Implementing the Common Core: Three Keys for Success (1)

Part I: Setting a Standard for Rigor

 Standards. We all have them. We set personal standards for cleanliness around the house. We have workplace standards for what constitutes average or above-average performance. We have ethical standards governing how we behave as a society. We don’t always live up to our own standards, and we don’t always share standards with the people around us, but we definitely have them.

In K-12 education, we’ve had state-level academic standards since at least the mid-1990s, and now we have national standards for mathematics and literacy. We’re in the midst of implementing those standards right now, and feelings about them are…what shall we say? Mixed? Contradictory? Occasionally passionate and occasionally ambivalent?

Passionate ambivalence shouldn’t be all that surprising. As I said, we all have our own sets of standards governing different aspects of our lives, and sometimes we find that our standards aren’t the same as other people’s. Whether it’s the state department of education or the authors of the Common Core, we don’t like it when someone comes into our classroom and says, “You don’t tell me what’s good; I tell you.” 

One problem with implementing new learning standards is that so many of the things calling themselves “standards” aren’t standards at all; they’re just To-Do lists. Teach this to your 3^rd graders. Make sure 4^th graders do that. This is curriculum mapping, not a set of standards against which we can measure and understand student learning.

We are told that the Common Core is “upping the rigor” on our teachers and on our students, but the standards alone can’t get us to that Promised Land, because the standards alone don’t tell us what rigor looks like. We need to decide that. It’s teachers and principals, working at the school level, who have to use the standards to define what constitutes rigorous work, and then create a culture that advocates and enables that kind of work across all subject areas.

What do we talk about when we talk about standards?

When we talk about standards, we are talking about two different things: what a person is doing, and how the person is doing it. We talk about content (the What) and we talk about form. But as it turns out, form has two components to it. Bound up in form are process (the How) and performance, or extent (the How Much).

As Grant Wiggins has pointed out in multiple blog posts, and as Paul Bambrick-Santoyo has demonstrated in his excellent book, Driven by Data, our learning standards do a good job of telling us what students are supposed to do (the content), but they rarely define either piece of the “form” puzzle: how they’re supposed to do it (the process) or the extent to which they need to do it to prove proficiency (the performance).

Wiggins, as usual, uses sports to create an interesting and insightful analogy. If I was judging an Olympics trial for high jumpers, I would have in my mind a description of what a proficient high-jumper does. I would compare each athlete against this mental standard. Did he execute the right steps? Did he do them correctly, and in the right order? That’s the content. Did he execute these steps with proper, accepted form? With beauty and grace? That may feel a little qualitative and mushy to you, but we’ve seen a lot of athletes in our time. We know what a high jump looks like when it’s done well. We know what a beautiful dive looks like. Our TV announcers freeze the video frame and show it to us again and again. Look—she sliced through the water without creating so much as a splash. Perfect form. Nobody disagrees. So there is clearly a standard in place.

Next, we have to deal with performance level or extent. If you can execute a perfect and beautiful high jump when the bar is set at nine feet, and I can execute an equally beautiful jump, but only at three feet, then you are clearly and indisputably the better jumper. At some point, we set a standard for what height a professional, top-rated high-jumper should be able to clear.

Do our learning standards set this kind of standard for process and performance? You decide. Here’s a sixth grade mathematics standard from the Common Core:

Find a percent of a quantity as a rate per 100 (e.g., 30% of a quantity means 30/100 times the quantity); solve problems involving finding the whole, given a part and the percent.

CCSS Math Content Standard 6.RP.A.3c

 

Now, borrowing an example straight from Bambrick-Santoyo’s book, let’s look at some questions “aligned” to this standard. Which question(s) would help us determine if a student was able to “meet the standard?”

1. Identify 50% of 20

2.  Identify 67% of 81

 3. Shawn got 7 correct answers out of 10 possible answers on his science test.   What percent of questions did he get correct?

4. J.J. Redick was on pace to set an NCAA record in career free-throw percentage. Leading into the NCAA tournament in 2004, he made 97 of 104 free-throw attempts. In the first tournament game, Redick missed his first five free throws. How far did his percentage drop from before the tournament game to right after missing those free throws?

