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My Deeper Reflection about Deeper Learning 2014

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Deeper Learning 2014 Reflection

I suppose I should start my reflection by reminding myself what the purpose of the conference was based on their own language:

Connect – I have made several new connections and have deepened my relationship with several old connections.
Innovate – I have new ideas for how to better support deeper learning in my organization, school, or classroom.
Experience – I will experience deeper learning for myself, which will help me to apply deeper learning principles to my own work.

so measured against their own questions, here is some of my thoughts

***It is worth pointing out that ALL the conference materials for the sessions are free and available at : https://sites.google.com/a/hightechhigh.org/dl2014-workshops/ **********

Wednesday: Deep Dive: Teaching Science with Robots with Dr Karl Wendt

After walking us through a series of robots that he had built – from underwater robots to programmable motorized robots – Karl introduced us to the project of the day – building, and testing a small entry-level robot that cost less than $10 to build called spout.

resources for all of his work are located here:
https://sites.google.com/site/discovercreateadvance/home

One of the strengths of what he’s doing, is he made a series of short instructional videos that show how to build the robot. My partner was Ben Daley, and we agreed that by doing it as a series of self directed videos, there was a sense of pacing and authenticity in constructing that would’ve been very different if it’d been synchronously teacher led. We found his work on these videos to be excellent, and felt that we could initiate this project right away.

My Take Aways: The thing that struck me about this project/deep dive was that there was a good principle at play here: the fun part begins with the students building the robot. The hook is that in order for the students to solve the challenges, there needs to be enough core content knowledge (electricity, torque, light, friction, switches, etc.). Depending upon the way the activities of the challenges are set up, it’s entirely possible to cover different branches of physics and physical science. That to me was the strength of this activity – in the kind of work that we do with STEM education, the way to get kids engaged in by bringing some authentic design challenge or construction. Careful selection conversation and building an adequate resource library to support learning will help shape the learning that needs to be part of the academic rigor. Karl’s webpage for his resources is located here:
https://sites.google.com/site/discovercreateadvance/projects-1
Nice. Design.

After dinner, there was movie night and a panel discussion. The teaching channel has built a resource area that includes 50 videos that are meant to be short explorations of specific practices of schools in the network (looking at student work, advisories, comity partners, etc). this is a great source that I plan to use extensively in my work both on campus and outside of campus. the video series is located here:

https://www.teachingchannel.org/deeper-learning-video-series

Thursday:
Keynote with Ron Berger.
At some point, they will put the video of this keynote online. My guess it will be linked somewhere from the main page here: http://deeper-learning.org/dl2014/
Ron talked a bit about beautiful work, but the highlight of his presentation was four 8th grade students from Polaris Charter Academy in inner city Chicago. Their presentation was engaging, compelling, executed flawlessly, and a powerful story. Their work started with the investigation of the preamble of the Constitution but evolved into a study of gun violence in their neighborhood and what that told them about their freedoms and liberties and protection for the common good. 
If this video does get put online, I highly recommend you watch it!

Looking at student work
attendees were put into groups of about 10 and given a piece student work. Facilitation of the session was led by a high-tech high student – our young lady was Killian and she did an excellent job leading and guiding our conversation. We looked at a compiled magazine that was created by sixth grade students to answer their big question of inquiry about different cultural and scientific theories about the end of the world. Our group had an excellent conversation about the things we saw that indicated deeper learning was evident, and places where we think the work could have been made stronger.
My take away from this one was a recognition that we need to more regularly look at our own student work as a team to help us decide how we are doing in looking at the rigor of our work, as well as how well it meets the other deeper learning characteristics like collaboration, developing academic mindsets, and problem solving.
Hour. Well. Spent.

Session 1: From Scratch with Scratch with Don Mackay
In this session, we were led through a series of design, Inquiry, and challenges about our understandings of electricity and magnetism. The documents for the workshop were here:
https://sites.google.com/a/hightechhigh.org/dl2014-workshops/workshops/session-1

After investigating , we were challenged with building a spinning motor from the equipment that he gave us. One of the things that made this interesting was the play between designing and exploring what we understood about electromagnetism. You can see that in the document linked above.
What were my big takeaways? I really feel that the pedagogical approach Don took was excellent – in our modeling terms from ASU, he began his studies with a discrepant event which challenged our notion of what we understood about the phenomena that underlie a particular field of study – in this case of electromagnetism. I like the bite-size nature of what he designed to explore this naïve understanding that we might have. I think this would suit well as ways to build knowledge in projects we do that a more extensive so that we’re creating place for rigorous conversation about what we understand. I’m going to try that with our light project will be doing in May.

