Skills in Flux

This week’s article summary is Skills in Flux (by David Brooks). Brooks--like Thomas Friedman—often writes about innovation, global change and competition—especially economically. I like Brooks because his op-eds are always provocative.

In the article summary below, he takes what has become a cliché (21^st Century Skills, e.g., the myriad Cs of Tony Wagner) and comes up with a new take on what skills, attitudes, and habits matter today, different from yesterday.

For anyone in education, his intro story about how an unheralded teacher (according to the teacher evaluation checklist) in reality optimally supports her students was spot on to me.

As I read his list of qualities needed for today's world, I thought of many of you and how you possess them. I also thought of the qualities I find most important: to me, "opposability" and "cross-class expertise" seemed particularly important.

Joe

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Several years ago, Doug Lemov began studying videos of excellent teachers. He focused not on their big strategies but on their microgestures: How long they waited before calling on students to answer a question (to give the less confident students time to get their hands up); when they paced about the classroom and when they stood still (while issuing instructions, to emphasize the importance of what’s being said); how they moved around the room toward a student whose mind might be wandering.

These subtle skills are often not recognized or even discussed by those who talk about education policy, or even by those who evaluate teachers.

The Los Angeles school system tabulated the performance of roughly 6,000 teachers, using measures of student achievement. The best performing teacher in the whole system was a woman who, up until that report, was completely unheralded. The skills she possessed were invisible. Meanwhile, less important traits were measured on her evaluations (three times she was late to pick up students from recess).

In part, Lemov is talking about the skill of herding cats. The master of cat herding senses when attention is about to wander, knows how fast to move a diverse group, senses the rhythm between lecturing and class participation, varies the emotional tone. This is a performance skill that surely is relevant beyond education.

This raises an important point.

As the economy changes, the skills required to thrive in it change, too, and it takes a while before these new skills are defined and acknowledged.

For example, in today’s loosely networked world, people with social courage have amazing value. Everyone goes to conferences and meets people, but some people invite others to lunch afterward. Then they connect people across networks. People with social courage are extroverted in issuing invitations but introverted in conversation — willing to listen 70% of the time. They build not just contacts but actual friendships by engaging people on multiple levels. They develop large informal networks of contacts that transcend their organization and give them an independent power base.

Similarly, people who can capture amorphous trends with a clarifying label also have enormous worth. Karl Popper observed that there are clock problems and cloud problems. Clock problems can be divided into parts, but cloud problems are indivisible emergent systems. Since it is easier to think deductively, most people try to turn cloud problems into clock problems, but a few are able to look at a complex situation, grasp the gist and clarify it by naming what is going on. Such people tend to possess negative capacity, the ability to live with ambiguity and not leap to premature conclusions. They can absorb a stream of disparate data and rest in it until they can synthesize it into one trend, pattern or generalization. Such people can create a mental model that helps you think about a phenomenon. As Oswald Chambers put it, “The author who benefits you most is not the one who tells you something you did not know before, but the one who gives expression to the truth that has been dumbly struggling in you for utterance.”

We can all think of many other skills that are especially valuable right now:

Making nonhuman things intuitive to humans. This is what Steve Jobs did.

Purpose provision. Many people go through life overwhelmed by options, afraid of closing off opportunities. But a few have fully cultivated moral passions and can help others choose the one thing they should dedicate themselves to.

Opposability. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

Cross-class expertise. In a world dividing along class, ethnic and economic grounds some people are culturally multilingual. They can operate in an insular social niche while seeing it from the vantage point of an outsider.

One gets the impression we’re confronted by a giant cultural lag. The economy emphasizes a new generation of skills, but our vocabulary describes the set required 30 years ago.

Cultural Competence

This week’s article summary is Inviting All Students to Learn from Educational Leadership (no link available). Its focus is how teachers can be more culturally competent.

As we have discussed in the past, one of our most critical responsibilities in teaching is honoring and celebrating our student' unique identities and what shapes and influences those identities. 

