because I knew it was going to be stuck in a drawer and never used for anything.  And since success motivates, students will be more likely to keep at something if they can see at each step whether or not they have been successful.

In the early 2010s, researchers John V. Antonetti and James R. Garver wanted to study the aspects of a lesson that create sustained student engagement.  Rather than choosing one aspect to study and controlling for everything else, they performed walkthrough classroom observations.  They performed 17000 classroom visits before publishing their book, but they have continued the work and are now at about 24000 visits.  John Almarode, who was the presenter of this particular session, said that no book has changed his teaching more than this one.  (Considering how many books he reads, that is a big statement; so I ordered it from the conference, and it is sitting at the top of my "to be read" pile.  He said that every time he turned the page, he had an aha moment.)  They found 8 things that cause a lesson to be engaging.

1. Clear and Modeled Expectations - What does the target look like?
2. Emotional Safety - Can they recover if they take a risk and make a mistake?
3. Personal Response - Can they bring their own perspective into it?  Can they write about it as a response?  Can they tell you what they think?
4. Sense of Audience - Is it valuable to someone other than the teacher?  This could be knowing that the work will be hung in the hall or posted to the web.  It could simply be that their partner cares about their part of the activity.
5. Social Interaction - Can they tell someone else what they know?
6. Choice - Perception of choice, or appropriate and limited choice (Choose from a menu that the teacher has designed), not a student coming in and telling you what they want to learn about.
7. Novelty - Just because something is good doesn’t mean you want to do it 180 days in a row.
8. Authentic - It doesn’t mean real-world.  It means it COULD happen.  (Don’t build an imaginary creature and design an imaginary habitat.  Instead, have them be zookeepers that have to choose an exotic animal and design a habitat at the zoo where you live that will let them live in your climate.). They need to know someone uses this knowledge, but you do not have to make it apply to their current lives.

In case you are concerned about incorporating eight things into every lesson, simmer down.  Take a deep breath.  According to the research, having only three of these will result in 87% sustained engagement.  If you have only two, you will get only 17%, so that third one is huge.  And, let me quote John Almarode.  "If you have bought into the clarity thing, you already have #1.  If you are a halfway decent person who doesn't hate children, you should already have #2.  So you really only have to choose one more."  He advises looking at your goal to decide on the third.  There are times when "turn and talk" is great (social interaction), and there are times when you need quiet reflection.  There are times when choice is appropriate, and there are times when you need them to do exactly one thing (choice in the lab can be dangerous).   Trying a new tool is sometimes what you want (novelty), but it can also tax their working memory if you are simultaneously introducing new and challenging material.  The ones you choose should be based on your professional judgment in accomplishing the goal.

As you head into this new year, you are planning lessons for next week.  Be ready to communicate clarity and care.  The plan your learning experiences using this list.

Educational Book Recommendations to Start the New Year

If you are a teacher, there are a lot of books available to you for professional development, but it's hard to know which ones are worth your time.  Some of the most popular ones should not be, and there are some gems that you might not ever hear about.  I read a lot of these, and I will soon be reading even more, so I thought we might wrap up this year and start the new semester with a few recommendations.  This is by no means a complete list of great education books, but you don't have time to read about my complete list.  I'll do another recommendation post in May, so you can read something great over the summer.

Learning Begins by Andrew Watson
If you want a very practical book about working memory and attention, this is the book for you.  Andrew Watson is an incredibly nice guy, and that comes across in his writing.  He was a high school English teacher before going into consulting work, so he understands the challenge of balancing curriculum requirements with student needs and understands this particular part of how the brain works better than anyone I know.  (Bonus recommendations:  Andrew has two other books:  Learning Grows is about growth mindset and stereotype threat.  The Goldilocks Map is a book I have not yet read, but I plan to read it this summer because it is about how to evaluate which research is valuable for implementation in your classroom.)

The Architecture of Learning by Kevin Washburn
This was my introduction to the world of brain science (except for some seminars on Brain-Based-Learning, which seems to have disappeared).  I saw Kevin at an ACSI conference and found him both credible and fascinating.  I bought this book and became Facebook friends with him.  He's another super nice guy, and this book will change how you view lesson planning.  It's not something you can do with every lesson; even he says you wouldn't have time for that.  What it is great for is to have a structured approach to those topics you always struggle to get across, the one that every class seems to have difficulty with.  I learned a lot from this book, and it primed me for my future love of cognitive science.

