8 Life Lessons I Wish I'd Known Sooner

As we head into Holiday Break, the final article summary of 2023 is 8 Life Lessons I Wish I'd Known Sooner.

Over the next two weeks, whenever you have some spare, idle moments (perhaps accompanied with a cup of coffee or a glass of wine), invest a little time reading these eight life lessons and assessing how well you live to them. 

A recent article summary focused on helping kids develop intrinsic motivation. This week’s similarly tells us that happiness and fulfillment ultimately come from within, particularly how we view ourselves and our place in the world and the people we interact with.

I went to a Quaker school for middle and high school. I didn’t know it at the time, yet the school’s values of  simplicity, humility, and moderation made an indelible impact on me. Mid-morning every Thursday the entire middle and upper school students and faculty had silent meditation in an old Quaker Meeting House that was built in the 1700s. For those of you who don’t know much about Quakers or their religious practices, there is no clergy, no choir, no homily—just people sitting on plain wooden benches, quietly contemplating their life. In middle school I dreaded these weekly meetings—I was too antsy to stay seated and quiet for 30 minutes. But, gradually I grew to cherish 30 minutes of private time, what our wizened headmaster called ‘the most important appointment of the week.’ 

It was during these weekly Quaker meetings that I discovered that simplicity, humility, and moderation were the keys to my happiness and fulfillment. This Quaker school was a stark contrast to its surrounding Long Island community, known as the Gold Coast, where conspicuous consumption, ostentation, and overindulgence rule. Even as a kid, I never cared much for material things, yet it wasn’t until I had time to think in Quaker meetings that I grew more confident in my comfort with simple needs. Nearly 50 years later, it’s these values that have guided my personal and professional life and continue to be my moral compass. 

I hope you also have some values that guide and direct you! 

Perhaps a few of the life lessons below will speak to you as we move into a new year with new beginnings!

Thank you to all of you for your dedication, tireless energy, boundless creativity and imagination, and positive collegiality during the first half of the school year!

Have a restful and fulfilling holiday break!

Joe

--- 

As I’ve aged, I can now look back at my younger self and recognize how much unnecessary suffering I created for myself by not knowing these eight simple truths. I learned these life lessons the hard way. Discovering them transformed my life.

Our power in life comes from focusing on what we can control, not what we can't.

In life, unfortunate things happen. When they do, it can be easy or tempting to become reactive and focus on what isn't going well. Many of us spend far too much time whining, complaining or venting about things we simply can't control: weather, traffic, other people's behavior, the past. Focusing on circumstances or things that are happening to us is far less effective than focusing on how we can respond to those things and what we can do about them. Avoid drama. Keep your focus on yourself and what more you can do, and you'll almost always find a find to improve things.

Fear is only in our minds: Fear is a product of our imagination. Usually, when we experience fear, we're worried about something that may (or may not) happen in the future. Our power lies in focusing on our present reality. Fear tends to inhibit action, but action can overcome fear. So, one of the best ways to overcome fear (of anything) is to simply get into motion and take action. Don't focus on the stories you tell yourself. Get out and do something about the things you're nervous or anxious about.

Failure is not the opposite of success — it's part of it: Most of us hate making mistakes or failing at anything. But making mistakes and falling isa huge part of our learning and growth process. When we err but take the time to find meaningful learning, our mistakes help us better ourselves and improve. They help us level up. Our mistakes are only failures if we choose to view them as failures. Winston Churchill said it best: "Success is going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm or energy." That couldn't be more true. It's not how we fall, but how we pick ourselves back up that really matters. Find the learning, apply it and move on with love and compassion for yourself.

Get comfortable with being uncomfortable: When we're uncomfortable, it often means that we're challenging ourselves, stretching ourselves and trying something new. That's how we grow! So, feeling uncomfortable is usually a sign that you're making progress and evolving. Getting used to that feeling can help us do it more often and with less resistance. The best way to get comfortable with being uncomfortable is to practice it. Instead of shying away from discomfort, make the choice to lean into it. Look for ways to make yourself uncomfortable; seek those out and know how helpful they will be for you and your development.