Some of the more eccentric yet prideful aspects of my identity are being left-handed (only about 10% of us are lefties!), being a native New Yorker who at 25 packed up his car and moved to Oklahoma (took a lot of heat from fellow New Yorkers—even my parents--when I did this: “Is that even a part of the United States!"), being first born (I like rules and I like living within rules!).

Although Trinity School students are fairly homogenous socioeconomically, religiously, racially, etc.—we as teachers need to be vigilant not to assume all our students fall within those majorities. I have spoken about the difference between intent and impact: sometimes we can inadvertently marginalize kids (or colleagues or parents) by assuming they all see things the same way and have had the same experiences. When I was a kid, I definitely felt “left”-out being a lefty in school (no modeling in how to hold my pencil, no lefty desks, total frustration trying to use scissors) and in PE class (I had learn how to bat and golf right handed and there were never any lefty baseball gloves in the PE equipment—and forget about finding a left-handed catcher’s mitt).

The suggestions below are not earth shattering—more common sense about getting to know your students as individuals and encouraging, supporting, empowering them to share and be proud of who they are and what they believe

Joe

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All people are shaped by the culture in which they live. The shaping process is both subtle and pervasive, and it can be difficult for all of us to grasp that people shaped by other cultures will see and respond to the world differently than we do.

As a result, it’s easy for teachers to interpret unfamiliar student behaviors as expressions of disinterest, deficiency, disrespect, or defiance.

Below are four ways to become better attuned to differences so all students flourish:

Recognize and appreciate cultural variance. Good teachers have always been ‘students of their students’. Now it’s important to be students of their cultures, attuned to their languages, appreciating their experiences and histories, and valuing their lenses on the world.

Tune in to culturally influenced learning patterns. Some students’ backgrounds are collectivist while others are more individualistic. Some will have learned to revere their teachers from a distance, others to negotiate with their teachers as they would with a peer, and still others that they owe their teachers no respect until it’s earned. Each new layer of understanding provides a platform for creating a classroom in which all comers can feel at home. Here are a few other cultural continuums on which individual students are arrayed:

• Needs to observe <---> Needs to test ideas
• Needs external structures <---> Creates own structures
• Competitive <---> Collaborative
• Conforming <---> Creative
• Reserved <---> Expressive
• Fixed sense of time <---> Flexible sense of time
• Information-driven <---> Feeling-driven

A teacher noticed that several students were uncomfortable responding to quick-response questions and on-the-spot writing prompts. Advised by a colleague that these students had been taught to value reflection over speed, and to listen and reflect before speaking, the teacher made two adjustments: first, she gave advance warning of an upcoming question by saying, “I want to hear from a couple of additional students on this topic. Then I’m going to ask for your thinking.” Second, early in a lesson she said, “As we conclude our lesson today, I’m going to ask you to summarize your understandings in writing.” These minor tweaks made a noticeable difference to the comfort and performance of formerly reticent students – and not just those the teacher originally had in mind.

Look beyond cultural patterns to see individuals. Although there are learning-style patterns within cultures, there are plenty of individual differences. Students who appear to be part of a homogenous group can vary tremendously because of differences in gender, school experience, parental support, time in the U.S., and personal temperament. True cultural sensitivity requires person sensitivity as well.

Plan inviting curriculum and instruction. This means teaching history, literature, music, language, and contemporary issues in ways that make as many connections as possible to students’ varied cultures and experiences. In other words, the curriculum leads students to explore content through universal lenses rather than only parochial ones. A teacher who looks at students as individuals – no matter what their cultural experiences are – will attend to their varied points of readiness, their interests, their exceptionalities, their status among peers, and so on when planning curriculum and instruction. And from a pedagogical perspective, it’s wise to try to hit as many points on the continuums listed above as possible, either in unit and lesson plans or the choices students are able to make. For example, in preparing students for a challenging assessment, a teacher might give two options: a quiz bowl, in which students compete in teams to answer sets of questions, or a tag team, in which students collaborate in groups to propose answers to the same questions, explain their thinking, and ask one another for elaborations to clarify their thinking.