How We Learn by Stanislas Dehane
I picked this one up because my Learning and the Brain friend, John Almarode tweeted that he could not put it down.  At first, I wasn't sure how I would feel about it because there is a lot of stuff in the first quarter of the book about Artificial Intelligence and how it compares or contrasts with human intelligence.  That's not bad, but it wasn't what I was looking for.  Once you get past that part, however, this is a fabulous book on how our brains work.  There were parts that stopped me cold, and I had to post the quote right away.  If you want to understand your brain and how this collection of cells between your ears acquires and assimilates information, then 75% of this book is for you!  

A Mind for Numbers by Barbara Oakley
Of all the books on this list, this is the best one for learners.  Barbara Oakley has a great story of believing that she wasn't good at math. Don't let the title confuse you, though.  This book isn't actually about learning math; it's just about learning.  She figured out how to learn so well that she is now a professor of Engineering and teaches a MOOC on Coursera called Learning How to Learn. (Another bonus recommendation:  If you think the title of this one would put a student off, she also has a book geared toward teenage students that is also called Learning How to Learn.)

Why Don't Students Like School by Daniel Willingham
Teachers, if you are going to read only one book about education, make it this book.  While I have found great value in every book on this list and many others, this one floored me.  There are valuable books that are hard to read, and there are easy-to-read books that aren't that valuable.  This one is the best of both worlds.  For years, I had seen it on lists of must-read books for teachers, but I let the title put me off.  I think I believed it would be about personalized learning, but when a trusted friend told me "Run. Don't walk" to read this book, I ordered it.   I read it over a three-day weekend, and I found myself stopping every few minutes to post notes from it.  It explains cognitive science and its impact on student learning better than any book I have read. 

Reflections on Learning and the Brain 2022 - Engagement Myths, Enemies, and Solutions

My raw notes are posted earlier on this blog, but they don't do much for me unless I mush it all together in my head to summarize and synthesize.  With that in mind, This is the fourth of five posts that are my own reflections of some sessions.  This one is mostly out of a presentation by Drs. Andy Hargreaves and Dennis Shirley, but there is a little from Dr. Jessica Minahan in here as well.  I will take the week off on Christmas weekend, but we will start the year with a very practical post about John Almarode's session on how to construct an engaging lesson.

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We tend to think of engagement as a binary situation.  You are either engaged or not, but if you think about your own level of engagement with things in your life, you know that isn't accurate.  I have been half-engaged in many meetings, with one eye on my email while I nodded along with the presenter.  Even as I write this, I'm also watching the Thanksgiving Day Dog Show, so I look away from what I'm writing frequently to ooh and aah over a cute dog.  That said, there are sort of three categories with a spectrum between the first two.

Full engagement - The student is thinking about the lesson you are teaching.  Note that even researchers can't always agree about how to measure this because it is hard to visually observe when they are thinking.  Some measure eye contact with the teacher, but then they have to recognize that we often look away to think about something.  Some measure note-taking, but others recognize that this act might be taking their attention away from the lesson for a moment or that some people doodle as a means of engagement.  Chances are, you can recognize full engagement from your students if you know them well.

Not engaged - This is when the student is simply not thinking at all about the lesson.  Perhaps they are daydreaming or staring at the floor.  I was once in a meeting so boring and so right before lunch that I just put my forehead on the table and looked at my shoes (sorry to the guy leading that, but it was rough).  In one of your students, it might be that they are looking at a website that sells shoes.  It can look like a lot of things, but all it really means is that they are not thinking about what you are teaching.

Actively disengaged - This one doesn't have to be defined for you because you absolutely know it when you see it.  The student is taking action to not think about your lesson on purpose and inviting others to join him.  He kicks the chair in front of him, pokes the kid next to him, says off-topic things out loud, flips his water bottle, and just generally finds any way he can not to pay attention.

As teachers, we are given a lot of advice, and one of the most common is "make your lesson more engaging."  What we are not given, outside of books like the one Drs. Hargreave and Shirley wrote, are realistic ways of doing that (except that my next post will be some very practical ways, so keep your eye out for that).  Worse, some of the advice we are given is wrong; so here are three common myths about engagement.

