Better Learning for Schools

My wife is a vegetable ninja. You see, over the years, she has secretly employed a handful of tricks to ensure that our four sons (and their father) develop healthy eating habits. From the time our boys were old enough to speak, she would offer them a choice. She would say something like, “Would you like broccoli or carrots to eat?” As they grew a bit older, she began ask them to suggest what vegetables should be part of our meals. It wasn’t until several years into our marriage that I realized the same techniques were being used on me. The results were inevitable—slowly and steadily, each of us learned to use our own agency to make healthy food choices on our own.

As I have watched my wife work with our own kids and with hundreds of other elementary students in school where she teaches, I have come to understand what I believe all educators need to understand—that early opportunities for good decision-making are likely to result in better decision making later on. As a vegetable ninja, my wife’s objective wasn’t just to get us to eat our vegetables. Ultimately, she wanted to increase the likelihood that we would make healthy food choices with…or without her around.

Sadly, today’s students are often portrayed in the media as passive consumers of media, rather than active agents and mediators of their own learning. But our young people are not the digital-zombies they society makes them out to be. In fact, educational research actually shows that students are very capable of engaging with technology in increasingly complex ways, and that they regularly discover new, unexpected uses for the tools that they select (Czerniewicz, Williams, & Brown, 2009).

In my recent visits to school districts, I have observed a number of classrooms where teachers are working strategically to create decision-making opportunities for their students. Most often, these opportunities are manifest in the form of control and choice regarding (1) what students learn, (2) how they learn, and (3) how they demonstrate understanding.

WHAT Students Learn

One way for teachers to afford students more control over learning is offer them choices about the content they will learn. In a science class for example, two very similar assignments could be constructed for separate informational texts of comparable difficulty, one on nebulas and another on black holes. Students could then be encouraged to choose between topics, while still completing the same learning objectives as their classmates.

In a number of schools, I have also seen students who are encouraged to choose topics of personal interest and to devote time each week to researching and exploration of the topic. These students prove quite capable of utilizing digital tools and plug-ins such as Museum Box, Evernote, Scrible, and ScrapBook to help collect information and to organize images, videos, texts, audio clips, and links to other resources on their chosen subject.

HOW Students Learn

Today’s students are also adept at selecting and integrating tools to accomplish their own learning objectives. For example, I recently visited with a fifth grader who was using a free app called Lego Movie Maker to turn a book project he had been assigned in one of his classes into an entertaining, stop-motion animation. He insisted that the app was simple enough to use, but expressed frustration with its inability to add narration over the video that he had already worked so hard on.

Immediately, the student began tinkering with combinations of different tools and apps in order to solve the problem. First, he tried recording his own narration using Audacity and Garageband. But after a few attempts, he was unable to import his voiceover into Lego Movie Maker. So instead, he exported the video he had made, and then opened it up in another app called Videoshop where he re-recorded the narration and combined it with the animation.

My wife and I have four boys—four squirrely boys. They aren’t what we would consider belligerent or even really disruptive. But each parent teacher-conference we have ever had goes about the same. We come in, sit down, and after a bit of courteous chit-chat, the teachers inevitably say something like…

‘You know, we spend a lot of time trying to get your son(s) to still and be quite so that other kids can learn.’

As an educator and researcher with some interest in classroom management, I tended to empathize with the teacher. But after a while, it occurred to me that these were four different boys–each with different personalities. They varied in age, interest, attention span…you name it. Yet, it was always the same concern—that their teachers couldn’t get them to sit still.

One time, instead of nodding and playing along, I asked one of my boy’s teachers a question. Actually, it was just a single word…

‘Why?’…

http://traffic.libsyn.com/remarkablechatter/moving_to_learn_Curtis_chandler.mp3

 

 

References

Glenberg, A. (2014, July 22). How Acting Out in School Boosts Learning. Scientific American Global RSS. Retrieved July 28, 2014, from http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-acting-out-in-school-boosts-learning/

Jensen, E. (2008). Teaching with the brain in mind. Alexandria (Virginia: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Curtis Chandler can be contacted at:

Twitter @curtischandler6

Blog:  Better Learning For Schools

Email:  [email protected]

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Most concepts can be covered in the lecture hall, but are better experienced away from a desk.oncepts can be covered in the lecture hall, but are better experienced away from a desk.

I’m not an art-therapist by any means, but it is incredible how much insight can be gained by doing a little drawing activity with your students. When visiting school districts, as often as I can, I ask students to illustrate what a classroom looks like at their school. Regardless of the location or demographic of the school, it is alarming just how similar many of the student drawings are. The majority of illustrations seem to show some version of a teacher talking at the front of the room. The students sit in neat, orderly rows with vacant expressions or appear to be sleeping.