Find ways to not take offense to things: Many of us go through life almost looking for reasons to be offended. This comes from our ego's desire to protect ourselves and our beliefs. Our minds can play tricks on us and convince us that we're "right" when we're not. When we don't like what we're hearing or experiencing, it's important to slow down and take the time to listen. Most miscommunications can be solved by simply seeking to understand others and alternative viewpoints or perspectives. Instead of judging people or things dissimilar to yourself, put acceptance there instead. Value differences. Having the strength to never take anything personally is essentially a superpower.

Growth requires change: A lot of us want to grow as people, but many of us are not willing to go through change to make it happen. That's not how growth works. If we want what we've never had before, we must be willing to do things we've never done before. Muscles grow by repeatedly putting stress and tension on them; then letting them recover before doing it again. It's the same with mental and emotional growth. If you're not ever feeling any kind of tension or stress, then you're probably not growing. Don't just embrace change or be open to it, but actively seek it out.

Focusing on what you love and are passionate about will lead to great happiness:Too many of us do things out of obligation (we feel we ought to) or fear (we feel we must). Real success happens when we do things out of love or desire (we want to). When we engage with jobs, activities or people we truly love, it rarely feels like work. Seeking out things we are passionate about helps us feel more intrinsic motivation and that keeps us going through tough or challenging times. This is when we are most aligned with ourselves, and it feels good to be congruent with ourselves. That leads to joy and fulfillment with whatever we're doing. It's hard not be successful when you feel joy and fulfillment.

Yesterday is heavy — put it down: All too many of us are focused on the past, or what happened last month or last year. The past is written; set in stone. It cannot be changed. Focusing on it too much can be dangerous because it's not within our circle of control. A former boss of mine used to say, "The past is interesting but nothing more." The past can guide and instruct us, but it doesn't determine our future or define us. Focusing on it too much takes us out of the present moment or our ability to plan for the future.

Until I learned these lessons, my life was filled with unnecessary disappointments or frustrations. Underneath all these lessons is a simple concept: Nearly everything in life is a choice we make. As I began to choose better, my days filled up with far more joy. Try it.

Deepening Student Understanding

This week's article summary is 5 Indispensable Ways to Deepen Student Understanding.

The essence of learning is saving new content (skills, concepts, facts, procedures) in long-term memory and then retrieving it when needed.

As I wrote in an article summary last year, some of our memories are episodic (resulting from highly emotional experiences in our lives) while most are semantic (resulting from practice and repetition).

Episodic memories are stored naturally (think of an embarrassing moment in high school), yet semantic ones require active effort and practice, i.e., studying.

Unfortunately, most of the study techniques we employ aren’t effective.

If your student experiences were like mine, you used trial-and-error, hodgepodge strategies to try to remember material you were being tested on in middle school, high school, and college. Most of us probably began around seventh grade marking our textbooks with a yellow highlighter and taking copious notes in class. My textbooks were awash in yellow and my notes mimicked what the teacher said or had written on the chalk board. When it came to study for a test, all I did was keep rereading my textbook highlights and notes. It was a very passive, inefficient, and ineffective way to try to remember, let alone understand. To survive as a student, I needed to find more effective study techniques.

It wasn’t until college that I started to be much more selective in what I highlighted and wrote down in class. I began to write questions in the margins of textbooks and used more diagrams in my notes so I could connect and make more sense of material covered in class. When it came time to study for a big test, I would use a different colored pen to strip down what I needed to remember to its barest essentials. Then, my final preparation for an exam was pretending to give a speech on what I was studying. Even today, when I’m giving a talk to a large group, I breakdown my comments into the three or four of the most salient points with two or three examples under each point.  

I wish I had been told when I was younger how my brain and memory function and what effective strategies to use.

The article below highlights five research-tested techniques to optimize placing information into long-term memory so it sticks. 

This is a good example of helping our students think metacognitively about how they learn.

 Joe

--

For the most part, students aren’t good at picking the best learning strategies—in study after study, they opt for the path of least resistance, selecting the strategies that provide an immediate sense of accomplishment. In a 2018 study, researchers pinpointed the crux of the problem: “Students want to see rapid gains when they are studying,” and they will pick whatever strategy they think will prepare them for tests or exams the quickest, even if it results in surface-level understanding. Speed is valued over comprehension, the researchers found, and while it may result in short-term gains, they tend to be fleeting.