Students will only be engaged if you make the lesson relevant to THEIR lives. - Well, first of all, if you teach 120 students a day, that's just exhausting (actually, even if you only taught 12 students a day, that would be difficult).  They don't all have the same interests or values.  According to Daniel Willingham's great book Why Don't Students Like School, most attempts to make a lesson relevant by tying it to pop culture will lead to the student only thinking about the pop culture thing you referenced instead of the thing you were trying to connect it to.  So your attempt at engagement paradoxically results in lower engagement.

Trying to do it by trends may also be a problem as it will lead to stereotyping.  For example, if you try to tie your math lesson to something you think girls will relate to, you are alienating those girls who aren't "girly."  And, those who do like the thing you are trying to connect with may feel that you are being cheesy or condescending.  Kids can tell when you aren't being authentic, so don't try to make something fit where it doesn't.  That doesn't mean your content doesn't naturally relate to their lives.  I teach physics, so I often say, "Where are my runners?  My swimmers?  My baseball players?  My musicians?" and ask them for expertise about their field because it is an example of the concept we are covering.  A history teacher is naturally going to end up addressing rights or injustice that connect to students' lives, but it fits there anyway; you aren't shoehorning it in to "make it relevant" while hoping to increase engagement.

Students like technology, so you MUST include technology to get engagement. - I teach in a one-to-one laptop school, so I am not against the use of technology in lessons.  There are things your students can accomplish with technology that they could not have without it.  BUT the idea that technology has to be involved for a lesson to be engaging is wrong.  Students engage in outdoor lessons that don't use tech at all.  They are engaged in physical activities whose only technology is shin guards.  I have found that sometimes, students are happy to have a breather from their screens.  One thing I have loved about my school since the adoption of our one-to-one program is that we were encouraged not to use technology for the sake of it but to match it to the goal of our lesson.  Sometimes, technology provides a better way; and sometimes it does not.  Use it to meet your learning goals, not to increase engagement.

Learning is only engaging if it is fun.  This may be the myth we have been told the most.  Students won't engage in a lesson if it isn't fun.  Good luck to the history teachers who teach about the atrocities, environmental science teachers who address climate change, and geometry teachers who teach proofs.  Even as a science teacher, I have to remind my students that, while I hope the lab is fun, that isn't the purpose.  There is a scientific principle to be gleaned from the observations I'm having them make.  Chasing engagement through fun is a fool's errand anyway as you can't compete with their entertainment sources.  You don't have Marvel's budget or Disney's Imagineers.  Your goal isn't entertainment; it is learning.  You may succeed with engaging them in an activity while still failing to teach them.  

So, now that I've told you what is not going to lead to more engagement, let me depress you a little more.  There are five "dis" words that can be considered the "enemies of engagement."  And we are seeing them in high numbers post-pandemic.  They are disenchantment, disconnection, disassociation, disempowerment, and distraction.  The good news is that there are antidotes to these enemies. (Wow, did I ever mix metaphors there.  Let's say there are superhero rivals to those enemies.)  Let's look at them one at a time.

Disenchantment - It's hard for students to see the magic in much these days.  Some of that is a result of their brain chemistry after returning from lockdowns, and some of it is because we are grieving the loss of over a million people without really acknowledging that grief.  We are recovering from chronic stress, and they are having difficulty seeing their place in the future.  Learning about the periodic table seems a little thin and pale to them.  Not surprisingly, the rival of disenchantment is . . . enchantment.  This comes from you.  You teach chemistry because there is something you find magical about it.  You didn't go into teaching math for a living because you hate it; there is something in it that you find really interesting.  When you read books to young children, you communicate through your demeanor that you just LOVE books.  When I was in middle school, history wasn't my thing, but I adored my history teacher, Mr. Watkins.  His favorite thing to study and talk about was the Russian Revolution.  I learned a lot about Czar Nicholas and Alexandra and Rasputin.  I read the 640 page book about them for no other reason than Mr. Watkins loved it.  Over a decade later, I stood in an art museum 1200 miles away, with tears running down my face because I was standing in front of Alexandra's crown.  It's going to take some time to re-enchant students, but it starts with showing your enchantment with it.  Be authentic about it, but realize you may need to push it harder than you did in the past.