Session 2:  From Maker Space to Maker Campus with David Stephen
Wow. I had never met David until this day, but he was a teacher and the architectural designer of the interior spaces for the high-tech high buildings. Wow. He led an excellent, progressive session about the work that he does, and how he sees the importance of space as one of the ways to create and support student agency and 21st century teaching. Instead of summarizing what he did, here are my tweets I sent out for his session (there are in reverse order last to first):

#deeperlearning Session with David Stephen http://www.newvistadesign.net  Provocative, Progressive, Powerful ideas on Agency by Design

#deeperlearning ideas for transforming spaces on the cheap: Make Space http://dschool.stanford.edu/makespace/  Great book. Easy to read. Low hanging fruit.

another great site on maker ideas – The Fab Lab http://fab.cba.mit.edu  #deeperlearning

#deeperlearning the resource at @AgencybyDesign is tied to the Making Thinking Visible team as well. too cool!

Two useful resources on design: http://www.archachieve.net  and http://www.designshare.com  Great ideas abound! #deeperlearning

#deeperlearning SO much of our conversation on Agency by Design is reminding me of the work by Pine and Gilmore on the “Experience Economy”


#deeperlearning Agency By Design is a project out of Harvard Project Zero http://www.pz.gse.harvard.edu/agency_by_design.php …

#deeperlearning great turn of phrase from Davis Stephen: “airport grade” soft furniture. Love it! I’ve seen blown apart bean bag chairs!

#deeperlearning how to create inviting educational spaces – David Stephen uses the term ‘artifactorium’ to define exhibit space feel of HTH

#deeperlearning with David Stephen of New Vista Design talking about creating Student Agency By Design “From Maker Space to Maker Campus”


His three shared documents are on the materials page under session 2 :
https://sites.google.com/a/hightechhigh.org/dl2014-workshops/workshops/session-2


My Take Aways: This session rekindled in the and interest and passion around the importance of facility design editing needs to both support and lead teachers needs and behaviors into the place they need to be and to not reinforce things that are keeping them from advancing their professional practice. This topic has been of high interest to me since we started designing the Weinberg technology Plaza on our campus back in 1998. I definitely want to spend more time going through his resources and the agency by design website mentioned above.

Friday:
Session 3: Beautiful, Beautiful Math with Marcia Dejesus-Rueff

We had about 16 people in this session and we looked at ways to bring Art (poetry, dance, musics) into the mathematics that we do. I really liked the fact that her compelling case was mathematics is a search for patterns. These patterns can be found in poetry, dance, music, just about any art form we looked at a Dylan Thomas poem, and a Frank Lloyd Wright stained glass window as ways to create a linking between art and mathematics. Her documents can be found on the session 3 resources page here:
https://sites.google.com/a/hightechhigh.org/dl2014-workshops/workshops/session-3

my takeaways: I am still professionally challenged by looking for rigorously appropriate and engaging art that can lead to deep understanding of algebra to mathematical principles. the session provided me with opportunities to look at some other examples of how that looks.

Unconference Sessions:
Polls were taken on Thursday to determine the topics that would be offered on Friday. They were a variety of sessions offered that looked at everything from how to start your own deeper learning school, to what assessment looks like, to professional development strategies for teachers.
I attended:
The Leader’s Guide to Deeper Learning with Ken Kay and James Gibson
Ken is now at EdLeader21, and the session focused on walking us through the deliberate planning process and leading a school through transformation to deeper learning. At our tables, we modeled the process of developing core competencies, identifying new student skills necessary, and finished by proposing strategies to move towards these goals. The pictures of the chart paper are located here:
https://flic.kr/ps/2Rxk1U

the resources that they shared in the workshop are located in session 3 folder here:
https://sites.google.com/a/hightechhigh.org/dl2014-workshops/workshops/session-3

Other Thoughts:
Larry Rosenstock mentioned in his address the importance of recess for our group as a means to connect with familiar and new colleagues. I can’t agree more with that impact – whether it was lunch time, or just corridor conversations, or the after hour social events, the group used the time outside of the sessions at least as powerfully if not more so as a means to explore, connect, challenge and extend their thinking about their work. Looking towards our conference in November (http://sotfconf.org) there was a lot we could take away from what work here at deeper learning 2014.

