Exploring Classroom Instruction that Works

In their 2001 cornerstone publication entitled Classroom Instruction that Works: Research-Based Strategies for Increasing Student Achievement, Robert Marzano, Debra Pickering and Jane Pollack penned one of the most thoroughly researched and practical books educators have seen in decades. As I visit classrooms meeting with teachers and with division heads, I regularly hear their keen interest in materials that have direct application to teaching and learning--today. Classroom Instruction that Works offers just that.

To prepare this book, researchers at Midcontinent Research for Education and Learning (McREL) engaged in meta-analysis, making sense of selected research studies on instructional strategies that could be used by teachers in K-12 classrooms. What the writers and researchers offer are nine strategies "that have a high probability of enhancing student achievement for all students in all subject areas at all grade levels." Of course, as the authors point out, no instructional strategy works equally well in all situations. Still, these "essential nine" offer powerful learning tools that have been shown to enhance student learning across many schools, grade levels and contexts.

Before we briefly explore each strategy, it is important to note Marzano, Pickering, and Pollack's dictum:

"Teachers should rely on their knowledge of their students, their subject matter, and their situation to identify the most appropriate instructional strategy."

So, while their meta-analysis points to the effectiveness of these approaches across contexts, the authors never lose track of this fact: countless research studies over time have demonstrated that "the most important factor affecting student learning is the teacher." In short, the essential nine, in the hands of an educator who is skilled not only in instructional strategies but management techniques and curriculum design, offer proven and effective tools for enhancing student learning.


Perhaps what is most impressive about this book is its unique combination of research & theory with classroom practice. Each chapter begins with a brief story revealing the strategy in action, followed by a section headed "Research and Theory" (on the particular strategy) and culminating with a section entitled "Classroom Practice." For those who seek strategies for Monday morning on Friday afternoon, making a beeline for the Classroom Practice section will serve you well--though I would hasten to add Robert Marzano's keen insight, as quoted in the ASCD Community Blog:

"I can think of no strategy that every teacher should use. . .My overarching comment is that. . .research only gets you so far and then teachers' reasoned adaptations must take over. All research is equivocal at least to some extent, and its application to new situations must be discussed and debated."

Again, these nine strategies are potentially powerful and effective tools for teachers who know: their students, their content, their curriculum and their learning environment. Placed in that spirit and context, a brief overview of these nine instructional strategies--along with some handy, interesting and thought-provoking links--appears below.

1. Identifying Similarities and Differences
Students' understanding of and ability to use knowledge are enhanced by:
• Presenting presenting them with explicit guidance in identifying similarities and differences
• Representing similarities and differences in graphic form

Identifying similarities and differences can take multiple forms, including
• Comparing
• Classifying
• Creating metaphors
• Creating analogies
Graphic organizers such as Venn diagrams can complement each of these forms.

2. Summarizing and Notetaking
• To effectively summarize, students must delete some information, substitute some information and keep some information.

• To effectively delete, substitute and keep information, students must analyze the information at a fairly deep level. [Dan Willingham's Why Don't Students Like School? offers keen insights into the workings of memory--and speaks specifically to the kind of deep level analysis Marzano and company are referring to.]

• Being aware of the explicit structure of information is an aid to summarizing it (e.g., knowing that a piece is a research article as opposed to a newspaper opinion piece)

• Providing students with a set of rules for creating a summary enhances their comprehension.

• When summarizing, students benefit from questioning what is unclear, clarifying those questions and then predicting what will happen next in the text.

• Research shows that taking more notes is better than taking fewer notes, though verbatim notetaking is ineffective because it does not allow time to process the information.

• Teachers should provide time for review and revision of notes, as notes can be the best study guide for tests.

3. Reinforcing Effort and Providing Recognition
• Students benefit from understanding the direct connection between effort and achievement.

• Research demonstrates that while not all students realize the importance of effort, they can learn to change their beliefs to emphasize effort. [This resonates with Carol Dweck's work on Growth vs. Fixed Mindsets.]

• Recognition is most effective if it is linked to the achievement of a standard.

