Building a Growth Mindset

The presentation started with a slide of a baby sporting a Harley headrag and smoking pot. The speaker says, “Baby’s aren’t born non-learners; they aren’t born with a fixed mindset.” A powerful image to support Carol Dweck’s 45-minute argument that we have the power to help all students move or maintain a growth mindset and it is incumbent upon us as educators to make sure that our classrooms are places carefully constructed to nurture that thinking. Enter, The Architecture of Learning by Kevin D. Washburn. While Dweck clearly outlines why and what we should encourage in young people, Washburn gives a detailed blueprint on how to create that in the classroom.

One of the elements of Washburn’s work that I find most compelling is his insistence that we are more intentional in anchoring students’ learning in what they already know. He states, “As stimuli enter the brain, neural networks search for patterns. When patterns are recognized, the brain recalls relevant prior experiences and merges new stimuli with known concepts to construct meaning and understanding” (91). While I think Elementary level teachers base their practice on this strategy, something happens on the way to high school where we just assume that students will either do this for themselves or it is no longer necessary for these connections to exist in order for them to comprehend the material. We would be fools to think that students would naturally make connections in their mind between something they already know and Shakespeare. I think this is also how our students fall into fixed mindsets. Without the understanding that they can build new pathways in their brains by connecting to things they already know, many students see things in a fixed manner: something is already determined.

Dweck explained a study she and her colleagues completed which monitored brain function in students as they took a test, got the results and were shown the correct answers. Her research showed that fixed mindset students stopped paying attention once the grade was displayed; growth mindset students stayed focused through the grade to find out the correct answers. Often as she is talking to students about nurturing a growth mindset she tells them, “you are growing neurons.” Washburn cites James E. Zull on the same topic; “We cannot understand anything unless we create internal neuronal networks that reflect some set of physical relationships that accurately map the relationships in the concept” (37). We need to help students build those networks and students need to understand the process of their learning. The Architecture of Learning outlines these steps: “Experience provides the new data that will be used to construct new knowledge. Comprehension provides the content and structure of the developing knowledge. Elaboration emphasizes the organization of component of comprehension by relating similar previous experiences. Application engages the brain in recall of the labeled and sorted data” (33).

Supporting a growth mindset is about praising effort and process. Washburn provides the perfect framework for educators to build experiences for students where they can struggle, deal with confusion, work towards a goal and be passionate about their work: “Authentic learning requires a motivated learner” (45). Authentic learning is a growth mindset.

Challenging Preconceived Notions: Differentiation and Assessment

I am the product of Duepner and Mittler and if you were to apply all stereotypes and generalities about the descendants of such strong German lines, you wouldn’t be too far off base judging me. My colleagues have asked me to apply or restrain my “Inner German” in various circumstances and, with all things, it hinders or aides from time to time. My recent week of examining assessment with Dean Shareski, Andrew Churches and completing the book by Rick Wormeli, Fair Isn’t Always Equal, has challenged my “Inner German” more than the competition in the World Cup’s Group D.

Andrew Churches and Dean Shareski both mentioned in their sessions that grading is one of the most polarizing conversations you could have with a group of teachers. It seems that we all have a preconceived idea of what grading should be (Churches suggests that is almost solely based in how we were graded) and we rarely move too far away from our model. Well, my immersion in this topic may be just enough to get me to move away from some of my previously strongly held beliefs.

The first issue will seem completely obvious to folks and I boldly am professing my ignorance as an educator. It is the premise that grading and assessment need to reflect mastery. It seems that discussions of this sort always lend themselves to sports analogies, but while my teams are judged by their win and loss record, the final destination is the State tournament and we will be remembered for our performance there. If we lose a few games along the way, it is very clearly wiped cleaned by our exhibition of mastery in the final contest and a resulting championship. Wormeli says “ In differentiated classrooms we grade on a trend, emphasizing patterns of progress over time. We don’t hold a student’s past performances against him or her” (159). This is a challenge to my thinking because it removes the absolute of what the numbers declare. Wormeli suggests that the solution is trusting ourselves as educators and professionals to assess the progress of our students. My fear with this thinking is that it will take the rigor out of the classroom. But Wormeli and others argue that it will allow you to push your students further in the pursuit of mastery and that the use of well-constructed rubrics are a huge help as well. So now I examine grades not as a reflection of your behavior as a citizen of our classroom and your ability to produce certain results on a certain day, but as a reflection of each students trend toward mastery.

