A Journey, Not a Race

What is the value of living in dialogue with one another?

We could ask any one of the 300 educators, parents and community members who, this past Tuesday, attended the first of six sessions in the 2011-2012 Summit School Inspiring Learning Series: the film Race to Nowhere. The film has been described as a “call to action for parents, families, educators and policy makers to challenge current assumptions on how to best prepare the youth of America to become healthy, bright, contributing and leading citizens.” The film finds its roots in the voice and vision of one woman who reaches out to all who will listen—and who invites us to collaborate: to rethink who we are and what we value as families, as schools and as a society.

Like the film, Summit’s Inspiring Learning Series offers an invitation: to learn, to ask questions, to have meaningful conversations. This series is about bringing parents and educators together to explore how we can be better parents, better educators and better advocates for our children.

This film and our Inspiring Learning Series call us to engage each other—not just about the challenges and demands of culture, society and institutions but about the conscious choices and decisions we make within and for our families.

In the final few minutes of the film, producer and co-director Vicki Abeles provides a call to action, listing what students, parents, teachers, administrators and medical professionals can do in the face of this race to nowhere. That list appears below. I invite you to read it and post your thoughts and questions.

This is the value of living in dialogue with one another.

Students

· Speak to the adults in your life about how you are feeling.

· Get plenty of sleep

· Unplug, slow down and make time for things you enjoy.

· Limit extra-curriculars and AP classes.

· Learn about the impact of caffeine and performance-enhancing medications.

Parents

· Discuss what success means to your family.

· Reduce performance pressure.

· Avoid over-scheduling.

· Allow time for play, family, downtime and sleep.

· Focus on the “right fit” for college rather than the “best” college.

· Attend school board meetings where education policies are established.

Teachers

· Become knowledgeable about the research on homework and the importance of play and downtime.

· See what happens when you assign less homework.

· Empower students with more voice and choice in the classroom.

· Develop methods to evaluate children without tests.

· Share your voice on policies impacting education.

Administrators

· Create a culture that supports the “whole child.”

· Address sources of stress for children, educators and families.

· Support “multiple pathways” in school integrating academics with career and technical education.

· Institute homework-free weekends, holiday breaks and summers.

· Consider a later start time for the school day.

· Schedule time for recess, physical activity, study halls and breaks.

· Create calendars to reduce conflicting demands on students.

· Support open communication between teachers, parents and students.

Medical Professionals

· Recognize the signs of youth stress – headaches, stomachaches, dizziness, chest pain, change in appetite and sleep patterns.

· Educate parents on the signs of depression in adolescents.

· Create awareness on the impact of the use of caffeine and prescription medications.

· Add your voice on the connection between health and education.

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Reaching Their Full Potential: 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 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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What Motivates us to Learn?

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 an 18-minute precis of his 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."

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.

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Just How Important Is a Good Night's Rest?

“Around the world, children get an hour’s less sleep than they did 30 years ago. . .The surprise is not merely that sleep matters—but how much it matters. . . . [C]hildren’s brains are a work in progress until the age of 21, and because much of that work is done while a child is asleep, this lost hour appears to have an exponential impact on children that it simply doesn’t have on adults.” -- Bronson and Merryman in Nurture Shock

As we enter a new school year, an important but too often neglected topic moves front and center--a topic that many parents dismiss with a sigh or a wave of the hand and one that children and adolescents respond to with an "arghh."

How Much Sleep Do You Really Need?

Age	Sleep Needs
Newborns (0-2 months)	12 - 18 hours
Infants (3-11 months)	14 - 15 hours
Toddlers	12 – 14 hours
Preschoolers	11 – 13 hours
School-age children	10 – 11 hours
Teens	8.5 – 9.25 hours
Adults	7-9 hours

Source: National Sleep Foundation

How often have you burned the candle at both ends—staying up late and getting up early? Perhaps you figured, as many of us do, that you could “catch up” another night—or over the weekend. And how often do your kids stay up late doing homework (following an athletic contest or other event); get an extra 30 minutes to an hour of 'quality time' with an over-worked, time-bankrupt parent; or actively engage in some form of social media until the wee hours—yet rise early for school? Again, perhaps you thought, as many do, that while not the best situation, kids are resilient and it’s no big deal.