The answer is: we don’t know! The content standard doesn’t make clear to what extent a student needs to be able to apply his knowledge, as a sixth grader, or even what form (simple equation vs. complex word problem) we’re looking for. This is because, as it clearly states, it is just a content standard. Aligning textbooks and curriculum maps to these standards alone is no guarantee that anyone in your school is working at the same level of rigor, much less the desired or required level.

How can we set performance standards?

If we want to define more clearly what standards for performance the Common Core is looking for, or the world of college and careers require, we need to work together. If every teacher in the school sets her own standard for excellence, for rigor, for “CCSS-ness,” there is no standard at all.  One teacher may be aiming for Question 1 from the example above, while another teacher aims for Question 4. We need commonly understood and accepted exemplars or anchors that tie performance to content.

Fortunately, we are not working in a vacuum. There is a lot of useful material surrounding the Common Core State Standards. We just need to make sure we’re aware of it, and know how to use it.

Literacy

The authors of the literacy standards have provided a lot of exemplar material to help us understand proficiency at different grade levels. Appendix B to the standards provides text exemplars by grade band, listing appropriate literary and informational texts, and also providing excerpts that teachers can use in class to practice close, analytical reading. The exemplars even distinguish texts that are appropriate at the independent reading level from texts that should be read aloud. Personally, I find these exemplar texts far more useful than the three-part equation for calculating text complexity. When I look at the excerpts, I get a real, visceral feeling for what rigorous means—and I can go out to hunt for other texts that measure up.

Appendix B also includes sample “performance tasks” at different grade levels. We know that the complexity of a particular text depends, in part, on what you ask students to do with that text. Here, the authors give us some rich examples of what textual analysis should look like at different grade levels.

Finally, Appendix C provides us with exemplars of student writing at different grade levels, with explanatory annotations to show us what makes the sample a true exemplar of good work.

The exemplars, tasks, and writing samples give us a real standard of performance against which we can measure not only our students’ work, but also our own work, as educators. Are we assigning similarly rich and rigorous texts? Are we asking students to work at high levels of complexity with these texts, performing tasks of analysis, evaluation, and synthesis? When we ask students to write, are we seeing work similar to what we see in Appendix C? Are we asking for and looking for these same kinds of things that the annotations are pointing out? If we are teachers, these are questions we should be asking in our PLC or department meetings. If we are school leaders, these are things we should be looking for during observations and walkthroughs. Not to punish each other, but to help each other as we define a new standard of work and find ways, as a team, to reach the standard we have set.

Mathematics

The Common Core mathematics standards do not include tasks, exemplars, or other performance-related anchors, which is a problem, as we saw above. However, there are two places where we can learn about form—not just the steps of the high-jump, but what it should look like, and how high it should reach.

First, there are the Standards for Mathematical Practice—the eight standards that define how math should be used, regardless of grade level or specific content. These standards speak to things like abstract reasoning, constructing and defending arguments, working with precision, and making use of structure. In broad terms, the eight statements set a standard against which we can measure current practice and current materials. For example, it’s pretty clear that Question 1 from the Bambrick-Santoyo example above does not ask students to do any abstract reasoning or complex problem-solving. Even Question 2 is fairly basic, asking for nothing beyond computation. But which of the other two questions—the two word problems—is set at the right level of rigor for sixth grade? That, we can’t really determine from the practice standards.

However, there is another place we can look for examples. The two major testing consortia have worked hard to define grade-level performance and show us what it looks like. You can find sample test items from PARCC, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, here, and items from the SMARTER Balanced consortium here. Both sets of sample items make issues of form (process and performance) pretty concrete, and both sets do a nice job of depicting, in a visceral and inescapable way, what the combination of math content and math practice looks like. They can be enormously helpful when having discussions at department or PLC meetings about rigor and the Common Core. Are we asking students to use their math in the ways these test items are doing? If not, what’s the difference? What aren’t we doing? Is the difference simply in content difficulty, or is there something in the application that we’re missing? Perhaps we’re providing too much explanation and scaffolding. Perhaps we’re relying too much on classic equations and aren’t asking students to find problems themselves.

