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

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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

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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

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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?

Should Kids Read 'Controversial' Books

This week's article summary is What Happens When Young People Actually Read 'Disturbing' Books.

The content of books and their availability to kids have always been hot topics, yet with today’s political polarization this ‘culture war’ topic is hotter than ever.

The research study below focuses not on the politics of book banning/censorship, but on how reading these books actually impacts kids. The research study invited eighth graders to choose books from a vast array covering many topics and themes, some of which had adult content.

The research results were striking and probably surprising to many.

Because students had choices, they selected books that were of interest to them. (I still remember in eighth grade being assigned the book Death Be Not Proud, which was so boring to me that it literally stymied my interest in reading for years. It wasn’t until The Exorcist was published that I rekindled my interest in reading.) Students eagerly choose and consumed books that were meaningful and intriguing to them, not because they offered titillating, alluring plots and scenes.  As they were engaged – even engrossed – in these books, their amount of reading rose and their comprehension soared.

As we’ve discussed before, reading is a great way to increase kids’ empathy. As these students read about characters and situations different from them and their lives, they not only learned about difference, they also became less judgmental as they grappled with the complexities of why characters made the decisions (some good, some bad) they did.

Rather than being corrupted by adult themes of the books they read, eighth graders more often brought their questions about controversial subjects to others (peers, teachers, even their parents), seeking understanding for how and why the book characters acted the way they did. Researchers found that students were in fact quite mature and balanced in reading controversial books. Students often contrasted what happened in books with their own family values.  For most, controversial topics and situations and questionable decisions by book characters acted more as cautionary tales about poor choices.

So, like a lot of topics, we adults can often get hung up on things that don’t really matter to kids. We need to give them more credit for their intelligence and reason. Reading has countless benefits and, to me, any strategies to get kids reading more is a boon ‘in my book!’

 Joe

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Lost in the political battles over “educationally suitable” books is what actually happens when young people read. 

One side assumes students reading certain books will become traumatized, radicalized, or morally perverted, while the other argues for free speech and democracy. 

But neither side offers evidence of what actually happens when students do read “disturbing” books. 

In a recent study, eighth-grade English language arts teachers stopped assigning a particular book and instead gave students wide access to books written for young adults, let them choose what to read (or not), and gave them time to read and openly discuss the books. 

The books students found most engaging were those that didn’t shy away from the complexities of being human or the different ways of being human in a diverse society. 

Here’s what we learned. The students, most of whom reported previously reading little or nothing, started reading like crazy—in and out of school—and their reading achievement improved. Students reported becoming better people, a change also noticed by their parents and peers. Reading engaging narratives about characters with complicated lives helped them become more empathetic, less judgmental, more likely to seek multiple viewpoints, morally stronger, and happier. They reported improved self-control, and building more and stronger friendships and family relationships. 

Central to these changes were conversations about the books with peers, teachers, and family members--whoever they could recruit for different perspectives on provocative or confusing parts. 

Parents reported welcoming opportunities for conversations, conveniently through book characters, about drugs, sex, relationships, and depression. The image of young people reading “dangerous” books alone, in secret, and in distress, was not what the research showed.

Students described characters’ questionable decisions as cautionary tales, not narratives to live into. The books helped them to see the consequences of problematic decisions and language. Because they all brought different experiences and purposes to their reading, the conversations were constantly lively, meaningful, even philosophical, and relationship-building. The complexities of characters’ lives and the consequences of their decisions deepened students’ moral thinking while making them grateful for their lives and families. Bad words and disturbing scenes simply fed bigger conversations about life and relationships.

Given the opportunity to read books they find meaningful, students (and their teachers and parents) can be disarmingly articulate about the nature and significance of their reading not just for their academic lives, but also for their social, emotional, and moral development, their wellbeing, and their family lives. 

