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"content": "\u003cp>Jasmine Bankhead went to a traditional teacher prep program in the early 2000s. She took about a year’s worth of coursework that was all pretty general. Bankhead was expecting to learn a lot when she did her student teaching. But on her first day, she says, “my mentor teacher, she came in, we talked for a few minutes, and she was like, ‘OK, I’ll be in the library from now on.’ And just like that, I was by myself. And although I complained a little bit to my student teaching supervisor, I still felt like I was expected to make it work.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jennifer Green did a nontraditional program back in the 1990s. She got five weeks of training in things like “introduction to classroom management” and “introduction to planning.” Then she was a teacher, in a huge, struggling high school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I would come in in the morning. I would close the door,” she says. “I would struggle through the day. I would cry three times a week after my third period, which was my most challenging group of students. I would dust myself off. I would tell my fourth period class that I had terrible allergies and that’s why my eyes were so red.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She says she got no help. The first time an administrator came to check on her it was January -- and the administrator just needed to know if she had enough textbooks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Green and Bankhead both wanted to become great teachers. But the system didn’t seem set up to help them do it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s a pervasive American myth that good teachers are born, not made, and that good teachers have a set of inborn traits that naturally blossom as they figure the job out on their own. To get better teachers, the theory goes, schools need to find more people with those traits. The other myth is that teaching is easy -- the work involves children and the content is pretty basic, so it must be easy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Teaching is complex work that people actually have to be taught to do,” says Deborah Loewenberg Ball, dean of the School of Education at the University of Michigan. Ball spent years as an elementary school teacher and was always praised for being a “natural,” but she says teaching never came easily. She worked hard at her job.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now, she’s trying to dramatically change teacher training to focus on the specific knowledge and skills that teachers need to effectively help students. Understanding math and knowing how to teach it are \u003ca href=\"http://www.americanradioworks.org/segments/thinking-about-math-from-someone-elses-perspective/\">two separate skills\u003c/a>. And understanding how to teach math well doesn’t come naturally.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>People who want to be teachers “deserve to learn how to do this work well,” Ball says. “And the children that they teach particularly deserve to have those teachers taught.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_42512\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1024px\">\u003cimg class=\"size-full wp-image-42512\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2015/10/tesfae-jackson.jpg\" alt=\"Teaching resident Grace Tesfae (left) working with students at Cesar Chavez Academy High School in Detroit. The classroom teacher, Cortney Kosmala-Jackson, is on the right. \" width=\"1024\" height=\"678\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/10/tesfae-jackson.jpg 1024w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/10/tesfae-jackson-400x265.jpg 400w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/10/tesfae-jackson-800x530.jpg 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/10/tesfae-jackson-960x636.jpg 960w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Teaching resident Grace Tesfae (left) working with students at Cesar Chavez Academy High School in Detroit. The classroom teacher, Cortney Kosmala-Jackson, is on the right. \u003ccite>(Emily Hanford/American RadioWorks)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Professionalizing Teaching\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ball and her colleagues at the University of Michigan have started treating teacher preparation like any other profession. That means identifying the core set of skills, techniques and knowledge required by an entry-level employee in that field. To be a plumber, for example, one needs to know how to vent a sanitary drainage system. To be a pilot, one needs to know how to do a crosswind approach and landing. And one would have to prove one can do these things to get licensed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This is true primarily at least across occupations and professions where people’s safety is at risk,” Ball says. “And I do think it’s of great concern that we don’t as a culture appear to think that children are at risk when we don’t execute that same kind of responsibility” when it comes to training teachers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s a lot of resistance to the idea of defining a core set of skills and knowledge that teachers should know before they start teaching, Ball says. It goes back to the belief that the ability to teach is a personal trait, dependent on individual style and talent. But Ball isn’t advocating that teachers give up their personality. She’s just trying to ensure every new teacher has the right skills for the job.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>High-leverage teaching practices\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>About 10 years ago, Ball and her colleagues at the University of Michigan decided to try to identify what that core set of teaching would look like.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Tim Boerst, chair of the Elementary Teacher Education program, says the question they asked themselves was this:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>“When a teacher goes out into the field, what are they routinely going to be needing to do? And how are those routines, those particular practices, really important in the learning of students? Because there are all kinds of things that teachers routinely do. Which are the ones that we’re going to be picking that we really think advance the learning of academic subject matter?”\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>They got a bunch of teachers and researchers together and came up with a list of the things they thought all beginning teachers should know how to do. Their list had 84 things on it. That was clearly too many. They needed a set of skills they could actually teach in their two-year program, so they whittled their list down to 19 skills and gave them a name: \u003ca href=\"http://www.teachingworks.org/work-of-teaching/high-leverage-practices\">high-leverage teaching practices\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The list includes skills like these:\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003cem>Leading a whole-class discussion.\u003c/em> “In instructionally productive discussions, the teacher and a wide range of students contribute orally, listen actively, and respond to and learn from others’ contributions.”\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cem>Designing a sequence of lessons toward a specific learning goal.\u003c/em> “Teachers design and sequence lessons with an eye toward providing opportunities for student inquiry and discovery and include opportunities for students to practice and master foundational concepts and skills before moving on to more advanced ones.”\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cem>Eliciting and interpreting individual students’ thinking.\u003c/em> “To do this effectively, a teacher draws out a student’s thinking through carefully chosen questions and tasks and considers and checks alternative interpretations of the student’s ideas and methods.”\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cem>Analyzing instruction for the purpose of improving it.\u003c/em> “Learning to teach is an ongoing process that requires regular analysis of instruction and its effectiveness.”\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Helping Teachers Learn Those Skills\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Teaching teachers is particularly difficult because everyone has some experience of either being a student or teaching something informally. And those prior experiences shape ideas about what education should look like.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When a student comes into the teacher preparation program at Michigan, faculty want to know what beliefs and skills students are bringing with them. Professors then tailor the curriculum to focus on the things students don’t know. They also work hard to help pre-service teachers unlearn habits or beliefs they picked up from their own years as children in school that are \u003cem>not\u003c/em> productive ways to help kids learn.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To figure out what incoming students already know about teaching, Michigan faculty asks them do a role-playing exercise where they actually do some teaching. The pre-service teachers are given a piece of paper with a math problem on it. The paper also includes an answer. Here’s one of the problems the Michigan students are given, with an answer a student might actually have given.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg class=\"size-full wp-image-42496 alignnone\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2015/10/ARW-Math-Problem.png\" alt=\"ARW Math Problem\" width=\"938\" height=\"515\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/10/ARW-Math-Problem.png 938w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/10/ARW-Math-Problem-400x220.png 400w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/10/ARW-Math-Problem-800x439.png 800w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 938px) 100vw, 938px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Michigan students get a few minutes to look at the problem. Then they sit down with a graduate student or professor who plays the role of the kid who came up with the answer 83. The pre-service teacher’s goal is to find out what the student did to produce that answer, and why. The entire teaching moment is recorded on video.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The point of this simulation is to see how well the Michigan student can elicit and interpret student thinking. That’s one of the high-leverage practices, and it’s hard to do. Even if the pre-service teacher can figure out what the student did, it’s really hard to leave space for the student to explain his or her own thinking.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Often, rather than eliciting the kid’s thinking, the “teacher” tells the kid what she thinks the kid was thinking, says Boerst. He calls it “filling in student thinking.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“And that happens in classrooms all the time,” he says. “Teachers make assumptions about what kids are thinking. Kids don’t really know how to say otherwise or maybe aren’t inclined to say otherwise. Like, ‘Yeah, that’s what I was thinking 'cause I don’t really want to say what I was thinking.’”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Boerst says this can lead teachers to think kids understand the material when they don’t.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By watching and coding these simulated assessments, Boerst and his colleagues have found that half of the students coming into the elementary teacher prep program at Michigan do this “filling in of student thinking.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Teaching students out of this habit is one of the goals of the Michigan teacher prep program. But just reading or talking about the fact that you shouldn’t do this as a teacher isn’t enough, says Boerst. People have to practice doing it a different way.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_42509\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1024px\">\u003cimg class=\"size-full wp-image-42509\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2015/10/davis-arias.jpg\" alt=\"Anna Arias and Betsy Davis, instructors in the Elementary Teacher Education program, watch video of their students practicing teaching, in the Brandon Center at the University of Michigan. \" width=\"1024\" height=\"678\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/10/davis-arias.jpg 1024w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/10/davis-arias-400x265.jpg 400w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/10/davis-arias-800x530.jpg 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/10/davis-arias-960x636.jpg 960w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Anna Arias and Betsy Davis, instructors in the Elementary Teacher Education program, watch video of their students practicing teaching, in the Brandon Center at the University of Michigan. \u003ccite>(Emily Hanford/American RadioWorks)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Teacher preparation in the United States hasn’t been focused enough on practice, says Ball. Traditionally, students in teacher prep programs spend a lot of time reading and talking about teaching.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The assignments in the past were much more reflection, analysis,” Ball says. “In some sense, we could have been misled by people getting good grades for writing well. And, although it may sound a little too extreme, I think we’re more interested now in whether they can do it well, not how well they can talk about it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At Michigan, students are continually recording themselves as they practice teaching, and then watching the video and analyzing it. When teachers encounter a difficult moment in the classroom, like a misconception that they aren’t sure how to debunk, they have a tendency to just get through it and try not to think about it again.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Many of us have had that experience of, ‘OK, phew, that’s over, I don’t have to do it again,' ” says Betsy Davis, a professor in the elementary education program. That’s exactly what Michigan is trying to train its pre-service teachers not to do. Instead, the program tries to instill reflection for the purpose of improvement into everything, especially mistakes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“By having the interns watch their own video of their teaching really carefully, they see things or they hear themselves saying things that don’t make sense or that are missed opportunities,” says Davis. “And that’s one of the things we ask them to highlight in their videos: What did you miss the chance to do that if you were doing this over you would do?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>A New Approach to Student Teaching\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But is all this video recording necessary when most teacher preparation programs include a student teaching component? Many people expect student-teachers will learn practical skills from the veteran educators with whom they are paired.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The problem with pinning all the practical experience on student teaching is that the quality of those experiences varies widely. Even more shocking, \u003ca href=\"http://www.cpre.org/prep-effects\">data collected in the mid-2000s\u003c/a> showed that more than 20 percent of first-year teachers had no student teaching experience at all. Forty-two percent of science teachers did \u003ca href=\"http://www.cpre.org/prep-effects\">no student teaching\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Remember Jasmine Bankhead, the student teacher who was left alone in the classroom on her very first day? That’s not so uncommon. Student teachers are either given too much responsibility, or they’re not given enough; they make copies or do recess duty. Or they just sit and watch the teacher teach. They might see really effective teaching, and they might not.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>All of these things were happening when students at Michigan went out into the field for their student teaching experience. It was always a scramble to find classrooms to send them to. There was no consistency. Students “were actually starting to pick up some negative practices from the field,” says Elizabeth Moje, an associate dean at the Michigan School of Education who helps oversee the student teaching program.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Moje wanted her students to see teachers who were really good at things like eliciting student thinking and leading class discussions. She needed a way to send only students to observe teachers the university knew were very effective. So that’s what they did.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now, rather than sending the students out to dozens of schools all over the Detroit metropolitan area, Michigan rotates its students in groups to just a few different classrooms in a few different schools. It’s similar to the way medical students rotate through different specialties during their training. There’s a lot Michigan has borrowed from the medical field. In fact, all the pre-service teachers are now called interns.