Here are a few other topics that came up:
· Don’t penalize for late work
· Don’t ever put in a zero
· Don’t offer extra credit
· Don’t penalize grades for absences or behavior issues
· Don’t grade homework
· Do tier assessments
· Do engage students’ creativity and problem solving skills: climb higher on Bloom’s Taxonomy
· Do allow students the freedom of choice
· Do create better assessment tools
· Do give lots of formative assessment opportunities followed by “Knowledge of Correct Results with Specific Actions to Reduce the Gap” (Churches)
· Do have students spend time reflecting on their own progress as learners

Each of these has a much longer explanation with plenty of research to support it and are not all as alarming as they may seem. But the bottom line for me is that it has forced me to be a “Reflective Practitioner,” as Dean Shareski mentioned, and truly ask myself why I grade, what I grade, how I grade and what is truly the best for judging mastery and helping students understand themselves as learners.

Keeping the Village Connected

I am lucky enough to work at a school that is involved in the Take2Video project. Essentially, schools are provided with high-def documentary footage of either Sudan or Cuba and are charged with the responsibility of creating something of note. Last year my co-teacher and I embarked on this journey with the footage of Sudan and while watching our students create an amazing documentary had an experience that truly defined our thoughts on education in the 21st century. This year, we are back for round two with the Cuba footage. Here is where the story begins.

One group of students is working on a documentary about the cars of Cuba and needed to know if the cars they were using were American, thus supporting the argument they were building about the effects of the embargo on all aspects of Cuban life. Since they knew very little of cars, as did I, I offered my father’s assistance. My dad grew up in the age where young men bought cars and worked on them in the driveway, where they took pride in figuring out how things worked and making masterpieces out of nothing. (I hesitate to mention to my father that he might have more in common with Cubans than he realizes.) So the students sent me 25 screen shots of various vehicles and in less than an hour, my father had responded with their make, model and year. Viola!

Those that choose to argue against technology, often point to the faceless interactions that it provides and how people truly are not connected. This recent example of our being able to tap into my father’s expertise and his willingness and availability to answer our questions, almost immediately, clearly argue against this. In this case, with this project and this task, technology allowed three people who may never have come in contact to connect. I can’t think of a more worthwhile purpose.

In the several weeks since Educon 2.2, I have spent quite a bit of time trying to frame what I have learned and puzzle it all together. Jim Heynderickx made some great observations in his conversation, “Many to Many—How Entire School Communities Can Collaborate.” I have to credit his session with helping me brainstorm ways to get more and more people connected inside and outside of our school. I really enjoyed his idea of having multiple generations of students networking and collaborating. I know many of them do this unofficially on Facebook, but I would rather turn that power toward the task of inquiry just as we did with the cars of Cuba.

So I guess this is a long-winded response to those who say that technology eats away at our humanity, I would argue the opposite, and that it helps keep the village together.

*Image from Take2Video, Karin Muller

Making Connections Meaningful

College football bowl season is drawing to an end, and while some are breathing a sigh of relief, I am saddened as it marks the beginning of seven dismal months until it starts up again. While I bristle when I hear coaches say that they coach young men how to succeed in life, certainly football and life and some similarities, I will acknowledge that all sports have lessons to teach. The best lesson I can see is that in an age where teenagers are accused of being completely self-involved (see The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in an Age of Entitlement), team sports are an area where they are forced to cooperate if they truly want to succeed. Essentially, they have to give up their own sense of self and join the whole in order to secure the big prize, often a championship of some sort, that they could not garner as an individual. (One could easily argue that this is still a form of self-promotion.)

Christakis and Fowler make some interesting observations about individuals’ desires to be part of something rather than alone in their book Connected. They suggest that humans are truly social beings and that “the function of loneliness is to promote reconnection” (56). So we don’t really want to go it alone and here we have contrasting messages. Teenagers want to be the center of attention, but they want to be a part of a network as well. Of course that answer seems clear enough, you can’t be the center of attention if there is no one there to pay attention to you.