Durable learning—the kind that sticks around and can become the foundation of a growing body of internalized knowledge—comes from hard work and even some degree of cognitive resistance. To get there, students need to tear down and rebuild learned material, breaking problems apart, identifying the most salient points, evaluating the relevance of each idea, and then elaborating on or even excavating novel insights from the original material. 

We scoured the research to find five relatively simple classroom strategies.

THE POWER OF SUMMARY (WITH NO CUTTING-AND-PASTING)

It doesn’t sound like much, but summarizing vastly outperforms activities like rereading. In a 2021 study, students first learned about greenhouse gases and then either wrote a short summary of what they had just learned, read a summary provided by the teacher, or simply reviewed each slide with no additional activity. On a follow-up test, the students who summarized scored 34 percent higher than the students who read a summary and a full 86 percent higher than the students who simply reviewed the original slides. Why is summarizing so beneficial? The researchers explain that it taps into key cognitive processes that encode learning more deeply: Students not only pay more attention to the information but also “mentally organize it into a coherent structure” and then integrate the information into existing knowledge networks, creating more durable memories.

YES, SKETCHNOTES WORK

Making visual sense of a challenging concept is often a richer exercise than traditional note-taking—or you can use it as a productive follow-on activity. Recent studies confirm what teachers know: When kids create concept maps, flow charts, or graphic organizers, they visually reorganize and make sense of learned material while highlighting the relationships between key concepts. When such artifacts are hand-drawn, they have the additional benefits conferred by deep, sensorimotor networks. A 2021 study found that students who filled in their own graphic organizers improved academic performance by 40 percent on a test of factual recall and 155 percent on a test of deeper comprehension.

ASKING GOOD—AND THEN BETTER—QUESTIONS

Getting students to craft high-quality questions of their own might be a better test of student comprehension than any quiz you can devise, a 2020 study suggests.

Researchers discovered that students who studied a lesson and then wrote their own questions outperformed students who simply restudied the material by 33 percent. Question generation promotes a deeper elaboration of the learning content; one has to reflect what one has learned and then extrapolate how an appropriate knowledge question can be inferred from this knowledge. While getting kids to pose simple questions—like yes/no, multiple-choice, or short-answer prompts—can lead to better retention, the deepest learning will require your students to ask tougher questions. Studies have shown that students performed better in recall tests when they were trained to generate cognitively challenging questions. Work with students to identify crucial themes or insights, and model how to write more complex, open-ended questions that start with explain, why, or how. These simple question starters will encourage students to think about the material more deeply, shifting from the details of a lesson to the bigger-picture concepts that help drive deeper learning.

EVEN BAD DRAWING IS PERFECTLY GOOD

In a 2018 study, researchers asked students to study lists of common words, such as trumpet or sailboat, and then either write them down or draw them. When asked to recall those words, students were twice as likely to remember words they had drawn. Importantly, the quality of the drawing is largely irrelevant, and students of all ages and skill levels will benefit from even rudimentary sketches. Why does it work so well? Drawing improves memory by encouraging a seamless integration of elaborative, motoric, and pictorial components of a memory trace. Unlike more passive forms of learning, like listening to a lecture or reading text, drawing weaves multiple memory strands together.

TEACH YOUR CHILDREN WELL

Parents sometimes complain that they don’t want their child “wasting time” by passing their own knowledge on to a peer. But a 2014 study revealed that when elementary students taught math concepts to their peers, they significantly outperformed students who had studied similar materials more conventionally. That’s because good teaching requires you to check for gaps in your own understanding, and students who teach, according to researchers, put more effort into learning the material, do a better job organizing information, and feel a greater sense of purpose. There are numerous ways to create peer teaching relationships:

• Think-Pair-Share: Have students learn about an issue, pair up with another student to discuss it in detail, and then share their thinking with the class
• Three Before Me: Encourage students to ask three of their classmates for help before asking the teacher
• Jigsaw Groups: In small groups, students are assigned different sections of a lesson or topic to study—for example, each student is told to learn about a different organelle in a cell. Students then discuss their area of expertise with other students who were assigned the same organelle before rejoining their original group to convey what they know. 