Whatever your subject area, and wherever you look for examples and exemplars, it’s clear that we cannot be efficient and effective at moving students towards higher levels of rigor unless we work together to set clear standards for what rigorous work looks like—standards that everyone can see, understand, and use to measure student performance. If anyone watching TV can know enough to judge high jump or a high dive, why can’t anyone in our school know enough to judge the quality of student work hanging on a bulletin board?

Building Performance Character (Part V)

(originally published at www.catapultlearning.com)

This will be my final installment on “performance character values,” the behaviors and traits that seem to have significant influences on student success in school and in life. Over the past few months, we’ve discussed things like persistence, precision, questioning, and collaboration. Each one is important, and working together, they can be incredibly powerful. But I think the final piece of the puzzle may be the most important…and the hardest to accomplish. Today I want to talk about making connections, or what the serious scholars call “transfer of learning.”

Teaching for Transfer

One of the greatest challenges we face as educators is helping students connect what they learn in the classroom to what they need to do in the world, whether it be taking a standardized test, filling out a tax return, making sense of a lease, or writing a report on the job. Transfer of skills and knowledge can be tricky, because when the context changes from the controlled environment of the classroom to the unpredictable and un-categorized world around us, it is often difficult to know which skills to call upon in a given situation. This is why so many teachers tear their hair out and say things like, “They understood this stuff in class. What happened?”

There are stories (apocryphal or not, I don’t know) about students missing what should have been easy questions on tests for just this reason. There is a story about high school students missing a question on the Pythagorean Theorem, simply because they couldn’t see the right triangle in the diagram. All through school, they had been given questions with formal, literal triangle shapes with little squares inside to indicate that the figures were right triangles. On this test, however, they were given a picture of a soda glass with a straw leaning inside of it. The straw, the side of the glass, and the base of the glass formed a triangle…but the students never saw it.

There’s another story about a high school reading test in which students were asked to read a humorous essay and answer some multiple-choice questions. Many students who successfully tackled higher-level inference questions failed to identify the genre of the piece, which should have been one of the easiest questions. It turned out that thousands of students across the state misidentified the piece as fiction, simply because it was funny. Essays weren’t funny. Not in their experience. The piece was also longer than five paragraphs—and, as everyone knows, essays are five-paragraphs long.

In both cases, students had been taught in such a limited and narrow context that they could not make actual use of their knowledge anywhere else. It reminds me a little of the old folk tale about the five blind men and the elephant. Each man has experience with a different aspect of the elephant, but none has experience with the entire animal. As a result, each man reaches a faulty conclusion about what it is he’s encountered.

To understand a concept or build a skill deeply enough to be able to make use of it in the world, we need to experience the whole elephant. We need to walk all the way around an idea, experience it from a variety of angles, and be able to identify all the different, seemingly separate aspects of it as, in fact, part of a coherent whole.

This means we need to think very differently about things like homework and practice sets for our students. Practice and repetition can be vitally important, but perhaps the way we’ve constructed and managed practice has been limiting and ineffective, especially when we’re dealing with more complex concepts. It’s not enough for students to “do” and then do again; they need to do it differently each time, come at a thing from a different angle, make use of a thing in a different way, or a different purpose...and then have time to compare, contrast, and discuss what changes, what remains the same, and what it all means.

Grant Wiggins was the first author I read who talked about transfer, and he returns to it again and again as the ultimate goal of our teaching. In a recent blog post, he shared this story:

My greatest learning as a teacher came on the soccer field. We had been working for a few weeks on the same key ‘moves’ on the field related to creating ‘space.’ After a few practices, the team looked good in the drills – they’ve got it! Next two games? Nothing: like we never learned it. Finally, in exasperation I yelled at my co-captain, Liz, one of the prime offenders in not using the moves practiced: USE what we worked on!! I yelled. Liz yelled back from the field: We would, Mr. Wiggins, but the other team isn’t lining up the way we did the drills!!

Interestingly, while the players may have failed to transfer their learning from the drills to the game, Grant succeeded in transferring his learning from the soccer field to the classroom. He saw the connections.

How Experts Are Formed

As John Bransford and his co-authors discovered, in How People Learn, experts in a field are able to see and use connections between seemingly different ideas or facts because their brains work differently from amateurs. As they amass knowledge, they build schema, or organizing structures, based on the patterns within the material they are learning. They see the particular through the lens of the general, because they come to think more abstractly. This makes it easier for them to access and recall information when they need it, and it makes it easier for them to make connections to prior knowledge when new facts arise.