Disconnection - It's hard for students to feel a connection with some of our material.  As I already addressed above, the answer is not necessarily to connect it to their lives.  What is important is that they see a purpose.  In his session, John Almarode said, "They need to know that this information is used by SOMEONE."  They need to see that there is meaning in the material for the world.  This generation is able to see a broader context better than past ones have been at their age, so if you can show them that what they are learning has meaning and purpose in the world, you can help them connect with it more.

Disassociation - There's no surprise here.  The social media that was supposed to connect us has left us disconnected and polarized.  Add two years of limited interaction to that, and the news isn't good for students feeling connected to their peers, the future, or your material.  Well, teachers, this is what we are good at.  We know how to connect kids to each other.  Surveying a class to find common ground, giving them a short collaborative activity that requires them to connect, and asking students to turn and talk to their neighbor about what they just learned are all ways of providing connection and belonging.  We got this if we just think about it for a minute.

Disempowerment - "Empowering students" and "giving students a voice" are so overused that they are now little more than faddish buzzwords.  While both of those things are important, we are addressing how to get kids to engage with a lesson, so think a little smaller.  WITHIN your lesson, how can you provide students with a choice?  Construct activities in two columns and allow them to decide which one they want to do.  You're making the columns, so you can still accomplish what you want, but they feel a little more in control of their lives.  "Would you like to write this down now or wait until the end?" is a way to give students a sense of choice.  Where the choice has to be yours, taking the time to explain why you made the choice you did honors the student as a human being because you cared enough to explain your thinking.  

Distraction - This is the big one.  If you asked most teachers why their students aren't engaged, this would probably be the reason they give.  They would likely blame technology, but ask an experienced teacher if kids were never distracted before they had computers.  I have watched kids read their pencils and play with their own fingers.  The rival of distraction isn't sensory deprivation.  It's to give them a challenging task that requires all of their focus.  Have them build something, engage in a scavenger hunt, make the goal big enough that it requires a lot of thinking.  And, of course, recognize that you are going to need to redirect from time to time.

Engagement can also be different in kids with high anxiety and those who have experienced trauma.  The amygdala in their brains is sometimes hypervigilant, and that can result in inaccurate self-thoughts when they are stressed.  In everyone, stressors are likely to distort our perception (assuming someone is looking at us when we have a zit or spilled coffee on our shirts, walking into a room where people are laughing and assuming that they are laughing at us).  In the anxious student, the presence of a pretty normal stressor can result in a complete shutdown, with inaccurate thoughts like, "I just can't do any of this (even when there is evidence to the contrary, like having done well yesterday or having a good grade). They may decide a teacher just hates them (even if there is evidence of much love from them).  You will not be able to get them engaged in a class until you have turned down the amygdala by giving them something incompatible with the negative thoughts (today's Wordle, a small Sudoku puzzle, a trivia question on a card).  Once their distorted thoughts have calmed down, they may be able to re-engage with the class.

As I said earlier, my next post will contain practical advice on how you can make your lessons foster engagement, so next week, look for some very practical advice.

Reflections on Learning and the Brain 2022 - Activating Prior Knowledge

My raw notes are posted earlier on this blog, but they don't do much for me unless I mush it all together in my head to summarize and synthesize.  With that in mind, the next few posts will be my own reflections of some sessions.  This is almost entirely from the presentation of Dr. Jim Heal.

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Like any issue, EduTwitter is polarized over the two extremes of classrooms being either teacher-led or student-centered.  Proponents of the research on direct instruction come out strongly in favor of teacher expertise.  More progressive teachers are all about students making meaning for themselves.  In reality, both of these camps are reflecting only a caricature of their ideology.  If you listen to the "teacher-led" people, the image you have in your mind is of a teacher lecturing non-stop for 45-90 minutes with no interaction whatsoever from students as they silently create a transcript of the lecture.  Outside of a college lecture hall, this isn't happening much in reality.  Listen to the student-centered crowd, and the image you have in your mind is a teacher setting some materials in the center of the room and saying, "1, 2, 3 Learn" without any input from the teacher for a few weeks.  I feel like even the most ardent proponent of the Montessori method hasn't gone quite this far.  The truth is that good instruction is both teacher-led and student-centered.  I don't mean, lecture one day and free play the next.  The truth is best represented in this quote from Jim Heal:

"Students are the center of learning as the primary beneficiaries of it, but that doesn't mean they should be responsible for all of the learning that needs to happen."