• Symbolic recognition works better than tangible rewards. [Dan Pink's recent TED talk and his upcoming book offer some thought-provoking implications for educators when it comes to motivation]

4. Homework and Practice
• The amount of homework assigned to students should be differnt from elementary to middle school to high school.

• Parent involvement in homework should be kept to a minimum.

• The purpose of homework should be identified and articulated.
No truer words were ever written: "Not all homework is the same." And a related point: Practice and Preparation are two common purposes for homework. When homework is assigned for the purpose of practice, it should be structured around content with which students have a high degree of familiarity. Practicing a skill with which a student is unfamiliar is not only inefficient, but might also serve to habituate errors or misconceptions. Hardly a worthwhile endeavor. [ASCD's Rethinking Homework: Best Practices that Support Diverse Needs is well worth a look.]

• If homework is assigned, it should be commented on.

• Establish and communicate a homework policy.

• Design homework assignments that clearly articulate purpose and outcome.

• Teachers should vary their approaches to providing feedback.

• Mastering a skill requires a fair amount of practice.
Note well: "It's not until students have practiced upwards of about 24 times that they reach 80-percent competency."

5. Non-linguistic Representations
• A variety of activities produce non-linguistic representations: creating graphic representations (descriptive patterns, time-sequence patterns, process/cause-effect patterns, episode patterns, generalization/principle patterns, concept patterns), making physical models, generating mental pictures, drawing pictures and pictographs and engaging in kinesthetic activity.

6. Cooperative Learning
• Five defining elements of cooperative learning: positive interdependence, face-to-face promotive interaction, individual and group accountability, interpersonal and small group skills, group processing

• Organizing groups based on ability should be done sparingly.

• Cooperative groups should be kept rather small in size.

• Cooperative learning should be applied consistently and systematically, but not overused.
+ Most effective when applied at least once a week.
+ Misused when tasks given to groups are not well structured.
+ Overused when implemented to such an extent that students have insufficient time to practice independently the skills and processes they must master.

• One way to vary the grouping patterns within a class is to use the three types of cooperative learning groups as identified by Johnson and Johnson: informal, formal and base groups.

7. Setting Objectives and Providing Feedback
• Goal setting is the process of establishing a direction for learning.
• Instructional goals narrow what students focus on.
• Instructional goals should not be too specific.
• Students should be encouraged to personalize the teacher's goals (adapting them to their personal needs and desires).
• Specific but flexible goals
• Contracts

• Feedback: One of the most generalizable strategies a teacher can use is to provide students with feedback to tell them how they are doing.
• Feedback should be corrective in nature: provide students with an explanation of what they are doing that is correct and what they are doing that is not correct.
Note: Simply telling students that their answer is right or wrong has a negative effect on achievement.
• Feedback should be timely.
• Feedback should be specific to a criterion.
• Students can effectively provide some of their own feedback.

8. Generating and Testing Hypotheses
• Research shows that a deductive approach (using a general rule to make a prediction) to this strategy works best.

• Teachers should ask their students to clearly explain their hypotheses and conclusions.

• A variety of structured tasks can be used to guide students through generating and testing hypotheses: Systems analysis, problem solving, historical investigation, invention, experimental inquiry, and decision making.

9. Cues, Questions and Advance Organizers
• Cues, questions and advance organizers should focus on what is important as opposed to what is unusual.

• 'Higher level' questions and advance organizers produce deeper learning than 'lower level' questions and advance organizers.

• Waiting briefly before accepting responses from students has the effect of increasing the depth of students' answers.

• Questions are effective learning tools even when asked before a learning experience.

• Advance organizers are most useful with information that is not well organized.

• There are four kinds of advance organizers: expository, narrative, skimming, and graphic

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Motivating Learners and Building Interest

"Without motivation, there is no learning."
- Pauline B. Gough in the esssay "Interest Matters" (Phi Delta Kappan, 83(8), 566)


Dan Pink and Mary Renck Jalongo make compelling cases for our paying careful attention to the roles of motivation and interest in learning, as noted in part one of this entry. Given Pink’s and Jalongo’s insights into the nature of motivation and interest, what is the teacher’s role in motivating learners and building interest?