The characteristics of classrooms that invite students to learn are as follows:

• Respect – Every student is valuable, able, and responsible
• Trust – Each student contributes to the learning process
• Optimism – Each student has the potential to be successful
• Intentionality – Every step of a lesson invites each student to learn.

Spread Positivity Not Negativity

This week’s article summary is What It's Like to Go Without Complaining For a Month.

I am a big believer in positive thought and attitude leading to a positive life and outcomes. (It's all about your perspective, right?)

In fact, my aspiration to become a head of school was influenced by a group of cynical, snarky, negative teachers. 

I was a ten-year teaching veteran of two schools. We had an after-school, all-school meeting—a meeting where the head of school was providing all-school updates to the faculty/staff (like we had on Wednesday). 

I was an 8^th grade history teacher and was being courted by the upper school history department to move from middle to upper school. All these upper school history teachers were incredibly bright and totally devoted to their discipline. But they also had the reputation of being a cynical, negative bunch who were “too cool for school.” This extended to them being mean and rude to poor performing students (it was the early 90s and we weren't as enlightened then about the dangers of sarcasm in the classroom). This negative, selfish attitude extended to relationships with colleagues and whole school events.  In faculty meetings, they always sat in the back row, never volunteered to help out colleagues, and certainty couldn’t be bothered listening to any administrator, let alone the head of school. (If you've taught in high school, you most likely know the type I'm describing.)

As I walked into the faculty meeting, their ring leader caught my eye and invited me to sit with them--in the prestigious back row reserved for only those who were invited. In some ways an honor, right? Here I was in my early 30s and I was being invited into this exclusive club. Oddly and sadly, they were in many ways the teachers most of us aspired to be like. (Is it any wonder kids have a hard time being empathetic, compassionate, and inclusive when they see adults act so badly?)

I still vividly remember this moment. I was at a crossroad in my career and even in my life. Would I join the negative cynics (the Dark Side)?

Ignoring the wave of the ring leader, I sat—not in the front (I’m not a total suck-up after all)—but in the third or fourth row—and decided then that I would rather be the guy on stage than a member of the back row that preferred to complaining to working with others on possibilities and solutions. 

This article made me think of my decision to be positive and avoid those who spread negativity. It made me a better teacher and, more important, it helped me be a better and more positive person.

Trinity is the fourth school I’ve worked in and maybe it’s a little bit of being elementary only and a little of the community ethos of continuous betterment, but I am very appreciative of the spirit of positivity here. Yes, there are stressful times and those who dwell on the negative in all our lives and even here at school, but mostly there is joy and fun and positivity at Trinity.

As most of us get a well-deserved break from school, think about how all of us can use the recommendations below and focus on the positive during stressful times.

Enjoy Spring Break!

Joe

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Over 1,000 other people recently signed up for the Complaint Restraint project.

The goal? Creating a more positive life by eliminating negative statements.

As the website states, there’s no secret sauce--simply stop complaining.

But is it that easy? What’s so bad about complaining, anyway?

Griping comes naturally for us. During an average conversation, we lob complaints at each other about once a minute, according to research. There’s a social reason for that. "Nothing unites people more strongly than a common dislike," says Trevor Blake, author of Three Simple Steps. "The easiest way to build friendship and communicate is through something negative."
Also, evolution primes us to focus on the negative for self-defense, says Jon Gordon, author of The No Complaining Rule. "The more we look at something that can hurt us and kill us, we are programed to be on guard against that."

But all of that whining comes with a cost. When we complain, our brains release stress hormones that harm neural connections in areas used for problem solving and other cognitive functions. This also happens when we listen to someone else moan and groan. "It’s as bad as secondhand smoke," Gordon says. "It’s secondhand complaining."

Swearing off something that comes naturally to us seems like a setup for failure. Indeed, the creators of Complaint Restraint admit they fail their mission miserably every year. "Things you do habitually are really hard to give up," says Joanna Wolfee a professor of English at Carnegie-Mellon University. "Have you ever tried to eliminate the ‘you knows’ and ‘uh-huhs’ from your speech? It is extremely difficult."

And sometimes we absolutely need to vent. It feels good, doesn’t it? One study showed that bottling emotions could shorten your life by an average of two years.