Examining this concept of team and taking this desire to be networked brings me to my current quandary. I had the great opportunity this week to give a presentation at the truly amazing St. George’s School in Newport, Rhode Island. Their faculty is clearly top-notch and with all of these presentations, I certainly take away more than I offer. But after presenting many of my ideas on how to integrate technology into the teaching of English, there were some pointed questions. One was about assessment; one was what do you take out (both of these are age old) and the third, (another dinosaur of a question, but still just as relevant today as years before) how do you deal with group projects. Needless to say, I really had no answers to any of these questions, and I took a stab at each. But the cooperative question truly stuck in my mind due to this book Connected as well as the fact that this is why we try to sell technology to teachers. We preach that we can truly generate an authentic audience and better collaboration through the use of these web 2.0 tools and other technology. Terrific, still doesn’t solve the age-old problem of one kid doesn’t do the work and another does. Christakis and Fowler have a label for these collaborators and free loaders and they suggest that a network often doesn’t work without a punisher (220). Now it has been suggested that I have a heavy hand in my classroom, but I really am not interested in taking on the title of punisher in each of the collaborative projects I create for the classroom. (I think the title of grader is certainly more than enough.) So how do we create these group projects so that they don’t need a punisher. The only answer I can see is to create a situation where the students feel like they need each other. They have to see that the only way they can achieve the goal, and the goal has to be attractive enough to all involved that they want to pursue it, is by working together. Just like a team, you can only win the championship when all of the disparate parts are working in tandem, we have to create the same environment in these group projects. Whether it is a combination of skill sets (you need linemen and quarterbacks) or a multiplicity of voices, it needs to be clear that the goal cannot be reached alone.

So how do we translate all of this into group projects in the classroom? First we need to examine all of the projects we have previously deemed necessary as group projects. We as educators seem sold on the value of collaboration, but bristle at the idea of doing it ourselves. So why would students be any different, yet they flock to each other on Facebook. The challenge continues that we must harness the power and desire for a network into projects we deem valuable in the classroom if only for the purpose of teaching the simple lesson that individuals can achieve far more as a collective group than by themselves. As Christakis and Fowler put it, “All of these challenges require us to recognize that although human beings are individually powerful, we must act together to achieve what we could not accomplish on our own…The miracle of social networks in the modern world is that they unite us with other human beings and give us the capacity to cooperate on a scale so much larger than the one experienced in our ancient past” (304). Through this we can thwart the constant bemoaning of teenagers (and adults) of what can I do, I am only one person. Tell that to the Obama campaign or to the protesters of the Iranian elections this summer: One person did quite a bit.

The Visual Literacy Imperative

I’m not going to lie, I like Youtube. When my brain is fried, but I’m not quite ready to go to bed, there is nothing better that some video of a cat chasing a flashlight into a wall or a dog spinning around imitating the sound of the blender. Truly the world is a better place. With the arrival of the video function on the iPod Nano and the rise in popularity of the Flip camera, I can only hope that there will be more videos of squirrels drunk on fermented pumpkins.

But the proliferation of video has me keenly interested in how this affects our students’ view of the world. We already knew they demand more stimulation of their senses than previous generations, that they see the world in splashes of color and now clearly they see it constantly in motion. As an English teacher, how do I continue to engage learners with what must seem the most mundane of media: the printed word? Maybe even more importantly, how do I help these students understand the millions of images they are being bombarded with hourly?

First of all, I think we have to acknowledge that it is here to stay. Whether it is a simple project making a video of a scene from Shakespeare or shooting a video for the SAT Vocab contest, this is something these students like to do and it sticks in their brains. But now it is also incumbent upon us to help them understand what they are seeing. The iPod Nano comes with video effects from Thermal to Sepia to Motion Blur. In my mind, there is no difference between determining the result of an effect applied to a video and understanding the goal of an author when using a specific tone in his work. While they think it is easier to determine this visually, it is simply because they have more practice and exposure to visual media rather that words on a page. If they read as much as they watched television, surfed the net and went to movies, we would have rhetorical geniuses.

There is no doubt that we feel the pressure to add more and more to our classes everyday, and believe it or not, I am now advocating one more addition. We need to teach students visual literacy. To help them understand how they are being manipulated by images, but also how they can take control of those images to tell their own stories. Just as Mike Masnik wrote on Techdirt that technology has not been the end to writing, but has bolstered it, video will not be the end to books. Students will always need some place to look for ideas whether it is to react to them or mimic them. Books will thrive hand in hand with the visual age: It is our job to help students see that this is truly a perfect match.