Student work is everywhere in High Tech High. Every time I come I take pictures to add to my collection – but this time with different intent for me. Since our students are going to work on building projects for the rest of the year, I wanted to capture some examples of already displayed student work to challenge my students to think of how they could make something as good as or better than what they see in the images. I have included a few examples below.

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Last Word
One of the last things we were asked to do was fill out a post card with at least one idea we would implement. I wrote three:
for my MPX program, bring more student work protocols into our meetings
for our work with Kupu Hou, find ways to sustain a community of learner model that will more directly influence the attendees to stay connected over a longer period of time
for work with the Hawaii education leadership Summit, rethink what the topic might be by spending more time asking our intended audience what would suit their needs past so that we can align our work with their needs

A Day with the Faithful or “What would Euclid Do?”

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Disclaimer alert: This post is more philosophical than procedural – your mileage may vary on what you get from reading this…it is more of an intellectual exploration for me…

I want to thank my son, Aukai, for letting me to reflect and talk to him about this issue to help me consider how I might write this post – he was a wonderful reflective partner and I am his debt for his time, interest and feedback. He is currently a Junior at Mid-Pacific Institute.

I spent the day on Saturday, March 1 The Hawaii Council of Math teachers annual conference (http://www.math.hawaii.edu/~tom/hctm/Speakers2014.pdf) with a few specific goals:
I gave a presentation that was titled “Hands-on, Minds-on Math – An Offering of Homegrown Math Projects and Activities“ – I was both excited and anxious about sharing the work I’ve been doing the past couple of years with my colleague Gregg on designing large and small projects and activities that incorporate mathematical thinking and concepts to real problems.
I was interested in attending other sessions to see what kinds of ways I might build my professional knowledge as a mathematics teacher
I was interested in getting connected to a network of math teachers to better my collegial connections with both our math department ( five other high school math teachers attended) as well other math teachers from the state and beyond.

As I was debriefing the experience of the day which was both rewarding and challenging, I was struck by the enthusiasm, the fervor – that our community exhibited. It’s probably no surprise to anyone that reads my blog or knows me, that I find myself particularly challenged with the more traditional ways that math is taught and learned, and how that fits into a larger picture of the ways in which we would like to see our students use math to further themselves and use it in their daily lives. In many ways, it struck me that this math meeting was like a church revival – true believers who enjoy the company of each other to reinforce and engage themselves in conversation about their excitement and belief in their faith as well as ways to improve the way they share it with their community. In a sense, the ending of the conference felt like a benediction – go forth and do good work and keep the faith. Go forth to engender in your students a knowledge of and passion of mathematically thinking.

But here is where I have a quandary. Since anyone that knows me knows that I teach math and science, I am often greeted with an apologies from people saying something like “I’m not very good at math” or “I really didn’t like math in school” much the same as someone who hasn’t been attending church might apologize to a religious friend saying I haven’t really followed through on my faith. I may be a blasphemer in saying this, but I don’t think that morality comes from just attending church or being part of a organized religion anymore that I think mathematical thinking comes solely from the traditional scope, sequence and pedagogy of math problems and content. I was raised Catholic, and if you didn’t go to confession, you felt guilty because you didn’t own up to God about your sins. In much the same way, if you did not do well in math there is a stigma of not being a mathematician, or somehow being viewed as religiously or mathematically unworthy.

( sidebar of a funny story that is relevant – was at a conference a few years ago when a mathematician about this issue shared a story of talking to a friend who was saying that they had taken German three times and failed. The person said dejectedly “there is no way that my brain could ever learn the German language”. Their friend responded “ it’s a good thing you weren’t born in Germany, then!”. Language skills and mathematical reasoning are much the same – if they are part of our culture and we are immersed in them fully, everyone can learn it. Perhaps not all equally, but certainly functionally.)