This means that, to some extent, the ability to make connections simply requires time. We can’t expect sixth graders to manipulate science knowledge the way actual scientists do. They simply don’t know enough. But this also means that “knowing things” is crucial. The idea that factual knowledge isn’t important anymore—that we can simply look things up on the Internet when we need information—is false. Teaching “critical thinking” strategies without building up a foundation of factual knowledge will not help our students. To put it bluntly, you can’t think about stuff unless you know something about the stuff you’re supposed to be thinking about.

However, we can’t dump facts on our students and expect them to learn how to make connections among them. We have to organize our teaching in ways that help students see the underlying structure of the material and identify the important patterns and principles. This is what Wiggins, McTighe, Erickson, and others talk about when they use terms like, “understanding by design” or “concept-based curriculum.”  You don’t ignore the trunk and the tusks; you teach those things with the whole elephant as your goal.

The Challenge of Deep Structure

One thing that makes this kind of teaching challenging is the fact that some patterns and structures matter more than others. Cognitive scientist and author, Daniel Willingham, in Why Students Don’t Like School, talks about how students (and adults) may see surface-level  connections between details and draw conclusions that aren’t important or even merited…while missing vital connections between things that look dissimilar on the surface, but have important and meaningful connections at a deeper level. This is why even the best medical student or intern may make a bad decision that the more experienced resident will not; a wealth of experience has let the resident understand the underlying patterns and structures of illness, and not become distracted by surface-level facts.

Here’s a famous example of how all of this can work:

Two groups of college students…were given a passage about a general who captures a fortress by dividing his army into groups that converge on the fortress simultaneously. The same students were then asked to solve the problem of how to destroy a malignant tumor with rays that cannot be used at very high or very low intensities. More than 90 percent of the students could solve the problem when they were told to use the information about the general and the fortress to solve the problem, but few students could solve the problem when not prompted to use the analogous connection between the two problems.

 On the surface, the two stories had nothing to do with each other. It was what the two anecdotes had in common structurally that allowed students to take ideas and principles from one situation and apply them to the other.

Metaphors Be With You

So, while discrete, factual information is important—students need to know what X is—its value may remain limited until we use analogies and metaphors to help students see what that information is like. The more different ways in which we can show students how X is like Y, the more three-dimensional and flexible their understanding of both X and Y can become. Some analogies will work on a surface level; some will work on a deeper level. But you have to start somewhere.

I learned this the hard way. I was teaching a Ray Bradbury story to a 9^th grade English class in New York City, many years ago. The story was about two knights preparing to fight a dragon that had been terrorizing a village. The dragon has skin like iron; a single, unblinking, yellow eye; breath of fire; and a mighty roar. As the dragon approaches, the knights put on their armor and set out to attack it. They are both killed. Suddenly, we hear two new voices:

"Did you see it?" cried a voice. "Just like I told you!"

"The same! The same! A knight in armor, by the Lord Harry! We hit him!"

"You goin' to stop?"

"Did once; found nothing. Don't like to stop on this moor. I get the willies."

The two new voices belong to train conductors. It’s a science fiction story. Time is slipping. The dragon is a train; the train is a dragon. One thing can be two different things, depending on your perspective. I loved the story. But when my students read it, they didn’t understand it. At all. They simply didn’t get it.

So I read it aloud to them.

Nothing.

So I had them create a chart, listing qualities of the dragon on one side and qualities of the train on the other.

“Oh,” they said. “Okay.”  They got it now, but they didn’t enjoy it. There was no “aha” moment, no fun in the thing. And I found that to be the case over and over again, that year. X was just X was just X was just X, and Y was just Y was just Y was just Y. Every single thing was just itself. Nothing resonated. Nothing vibrated. Nothing set off associations. I blamed them, of course, being young and foolish. But it was my fault. It was our fault, as a school. We weren’t teaching for the resonance. They learned exactly what we taught them: X was just X was just X was just X.

Do we really wonder why some students have trouble understanding the relevance of their school work?