 

Using Intrinsic Motivation in the Classroom

This week's article summary is 6 Intrinsic Motivators to Power Up Your Teaching.

Much like an earlier summary on working memory, this one also focuses on helping kids be more aware of how they learn and how to optimize that learning.

Education and school are still grounded in extrinsic motivators like grades and praise from authority figures like teachers and parents. 

Yet teachers and parents want their students and children to grow up to intrinsically motivated, or, as the article states, to find fulfillment and satisfaction in autonomy, purpose, and competence versus external rewards and recognition.

Just like the earlier article recommended teachers help kids to think about metacognition, this week’s advises us to help kids see the differences between extrinsic and intrinsic motivators.

Elementary students are very concrete in their thinking so extrinsic rewards and consequences are easier for them to understand. Still, as one of Trinity’s over-arching goals is to develop in our students a strong sense of self, helping them see the difference between goals and measures you set for yourself and goals and measures others set for you is a step towards becoming more focused on one’s inner goals and hence becoming more personally empowered.

Joe

-----

Think of something you love to do that also requires some effort and commitment. Perhaps you play the cello, and you practice several days a week. Or you might be into photography—on the weekends, you set your alarm early so you can get up and out in time for the "good light." Do you hike or sing in a choir or garden or write? Why do you do whatever it is that you do? What motivates you?

I run. Five days a week I hit the pavement, whether I'm home or on the road working with schools. Through heat and humidity, rain and wind, and even ice and snow, I get out there.

As I think about what keeps me going, several things come to mind.

The first is that I have goals: I'm currently training for a half marathon, and I'd love to get close to the time I clocked two years ago. Each day when I hit the pavement, my workout has some connection to that goal. 

Another motivator for me is the people I run with or who I've connected with. I'm running the half marathon with a good friend, and we train together when we can. I also feel a kinship with the running community, whether it's folks I've connected with.

There are plenty of other things that keep me going. I love to be outside, and running is a great way to get some fresh air and explore new places. Upbeat music loaded onto my exercise watch keeps the running fun and enjoyable.

As you think about what keeps you motivated to garden or sing or hike, chances are, it's some of these same things. You enjoy the challenge of mountain biking on a new trail. You love the camaraderie of your book group. It's energizing to sing in front of an audience.

Your students are no different. We are all driven by the same intrinsic motivators—psychological needs that keep us energized and engaged with pursuits: autonomy, belonging, competence, purpose, fun, and curiosity.

Wouldn't it be great if we could foster that same kind of intrinsic motivation for schoolwork in our students? Imagine the energy students would have as they felt agency, connection to others, purpose, a sense of accomplishment, fun, and connection to their personal interests!

If our goal is to move beyond compliance in the classroom—to have students who are truly self-motivated, who have the energy and enthusiasm to dig into powerful and important learning—we must leverage these six motivators. Although not new or groundbreaking, each is foundational to good instruction.

Autonomy: The need for self-direction is vitally important if we want students to be self-motivated. Learners are more likely to be fired up and excited about their work when they have some power and control over what or how they're learning. In fact, according to Ryan and Deci, the cocreators of self-determination theory, autonomy is perhaps the most essential of intrinsic motivators. There are many ways to increase students' sense of autonomy in the classroom, but perhaps the most obvious is to offer them choices about their learning. Let students choose from a variety of fantasy and science fiction books as a part of a genre study. Offer them options for how they demonstrate their understanding of science or social studies content. Give students the choice of where to work or which materials to use as they learn. Even simple choices can help meet students' need for self-direction.

Belonging: Although Deci and Ryan argue that autonomy is the most important of the intrinsic motivators, Abraham Maslow pushes us to prioritize belonging. His theory of human motivation makes the case that people's needs for connection and affiliation are practically as important as our most basic needs for food, water, shelter, and safety. We know that students crave a sense of belonging and connection with others, so let's make sure to meet that need through their academic work. Of course, collaborative learning structures are efficient ways to foster a sense of belonging between students. Group projects, lab partners, book clubs, and even simple think-pair-shares are all ways to connect students through daily academic work. It is important to recognize, however, that we have to do more than put kids in groups and tell them to cooperate. Students need direct instruction and guided practice to build social skills, just as they do academic skills. Let's offer students the skill-building and support they need so group work can be a positive and productive experience. We need to make sure that classroom communities are safe and inclusive spaces where all students feel like they belong. Let's not count on icebreakers and get-to-know-each-other activities in the first weeks of school to build group cohesion. This is an ongoing and year-long endeavor that we can support through effective collaborative learning.