I fundamentally believe that part of being human is a brain that is mathematical. When a quarterback looks down the field to find an open receiver, they do some incredible mathematics – gauge the speed of their receiver, extrapolate what location they will be at at the right time, determine the space between that person and a defender, throw a ball with the correct arch and speed to put it in their hands accurately – and all of this done in the blink of an eye – if you had to program that mathematically, it would be incredibly complex – but isn’t that the point? They’re doing this mathematics instinctively but somehow it’s not considered ‘real’ math. After all, who says, “Tom Brady is a incredible mathematician!”

I am not trying to make the case that we should not be including mathematics education for all students in school. What I am wondering, is what that scope, sequence, pedagogy and assessment should be like and how white might at least be more inclusive to the different ways that math thinking can be both exhibited and build on success for students.

At a wonderful session I attended by Robert Kaplinsky http://robertkaplinsky.com/ he highlighted some the important ideas that come from the common core about mathematics education. The first was that proper mathematics education needs to stand on three legs equally:
* students must be fluent in operational procedures,
* students must demonstrate understanding of mathematical concepts and what they mean, and
* students must be able to apply mathematical concepts to new situations so that they can demonstrate true fluency with it.

Think of it this way: we wouldn’t teach a world language class and only test vocabulary and sentence structure – we want students to be able to explain the language, perhaps even asking them to compare and contrast the similarities to other languages. And we would want students to be able to apply the language – have a conversation, visit a country that uses that language predominantly and feel comfortable in it, be able to read and that language for meaning and pleasure.

A math teacher I knew a few years ago was talking to some higher level math students and he admitted to the students that most of mathematics education is designed to teach students to be calculators – to memorize and execute specific mathematical operations to solve specific problems. He admitted that the goal was not to make them mathematicians. The students were offended and asked why wouldn’t we design curriculum to help them be better mathematicians, and not just computers, and his response was “because you can’t handle it”. I fundamentally believe that no more than we would teach a musical instrument by having students in isolation learn scales and note positions, but never perform, or learn the rules of grammar and vocabulary and never write beyond simple prompts, we need to rethink math curriculum so that it gives students not just a chance to understand the operations and procedures that are so important, but also to put their knowledge into practice – to walk the walk, and talk the talk of true mathematicians.

I fundamentally believe all students can create art, can writes elegant creative essays, can find wonder and discover important ideas about our physical universe and can see the world as a mathematician. Perhaps they can’t do this all equally – not everyone gets to be or wants to be the quarterback. But the idea of creating mathematicians in skill, understanding, and application challenges me to keep working on the curriculum I design and the experiences that my students have in my class.

Still left unanswered in this post, is a conversation about standardized tests like the SAT. Another day…

The slides from my presentation on some of the ways I’ve tried to design relevant, rigorous and engaging curricula are in my blog post previous to this is a PDF.

Religion and faith and mathematics are a tricky business – we want everyone to appreciate, embrace and apply the wonders we see unfolded from our higher view. The real challenge is to find ways to make that happen in the lives of everyone, regardless of their leanings, capabilities and dispositions.

This post is already gotten long, and I could rant on some more, but it was the beginning of my unpacking of my thinking from the conference…my work and thinking is “To Be Continued…”

On constructivism and modeling

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Constructivism, models and transfer learning

Full disclosure alert: regardless of anything else I do or say, my fundamental belief in education comes from a fully constructivist framework. For those that care to get philosophical, this is based on work that dates back long before Dewey, but we could use him as a starting point for why experience and real, hands on, meaningful work are not just a good idea, but truthfully the only real way to get to the understanding of anything in the real world. That isn’t to say that there are times that telling kids something doesn’t have meaning, but when that won’t be grounded in a real experience or useful information or transfer it is not likely to have much usefulness or long-lasting effect.

“We only think when we are confronted with problems” – John Dewey

This week in our class we have been continuing our work utilizing the CASTLE curriculum that was designed by Mel Steinburg at Smith College and has been implemented for many years as an effective means to have students learn and apply a useful model for what electricity is. Brief description of that here:http://www.pasco.com/prodCatalog/EM/EM-8624_castle-kit/.