He offers a resolution to the paradox through teachers designing learning experiences that activate the prior knowledge of the student while being taught the new knowledge by the teacher.

If we look at Daniel Willingham's model of what is happening in our minds while we learn, we see that there is a reciprocal relationship between encoding and retrieval as we put things in and retrieve things from our working memory.  Anything not involved with this "merry dance" (Jim Heal is quite British) is forgotten.  This is why remember we the stories we tell and forget what we ate yesterday.  We are retrieving one and not retrieving the other.  

What had not occurred to me before this session is that we don't have to be talking about the same information in those arrows.  We can be encoding one thing while retrieving something else - and if that something else is relevant to the new information, the encoding will be stronger, like velcro hooks (new knowledge) being attached to the loops (prior relevant knowledge).

There's good news and bad news here.  The good news is the brain very naturally retrieves prior knowledge that it deems to be in the same category as the new knowledge.  It has to.  Your brain is like a categorizing machine.  The bad news is that the brain doesn't always do this correctly.  It may activate irrelevant prior knowledge, so we should be careful about trying to connect new learning to something from pop-culture just to make it interesting (then they are thinking about the singer instead of the point you were making).  It can activate relevant prior knowledge that the learner doesn't realize is connected, so we should help them make those connections.  Most dangerously, it can activate prior knowledge that is only partially relevant, leading us to encode some very wrong conclusions. 

There is another piece of good news, though.  We have some control over which prior knowledge they retrieve.  We do it by cues and questions.  The higher quality the cue, the better thinking we get from our students.  Say, for example, that you want to teach about spiders after your students have already learned about insects.  You can put up a picture of a spider and ask, "How many legs does a spider have?"  While valid, it only retrieves one piece of relevant knowledge - the number 8.  If, instead, you point to the picture and say, "In what ways is a spider different from an insect?" you will get a variety of answers.  You may want to do this with several spider pictures to create a schema because spiders can be different from each other.  

Creating a schema is both a natural and a complex task.  When a child sees a new kind of dog, they are naturally tagging it with a number of categories (things with fur, things with four legs, things that pant, things I'm afraid of for some).  But it's easy to go wrong because things that are very different can have some things in common.  There are some ways in which a plane is like a bird, but they don't really belong in the same schema when you see a photo of a chickadee.  This is why teacher-led instruction matters so much.  Left on their own, students may encode the information incorrectly, so it is important to design the learning experience well.  You might give the a set of cards with words and pictures and ask them to categorize, but it will then be important to have a full class discussion on those categories.  A student might be able to defend why they put something into a certain category or you may have the chance to address misconceptions.  This can only be done if the teacher has carefully crafted the experience, not just said, "Google images of this."  They need the schema to be explicit, and that cannot happen accurately without a teacher-led process.

So should classrooms be teacher-led or student-centered?  The answer is yes.  Researcher Sam Sims published this on November 17, 2022 - "Researchers found little support for the arguments made by either side and concluded that 'the debate has largely been an unhelpful distraction for the field.'"  Don't figure out what side you are on.  Figure out what goal you have for a lesson and decide what works for those students for that lesson in that context.  You can use art and science to craft the right experience for your lesson.

Reflections on Learning and the Brain 2022 - Kids Who Can't Start

My raw notes are posted earlier on this blog, but they don't do much for me unless I mush it all together in my head to summarize and synthesize.  With that in mind, the next few posts will be my own reflections of some sessions.  This one is from a session with Dr. Jessica Minahan.  Warning:  This is a long post.

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Do you have a student who just can't seem to get started working?  A student with emotional regulation issues?  One who reacts weirdly when you ask them to do something you think is minor and reasonable?  If that student is dealing with high anxiety, acute depression, or trauma, there may be a reason for all of this.  Those things are interfering with their working memory, which is needed, not only for the acquisition of information but also for remembering the strategies they would normally use for coping with small stressors.  And it will also interfere with their ability to initiate any kind of work.  