In a polarized society, these teens’ embrace of different perspectives surely seems like a plus. But there are bigger, more immediate issues facing US teens, among whom anxiety disorders are prevalent. Teens are lonelier than any other age group. In 2019, over a third reported persistent hopelessness or sadness. These problems are astronomically higher for gay, lesbian, or bisexual students. Asked how they feel while in school, three quarters of the words teens choose are negative, the top being “tired,” “bored,” and “stressed.” 

Reading and talking about personally meaningful books can provide a literal lifeline for teens. Somewhere in the arguments about whether books are “educationally suitable” we’ve lost the thread of why we want students to read in the first place, what they, and we, stand to gain in the process, and what’s at stake.

What Kids Need to Know About Working Memory

This week's article summary is What Kids Need to Know About Working Memory.

As we all know, working memory is where the brain stores information for a limited time. Working memory can’t effectively manage too much data, hence why phone numbers are broken down into three larger chunks, for example 404-259-6742.

Like last week’s article summary on metacognition, today’s is a reminder to teachers to help students better understand the limitations of their working memory and to employ strategies to optimize its use. I like the article’s image of working memory as a juggling octopus—even with eight arms, an octopus can only juggle a finite amount of balls.

Think about how difficult classroom activities that require a lot of juggling balls--like multi-step directions—are for everyone, even with an understanding of the limits of working memory and utilization of strategies to maximize it. 

The article provides a number of concrete strategies kids (and adults) can use to enhance their working memory from chunking, which most of us are familiar with, to visualization.

We have discussed the importance of having our students think metacognitively—to think about how they think. Obviously thinking about working memory and trying different strategies is an aspect of metacognition. 

Joe

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Have you ever walked into the kitchen to get something, only to have your mind forget what? Or left the grocery store with everything on your mental list except the one thing you really needed for dinner?

Every day, we encounter the limitations of our working memory. 

When your kids forget to brush their teeth or turn in their homework (that’s sitting completed in their backpack), they are facing the same challenge. 

The answer is not lecturing, bribing, or berating; it’s helping kids understand their working memory and then build routines and workarounds to address its inherent limits. 

What is Working Memory?

Working memory is basically a temporary holding area for our thoughts while we are using them. It’s also where we hold new information that comes at us — data that may or may not eventually find its way into our long-term memory. 

Think of working memory as an octopus sitting in our prefrontal cortex, juggling a set of balls. It can hold about four “balls” at once before they start dropping. 

Working memory limitations are why many students struggle at following multi-step directions. It’s not a lack of focus. Their working memory simply does not have the capacity to “keep in mind” something like a five-step process — unless they’ve practiced those steps so many times that it has become a routine that doesn’t require active thought. 

Students — particularly those who have working memory struggles — need concrete strategies for moving material into long-term storage. Here are a few hacks you can teach your kids to empower them to use their memory systems more effectively.

Teach Kids About Chunking: Try this experiment with kids to help them understand the purpose and limits of their working memory: ask them to repeat back a sequence of three numbers or items (e.g. 1, 22, 3 or banana, strawberry, apple). If they are paying attention as you speak, that will likely be an easy task. Now increase to five items. The task will be harder for many kids and require more concentration and mental rehearsal. Now increase to 10 items. Most kids simply can’t hold a string of novel words for that long in their working memory. They don’t have enough “slots.” They will likely remember the first few and last few words but forget those in the middle of the list — the same reason kids might complete the first and last task you ask of them but forget the in-betweens. Now try giving kids a string of numbers they already know well — like a familiar 10-digit phone number. They will likely be able to hold this number PLUS a couple of items in their mind because the phone number is a single “chunk” and so only takes up one working memory slot. So one way to improve our memory capacity is “chunking”: taking pieces of information and combining them into larger units that tie together. 