The power of this curriculum is that it is not teacher directed in the sense of lectures, but instead is unfolded as a series of investigations to try and understand how and why simple circuits with batteries and light bulbs work the way they do. I was first introduced to this curriculum in the mid-1990s at Arizona State University in the most excellent Modeling Workshop series which I still think is the finest professional development activity I’ve ever attended. http://modelinginstruction.org

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conversation and group checking of ideas

conversation and group checking of ideas

Trying to make meaning of what we see happening

Trying to make meaning of what we see happening

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a tea assembles a circuit to investigate

a tea assembles a circuit to investigate

This week’s opening activities had students trying to understand what is going on in wires when we connect batteries and lightbulbs together. I know an outsider might say “we’ll just tell them that electricity moves” – but good research and a constructivists pedagogical approach understand that knowing something and understanding something are two different things. All of my students already know about electricity – but none of them truthfully can apply the ideas to answer discrepant or novel phenomena – critical if we are to transfer the knowledge we have to solve problems. In our case, our students will eventually be using this knowledge to help members in our community (school, home, a larger community) find ways to save both money and environmentally friendly sustainable activities in their energy use at home.We will do this through the process of energy auditing with specific recommendations to improve efficiency and lower energy use and cost.

So what about this business with knowledge and learning? When do we teach something, and when do we let students develop it through real-world experience?
There is a marvelous discussion by Marc Chun, of the Hewlitt foundation about the importance of ways to build transfer that I think are relevant to this conversation here:

You will notice that he refers to this kind of learning as “deeper learning”. One of my goals over the last year has been to more closely tie the work we are doing in our MPX program and at the school in general to this deeper learning movement that is taking root across the country. More info on deeper learning here:
http://www.hewlett.org/deeperlearning

That’s all for today, but in the future I will need to add Why the question

“How do you know that?”

is so important. The value of making thinking visible through tools like whiteboards and thinking routines. The value of discrepant events to help expose naïve and experts thinking and what we understand in mathematics and science. why the work of Robert Gagne’s and his 9 events of instruction do fit in to project-based learning, and the value and challenge of instructional design as a whole.

On Organizational change and the “vision” thing for MPX

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I recently responded to a request from a colleague as a part of his masters program to talk about our work with MPX this year – perfect chance to add to the blog this morning… his questios and my answers below

1. What influenced/inspired you to head up the MPX program?

Philosophically, it was in line with where my professional work was going – more emphasis on how we teach and how curriculum is delivered. Although the past 20 years of my life have been spent more than the role of technology in the classroom, I always believed that it was to support a more progressive learning approach, this was a perfect opportunity to put it into place. 
Professionally, it was a new challenge for me as I have not been in the classroom for a long time. I believe fundamentally that we must practice what we preach, and if we wanted to see more folks at the school adopting these ideas, I needed to live this as a part of what I did.

2. What is your philosophy of Project Based Learning?

Ultimately, I believe in the same basic ideas John Dewey supported: learning by doing. We often times in education spend so much time doing skill development with students but never giving them the whole problem to understand why they should learn something. I’m a firm believer that the cognitive science makes clear that when we first give students the whole problem in context, the skills and knowledge that are needed are grafted into their learning more powerfully and therefore gives them a reason to learn and a passion to understand.

3. What challenges have you faced with students that are not used to the “lack of structure” in a Project Based Learning class?

It is very common for students that have been raised to not do project-based work to spend time waiting to be told what to do. Reading other school stories have confirmed this occurrence. The challenge, therefore, is walking a thin line between explicit structure (do this, then this, then this…) and implicit structure (in order to get to the end, what things need to be planned and attained to get there? What drafts, resources, models, interviews, practice sessions so you can show proficiency?)
There is inherent tension in a  structure so students keep doing work, not so much structure that it’s being driven by the teacher, not by the student. That kind of puppetshow “ignore the man behind the curtain” scaffolding is a challenge to make sure that it works effectively and the students are productive. Most importantly, they need to feel that work and the structure came from them as they need to solve their problem, not set on them by an adult without them understanding why it needed to be done that way.