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When interns visit classrooms, they check in with the teacher and then work in small groups or one-on-one with students. A Michigan adviser is also in the class, observing as interns work with students. If one of the interns struggles, the advisor can jump in with real-time feedback.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For example, in a discussion about the causes of the Civil War, one intern repeatedly asked questions hoping to solicit a particular response from the middle school students that just wasn’t coming. There were lots of awkward pauses as the intern waited for the kids to pick up on his train of thought.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Adviser Rebecca Gadd was observing. When the intern had tried a few different questions with no luck, she stopped the discussion and pulled the intern aside to give him some tips.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“OK, so what I would suspect is that the way that this is explained is a little bit abstract,” she says, referring to the reading assignment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“So you need to think, are you going to ask or are you going to explain?” She recommends that he stop asking the students questions because they clearly missed the point in the reading. It’s time to explain it to them. Just tell them what you want them to know.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gadd is a former middle school teacher. She wishes her training had included this kind of guided practice. Teachers can go through their entire training -- their entire careers even -- without anyone taking them aside and offering in-the-moment feedback. She says Michigan got the idea for doing this from medical training.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When aspiring doctors are practicing with patients, medical educators don’t wait until they’ve killed the patient to intervene and say, ‘You should have done this differently,' ” she says. “Instead, they intervene in the moment and say, ‘OK, we need to be doing this.' ”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_42511\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1024px\">\u003cimg class=\"size-full wp-image-42511\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2015/10/lucien-gerondeau.jpg\" alt=\"Lucien Gerondeau, a student in the Secondary Teacher Education program at the University of Michigan. Behind him is Elizabeth Moje, a professor and associate dean. \" width=\"1024\" height=\"678\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/10/lucien-gerondeau.jpg 1024w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/10/lucien-gerondeau-400x265.jpg 400w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/10/lucien-gerondeau-800x530.jpg 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/10/lucien-gerondeau-960x636.jpg 960w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Lucien Gerondeau, a student in the Secondary Teacher Education program at the University of Michigan. Behind him is Elizabeth Moje, a professor and associate dean. \u003ccite>(Emily Hanford/American RadioWorks)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Becoming a Teacher\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Michigan students in the secondary teacher education program spend two semesters in classrooms, observing and working with kids one-on-one or in groups. The idea is a gradual assumption of responsibility.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They don’t actually do what most people think of as student teaching until their third semester. That’s when they’re promoted from intern to resident, and they actually get to take charge and teach the class.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Grace Tesfae is in her semester-long residency, getting ready to graduate from Michigan in a few months. She’s excited about having her own classroom, but also scared to be on her own. “I feel like I’ll be ready when the time comes,” Tesfae says, sounding a bit uncertain.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Michigan doesn’t have much data yet on whether the new approach is working. It’s not even clear what kind of data would provide a meaningful measure of what Michigan is trying to do. They could look at test scores of students in their graduates’ classrooms. That would tell them something. But Michigan wants to know if its teachers can do things like elicit and interpret student thinking and lead class discussions. Test scores don’t tell you that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Michigan does have its interns repeat the simulation they did at the beginning of the program, where they tried to figure out how a kid was thinking while solving a math problem. By the end of their first year in the program, most interns are no longer filling in, rather than eliciting, a student’s thinking. The Michigan interns show progress on other elements of the 19 high-leverage teaching practices, too.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Deborah Ball admits that those 19 practices are just a first bet for changing teacher education. “These aren’t necessarily the end, but they are the best bets we had,” Ball said. \"And we have to have a systematic way of revising those.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bottom line though, from Ball’s point of view, is that the teaching profession needs to come to some kind of common understanding about the skills that are required to enter the profession. And just like plumbers and pilots, new teachers should have to demonstrate they have these skills.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_42510\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1024px\">\u003cimg class=\"size-full wp-image-42510\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2015/10/grand-rounds.jpg\" alt='Students, faculty and guests gather at the University of Michigan School of Education for \"Grand Rounds,\" where they present and discuss issues in their teaching practice much the same way doctors present and discuss issues in their medical practice. ' width=\"1024\" height=\"615\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/10/grand-rounds.jpg 1024w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/10/grand-rounds-400x240.jpg 400w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/10/grand-rounds-800x480.jpg 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/10/grand-rounds-960x577.jpg 960w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Students, faculty and guests gather at the University of Michigan School of Education for \"Grand Rounds,\" where they present and discuss issues in their teaching practice much the same way doctors present and discuss issues in their medical practice. \u003ccite>(Suzanne Pekow/American RadioWorks)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Ball has started \u003ca href=\"http://www.teachingworks.org/\">an organization\u003c/a> to try to develop new licensing assessments for people who want to be teachers and to work with teacher preparation programs across the country to develop common approaches to professional training. It’s a big job. The U.S. Department of Education \u003ca href=\"https://nces.ed.gov/programs/projections/projections2020/sec3b.asp\">projects\u003c/a> that by 2020, the United States will need nearly 430,000 new teachers a year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ball’s ultimate goal is to make sure every first–year teacher in the United States is what she calls “a well-started beginner.” That’s what she and her colleagues are aiming for at Michigan.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’re really eyeing the first year, honestly,” she says. “Really, the goal is that kids wouldn’t have first-year teachers who are completely underprepared, that it wouldn’t be true anymore that you could just end up with a teacher who, this is her year to have a wreck year.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ball feels particular urgency about this question because in the United States, it’s poor kids who are most likely to get first-year teachers. Ball says that to improve education for all kids, and especially for poor kids, first-year teachers have to be much better prepared.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>Emily Hanford\u003c/strong> is an education correspondent for \u003ca href=\"http://www.americanradioworks.org/\">American RadioWorks\u003c/a>, the national documentary unit of American Public Media. Check out the American RadioWorks website for a more in-depth version of \u003ca href=\"http://www.americanradioworks.org/segments/rethinking-teacher-preparation/\">this article.\u003c/a> You can also read other articles about teacher learning and listen to the accompanying \u003ca href=\"http://www.americanradioworks.org/documentaries/teaching-teachers/\">radio documentary\u003c/a> program. American RadioWorks hosts a weekly education \u003ca href=\"http://www.americanradioworks.org/podcast/\">podcast available here\u003c/a>. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Jasmine Bankhead went to a traditional teacher prep program in the early 2000s. She took about a year’s worth of coursework that was all pretty general. Bankhead was expecting to learn a lot when she did her student teaching. But on her first day, she says, “my mentor teacher, she came in, we talked for a few minutes, and she was like, ‘OK, I’ll be in the library from now on.’ And just like that, I was by myself. And although I complained a little bit to my student teaching supervisor, I still felt like I was expected to make it work.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jennifer Green did a nontraditional program back in the 1990s. She got five weeks of training in things like “introduction to classroom management” and “introduction to planning.” Then she was a teacher, in a huge, struggling high school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I would come in in the morning. I would close the door,” she says. “I would struggle through the day. I would cry three times a week after my third period, which was my most challenging group of students. I would dust myself off. I would tell my fourth period class that I had terrible allergies and that’s why my eyes were so red.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She says she got no help. The first time an administrator came to check on her it was January -- and the administrator just needed to know if she had enough textbooks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Green and Bankhead both wanted to become great teachers. But the system didn’t seem set up to help them do it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s a pervasive American myth that good teachers are born, not made, and that good teachers have a set of inborn traits that naturally blossom as they figure the job out on their own. To get better teachers, the theory goes, schools need to find more people with those traits. The other myth is that teaching is easy -- the work involves children and the content is pretty basic, so it must be easy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Teaching is complex work that people actually have to be taught to do,” says Deborah Loewenberg Ball, dean of the School of Education at the University of Michigan. Ball spent years as an elementary school teacher and was always praised for being a “natural,” but she says teaching never came easily. She worked hard at her job.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now, she’s trying to dramatically change teacher training to focus on the specific knowledge and skills that teachers need to effectively help students. Understanding math and knowing how to teach it are \u003ca href=\"http://www.americanradioworks.org/segments/thinking-about-math-from-someone-elses-perspective/\">two separate skills\u003c/a>. And understanding how to teach math well doesn’t come naturally.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>People who want to be teachers “deserve to learn how to do this work well,” Ball says. “And the children that they teach particularly deserve to have those teachers taught.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_42512\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1024px\">\u003cimg class=\"size-full wp-image-42512\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2015/10/tesfae-jackson.jpg\" alt=\"Teaching resident Grace Tesfae (left) working with students at Cesar Chavez Academy High School in Detroit. The classroom teacher, Cortney Kosmala-Jackson, is on the right. \" width=\"1024\" height=\"678\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/10/tesfae-jackson.jpg 1024w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/10/tesfae-jackson-400x265.jpg 400w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/10/tesfae-jackson-800x530.jpg 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/10/tesfae-jackson-960x636.jpg 960w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Teaching resident Grace Tesfae (left) working with students at Cesar Chavez Academy High School in Detroit. The classroom teacher, Cortney Kosmala-Jackson, is on the right. \u003ccite>(Emily Hanford/American RadioWorks)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Professionalizing Teaching\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ball and her colleagues at the University of Michigan have started treating teacher preparation like any other profession. That means identifying the core set of skills, techniques and knowledge required by an entry-level employee in that field. To be a plumber, for example, one needs to know how to vent a sanitary drainage system. To be a pilot, one needs to know how to do a crosswind approach and landing. And one would have to prove one can do these things to get licensed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This is true primarily at least across occupations and professions where people’s safety is at risk,” Ball says. “And I do think it’s of great concern that we don’t as a culture appear to think that children are at risk when we don’t execute that same kind of responsibility” when it comes to training teachers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s a lot of resistance to the idea of defining a core set of skills and knowledge that teachers should know before they start teaching, Ball says. It goes back to the belief that the ability to teach is a personal trait, dependent on individual style and talent. But Ball isn’t advocating that teachers give up their personality. She’s just trying to ensure every new teacher has the right skills for the job.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>High-leverage teaching practices\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>About 10 years ago, Ball and her colleagues at the University of Michigan decided to try to identify what that core set of teaching would look like.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Tim Boerst, chair of the Elementary Teacher Education program, says the question they asked themselves was this:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>“When a teacher goes out into the field, what are they routinely going to be needing to do? And how are those routines, those particular practices, really important in the learning of students? Because there are all kinds of things that teachers routinely do. Which are the ones that we’re going to be picking that we really think advance the learning of academic subject matter?”\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>They got a bunch of teachers and researchers together and came up with a list of the things they thought all beginning teachers should know how to do. Their list had 84 things on it. That was clearly too many. They needed a set of skills they could actually teach in their two-year program, so they whittled their list down to 19 skills and gave them a name: \u003ca href=\"http://www.teachingworks.org/work-of-teaching/high-leverage-practices\">high-leverage teaching practices\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The list includes skills like these:\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003cem>Leading a whole-class discussion.\u003c/em> “In instructionally productive discussions, the teacher and a wide range of students contribute orally, listen actively, and respond to and learn from others’ contributions.”\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cem>Designing a sequence of lessons toward a specific learning goal.\u003c/em> “Teachers design and sequence lessons with an eye toward providing opportunities for student inquiry and discovery and include opportunities for students to practice and master foundational concepts and skills before moving on to more advanced ones.”\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cem>Eliciting and interpreting individual students’ thinking.\u003c/em> “To do this effectively, a teacher draws out a student’s thinking through carefully chosen questions and tasks and considers and checks alternative interpretations of the student’s ideas and methods.”\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cem>Analyzing instruction for the purpose of improving it.\u003c/em> “Learning to teach is an ongoing process that requires regular analysis of instruction and its effectiveness.”