Fostering Healthy Conflict

This week’s article summary is Fostering Healthy Conflict.

Teaming is an integral aspect of teaching today.

If you’ve been in education as long as I, you remember what teaching was like before teaming: one teacher alone in a classroom. Yes, teachers in the Faculty Room or in after-school faculty meetings might share a little about their craft, yet overall teaching was a very independent existence. I learned more by trial-and-error than by mentorship.

As I mentioned in preplanning, there are many benefits to team teaching and being on a team: more ideas and perspectives shared, greater willingness to experiment and pilot new ideas, more support and feedback, closer relationships, and better productivity.

Yet, there are potential pitfalls as well: personal agendas, power dynamics, tension (overt, covert), distrust, passive/aggressive behavior, lack of follow through and accountability.

Patrick Lencioni in his classic book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team writes that the foundation of effective teaming is trust.

A vital aspect of trust is the willingness to be honest with team members. However, many of us shy away from honesty for fear that we will hurt the feelings of others.

The brief article below provides some sentence stems to help encourage healthy skepticism and disagreement in team meetings.

In our personal and professional lives, we know and work with some people who have excellent bedside manners. They have the ability to push and disagree in a non-threatening, respectful manner. They have natural empathy and can put themselves in the place of others.

Others, however, can overly blunt and confrontational. These people need support and scaffolding to help them work effectively with others.

One of the qualities of a high-functioning team is the ability to productively disagree. The article below helps provide some guidance for those teams that struggle with this and consequently aren’t maximizing their potential.

 Joe

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If educators are to have the kinds of conversations necessary to meet the needs of every child, then we’re going to have to learn how to navigate conflict.

Not angry, personalized, win/lose conflict, but healthy exchanges where colleagues wrestle with ideas, ask questions, demonstrate curiosity, change their minds, and keep students at the center.

How can we build the skills necessary for productive conflict?

One way is using sentence stems that lead the conversation in the right direction. Some examples:

Can you elaborate on your thinking, because I’m not sure I understand?

I have some concerns about that suggestion. Could you explain it more?

I want to push back on that idea. I’ve noticed ___ and would like to suggest ___.

I hear what you’re saying, but have you considered ___?

Can you help me understand why you believe that? My experience has led me to a different conclusion, but I want to understand your perspective.

I disagree with you about that, but I want to hear your thoughts.

It would help me get behind that idea if I could hear more about ___.

I agree with several points you made, but I want to challenge you on this idea. 

I have a request to make. Are you open to hearing it?

Is Lecture Good Pedagogy?

This week's article summary is Been To a Good Lecture?

My previous school was very progressive: it emphasized the process of learning over the final product; gave students ample voice and choice over what they learned, when they learned it, and how they demonstrated their understanding of it; and employed active, experiential, problem-based activities.

I arrived at the school with much more experience in and familiarity with traditional teaching: lecture, textbooks, note-taking, tests, and research papers. Anything I had done that could be considered progressive was accidental and more a result of an intuitive sense that kids learn better when engaged in what they’re learning.

So in my first year as Middle School Director, I spent as much time as I could observing classes to see progressive teaching in action.

Of all the sixth, seventh, and eighth grade teachers I observed, by far the most popular was the school’s eighth grade history teacher: the kids loved her, worked and laughed hard in her class, and learned much content. Whenever I visited her classroom, I was equally mesmerized by her narrative tales about American history.

The problem: all she did every day was sit in the front of the classroom and talk. She was the classic sage on the stage. Her typical class was 97% teacher talk, 3% student-to-teacher talk, 0% student-to-student talk.

Imagine my surprise: a funky, progressive school with its most popular and effective teacher violating every precept of John Dewey’s child-centered pedagogy upon which the school had been founded in 1922.

Just from observing her in the classroom I learned a lot about teaching:

• One teaching method does not fit all teachers
• Essential to student learning is teacher engagement with their students, not the pedagogy the teacher employs
• To optimize learning, teachers first need to earn the trust of their students by creating an emotionally safe and comfortable classroom
• All of us, including kids, love to learn from hearing stories

So, is lecture bad pedagogy? Is hands-on learning preferable?