4. What has been / is your greatest challenge in defending the purpose and success of your program to “non-believers”?

We all see the world through the lens of our culture and our accepted practice. When we use words like school, teacher, curriculum we all already have experiences in this and therefore expectations of what that should look and feel like. One of the phrases that came out of students thinking early last year was “but I don’t think I’m learning anything”. It took us a while to unpack this statement, and we realized that students thought learning only occurred when the teacher told him something and they memorized it, or completes a worksheet following the instructions.
There is also the challenge of a standard curriculum and tests. The work we do does not lend itself naturally to the delineated scope and sequence and the testing regimen that is part of traditional schooling. If we think broadly about education, we want students to be better thinkers, better problem solvers, better writers & communicators, better readers and critical thinkers. In many ways, the work we do supports this easily, but it does not always map back to the scope and sequence charts that are in the disciplines that are prescribed for our coursework.

5. Your program has just completed its first two years.  What types of challenges do you foresee, if any, your original students will face in mainstreaming back to a traditional teacher-centered classroom?

In a perfect world, we would be able to keep our students to the end of high school, then the transition would only be going to college, which is a very different experience and from other PBL school’s history is not a major concern. Our biggest challenge is taking students out of 10th grade after adopting one way of learning, and forcing them back into a seven period Day in which six or seven teachers have different expectations in which more than not work is still teacher centered. Although our students that have left the program have said it takes a little while to transition on this, I wish it wouldn’t have to be that way. Hopefully, the positive of this is students are more critical (in the actual sense of the word) or maybe a better word is discerning, about the curriculum that they see in front of them and ask hard questions about why do we need to know this? How does it fit into what I need to know the real world? Where is this taking me for my future? What are things I need to take away that I will find exciting and useful?

6. What letter grade would you give your program after its first two years of existence and why?

I would much rather give narratives than letter grades. In much the same way that a letter grade does not really paint a full picture of  an explanation of learning that happens in our program, a letter grade for our program as a whole doesn’t begin to cover what we have done. Much the same as our elementary school gives narrative assessments, and places students on a continuum of learning, I feel we need to do the same with our program, and frankly should for our high school in general. One of the ways that we measure doing good work in our program is whether we hold to the 6 As of good project design: 

The Six A’s of Designing Projects

• Academic Rigor
• How do the projects address key learning concepts, standards or help students develop habits of mind and work associated with academic and professional disciplines? 

• Authenticity 
• How do the projects use a real world context (e.g., community and workplace problems) and address issues that matter to the students?

• Applied Learning 
• How do the projects engage students in solving semi-structured problems calling for competencies expected in high-performance work organizations (e.g., teamwork, problem-solving, communication, etc.)?

• Active Exploration
•  How do the projects extend beyond the classroom and connect to work internships, field-based investigations, and community explorations?

• Adult Connections 
• How do the projects connect students with adult mentors and coaches from the wider community?

• Assessment Practices
• How do the projects involve students in regular exhibitions and assessments of their work in light of personal, school and real-world standards of performance?

Using this as our framework for assessment, we made substantial strides this year in developing projects that more closely aligned with the six tenets of good project-based learning – which we argue is the best kind of learning.

7. Where do you see your program in two years, five years, ten years from now?  How many students participate in the MPX program and do you see it growing in numbers or remaining status quo?
The initial vision of this program was always an incubator to help inform the entire high school about ways to adopt more authentic learning experiences in their curriculum. To that end, I see the work we’re doing as continually feeding into the whole school as a means to develop ways to help everyone adopt more engaging in effective learning activities in their classes. It certainly challenges our ideas of testing, curriculum, and what should be our core knowledge and skills as a high school. We debate a lot about how big this program should be – if we take it in context of what the intent was (what I just mentioned above), the size is not nearly as important as the purity of work that we do – if we can continue to do exciting state-of-the-art curriculum ideas that are based on authentic problems, then they will lend themselves to the adoption of others looking at ways to improve their practice.
Personally, in my “fantasy world” all learning should be like this – shouldn’t it? In other words, in a  perfect world, students would work on projects that they choose and are  inherently interesting, and adults would help shape that learning so that it may map to appropriate content areas. I fully understand that is no small order given the current culture and context of education, but if we really want what is best for students, rethinking the whole enterprise about learning is worth considering. I might add, that our elementary school more than not already teaches this way.