The good news is this: There can be middle ground between going cold turkey and being a Negative Nancy. If you’re serious about complaining less, here are some realistic tips for success.

Start By Defining What A Complaint Is: If you point out that it’s cold outside, is that a complaint? No, that’s an observation. A complaint is, ‘It’s cold outside and I hate living in this place.’

Track How Often You Complain And What About: Change starts with awareness.  

Separate Yourself From Chronic Complainers: If you must lend an ear, try to respond with something positive rather than joining in on the rant session. You will find over a period of time those people who complain constantly start to leave you alone because their brains are not getting that stimulus they’re looking for.

Turn Complaints Into Solutions: This is called "positive complaining" or "effective complaining. Don’t sit around and admire the problem. Do something about it.

Use The "But-Positive" Technique: If you find yourself griping, add a ‘but’ and say something positive.

Change "Have To" To "Get To": “I have to pick up the kids" becomes "I get to pick up the kids." You change a complaining voice to an appreciative heart. You’ll feel so much better the more you focus on the positive over time. At first, it will be a little awkward, but the more you get used to it, it becomes your natural state.

One participant in the Complaint Restraint project stated it was hard but worth it. "I slipped a lot. But I’ve had more examples this month of me being more positive and better things happening."

Lack of Reading Today

This week’s article summary is called Fewer Kids Are Frequent Readers from the Boston Globe.

Not surprisingly the culprit for kids today is access to technology and how it takes up so much of a child’s free time.

I would guess that the same holds true for a decline in physical activity and free, imaginative play for kids. 

I would also guess that the same holds true for us adults. As we spend more time online, we spend less time on other activities that used to consume the lion share of our downtime.

The culprit of my youth was television—The Boob Tube. (I can't even calculate the amount of hours I watched reruns of I Love Lucy, Gilligan's Island, The Flintstones, F Troop!) Fortunately, though, these shows were only on in the late afternoon and early evening—the only TV option in the early afternoon back then was soap operas—might as well go outside ride my bike. Video options for kids today extend beyond network or cable TV to YouTube, Netflix, and Amazon Prime.

Read the article below and have a good weekend—and, if you have kids, read to them, and, if you don't, do yourself a favor, pick up a “real" book and enjoy it!

Joe

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Books can be a hard sell as kids get older and spend more time texting, on YouTube, or playing games on their phones.

A new report by children’s publishing company Scholastic shows how reading habits change through childhood, and offers hints for parents looking to get their kids to read more.

The number of kids ages 6-17 who frequently read books for fun (i.e., 5-7 days a week) is lower than it was four years ago — 31% versus 37%. While more than half (53%) of kids ages 6-8 are frequent readers, that figure falls to just 14% for kids ages 15-17. (Interestingly, the percentage of parents with kids ages 6-17 who read frequently is also down, from 28% in 2010 to 21% in 2014.)

It isn’t because people see reading as less important than in the past. Both parents and kids surveyed say reading is among the most important skills for kids to have, outranking math, computer, and social skills.

Yet as kids get older, they spend more time with screens. Nearly 60% of kids ages 12-14 play games or apps on electronic devices 5-7 days a week, while 51% of kids in the same age group go online using a smartphone or other hand-held device 5-7 days a week.

Depending how it’s used, screen time can complement books to build kids’ reading skills.

Searching the Web and being online still give kids practice reading — they’re part of a broader scope of reading. Reading a variety of material — literature, textbooks, even social media posts — is important for kids to learn how to compare and use information from different sources.

The report also offered insights into what kids look for in books and what makes them frequent readers.

Kids across age groups agreed that their favorite books — and the ones they’re most likely to finish — are ones they picked out themselves. The quality kids look for most in books is that they make them laugh.

Not surprisingly, kids who read frequently are more likely to have parents who are avid readers. Among kids ages 6-11, heavy readers are also more likely to have been read aloud to 5-7 days a week before kindergarten, and to still be read aloud to. They also go online less often in their spare time.

Among kids ages 12-17, having opportunities to read independently during the school day was associated with more frequent reading, as was having parents who build reading into kids’ daily routine and put limits on screen time.