 “The Dragon” is obviously not an example of “deep structure” comparison. It’s just a fun little story, with no particularly meaning or importance. But appreciating patterns and resonances, understanding metaphor and simile—these are things that take many years to develop. If we strip poetry, metaphor, allusion, and wit from the texts we ask our littlest readers to tackle, and then lead them from garbage-y picture books into bland textbooks, where facts are presented as simply and basically as possible, then when, exactly, do we think they’re going to learn how to think richly and associatively?

I challenge you to think of any great idea, discovery, or advancement that was not based, at least in part, on association. Newton’s apple, Einstein’s “though experiments,” the invention of the computer “desktop,” airplanes with turned-up wingtips—again and again, we find answers to our newest and strangest questions by looking elsewhere and making connections. We are deeply enmeshed in our history, our culture, and the natural world around us, and the more we understand how those connections work, the wiser we can be.

The world feels fragmented and arbitrary enough to our children—a universe of random dots that they didn’t create or ask for, a universe they struggle to make sense of, day by day. Isn’t it our job to help them connect the dots?

Building Performance Character (Part IV)

(originally published by Catapult Learning, LLC, at http://www.catapultlearning.com/2013/07/24/building-student-character-in-the-classroom-part-iv/)

 

For the past few months, I've been talking about the performance-related character values that significantly influence student success in school and in life. I’ve discussed the importance of persistence, precision, and questioning in detail. Today, I’d like to talk about collaboration and ownership of learning—what I’ve learned from the research, and what I learned last night, watching my children perform in a band camp concert. It wasn’t exactly a peer-reviewed journal study, but sometimes you need to sit still and enjoy a show for the thoughts in your head to coalesce and teach you something. More on that in a bit.

Working with Others

Collaboration is nothing new in our schools. “Group work” has always been part of our classroom practice, though its value has co-existed a little nervously and uncertainly with the idea of “doing your own work.” We are taught from a very young age that we are going to be assessed and judged on our ability to do things independently. From nursery school reports that say things like, “runs with scissors,” right up through our doctoral dissertations, it is our individual skills, applied independently, which are watched, assessed, rated, and communicated out to the world. We may, in our early years, be told that we “work well with others,” but the focus is still on each, individual one of us, not on what the group we work with has actually done, or how our effort has contributed to the success of the team.

In recent years, the ability of students to work effectively in groups or teams has received increased attention. The rise of STEM education has shined a new light on inquiry-based and project-based learning. Extracurricular organizations like Odyssey of the Mind and First Lego League  give students opportunities to work together on complex, long-term projects to solve real-world problems in creative and exciting ways. And The Partnership for 21^st Century Skills, which has driven so much of the debate about the changing workforce and how best to prepare for it, has identified collaboration as one of the most important things we need to teach our children.

The fact is, in the world beyond school, almost none of us work in isolation or are judged purely by the work we perform alone. Even the neurosurgeon possessing rarified skills has to work as part of a surgical team, and can undermine her effectiveness if she can’t work well as part of that team. In virtually every workplace, there are critical issues of communication, leadership, follower-ship, and the ability to assess the wisdom and importance of what other people say, issues that can make or break an organization. Lord knows, I’ve worked in plenty of organizations where managers have been expected to know what group leadership means, without ever having been given training in those skills. Follower-ship can just as important...and can receive just as little training. And in today’s workplace, with flattened hierarchical structures and distributed leadership, the lines between leader and led can be blurred and confusing; everyone is expected to participate in leading; everyone must spend some time pitching in and being led. But who is teaching us how to make it work?

Athletic coaches know how to bring individuals together into a team. The military knows how important unit cohesion and unified action can be. But in academics, it’s still every child for himself. When we place students in pairs or groups, do we know why we are doing it?  Is it just a way to vary our daily routine, or does collaboration really matter? If it does matter, in what ways does it matter? We have learning goals tied to the content of what we ask students to work on, but perhaps we should have objectives aligned to the way in which we ask students to work, as well. What collaboration skills are we trying to teach with a particular activity? What’s the best way to teach those skills? Do we have a picture in our heads of what “good” looks like—what it entails—at different grade levels?