Such a wide-spread perspective of classroom learning as a passive, disengaged activity should cause us great alarm, especially in the wake of so much recent focus on the need for differentiation (e.g., Benjamin, 2014; Tomlinson, 2013), brain-compatible learning (e.g., Siemens, 2014; Sprenger, 2010), and the theory of multiple intelligences (e.g., Armstrong, 2003, Gardner, 1993). The educational giants of the past such as Aristotle, Dewey, Whitehead, and Montessori have all encouraged the need for activity and movement to promote learning (Stacey, 2008). The greatest insight on human development wasn’t developed at a desk, but on Thoreau’s two-year walk through the woods and around a pond. So why do kids still seem to be spending so much time in chairs?

The reality is that, as educators, we tend to do what is done to us. By that I mean that, as students, many of us experienced classroom learning that was largely teacher-centered—permeated by lecture and other forms of direct instruction. Now that we are teachers, many of us continue to perpetuate this traditional approach to the classroom. On occasion, we play a review game with students, have a class discussion or attempt to do something problem or project-based…but for the most part, our classroom largely resembles—and runs like—an 18th century, one-room school house.

This is really odd, because most of us would never try such an approach outside of our classroom.   For example, recently while I was on vacation, my mother got her first smart-phone and asked if I could help her learn to use it. I didn’t drive her to a school, sit her down in a chair, and start to lecture her. Nor did I require her to read the 182-page user manual and give her a stack of worksheets to complete. I did what any decent son (or teacher) would do when the stakes are high. I sought to make learning more active, participatory, and learner-centered. I showed my mother a few video tutorials on Youtube and demonstrated how to navigate some of the phone’s basic features and functions. She fiddled, practiced, asked several questions, downloaded a few recipe apps, and then went into the garage to show my dad all the cool things she could do. Now he wants a new phone as well. There was no lecture…just learning.

But it’s not just moms and smartphones. Recently, Mike Wesch, an innovative professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, posted a video of his students outside of the classroom, running around campus, playing a marshmallow war game. In collaboration with his students, Dr. Wesch created the simulation to help his students explore world history, global economy, sustainability, international relations, culture change, and structural power. These concepts could have been covered in the lecture hall, but were better experienced away from a desk. I would be interested to see what his students would draw if asked to create an illustration of what a classroom looks like.

I am not saying that every teacher needs to develop large-scale games for their students to play,

While much of education acknowledges the need for us to focus on literacy and numeracy, not everyone realizes the paramount importance of listening and spoken language skills. For example, I remember that when my wife and I were first married we arrived at home about the same time one evening. We were both a bit worn-out, and feeling somewhat indecisive about what we should make for dinner. At some point she asked me, “Well, what do you think we should have for dinner?”

It seemed like a simple enough question. I took a few seconds, thought, and then confidently replied—“lasagna.” To my surprise, she then looked at me, paused, and said…”no.” At that point, I thought again and with a bit less confidence offered another suggestion…”spaghetti.” Again she paused and then replied… “Nope.” Confused, I offered up one final idea. This time, though, it was in the form of a question. “Want to go out?” Her face changed, she smiled, and replied, “Sure.”

It was only afterwards as we were sitting down to enjoy our meal at the restaurant that I figured out what had happened. You see, I thought my wife was actually asking me what it was that I wanted for dinner. But what she really wanted was for me to guess what it was that she wanted for dinner.

Many such misunderstandings at home, in the community, and in the workplace can be attributed directly or indirectly to some degrees of misunderstanding and miscommunication. Sometimes the speaker is to blame. Sometimes it is the person listening. Most of the time it is a bit of both. But in nearly every situation, effective listening and oral communication make it possible for us to understand and…to be understood…

http://traffic.libsyn.com/remarkablechatter/Lasagna_Santa_and_Other_Listening_and_Speaking_Lessons.mp3

References

Copeland, M. (2005). Socratic circles: Fostering critical and creative thinking in middle and high school. Portland, Me: Stenhouse Publishers.

Curtis Chandler can be contacted at:

Twitter @curtischandler6

Blog:  Better Learning For Schools

Email:  [email protected]

Subscribe to this podcast and many others!

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There has been a lot of talk lately on how we might improve student learning and student engagement.   One widely accepted notion is that improving student engagement is likely to result in improved student learning. But there hasn’t been nearly as much conversation—if any—about teacherengagement.  Now, what do we mean by teacher engagement?  A handful of scholars and researchers have begun to draw attention to this very notion. Cathie West (2013), for example, in her book The 6 Keys to Teacher Engagement asks…

What does teacher engagement look like? Highly engaged teachers demonstrate best practice teaching, use data to verify instructional effectiveness, make changes in their teaching approach when student performance falters, and dialogue openly about their successes and failures. These highly engaged teachers are professionally on fire and get solid results.