8. What types of barriers have you encountered when trying to initiate changes?  

One of my favorite quotes from the last few years was by Calvin Taketa, the head of the Hawaii Community Foundation. At a conference about transforming schools, he used the line “culture eats strategy for breakfast”. We have in education the problem of “that’s the way we have always done it”. More than not, school and curriculum is based on the concept of conformity and uniformity. These barriers are tough when we look at what it takes to really design engaging curriculum that builds students into a model of active learning. This is not a mid-Pacific Institute problem. It is an organizational problem. All organizations develop a culture in which ideas that go outside of the norm are challenged, and typically dismissed because they would mean making substantial changes to the structures in place. Clay Christensen’s research in “The Innovator’s Dilemma” spells this out and it is what led to his work “Disrupting Class”. A couple of examples of this in our case are the inability to support students about their work because of graduation requirement conflicts, programming our schedules so that we have access to the kids more regularly in a row, the fact that we have to set minimum entry points because when our students leave our curriculum they have to fit back in to the schedule, the need to map against some of the core concepts that really need to be rethought for everyone, but we have to play to that specific set of standards, designing inherently exciting and innovative curriculum takes time and coordination – we have very little time as a team sit down and really think about the work we are doing.

9. How have you overcome these barriers?

We haven’t overcome all of these yet, but in some of them we have been able to get a little more time for our teachers, we’ve been able to negotiate ways to have less stress about covering every core concept that is not in the traditional courses, we try and help our students in leaving our program choose wisely so they are in courses that more line with their interests and abilities, we continue to try and add more teachers to our conversation to help us build the bridge so that our kids are not perceived as different than others…

10. What has contributed to your and your program’s success?

Most importantly, our team for our program has been outstanding in our vision in their willingness to work in these Muddy Waters that we have been traveling through to build the program that we have. I can’t speak enough of, or praise enough, their willingness to continually make the adjustments needed so that we can work and build exciting learning experiences for our students together. Our administration has been fantastic about trying to support this program, in understanding that we need to create some space and time to give this an opportunity to succeed. They also know that the goal of the program was not to make it separate, but to use it as a lens into powerful ways of learning, and they continue to lead us to make sure that others have an opportunity to learn from the work we are doing to make it a vehicle for incubating ideas.
One of our surprising findings was that our parents have become one of our best advocates, as they have seen very exciting results for the child that is positive and they have been excited about it. We also have been blessed with community partners who have been excited to work with our students. This created the opportunities for authenticity and community involvement that we so greatly aspire to.

 

Mindset, Teachers and the classroom

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Mindsets, Education and Teachers

Prologue:
Well, it has been a while since I have blogged but it is time to start up again. I fear the discipline of putting words to page is not an easy task for me, but I realize that blogging as an act act is not something I do for an audience, but an opportunity to clarify my own thinking. As I am approaching the most challenging writing assignment of my life soon – the dissertation (duh-duh-duh duhhhhh) I need to get to putting ideas down to get my thinking explicit. This has come up a lot in the research class ETEC 705B which is designed to help guide our work towards prospectus, selection of a committee, preparation for compulsories, and then on to designing and implementing a project. One of the roadblocks for people is the challenge putting ideas and summaries to paper, so this will hopefully be one of the ways I can just get idea on paper, even if only peripherally related to my my thrust of my work (another topic for another day)…

Premise:
One of the wonderful books I have been reading (caveat – I have not finished yet) is Carol Dweck’s marvelous “Mindset”mindset
For those not familiar with her work, here is a quick review to set the body of my writing:
There are two kids of people – those with fixed mindsets and those with growth mindsets. She has designed a simple questionnaire can identify which of these two groups people fall into – try this sample yourself (full quiz available here):

You have a certain amount of intelligence, and you can’t really do much to change it.

Strongly Agree Agree Mostly Agree Mostly Disagree Disagree Strongly Disagree
 
Your intelligence is something about you that you can’t change very much.

Strongly Agree Agree Mostly Agree Mostly Disagree Disagree Strongly Disagree
 
No matter who you are, you can significantly change your intelligence level.

Strongly Agree Agree Mostly Agree Mostly Disagree Disagree Strongly Disagree
 
To be honest, you can’t really change how intelligent you are.

Strongly Agree Agree Mostly Agree Mostly Disagree Disagree Strongly Disagree
 
So what is the difference between growth mindset people and fixed mindset? A tremendous amount – growth mindset people believe hard work and taking risks are powerful ways to improve yourself. Fixed mindset people tend to believe you have what you got so avoid risks or new challenges, since it would be limited by their fixed abilities.