Monitoring Progress and Embracing Learning

When we talk about “owning your own learning,” we have in mind a picture of active learning, intrinsic motivation, personal goal-setting…in short, a picture of someone becoming an independent, life-long learner. But it can be difficult to figure out how to make that picture become reality.

Unfortunately, it’s very easy for students to feel that school is something that happens to them, rather than something they do. After all, they don’t choose to attend school; they have to attend. They rarely get to select classes, topics, or even assignments. And far too often, they feel that grades and scores are arbitrary—gifts or punishments meted out by the teacher for inscrutable reasons.

Robert Marzano, in The Art and Science of Teaching, writes of the importance of using rubrics  or scales for major assignments to help students understand what is expected of them and to allow them to compare their work with exemplars. He makes it clear that such scales should be student tools as well as teacher tools. In fact, in Marzano’s teacher effectiveness framework, it’s clear that proficiency in “setting objectives and learning goals” requires students to see, know, and understand not only the daily or weekly objectives, but also the criteria by which they are going to be assessed. Those of us who have made a practice of sharing and discussing scoring rubrics with students at the start of a project know that it makes conversations much more interesting at the end of a project, when a student inevitably comes up and says, “Why’d you give me a C?”  “I didn’t give you anything,” the teacher is able to say. “You gave yourself a C.  Here’s how…”

Marzano also recommends creating progress reports that students can own and fill out from time to time, to evaluate and keep track of their progress towards longer-term goals.  A student who uses such a tool stops thinking of the semester as one-thing-after-another, and starts seeing the larger arc, shape, and purpose of the course. Of course, in order to accomplish this, the teacher needs to ensure that there is an arc, shape, and purpose to the course.

Another aspect of self-monitoring and self-correcting is the ability to hear and act on critical feedback. Far too many students receive numerical or letter grades with little or no feedback (positive or negative) on their work. Even when it’s based on a detailed scale or rubric, the only thing a single grade can do is reinforce or challenge a student’s preconceptions. To encourage the kind of growth mindset we’ve spoken of in the past few months, teachers must provide specific, timely, and understandable feedback on student work at regular intervals—feedback that can help students analyze their work in progress and make improvements along the way.

What I Learned at Band Camp

So, what does all of this have to do with watching my 9 and 13 year old boys play in their end-of-band-camp concert? Quite a lot, as it turns out.  To start with, watch this video from the 1955 movie, The Dam Busters, and look for the little epiphany at 1:22.  That was me, last night.

The Vienna Band Camp program in Northern Virginia is in its 35^th year, and it’s a fantastic program. Children from early elementary school through high school spend four hours a day in the program, five days a week, for a whole month. They take a variety of classes and rehearse every day as part of an ensemble. Watching the beginning band perform at the end of the program is always shocking. Many of the students start the program as complete novices, never having touched a musical instrument before. At the end, four weeks later, they are playing music. Not random, horrible noise; music. They’re not experts, by any means, but they know their instruments. They know how to read their music. They know how to keep time with each other. They are a team. Watching the beginning band at the end of the summer, you really start to understand what things like “deep practice,” and “10 years or 10,000 hours” really means. You see growth, right before your eyes.

As I sat there and watched the concert, so much of what I’d been thinking about in terms of “performance character” came together in my mind, just as the converging spotlights bring the strands of a problem together in Wing Commander Gibson’s mind, in The Dam Busters.

Obviously, a band is a collaborative effort. But think about what the camp needs to do to form a band. Students spend time each morning simply working on their instruments—building their individual skills and honing their technique. They work with a particular teacher who is an expert on that instrument, and they meet in groups composed only of the players of that instrument—players who are all more or less at the same level of proficiency. This model of instruction should sound familiar—it’s the way most of us teach our students in traditional classrooms.