 If I am understanding this correctly, that means that teachers who sit attentively at meetings and complete their reports on time may not be highly engaged professionally. Instead, we would all do well to look at other indicators demonstrated by teachers—their conversations, actions, results, commitment to students, and intense desire to improve their practice (McEwan, 2005). I recently had a chance to visit with Dr. Jim Parson’s of the University of Alberta. Dr. Parson’s has authored a number of articles…and over 20 books on learning and engagement. He was also the director of the School Improvement Initiative in Alberta. His latest research focuses on this emerging idea of improving student outcomes and engagement by focusing instead on the teacher…and…on teacher engagement…

http://traffic.libsyn.com/remarkablechatter/teacher_engagement.mp3

References

McEwan, E. K. (Ed.). (2005). How to deal with teachers who are angry, troubled, exhausted, or just plain confused. SAGE.

West, C. (2013). The 6 Keys to Teacher Engagement: Unlocking the Doors to Top Teacher Performance. Routledge.

Curtis Chandler can be contacted at:

Twitter @curtischandler6

Blog:  Better Learning For Schools

Email:  [email protected]

Be sure to subscribe to receive an email of future podcasts.

 

What Every Teacher Needs to Know About Student Motivation and Engagement

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As human beings, most of us tend to avoid things that are difficult. For example, I was recently visiting a school where kids were running the mile as part of their physical education class.

The teacher I visited with mentioned something interesting. He does not tell his students in advance when they will run the mile. He has to ‘spring’ it on them—surprise them. Otherwise, kids don’t show up that day for school. Or…they mysteriously forget their gym clothes…or perhaps develop mysterious symptoms just before physical education begins. Why is that? It’s because most human beings hate to run the mile. And if left to our devices…we will avoid it—and anything else difficult like it—as if it were the plague.

Much of what we know about human motivation and engagement in difficult tasks can be summed up in something called Expectancy Value Theory. This construct suggests that whether or not you or I choose to initiate, persist in, and complete a task—like running the mile—is based on (1) expectancy, or our belief that we will be successful at… and (2) value, or our belief that running the mile is actually worth our time.

In other words, pretend that you are in the seventh grade, and the teacher announces that everyone will be running the mile during class this next Thursday. If you are a kid who feels like you stink at running the mile, you are a bit more likely to be ‘mysteriously ill’ the day it is scheduled to be run…or to find some other way out if it. Or…you might even show up the day of the mile, but will probably not run the entire way…because you think it is just too hard.

A similar phenomenon exists if you just don’t see the point in running the mile. For example, I had a student who was an accomplished high school wrestler and had incredible endurance, but…was walking the mile during P.E. When I asked him about it, he said, ‘What’s the point!?! I already ran 5 miles this morning before school. I will have to run again tonight at practice.’ His lack of motivation wasn’t due to a lack of anticipated success. Running the mile in P.E. just wasn’t something he perceived as worth his time.

It is the same in the classroom. I admit that it is really heart-warming to visit with so many schools and hear how they are working to make learning more rigorous and relevant. But an understanding of expectancy-value theory provides to points of insight. First…while rigor is important, we will undoubtedly lose students if our class becomes too difficult. Second…teachers should take every opportunity to design relevant learning experiences and articulate that relevance to their students. Kids want to connect with their learning, but it takes an effective teacher to help them to do so.

The truth is that, while they are actually two distinct elements of student learning, the terms motivation and engagement are often used interchangeably to describe students’ energy and drive to learn, work effectively, and achieve their potential at school and the behaviors that follow from this energy and drive. While the term student engagement is often defined in various ways, Chapman’s (2003) definition is widely accepted and applied—student’s cognitive investment in, active participation in, and emotional commitment to learning. In contrast, Maehr and Meyer (1997) define motivation as a construct used to explain initiation, direction, intensity, persistence, and quality of behavior, especially in goal-directed behavior. In other words, why it is that we are doing what it is that we are doing. Simply put, motivation is an essential part of engagement, just as engagement is an essential part of learning and achievement…

I recently had the chance to work with a number of amazing educators whose job it is to help engage students in learning tasks…and extremely difficult ones at that—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics classes where kids do everything from build water purification systems to design,

Over the past decade it seems that I have had the same literacy conversation dozens of times with parents.  Around the time a student hits his or her teenage years, it seems that their parents grow increasingly concerned that their child just doesn’t seem to be reading on their own any more.  Now, to be clear, these are often kids in homes where reading is modeled and encouraged.  But, for a variety of reasons, it seems that young people seem to fall increasingly out of love with leisurely literacy activities.