Jalongo’s analysis lands on five research-based recommendations for “support[ing] children in reaching their full potential.”

[1] Establish a Rationale for Learning
Far too often in teaching and learning, in our zest to teach our children how and what, we sorely neglect why. Jalongo nails the importance of why on three counts:

• “Sansone and Smith (2000) found that when students were provided with reasons for learning, they were more adept at generating strategies for making relatively boring tasks more interesting.”

• “A review of the literature suggests that when children have to deal with dull materials, it places a drain on their ability to focus and slows down their reading and response time.”

• “Conversely, when they work with high interest materials, it ‘frees up’ some of their cognitive resources and makes their processing of information more efficient; this enables them to persist at the task and retain the material better” (Ainley & Hidi 2006).

[2] Set, Monitor and Attain Goals
How do we help, even inspire, students to get from here to there? In part, we articulate our goals in the classroom AND we help students frame their goals as well. We need to name the end game rather than assuming it—or having our students guess at it. And we need to join with our students in mapping out the route our journey will take along with our measures for determining our success. Jalongo focuses on two key points:

• “In order to set learners’ expectations for success, teachers need to share their goals and methods of evaluation with students and establish an emotional climate for success in classrooms.”

• “Evidence suggests that when achievement in a domain is attributed to effort rather than innate ability, students tend to perform better, assuming that value is attached to the goal in their society as well.”
Both Stevenson and Stigler’s work from the early 90’s and Carol Dweck’s more recent work on growth mindset support this argument.

[3] Capture Learners’ Attention
A graduate school professor of mine once shared a syllogism that applies here: “We understand what we remember. We remember what we pay attention to. We pay attention to what we want.” Capturing students’ attention is a sine qua non of enhancing their learning. Quite simply, if students do not pay attention, they do not learn. So how do we achieve that end? Jalongo offers several keen insights:

• “To learn, we first have to understand it: we have to make a connection to prior knowledge; and we have to want to learn it. . .Hook into what is important for your students’ lives, presently and in the future. Connect to what they already know” (Mack-Kirschner, 2005).

• “Tapping into the learners’ experiences and emotions generates interest because ‘personal and meaningful memories can be held in their brilliance while dry facts learned at school may soon fade away’ (Gilbert 2002).”

• “There is ample evidence that human beings are drawn to and remember material in narrative form much better than when the same material is presented as a list of facts.”

In his thought-provoking, often practical and thoroughly researched book Why Students Don't Like School, University of Virginia cognitive scientist Dan Willingham explores the power of story structure in memory and learning. Willingham lands on "four principles" (or the four Cs) of story: causality (events are causally related to one another), conflict (main character is unable to reach a goal), complications (sub-problems that arise from the main goal) and character ("A good story is built around strong, interesting characters, and the key to those qualities is action.")

• “Ask questions that are perplexing, paradoxical or unexpected. . .Good questions. . .help to build a commitment to thoughtful inquiry and reliance on authoritative resources.”

[4] Understand the Role of Choice in Learning
Jalongo brilliantly captures the complexity of the role of choice in learning. Quite rightly, she notes, “Many teachers assume that giving children a wide array of choices will lead to greater engagement and academic achievement; however, both the research and practical experience suggest this is not necessarily the case.”

Indeed, the nature and the context of the choices we give our students have everything to do with the degree to which these choices inspire engagement and motivation, and enhance learning. As Jalongo notes, “Choice involves making a judgment and, in the absence of information on how to render that decision, a huge range of options can backfire, causing students to disengage and rush through the task just to get it over with.”

Jalongo makes a distinction worth careful consideration: “One reason that choice is overrated is that research has tended to confound the variables of choice and interest (Flowerday, Schraw, & Stevens, 2004). In studies of choice, learners usually select something that interests them. Therefore, the positive effects on achievement attributed to choice may actually be attributable to interest.” This takes us back to part 1 of this blog entry and the essential role students’ interest in their motivation and learning.