Competence: In Visible Learning and the Science of How We Learn, Hattie and Yates make the point that we are all "motivated by knowledge gaps but demotivated by knowledge chasms". This speaks to the importance of students having a sense of competence. When challenges are within reach, and when students see themselves growing and getting better at something, they are more motivated. This, of course, is why differentiation is so important—not just because the just-right challenge level allows for incredible cognitive growth, but because it creates learning experiences that are pleasurable. When learning is too hard, it's frustrating. When it's too easy, it's boring. It's the just-right sweet spot where learning can be fun. Too often, however, we make differentiation harder than it needs to be. Although sometimes it might be important to differentiate the instruction (providing specific strategy or skill instruction to small groups, for example), usually we can create differentiated learning options for the whole class and help students learn how to choose their just-right fit. These options might include assignments, demonstrations of learning, or tasks to complete. I once observed a calculus teacher share a worksheet with her students that included a variety of problems to solve. She challenged them, "See if you can find the problems that are hard enough to make you sweat a little, but you can do with some hard work and a little help."

Purpose: One of my favorite questions students ask is, "Why do we have to do this?" It means they're searching for purpose. They're not going to do work sheep-like just because I handed it to them. They need to know the why before they can worry about the what or the how. The way we answer this question is hugely important. Be careful not to emphasize grown-up reasons that make sense to you but that may not resonate with your students ("Someday in high school you'll need to write a lab report, so you need to learn how to do it now"). Be ready to offer them purpose that matters to them in the moment. Some schoolwork, like project-based and service learning, is already loaded with purpose. Then there are times when you might need to manufacture some purpose. One way to do this is by having students create a real product (such as a book or movie) and/or share their learning with a meaningful audience. Students can write short stories to include in a class anthology—one that will be printed and shared with families. You might create a hallway display to teach passersby about the water cycle. Or you could conclude an independent research unit with a celebration of learning where students set up poster sessions and share their work with the school community.

 Fun: Should all schoolwork be fun? Of course not. But if we can make our lessons more fun, why wouldn't we? A little play can go a long way. There are tons of benefits (in addition to self-motivation) of play. Perhaps there are some games you can weave into instruction. One of my favorite activities is to create matching card sets (with math facts, vocabulary words and definitions, famous people and their events, and so on), tape a card to the back of each student, and then challenge the class to pair each other up without talking. Or you might invite students to create their own games that are aligned to the content. In my experience in classrooms, even finding simple ways of adding dice, dominos, spinners, and cards into an activity can boost students' engagement.

Curiosity: Your students bring a plethora of interests into your classroom. They are skateboarders, social justice advocates, chess and soccer players, pianists, and gamers. When we find ways of connecting learning goals to students' interests—the things they're naturally curious about—they will be more invested. Students can investigate their interests through independent research projects or non-fiction reading and writing units. Or you might weave interests you know your students have into daily class work. For example, when studying human body systems, students might choose one of the following comparisons to complete: The human body is like a … (1) sports team, (2) computer, (3) forest ecosystem, or (4) (create your own). Literacy workshop is another fantastic vehicle for connecting with students' interests. I once had a student who, when offered the chance to take on a "challenge project" and investigate something he was passionate about, used both reading and writing workshop time to read The Lord of the Rings, draw a 42-piece pictorial timeline to share with the class, and write a 13-page sequel. He was in 4th grade and had just turned 10. 

 Autonomy. Belonging. Competence. Purpose. Fun. Curiosity. Many of these motivators keep me hitting the pavement five days a week. Chances are these same intrinsic motivators keep you fired up and energized in your personal and professional life—and help you push through when the going gets tough. What if your students were able to tap into these intrinsic motivators as they learn to analyze a piece of text, solve differential equations, play in a musical ensemble, and conduct a scientific experiment? Can you imagine the skills and habits of self-motivation they might gain—skills and habits they can use regardless of the path they take in life?