However, later in the day, students meet in very different configurations. They meet with their ability-level band mates—a combination of all the instruments—and they work with a different teacher. This teacher is not a specialist in violin, or oboe, or trumpet; she is a conductor, and her specialty is…well…project work. Interdisciplinary teamwork. Her job is to teach students how to use their instruments along with other instruments: how to play together at tempo; how to listen to each other and adjust; how to watch the leader for instructions; how to work as a team toward a common goal. Those are clearly collaboration skills. But the conductor also works with students on other “performance character” skills. There’s precision—the understanding that there is a right way and a wrong way to play a note or a phrase. There’s perseverance—the understanding that each student has a responsibility (to himself and to the group) to work and work and work until he gets it right. Built into that one, as we discussed earlier, is resilience—the ability to take criticism and manage stress and frustration. There’s questioning—the understanding that you, the student, have a responsibility to stop things and ask for help or clarification where necessary, and not just keep your head down and hope nobody notices. Finally, there’s the owning of your own learning—monitoring your progress, caring about your growth, and seeing what you’re doing as part of a life-long love of music and enrichment of life. It’s all in there.

If you needed an argument for why the arts must be supported and paid for in our schools, why they are not luxuries or frills, look no further. If we include team athletics in our schools because we value what they teach about sportsmanship, competition, perseverance, and teamwork, then team musicianship should be valued no less. There are values and skills we want every single child to learn, practice, and make part of their lives, and if we truly believe that children are different, we need to provide different ways for them to learn those things. Neither of my children took to team sports. (Big surprise.) Both of them have flourished and grown doing team music.

Finally, what can band camp teach us about how we conduct our classrooms and our schools? The comparison is interesting. We are obviously “techniques” teachers; we develop the core skills. But look what’s missing.  Who brings students together to learn how to “play” with those skills?  Who even defines or communicates what it means to play with the skills we’re teaching them? I’m not talking about music, or sports, or studio art; I’m talking about academics. The stuff we teach in our “techniques” classes. Whose job is it to bring math, and science, and history, and language arts together, and teach students how people actually use those things, all mixed up together, to make “music” with each other in the real world? Who is the bandleader, selecting the pieces to play and leading students from the first, squeaky rehearsal to something worth sharing with parents and grandparents? Where is the opportunity for our students to perform what they know, academically, and to receive the applause they deserve?

If the answer to all of the above is “no one,” think about what that means. We aren’t simply depriving our children of a chance for Grandma to applaud and take pictures. It’s much bigger than that. Our students will eventually graduate. They will move off into higher education or the working world. They will take their seats in the symphony orchestra of adult life. Someone will step up to the podium and tap their baton on the music stand, expecting everyone to sit up straight, lift their instruments, and be ready. Something important is about to begin. Will the young people we taught be ready? Will they even know what they’re supposed to be ready for?

Building Performance Character, Part III

 

(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.”

Building Performance Character: Part II

 

(originally published at http://www.catapultlearning.com/2013/05/13/building-student-character-in-the-classroom-part-2/)

Last month I talked about six performance-related character values  that can help students become independent and successful adults. They are:

·         Persisting towards solutions

·         Working with precision

·         Asking questions

·         Working with others

·         Making connections

·         Monitoring progress and embracing learning

I think it’s worth taking some time to look a little more closely at the first trait on the list.

Persisting Towards Solutions

It is easy to see persistence as a moral value rather than an academic one—a sign of integrity or strength that people embody as some kind of spiritual or genetic gift.  But the willingness and ability to persist towards a goal can be taught and nourished—and it can just as easily be undermined.

Researcher Carol Dweck has written extensively about what she calls a “growth mindset” towards intelligence—a belief that a person’s intellectual ability is neither fixed nor destined, but is, instead, the result of hard work. Her studies have demonstrated that students who believe that intelligence is malleable and open to improvement do better in school than those who believe their intelligence is fixed and innate...even when those “fixed mindset” students have high IQs and have done well in school. This becomes very clear around the middle school years, when the level of challenge tends to be raised across the board. Students who had previously thought of themselves as the “smart kids” find themselves facing challenges and expectations that can be daunting, and if they can’t handle the work, they often retreat, surrender, and then turn on themselves, feeling betrayed by their native intelligence. Students with a growth mindset, however, understand that a greater challenge simply requires greater work on their part...and that “failure,” rightly understood, is just a step along the pathway to success. What is even more interesting is that students with a fixed mindset can change—and that a change in their mindset can have profound effects on their academic outcomes (research study abstract here).

This willingness to dig in and work hard in spite of obstacles or frustration is what people used to call “grit,” and it’s a quality that University of Pennsylvania psychologist Angela Duckworth believes may contribute much more to academic achievement than intelligence. Dr. Duckworth has even developed a “grit quiz” to help people assess how much of the quality they possess.

