Non-comformity in Schools

This week I am only giving you a summary of one article.

Even though I am a big fan of schools emphasizing student grit, perseverance, and stick-to-it-iveness (as illustrated in Paul Tough’s How Children Succeed), there is a danger of following any idea so zealously that there’s no room for flexibility or recognition that there’s always a different perspective.

Hence the article, American Schools Are Failing Nonconformist Kids, provides a nice counterbalance to our emphasis on developing grit in students.

A quote by Mark Twain (is anyone quoted more?) fits nicely here: Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment.

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 Of the possible child heroes for our times, young people with epic levels of the traits we valorize, the strongest contender has got to be the kid in the marshmallow study at Stanford in the 1960s. Having been told that if he abstains from eating the marshmallow in front of him for 15 minutes, he’ll get two marshmallows later--and he doesn’t eat it! 

This kid is a paragon of self-restraint, a savant of delayed gratification. He’ll go on, or so the psychologists say, to show the straight-and-narrow qualities required to secure life’s sweeter and more elusive prizes: high SAT scores, money, health.

‘Self-regulation’, ‘self-discipline’, and ‘emotional regulation’ are big buzzwords in school right now. All are aimed at producing ‘appropriate’ behavior, at bringing children’s personal styles in line with an implicit emotional orthodoxy, which is embodied by a composed, conforming kid who doesn’t externalize problems or talk too much or challenges the rules too frequently or move around excessively or complain or have passionate outbursts. He has a keen inner minder to bring rogue impulses into line.

What we are teaching today is obedience, conformity, and following orders. We’re certainly not teaching kids to think outside the box. The message is: it’s up to you. Grit means it’s your problem. Just bear down. So in addition to reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic, add the fourth R of self-regulation.

Emotional intelligence sounds unassailably great. Who wouldn’t want high ratings for oneself or one’s children, especially given Daniel Goleman’s claim that emotional intelligence is a more powerful predictor of career success than IQ?

A recent study on the effects of social and emotional problems, however, found that emotional intelligence in kindergarten was completely unpredictive. Children who started school socially and emotionally unruly did just as well academically as their more contained peers from first grade through eighth grade. A recent study at Florida International University also found minimal correlation between emotional intelligence and college students’ GPAs.

One way to measure the population of kids who don’t meet today’s social and behavioral expectations is to look at the percentage of school-age children diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Over the years, that figure has risen 41 points. (A lot of these kids were just born at the wrong time of the year. The youngest kindergarteners, by month of birth, are more than twice as likely than the oldest to be labeled with ADHD. This makes sense given that the frontal cortex, which controls self-regulation, thickens during childhood. The cortexes of children diagnosed with ADHD tend to reach their thickest pointcloser to age eleven than age eight.)

The Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking judge originality, emotional expressiveness, humor, intellectuals vitality, open-mindedness, and the ability to synthesize and elaborate on ideas. Since 1984, the scores of America’s schoolchildren have dropped by more than one standards deviation; that is to say, 85% of kids scored lower in 2008 than their counterparts did in 1984. Not coincidentally, that decrease happened as schools were becoming obsessed with self-regulation.

Enjoy the weekend and the beautiful weather!

Joe

Learning Styles in Education?

Below are salient quotes from two articles that focus on two initiatives in schools that have gotten much attention in past years—learning styles and teaching empathy.

Have a well-deserved three-day weekend!

Joe

Is Teaching to a Student's Learning Style a Bogus Idea:

•   Cognitive scientists are mistaken to equate cognitive strength with learning styles: they are totally different. 

•   Whereas cognitive ability clearly affects the ability to learn, an individual’s style doesn’t. 

•   You can have two basketball players, for example, with a different style. One is very conservative while the other is a real risk-taker who likes to take crazy shots, but they are equivalent in ability.

•   The idea that ability affects performance in the classroom is not particular surprising. The more interesting question is whether learning styles, as opposed to abilities, make a difference in the classroom. Some studies have claimed to have demonstrated the effectiveness of teaching learning styles, although they had small sample sizes, selectively reporteddata or were methodically flawed. Those that were methodically sound found no relationship between learning styles and performance on assessments. Learning styles is a myth perpetuate by sloppy research and confirmation bias.

•   It’s the material, not the differences among the students, that ought to be the determinant of how the teacher is going to present a lesson. 

•   If the goal is to teach students the geography of South America, the most effective way is to look at a map instead of verbally describing the shape and relative location of each country. If there’s one terrific way capture a concept for almost everybody, then you’re done.

Can Empathy Be Taught?

•    Empathy, broadly speaking, is recognizing another person’s feelings, thoughts, and motivations.

•   Experts like Dr. Daniel Goleman have identified different kinds of empathy. Emotional empathy is actually feeling what others are feelings. Weoften experience emotional empathy when we watch sad movies, see other people cry, or hear about national tragedies. Cognitive empathy is the ability to appreciate—without reacting emotionally—how another person sees a situation.

•   Compassionate empathy or empathetic concern arises when emotional and cognitive empathy team up to produce a desire to do something. This is the concept we want to encourage in students and nurture in ourselves.

•   The way to teach empathy is to embed social emotional learning into the curriculum. Teach children to listen to others and to ask questions. Talk about how characters in literature or film might experience the world.Bring multiple perspectives and stories into the study of history. Employ lots of cooperative learning and teamwork in class. And help students learn to talk about their roles, challenges, and what they need. 

•   Always remind students that everybody has different thoughts, feelings, and perspectives and that those of others are just as valid as their own.

Being a Tough Teacher

Two interesting items this week:

First, a Trinity trustee sent me this link to a YouTube video.  The short video is from a poetry slam contest in New York that captures a number of diversity concepts I touched on Tuesday: the variety of experiences that shape self-identity, the importance of teaching kids to think from multiple perspectives, the tendency to think one's experience is the norm and everyone else's is lesser.