\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Helping Teachers Learn Those Skills\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Teaching teachers is particularly difficult because everyone has some experience of either being a student or teaching something informally. And those prior experiences shape ideas about what education should look like.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When a student comes into the teacher preparation program at Michigan, faculty want to know what beliefs and skills students are bringing with them. Professors then tailor the curriculum to focus on the things students don’t know. They also work hard to help pre-service teachers unlearn habits or beliefs they picked up from their own years as children in school that are \u003cem>not\u003c/em> productive ways to help kids learn.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To figure out what incoming students already know about teaching, Michigan faculty asks them do a role-playing exercise where they actually do some teaching. The pre-service teachers are given a piece of paper with a math problem on it. The paper also includes an answer. Here’s one of the problems the Michigan students are given, with an answer a student might actually have given.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg class=\"size-full wp-image-42496 alignnone\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2015/10/ARW-Math-Problem.png\" alt=\"ARW Math Problem\" width=\"938\" height=\"515\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/10/ARW-Math-Problem.png 938w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/10/ARW-Math-Problem-400x220.png 400w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/10/ARW-Math-Problem-800x439.png 800w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 938px) 100vw, 938px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Michigan students get a few minutes to look at the problem. Then they sit down with a graduate student or professor who plays the role of the kid who came up with the answer 83. The pre-service teacher’s goal is to find out what the student did to produce that answer, and why. The entire teaching moment is recorded on video.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The point of this simulation is to see how well the Michigan student can elicit and interpret student thinking. That’s one of the high-leverage practices, and it’s hard to do. Even if the pre-service teacher can figure out what the student did, it’s really hard to leave space for the student to explain his or her own thinking.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Often, rather than eliciting the kid’s thinking, the “teacher” tells the kid what she thinks the kid was thinking, says Boerst. He calls it “filling in student thinking.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“And that happens in classrooms all the time,” he says. “Teachers make assumptions about what kids are thinking. Kids don’t really know how to say otherwise or maybe aren’t inclined to say otherwise. Like, ‘Yeah, that’s what I was thinking 'cause I don’t really want to say what I was thinking.’”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Boerst says this can lead teachers to think kids understand the material when they don’t.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By watching and coding these simulated assessments, Boerst and his colleagues have found that half of the students coming into the elementary teacher prep program at Michigan do this “filling in of student thinking.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Teaching students out of this habit is one of the goals of the Michigan teacher prep program. But just reading or talking about the fact that you shouldn’t do this as a teacher isn’t enough, says Boerst. People have to practice doing it a different way.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_42509\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1024px\">\u003cimg class=\"size-full wp-image-42509\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2015/10/davis-arias.jpg\" alt=\"Anna Arias and Betsy Davis, instructors in the Elementary Teacher Education program, watch video of their students practicing teaching, in the Brandon Center at the University of Michigan. \" width=\"1024\" height=\"678\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/10/davis-arias.jpg 1024w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/10/davis-arias-400x265.jpg 400w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/10/davis-arias-800x530.jpg 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/10/davis-arias-960x636.jpg 960w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Anna Arias and Betsy Davis, instructors in the Elementary Teacher Education program, watch video of their students practicing teaching, in the Brandon Center at the University of Michigan. \u003ccite>(Emily Hanford/American RadioWorks)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Teacher preparation in the United States hasn’t been focused enough on practice, says Ball. Traditionally, students in teacher prep programs spend a lot of time reading and talking about teaching.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The assignments in the past were much more reflection, analysis,” Ball says. “In some sense, we could have been misled by people getting good grades for writing well. And, although it may sound a little too extreme, I think we’re more interested now in whether they can do it well, not how well they can talk about it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At Michigan, students are continually recording themselves as they practice teaching, and then watching the video and analyzing it. When teachers encounter a difficult moment in the classroom, like a misconception that they aren’t sure how to debunk, they have a tendency to just get through it and try not to think about it again.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Many of us have had that experience of, ‘OK, phew, that’s over, I don’t have to do it again,' ” says Betsy Davis, a professor in the elementary education program. That’s exactly what Michigan is trying to train its pre-service teachers not to do. Instead, the program tries to instill reflection for the purpose of improvement into everything, especially mistakes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“By having the interns watch their own video of their teaching really carefully, they see things or they hear themselves saying things that don’t make sense or that are missed opportunities,” says Davis. “And that’s one of the things we ask them to highlight in their videos: What did you miss the chance to do that if you were doing this over you would do?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>A New Approach to Student Teaching\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But is all this video recording necessary when most teacher preparation programs include a student teaching component? Many people expect student-teachers will learn practical skills from the veteran educators with whom they are paired.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The problem with pinning all the practical experience on student teaching is that the quality of those experiences varies widely. Even more shocking, \u003ca href=\"http://www.cpre.org/prep-effects\">data collected in the mid-2000s\u003c/a> showed that more than 20 percent of first-year teachers had no student teaching experience at all. Forty-two percent of science teachers did \u003ca href=\"http://www.cpre.org/prep-effects\">no student teaching\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Remember Jasmine Bankhead, the student teacher who was left alone in the classroom on her very first day? That’s not so uncommon. Student teachers are either given too much responsibility, or they’re not given enough; they make copies or do recess duty. Or they just sit and watch the teacher teach. They might see really effective teaching, and they might not.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>All of these things were happening when students at Michigan went out into the field for their student teaching experience. It was always a scramble to find classrooms to send them to. There was no consistency. Students “were actually starting to pick up some negative practices from the field,” says Elizabeth Moje, an associate dean at the Michigan School of Education who helps oversee the student teaching program.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Moje wanted her students to see teachers who were really good at things like eliciting student thinking and leading class discussions. She needed a way to send only students to observe teachers the university knew were very effective. So that’s what they did.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now, rather than sending the students out to dozens of schools all over the Detroit metropolitan area, Michigan rotates its students in groups to just a few different classrooms in a few different schools. It’s similar to the way medical students rotate through different specialties during their training. There’s a lot Michigan has borrowed from the medical field. In fact, all the pre-service teachers are now called interns.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When interns visit classrooms, they check in with the teacher and then work in small groups or one-on-one with students. A Michigan adviser is also in the class, observing as interns work with students. If one of the interns struggles, the advisor can jump in with real-time feedback.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For example, in a discussion about the causes of the Civil War, one intern repeatedly asked questions hoping to solicit a particular response from the middle school students that just wasn’t coming. There were lots of awkward pauses as the intern waited for the kids to pick up on his train of thought.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Adviser Rebecca Gadd was observing. When the intern had tried a few different questions with no luck, she stopped the discussion and pulled the intern aside to give him some tips.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“OK, so what I would suspect is that the way that this is explained is a little bit abstract,” she says, referring to the reading assignment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“So you need to think, are you going to ask or are you going to explain?” She recommends that he stop asking the students questions because they clearly missed the point in the reading. It’s time to explain it to them. Just tell them what you want them to know.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gadd is a former middle school teacher. She wishes her training had included this kind of guided practice. Teachers can go through their entire training -- their entire careers even -- without anyone taking them aside and offering in-the-moment feedback. She says Michigan got the idea for doing this from medical training.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When aspiring doctors are practicing with patients, medical educators don’t wait until they’ve killed the patient to intervene and say, ‘You should have done this differently,' ” she says. “Instead, they intervene in the moment and say, ‘OK, we need to be doing this.' ”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_42511\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1024px\">\u003cimg class=\"size-full wp-image-42511\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2015/10/lucien-gerondeau.jpg\" alt=\"Lucien Gerondeau, a student in the Secondary Teacher Education program at the University of Michigan. Behind him is Elizabeth Moje, a professor and associate dean. \" width=\"1024\" height=\"678\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/10/lucien-gerondeau.jpg 1024w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/10/lucien-gerondeau-400x265.jpg 400w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/10/lucien-gerondeau-800x530.jpg 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/10/lucien-gerondeau-960x636.jpg 960w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Lucien Gerondeau, a student in the Secondary Teacher Education program at the University of Michigan. Behind him is Elizabeth Moje, a professor and associate dean. \u003ccite>(Emily Hanford/American RadioWorks)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Becoming a Teacher\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Michigan students in the secondary teacher education program spend two semesters in classrooms, observing and working with kids one-on-one or in groups. The idea is a gradual assumption of responsibility.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They don’t actually do what most people think of as student teaching until their third semester. That’s when they’re promoted from intern to resident, and they actually get to take charge and teach the class.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Grace Tesfae is in her semester-long residency, getting ready to graduate from Michigan in a few months. She’s excited about having her own classroom, but also scared to be on her own. “I feel like I’ll be ready when the time comes,” Tesfae says, sounding a bit uncertain.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Michigan doesn’t have much data yet on whether the new approach is working. It’s not even clear what kind of data would provide a meaningful measure of what Michigan is trying to do. They could look at test scores of students in their graduates’ classrooms. That would tell them something. But Michigan wants to know if its teachers can do things like elicit and interpret student thinking and lead class discussions. Test scores don’t tell you that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Michigan does have its interns repeat the simulation they did at the beginning of the program, where they tried to figure out how a kid was thinking while solving a math problem. By the end of their first year in the program, most interns are no longer filling in, rather than eliciting, a student’s thinking. The Michigan interns show progress on other elements of the 19 high-leverage teaching practices, too.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Deborah Ball admits that those 19 practices are just a first bet for changing teacher education. “These aren’t necessarily the end, but they are the best bets we had,” Ball said. \"And we have to have a systematic way of revising those.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bottom line though, from Ball’s point of view, is that the teaching profession needs to come to some kind of common understanding about the skills that are required to enter the profession. And just like plumbers and pilots, new teachers should have to demonstrate they have these skills.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_42510\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1024px\">\u003cimg class=\"size-full wp-image-42510\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2015/10/grand-rounds.jpg\" alt='Students, faculty and guests gather at the University of Michigan School of Education for \"Grand Rounds,\" where they present and discuss issues in their teaching practice much the same way doctors present and discuss issues in their medical practice. ' width=\"1024\" height=\"615\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/10/grand-rounds.jpg 1024w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/10/grand-rounds-400x240.jpg 400w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/10/grand-rounds-800x480.jpg 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/10/grand-rounds-960x577.jpg 960w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Students, faculty and guests gather at the University of Michigan School of Education for \"Grand Rounds,\" where they present and discuss issues in their teaching practice much the same way doctors present and discuss issues in their medical practice. \u003ccite>(Suzanne Pekow/American RadioWorks)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Ball has started \u003ca href=\"http://www.teachingworks.org/\">an organization\u003c/a> to try to develop new licensing assessments for people who want to be teachers and to work with teacher preparation programs across the country to develop common approaches to professional training. It’s a big job. The U.S. Department of Education \u003ca href=\"https://nces.ed.gov/programs/projections/projections2020/sec3b.asp\">projects\u003c/a> that by 2020, the United States will need nearly 430,000 new teachers a year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ball’s ultimate goal is to make sure every first–year teacher in the United States is what she calls “a well-started beginner.” That’s what she and her colleagues are aiming for at Michigan.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’re really eyeing the first year, honestly,” she says. “Really, the goal is that kids wouldn’t have first-year teachers who are completely underprepared, that it wouldn’t be true anymore that you could just end up with a teacher who, this is her year to have a wreck year.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ball feels particular urgency about this question because in the United States, it’s poor kids who are most likely to get first-year teachers. Ball says that to improve education for all kids, and especially for poor kids, first-year teachers have to be much better prepared.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>Emily Hanford\u003c/strong> is an education correspondent for \u003ca href=\"http://www.americanradioworks.org/\">American RadioWorks\u003c/a>, the national documentary unit of American Public Media. Check out the American RadioWorks website for a more in-depth version of \u003ca href=\"http://www.americanradioworks.org/segments/rethinking-teacher-preparation/\">this article.\u003c/a> You can also read other articles about teacher learning and listen to the accompanying \u003ca href=\"http://www.americanradioworks.org/documentaries/teaching-teachers/\">radio documentary\u003c/a> program. American RadioWorks hosts a weekly education \u003ca href=\"http://www.americanradioworks.org/podcast/\">podcast available here\u003c/a>. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"disqusTitle": "How Can We Teach Math To Encourage 'Patient Problem Solving'?",