Here are some chunking strategies we can teach kids:

• Group information by type or category: Trying to remember dinosaur names? Try grouping them by large carnivores, small carnivores, large herbivores, small herbivores.
• Write your notes in different colors: Color can set some items apart. Perhaps you highlight the causes of a conflict in one color and highlight key figures in another. Or perhaps important equations are always written in purple in your notes. 
• Take Picture Notes: Our brain loves pictures; take the information and draw quick sketches that represent what you are learning — chunking information into visual form.
• Use a mnemonic device: Memory devices — such as “My Very Excellent Monkey Just Served Unicorn Noodles” to remember the order of the planets — can help the brain store a string of information with very little effort.
• Turn information into a song: Can you still sing along to songs from your childhood? There’s a reason kids learn their ABCs first through song. Combining words and music creates an instant chunk.  
• Turn your studies into a story: Whether you are studying photosynthesis or quadratic equation, try explaining it like a story to a pet, stuffed animal, or a younger sibling. Stories are inherently memorable.

Teach Kids to Use (Mental) Places and (Physical) Spaces: When I walked into a seventh-grade class and told them they would be able to name the first 20 United States Presidents in order by the end of our 40-minute class — and that it would be relatively easy — no one believed me. But they did it. I wasn’t teaching history; I simply wanted to demonstrate a technique called The Memory Palace. This strategy taps our brains’ spatial memory — which is fairly well developed — to support our working memory. How does it work? Mentally place what you want to remember in familiar physical places. For example, if you want to memorize your shopping list, you might imagine a banana on the floor, flour and oil covering the kitchen counter, a strawberry in the bathroom sink, garlic in the toilet, and onions in the bathtub. When you want to remember the list, you mentally walk through the house and picture the chaotic scene.

Here’s another way to tap the power of places and spaces to augment memory: Don’t just study in one spot. Move around! If you have a history test on three chapters coming up, try studying one chapter in your room, another under a tree, and yet another in the kitchen. Review your lines for the play while swinging or out on a walk. The physical environment will become part of what’s encoded in your memory, so when you get to a specific problem, you might imagine yourself under the tree reviewing that very topic.  

When kids struggle with memory — from mastering math facts to remembering the steps of a task — it’s so easy for them to feel like something is wrong with them. You’ve heard their self-talk: “I’m stupid.” “I’ll always be bad at math.” “She finished before me — that means she’s smarter than me.” When we take steps to demystify our brains’ memory systems, we empower them to find the strategies that work for their beautiful brain. 

 

Metacognitive Talk in the Classroom

This week's article summary is Metacognitive Talk in the Classroom.

Through the years, I’ve talked about how important metacognition is in helping students (and ourselves) counter unconscious biases they most likely have.

But as you’ll see in the article below, metacognition is simply good pedagogy in the classroom.

Our goal as teachers is to guide our students to be effective problem solvers. Being aware of how we think and how we systematically approach and solve a problem help develop the habit and skills of responsible decision-making.

Metacognition is an intimidating word, yet the classroom strategies below, such as giving students ample time to work with other students, asking open-end questions, having students find multiple ways to a solution, and having kids reflect on how their learning processes are tools most of us use in the classroom to help our students better understand how they learn.

Joe

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Psychologists have long advocated the idea of metacognitive talk. Jean Piaget believed that children benefited from being active participants in the construction of knowledge, and Lev S. Vygotsky introduced the idea that students can co-construct knowledge through social interactions. Talking with their peers, asking questions, and debating best approaches to problem-solving help students develop more complex thinking and reasoning skills. Conversations can create productive conflict that helps students develop multiple perspectives, leading to deeper learning.

If students are given clear directions and guidelines for their discussions, interacting with peers can be more effective than working only independently and as effective as working one-on-one with an adult.

However, popular techniques like “turn and talk” to your neighbor may not be structured enough to be effective at co-creating knowledge. During discussions students need to do the following:

• Examine their thinking process and the approach they used in order to identify different ways of solving a particular problem
• Explore diverse strategies or varying viewpoints
• Use active listening strategies to take in and then test out ideas and methods that are different from their own
• Debate or negotiate to reach a consensus in their discussions before presenting to the group.

In practice, this often looks like the teacher talking for a short time at the beginning of the lesson, with students working independently to decide on a strategy and try a skill on their own and then spending the majority of learning time engaged in discussion.