According to researchers and authors Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman in their chapter “The Lost Hour” (from Nurture Shock: New Thinking about Children), lack of sleep is a big deal—one that takes a profound toll on children and adolescents, undermining academic performance and emotional stability while contributing to the international obesity epidemic and the rise of ADHD.

Several key points from their research are particularly relevant to both parents and educators. I list the points below by topic—and offer a brief reflection.

Academic Performance

· “. . .performance gap caused by an hour’s difference in sleep was bigger than the gap between a normal fourth-grader and a normal sixth-grader. Which as another way of saying that a slightly-sleepy sixth grader will perform in class like a mere fourth-grader.”

· “Sleep disorders can impair children’s IQ as much as lead poisoning.”

· “Teens who received A’s averaged about fifteen more minutes sleep than the B students, who in turn averaged fifteen more minutes than the C’s and so on.”

· “Sleep loss debilitates the body’s ability to extract glucose from the bloodstream. Without this stream of basic energy, one part of the brain suffers more than the rest—the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for what’s called ‘Executive Function.’ Among these executive functions are the orchestration of thoughts to fulfill a goal, prediction of outcomes, and perceiving consequences of actions.”

· “The more you learned during the day, the more you need to sleep that night. . .[M]emories are enhanced and concretized during the night—new inferences and associations are drawn, leading to insights the next day.”

Emotional Stability

· “[T]he emotional context of a memory affects where it gets processed. Negative stimuli get processed by the amygdala; positive or neutral memories get processed by the hippocampus. Sleep deprivation hits the hippocampus harder than the amygdala. The result is that sleep-deprived people fail to recall pleasant memories, yet recall gloomy memories just fine.”

· “Sleep loss for teenagers is a special challenge. . .the circadian system—the biological clock—does a ‘phase shift’ that keeps adolescents up later. In prepubescents and grownups, when it gets dark outside, the brain produces melatonin, which makes us sleepy. But adolescent brains don’t release melatonin for another 90 minutes. . .Awakened at dawn by alarm clocks, teen brains are still releasing melatonin.”

· “Several scholars have noted that many hallmark traits of modern adolescence—moodiness, impulsiveness, disengagement—are also symptoms of chronic sleep deprivation. Might our culture-wide perceptions of what it means to be a teenager be unwittingly skewed by the fact they don’t get enough sleep?”

· "An hour more of sleep improved students' quality of life."

Obesity

· “Dr. Eve Van Cauter discovered a ‘neuroendocrine cascade’ which links sleep to obesity. Sleep loss increases the hormone ghrelin, which signals hunger, and decreases its metabolic opposite, leptin, which suppresses apptetite.”

· “Those kids who get less than 8 hours sleep have a bout a 300% higher rate of obesity than those who get a full ten hours of sleep.”

· “. . .kids who don’t sleep well are often too tired to exercise—it’s been shown that the less sleep kids get, the less active they are during the day. So the net calorie burn, after a good night’s rest is higher.”

* * * * *

The research behind Bronson and Merryman's analysis is compelling--even overwhelming--taking up 10 full pages in the "Selected Sources and References" section of their book. There is little doubt that sleep represents a crucial component of children's and adolescents' health and well-being.

So, what to do?

One strong recommendation from sleep researchers Mary Carskadon (Brown University) and Mark Mahowald (Director of the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center) is to move the start time for high school later. When high schools in Edina, Minnesota changed from 7:25 a.m. to 8:30 a.m., SAT scores soared. And with young adults responsible for more than half of the 100,000 fall asleep automobile accidents annually, careful examination of later start times is well worth considering--even amid the many logistical hurdles, including bus schedules, sports schedules, and morning rush hour--all "adult convenience excuses" the researchers note.

An area of real potential for pre-high schoolers--children whose circadian system has not undergone the "phase shift" that keeps adolescents up later--is what Bronson and Merryman call the "slush hour," the last hour of a child's day. Bronson and Merryman describe this time as "a rush to sleep and a slush fund of potential time, sort of a petty cash drawer from which we withdraw ten minute increments." Worth considering is this: The research tells that increments of sleep time even as small as ten or fifteen minutes have an impact on the quality of children's lives.

If parents were to treat that final hour as the first hour of sleep--as an investment in their children's health and well being--as opposed to a slush fund that increases their children's sleep debt, that lost hour would be found. And our children would be the better for it.

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