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"content": "\u003cp>Educators who have bought into the power of inquiry-based teaching will admit that math is one of the most challenging areas to apply the pedagogy. Math has been taught based on computation for so long and built up such a bad reputation with many students that it can be hard to break through students' anxiety, intimidation and hatred of math. As Dan Meyer said in his \u003ca href=\"https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_meyer_math_curriculum_makeover?language=en#t-580853\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">2010 Tedx Talk\u003c/a>, \"I sell a product to a market that doesn't want it, but is forced by law to buy it.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After six years in the classroom and a doctorate in math education from Stanford, Meyer is now the Chief Academic Officer at \u003ca href=\"https://www.desmos.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Desmos\u003c/a>. But his blog has long been a \u003ca href=\"http://blog.mrmeyer.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">go-to resource\u003c/a> for teachers looking for different ways to inspire what he calls \"patient problem-solving\" in students. He says to help students develop mathematical reasoning, teachers need to focus less on the computation side of math, and more on helping kids determine which pieces of information are useful, which are extraneous and how it all fits into the real world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Students come into our classrooms with loads of experiences mathematically that we don't anticipate,\" Meyer said. \"We need to draw those out of students and build on those.\" His strategy is to ditch textbooks that lay out problems in neat, simple ways that easily fit into predetermined formulas, and instead get students talking about a problem that draws on their intuition. For example, he will show students a picture of two hills. One hill is taller and the other is longer. The he'll ask, \"Which hill is steeper?\" It's a deceptively simple question that provokes a big discussion because there are good arguments for both answers. Out of that discussion students develop an understanding of slope.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Problems like this one engage even the most math-intimidated student because it starts from what Meyer's calls \"the level playing field of intuition.\" All students have seen hills and can talk about what they are seeing. Gradually the math enters the conversation to make it easier to discuss. The math serves the conversation, not the other way around, Meyer said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"In a good argument kids walk away feeling like they're a thinking thing,\" Meyers said. That may seem obvious, but so much of teaching math through a computational lens asks students to find the right equation and plug in numbers. It doesn't ask them to be big thinkers; but it's precisely the experience of grappling with a problem that sparks curiosity, motivates students and develops the patient problem-solving that is so lacking in much of the population.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Watch Meyer's funny and enlightening Tedx talk for a more comprehensive explanation of how he teaches.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/qocAoN4jNwc?rel=0\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"autoplay; encrypted-media\" scrolling=\"yes\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Educators who have bought into the power of inquiry-based teaching will admit that math is one of the most challenging areas to apply the pedagogy. Math has been taught based on computation for so long and built up such a bad reputation with many students that it can be hard to break through students' anxiety, intimidation and hatred of math. As Dan Meyer said in his \u003ca href=\"https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_meyer_math_curriculum_makeover?language=en#t-580853\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">2010 Tedx Talk\u003c/a>, \"I sell a product to a market that doesn't want it, but is forced by law to buy it.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After six years in the classroom and a doctorate in math education from Stanford, Meyer is now the Chief Academic Officer at \u003ca href=\"https://www.desmos.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Desmos\u003c/a>. But his blog has long been a \u003ca href=\"http://blog.mrmeyer.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">go-to resource\u003c/a> for teachers looking for different ways to inspire what he calls \"patient problem-solving\" in students. He says to help students develop mathematical reasoning, teachers need to focus less on the computation side of math, and more on helping kids determine which pieces of information are useful, which are extraneous and how it all fits into the real world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Students come into our classrooms with loads of experiences mathematically that we don't anticipate,\" Meyer said. \"We need to draw those out of students and build on those.\" His strategy is to ditch textbooks that lay out problems in neat, simple ways that easily fit into predetermined formulas, and instead get students talking about a problem that draws on their intuition. For example, he will show students a picture of two hills. One hill is taller and the other is longer. The he'll ask, \"Which hill is steeper?\" It's a deceptively simple question that provokes a big discussion because there are good arguments for both answers. Out of that discussion students develop an understanding of slope.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Problems like this one engage even the most math-intimidated student because it starts from what Meyer's calls \"the level playing field of intuition.\" All students have seen hills and can talk about what they are seeing. Gradually the math enters the conversation to make it easier to discuss. The math serves the conversation, not the other way around, Meyer said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"In a good argument kids walk away feeling like they're a thinking thing,\" Meyers said. That may seem obvious, but so much of teaching math through a computational lens asks students to find the right equation and plug in numbers. It doesn't ask them to be big thinkers; but it's precisely the experience of grappling with a problem that sparks curiosity, motivates students and develops the patient problem-solving that is so lacking in much of the population.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003cem>Our\u003c/em> \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/10/12/446351549/ideas-a-new-series-from-npr-ed\">Ideas series\u003c/a>\u003cem> is exploring innovation in education.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It's 20-year-old Randall Lofton's third shot at college. He's already wiped out twice. Too much partying and basketball, he says, and not enough studying. \"I didn't apply myself.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lofton is now trying to balance a full-time job with three classes at community college. He's taking a mix of online and in-class work at Valencia College in Orlando, Fla.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"So this is pretty much my last chance,\" he says. \"This is something that I want to do, so I'm gonna work my heart off.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So far, he is. Lofton recently aced an online introductory composition class. One small thing that may have proved a big help: His professor sent several personalized messages of support. Lofton even keeps one email from his English professor, Neal Phillips, saved on his tablet.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"I screen-shot it and I saved it,\" Lofton says. \"And he was basically saying, like, 'Don't quit, you're very hardworking in this class. The course is almost over; I appreciate your participation. I appreciate how you're very diligent and very intrigued by the work.' That touched me that somebody was paying attention. And I'm not just in somebody's class just as a name. That was cool.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_42475\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 250px\">\u003cimg class=\"size-full wp-image-42475\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2015/10/valenciacollegeew-4-edit_slide-493f1176206ab4c706c5550ee051dd28390634a4-e1444976052705.jpg\" alt=\"Randall Lofton, 20, is trying to balance a full-time job and three classes at Valencia College.\" width=\"250\" height=\"167\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Randall Lofton, 20, is trying to balance a full-time job and three classes at Valencia College. \u003ccite>(Eric Westervelt/NPR)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The email from Phillips showed genuine care from an engaged professor. It was also, perhaps unbeknownst to Lofton, part of the community college's strategy to marry data science with interventions to improve student performance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Call it higher ed's version of \u003ca href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1210166/\">Moneyball.\u003c/a> Only the goal isn't a World Series ring; it's to help more students stick with college, improve academically and graduate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Fast analysis of disparate data streams, including your daily Web surfing, helps corporate America market its goods, chart growth and follow you across the Internet with annoying ads. Innovative predictive analytics are essential for businesses, especially tech companies. They've got \u003ca href=\"http://theinnovationenterprise.com/summits/predictive-analytics-innovation-chicago-2015\">annual conferences on the stuff\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So why aren't more of the best minds in higher education doing more to tap those data streams to improve teaching and learning?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yes, colleges and universities have long used data to help shape policy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But too often, critics say, the approach is retro — looking at performance data in spreadsheets that administrators funnel into sparsely read \"best practices\" reports for faculty. Or the information is kept in silos and used for alumni fundraising, marketing or for preparing reports for the board of directors.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It is, in effect, academic autopsy data. The information rarely has anything to do with helping improve student learning \u003cem>in real time.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now, more schools such as \u003ca href=\"http://valenciacollege.edu/\">Valencia College\u003c/a> are dipping their toes deeper into the streams of what some have dubbed predictive and learning analytics.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yep, more annoying ed-tech buzzwords. Basically it means \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2014/07/04/327745863/big-data-comes-to-college\">big data goes to college\u003c/a>, as software and digital platforms collect and sort academic data that teachers can then use quickly as an intervention strategy. The data collected include how engaged a student is online with course material, with discussion forums, and information on his or her academic background and other data points.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The goal is to use data science to improve learning, boost completion rates and help teachers and counselors better target academic interventions fast, with a compelling nudge, counseling or other outreach.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"It's our mission to democratize data,\" says Mark Milliron, co-founder and chief learning officer with the higher ed software company \u003ca href=\"http://www.civitaslearningspace.com/\">Civitas Learning\u003c/a>, a leader in this field. \"And to to get that data to people who need it most — the faculty, students and advisers.\" There are others doing similar work including Civitas competitors \u003ca href=\"http://www.starfishsolutions.com/\">Starfish\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"http://www.blackboard.com/\">Blackboard\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Valencia College is currently piloting evidence-based data-analysis tools by Civitas aimed at helping boost student engagement and performance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_42474\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 250px\">\u003cimg class=\"size-full wp-image-42474\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2015/10/valenciacollegeew-1-edit_slide-900a2d65f7fef0b2c3fc18136522b0a7ccc96bce-e1444976490878.jpg\" alt=\"English professor Neal Phillips sits at a Valencia campus computer in Orlando, Fla., crafting an email blast to students who've been flagged by a new program that analyzes how they're performing.\" width=\"250\" height=\"167\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">English professor Neal Phillips sits at a Valencia campus computer in Orlando, Fla., crafting an email blast to students who've been flagged by a new program that analyzes how they're performing. \u003ccite>(Eric Westervelt/NPR)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>It's early in the fall semester, but Phillips already sees danger signs for a handful of students in his online Intro to English Composition class. Some students haven't logged in lately or seem academically adrift.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And so, on a recent afternoon, he's at a computer on campus, crafting an email blast to students on his class roster who have a red frowny-face circle next to their name.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Dear so and so. I don't like to say 'dear.' So I'm gonna put instead YO!\" he says as he taps away at his keyboard.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He wants to reach out to them before it's too late. The emails will land in inboxes looking personalized to each student. And they are — sort of.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Your ole professor Phillips here,\" he continues writing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He opts for the more personalized \"I care\" tack over the vaguely creepy, \"I'm watching your online activity\" approach.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"I wanted to know if there's anything additional I could do to assist you in the course,\" he writes to half a dozen red-flagged students.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These introductory or \"gateway\" courses are hugely important for Valencia, as they are at many other community colleges. National and Valencia figures show that if students withdraw from or fail even\u003cem> one\u003c/em> of their first five course attempts, their chance of graduating is cut in half. Fail or withdraw from two classes, and those chances are cut in half again.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But fast, early interventions might save them. \"We want to help them get there as much as possible,\" Philips says, \"because, yeah, the data is not good if they don't do well on the first try.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To help intervene, he's using software and a learning platform called \u003ca href=\"http://www.civitaslearning.com/solutions/\">Illume\u003c/a> and an app called Inspire. Both are from Civitas.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here's how it works: The system vacuums up as much data as possible on things such as student participation online in assignments and discussion boards, how often and how long a student logs in to the school's learning platform, and data on a student's academic background. It's refreshed four times a day to create a student \"engagement score,\" among other data points.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"It's unique because it's not just grade data or did they reply to something. It's a more holistic view of the student,\" says Valencia mathematics professor Brian Macon. \"I don't think I'd want to teach without it now that I've had it for a year.