Second, key quotes from a recent article in the Wall Street Journal entitled Why Tough Teachers Get Good Results, in which the author reminisces about her tough—but not abusive—high school orchestra teacher in the 1960s as food for thought for educators in the 21^st century. (See how many you agree with and which ones you disagree with.)

A Little Pain is Good For You: The study by psychologist Anders Ericsson showing that 10,000 hours of practice is needed to attain true expertise also found that the path to proficiency requires “constructive, even painful, feedback.” High-performing violinists, surgeons, computer programmers, and chess masters “deliberately picked unsentimental coaches who would challenge them and drive them to higher levels of performance.”

Memorization Pays Off: Fluency in basic math facts is the foundation of higher achievement, but many American students aren’t learning their time tables and basic math facts. One reason Asian students do so much better in math is the hours of drill in their schools.

Failure is Part of the Learning Process: In a 2012 study, French sixth graders were given extremely challenging anagram problems. One group was told that failure and persistence were a normal part of the learning proves, and this group consistently outperformed their peers on subsequent assignments. American parents and educators worry too much about failure being psychologically damaging and haven’t given children the right messages about failure being intrinsic to the learning process.

Strictness Works: A study of LA teachers whose students did exceptionally well found that they combined strictness with high expectations. Their core belief was “Every student in my room is underperforming based on their potential and it’s my job to do something about it—and I can do something about it.”

Creativity is Not Spontaneous Combustion: Most creative geniuses work ferociously and, through a series of incremental steps, achieve thingsthat appear (to the outside world) like epiphanies and breakthroughs. Creativity is built on a foundation of hard work and grit.

Grit is More Important Than Talent: Angela Duckworth’s study found that the best predictor of success is passion and perseverance for the long-term goals, not innate talent. Another key element of grit is students’ belief that they have the ability to change and improve, and this can be inculcated by teachers who share that belief.

Praise Must Be Strategic: As Carol Dweck has found, complimenting students for being “smart” has negative consequences, whereas praising a students for being a “hard worker” leads to greater effort and success.

Moderate Stress Makes Your Stronger: Researchers have found that being exposed to challenges builds resistance and confidence. With a demanding teacher students pick up an underlying faith in their ability to do better. 

Enjoy the weekend!

Joe

Cognitive Dissonance

This week are two articles that might lead to cognitive dissonance (See number 9 below). 

See if you agree with the conclusion in the first article and see how many of the famous experiments in the second article you were familiar with. (And let me know if you can figure out why experiment 8 is even on the list.)

Enjoy the weekend!

Joe

Are Private Schools Worth It?

•   Researchers at the U of Illinois found that Private schools—long assumed to be educationally superior—are in fact underperforming public school

•   Studying the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, they found that, when controlling for demographic factors, public schools are doing a better job academically than private schools.

•   Private school students have higher scores because they come from more affluent families.

•   Other research at Educational Testing Service, Notre Dame, and Stanford has also found this to be true.

•   Our typical and best public schools are doing a pretty good job—it’s just that the national averages are often dragged down by the fact that we have a lot of schools with poor-performing students who happen to be poor. We have such a large socioeconomic polarization in this country and the students at the bottom are skewing the overall sense of how we are doing.

•   NAEP data over the past couple of decades have shown remarkable improvement in U.S. students’ scores.

•   There is a danger in the autonomy that private schools have. The teachers aren’t required to be certified, there is less professional development happening, they’re not held accountable to the same kinds of stare curriculum standards and tests.

•   Why would somebody pay money for a service that is apparently inferior to one they could get for free? There are, however, reasons for choosing a private school—it’s things like reputations, convenience, safety, the value systems that are represented by schools, but parents are also making choices based on the peer group they are selecting for their students, which does have an impact on student’s performance. If you send a child to a school with more affluent peers, he/she is going to do better regardless of whether or not it’s a private or public

•   This is also happening in a context of the constant chorus of public schools are failing. Parents are told this by the media and by a lot of reform organizations, and so that message gets internalized. People just assume that private is better.

10 Psychological Studies That Will Change What You Think You Know About Yourself

Interesting article from Huffington Post that discusses a number of famous psychological studies—and the findings of some of them, i.e., how people behave, certainty have implications for us as teachers. I knew about some of the studies but others were new to me. Here's the link to the full article.

•   1971 Stanford Prison Study—which measured how human behavior is affected by social situations. (Shows dark side of humans)

•   1998 Kent State Study about “change blindness”—where we can miss significant details in any visual scene

•   Famous late 1960’s Stanford Marshmallow Experiment that shows the importance of self-control and delayed gratification and future success

•   1961 Yale Study about how far people would go to obey authority figures when asked to harm others. Human moral nature includes a propensity to be empathetic, kind, and good to our fellow kin and group members, but we also have an inclination to be xenophobic, cruel, and evil to tribal others.

•   Study that shows illustrates that those is positions of power often act towards others with a sense of entitlement and disrespect.

•   1950s experiment in a boys summer camp that showed how quickly we can form into competitive, even hostile, tribal groups.

•   Late 1930s Harvard study that followed male undergraduates throughout their life and found that the main pillars of happiness in life is love.

•   The one pretty strange study that shows Oscar winners live longer than Oscar nominees who lost (I haven’t figures out why this “study” was in the article.)

•   1959 study that shows human have a natural propensity to avoid cognitive dissonance, i.e., our brains seek to make the world orderly and harmonious and we are more apt to accept new information that supports our orderly view of the view than the accept new information that changes our current world view.

•   NYU study that shows that we all have a tendency—unconsciously--to stereotype groups of people, which then causes us to judge people based on unconscious stereotypes.