How the Brain Best Learns

This week’s article summary is Six Important Things to Know About How Your Brain Works. While the article is meant to help us better understand how our brains best learns, there are obvious classroom implications for teachers.

As I read the article, I thought of various times in my life when I did (or didn’t) utilize the techniques explained, e.g., I am definitely a whole-to-part and a visual learner—both of which aid greatly in the learning process. 

As most of you know, sleep and learning are closely connected. I am fascinated by the importance of sleep. I especially wonder how sleep fits into evolution: we're vulnerable when we sleep yet all animals need ample sleep to survive. Scientists still grapple with the evolutionary benefits of sleep: some speculate it is because sleep slows down metabolism (a benefit when food was scarce and hard to find), that it keeps us safe and quiet during times when we were vulnerable to predators, that mammalian brains are so much more sophisticated than reptilian one and need downtime to categorize what has been experienced and learned. I've often thought that perhaps the reason some of us are morning people (I am) and some are night owls (I'm definitely not) is because having our prehistoric ancestors be awake at different times would have helped ensure the protection of the tribe—and those beneficial traits were passed down to us in our DNA. (In another life, I might have been an evolutionary biologist.)

Clearly while there has been much learned about the brain in the past twenty years, there will be much more learned in the upcoming years, particularly in how to optimize learning—and the implications for education are obvious.

Joe

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Whether you want to learn a new language, learn to cook, take up a musical instrument, or just get more out of the books you read, it helps to know how your brain learns.

While everyone learns slightly differently, we do have similarities in the way our brains take in new information, and knowing how this works can help us choose the most efficient strategies for learning new things.

Here are six things you should know about the brain’s learning systems.

1. We take in information better when it’s visual

The brain uses 50 percent of its resources on vision. Think about that for a minute. Half of your brainpower goes to your eyes and the processes in your brain that turn what you see into information. The other half has to be split up among all the other functions your body has. Vision is not only a power-hungry sense, but it trumps our other senses when it comes to taking in information.
A perfect example of this is an experiment where 54 wine aficionados were asked to taste wine samples. The experimenters dropped odorless, tasteless red dye into white wines to see whether the wine tasters would still know they were white based on the taste and smell. They didn’t. Vision is such a big part of how we interpret the world that it can overwhelm our other senses.
Another surprising finding about vision is that we treat text as images. As you read this paragraph, your brain is interpreting each letter as an image. This makes reading incredibly inefficient when compared to how quickly and easily we can take in information from a picture.
More than just static visuals, we pay special attention to anything we see that’s moving. So pictures and animations are your best friends when it comes to learning.
Action: Find or make flash cards with images on them. Add doodles, photos, or pictures from magazines and newspapers to your notes. Use colors and diagrams to illustrate new concepts you learn.

2. We remember the big picture better than the details

When you’re learning lots of new concepts, it’s easy to get lost in the barrage of information. One way to avoid being overwhelmed is to keep referring back to the big picture. This is probably where you’ll start with something new, so coming back to explore how the new concept you just learned fits into that big picture can be helpful. In fact, our brains tend to hang onto the gist of what we’re learning better than the details, so we might as well play into our brains’ natural tendencies. When the brain takes in new information, it hangs onto it better if it already has some information to relate it to. This is where starting with the gist of an idea can be helpful: it gives you something to hang each detail on as you learn it.
I read a metaphor about this concept once that I loved: imagine your brain is like a closet full of shelves: as you add more clothes they fill up more of the shelves and you start categorizing them. If you add a black sweater (a new piece of information) it can go on the sweater shelf, the black clothes shelf, the winter clothes shelf, or the wool shelf. In real life you can’t put your sweater on more than one shelf, but in your brain that new piece of information gets linked to each of those existing ideas. You’ll more easily remember that information later because when you learned it you related it to various other things you already knew.
Action: Keep a large diagram or page of notes handy that explains the big picture of what you’re learning and add to it each major concept you learn along the way.