Finally, on this point, Jalongo specifically addresses the kinds of choices we should consider giving out students: “Contrary to popular opinion, completely individualizing the curriculum is not the only way. It often is preferable to make the course of action—rather than topic—the place where students exercise the most choice.” The Northeast Foundation for Children’s Responsive Classroom’s extensive, well-researched and wonderfully practical recommendations on academic choice support Jalongo’s insights. In Learning Through Academic Choice, author Paula Denton notes that, essentially, teachers have two choices to offer students: [1] What to learn (content) and [2] How to learn it (process). Denton goes on to identify 3 key findings from 32 research studies that examined outcomes of providing choices to students K-12:


I. When students make choices about what and/or how they learn, they become more motivated to learn
· More likely to be on task
· More likely to incorporate use of positive learning behaviors and skills at own initiative
· Students with Academic Choice (AC) experience tend to prefer more challenging tasks and complete more of those tasks
· AC experiences support intrinsic motivation to learn

II. When students make choices about what and/or how to learn, they think harder and use more academic skills.

· AC enhances problem-solving and critical thinking skills.
· Those with AC experience show greater persistence in staying with difficult tasks and tend to set intrinsically motivated learning goals
· AC enhances creativity
· AC leads to more self-initiated editing and revision of work; more personal application of learning to students’ lives (transfer); and better organization, understanding, and ability to isolate variables in science experiments.

III. When students make choices about what and/or how to learn, they are more likely to behave in constructive ways and develop more friendships with a wider range of classmates.

· Taking initiative and making decisions has been shown to correlate with students’ attempts to solve problems through independent discussion reasoning (rather than tattling and fighting)
· Use of even minimal AC correlates with decreased disruptive behavior during AC times.
· In in-depth study of boy with significant learning and behavior issues, use of AC was associated with increases in student friendship and academic performance

[5] Build Students’ Skill in Self-Evaluation
Jalongo’s fifth recommendation focuses on the importance of “self-evaluation [as] a major mechanism for building intrinsic motivation.” Jalongo’s point here is simple: “If learners exercise control over when to move on to the next challenge, it helps build confidence and avert failure.” This, she argues, is one of the reasons children demonstrate such a passion for electronic games: “These learning situations put children in control and allow them to adjust and evaluate their performance.” In short, “self-evaluation is a major mechanism for building intrinsic motivation.”

* * * * * * * *

These five recommendations gain their chief importance as strategies for and approaches to cultivating in our students those "building blocks" that Dan Pink describes in his TED talk and his upcoming book Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us.

Autonomy: the urge to direct our own lives

Mastery: the desire to get better and better at something that matters

Purpose: the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves

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Motivation and Learning

What do author Dan Pink and Professor of Education Mary Renck Jalongo have in common?

A studied and compelling interest in motivation--and what both inspires and sustains it. Taken together, their core concepts and principles place motivation squarely in the center of learning and creativity. And while they approach motivation from very different contexts--Pink from the world of business and Jalongo from the world of children's education--they offer surprisingly complementary explanations of the nature of motivation--and, equally important, wonderfully complementary answers to the fundamental question: What motivates us to learn?



In his TED International Talk on "The Surprising Science of Motivation," author Dan Pink presents what appears to be an 18-minute precis of his upcoming book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. In brief, Pink argues that "there is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does" when it comes to motivating workers. And what does science know? Well, Pink has done his homework (along with extensive research, citing a staggering array of studies both national and international, including one by The United States Federal Reserve) and he notes that science knows three crucial things when it comes to motivation:

[1] Traditional extrinsic motivators do work, but only in a surprisingly narrow band of circumstances (i.e., simple, routine, linear tasks that do not involve problem solving or creativity--exactly the sorts of tasks that can be outsourced).

[2] Carrot and Stick/If-Then Rewards often squelch and even punish creativity. The prospect of a reward or punishment tends to focus thinking to the point of narrowing (or limiting) it and making the consideration of a wide variety of possibilities and perspectives less likely.

[3] The secret to high performance in 21st century tasks involving problem solving, innovation and creativity isn't rewards or punishments but the intrinsic drive to do things because they are meaningful and they matter.