This in itself is a huge thing to know, as it tells you a lot about yourself and others around you and why they behave they way they do. She gives lots of case studies in her book from her research – from 4 year olds to adults and they provide amazing context and contrast between the two groups.
Some of this may sound familiar as locus of control issue (it does to me) – growth mindset people believe when things don’t work for them, it is in their control to fix the problem (work harder, change initial conditions, etc). Fixed mindset people will believe that external forces are the root of their problems – poor performance or results are due to lack of talent, outside forces (the coach doesn’t like me) and will not try to address the problem as something they can do within themselves.
The second part of her work shows that it is possible to change your mindset, and in doing so it can dramatically change your life. Once a person really takes to heart that they CAN affect change in their life by taking on challenge, working hard and taking risks, they live dramatically different lives because they are able and willing to do the things they need to grow and attain goals. This is abbreviated explanation doesn’t do the book justice – buy it! It does however lay the foundation for my thinking…

How important is understanding this in education? I believe it is critical. She advocates teaching all children this – both that people are usually one or the other and more importantly that they CAN change by adopting some new thinking about their own intellect and talents.

Rumination:
Here is where it matters for this blog – think about how important this is as a teacher. If a teacher has a fixed mindset, it doesn’t just color their thinking on their own abilities, but also how they view their children in their class. A teacher with a growth mindset will believe that every child in their class has the ability to achieve and will set up the conditions for success for all students. This won’t just be an artificial attempt – it will be deep and thoughtful – looking at research, addressing learning styles, understanding their students, etc. More importantly, when students don’t do well, the teacher will not play the “some kids have talent for this and some don’t” card, but will look at what they are doing and adjust because they will have the same mindset they believe their students have.
This is reminiscent of the great movie “Stand and Deliver” and the success Jaime Escalante had with his students. There is a scene in the movie that shows this kind of mindset in operation:

Jaime Escalante: [to his students] … There will be no free rides, no excuses. You already have two strikes against you: your name and your complexion. Because of those two strikes, there are some people in this world who will assume that you know less than you do. *Math* is the great equalizer… When you go for a job, the person giving you that job will not want to hear your problems; ergo, neither do I. You’re going to work harder here than you’ve ever worked anywhere else. And the only thing I ask from you is *ganas.* *Desire.*
[Passing one boy, he ruffles up the student’s hair]
Jaime Escalante: And maybe a haircut.
[Everyone laughs]
Jaime Escalante: If you don’t have the *ganas,* I will give it to you because I’m an expert.

Note that he both believes that his students CAN do this and he has the ability to help them succeed. Well done.

Let’s contrast that to a fixed mindset teacher – they will not only believe that they have limited abilities, but will assume the same is true of their students – it is their paradigm. This means they will see the class as more of a sorting operation – need to determine who gets the A’s, B’s, F’s etc. For this teacher, the bell curve is a natural outcome from the distributions of abilities and talents in their class. Their students will get this as well (students as a whole are marvelous at picking up on class culture and teacher expectations). As the old saying goes “If you think some of your students cannot do do the work, you are probably right”.
We had a debate a few year ago on our campus about whether we should eliminate letter grades of C or D. Not as a means of grade inflation, but to require students to do the work needed to attain a grade of at least B. The idea was too radical for the group at the time and died a slow death, but in a recent article in the for Educational Leadership here, Carol Dweck lists some school districts that have adopted a grade scale of A, B and not yet. This is not a case of grade inflation, it is a view that all students can and SHOULD be expected to do the work. “I am not good at math” just won’t cut it when the options you have are to either pass or keep working until you do pass.
Recently Sir Ken Robinson was the keynote at our Hawaii Schools of the Future conference, and he was asked how he would create a school from the ground up. After some thought he basically said he would start with teachers who really understood and cared about kids. From that, the other things (schedule, assessment, curriculum, buildings, resources) would come. It made me think that as we look towards hiring new teachers, do we really make sure they they have a growth mindset? Imagine if you gave all the teachers at your school the Mindset quiz tomorrow – what do you think you would find? What if half of your teachers felt intelligence and talent are fixed quantities? How would you shape professional development to start to change their mindset. Will anything else you do matter if you don’t?