Election Day: Education and the Pursuit of Happiness

Originally published by Catapult Learning, LLC, at: http://www.catapultlearning.com/2012/11/02/election-day-education-and-the-pursuit-of-happiness/

Then tell me, O Critias, how will a man choose the ruler that shall rule over him? Will he not choose a man who has first established order in himself, knowing that any decision that has its spring from anger or pride or vanity can be multiplied a thousand fold in its effects upon the citizens?

Plato, Critias

Whenever Election Day comes around, I try to step back from the partisan craziness for a second and think about the strange legacy that has been bequeathed to us. Nothing about the system we now take for granted was a sure thing when the Founders put the pieces in place. When John Adams handed power to Thomas Jefferson in 1800 without violence or incident, it was as remarkable an event in the history of self-rule as the American Revolution had been. The people voted one party out and another party in, and the rulers complied peaceably. The blueprint turned out to be more than clever; it worked.

Of course, not everybody got to vote back then. Only men were deemed knowledgeable and responsible enough to participate in the democratic experiment. Men over 21, that is. White men over 21…who owned property. John Adams, who fought so passionately to liberate the colonies from British rule, felt that women, children, and the poor were too dependent on others for their food, shelter, and other essentials to be able to cast a responsible vote. His friend, Benjamin Franklin, disagreed. He imagined a man who owned nothing but a jackass and was therefore entitled to vote, but who lost his voting rights when the animal eventually died. The man had lost his property but had gained in knowledge and experience over the years. According to the law, it didn’t matter. “In whom is the right of suffrage?” Franklin asked. “In the man or in the jackass?”

But times have changed. We no longer believe that a person has to be wise, wealthy, or well-educated in order to cast a vote. And everybody approaches their civic duty differently. Some of us read newspapers obsessively, trying to be well-informed on the issues; some of us respond to candidates more viscerally, looking for a leader who possesses the personal and moral virtues needed to guide us through difficult times; some of us just vote a party ticket; and some of us don’t vote at all. All of us are susceptible to lies, half-truths, and misrepresentations. It’s very difficult to know enough to cast a perfectly wise vote. Perhaps all we can do is know what kinds of questions to ask, and how to evaluate the answers we get back.

I say “all we can do,” but it’s an awful lot to ask. How can we know what kinds of questions to ask in order to learn the things that will truly reveal a candidate to us—especially when candidates are trained to avoid saying anything too revealing? A social studies teacher might tell you that you need to have a deep and thorough understanding of American history and the structure of American government—to know where we have been and how we got here. A math teacher might tell you that you need to understand statistics thoroughly and comfortably in order to pose the right questions about data claims being made by campaigns. An English teacher might tell you to examine what a candidate says and how he says it—to question the rhetoric and evaluate the arguments. A science teacher might tell you that no promise a candidate makes can be taken as valid without it first being tested methodically.

Asking questions—the right questions—lies at the heart of learning, but we don’t talk nearly enough in our schools about the importance of questioning. We talk about the need to wait more than three seconds for a student to answer a question, but we don’t spend much time talking about the quality of the questions we’re asking, or what we do with the responses. And we don’t spend much time training students to ask better questions themselves…or encouraging them to want to.

At a recent conference on online learning, a speaker and author named Chic Thompson talked about the importance of asking great questions in school and in life. He pointed out that we tend to ask fewer and fewer questions as our life progresses, moving from a childhood defined by question-marks to an adulthood defined by periods. We take things for granted. We say, “It is what it is.” We shrug.

But can we afford that shrug? It is Election Day, after all—decision day—a day to make a choice. I know it’s easy to feel as though the choice one is asked to make is small, or futile, or unimportant. But it’s still a choice, and if we choose not to choose, we allow others to dictate our life to us. Which is not exactly what the Founders had it mind.

I wonder, sometimes, what possessed Thomas Jefferson to change John Locke’s formulation of “life, liberty, and property” to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” when listing our most valuable and essential rights in the Declaration of Independence. It’s such a strange formulation: the pursuit of happiness. What on earth did he mean by it? He didn’t say, “Life, liberty, and happiness.” He wasn’t saying we were promised or guaranteed happiness itself. No. He said we had a right to the pursuit—a right to the chase—a right no government should be permitted to remove or repress.

