Across the Pond

I've been meaning to share a few things which stood out during my visit to Overlake this winter.

Thing One: Like Northwest students, students at Overlake keep portfolios of written work. These are stored in the classroom and periodically, time is made for students to review the feedback they've received on written work: how do thesis statements from September compare with those written later in the year? What kinds of mechanical errors are no longer showing up in papers?

Thing Two: Standard Operating Procedure is to return written work with comments but no grades. Students have a chance to respond to teacher feedback in writing; only then does the student receive a grade. The English Department Head emphasized the value of this opportunity for students to process feedback separately from grades. Students can defend their choices, make adjustments or make adjustments and explain the thinking behind their original choices. As at Northwest, students are free to fully revise written work. In our department, conferences create an opportunity for students to process feedback with their teachers, but it was interesting to see that Overlake has also built in this kind of intentional dialogue.

Thing Three: I was impressed by the systematic use Overlake makes of Diane Hacker's Pocket Manual for Writers. Many Overlake teachers grade papers using a rubric which references page numbers in the Hacker text. The teacher checks "Run-On" on the rubric; the rubric refers students to the run-on section of Hacker's text. If additional work is needed, Hacker's web-site offers an extensive menu of supplementary explanations and exercises. How efficient is that? Do we still use Hacker? Are we missing an opportunity to tap into some free stuff?

Teaching So Students Remember

The first TESOL workshop I went to was given by Kathy Olson, an educational consultant who reminded me of a veteran elementary school teacher--in a goood way. Her presentation outlined ways for teachers to capitalize on basic brain-research findings.

Naturally, she cited the alarming statistic that most of us forget as much as 80% of what we read and 90% of what we hear within 24 hours. However, she offered lots of ideas for working with this in the classroom.

Her first suggestion was about attention. She is WAY into stimuli, the more intense the better. She points out that students don't learn anything if you don't have their attention...so she recommends music, movement, humor, emotions, costumes, surprise. She points out that most of us love to guess and apparently, we try harder to remember information we've guessed wrong.

Olson recommends visuals, as vision trumps all other senses in the impact it makes on the brain. Even simple things like color can make a measurable difference: colored paper, highlights and of course pictures. (Evidently, groups using illustrated texts performed 36% better than groups using text alone.) She touted the great return you get by accessing prior knowledge. Connecting new information to information already stored in long-term memory enables the brain to process more effectively.

Her main idea is that once you have the students' attention and introduce some new material, it is important to "rehearse" or "manipulate" the information right away. This will move the new input from short term memory--where it will stay for fewer than 24 hours--to long-term memory, where it actually becomes useful to the student.

She offered lots of ideas about ways to do this: paraphrasing, summarizing, personalizing, predicting, repeating, mapping, classifying--especially classifying. The brain loves identifying patterns, charting differences and similarities, connecting ideas to each other or to personal experiences. I tried and failed to attach her powerpoint, but if you're interested, look her up on the web (Kathy Olson and "Teaching So Students Remember").

At times during her presentation, Kathy seemed a little grade school--or perhaps old-school: costumes? Really? However, I overheard a bunch of juniors yesterday fondly reminiscing about the 9th grade lecture Daniel gave dressed as Theodora of the Byzantine Empire. It's true that they remembered the costume better than the lecture, but at least two out of three remembered that there was a Byzantine Empire, with Theodora and Justinian on the throne.

Education for the Future

Howard Gardner was the keynote speaker at TESOL this year. His talk addressed the impact technology has had on education and the workplace; specifically, he has been thinking about how technology has changed our role as educators.

Gardner has identified four areas in which he believes students will need strong preparation in order to succeed in the world of the future: strength in a discipline, the ability to synthesize, creativity and ethics.

The first point concerns mastery of a discipline. Gardner feels that the acquisition of information used to be a legitimate goal of education, but that technology has changed this. Many students now have extremely efficient "personal assistants" (computers) which can look stuff up and do basic calculations. To succeed in an environment where general information is widely available, Gardner thinks expertise will become a priority-- not just knowing stuff, but mastery of a certain kind of thinking: "What does it mean to think like a historian?" "How would a scientist approach this question?" He encourages teachers to provide these kinds of opportunities for their students.

