5 Strategies to Demystify the Learning Process for Struggling Students

 This week's article summary is 5 Strategies to Demystify the Learning Process for Students.

Carol Dweck’s Growth Mindset research over the past dozen years has influenced teachers to guide their students to become neuroscientists, i.e., to know how their brains function: how knowledge is stored, how it is retrieved, and how new knowledge interlaces with other stored knowledge.

The expression “Name it to Tame it” comes to mind when we ask our students to think metacognitively—literally to think about thinking.

Through my student years I never consciously thought metacognitively. Instead through trial and error and experience I gradually learned what worked and didn’t work for me when I has some sort of assessment that required me to demonstrate my learning and understanding—be it a test, a paper, or even a classroom presentation.

Like most of us, I went through the stage in high school and college of thinking I was being studious by underlining and highlighting textbooks like mad and then reviewing and re-reading my copious notes before big exams. I was working but not efficiently or effectively. During exams I often found myself picturing exactly where the critical information was in the textbook or in my notes yet I just wasn’t able to pull the details to the surface.

By the time I was a junior in college, I had begun to be much more judicious in what I underlined and wrote summary notes and questions to myself as I listened to lectures and class discussions. When I studied, I systematically reduced my notes to the essentials, so I had a fuller grasp of big concepts. Rather than passively re-reading my notes, I used to pretend I was giving a speech on the topic at hand and walked around my bedroom (luckily I didn’t have a roommate) as if I was an esteemed professor.

Without knowing it, I was using more effective, active study techniques, and not surprisingly my grades and confidence as a student rose accordingly.

The article below provides some basic metacognition a-ha’s all students will benefit from knowing, understanding, and using to learn effectively and, most critically, long-lastingly.

Joe

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The field of metacognition offers educators many techniques that are rooted in brain research 

When students do not understand how their brains learn and retain material, they can develop misconceptions about themselves as learners — such as a faulty assumption that they are bad at a subject or that they suffer from performance anxiety. 

Think about the common experience of students who reread their notes and think they know the material —  only to enter a test and find that they cannot retrieve the information. They simply haven’t been taught how to study in a way that allows them to retrieve the information.  

Most teachers are not at all comfortable with or trained in neuroscience.

Below are some key principles teachers can use in the classroom and share with students to help them demystify the learning process.  

The Hiker Brain vs. The Race Car Brain

Start by teaching students the difference between focused and diffused thinking. When the brain is in focused mode, you can get started on the task at hand. But deep understanding is not fully accomplished in this mode. Diffused thinking occurs when you allow your mind to wander, to imagine and to daydream. In this mode, the brain is still working —  consolidating information and making sense of what you are trying to learn. If a concept is easy for you to grasp right off, the focused mode might be sufficient, but if a new skill or concept takes consideration, you have to toggle back and forth between these two modes of thinking as you get to true understanding of the material — and this doesn’t happen quickly. Because toggling is essential to learning, teachers and students need to build downtime into their day — time when learning can “happen on background” as you play a game, go on a walk or color a picture. It’s also one reason why sleep is so vital to healthy cognitive development.

Since students tend to equate speed with smarts, use this metaphor: “There’s a race car brain and a hiker brain. They both get to the finish line, but not at the same time. The race car brain gets there really fast, but everything goes by in a blur. The hiker brain takes time. It hears birds singing, sees the rabbit trails, feels the leaves. It’s a very different experience and, in some ways, much richer and deeper. You don’t need to be a super swift learner. In fact, sometimes you can learn more deeply by going slowly.

Chains and Chunks

In cognitive psychology, “chunking” refers to the well-practiced mental patterns that are essential to developing expertise in a topic. This can also be described as chains. Learning is all about developing strong chains. For example, when you are first learning how to back up a car, you have to consciously think about each step, from how to turn the steering wheel to how to use your mirrors. But once that process is chained, it’s easy — it becomes automatic. Similarly, once solving certain equations becomes automatic in math, students can apply these equations to more complex problems. Teachers can help students identify the procedures in a unit of study that they need to master in order to take their learning to the next level —  from the steps of the scientific method to fundamental drawing techniques. Any type of mastery involves the development of chains of procedural fluency. Then you can get into more complex areas of fluency. Here’s another way to think about it. We all have about four slots of working memory that we can use to problem-solve in the moment. One of those slots can be filled with an entire procedural chain —  and then you can put new information in the other slots.

The Power of Metaphor

Metaphor and analogy are extraordinarily powerful teaching tools. When you are trying to learn something new, the best way to learn it is to connect it with something you already know. The formal term for this is “neural reuse” —  the idea that metaphors use the same neural pathways as the concept a metaphor is describing. So familiar metaphors allow a learner to draw on a concept they have already mastered and apply it to a new situation. Metaphors “rapidly on-board” new ideas. 