3. Sleep largely affects learning and memory

Studies have shown that a night of sleep in-between learning something new and being tested on it can significantly improve performance. In a study of motor skills, participants who were tested 12 hours after learning a new skill with a night of sleep in-between improved by 20.5 percent, compared to just 3.9 percent improvement for participants who were tested at 4-hour intervals during waking hours.
Naps can improve learning just like a full night of sleep can. A study from the University of California found that participants who napped after completing a challenging task performed better when completing the task again later, compared to participants who stayed awake in-between tests.
Sleeping before you learn can also be beneficial. Sleep prepares the brain like a dry sponge, ready to soak up new information.
Action: Try practicing your new skill—or reading about it—before going to bed or taking a nap. When you wake up, write some notes on what you remember from your last study session.

4. Sleep deprivation significantly reduces your ability to learn new information

Sleep deprivation is a scary thing. Because we don’t fully understand sleep and its purpose yet we don’t always respect our need for sleep. But although we can’t say definitively what sleep does for us, we know what happens if you don’t get enough. Sleep deprivation makes us play it safe by avoiding risks and leaning on old habits. It also increases our likelihood of being physically injured, since our bodies don’t perform as well when we’re tired. Most importantly for learning: sleep deprivation can cut your brain’s ability to take in new information by almost 40 percent. Compared to getting a good night’s sleep and waking up refreshed and ready to learn, an all-nighter doesn’t seem worth the effort.
A Harvard Medical School study found that the first 30 hours after learning something are critical, and sleep deprivation during this time can cancel out any learning benefits of getting a full night’s sleep after those 30 hours are up.
Action: Forget all-nighters. Save practice and study sessions for days when you’re alert and well-rested. And definitely avoid sleep deprivation right after learning something new.

5. We learn best by teaching others

When we expect to have to teach other people what we’re learning, we take in new information better. We organize it better in our minds, remember it more correctly, and we’re better at remembering the most important parts of what we’ve learned.
One study told half the participants they would be tested on the information they were learning, and told the other half they would have to teach someone else what they learned. Both sets of participants were tested on the information and didn’t have to teach anyone else, but the subjects who thought they’d be teaching others performed better on the test. Though we don’t realize it, learning with the idea that we’ll have to teach this information later tends to invoke better methods for learning subconsciously. For instance, we focus on the most important pieces of information, the relationships between different concepts, and we carefully organize the information in our minds.
Action: Keep a notebook or blog where you write about what you’ve learned. Write about each new concept you learn as if it’s a lesson for others.

6. We learn new information better when it’s interleaved

A common learning approach is ‘block practice’. When you practice or focus on learning one particular thing over and over, that’s block practice. For instance, you might study history for a few hours in a row, or practice just your serve in a tennis lesson. Brain experts recommend a different approach to learning called ‘interleaving’, which mixes up the information or skills you practice.
One research experiment supporting this technique involved teaching participants about artistic styles by showing them a series of images on a screen. Some of the participants were exposed to block practice of artistic styles (all 6 examples of a painter’s style are shown before moving on to another painter’s style), while others have their images interleaved (examples of different painter’s styles are mixed in together). When the two groups were tested afterwards on how well they recognized a painter’s style in a painting they hadn’t seen before, the interleaving group scored around 60 percent, while the block group scored around 30 percent. Yet, surprisingly, around 70 percent of the participants in this experiment said they think the block practice was most effective in helping them learn. Clearly we have some work to do to understand what helps us learn best. ‘Interleaving’ works better because it plays into our natural abilities to recognize patterns and outliers. When applied in the real world it also provides an opportunity for us to review information regularly, as we interleave what we already know with new information.
Some examples for interleaving could be cycling through three different subjects you need to study before exams, practicing speaking, listening, and writing skills of a foreign language in tandem rather than in blocks, or practicing your forehand, backhand, and serves in a single tennis lesson rather than setting aside one lesson for each.
Action: When you’re learning or practicing a new technique, practice it interleaved with other techniques. For instance, if you’re practicing a particular golf swing, practice other swings at the same time to mix it up.If you’re learning new information, mix in information you already know—old vocabulary words and new when you’re learning a foreign language, for instance.