If what we want is high performance in the area of 21st century tasks--those that involve creativity, problem solving, and conceptual agility and flexibility--then the old carrot and stick approach of reward and punishment is not the way to go. Specifically, Pink identifies three "building blocks" for the "new operating system of business"--building blocks that I believe apply equally well to teaching and learning in the 21st century:

Autonomy: the urge to direct our own lives

Mastery: the desire to get better and better at something that matters

Purpose: the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves

Enter Mary Renck Jalongo. Now, Professor Jalongo's Association of Childhood Education International (ACEI) position paper "Beyond Benchmarks and Scores: Reasserting the Role of Motivation and Interest in Children's Academic Achievement" moves far beyond the area of motivation. (In fact, the article contains the basic framework for an entire graduate course of study on translating learning theory into classroom practice. Truth is, if you have time to read only one educational research article this year, you couldn't possibly do better than this one.) But motivation is central to the piece--just as it is central to children's learning. Jalongo writes,

"Motivation refers to the reasons that individuals take action; motivation to learn is a current or recurrent desire to gain information, develop skills , and attain mastery."

Jalongo's analysis and synthesis of the research on the roles of interest and motivation in learning pivot on the following 12 concepts and principles:

+ Interest represents "an integration of feelings, motivation, and cognition" and "is arguably the most important form of intrinsic motivation." Interest is a sine qua non of learning.

+ Research on interest can be divided into three categories:

Situational Interest: a spontaneous and short-lived interest based on novelty, the child's curiosity or salient information from the experience itself (e.g., dissection of an owl pellet)

Individual Interest: unique to the individual and an enduring preference for a specific subject, topic, concepts or an activity. The basis for this kind of interest appears to be "prior knowledge, personal experience, level of skill and the emotions associated with the learning topic or experience."

Instructional Facilitation of Interest: the relative effectiveness of efforts by educators to engage the learners through attention to situational and/or individual interests.

+ "Intrinsic motivation results when the learning activity is rewarding in itself because it is interesting, exciting, challenging or otherwise engaging or meaningful."

+ "When learners see themselves as competent--or as capable of becoming competent--at a task, their intrinsic motivation increases."

+ "The teacher survival skill of our era just may be connecting interesting tasks to worthwhile academic achievement goals and, by so doing, increasing student motivation to learn."

+ Learners are motivated to learn when "they can reconcile the perceived value (i.e., reasons for doing/learning something) with the cost (i.e., expenditure of effort and emotional investment required to accomplish the learning)."

+ "When learners are interested, they are better able to focus attention, have more positive feelings about the learning experience, and are more likely to store the learning in long-term memory."

+ "The key is to set the level of difficulty at the point where the learner needs to stretch a bit and can accomplish the task with moderate support"--what Vygotsky termed the zone of proximal development.

+ "High ability matched with high challenge results in an optimal learning experience, low ability and high challenge results in frustration, and high ability and low challenge results in boredom"--all related to Csikszentmihalyi's concept of flow.

+ "Rewards have been found to increase motivation and interest in tasks that are of initial low interest."

+ "Although it is common to think of motivation as either extrinsic or intrinsic, it actually exists on a sort of continuum ranging from motives that are apart from the self to those that are deep within. . .So intrinsic motivation is not the 'ideal' while extrinsic is the 'real'; rather, the two can be reconciled and work in concert to motivate academic achievement."

+ "Instructional designs that promote motivation and interest emphasize three important variables:

1) autonomy--learners are given some options and leeway in the learning process so that they see the connections between their personal values and the environment;

2) competence: learners receive timely and useful feedback on their learning processes and success;

3) social relatedness--teachers accept and respect their students, thereby creating a supportive and relaxed learning atmosphere that encourages loyalty and cooperation."

Worth considering is this: How do Pink's notions of autonomy, mastery and purpose relate to Jalongo's ideas about interest and motivation?

In a nutshell, when educators focus on students' interests--and, in the process cultivate autonomy, competence and social relatedness--we leverage our students' feelings, motivation and cognition. And it is this combination of feelings, motivation and cognition that is the source of inspiring learning.

* * * * *

In the follow-up to this post, we will explore Jalongo's 5 recommendations for supporting children in reaching their full learning potential.