Research tells us that reader motivation and engagement both result from an interplay between intrinsic and extrinsic factors (Wigfield & Guthrie, 1997).  There is an intrinsic motivation that refers to a willingness to read because that activity is satisfying or rewarding in it’s own right (Shieffele, et al., 2012).   For example, a person can be motivated to read because of an interest in the topic of the text or because the reading activity itself provides a positive experience, such as being absorbed in a story (Shiefele, 2009).  But there is also anextrinsic reading motivation that comes into play. By extrinsic motivation, we mean the  external outcomes that are associated with the reading topic or reading activity.  For example, students might consider possible praise from a teacher, good grades or outperforming their peers (Wigfield & Guthrie, 1997).

Helping young people to become literate now implies a need for educators who seek strategically to improve their students’ reading motivation by focusing on both the intrinsic and extrinsic elements of reading.  A number of teachers I have worked with lately are seeking to do this by providing students with positive reading experiences and by making the tangible benefits of reading explicit to students.  But there remains the question—Just how do we improve and assess students’ engagement in the literacy activities we design for them?

I was recently attending and presenting at a conference that focused on student engagement in literacy. At the conference, I was able to sit down and visit with Dr. Linda Rice, a professor and researcher from the University of Ohio. Dr. Rice has authored a number of books and articles on student engagement in literacy.  She has also been a classroom teacher for years. I started off by asking her how she felt we can assess teens engagement in literacy activities.  She stressed a sort of strategic multiplicity when it comes to how we engage students and how we assess them…

http://traffic.libsyn.com/remarkablechatter/Improving_and_Engaging_Teens.mp3

References

Nilsen, A. P. (2013). Literature for today’s young adults. Boston: Pearson.

Schiefele, U. (2009). Situational and individual interest. In K.R. Wentzel & A. Wigfield (Eds.), Handbook of motivation at school (pp. 197–222). New York: Routledge.

Schiefele, U., Schaffner, E., Möller, J., Wigfield, A., Nolen, S., & Baker, L. (2012). Dimensions of Reading Motivation and Their Relation to Reading Behavior and Competence. Reading Research Quarterly, 47(4), 427-463.

Wigfield, A., & Guthrie, J.T. (1997). Relations of children’s motivation for reading to the amount and breadth of their reading. Journal of Educational Psychology, 89(3), 420–432.

Curtis Chandler can be contacted at:

Twitter @curtischandler6

Blog:  Better Learning For Schools<...

Recently, much attention has been turned to the importance of listening and speaking.  Across the United States, for instance, new curricular standards encourage regular classroom practice in speaking and listening from the time kids enter kindergarten…until they complete high school (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010).  In this podcast, we visit with researchers, educators, and students about ways to improve the listening and speaking activities taking place in our schools.

http://traffic.libsyn.com/remarkablechatter/Engaging_Students_in_Listening_Speaking_and_Thinking.mp3

Curtis Chandler can be contacted at:

Twitter @curtischandler6

Blog:  Better Learning For Schools

Email:  [email protected]

 

Be sure to subscribe to receive an email of future podcasts.

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Not too long ago I was at school, and came around the corner to find several students crowded around one kid’s cell phone screen.  They were laughing…so naturally…I assumed the worst—that they were sharing something salacious and titillating.  I yelled, “Freeze!  No one move a muscle!” I confiscated the phone with the students looking at me in confusion.    I soon discovered why.

I looked at the screen expecting something profane or pornographic.  But what I found surprised me…and got me thinking.  It turned out that these students were actually looking at a free app that one of them had downloaded called K-D Calc.  It’s designed to provide feedback on how well you play Call of Duty, Battlefield, Halo, or any other multiplayer series game.  It provides stats that help you track your progress and see where you can improve with a simple ratio calculator that allows you to quickly see your win-loss ratio, detailed historical statistics, and links to a number of YouTube channel resources to help improve your game.

This is the world that students and their teachers live in—a world permeated by feedback.  We always seem to know exactly how we are doing.  The treadmill at the gym, for example, tells us our current pace, how many calories we have burned, and how much further we have to run to meet our workout goal. We get regular updates on our data and Internet usage throughout the month.  The GPS on our phone or built in to our car tells us where we are, where we are headed, and delivers timely step-by-step instructions.  Should we happen to take a wrong turn, a GPS immediately makes a quick adjustment, and delivers modified directions to get us back on track.