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of course, professors have long had the ability to send a pep talk email or try to motivate and engage students with the right words after class or during office hours.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the difference now, says Kurt Ewen, a senior administrator at Valencia, is that real-time feedback allows teachers to more quickly flag a student who's struggling and, perhaps, better pinpoint what types of interventions might be needed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Part of what this tool allows for us to do is to shorten the amount of time that we have to wait to see where a student is,\" Ewen says. \"Now they can do it in a way that they don't have to wait until after midterm.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The tools also can gather and analyze data from college or university learning-management and student-data systems, among other streams. That, for example, can tell a school exactly what its GPA tipping-point for student success or failure is, or whether grades are more predictive of completion than SAT or ACT scores.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"We help the institutions, especially the faculty and advisers, turn the lights on bright so they can see what's happening and use the best of their professional skill and will to change the trajectory for that student,\" Milliron says. The four-year-old company recently got new \u003ca href=\"http://techcrunch.com/2015/09/28/civitas-learning-gets-60-million-commitment-from-warburg-pincus/\">investor pledges of some $60 million\u003c/a> to expand its products.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At Valencia and other schools using predictive analytics, a semi-personalized email is just one intervention. Others might include one-on-one or group tutoring, peer-to-peer mentoring, meetings with an adviser or professor or other steps.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The job of intervening is made that much more challenging by the fact that Valencia serves more than 70,000 students in two sprawling central Florida counties. Many students have to balance school with full-time jobs, kids and other responsibilities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here's another reason using data for early intervention matters: Studies show that nearly 80 percent of first-year community college students need at least some remedial English or math help.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But Florida was tip of the spear in a national backlash against what many saw as ineffectual remedial education. Students at public universities in Florida are no longer required to take remedial tests or classes. It's now their choice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So now some introductory courses act as de facto remedial classes. Students in Phillips' composition class will have to show they can handle college-level work and craft cogent arguments within well-framed essays. \"They have to have minimum competencies,\" Phillips says. \"They have to do so much writing. They have to follow through on the tasks.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>No one involved in Valencia's pilot project sees these new digital platforms as silver bullets. Civitas' Milliron readily concedes the best data systems in the world \"will not fix a student who is not on purpose, who is not willing to engage and doesn't have the tenacity and motivation to succeed in higher education.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>His company's tools do help, he believes, those students who might be really trying hard but just aren't connecting with the material or who are stuck and just don't know whom to talk to.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Civitas says its numbers from the dozens of schools it's working with have consistently shown a boost of 3 to 7 percent in course completion and \"persistence,\" meaning continued enrollment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And Civitas is betting that helping improve retention rates will prove profitable. As the company's chief executive, Charles Thornburgh, has said: \"Approximately $100 billion in tuition and fees are spent each year [in the U.S.] on students who will not graduate. We believe there is an opportunity to improve that number by 5 to 10 percent, which is a multibillion-dollar opportunity.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As for Valencia, it's not yet clear whether the added data and interventions are helping boost student performance or graduation rates. \"It is still early to determine the impact of the analytic tools,\" Ewen says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Nonetheless, Valencia professors and administrators are cautiously optimistic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong> \"\u003c/strong>It has the potential to be innovative depending upon the people who use it,\" Ewen tells me. \"We believe that predictive analytics has the potential to take us to a place we haven't been before and as an enhancement to the work we've been doing already.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For student Lofton, all the nudges helped push him to participate and thrive. He got an A in Phillips' class.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"We felt like the essays were, like, so moving and touching, we was like, 'Man, we gotta discuss this!' \" he says. \"The course was interesting. The extra credit [for online participation] to me was just a bonus.\" Students should give it their all, he says, especially if a professor such as Phillips \"is going all out as far as trying to help the kids pass.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\n\u003cp>Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cem>Our\u003c/em> \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/10/12/446351549/ideas-a-new-series-from-npr-ed\">Ideas series\u003c/a>\u003cem> is exploring innovation in education.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It's 20-year-old Randall Lofton's third shot at college. He's already wiped out twice. Too much partying and basketball, he says, and not enough studying. \"I didn't apply myself.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lofton is now trying to balance a full-time job with three classes at community college. He's taking a mix of online and in-class work at Valencia College in Orlando, Fla.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"So this is pretty much my last chance,\" he says. \"This is something that I want to do, so I'm gonna work my heart off.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So far, he is. Lofton recently aced an online introductory composition class. One small thing that may have proved a big help: His professor sent several personalized messages of support. Lofton even keeps one email from his English professor, Neal Phillips, saved on his tablet.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"I screen-shot it and I saved it,\" Lofton says. \"And he was basically saying, like, 'Don't quit, you're very hardworking in this class. The course is almost over; I appreciate your participation. I appreciate how you're very diligent and very intrigued by the work.' That touched me that somebody was paying attention. And I'm not just in somebody's class just as a name. That was cool.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_42475\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 250px\">\u003cimg class=\"size-full wp-image-42475\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2015/10/valenciacollegeew-4-edit_slide-493f1176206ab4c706c5550ee051dd28390634a4-e1444976052705.jpg\" alt=\"Randall Lofton, 20, is trying to balance a full-time job and three classes at Valencia College.\" width=\"250\" height=\"167\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Randall Lofton, 20, is trying to balance a full-time job and three classes at Valencia College. \u003ccite>(Eric Westervelt/NPR)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The email from Phillips showed genuine care from an engaged professor. It was also, perhaps unbeknownst to Lofton, part of the community college's strategy to marry data science with interventions to improve student performance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Call it higher ed's version of \u003ca href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1210166/\">Moneyball.\u003c/a> Only the goal isn't a World Series ring; it's to help more students stick with college, improve academically and graduate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Fast analysis of disparate data streams, including your daily Web surfing, helps corporate America market its goods, chart growth and follow you across the Internet with annoying ads. Innovative predictive analytics are essential for businesses, especially tech companies. They've got \u003ca href=\"http://theinnovationenterprise.com/summits/predictive-analytics-innovation-chicago-2015\">annual conferences on the stuff\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So why aren't more of the best minds in higher education doing more to tap those data streams to improve teaching and learning?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yes, colleges and universities have long used data to help shape policy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But too often, critics say, the approach is retro — looking at performance data in spreadsheets that administrators funnel into sparsely read \"best practices\" reports for faculty. Or the information is kept in silos and used for alumni fundraising, marketing or for preparing reports for the board of directors.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It is, in effect, academic autopsy data. The information rarely has anything to do with helping improve student learning \u003cem>in real time.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now, more schools such as \u003ca href=\"http://valenciacollege.edu/\">Valencia College\u003c/a> are dipping their toes deeper into the streams of what some have dubbed predictive and learning analytics.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yep, more annoying ed-tech buzzwords. Basically it means \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2014/07/04/327745863/big-data-comes-to-college\">big data goes to college\u003c/a>, as software and digital platforms collect and sort academic data that teachers can then use quickly as an intervention strategy. The data collected include how engaged a student is online with course material, with discussion forums, and information on his or her academic background and other data points.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The goal is to use data science to improve learning, boost completion rates and help teachers and counselors better target academic interventions fast, with a compelling nudge, counseling or other outreach.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"It's our mission to democratize data,\" says Mark Milliron, co-founder and chief learning officer with the higher ed software company \u003ca href=\"http://www.civitaslearningspace.com/\">Civitas Learning\u003c/a>, a leader in this field. \"And to to get that data to people who need it most — the faculty, students and advisers.\" There are others doing similar work including Civitas competitors \u003ca href=\"http://www.starfishsolutions.com/\">Starfish\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"http://www.blackboard.com/\">Blackboard\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Valencia College is currently piloting evidence-based data-analysis tools by Civitas aimed at helping boost student engagement and performance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_42474\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 250px\">\u003cimg class=\"size-full wp-image-42474\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2015/10/valenciacollegeew-1-edit_slide-900a2d65f7fef0b2c3fc18136522b0a7ccc96bce-e1444976490878.jpg\" alt=\"English professor Neal Phillips sits at a Valencia campus computer in Orlando, Fla., crafting an email blast to students who've been flagged by a new program that analyzes how they're performing.\" width=\"250\" height=\"167\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">English professor Neal Phillips sits at a Valencia campus computer in Orlando, Fla., crafting an email blast to students who've been flagged by a new program that analyzes how they're performing. \u003ccite>(Eric Westervelt/NPR)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>It's early in the fall semester, but Phillips already sees danger signs for a handful of students in his online Intro to English Composition class. Some students haven't logged in lately or seem academically adrift.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And so, on a recent afternoon, he's at a computer on campus, crafting an email blast to students on his class roster who have a red frowny-face circle next to their name.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Dear so and so. I don't like to say 'dear.' So I'm gonna put instead YO!\" he says as he taps away at his keyboard.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He wants to reach out to them before it's too late. The emails will land in inboxes looking personalized to each student. And they are — sort of.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Your ole professor Phillips here,\" he continues writing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He opts for the more personalized \"I care\" tack over the vaguely creepy, \"I'm watching your online activity\" approach.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"I wanted to know if there's anything additional I could do to assist you in the course,\" he writes to half a dozen red-flagged students.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These introductory or \"gateway\" courses are hugely important for Valencia, as they are at many other community colleges. National and Valencia figures show that if students withdraw from or fail even\u003cem> one\u003c/em> of their first five course attempts, their chance of graduating is cut in half. Fail or withdraw from two classes, and those chances are cut in half again.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But fast, early interventions might save them. \"We want to help them get there as much as possible,\" Philips says, \"because, yeah, the data is not good if they don't do well on the first try.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To help intervene, he's using software and a learning platform called \u003ca href=\"http://www.civitaslearning.com/solutions/\">Illume\u003c/a> and an app called Inspire. Both are from Civitas.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here's how it works: The system vacuums up as much data as possible on things such as student participation online in assignments and discussion boards, how often and how long a student logs in to the school's learning platform, and data on a student's academic background. It's refreshed four times a day to create a student \"engagement score,\" among other data points.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"It's unique because it's not just grade data or did they reply to something. It's a more holistic view of the student,\" says Valencia mathematics professor Brian Macon. \"I don't think I'd want to teach without it now that I've had it for a year.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of course, professors have long had the ability to send a pep talk email or try to motivate and engage students with the right words after class or during office hours.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the difference now, says Kurt Ewen, a senior administrator at Valencia, is that real-time feedback allows teachers to more quickly flag a student who's struggling and, perhaps, better pinpoint what types of interventions might be needed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Part of what this tool allows for us to do is to shorten the amount of time that we have to wait to see where a student is,\" Ewen says. \"Now they can do it in a way that they don't have to wait until after midterm.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The tools also can gather and analyze data from college or university learning-management and student-data systems, among other streams. That, for example, can tell a school exactly what its GPA tipping-point for student success or failure is, or whether grades are more predictive of completion than SAT or ACT scores.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"We help the institutions, especially the faculty and advisers, turn the lights on bright so they can see what's happening and use the best of their professional skill and will to change the trajectory for that student,\" Milliron says. The four-year-old company recently got new \u003ca href=\"http://techcrunch.com/2015/09/28/civitas-learning-gets-60-million-commitment-from-warburg-pincus/\">investor pledges of some $60 million\u003c/a> to expand its products.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At Valencia and other schools using predictive analytics, a semi-personalized email is just one intervention. Others might include one-on-one or group tutoring, peer-to-peer mentoring, meetings with an adviser or professor or other steps.