Jefferson probably didn’t think of happiness the way we so often do, in fleeting and transitory terms. The leaves change color and the weather gets cooler, so I’m happy. Or: I wanted ice cream and I got ice cream, so I’m happy. That’s a very appetitive, maybe even animalistic way of thinking of happiness: I get what I want in the moment that I want it. I scratch an itch. That’s the way advertising has taught us to think of happiness, but there is something more to the word, especially as a classically educated man of the 18th century would have thought of it. To Aristotle and the ancient Greeks, the word happiness meant something more like the fulfillment of one’s life-work and the realization of one’s potential. Seen this way, “the pursuit of happiness” is not about getting the ice cream cone on a hot day; it’s about following your passion, chasing your dream, and becoming the person you want to be instead of the person your social class, gender, or economic background has told you you’re allowed to be.

Jefferson understood that it wasn’t enough simply to possess rights. He knew that without an understanding and an appreciation of those rights, people would eventually lose them. They would satisfy immediate appetites instead of delaying gratification and planning towards long-range goals. They would lose sight of the value of their liberty and sell it too cheaply. And he understood that the best protection against this fate was education. In his plans for the creation of the University of Virginia, Jefferson laid out a remarkably succinct list of “Goals for Public Education,” including (at the primary level):

 to give every citizen the information he needs to transact his business…
 to enable him to calculate for himself, and to express and preserve his ideas…
 to understand his duties to his neighbors and country, and to discharge with competence the functions confided to him by either…
 to know his rights…
 to develop the reasoning faculties of our youth…
 to form [our youth] to habits of reflection and correct action, rendering them examples of virtue to others, and of happiness within themselves.

Thomas Jefferson, 1818

It’s clear from the list that Jefferson felt education had to be about more than simply fulfilling personal goals or storing up academic knowledge. Jefferson talked about raising young people to be “examples of virtue to others” as well as “happiness within themselves,” and while both things are important, we have decided that public education is not the place to discuss things like “virtue,” or “duties to neighbors and country.” Those things are best taught at home, or as part of religious studies. In the separation of church and state, we have removed ideas like virtue and duty from schooling.

And yet, the things we do teach in school—the story of our quest for freedom; the stories of our search for knowledge and know-how; the various real and imagined stories we’ve told ourselves through the centuries—none of this is devoid of values, virtues, or a sense of public duty, whether rightly or wrongly understood. The things we have decided are worthy of study are not just dry facts—they are visceral parts of human history, tied to our passions, our dreams, and our fears. That is what makes them worthy of study. That is what makes them matter.

HENRY: I’m not going to be a part of any peacetime of yours. I’m going a long way from here and make my own world that’s fit for a man to live in. Where a man can be free, and have a chance, and do what he wants to do in his own way.
ANTROBUS: How can you make a world for people to live in, unless you’ve first put order in yourself? Mark my words: I shall continue fighting you until my last breath as long as you mix up your idea of liberty with your idea of hogging everything for yourself. You and I want the same thing; but until you think of it as something that everyone has a right to, you are my deadly enemy and I will destroy you.

Thornton Wilder, The Skin of Our Teeth

I think about this Thornton Wilder quote and Mr. Antrobus’s challenge to his wild, out-of-control son: “I shall continue fighting you until my last breath as long as you mix up your idea of liberty with your idea of hogging everything for yourself.” There is a difference between liberty and license, and it’s not one we talk about nearly enough with our young people. Liberty comes loaded down with obligations. You buy your personal freedom with civilized behavior that makes an un-oppressive, unrestricted public space possible. A school, town, or nation that becomes nothing more than a bunch of people “hogging everything” is a group of people living completely out of control—a group of people that will soon be at each other’s throats. It will not take long before they turn to some strongman, some king, in order to restore order and protect themselves from their own limitless and barbarous appetites.

And what is it that protects us from this “state of nature,” as Hobbes called it, and allows us think about things beyond saving our skin? What is it that balances our appetites with a sense of civic obligation and helps us see a horizon beyond our own hunger? What is it that makes the pursuit of happiness possible? For Hobbes, it was a supreme and all-powerful ruler. For Jefferson, it was a different kind of social contract, bound by law and made possible by education. It was, as it turns out, all that stuff in our books.