Here are some strategies for encouraging metacognitive talk:

Limiting teacher talk time: The teacher should talk to model the thought process necessary for a new skill or to provide direct instruction, but most of the thinking and reasoning work should be left to the students.

Use open-ended questions and encourage problem-solving: Many times we ask questions that have a correct answer, which means that only students who have already learned the information are likely to talk. Instead, we can try to ask more questions that are open-ended and encourage students to find the answer on their own or explore the process to find the answer collaboratively. Closed questions tend to test recall of specific information, such as “What is the capital of North Carolina?” whereas open-ended questions require students to use what they have learned to demonstrate deeper understanding, apply, analyze, evaluate, or create.

Explaining the steps or outlining the process: Similarly, when they are working independently, students need to get in the habit of focusing on explaining their thinking process and how to arrive at an answer. There are a variety of ways to do this:

• Students can be prompted to focus on process by using an already-solved example problem to explain in words how to get from one step to the next. Similarly, students could correct an incorrectly solved problem, identify the mistake, and explain the process for arriving at the correct solution.
• Students can describe problem-solving steps in words next to a visual representation. They can also create thought bubbles next to a text or the steps of a problem to show their thinking process and make it easier to convey to a partner during discussion.
• Students can compare and contrast their process for solving a problem with their partner’s strategy.

Generating knowledge and new examples: Have students create their own unique examples and then collaborate with a partner to compare and contrast what they came up with and check each other’s work. This will help them test out new ideas, strengthen recall of learned information, and deepen their understanding. Students can create and solve their own math problems, make their own practice test questions and quiz each other to see what they remember from the lesson, assemble a model to demonstrate or try out something they learned, or write their own examples of a particular type of literary work or device. Teachers can also have students generate knowledge after listening to direct instruction or a video. Students can do a free recall where they write down or draw a thinking map of everything they can remember. Then pair them up to compare, check, and sort through what they came up with.

 Taking on a specific role in the critical thinking process: Talk can be used as a scaffold that allows students to engage in assignments with increased rigor. Students can be taught strategies to use, like reciprocal teaching where students work in groups to analyze a complex fiction or nonfiction text or sort through a math word problem, each taking on a specific thinking role in order to practice making predictions, asking questions, clarifying, and summarizing. Partnering on note-taking helps students work through specific reading skills and questions as a group.

Talking to produce thought, or metacognitive talk, is one of the most effective learning methods. By working together, students collectively develop their language, thinking process, and reasoning skills. They monitor, evaluate, and revise their approach to problem-solving in order to become more strategic learners.

 

Reading and Math Wars in Education

This week's article summary is The Science of Reading Swept Reforms into Classrooms: What About Math?

As you’ll see from the article, the math wars are just as important as the reading wars, yet for various reasons math continues to get less attention than reading. One reason is because while we all consider ourselves readers, many of us don’t see ourselves as mathematicians.

The reading wars center on the debate between the whole-language approach (kids will naturally learn to read when surrounded by a literature-rich home and school) versus systematic, explicit phonics lessons.

As we now know, while the research has always supported the need for direct phonics instruction, it’s only been over the past few years that whole language has lost the war—although there are still a few hold-out teachers who cling to how they’ve always taught reading.

While the reading wars appears to be over, it doesn’t mean there’s no place for a literature-rich environment. Reading to your kids in the classroom and at home helps excite them about reading, stimulate their imagination, and become more empathetic. Still, the vast majority of kids need explicit instruction to build the foundational skills and concepts to read on their own.

The math wars similarly center on those who believe procedural fluency is paramount versus those who consider conceptual understanding most critical.

Procedural fluency has traditionally been measured via timed assessments to ensure the math facts are stored in long-term memory and can be quickly recalled, thus allowing our short-term, working memory more space to handle higher-level math concepts.

The challenge for the math wars is both sides of the argument have some merit: kids need both procedural fluency and conceptual understanding.

Over the past few years Trinity has seemingly found the magic formula under the premise that procedural fluency emanates from conceptual understanding.

At admissions open houses, I often tell parents that at Trinity the three keys math concepts we develop are number operations, number flexibility, and algebraic reasoning.