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The job of intervening is made that much more challenging by the fact that Valencia serves more than 70,000 students in two sprawling central Florida counties. Many students have to balance school with full-time jobs, kids and other responsibilities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here's another reason using data for early intervention matters: Studies show that nearly 80 percent of first-year community college students need at least some remedial English or math help.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But Florida was tip of the spear in a national backlash against what many saw as ineffectual remedial education. Students at public universities in Florida are no longer required to take remedial tests or classes. It's now their choice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So now some introductory courses act as de facto remedial classes. Students in Phillips' composition class will have to show they can handle college-level work and craft cogent arguments within well-framed essays. \"They have to have minimum competencies,\" Phillips says. \"They have to do so much writing. They have to follow through on the tasks.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>No one involved in Valencia's pilot project sees these new digital platforms as silver bullets. Civitas' Milliron readily concedes the best data systems in the world \"will not fix a student who is not on purpose, who is not willing to engage and doesn't have the tenacity and motivation to succeed in higher education.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>His company's tools do help, he believes, those students who might be really trying hard but just aren't connecting with the material or who are stuck and just don't know whom to talk to.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Civitas says its numbers from the dozens of schools it's working with have consistently shown a boost of 3 to 7 percent in course completion and \"persistence,\" meaning continued enrollment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And Civitas is betting that helping improve retention rates will prove profitable. As the company's chief executive, Charles Thornburgh, has said: \"Approximately $100 billion in tuition and fees are spent each year [in the U.S.] on students who will not graduate. We believe there is an opportunity to improve that number by 5 to 10 percent, which is a multibillion-dollar opportunity.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As for Valencia, it's not yet clear whether the added data and interventions are helping boost student performance or graduation rates. \"It is still early to determine the impact of the analytic tools,\" Ewen says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Nonetheless, Valencia professors and administrators are cautiously optimistic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong> \"\u003c/strong>It has the potential to be innovative depending upon the people who use it,\" Ewen tells me. \"We believe that predictive analytics has the potential to take us to a place we haven't been before and as an enhancement to the work we've been doing already.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For student Lofton, all the nudges helped push him to participate and thrive. He got an A in Phillips' class.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"We felt like the essays were, like, so moving and touching, we was like, 'Man, we gotta discuss this!' \" he says. \"The course was interesting. The extra credit [for online participation] to me was just a bonus.\" Students should give it their all, he says, especially if a professor such as Phillips \"is going all out as far as trying to help the kids pass.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\n\u003cp>Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Institutions of higher education are under pressure from students and employers to prove that graduates are gaining the cross-cutting skills -- such as critical thinking, problem-solving, communication and quantitative analysis -- necessary for success in the real world. Now, a \u003ca href=\"http://www.sheeo.org/msc\" target=\"_blank\">consortium\u003c/a> of 59 universities and community colleges in nine states is working to develop a rubric-based assessment system that would allow them to measure these crucial skills within ongoing coursework that students produce.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Right now, some universities require a small sample of their students to take a standardized test before graduating, but many administrators and faculty find this method problematic. Students have no personal investment in the test, and it is divorced from the coursework that they see as their primary objective while in college. Also, not everyone does well on tests, but they may shine in their coursework.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Concerns over the effectiveness of standardized tests prompted the Association of American Colleges and Universities to begin working on a rubric-based alternative that is consistent and valid.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignright\">'Having gone through the norming session, I see how it works and that you can really get to a fair assessment of student work.'\u003ccite>Kathy Wills, Engish professor\u003c/cite>\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>First, they set out to define the essential learning outcomes that faculty, employers and accreditors saw as important. They settled on 16 qualities, some of which are: critical thinking, writing, quantitative literacy, oral communication, ethics, teamwork, intercultural understanding, and integrating learning from one area to another.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For the first-year pilot study they focused only on three of those outcomes: \u003ca href=\"https://www.aacu.org/value/rubrics/written-communication\" target=\"_blank\">written communication\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://www.aacu.org/value/rubrics/critical-thinking\" target=\"_blank\">critical thinking\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://www.aacu.org/value/rubrics/quantitative-literacy\" target=\"_blank\">quantitative literacy\u003c/a>. The faculty worked together to write rubrics (called \u003ca href=\"https://www.aacu.org/value-rubrics\" target=\"_blank\">Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education or VALUE rubrics\u003c/a>) that laid out what a progression of these skills looks like. The rubrics were tested on campuses and rewritten three times before reaching a final version.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Once the rubrics were set, faculty from all 59 universities were trained on how to use them. They went through norming sessions where each person would score a piece of student work using the rubric, and they’d come together to make sure people were assigning a similar grade.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I really trust the process of preparation that the scorers have,” said \u003ca href=\"https://www.iupuc.edu/academics/divisions-programs/liberal-arts/contact-liberal-arts/katherine-wills/\" target=\"_blank\">Kathy Wills\u003c/a>, associate English professor and director of the writing program at Indiana University-Purdue University Columbia campus. “Having gone through the norming session, I see how it works and that you can really get to a fair assessment of student work.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a \u003ca href=\"https://www.aacu.org/press/press-releases/multi-state-collaboration-produces-valuable-new-evidence-about-writing-critical\" target=\"_blank\">pilot study of the rubrics\u003c/a>, 127 trained scorers evaluated 7,000 samples of student work across a variety of disciplines. Because they were grading the cross-cutting skills of written communication, critical thinking and quantitative literacy, faculty evaluated work from disciplines that were not their own.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“These rubrics are designed to be cross-disciplinary,” explained \u003ca href=\"http://www.worcester.edu/Bonnie-Orcutt/\" target=\"_blank\">Bonnie Orcutt\u003c/a>, associate professor of economics at Worcester State University and temporarily the director of Learning Outcomes Assessment for the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education. “I can look at something and have no idea if the content was correct, but that’s not what I’m looking for. Independent of whether the content is correct, they may have used a body of evidence really well, have good organization, good syntax, good citations.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In other words the facts might be all wrong, but the person is a good writer, which is what the scorer is trying to evaluate with this rubric.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"https://www.aacu.org/press/press-releases/multi-state-collaboration-produces-valuable-new-evidence-about-writing-critical\" target=\"_blank\">pilot study results\u003c/a> are encouraging. “This is something that’s possible for campuses to do and is something that could be delivered to states for decision-making,” said Terrel Rhodes, \u003ca href=\"https://www.aacu.org/\" target=\"_blank\">Association of American Colleges and Universities\u003c/a> vice president.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The organization is now working with assessment experts to design an even more rigorous study of rubric-based grading, but Rhodes says the pilot study results have faculty and administrators feeling confident.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>ASSESSMENT THAT IMPROVES TEACHING\u003cbr>\n\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>\nAn unexpected consequence of the study has been the examination of teaching practices in higher education. “Faculty get invested in what they’re getting out of it,” Rhodes said. “They’re actually getting information that they’re turning around and using to change the way they’re teaching and the assignments they are using.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That never happened with the standardized tests, which spit out numbers but don’t offer the formative feedback that professors need to target specific areas for improvement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Professors began realizing how much the language of their assignment prompts communicated what they expected from students. That might seem obvious, but without other samples to compare to, professors just thought their students didn’t have the skills.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignleft\">'Faculty get invested in what they’re getting out of it.'\u003ccite>Terry Rhodes, AAC&U\u003c/cite>\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>“When you see the differences in the kind of responses you get from students from one prompt to another, that made me even more aware,” Wills said. She’s extra careful to write clear prompts and has workshopped assignments with her colleagues in the English department to be sure it’s clear what she wants from students. She’s also trying new kinds of assignments.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For example, in a creative writing poetry class, she had students bring in objects from nature or identify smells before they ever wrote a written word. She wanted them to have a visceral understanding of sensory experiences and bring that to their writing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It helped them understand the concept,” she said. Later, when she critiqued their writing for being too abstract and told students they needed more sensory imagery, they knew what she meant. “I was able to pull on a base that I had created. It made my teaching easier in some ways.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The pilot has also gotten the faculty thinking more about how they are going to incorporate cross-disciplinary skills throughout their content areas. “You can’t teach writing or critical thinking without some content, so you’re thinking how can I use this content as the vehicle to enhance students' critical thinking, quantitative thinking skills, etc.,\" said Orcutt.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She believes the rubric-based assessment project has been profoundly helpful for not just identifying how well universities are teaching these skills, but also for shining a light on what’s happening in the classroom.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>BRIDGING THE GAP TO K-12\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So far, this rubric work has been happening only at two- and four-year universities. But the conversation happening in higher education isn’t so different from that going on in K-12 schools. \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/01/21/more-teachers-refuse-to-give-standardized-tests/\" target=\"_blank\">Parents and teachers are pushing back\u003c/a> against blunt assessment instruments like standardized tests, and are looking for a way to hold schools accountable that doesn’t mean taking time away from class work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The important thing here is it’s authentic work and not just teaching to the test,” Wills said of the pilot study. “It’s real teachers and real work.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many K-12 educators and parents would like to see a similar type of system in their schools. Many welcome assessment and see the need to make sure kids are learning, but they’d like to see those evaluations happening based on the work students produce for class in context that they care about.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wills acknowledges that a lot of the new focus on cross-cutting skills in college comes out of work going on in K-12 education. She’s been working closely with other educators in Indiana to communicate university expectations to K-12 schools and help align curriculum.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rhodes says that while K-12 teachers weren’t explicitly involved in constructing the rubrics, they were brought in later as part of a group testing the ease of use.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“All of them were able to utilize the rubrics, look at student work and come to high levels of agreement about the quality of the work,” Rhodes said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>K-12 teachers are also looking at the rubrics on the website, although Rhodes doesn't know for sure how they are being used. He sees this as a positive sign that, down the road, a similar rubric-based assessment system could be used for these types of skills at all levels.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Institutions of higher education are under pressure from students and employers to prove that graduates are gaining the cross-cutting skills -- such as critical thinking, problem-solving, communication and quantitative analysis -- necessary for success in the real world. Now, a \u003ca href=\"http://www.sheeo.org/msc\" target=\"_blank\">consortium\u003c/a> of 59 universities and community colleges in nine states is working to develop a rubric-based assessment system that would allow them to measure these crucial skills within ongoing coursework that students produce.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Right now, some universities require a small sample of their students to take a standardized test before graduating, but many administrators and faculty find this method problematic. Students have no personal investment in the test, and it is divorced from the coursework that they see as their primary objective while in college. Also, not everyone does well on tests, but they may shine in their coursework.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Concerns over the effectiveness of standardized tests prompted the Association of American Colleges and Universities to begin working on a rubric-based alternative that is consistent and valid.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignright\">'Having gone through the norming session, I see how it works and that you can really get to a fair assessment of student work.'\u003ccite>Kathy Wills, Engish professor\u003c/cite>\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>First, they set out to define the essential learning outcomes that faculty, employers and accreditors saw as important. They settled on 16 qualities, some of which are: critical thinking, writing, quantitative literacy, oral communication, ethics, teamwork, intercultural understanding, and integrating learning from one area to another.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For the first-year pilot study they focused only on three of those outcomes: \u003ca href=\"https://www.aacu.org/value/rubrics/written-communication\" target=\"_blank\">written communication\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://www.aacu.org/value/rubrics/critical-thinking\" target=\"_blank\">critical thinking\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://www.aacu.org/value/rubrics/quantitative-literacy\" target=\"_blank\">quantitative literacy\u003c/a>. The faculty worked together to write rubrics (called \u003ca href=\"https://www.aacu.org/value-rubrics\" target=\"_blank\">Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education or VALUE rubrics\u003c/a>) that laid out what a progression of these skills looks like. The rubrics were tested on campuses and rewritten three times before reaching a final version.