At the end of Wilder’s play, amidst the ruins of war, Mr. Antrobus, the eternal survivor and world-builder, takes his books out of hiding and listens again to the wisdom of Plato, Aristotle, and the Book of Genesis. He takes heart and takes hope, and he starts repairing his broken world. He makes a choice not to give up.

We make choices every day—hundreds of times every day. What are they informed by? What voices whisper in our ears and help us decide what to do? Do the choices we make add to or detract from our personal and civic happiness? These are important questions, and ones that our world-weary and cynical shrugs stop us from asking. We do damage to our children by letting them see us shrug or hear us say, “It is what it is.” We have an obligation to say, “What it is?” and “Why is it?” and “How could it be different?” We need to ask those questions and we need to teach our students to ask them, and to keep on asking them until they’re satisfied with the answers we give them…even if it pulls us away from our lesson plans. Because the pursuit of happiness was our first common core standard, and it will always be our most important one.

Happy Election Day.

If You Build It, They Will Come: The Importance of School Structure

This post was originally published on the Catapult Learning site, at: http://www.catapultlearning.com/2012/10/08/if-you-build-it-they-will-come-the-importance-of-school-structure/

"There are several ways," Dr. Breed said to me, "in which certain liquids can crystallize--can freeze--several ways in which their atoms can stack and lock in an orderly, rigid way." That old man with spotted hands invited me to think of the several ways in which cannonballs might be stacked on a courthouse lawn, of the several ways in which oranges might be packed into a crate. "So it is with atoms in crystals, too; and two different crystals of the same substance can have quite different physical properties…."

"Now think about cannonballs on a courthouse lawn or about oranges in a crate again," he suggested. And he helped me to see that the pattern of the bottom layers of cannonballs or of oranges determined how each subsequent layer would stack and lock. "The bottom layer is the seed of how every cannonball or every orange that comes after is going to behave, even to an infinite number of cannonballs or oranges."

Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

My teaching career began in a small high school for students who had dropped out or been kicked out of a variety of public and private schools. Some of the students had severe learning disabilities. Some of the students were grappling with drug addiction. Some of them had been in trouble with the law. We had ”rednecks,” “preppies,” “stoners,” “Goths,” and less-easily defined outcasts. The only thing the students had in common was the fact that traditional schooling had not worked for them.

The building looked nothing like a school. It was a small, tastefully decorated house near a college campus with big work tables in every room. Students arrived in the morning, met with their advisors, and made a plan for the day based on monthly and semester-long plans that had been created earlier. There was no such thing as “seat time” at this school; there was a list of graduation requirements, and students worked their way through them in their own way, at their own pace. Students were free to work wherever they liked, including outside in the garden. They were free to go into the kitchen and get a bagel or a cup of coffee when they were hungry.

The school ran on a handful of rules, including “no fighting” and “don’t let the cats outside.” Given the track records of the students, one would have assumed that fighting, vandalism, and other bad behavior would be serious issues, at least among the newer students. But in the four years I taught there, this was never the case. There was never any fighting. There was never any vandalism. Not one incident, ever. Whatever bad behavior these students had exhibited in other schools, it never manifested itself within our walls. The students did not require an adjustment period. They adapted themselves to their new environment in the blink of an eye. Apparently, once they no longer needed to lash out a world that didn’t fit them, they stopped lashing out.

I have no doubt that if we had taken one of those students back to his old school, he would have reverted back to his old ways just as quickly, and with just as little thought. We humans are an amazingly adaptable species. We have migrated to every corner of the globe and have adapted ourselves to every conceivable type of environment, from mountains to plains, from tundra to desert. And we have not simply managed to survive in different environments; we have thrived in them.

There seems to be something within us—something deep, in an ancient place in our brains—that helps us understand new environments and adapt to them quickly. It seems to be something deeper and more primal than reason or logic. It just happens. We see new opportunities and new challenges, and we act upon them. It may be what we do best.

When I think about my old school and I let my mind spin out crazy thoughts about the human race, it makes me wonder if setting higher academic standards for students and new professional expectations for teachers are enough to make real change occur. If we are hard-wired to fit ourselves into whatever environment we find ourselves in and do whatever is necessary to succeed and, then new ideas grafted onto old structures may be doomed to failure. The structure of our environment may be the “seed” that determines the structure and behavior of everything that “stacks and locks” on top of it, from the way students act to the way teachers behave.