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Learning from Our Digital Natives

On October 13, we committed a professional development day to the exploration of the following question:

Preparing Our Students for a Future We Can’t Predict: What Do the Arts and Technology Have to Do with 21st Century Learning and Leading?

Over the coming months, my blog entries will occasionally focus on different aspects of this professional development day—and the many experiences and opportunities that have followed, and will continue to follow, from it.

One of the remarkable gifts of that day was a two-part presentation by a Carnegie Mellon sophomore named Anthony Chivetta—a presentation that Anthony made from his dorm room using Skype (video conferencing technology). In the first half of his presentation, we focused on Anthony’s thought-provoking video piece entitled “Three Lessons from High School.” I encourage you to click on the link and experience the presentation. It’s all of nine minutes, and worth every second.

For those who want to cut to the chase, Anthony’s three lessons were:

[1] Value the human relationships in your life.
• Give people the benefit of the doubt.
• Let people show their good side.
• Don’t be afraid to be amazed.
• Respect who people are.
• Don’t force people to choose you over other passions.
• Friends make things possible.

[2] Take pride in your work.
• The work we do is a projection of ourselves.
• Our lives are the sum of the actions we take.

[3] Find a role and do it well.
• “Act well your part, there all the honor lies.”
• There is nothing more rewarding than finding a job and doing it well.
• Be the person you want and would dare to be—and enjoy every minute of it.

The second half of Anthony’s presentation featured a piece entitled “Making Learning Relevant Through Expression.” Key points?

• We have moved from a read-only to a read/write culture.
• As teachers, how will you take advantage of your students’ desire to create?
• What do authentic “artifacts of learning” look like?
• How do you move in a classroom from information to knowledge to presentation (by students)?
• Are your students proud of their work? Should they be? What if they were?
• How do your students measure their self-worth?

The first half of Anthony’s presentation created the context for the second half. And in just 45 minutes, a 19 year-old college student, precisely the kind of digital native so brilliantly described in Palfrey and Gasser’s Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives, both challenged and inspired an entire faculty to embrace their students’ fundamental human desire & capacity to create through the arts and technology.

When asked what he thought made his generation different, perhaps, from previous generations, Anthony answered simply,

“As a generation, we have come to expect to design and create the world around us. And we can do so—including IN school—through the arts and technology, and often through a combination of the two.”

Anthony’s essential question for educators?

“How do you tap into your students’ desire to create and use that desire to make classroom activities more relevant and meaningful for them?”

Now that’s a question worth pursuing.

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Thinking Partnerships in the Age of Web 2.0

Over the past two and a half days, I have had the chance to engage in meaningful conversation with other heads of school from around the country at the Elementary School Heads Association (ESHA) Conference in Washington, D.C. At Summit, we call these kinds of conversations “thinking partnerships”—with each participant listening carefully and responding thoughtfully, always—in Stephen Covey’s powerful dictum—“seek[ing] first to understand, then to be understood.”

No question about it: Face-to-face dialogue, with the inevitable give & take and ebb & flow of personal contact, both renews the soul and enlivens the mind.

But what about the other 363 days when I am not attending the ESHA Conference with colleagues? How do I continue conversations with colleagues near and far? How do I deepen and ignite conversations? How do I draw others into conversation and leverage them as the skilled, wise thinking partners they are—or could be were I to “connect” with them more often?

One option is to join Twitter. Now, I’ve had a Twitter identity for over a year, and up to today have not leveraged it. Truth is I’ve been missing an important opportunity.

In attending a session this morning on the use of social media in schools, I gained a window into the utility and power of Twitter. During the social media session, I learned about a one-minute video that explores the importance of Twitter for educators. But as I sat down to write this entry, I couldn’t for the life of me remember the name of the video or how to locate it. So, after a fruitless on-line search, I posted my first tweet in over a year:

“Anyone familiar with the 1 minute video on why educators should use Twitter? I've heard of it but don't know where to find it. . .”