Let me start by telling a story about a mistake I made.  In my class, we do a fair amount of retrieval practice using something I call the BBQ (big basket of questions).  I do it a number of different ways, but on this particular morning, I was calling on students by calling their names from a pile of popsicle sticks.  When I do this, a student cannot just say, "I don't know" and expect me to move on.  If allowed that, I would get seven "I don't knows" in a row.  We talk about the purpose of retrieval and why it is beneficial even if you are wrong.  I've done all the setup to create a culture of trying, so this isn't just a mean rule.  On this day, I called on a young lady whose first language is not English (although she has lived here for several years and speaks very good English).  She said, "I don't know" to which I replied with a smile, "You know you have to guess."  She completely froze up and couldn't give me any answer.  Her mother contacted me later to tell me that, at that moment, she was so stressed, she couldn't figure out how to say anything in English.  I now have better strategies for a moment like this (thanks to the Craig Barton Tips for Teachers podcast).  I can ask someone else and return to the original student to say, "Can you summarize what he said?" or "Do you agree with that?" or ask them another question to avoid the presumption that you are off the hook if you say you don't know.  At that time, I did not yet have those strategies, so I unnecessarily stressed this girl.  (Fortunately, I had a good relationship with both her and her mom, so we moved forward without difficulty.) This is an example of how stress causing a decrease in working memory can prevent a student from even starting to answer.

Dr. Jessica Minahan is a behavior analyst who conducts interventions in schools.  She is also a wealth of ideas that would work with any student, and I will look forward to reading her book, The Behavior Code.  She used an interesting metaphor to exemplify why some students react differently than others to the same stimulus - soda bottles.  If you came into a room where there were two soda bottles, and you opened one without incident but opened the other with an eruption, you would know that something had happened to the second bottle.  You didn't do anything different by opening them, but one reacted differently because of its past.    Sometimes, a minor comment or instruction might be fine for one student but cause another to erupt.  It's a "soda bottle" moment, triggered by your requestion combined with whatever has happened to them.  

This session was, specifically, about how to get them over the inertia of starting an activity.  Many teachers were trained in the use of incentives, punishments, rewards, moving a clip down a chart, or a million other motivational techniques.  Those may increase motivation, but they do not teach a skill.  If I can't do something (or believe I can't do it), it doesn't matter what the incentive is.  If you offer me ten thousand dollars to only speak French for a week, I'll be highly motivated, but I won't know how to speak French.  Adding another zero won't even help.  Punishing me for not doing it won't teach me French either.  You just can't start with a skill you don't have.

Perhaps you have the skill, but there is something preventing you from believing you have it.  Kids who struggle with anxiety and depression sometimes have distorted perceptions of reality.  They get rattled by the stressor and their amygdala says, "Don't even worry about passing this into your prefrontal cortex; just get out of here."  If you have one of these students, it is worth your time to learn about their perceptions of pretty normal requests.  

• If you tell them to do something while standing across the room, they perceive you as trying to embarrass them in public.
• If you walk straight at them while repeating a request, they sense danger.
• If you stand in front of their desk looking down at them while making a request, they find you threatening.
• Public praise makes them super uncomfortable, and they will do the opposite of what you ask to avoid it.

If you can figure out how to make your requests to these students non-verbal, you will get much better results.  Mime taking off the hat.  Squat down next to their desk, so you can talk quietly to them while not making direct eye contact.  When you want to praise them, write it on a post-it, drop it on their desk, and walk away.  Use gentler words, like "pause" rather than "stop."    

Whenever possible, give the rationale before your request BEFORE the request.  For example, modify a request from, "Move your backpack.  I'm going to trip over it." to "I don't want to trip, could you move your backpack?"  Some limited choice is also a powerful way to bring down their amygdala activity, so you could say, "Hey, I don't want to trip.  Would you rather move your backpack to this spot or that spot?"  All of these are the same request, but you will get better results from the less demanding ones.

Because stress reduces working memory, some of them may have trouble interpreting your instructions, making it difficult to initiate action.  It may be helpful to write instructions on the board or project them on a slide.  Even better, use a photograph to show what you mean.  Instead of repeating, "take out your calculator and pencil and math journal" over and over as kids enter the room, you can project a photograph of a calculator, a pencil, and a notebook with the words "time for math journals."  This won't just help those with anxiety; it will also help English language learners, students with processing disorders, kids with ADHD, and pretty much everyone because words are more powerful in memory when paired with pictures (dual coding), so eventually you could fade out the explanation and just have the cue "Math journals" because the picture will be in their mind.