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Once the rubrics were set, faculty from all 59 universities were trained on how to use them. They went through norming sessions where each person would score a piece of student work using the rubric, and they’d come together to make sure people were assigning a similar grade.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I really trust the process of preparation that the scorers have,” said \u003ca href=\"https://www.iupuc.edu/academics/divisions-programs/liberal-arts/contact-liberal-arts/katherine-wills/\" target=\"_blank\">Kathy Wills\u003c/a>, associate English professor and director of the writing program at Indiana University-Purdue University Columbia campus. “Having gone through the norming session, I see how it works and that you can really get to a fair assessment of student work.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a \u003ca href=\"https://www.aacu.org/press/press-releases/multi-state-collaboration-produces-valuable-new-evidence-about-writing-critical\" target=\"_blank\">pilot study of the rubrics\u003c/a>, 127 trained scorers evaluated 7,000 samples of student work across a variety of disciplines. Because they were grading the cross-cutting skills of written communication, critical thinking and quantitative literacy, faculty evaluated work from disciplines that were not their own.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“These rubrics are designed to be cross-disciplinary,” explained \u003ca href=\"http://www.worcester.edu/Bonnie-Orcutt/\" target=\"_blank\">Bonnie Orcutt\u003c/a>, associate professor of economics at Worcester State University and temporarily the director of Learning Outcomes Assessment for the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education. “I can look at something and have no idea if the content was correct, but that’s not what I’m looking for. Independent of whether the content is correct, they may have used a body of evidence really well, have good organization, good syntax, good citations.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In other words the facts might be all wrong, but the person is a good writer, which is what the scorer is trying to evaluate with this rubric.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"https://www.aacu.org/press/press-releases/multi-state-collaboration-produces-valuable-new-evidence-about-writing-critical\" target=\"_blank\">pilot study results\u003c/a> are encouraging. “This is something that’s possible for campuses to do and is something that could be delivered to states for decision-making,” said Terrel Rhodes, \u003ca href=\"https://www.aacu.org/\" target=\"_blank\">Association of American Colleges and Universities\u003c/a> vice president.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The organization is now working with assessment experts to design an even more rigorous study of rubric-based grading, but Rhodes says the pilot study results have faculty and administrators feeling confident.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>ASSESSMENT THAT IMPROVES TEACHING\u003cbr>\n\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>\nAn unexpected consequence of the study has been the examination of teaching practices in higher education. “Faculty get invested in what they’re getting out of it,” Rhodes said. “They’re actually getting information that they’re turning around and using to change the way they’re teaching and the assignments they are using.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That never happened with the standardized tests, which spit out numbers but don’t offer the formative feedback that professors need to target specific areas for improvement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Professors began realizing how much the language of their assignment prompts communicated what they expected from students. That might seem obvious, but without other samples to compare to, professors just thought their students didn’t have the skills.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignleft\">'Faculty get invested in what they’re getting out of it.'\u003ccite>Terry Rhodes, AAC&U\u003c/cite>\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>“When you see the differences in the kind of responses you get from students from one prompt to another, that made me even more aware,” Wills said. She’s extra careful to write clear prompts and has workshopped assignments with her colleagues in the English department to be sure it’s clear what she wants from students. She’s also trying new kinds of assignments.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For example, in a creative writing poetry class, she had students bring in objects from nature or identify smells before they ever wrote a written word. She wanted them to have a visceral understanding of sensory experiences and bring that to their writing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It helped them understand the concept,” she said. Later, when she critiqued their writing for being too abstract and told students they needed more sensory imagery, they knew what she meant. “I was able to pull on a base that I had created. It made my teaching easier in some ways.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The pilot has also gotten the faculty thinking more about how they are going to incorporate cross-disciplinary skills throughout their content areas. “You can’t teach writing or critical thinking without some content, so you’re thinking how can I use this content as the vehicle to enhance students' critical thinking, quantitative thinking skills, etc.,\" said Orcutt.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She believes the rubric-based assessment project has been profoundly helpful for not just identifying how well universities are teaching these skills, but also for shining a light on what’s happening in the classroom.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>BRIDGING THE GAP TO K-12\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So far, this rubric work has been happening only at two- and four-year universities. But the conversation happening in higher education isn’t so different from that going on in K-12 schools. \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/01/21/more-teachers-refuse-to-give-standardized-tests/\" target=\"_blank\">Parents and teachers are pushing back\u003c/a> against blunt assessment instruments like standardized tests, and are looking for a way to hold schools accountable that doesn’t mean taking time away from class work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The important thing here is it’s authentic work and not just teaching to the test,” Wills said of the pilot study. “It’s real teachers and real work.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many K-12 educators and parents would like to see a similar type of system in their schools. Many welcome assessment and see the need to make sure kids are learning, but they’d like to see those evaluations happening based on the work students produce for class in context that they care about.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wills acknowledges that a lot of the new focus on cross-cutting skills in college comes out of work going on in K-12 education. She’s been working closely with other educators in Indiana to communicate university expectations to K-12 schools and help align curriculum.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rhodes says that while K-12 teachers weren’t explicitly involved in constructing the rubrics, they were brought in later as part of a group testing the ease of use.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“All of them were able to utilize the rubrics, look at student work and come to high levels of agreement about the quality of the work,” Rhodes said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>K-12 teachers are also looking at the rubrics on the website, although Rhodes doesn't know for sure how they are being used. He sees this as a positive sign that, down the road, a similar rubric-based assessment system could be used for these types of skills at all levels.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Finland is often applauded for its great education system. Earlier this year the Finns announced the intention to move towards* \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2015/03/23/tossing-out-teaching-by-subject-as-part-of-a-modern-high-school-education/\" target=\"_blank\">secondary education that is topic-based\u003c/a>, rather than subject-based in order to emphasize the interdisciplinary nature of real-world problems. Finnish educators hope teaching in this way will help students draw connections between disciplines and find previously undiscovered areas of interest. A similar strategy applies to the Finnish approach to the youngest learners. Rather than focusing on math and literacy, Finnish kindergartens are all about play.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In his \u003ca href=\"http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/10/the-joyful-illiterate-kindergartners-of-finland/408325/\" target=\"_blank\">Atlantic article\u003c/a>, Tim Walker describes seeing both free play and more pedagogically focused play in Finnish kindergartens. Both kinds of play are explicitly required and are being emphasized even more in the newest version of the curriculum. Walker writes:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>\"'Play is a very efficient way of learning for children,' she told me. 'And we can use it in a way that children will learn with joy.'\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The word 'joy' caught me off guard—I’m certainly not used to hearing the word in conversations about education in America, where I received my training and taught for several years. But Holappa, detecting my surprise, reiterated that the country’s early-childhood education program indeed places a heavy emphasis on 'joy,' which along with play is explicitly written into the curriculum as a learning concept. 'There's an old Finnish saying,' Holappa said. 'Those things you learn without joy you will forget easily.'\"\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/10/the-joyful-illiterate-kindergartners-of-finland/408325/\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>*This post has been modified to reflect that Finland has not yet rolled out topic-based secondary education across the country, but is moving in that direction.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Finland is often applauded for its great education system. Earlier this year the Finns announced the intention to move towards* \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2015/03/23/tossing-out-teaching-by-subject-as-part-of-a-modern-high-school-education/\" target=\"_blank\">secondary education that is topic-based\u003c/a>, rather than subject-based in order to emphasize the interdisciplinary nature of real-world problems. Finnish educators hope teaching in this way will help students draw connections between disciplines and find previously undiscovered areas of interest. A similar strategy applies to the Finnish approach to the youngest learners. Rather than focusing on math and literacy, Finnish kindergartens are all about play.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In his \u003ca href=\"http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/10/the-joyful-illiterate-kindergartners-of-finland/408325/\" target=\"_blank\">Atlantic article\u003c/a>, Tim Walker describes seeing both free play and more pedagogically focused play in Finnish kindergartens. Both kinds of play are explicitly required and are being emphasized even more in the newest version of the curriculum. Walker writes:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>\"'Play is a very efficient way of learning for children,' she told me. 'And we can use it in a way that children will learn with joy.'\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The word 'joy' caught me off guard—I’m certainly not used to hearing the word in conversations about education in America, where I received my training and taught for several years. But Holappa, detecting my surprise, reiterated that the country’s early-childhood education program indeed places a heavy emphasis on 'joy,' which along with play is explicitly written into the curriculum as a learning concept. 'There's an old Finnish saying,' Holappa said. 'Those things you learn without joy you will forget easily.'\"\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/10/the-joyful-illiterate-kindergartners-of-finland/408325/\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>*This post has been modified to reflect that Finland has not yet rolled out topic-based secondary education across the country, but is moving in that direction.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>When a group of kids from a Delhi slum figured out how to navigate the Internet in English simply by playing with a computer for a few days, it was the beginning of a movement to harness the power of self-organized learning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://sugatam.wikispaces.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Sugata Mitra’s “Hole in the Wall” \u003c/a>experiment has garnered a lot of attention since it first begun in 1999 and won a TED prize in 2013. It demonstrated that a group of students working together, motivated by a deep question and with access to a computer, could produce amazing results. But few self-organized learning environments exist in traditional education.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cleveland is a world away from Delhi, but Dora Bechtel says many of her students at \u003ca href=\"http://www.clevelandmetroschools.org/Page/1154\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Campus International School\u003c/a> remind her of the Indian children she observed in videos about the Hole in the Wall experiment. Her school is housed on Cleveland State University’s campus and uses the \u003ca href=\"http://www.ibo.org/en/programmes/primary-years-programme/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">International Baccalaureate (IB) program\u003c/a>. Sixty percent of its students come from Cleveland itself and the other 40 percent are the children of professors or residents of suburban communities.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignright\">\"Seeing them take charge has really showed us that maybe we are being a little too rigid and structured, and not trusting our students enough.\"\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>Recently, Bechtel has been experimenting with \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/12/11/ready-to-ignite-students-curiosity-heres-your-toolkit/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Self-Organized Learning Environments, or SOLEs\u003c/a>, in her elementary school classes. SOLEs are short forays into the kind of self-organized learning that Sugata Mitra found to be so powerful.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a classroom SOLE, Bechtel asks her students a “messy question,” something that doesn’t have just one right answer, then sets them loose to research the question in small groups. Students choose who they work with, find their own information, draw their own conclusions and present their findings to the whole class. It can be a bit chaotic, but Bechtel says that's often good.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There’s chaos and then there’s learning and you can tell the difference,” Bechtel said. She’s excited about SOLE because the method has students asking questions and taking ownership in a whole new way. The IB program already emphasizes inquiry and finding information for oneself, but Bechtel says the total freedom of the SOLE has actually pushed students to go deeper, come up with more varied results and to help one another collaboratively.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe src=\"https://embed.ted.com/talks/lang/en/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_education\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" scrolling=\"yes\" class=\"iframe-class\" frameborder=\"0\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s making my work easier because after they learn how a SOLE works and that this is a life skill -- that when we have a question we research answers -- they started calling everything a SOLE,” Bechtel said. “They started calling any type of wondering a SOLE.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bechtel worked with third-graders last year when she first started using SOLEs in her classroom and says she was impressed by how far her students’ curiosity carried them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’ve been researching and doing this type of questioning and work all this time, but I don’t ever remember it carrying into home other than homework,” Bechtel said. But after a SOLE, she said, students continued their research at home, sometimes even including their families.