Math is a language and much like reading, explicit instruction is needed. But as the article explains, viewing math solely through an algorithmic lens (which is how many schools still teach math) won’t help children develop a foundational conceptual understanding of math. Students need to be able to solve math problems and demonstrate their answers in multiple ways. In this way they begin to truly understanding the ‘why’ of math, not just the ’how.’

The math wars are still being fought in schools across the country, yet Trinity has taken the best of both sides and is making a huge difference in the lives of our students!

Joe

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For much of her teaching career, Carrie Stark relied on math games to engage her students, assuming they would pick up concepts like multiplication by seeing them in action. The kids had fun, but the lessons never stuck.

A few years ago she shifted her approach, turning to more direct explanation after finding a website on a set of evidence-based practices known as the science of math.

“I could see how the game related to multiplication, but the kids weren’t making those connections,” said Stark, a math teacher in Kansas City. “You have to explicitly teach the content.”

As American schools work to turn around math scores that plunged during the pandemic, some researchers are pushing for more attention to a set of research-based practices for teaching math. The movement has passionate backers, but is still in its infancy, especially compared with the phonics-based science of reading that has inspired changes in how classrooms across the country approach literacy.

“I don’t think the movement has caught on yet. I think it’s an idea,” said Matthew Burns, an education professor at the University of Florida who was among researchers who helped create a Science of Math website as a resource for teachers.

There’s a debate over which evidence-based practices belong under the banner of the science of math, but researchers agree on some core ideas.

The foremost principle: Math instruction must be systematic and explicit. Teachers need to give clear and precise instructions and introduce new concepts in small chunks while building on older concepts. This guidance contrasts with exploratory or inquiry-based models of education, where students explore and discover concepts on their own, with the teacher nudging them along.

In some ways, the best practices for math parallel the science of reading, which emphasizes detailed, explicit instruction in phonics, instead of letting kids guess how to read a word based on pictures or context clues.

Margie Howells, an elementary math teacher in Wheeling, West Virginia, first went researching best practices because there weren’t as many resources for dyscalculia, a math learning disability, as there were for dyslexia. After reading about the science of math movement, she became more explicit about things that she assumed students understood, like how the horizontal line in a fraction means the same thing as a division sign.

“I’m doing a lot more instruction in vocabulary and symbol explanations so that the students have that built-in understanding,” said Howells.

Some elements of math instruction emphasize big-picture concepts. Others involve learning how to do calculations. Over the decades, clashes between schools of thought favoring one or another have been labeled the “math wars.” A key principle of the science of math movement is that both are important, and teachers need to foster procedural as well as conceptual understanding.

When Stark demonstrates a long division problem, she writes out the steps for calculating the answer while students use a chart or blocks to understand the problem conceptually.

For one fifth grader who was struggling with fractions, she explicitly re-taught equivalent fractions from third grade — why two-fourths are the same as one-half, for instance. He had been working with her for three years, but this was the first time she heard him say, “I totally get it now!”

Still, skeptics of the science of math question the emphasis placed on learning algorithms, the step-by-step procedures for calculation. Proponents say they are necessary along with memorization of math facts (basic operations like 3×5 or 7+9) and regular timed practice — approaches often associated with mind-numbing drills and worksheets.

Math is “a creative, artistic, playful, reasoning-rich activity. And it’s very different than algorithms,” said Nick Wasserman, a professor of math education at Columbia University’s Teachers College.

Supporters argue mastering math facts unlocks creative problem-solving by freeing up working memory — and that inquiry, creativity and collaboration are still all crucial to student success.

“When we have this dichotomy, it creates an unnecessary divide and it creates a dangerous divide,” said Elizabeth Hughes, an education professor at Penn State and a leader in the science of math movement. People feel the need to choose sides between “Team Algorithms” and “Team Exploratory,” but “we really need both.”

Best practices are one thing. But some disagree such a thing as a “science of math” exists in the way it does for reading. There just isn’t the same volume of research, education researcher Tom Loveless said.