The second point was about synthesizing information. Again, Gardner seemed to be responding to the flood of undigested information that is available on the web. To take advantage of this resource, it is important that students have the skills to distinguish the useful from the useless and to discern what (if anything) all the data adds up to: students need to be able to determine significance in a sea of information.

Gardner's third point concerned deepening students' capacity for creativity. He made an interesting little jab here about genuine creativity being a challenge in "rule-and-tradition bound" institutions like schools. However, he thinks that succeeding in the 21st century will require personalities that are willing to stretch, break rules and even risk failure. Teachers should be thinking about ways we can develop these capacities in our students.

Finally, he spoke about ethics. Gardner reported that as he travels around the world these days talking to people in education, research, publishing and business, he meets young people who feel pressured by the pace of opportunity. They sometimes say that they can't afford to worry about ethics right now. First they need to "make it," then they can focus on doing the right thing. Gardner feels that whenever possible teachers should share stories of people who faced challenging situations and made ethical choices. He also recommends cautionary tales about people who failed to do the right thing and the costs of that failure.

Gardner has launched a project called Good Work. The mission of Good Work is "to identify individuals and institutions that exemplify good work: work that is excellent in quality, socially responsible, and meaningful to its practitioners—and to determine how best to increase the incidence of good work in our society."

Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose

Jamie Feild Baker has been reading Daniel Pink lately; Pink writes about motivation for a business audience, but a lot of educators have been excited about his book Drive. A bit like Alfie Kohn, Pink argues that extrinsic motivators--like gold stars, grades and merit pay--can have the opposite of their intended effect.

His idea is to replace the carrot-and-stick approach with "three essential elements:

(1) Autonomy – the desire to direct our own lives (2) Mastery – the urge to get better and better at something that matters and
(3) Purpose – the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.”

Reflecting on Pink's work in her blog, Baker challenges us as teachers to "scrutinize" our curricula for these three elements.

1. Does the work we offer our students include an opportunity for
choice and self direction?

2. Does it offer students a sense of increasing mastery--as opposed to repeating something they know how to do?

3. Is there a palpable "Big Picture" purpose to the work?

Pink and Baker are both admirers of "Google's 20% time," a model which allows Google engineers one day a week to work on something they are passionate about. Word is that our own NWS Curriculum Committee is contemplating the feasibility of a senior "capstone experience." Setting up such a program presents more than a few serious challenges, but Daniel Pink is emphatic about the pay-off of harnessing students' intrinsic interests and giving them practice with problem-solving...that is, solving real- world problems, where answers are often "poorly defined, multi-disciplinary and have several possible answers, none of them perfect."

T.E.A.C.H. Online

Somehow, while wrapping up in South Africa, Jeff found time to forward another interesting resource: T.E.A.C.H. Online. This is an extensive website, but a useful component is the section on teaching emotive or controversial history, which the site defines as history "where there is actual or perceived unfairness to people by another group or individual in the past." Some examples include teaching about slavery, empire and the Arab/Israeli conflict. The link contains practical lesson plans and also some philosophical principles which are interesting to think about.

The first of these is that the best results are achieved when students are invited to participate in specific inquiry questions. Teachers are challenged to create activities that allow independent thinking within "a secure historic and pedagogic framework."

This fine-sounding idea is echoed in another principle, that of interpretations. It's important that students grapple with multiple understandings of a historical event or situation. Students need practice comparing versions of history and assessing the different kinds of evidence, source material and points of view that shape them. This gives students a more nuanced understanding of a particular set of events--and a deeper understanding of the discipline of history itself. One interesting lesson involves annotating a web site which is biased in favor of Israel. The specific inquiry is for students to take note of what is missing and what is emphasized in this account. How might a Palestinian describe these events differently?

I am reminded of the Age of Explo exercise the 9th grade sometimes does, which offers students different accounts of the discovery/despoiling of the Americas by European explorers. Students immediately recognize and appreciate the opportunity this exercise creates: the opportunity to sharpen their judgment and do their own thinking.

Thanks, JB, for sending this interesting website. We are looking forward to getting the next Blair Report live, in real time.