It all depends on the teacher.

Joe

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It’s hard to avoid telling students things that we think they need to know. Thus, the lecture.

Unfortunately, evidence suggests lectures are not a useful way to improve learning. In fact, the effect size of lectures is negative. Three meta-analyses of lectures have focused on a comparison between a lecture and active learning or innovative teaching—and the lectures fare worse.

But we’ve been to good lectures. We’ve been challenged and entertained by a lecturer. Our curiosity has been piqued and our critical thinking has been provoked by someone standing in front of the room sharing information. Thus, there must be some good that can come from a lecture.

So, perhaps this is a case of a false dichotomy. Maybe lectures, done well, can be active and innovative.

What students don’t need is an information dump. Simply regurgitating information students could have read or watched on video doesn’t constitute a good lecture.

Students benefit from the following characteristics in lectures:

Presentation Skills:

• Is knowledgeable, current, and accurate in the subject
• Uses relevant and meaningful examples
• Verbally fluent in public speaking

Mode of Lecture:

• Paces lecture so students can take notes
• Provides summaries during the lecture

Motivation:

• Arouses curiosity and interest in audience

Social Equity:

• Uses inclusive examples
• Uses non-biased language

Modeling:

• Shows enthusiasm for topic and audience

 Critical Thinking:

• Encourages independence in learning
• Challenges audience’s views to prompt critical reasoning

 Cognitive Processes:

• Clearly structures the lecture
• Builds on audience’s knowledge
• Pauses for students to consolidate their thinking

Effective lecturers model expert thinking, tell compelling stories that illuminate concepts, and share experiences that provide context and insight.

Accessibility and interactivity are key to effective presentations of information. By accessibility, we mean that the content must be relevant to students, understandable to them, and designed to build on existing knowledge while stretching them to consider new ideas.

The interactive nature of the lecture is equally important. It is designed with motivation in mind and considers students’ learning needs, such as posing questions, pausing for notetaking, and providing ­opportunities for reflection.

Time—including both pace and length—is another important aspect of a good lecture. A pace of about 100 words per minute generates higher levels of comprehension, and students perceive the information to be more valuable, compared to more typical speaking rates of 150 to 200 words per minute.

For length, the focus should be on the ways students are asked to recall and retrieve information: When lectures are interspersed with opportunities to practice and apply information, interact with peers, and retrieve information from their minds, the overall length of time spent in the lecture is less ­relevant.

Good lecturers often asks the audience to interact with the material by making annotations and asking questions. They speak for brief amounts of time, then pause to allow the audience to discuss the content with one another in small groups and collaboratively generate ideas about an idea or concept.

While there are both good and bad examples of lectures, it’s unlikely that lectures will be eliminated from the educational landscape. So, we need to focus on how to improve these learning experiences. Importantly, lectures should be integrated into other learning experiences in class. Lectures can be effective as part of the gradual release of responsibility, with other instructional experiences planned as part of the overall lesson for students.

By viewing lectures as one component of learning, not the sole way of learning, we can build students’ capacity to pay attention and receive information in this format. Emphasizing interactivity, pacing, and frequent opportunities for retrieval and practice can change the effectiveness of lectures.

Has the Novel Become Obsolete in Schools?

This week's article summary is Students Are Reading Fewer Books in English Class, and it’s a continuation of previous summaries about middle, high school, and college students lacking basic literacy skills.

As you’ll see in the article, today’s middle and high school English teachers rarely if at all assign full-length novels to their students due to the pressure of high-stakes standardized testing and the need to cover an overly-broad curriculum.

While short reading passages from famous novels may help teachers cover their course’s curriculum, it unfortunately isn’t helping students fully develop their literacy/reading skills. I like reading snippets of books and short stories, but there are critical reading (and executive function) skills you develop, use, and practice when reading a novel from beginning to end.

The current data is stark: few kids today read proficiently or for pleasure--although if you’re not competent in whatever area, why would you focus on it during your free time?