Our schools were not designed randomly or arbitrarily. The structure of American public schooling was thoughtful and deliberate. Its original goal, back in the 1800s, was the homogenization of an increasingly diverse population of immigrants, so that young adults would be employable, manageable, and able to fit reasonably comfortably into the larger, white, and Protestant society. We can decry the fact that we “batch process” children in our schools (to use Sir Ken Robinson’s phrase), but it is no accident that we do so. The machine was built with a particular end in mind, and it is an excellent and productive machine… as long as you want what it produces.

In industry, it would seem obvious that an engineer cannot demand or expect a different end product unless he first retools the machine that produces the product. And yet, our expectations of American schools change radically from decade to decade without most of us feeling the need to “retool” those machines from the inside out. We may tinker around the edges, but the guts of the machine remain essentially unchanged.

This may explain, at least to some degree, why sustaining educational reforms is so difficult. Using Mr. Vonnegut’s imagery instead of my factory metaphor, imagine trying to stack oranges in a different pattern half-way through a crate. A pattern has already been established. Several layers of oranges are sitting there in the crate. But you want all the new levels to be stacked differently. Can you do it? Of course you can do it—you can do anything through brute force. But the minute you take your hands off those top layers, what’s going to happen? All of the top-level oranges will slide back into the original pattern.

Early this morning, I went with my wife to our local middle school to meet with my son’s counselor and academic team. School has been in session for about five weeks, and my son, new to the world of junior high school, has been having some trouble. His core teachers sat around a table with us and shared anecdotes about his performance in class, and we strategized together about how best to help him. I was surprised and pleased to see how well they worked together, how well each of them knew my son, and how “on the same page” they were. I was surprised and pleased by the whole event, and it struck me that nothing like this had ever happened when I was in junior high school. Nor had it happened in any of the schools I taught in… except for my first school.

Looking around the office, I noticed a large whiteboard listing the schedules of all of the school’s teachers, and I saw that discrete teams of teachers taught discrete groups or “houses” of students, and that teachers had quite a lot of individual planning time built into their schedules, as well as time to meet together as professional learning communities. The structure of their day was very different from the structure of the days I spent as a classroom teacher, and the structure within which they worked facilitated the expectations that were being set by the school leaders. The teachers knew their students well. They knew each other well. They worked—all day long—as a team, focused on a particular group of students. And they did so not because they happened to be nice people, or dedicated people, or even wise people. They did so because it was built in.

Every machine is perfect. Every machine delivers exactly what it was built to deliver. If we do not like what we’re seeing at the end of the production process, we can certainly yell at the machine (if it makes us feel any better). We can harass and insult the engineers (who were hired to build and maintain exactly what is sitting in front of them). But neither of those things will change what comes down the assembly line, year after year. The pattern has been set.

The mad scientist in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel was right. If you want a different stack of oranges, you have to start at the ground level and change the pattern in which they’ve been arranged. If we want a different set of schools, or teachers, or students, we may have to do the same thing and work from the ground up. Change the “seed” and you change the pattern. Change the pattern and you change everything.

Transitioning and Teaching: The Common Core State Standards and Math

This post was originally published on the Catapult Learning site, at http://www.catapultlearning.com/2012/09/10/transitioning-and-teaching-math-and-the-common-core-state-standards/


The meeting room was generic. The hotel could have been anywhere. I had to wonder how many people had cycled in and out of that room over the years, staring at PowerPoint slides that someone had thought would change the world. Thousands, probably. I had certainly been one of those people—drinking bad coffee, sucking on hard candies, wondering when lunch was going to be served. Today, though, I was the presenter… and lunch had long since come and gone.

I looked out at the sea of faces in front of me. Eyes were shifting back and forth between me and the math problem on the screen. It was a sample test item prepared by one of the two consortia developing assessments for the Common Core State Standards, and as the eyes shifted back to me I could see alarm and confusion in them.

“The first part of the problem you can do through brute force, right?” I said. “Just basic computation. But then where are you? What do you do with this second part?” I pointed to the bottom of the screen.

The second part of the problem asked students to decide whether or not the equation in the question could yield more than one correct answer. If students thought there might be a second answer, they could click on a button and be given a place to enter that answer. If they thought there was no second possible answer, they could click a different button and proceed to the next question. There were no clues for the student as to which button they should click. The choice was entirely theirs to make.