Author Daniel Coyle, in The Talent Code, gives us some dramatic examples of grit and persistence in what he calls “deep practice,” which others call “deliberate practice.” He describes tennis players in Russia, soccer players in Brazil, and student musicians here in the United States who approach practice in an intensely focused way, aiming straight for their areas of weakness and using their practice sessions to work and work and work each area until it improves. It is radically different from the way, say, my 9-year-old practices the saxophone, which involves playing a song one time, straight through, and then putting the instrument away. When student athletes or student musicians engage in deep practice, they make enormous improvements in a very short time. And as Malcolm Gladwell has shown us, about ten thousand hours of this kind of practice is what separates true masters from the rest of us.

Take a look at the graph here and note the difference between the violinists who, after ten years of practice, are good enough to become teachers, and those who are good enough to be professional musicians. The difference isn’t just that the professionals have put in more hours over the same period. It’s that their trend line starts to curve. The more time they put in, the more time they want to put in. Getting better makes them practice more, which makes them get even better, and so on.

That wonderful feedback loop doesn’t happen on day one, though. So why are those soccer players in Brazil willing to practice one particular move over and over again, day upon day, when my son can’t manage to get through a simple scale? Part of it has to do with focused coaching and timely, specific feedback. That’s our job, as educators. It’s human nature to avoid and ignore errors and mistakes. No one likes to focus on what they’re doing wrong—but that’s exactly what deep practice requires, and it’s exactly what a good coach pushes athletes and performers to do. The question is: are we being good coaches?

There’s another piece of the puzzle, and that’s desire. If kids don’t care—if they don’t really want to be successful at [fill in the blank], they won’t put in the hard time needed to get there. Persistence requires desire, or, as Daniel Coyle calls it, “ignition.” Something’s got to light your fire. Desire isn’t everything, of course, but you can’t get very far without it. So engaging and motivating students—getting them hooked, interested, and passionately involved in what we’re teaching—is clearly important. Simply getting them to sit still, behave, and take notes is not enough. We’ve talked for years about classroom management, but the subtext of our terminology suggests that the classroom is a problem requiring control and compliance. Perhaps if we called it and thought of as “classroom engagement,” or even “classroom ignition,” we’d all be happier and more productive.

A final aspect of persistence that’s important to note is resilience—the ability to roll with the punches, change course, and adjust to the unexpected. It doesn’t mean that students should never get frustrated. That’s a little unreasonable. But students (just like the rest of us) need to learn how to manage frustration—how to step back, take a deep breath, and try something different. Blogger and author Seth Godin writes of the importance of resilience for adults facing uncertain economic times, and it is just as important for students. If we only teach students one way to do something, and spend all of our practice time drilling that one method, are we really preparing them for the unpredictable and ambiguous world beyond the classroom? What happens when the One Way doesn’t work for a particular problem or in a particular situation? Some students will get angry at the material. Some will get angry at school in general. And some will blame themselves. How helpful are any of those responses, really?

Persistence means taking a “never say die” attitude towards a problem, but it shouldn’t have to mean bashing your head against a brick wall…especially if there’s a doorway a few feet away. Sometimes, going around can be more effective than trying to going through. But you can’t go around if you don’t take a step back, calm yourself down, and reassess both the situation and your approach to it. As the old saying reminds us, the little reed persists in the wind storm while the mighty oak cracks and falls, because the mighty oak can’t bend. Do we simply expect our students to know how to bend…and how to snap back and try again?

It again raises the interesting question about what we see as our mission. Are we teachers of math or teachers of children? Are we preparing students to be poets and mathematicians…or well-rounded adults who can enjoy poetry and fill out a tax return? If we take a whole-child approach to education, we can’t help but see these performance character values as a real and vital part of our curriculum. After all, the ultimate goal of an education isn’t simply knowing stuff. The ultimate goal is a rich and rewarding life.

Of course our students need to know their fractions. Of course they need to know how to write a good paragraph. But if they don’t know how to keep going in their learning—how to Not Give Up when challenges rise up—the fractions and paragraphs won’t matter.