I am a member of a dying breed: a reader of books. I’m the lone member of my family who reads books. I typically have two or three books going at once. Most weekends I spend idle time browsing the shelves of bookstores; my favorite is Half-Price Books in Decatur, near Emory University where the customers are as interesting and diverse as the used books for sale. Whenever I’ve moved to a new city, one of the first things I did was get a local library card. Every year I look forward to Jill asking  me to preview an array of books for the upcoming faculty/staff summer learning options; in fact, she gave me my first preview read earlier this week.

As we live in an age of distraction and instant gratification, I recognize that our attention spans have shortened—even an avid reader like me now prefers short paragraphs and chapters.

Yet, I still see the need and value in students reading complete novels, not just short passages. Some of my favorites from high school and college were The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, Crime and Punishment, Animal Farm, Frankenstein, and The Martian Chronicles.

I’m skeptical if the novel will ever regain its popularity, yet for the sake of our students’ critical thinking skills and focus/attention, we need to keep the novel alive in middle and high schools!

Joe

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Chris Stanislawski didn’t read much in his middle school English classes, but it never felt necessary. Students were given detailed chapter summaries for every novel they discussed, and teachers often played audio of the books during class. Much of the reading material was either abridged books or online texts and printouts.

“When you’re given a summary of the book telling you what you’re about to read, it ruins the whole story for you,” said Chris, 14. “What’s the point of actually reading?”

In many English classrooms across America, assignments to read full-length novels are becoming less common. Some teachers focus instead on selected passages — a concession to perceptions of shorter attention spans, pressure to prepare for standardized tests, and a sense that short-form content will prepare students for the modern, digital world.

The emphasis on shorter, digital texts does not sit well with everyone.

Deep reading is essential to strengthen circuits in the brain tied to critical thinking skills, background knowledge — and, most of all, empathy, said Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA.

“We must give our young an opportunity to understand who others are, not through little snapshots, but through immersion into the lives and thoughts and feelings of others,” Wolf said.

There’s little data on how many books are assigned by schools. But in general, students are reading less. Federal data from last year shows only 14% of young teens say they read for fun daily, compared with 27% in 2012.

Teachers say the trend stems from standardized testing and the influence of education technology. Digital platforms can deliver a complete English curriculum, with thousands of short passages aligned to state standards — all without having to assign an actual book.

“If schools are judged by their test scores, how are they going to improve their test scores? They’re going to mirror the test as much as possible,” said Karl Ubelhoer, a middle school teacher in Tabernacle, New Jersey.

For some students, it’s a struggle to read at all. Only a third of fourth and eighth graders reached reading proficiency in the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress, down significantly from 2019.

Leah van Belle, executive director of the Detroit literacy coalition, said when her son read “Peter Pan” in late elementary school, it was too hard for most kids in the class. She laments that Detroit feels like “a book desert.” Her son’s school doesn’t even have a library.

Still, she said it makes sense for English classes to focus on shorter texts. “As an adult, if I want to learn about a topic and research it, be it personal or professional, I’m using interactive digital text to do that,” she said.

Even in well-resourced schools, one thing is always in short supply: time.

Terri White, a teacher at South Windsor High School in Connecticut, no longer makes her honors ninth-grade English class read all of “To Kill a Mockingbird.” She assigns about a third of the book and a synopsis of the rest. They have to move on quickly because of pressure for teachers to cram more into the curriculum, she said. “I maintain rigor. But I’m more about helping students become stronger and more critical readers, writers and thinkers, while taking their social-emotional well-being into account,” she said.

In the long run, the synopsis approach harms students’ critical thinking skills, said Alden Jones, a literature professor at Emerson College in Boston. She assigns fewer books than she once did and gives more quizzes to make sure students do the reading.

Will Higgins, an English teacher at Dartmouth High School in Massachusetts, said he still believes in teaching the classics, but demands on students’ time have made it necessary to cut back. “We haven’t given up on ‘Jane Eyre’ and ‘Pride and Prejudice.’ We haven’t given up on ‘Hamlet’ or ‘The Great Gatsby,’″ Higgins said.

 

His school has had success encouraging reading through student-directed book clubs, where small groups pick a book and discuss it together.  “It’s funny,” he said. “Many students are saying that it’s the first time in a long time they’ve read a full book.”