The Big Green Monster

Every Mother’s Day, my mom and I go to the nursery and pick out flowers for our gardens. This year, I decided to try my hand at vegetables as well. I bought two cherry tomato plants and some cilantro. Well, the cilantro died almost immediately, but my tomato plants chugged along until early in the summer before they started to take over my entire yard. Finally, in late July the tomatoes started to arrive and they haven’t slowed down since. I have picked literally hundreds of tiny tomatoes and that does count the ones my dogs have gotten away with. While this process must be rather entertaining for the neighbors, every afternoon I high hurdle over the fence that ineffectively protects the plant from the dogs and then crawl under the plant and paw through the leaves trying to find all the little red gems.

For the past few days, as I have been bobbing and weaving my way around the green monster, I have thought that this activity is the perfect metaphor for using technology in the classroom. The key to finding all of the tomatoes is looking at the leaves from literally 50 different directions. They hide under branches and leaves and every new way you hold your head looking at the plant, you literally stumble upon another handful of tomatoes. Similarly, through twitter networks and RSS feeds, teachers are literally looking in hundreds of different directions and every so often, they discover a new tool or strategy to implement in the classroom. Each day that I am out in my tomato patch, I smile thinking about what the neighbors must think and laugh at my dogs waiting patiently outside the fence hoping for a snack. I also relish the aerobic/pilates-like activity this has become and find the search as relaxing and enjoyable as the reward. My hope is that this holds true for folks in the classroom as well. Just like we hope for our students to enjoy the journey of learning as much as the results, I hope teachers enjoy the pursuit of new technologies as much as the actual reward of finding something new to implement in their classrooms.

Is Tech Where It’s At?

I am staring out of a rainy window in Memphis having just finished the Lausanne Laptop Institute. Having done a reasonable amount of traveling lately, I have been overly exposed to the public and its ridiculous habits. Without going on a tirade about people’s absurd behavior when exiting a plane, I keep thinking of the constant cell phone conversations that I got to overhear in the past two weeks. They almost always started with “Where you at?” Well, despite the grating of terrible grammar, it does give me pause to think. After a summer of heavy reading and a couple presentations here at Luasanne, I can’t help but pause to think about where we are “at.”

One thing that has been perfectly clear to me is the success of the launch of our one to one program. Those that know me know that I was not for laptops in any form and was brought reluctantly into this whole process. But I must applaud Elizabeth Helfant and my colleagues who did some serious heavy lifting in the years prior so that once the magic day arrived, almost one year ago, it was as seamless and meaningful as possible.

Despite this success, I am still left wondering about and assessing the role of technology in education. Thomas Newkirk in his book Holding on to Good Ideas in a Time of Bad Ones discusses the early mechanization of education where many thought of a good education as a factory churning out identical products. He quotes one expert of the time as saying, “Teachers cannot be permitted to follow caprice in method. When a method which is clearly superior to all other methods has been discovered, it alone can be employed. To neglect this function and to excuse one’s negligence by proclaiming the value of the freedom of the teacher was perhaps justifiable under our earlier empiricism, when supervisors were merely promoted teachers and on the scientific side knew little more about standards and methods than the rank and file” (18). He goes on to discuss how in the process of reforming education, too much attention was given to research and little was paid to the actual classroom teachers and their “wisdom of practice” (19). At first this may seem like a perfect argument for technology and a way to convince the reluctant adopters. But as a classroom teacher, I support the “wisdom of practice.” All of this makes me worry, even just for a minute, as so many of these experts that travel around and educate us about technology use in the classroom have been out of the classroom for years. Are we walking down the same slippery slope that Newkirk is describing?

David Warlick recently discussed the results of two polls he ran. The first stated that teachers could still be good teachers without the use of technology and the second claimed that a teacher that is not using technology in the classroom is not doing his job. How can these results possibly exist side by side? Where will these two points converge?

All of this is not a drawn out way to announce that I am abandoning the tech side of the world. That would be impossible: I just joined Facebook. It is simply a cautionary note that we not go blindly into this new world. I believe that technology makes the classroom a more dynamic student-centered learning environment. I simply hope that we stop, look at what we are doing, reassess and make sure that our original reasons are still sound or that our new ones are even more solid. I know that my students are engaged in the literature and the class and writing sooner and more often with the use of technology. In the absence of hard date and research, this will just have to do for now. Finally, this is also a pledge from me that I redouble my efforts to make sure that on the eve of this new school year, I am doing everything I can to make sure my classroom is the best place possible for the students who will reside there these next nine months.