Sometimes students say, "I don't understand" when all they really want is reassurance.  This is a type of inaccurate thought that should be a yellow flag for you.  Your natural instinct to rescue them will not help them learn to recognize it for themselves.  Don't become their pre-frontal cortex.  Ask a few questions to find out if they do understand, and if you have deemed that they probably do, ask them, "Do you need help or do you just want to check in?"  Often, that's all it takes for them to realize that is what they are doing, and you can say, "From now on, you can just say you want to check in."  They may need to repeat directions to you just to reassure themselves that they heard you correctly.  I had a student many years ago who routinely stopped me about halfway through lessons to say, "I don't understand" and then proceed to summarize my lesson perfectly.  One day, I said, "It seems to me you do understand and you just need to hear yourself say it."  She agreed that was probably true, so I said, "You're welcome to keep doing it (everyone was getting taught twice!), but just leave off the part about not understanding it."  I hope it taught her that she was more skilled than she thought.

Another form of inaccurate thought is "all or nothing" thinking.  Watch this sequence from Patricia Heaton on Who Wants to Be A Millionaire.  Aside from Regis being more patient than I have ever seen a game show host with anyone, notice that it takes her less than half a second to decide she cannot answer this question.  She could have eliminated 90 pennies without doing any math, but her brain was telling her she couldn't do anything with numbers.  Regis does exactly what every teacher should do - start with the easiest thing and show them that they can do it.  Again, our job is not to become their surrogate prefrontal cortex, it is to calm their amygdala down enough to allow the thoughts to get to their prefrontal cortex.  Getting them to recognize that they can do any part of the task will help break them from the idea that it is all or nothing.

Writers sometimes talk about "blank page syndrome," and I've seen it in yearbook students as well.  It can be hard to start something completely out of nothing.  You can have trouble overcoming the inertia, and it can feel vaguely threatening.  The idea of continuing is much less intimidating than starting, so one thing that may be helpful when doing a list of problems or sentences is to do the first problem together as a class and then begin the second problem and say to the class, "continue."  

It is also important to give students strategies for what to do when they get stuck.  We, as teachers, have been bad in the past about using vague instructions, like "Try your best" or "concentrate" rather than teaching them skills or jumping in to rescue them ourselves.  You can try other things that they can use in all classes, not just yours.

• When a student needs help, pretend you aren't as smart as you are.  Say something like, "Why do you think you're stuck?"  If they say they don't understand a word, slowly repeat, "Hmm.  You don't understand the word." They will likely come to the conclusion on their own, "I guess I can look it up."
• Teach them to chunk a big thing into parts.  Often, we do that FOR them, but if we take the time to do it WITH them, we give them the tools to apply it elsewhere.
• Pair a negative with a positive.  The example she gave was a class in which the students didn't like writing because they thought it was hard.  The teacher had students sit on pillows while they wrote and would introduce it with, "Let's get comfy. It's time to write."  One day, a student came to the teacher and said, "Can write today?  My back hurts."
• Chunk time, not just process.  You can say, "We will work on this for three minutes."  At the end of three minutes, ask them to pause their work and then say, "Continue."
• Allow students to practice on whiteboards.  I've been confused about why kids prefer them until very recently, when someone on Twitter quoted one of their students saying, "Mistakes don't feel permanent with these."  At the conference, Dr. Minahan asked us to recall a time when we saw a student erase a mistake until they erased a hole in their paper.  You have to really have some hatred for a mistake to want to obliterate it that way.  With a whiteboard, you can easily wipe the mistake away.
• I love crossing things off of lists.  Part of that is the sense of satisfaction and completion, but for the kid who has trouble with perseverance, it also shows them a diminishing amount of things left to do.  Consider including a way for students to check off what they've completed.  This could be a list for them to cross off, boxes for checkmarks next to their problems, or a rectangle divided into the number of boxes you have problems (students can fill in a box after completing each problem, and it will remind them of an internet downloading bar - she said she started hearing kids use language like "well, we only have three left" when she implemented this strategy.
• Make a poster of a variety of strategies for your classroom with ways to get around getting stuck.  You can refer to it or tell kids to refer to it when they get stuck.

Overcoming inertia is hard for everyone, so it is easy to empathize with students when they have it.  Share that with them, tell them ways in which you address it, and teach them strategies to overcome it.  It will help them in more than just your class.