But in schools, there is much room for improvement in the ways in which we seek to provide students with meaningful feedback.  In the early grades, teacher feedback seems to serve as verification that someone cares enough about our work to read and think about it.  But feedback should be much more than that.  It should match specific descriptions and suggestions.  It should be just-in-time and just-for-me information delivered to students when and where it will do the most good (Brookhart, 2008).

Dr. Judy Willis is a neurologist turned classroom teacher.  She now works with Edutopia and lectures around the country to promote the incorporation of neuroscience in classroom learning.  She has spoken often about the feedback and scaffolding that are needed to support students’ in difficult learning tasks, and posits that we might look towards video games as models for our classrooms.  After all, gamers are making errors 80% of the time.  But, games give hints, cues, and other feedback so players’ brains have enough expectation of reward to persevere.  Why couldn’t a classroom feedback model follow suit.  Games provide timely, corrective, and progress-acknowledging feedback that allows the students to correct mistakes, build understanding progressively, and recognize their incremental progress.

Dr. Willis insists that good games give players opportunities for experiencing intrinsic reward at frequent intervals when they apply the effort and practice the specific skills they need to get to the next level. Games do not require mastery of all tasks and the completion of the whole game.  Instead, the player gains points or tokens for small incremental progress and ultimately the powerful feedback of the success of progressing to the next level (Willis, 2011).

John Hattie publishes very large books that put together several people’s research from around the world. A substantial amount of what he has aggregated focuses on improving the use of feedback in schools.  Hattie (2009) states that educators need to keep three questions in mind when it co...

Human beings are wired for two things—learning and playing.  No one is likely to argue with the first claim…that we are wired for learning.  Babies who are only a couple months old, for example, naturally begin to babble and imitate sounds.  After a few more months, they learn to support their entire weight on their legs.  By the time they are two-years-old, they can walk up and down stairs with just a bit of support; they even start formulating two-to-four word sentences.  This natural acquisition of new skills and abilities transpires for nearly every human being and is evidence that we are wired…for learning.

But are we also wired for playing? Recently I had the opportunity to visit with Dr. Barbara Voorhies, an archeologist who studies ancient civilizations on the coast of Chipas, Mexico. She has a PhD from Yale, and is currently a professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California in Santa Barbara.  Back in late 80’s, one of her projects at an ancient fishing village involved the excavation of enormous mounds of shells that had gone largely undisturbed for thousands of years.  The real, discovery, however, wasn’t in the shell mound…but underneath it: an odd, round shape pressed into the mud by an ancient fisherman.

Though her discovery was decades ago, it wasn’t until just recently that she was able to put all the pieces together.  Based on other people’s research and a number of similar discoveries around the world, Dr. Voorhies figured out that below this massive pile of shells was an ancient  ‘chase’ game played with primitive dice—much like Candyland or Chutes and Ladders. It’s one of many games played by ancient man that has been discovered all over the world.  Some of the games are alleged to be the predecessors of ‘mobile gaming’: a mat with the game painted on it so that could be rolled up, transported, and played anywhere.

Humans have played games for thousands of years.  And why wouldn’t we?  Games offer rapt and rapid learning—a chance to learn deeply and quickly. My family recently had a few days off of school due to snow, so in addition to sledding and snowball fights, we dusted off the old Monopoly board.  As my kids played I made little notes from time to time about the formal and informal learning that that seemed to be taking place.  Any one who has played a bit of Monopoly tends to develop a strategy that seems to combine risk assessment, diversification, and timing. There is also a great deal of mental math, negotiation, and trading that comes into play.  But as I watched three of my sons play, I noticed another skill being the developed—the ability to adapt and evolve.

Games like Monopoly have their own rules, but it is not uncommon for people play by ‘house rules,’ or their own modified version of the game.  At our house, as the game drug on, my sons made their own adjustments and modifications.  For example, it didn’t take them long to learn that being the banker was a lot of work, so they decided that everyone would take a turn running the money for ten minutes and then collect an extra 200 dollars at the end of their shift.  At one point, the youngest brother started to lose the game—and as a result—also started to lose interest.   To ensure that he kept playing, the other two brothers afforded him control over the selection of music that played in the background on Pandora.  My favorite part of watching them play, though,  was when one of the brothers successfully bartered for control of Boardwalk using a combination of his own previously acquired properties and two chocolate chip cookies that were fresh out of the oven.

These kids calculated, schemed, and compromised.  They experimented with strategies and even developed a bit of financial diction.  That is the real power of games.  Games do what teachers often struggle to do—they blur the lines betwe...