“See, they don’t just want you to solve the problem,” I said. “They’re trying to find ways to make you show that you understand it…how it works, what makes it tick, and what you can do with it.”

It’s always funny when I have to talk about math, because I was always bad at math. It was something I just accepted about myself, and no one ever challenged the idea—not teachers, not parents, and certainly not me. No one ever said, “We can’t allow you to be bad at math any more than we can allow you to be bad at reading.” And no one ever tried to figure out what, exactly, I was bad at. I learned the procedures and formulas, I plugged in the numbers as best I could, and sometimes things worked. I never really understood why some questions came out right and some didn’t. At some level I knew what to do, but at a deeper level I had no idea what I was doing.

When I look at the way the Common Core State Standards in math have been written and the “instructional shifts” that lie at the heart of the transition to these new standards, I feel as though they have been written with my old student self in mind. Someone out there wants children to understand math at a conceptual level and to be comfortable speaking it like a language. Someone out there wants children to be able to see patterns, draw conclusions, make generalizations, and transfer academic content knowledge out of the textbook and into the messy, unpredictable world around them. Someone wants students to be able to lift the hood, peer down into the engine, and know what it is they’re looking at.

Of course, these aren’t new ideas. Lynn Erikson wrote about concept-based curriculum and instruction back in 2002. Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe wrote about teaching for understanding back in 2005. And they are far from alone. Many people have sat in hotel conference rooms, looking at PowerPoint slides and listening to presentations about these issues. We go to conferences, we read books, and we return to our classrooms, often finding it challenging just to teach the most basic skills to our students. There is so little time available. There are so many students to be served. There are so many different needs to be met.

The transition to the new standards is meant to be gradual and it has to be gradual, because changing a standard doesn’t automatically mean that someone can meet it. A high jumper doesn’t become a better athlete just because the coach raises the bar. It’s fine to change our expectations, but we need to talk about what it takes to meet those expectations and then put a plan in place for getting there. What will the athlete need to do differently in order to jump higher? What will the coach need to do differently in order to train the athlete to do those things? How long will it take, under a reasonable training regimen, to get there?

And there’s another question the coach must ask when it feels as though an athlete can’t push through to the next level of performance: is it her or is it me? Is she truly performing at the outer limit of her capacity, or could she go further with the right kind of help? Am I the one who is limited? Could I be doing more? These are very uncomfortable questions to ask, but real change and growth are impossible without them.

If student performance is what we care about, we have to ask ourselves those questions. Wiggins and McTighe talked about backwards planning—starting with the goal in mind—when designing curriculum, but it’s clear we need to think about backwards planning when it comes to our pedagogy and instructional practice as well. A standards crosswalk can help us pinpoint gaps and challenges in what we have been teaching. But we also need a crosswalk focused on how we teach. Given the new standards and the instructional shifts required to meet them, where are our current approaches sufficient? Where will they need to change? What help will we need to bridge the gaps we might be facing?

This is not something that can be mandated by administrators or purchased in pre-packaged sets. This is work that academic departments and professional learning communities need to undertake together, working in honest, authentic (and safe) dialogue.

We cannot ask our students to change, grow, and excel if we, as their coaches, are complacent about our own performance. This is the best modeling we can do for our students. We need to show them, in the way we live out our practice, that we can all do better, that we can all use some help, and that learning never ends.

Back to School: The End of the Silly Season

(originally published at http://www.catapultlearning.com/category/blog/)

In Washington, where I live, the summer months are often called the “silly season,” the time when logic flies out the window and the news media focus (more than they usually do) on the frivolous and the outrageous. During a presidential election year, the silly season becomes a time of alarmist rhetoric, full of dire warnings and exaggerated accusations. Candidates and their surrogates say horrendous things about their opponents. It would all qualify as silly if so many people weren’t willing to accept and believe the absolute worst about those with whom they disagree.


This is not just a political issue. In many aspects of our lives, we tend to favor information that confirms what we already believe or suspect to be true. This is called a confirmation bias, and it affects our ability to weigh new information objectively and make rational decisions based on data. There is an old saying that you are entitled to your own opinions but you’re not entitled to your own facts, but this turns out not to be true. Increasingly in our fragmented culture, we do have our own facts. It becomes easier and easier to avoid seeing or hearing anything that would challenge our preconceived notions.