While I’ve yet to hear from anyone with url information on the video, a handful of followers have sent me links to all kinds of other sources on the topic of leveraging Twitter in teaching and learning. For example, these links are well worth pursuing:

• Carol Cooper-Taylor’s 50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Education

• Paul Boag’s 8 Useful Tips to Become Successful with Twitter

• Twitter for Beginners

• A Teacher’s Guide to Twitter

• Darren Rowse’s How to Use Twitter – Tips for Bloggers

The really amazing part of my first tweet in over a year, however, was this: as a result of scanning for responses to my tweet, I discovered a number of interesting, compelling and even inspiring tweets, including:

• Information on a live webcast of writer and researcher Lucy Calkins’ webcast discussion on literacy

• A link to the national gallery of writing and a related ning

• An invitation to a ning (on-line network of folks with common interests) that focuses on teaching and learning in independent schools.

+ A brilliant blog piece by Larry Cuban entitled “Deja Vu All Over Again: Individualized Reading Resurfaces as Reading Workshop”

In short, in reaching out to a small (but growing!) group of folks for support, I stepped into a rich, diverse and ongoing conversation about teaching and learning beyond my campus, city and state. In just a few minutes, I was able to engage in a much larger conversation, connecting with issues and opportunities beyond the four walls of my school, related to the work to which we are committed as educators.

The sessions at the Elementary School Heads Association Conference over the past two and half days have been energizing and renewing. But when I’m not able to travel--or even leave campus--one viable source of meaningful conversation and professional development can begin with a trip to Twitter.

Post Script (October 23, 2009)
Here is the video that prompted my original tweet--and, eventually, led to this post.

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To Remain an Artist as One Grows Up: The Role of Creativity in Learning & Leading in the 21st Century

In our opening faculty meeting this year, we viewed a remarkable TED talk by Sir Ken Robinson, author of the recently published book The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything. Robinson’s talk pivoted on a single point that has spawned an essential question for our faculty.

His point? “Creativity is as important in the education of our children as literacy. And we should treat it with the same status.”

The essential question in front of us? How do educators prepare children for a future we cannot predict?




Of course our question follows from Robinson’s point. As so many writers, think tanks and publications have argued (from Daniel Pink in A Whole New Mind to the New Commission on the Skills of the American Work Force in Tough Choices or Tough Times), creativity and innovation are keys in serving and sustaining 21st century learners and leaders. According to Tough Choices or Tough Times, to better prepare our children for the global market place, American schools must more effectively simulate the “artistic, investigative, highly social [and] entrepreneurial environments” of the world outside the classroom. Why? For a simple and profound reason: “The crucial new factor, the one that alone can justify higher wages in this country than in other countries with similar levels of cognitive skills, is creativity and innovation.”

Robinson argues that schools of the 21st century have the fundamental obligation of tapping into and cultivating children’s extraordinary capacities for creativity and innovation—of addressing Pablo Picasso’s jarring assessment: “All children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as [one] grows up.” Robinson notes:

“Kids will take a chance. If they don’t know, they’ll have a go. They’re not frightened of being wrong. Now I’m not saying that being wrong is the same as being creative. But what we do know is if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.”

One take home point, then, for educators, is to create contexts in school where intellectual, creative and problem-solving risk-taking are encouraged and refined. Robinson passionately argues that “by the time children become adults, they have become frightened of being wrong. . .We stigmatize mistakes.” When we do this in schools, he argues, we “educate children out of their creative capacities”—the very capacities that will serve them as adult learners and leaders in all walks of life throughout the 21st century.

Robinson contends that it is education that is meant to take our children and this world into “this future that we cannot grasp.” And our evolving view of 21st century education must, he argues, include a deep commitment to cultivating creativity and innovation. He defines creativity as “the process of having original ideas that have value.” And he argues that these original ideas, more often than not, come through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things. Yes, we must continue to engage our students in exploring a wide variety of disciplines and the rich ways of knowing associated with those disciplines. And we must do so in ways that honor a dynamic and diverse view of intelligence—one that, for example, embraces the importance of the arts and the sciences with equal passion and commitment.

So, how do we prepare our children for a future we cannot predict? We start, in Sir Ken Robinson’s words, by “See[ing] our creative capacities for the richness they are and our children for the hope they are. Our task is to educate their whole being so they can face this future. We may not see this future but they will. And our job is to help them make something of it.”

