(originally published at http://www.catapultlearning.com/2013/06/18/building-student-character-in-the-classroom-part-iii/)
Over the
past couple of months, I’ve been talking about six performance-related
character values that I'm trying to focus on in new program development for my company:
·
Persisting
towards solutions
·
Working
with precision
·
Asking
questions
·
Working
with others
·
Making
connections
·
Monitoring
progress and embracing learning
I wrote last month about persistence.
Today, I’d like to talk about the importance of working with precision and
asking questions.
Working with Precision
When we talk
about precision in school settings, we often mean things like proofreading,
checking calculations, and following instructions. But what is it that allows students to be precise and
careful in their work? As a teacher, do I get careful work just by asking for
it? Surely not. I remember asking for it (begging for it) all the time, and
getting it….well, significantly less than all the time.
As with so
many things, it’s All About the Brain. There are several important, cognitive
processes that govern precision, and together they are called “executive
functions.” These processes included planning, problem solving, task switching,
and monitoring (among others). Executive functioning is crucial in child
development, and obviously plays a huge role in a child’s ability to attend
school successfully. Historically, teachers and psychologists have seen executive
functions simply as control mechanisms—processes that allow students to rule
over and monitor their actions. But researchers now see two slightly different,
but complementary, things at play within the larger idea of executive functions:
cognitive self-control and cognitive flexibility.
Self-control
is the part we understand fairly well, but the second term, “cognitive
flexibility” may strike some people as unusual. The term refers to a student’s
ability to think outside the box, see alternative solutions, and negotiate
unfamiliar situations. The kinds of critical thinking and problem-solving
demanded by the Common Core State Standards and our increasingly innovation-
and creation-oriented workforce make this kind of thinking crucial, so it’s
definitely an important piece of the puzzle.
But hold on
a minute. Can students really think flexibly and differently if cognitive
self-control is in force, ruling over their desires, urges, and temptations?
Don’t we ask students to “stay on task” and not
go off on tangents? Don’t we want them to do as their told, and not think up a
variety of alternatives to our instructions?
Well, let’s
remember that self-control and flexibility are meant to be understood as
complementary. They do different things, but they work together to create a
balanced approach to the challenges of life. Sometimes control and conformity
rule the day; other times, flexibility and innovation are required. Not chaos;
just flexibility. And this is nothing very new. The entire scientific method
involves careful testing of theories and examination of results to reach
conclusions. Could we even have
science if self-control ruled over us so completely that we could not consider
alternatives? Would we have ever left our caves or trees to try anything
different?
As it turns
out, cognitive self-control is more nuanced that we might have thought. It
certainly involves the inhibition of bad behavior and distractions, but it can
also involve inhibition of habitual, instinctive, and thoughtless responses,
allowing a student some breathing room and a chance to think—to substitute an
alternative response that may prove to be more effective. Self-control monitors
everything—including an over-developed sense of control. It’s like that old
joke: moderation in all things, including moderation. Executive functions exist
to keep us from acting impulsively, and thoughtlessly following a routine can be
sometimes be an unhealthy impulsive.
Precision
can relate not only to student work, but also to student communication with
peers and teachers about the work. It
should involve thinking before speaking, choosing one’s words wisely,
constructing rational arguments, and paying attention to the relationships
among textual details or physical pieces of evidence. It is a habit of mind—a
way of interacting mindfully and deliberately with the world around you.
Asking Questions
We spend a
lot of time thinking about the kinds of questions we ask our students and the
various ways in which we encourage students to answer our questions. Author and
researcher, Robert Marzano, has written thoughtfully about ideas such as wait
time, chained response, choral response, and other strategies to maximize
student responsiveness. But little attention has been paid to the kinds of
questions that students ask of us, or
of each other.
Modeling and
posing questions lie at the heart of one of the eight Standards for
Mathematical Practice embodied in the Common Core State Standards for
Mathematics, but it is just as vital a performance value in English language
arts, science, social studies, or any other academic discipline.
When we
speak of asking questions here, we do not mean badgering the teacher with
incessant demands for clarification and explanation. Obviously, we want to
encourage our students to speak up and ask for help when they need it, but
questioning as a performance character trait takes this basic level of
questioning to a higher level. We need to encourage students to ask questions
from higher levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy—questions of analysis, of evaluation,
and of synthesis. We need to get students to wonder (and demand to know) what
has been left unsaid, what lies behind the curtain, what causes certain things
to happen, what would happen if…. We
need to encourage their curiosity and help them understand that
learning—life-long learning—is less about finding answers than seeking out new questions.
Obviously,
this can pose challenges for teachers who are used to being able to manage the
discourse of the classroom closely and control the range of questioning to
ensure things hew closely to the syllabus or the lesson plan. When you
encourage and honor student questioning, you open the door to the possibility
that students will ask questions about all sorts
of things. The danger here isn’t the totally-off-the-wall question—that’s an
easy one to deal with. The danger comes from the question that is related to
the topic at hand but demands content knowledge beyond the scope of the
textbook, the question that should be honored and needs to be addressed. It
demands a classroom teacher who is just as engaged and curious and questioning
as we want our students to be—a teacher who knows far more about her subject
than what she is teaching…or is at least willing to find out.
One of my
favorite examples of how Common Core is asking us to change the way we think
about instruction comes from a math teacher named Dan Meyer. He speaks movingly
about the need to remove scaffolding and support from our instruction to make
vital questions—questions worth asking and answering—leap into the minds of our
students. If you have not seen his TED talk, Math Class Needs a Makeover, take a few minutes to watch and
listen: http://tinyurl.com/28k8hyy.
One of the
things I like about these performance character values we’ve been discussing is
that, taken together, they paint a very clear picture of “what good looks like”
–-not just for students, but also for schools and the whole idea of school
culture. Every state is developing frameworks and rubrics and tools for teacher
evaluation so that they can nail down—once and for all—what good teaching looks
like. But if you could walk around a school and see these six performance traits
at play among teachers and students—if you could see real and consistent
evidence of persistence and resilience, precision and questioning, and the
others we haven’t gotten to yet, I think you would feel pretty confident that
you were in a good school. In fact, if I was starting a school and needed to
write a mission statement, I think I’d be tempted to list these six values,
draw a circle around them, and just write: “Make these happen.”