It would be nice to believe that this kind of thinking does not affect us in our professional lives as educators—that we are able to embrace “data-driven instruction” when it comes to our students and “life-long learning” when it comes to our own practice. But I suspect the confirmation bias plays its role with us as well. Are we too easily certain that the instructional decisions we make are the soundest and wisest ones—that the strategies we employ are the most effective, and that the activities in which we engage our students are the most productive? How strongly do we believe in own expertise, even though it is shielded from outside view and tested rarely, if ever, against outside metrics? How often do we allow ourselves to say, “I need to learn a different way?”

In a recent research study on differentiated instruction, I discovered that isolation can breed not only stagnation, but also complacency. The teachers I interviewed who liked the isolation of the classroom tended not to question or challenge their own practice. They resisted or scorned professional development. They found classroom observations to be a waste of time. They knew what they knew, and they did what they did, and it was all Good Enough. They deliberately avoided seeing or hearing anything that might challenge their comfortable vision of themselves as proficient practitioners.

On the other hand, those teachers who reached out to collaborate with peers or participate in informal classroom observations proved much more flexible and adaptable in their practice—much more willing to experiment with new techniques. They were more self-reflective and more self-critical. They were more willing to accept the fact that there were areas of their practice where they could grow and improve. They were more willing to say, “Show me how you do it.”

These teachers often had to defy the structural isolation in which they worked in order to observe or work with peers. Nothing in their school culture was encouraging them to leave their rooms or seek out new learning. They brought a culture of collaboration into the school with them from previous careers or other life experiences.

Are we willing to see data that challenges what we think about ourselves? Are we willing to open the door that might allow us to learn something new? In a recent OpEd piece in the New York Times, Thomas Friedman described what Andreas Schleicher and his team at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (the people responsible for the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA test) have been doing to make their data more visible and accessible to people around the world. They are trying to design ways for educators and parents to compare not only national performance on the world stage (how does the United States compare with Finland?) but also individual school performance (how does my son’s school compare with a socioeconomically similar school in Finland?)

“Imagine, in a few years, you could sign onto a Web site and see this is how my school compares with a similar school anywhere in the world,” says Schleicher. “And then you take this information to your local superintendent and ask: ‘Why are we not doing as well as schools in China or Finland?’ ”

What would a superintendent say in response to a challenge like this, when most of them don’t know what goes on in individual classrooms across the district, or how one teacher’s techniques and approaches compare, in effectiveness, with any other’s? They may know which schools are doing well or doing poorly, getting better or getting worse based on some metric or other. But would they know why?

Are we willing to talk about what we do, and let people see what we do? Are we willing to investigate what actually works, and why it works? Are we willing to learn from each other?

Inevitably, in politics and in our larger life, the silly season gives way to the more melancholy realities of autumn. We go back to school. We get back to work. We bear down and get ready for winter. If we truly believe in life-long learning, then every day must be back-to-school-day for us. We need to ask ourselves the same questions we ask when we look at our children: What new things will you learn this year? What new things will you explore? In what ways will you grow?

Learning on Demand

The world of education does a marvelous job of ignoring and resisting modern fads and trends, serving up instruction in more-or-less unchanged ways for over a hundred years. It will be interesting to see if we can hold out against the trend of "on-demand" that has affected so many other areas of modern life.

We've already seen the authority of the gatekeeper erode in face of on-demand publishing, whether in print or online. Anyone who has something to say can now get heard...if anyone cares to listen. We've seem the authority of the editor erode in the face of ITunes, Netflix, and other methods of getting entertainment in self-selected, bite-sized chunks.

Now we're starting to see some early attacks on gatekeeper/editor authority in schooling. We have the many videos of the Khan Academy; now we have modular college courses. Get what you want, when you want it, at the level you want it. Test out of it if you can prove you know it.

In a world where 8-year-olds already know how to reach out into the cosmos and grab information whenever they're curious about something, does "sit-and-get" classroom education really have a future? Will children even think of schools and teachers as unique repositories of information and learning anymore? Or will schools need to transform into places where kids can work together to play with, manipulate, and analyze the information they've gotten elsewhere, learning from teachers how to use what they're learning in exciting and meaningful ways?