Here’s to a new school year filled will creativity, innovation, and unleashing the human imagination!

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“Both/And Thinking” and the Five Strands of Mathematical Proficiency

Too often in education examination of important questions can devolve into shouting matches, producing cacophony rather than providing clarity. Why does this happen? Frequently we fall into a trap, what the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) essay entitled “Moving from Either/Or to Both/And Thinking in Early Childhood Practice” describes as

“a recurring tendency in the American discourse on education: the polarizing into either/or choices of many questions that are more fruitfully seen as both/and. For example, heated debates have broken out about whether children in the early grades should receive whole-language or phonics instruction, when, in fact, the two approaches are quite compatible and most effective in combination.” (Developmentally Appropriate Practice in Early Childhood Programs, p. 23)

Both/And thinking marks the work of the National Research Council (NRC) in their landmark monograph Helping Children Learn Mathematics, which outlines steps for cultivating mathematical proficiency in our students. Rather than joining in the endless (and fruitless) “math wars,” the National Research Council, under the aegis of the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education, conducted a study of what research reveals about “successful mathematics learning from the preschool years through eighth grade.” The NRC carried out a three-part charge:

1. Synthesize the rich and diverse research on pre-kindergarten through eighth grade mathematics learning.
2. Provide research-based recommendations for teaching, teacher education and curriculum for improving student learning and to identify areas where research is needed.
3. Give advice ad guidance to educators, researchers, publishers, policy makers, and parents. (p.7)

The National Research Council’s “five strands of mathematical proficiency” offer a rich and complex view of the teaching and learning of mathematics—one which flies in the face of the “either/or” thinking that has dominated the shed-more- heat-than-light arguments of the past ten years. The NRC’s meta-research identifies “five strands” of mathematical proficiency. Rather than advocating only computational fluency or only conceptual understanding, the NRC notes the following:

“When people advocate only one strand of proficiency, they lose sight of the overall goal. . . . [S]ome people who have emphasized the need for students to master computations have assumed that understanding would follow. Others, focusing on students’ understanding of concepts, have assumed that skill would develop naturally. By using these five strands, we have attempted to give a more rounded portrayal of successful mathematics learning” (pp. 12, 10).

In other words, we needn’t choose between computational fluency and conceptual understanding. Our students need both—and more. The NRC’s five strands of mathematical proficiency are as follows:

• Conceptual understanding: a student’s grasp of fundamental mathematical ideas. One not only knows isolated facts and procedures but one knows why a mathematical idea is important and the contexts in which it is useful.

• Procedural fluency (computing): skill in carrying out mathematical procedures flexibly, accurately, efficiently, and appropriately. This includes being fluent with procedures such as adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing whether using pencil and paper or mentally. It also can include procedures from algebra, geometry, and statistics. Fluency can be defined as having the skill to perform the procedure quickly, accurately, and flexibly.

• Strategic competence (applying): ability to formulate, represent, and solve mathematical problems. A student should learn not only to solve routine problems but also apply the same problem solving techniques to invent a solution to a non-routine problem.

• Adaptive reasoning: capacity for logical thought, reflection, explanation, and justification. Reasoning connects all areas of math through logical connections between concepts and situations. Reasoning also interacts with the other strands of mathematical proficiency, especially when one is trying to solve a problem.

• Productive disposition (engaging): habitual inclination to see mathematics as sensible, useful, and worthwhile, coupled with a belief in diligence and one’s own efficacy. Students who are engaged in mathematics believe they can solve problems as well as learn concepts and procedures even if it requires effort. They view mathematical proficiency as an important part of their future.

These five strands are interwoven and interdependent. It is difficult to develop one strand without impacting another. Learning all of the strands of mathematical proficiency solidifies not only one’s knowledge base but also one’s flexibility in using these skills in new or novel situations. And that’s the point: 21st century students must, above all else, be adept at learning how to learn. As educators, we must both model this kind of learning AND create the optimum context for it. Both/And Thinking can help us do precisely that.

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