The Problem of Procrastination

Procrastination is the number one challenge facing most learners. To train the brain to systematically focus and relax — to toggle — try the “Pomodoro Technique.

Developed by Francesco Cirillo, this strategy uses a timer to help the learner work and break at set intervals. First, choose a task to accomplish. Then, set a timer for 25 minutes and work until the timer goes off.  At that point, take a five-minute break: stand up, walk around, take a drink of water, etc. After three or four 25-minute intervals, take a longer break (15 – 30 minutes) to recharge. This technique trains your ability to focus and reinforces that relaxing at the end is critical to the process of learning.  Teachers can build a similar rhythm into the school day, providing brain breaks and movement time to help students toggle between focused and diffused thinking.

Expanding Possibilities

When we teach children and teenagers how they learn, we can blow open their sense of possibility. Tell your students that they don’t just have to be stuck following their passion. You can broaden your passions enormously. And that can have enormous implications for how your life unfolds. We always say ‘follow your passions’ but sometimes that locks people into focusing on what comes easily or what they are already good at. You can get passionate about — and really good at many things

A Simple Way to Self-Monitor for Bias

 This week's article summary is A Simple Way to Monitor for Self-Bias.

Written by a teacher, the article provides 5 categories teachers can use to assess how fair and equitable we are in dealing with all the kids in our classroom.

As I read the article, I thought back to my years in the classroom. In some ways, I think I fooled myself into thinking by treating all my students equally, I was treating them equitably. We all have biases and the way I liked to learn as a student became the dominant culture of my classroom as a teacher.

As a student, I liked open-ended class discussions. I preferred written assessments that let me form an opinion and draw my own conclusions. I needed to see the big picture of any topic before learning the specifics. I liked doing my work in class and having only a small amount of work to complete at home. I liked the social aspect of group work but didn’t find it helped me learn.

So I created a classroom culture and practice where the above procedures predominated, and it naturally favored students who learned as I did when I was a student. I treated all my students the same (equally) but in doing so I wasn’t acknowledging those who needed to learn differently. Hence, there was little equity in my classroom.

While the article’s title includes the word ‘simple’, DEI work (be it about race, gender, ability, family background, etc.) is anything but. It takes a lot of time, reflection, honesty, and grace. 

Joe

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Let’s say that you, like me, have a renewed commitment this year to ensuring equity in your classes. Perhaps you attended a seminar entitled “Antiracist Education” or “Racism in the Classroom”—and afterward you read books such as How to Be an Antiracist. 

Now you’re ready; you want to do what some people call “the work.” But then you get to your classroom and don’t have any idea where to begin.

One time I found myself in a similar situation. I was in a casual meeting with my principal, a well-respected Black leader at our school. We were discussing test scores, classroom management, and our new crop of teachers. The conversation turned to my own students and he said, “The main problem with you in the classroom is that you don’t know how to handle some of these Black boys.”

We had an excellent working relationship, so even though the comment stung, I knew better than to ignore him. I began to watch myself, to check the spaces in my pedagogy where bias and prejudice were leaking through. I focused on five key areas where I could track my behavior as I made notes about interactions with my students. I wanted to self-monitor for racial bias.

Once the data was staring me in the face, I knew my principal was right: I was treating some of my Black male students differently from other students. It was unconscious but true. Empowered by this knowledge, I was able to make a deliberate decision to change my behavior.

Here are 5 areas to self-monitor for bias.

Discipline: Research finds that Black students are punished in schools at disproportional rates; it is worthwhile to investigate if this is true in our classes. As an important piece of the inquiry, however, don’t just track big acts of discipline—detentions and referrals and calls home. Rather, keep a clipboard close at hand, and every time you find yourself managing a student, mark it down. Out-of-turn phone usage, quasi-innocent time out of seat, medium-level volume issues—sometimes these small things require correction, but how we handle them is worth inspecting for bias.

Calling on Raised Hands: Who do we call on when they raise a hand to participate? There’s little ambiguity here, making this an obvious area for self-reflection. Don’t be too hard on yourself about the classroom Hermione, the one you call on far too often because they are the only one offering. Pay attention instead to moments when you are offered a choice. As a bonus for my fellow male teachers out there, tracking this behavior could also help uncover gender bias in our practice.

Cold Calling: If you’re anything like me, sometimes you call on a student not because they are offering a comment or question but because you think they aren’t paying attention. You’re trying to trap them in a moment of laziness or misbehavior. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this method of classroom management, but it’s important to know if we’re applying it equitably.

The point of the first three trackers is to see what names come out of our mouths at which times. This data can cut across the blur of memory and give better information about actual practice. The next two trackers are more subjective because they will try to tease out a different kind of bias through asking us to monitor our thoughts and feelings.

“This Kid is in the Wrong Class”: Most teachers know that gut-level feeling of excitement or dismay upon being asked to write a letter of recommendation. I tried to capture that feeling midstream by tracking the times I wondered whether a particular student should be in a different level of my class—up to honors or down to regular or even something else entirely. I’m not referring just to official actions to get a student moved but also to the mere thoughts that flashed across my mind. Research supports the conclusion that Black and Brown students are disproportionately tracked into lower-level classes. Whether or not we’re in charge of student placement, do we sometimes feel that same bias? It’s a worthwhile question to explore.

Good Times: Which students get you to joke around and bring out your “more than a teacher” personality? Which students do you swap stories with about activity in the outside world? Who pulls us into their orbit when we overhear an interesting conversation? Which students end up most often in the funny or charming classroom anecdotes that we share with our partners and friends? What kind of student gets marked down here?

If you keep track of these aspects of classroom management and conversation for a month, you may discover something surprising about the way you interact with students. I know I did. But it gave me something to work on, a plan to make, and an action item to fix. I know it’s only scratching the surface of the work, but it gave me a place to begin. I don’t doubt that it will do the same for you.

Teaching History in Polarized Times

This week's article summary is New National Civics Guidelines Carve a Middle Path.

Historically (pun intended) history teachers have gotten a bad rap. The common joke is history teacher is the job the football coach has to make him a full-time employee—sit at your desk drinking your coffee, let the kids read the textbook on their own, and use the teacher’s edition for activities, assignments, and test questions.

What once was a quaint, low-stress job is a minefield today as the article below attests. 

I like the premise of the new history guidelines below: history should be viewed through the lens of ‘reflective patriotism’ as we compare our country’s ideals with its reality.

While the polarized times we live in seem as if we will never be able to find common ground, we need to remember that there have been many times in our country’s history where bitter partisanship dominated, the Civil War and the 1960s being two prime examples.

I agree with the article’s hope that we as teachers, even in the younger grades of Trinity, can guide our students to be thinkers who practice open inquiry, can see the grayness and ambiguity of life, and can avoid the zero-sum, right-wrong, win-lose paradigm many favor today.

To me, our country, like all of us, are works in progress--imperfect but striving to get better every day.  

Joe

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 Is America a land of freedom and opportunity, a shining civic example of government by and for the people? 

Or is it a system built on oppression and disenfranchisement that’s forced marginalized peoples to fight for full participation?

A new set of K-12 history and civics guidelines tries to find a middle ground between the competing narratives by posing the question: What if it’s both?

The “Roadmap to Educating for American Democracy” guidelines are part of an ambitious project to reverse decades of neglect of the social studies. But they also come in perhaps the most difficult era the discipline has ever faced and will likely face intense scrutiny as a result.

Unprecedented levels of polarization and the seismic political and social events of 2020 have turned the social studies field into the most explosive curriculum area in K-12 education.

Debates rage over provocative new retellings of the American story, like The New York Times’ 1619 Project, and more familiar, idealistic, even sanitized narratives like those favored by former President Trump’s now-disbanded 1776 Commission.

The new guidelines center on the idea of “reflective patriotism”: that students should learn to feel committed to this country and the ideals it purports to represent, while also questioning, critiquing, and holding the powerful to account when it fails to live up to those ideals.

Students should learn about the importance of civic participation, the founding of American democracy, and the notion that civil disagreement is baked into the U.S. Constitution and is part of the American experiment, they state.

The guidelines stress that a lack of civics knowledge is a problem for our education system at all levels. 

The guidelines prioritize inquiry into the nation’s complicated and contested founding and evolution.

The 40-page draft outlines key concepts, thematic “driving questions” for student inquiry, and more-specific sample guiding questions.

While the draft does reference some contentious issues, including the forced removal of Indigenous people and the institution of enslavement, many of the driving questions are conceptual. 

Throughout students’ K-12 education, the guidelines say, they should be using critical inquiry skills to engage with all the rich conceptual questions kicked up by the founding of America. For example, how does the idea of “We the People” change over time? Which moments of change have most defined the country’s evolution and that of its political institutions? What kinds of stories tell us who we are and where we’re from?

As for who is part of that civic life, the roadmap uses two definitions of the word citizen. The guidelines discuss the rights granted to those considered legal citizens of the United States, but also engage with the idea of a citizen as someone who contributes to a community, whatever their age or legal status. 

All of these choices make room to teach both traditional civics topics like voting and government structure, while also engaging with “action civics,” an approach that explores how people can identify issues that are important to them and make change.