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s something about the ownership of it all that makes them feel like they did all of this,” Bechtel said. “They’re so much more engaged, and I think they like moving around the room.” SOLEs have worked so well that Bechtel and other grade-level colleagues now develop essential questions to kick off each unit in their curriculum. For example, in a unit about cities, Bechtel started with a SOLE based around the question, “Why do cities change?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>SOLEs seed excitement for the learning that will come, and often student presentations touch on aspects of the curriculum that is several weeks down the road. When the class gets there, the kids already have some information about and experience with the concepts and can more easily add to their knowledge base.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bechtel has also found that when she does SOLE, she has less difficulty differentiating her instruction. She has many different ability levels in her class, including several with individualized education plans, some low performers, a few in the middle and several very high-achieving kids. As any teacher knows, finding challenging work for such a varied class of learners is extremely difficult. But because the SOLE is so open-ended, more advanced students are helping struggling students and kids access information in whatever way they can.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bechtel remembers one SOLE where several of her lowest achievers decided to work together. She was worried they would be frustrated, but they happily used the computer to accommodate their learning differences. They found apps that read difficult texts out loud, watched videos and examined images to find the answers to their questions. Meanwhile, some of the advanced learners were finding connections to other areas, asking related questions and researching those as well.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I hear five weeks of planning going on in the same 45 minutes,” Bechtel said. And, because the kids all present their research and analysis, every student in the classroom gets the benefit of the others’ thinking. “Now I can go deeper with it,” Bechtel said. “They own the knowledge so much more, even though they know that I came up with the question.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe src=\"https://player.vimeo.com/video/18685938\" width=\"640\" height=\"480\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"yes\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bechtel believes part of her success with SOLEs came from her deep connection to the students -- she had the same group for three years in a row when she started experimenting with the model. The students were comfortable with one another and Bechtel had already taught them a lot of the basic research skills they would need. Other teachers at Campus International are finding success with SOLE, and perhaps even more importantly, Bechtel believes it is changing how the staff thinks about students.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Seeing them take charge has really showed us that maybe we are being a little too rigid and structured, and not trusting our students enough,” she said. Other parts of her classroom are more traditional, with restrictions and supports to help reach all students. But Bechtel wonders if some of those restrictions are holding kids back.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It almost changes the way you see the world,” said Campus International principal Julie Beers. “Students are always coming up with great questions, and then you’re wondering and looking up the answer.” She says SOLEs may start out with a teacher-driven question, but kids come up with their own questions too, some of which are the best ones. One second-grader asked, “Could we hear if our ears were square?” His class did a SOLE to find out more about the physics and biology of hearing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“SOLE has been our training wheels,” Beers said. “We practice it every single week. The students know they are responsible for the information they bring.” SOLE has been a small way for teachers to test giving students more freedom and ownership over both what to learn and how to learn it. And Beers is clear that the technique could work in any school because there are curious kids everywhere.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>SOLE In High School\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://www.ibo.org/en/programmes/primary-years-programme/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">MC2 STEM High School\u003c/a> in Cleveland has a reputation for being innovative. The school sets high expectations for the students it pulls from all over Cleveland, and it then does a lot to help them meet those goals. For example, all incoming ninth-graders take Algebra 2 with an emphasis on precalculus and physics. “Our belief is everyone can learn it with the right time and support,” said principal Feowyn MacKinnon.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_42070\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg class=\"size-medium wp-image-42070\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2015/09/7thMath-800x400.jpg\" alt=\"Example search for questions on SOLE Cleveland site.\" width=\"800\" height=\"400\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/09/7thMath-800x400.jpg 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/09/7thMath-400x200.jpg 400w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/09/7thMath-960x480.jpg 960w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/09/7thMath.jpg 982w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Example search for questions on SOLE Cleveland site.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Since MC2 students come from public schools throughout the city, many are used to a much more traditional school setting. MacKinnon says SOLE has been a great way to help incoming ninth- graders learn to be independent thinkers, deep question askers and researchers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We wanted to shift it so they are carrying the load of learning,” MacKinnon said. Every year ninth-graders do an end-of-year project called \u003ca href=\"http://www.mc2stemhighschool.org/assets/documents/edutopia-stw-mc2STEM-sample-projects-rockets-robots.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">“Rockets and Robots”\u003c/a> where they eventually build both a rocket and a robot. It’s a transdisciplinary project and teachers saw SOLE as a perfect way to integrate the ethical questions about technology and society. Students did a SOLE on the question: \"Just because we can make the technology, should we?” Students delved into the ethical complexities of technology and human life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The SOLEs have really worked out well when they are value questions or questions that students can have opposing answers to,” MacKinnon said. At first students didn’t really understand how to ask their own deep questions, but as they research they get curious and the questions naturally pop up. Peers are important to this process as well. Students try hard to present a different perspective from other groups. “They saw that they were producing the same answers as some of their classmates so they dug deeper,” Mackinnon said. They went beyond their gut reaction to a question and really looked at all sides of the question.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It took ninth-graders a little while to get used to driving their own learning, but with practice they are now approaching every topic with their own essential questions. Seniors are even questioning why they have to take state standardized tests, a headache for MacKinnon, but one she says she welcomes if it means the school is producing students that question the world around them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MacKinnon has noticed SOLEs work best when the teacher is completely hands off. When teachers try to structure the research or walk around reminding students of the task, they are inadvertently bringing the focus back to themselves as authority figure. Students tend to direct questions to them about whether they’re doing the assignment correctly. When teachers step back, students step up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“A lot of my ‘worst kids,’ the kids who are behavioral challenges -- I call them pineapples (prickly but sweet) -- they really excel in the SOLE,” McKinnon said. In a SOLE about what type of renewable energy would best serve Cleveland, MacKinnon remembers how much one of her “pineapple students,” Aaron, excelled at the assignment. Aaron is that smart kid who just can’t sit still. He’s often dancing in class and usually distracting others.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The first time we did a SOLE he loved it,” MacKinnon said. He didn’t join a group, but instead went around to all the other groups trying to convince them of his answer. “Every team would give him a response, so he had 20 people in the class challenging him, but he was in his element,” MacKinnon said. “He got attention; he got to participate in everyone’s group and no one told him to sit down.” When he presented, he already knew all the counter-arguments and could rebut them. “It’s kids like that who typically thrive because they’re allowed to be that person that school is telling them not to be, and that person contributes to everyone else’s learning,” Mackinnon said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Spreading the SOLE Movement\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://www.tedxcle.com/jeffrey-mcclellan/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Jeffrey McClellan\u003c/a> is the \u003ca href=\"https://www.solecle.com/#/welcome\">SOLE Cleveland\u003c/a> evangelist. He’s the founding principal of MC2 STEM High School, but has since moved on to help more traditional schools find workable avenues to experiment with innovative techniques. He thinks SOLE could be the best way for teachers to \u003ca href=\"https://www.theschoolinthecloud.org/updates/can-cleveland-schools-hold-1-000-soles-in-six-months\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">dip their toes in student-driven learning\u003c/a>. The SOLE Cleveland website even has \u003ca href=\"https://www.solecle.com/#/questions\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">question suggestions\u003c/a> for teachers just getting started, arranged by grade level and subject.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/N9f8Lb_ugrk\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"yes\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“SOLE says I trust you to find the information and participate and contribute to the learning of this classroom,” McClellan said. “And it does it in a way that’s really different from other transformation models because it’s this one little slice.” SOLEs can be done in one period or 60 minutes in elementary schools. It’s a way to introduce lots of ideas or dig deeply into one.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Over time you actually hone in on the art of asking questions,” McClellan said. “Kids become much more inquisitive, they start to own their own learning.” And it’s a great way to show kids that the teacher doesn’t hold all the answers. Ultimately it’s up to individuals to find answers to life’s questions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MC2’s current principal, Feowyn MacKinnon, hosts many teachers interested in the SOLE model. They always ask, “What next?” Students did a SOLE, it took a whole class period when none of the formal curriculum was being covered, now how does it connect to the material the teacher is responsible for teaching?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“My response to that is you can use SOLEs as often or as little as you like, but it really challenges the way the kids are thinking and it’s going to be a tool throughout all the other subjects and curriculum pieces,” MacKinnon said. She reasons that inquisitiveness, researching and presentation skills, not to mention finding reliable evidence and citing sources, will all be useful in whatever else students do. Plus, hopefully, they will have had a joyful experience of learning.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "Several schools are embracing self-organized learning environments as a way to engage students through inquiry, ownership and collaboration by starting with a \"messy question.\"",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>When a group of kids from a Delhi slum figured out how to navigate the Internet in English simply by playing with a computer for a few days, it was the beginning of a movement to harness the power of self-organized learning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://sugatam.wikispaces.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Sugata Mitra’s “Hole in the Wall” \u003c/a>experiment has garnered a lot of attention since it first begun in 1999 and won a TED prize in 2013. It demonstrated that a group of students working together, motivated by a deep question and with access to a computer, could produce amazing results. But few self-organized learning environments exist in traditional education.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cleveland is a world away from Delhi, but Dora Bechtel says many of her students at \u003ca href=\"http://www.clevelandmetroschools.org/Page/1154\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Campus International School\u003c/a> remind her of the Indian children she observed in videos about the Hole in the Wall experiment. Her school is housed on Cleveland State University’s campus and uses the \u003ca href=\"http://www.ibo.org/en/programmes/primary-years-programme/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">International Baccalaureate (IB) program\u003c/a>. Sixty percent of its students come from Cleveland itself and the other 40 percent are the children of professors or residents of suburban communities.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignright\">\"Seeing them take charge has really showed us that maybe we are being a little too rigid and structured, and not trusting our students enough.\"\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>Recently, Bechtel has been experimenting with \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/12/11/ready-to-ignite-students-curiosity-heres-your-toolkit/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Self-Organized Learning Environments, or SOLEs\u003c/a>, in her elementary school classes. SOLEs are short forays into the kind of self-organized learning that Sugata Mitra found to be so powerful.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a classroom SOLE, Bechtel asks her students a “messy question,” something that doesn’t have just one right answer, then sets them loose to research the question in small groups. Students choose who they work with, find their own information, draw their own conclusions and present their findings to the whole class. It can be a bit chaotic, but Bechtel says that's often good.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There’s chaos and then there’s learning and you can tell the difference,” Bechtel said. She’s excited about SOLE because the method has students asking questions and taking ownership in a whole new way. The IB program already emphasizes inquiry and finding information for oneself, but Bechtel says the total freedom of the SOLE has actually pushed students to go deeper, come up with more varied results and to help one another collaboratively.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe src=\"https://embed.ted.com/talks/lang/en/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_education\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" scrolling=\"yes\" class=\"iframe-class\" frameborder=\"0\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s making my work easier because after they learn how a SOLE works and that this is a life skill -- that when we have a question we research answers -- they started calling everything a SOLE,” Bechtel said. “They started calling any type of wondering a SOLE.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bechtel worked with third-graders last year when she first started using SOLEs in her classroom and says she was impressed by how far her students’ curiosity carried them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’ve been researching and doing this type of questioning and work all this time, but I don’t ever remember it carrying into home other than homework,” Bechtel said. But after a SOLE, she said, students continued their research at home, sometimes even including their families.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s something about the ownership of it all that makes them feel like they did all of this,” Bechtel said. “They’re so much more engaged, and I think they like moving around the room.” SOLEs have worked so well that Bechtel and other grade-level colleagues now develop essential questions to kick off each unit in their curriculum. For example, in a unit about cities, Bechtel started with a SOLE based around the question, “Why do cities change?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>SOLEs seed excitement for the learning that will come, and often student presentations touch on aspects of the curriculum that is several weeks down the road. When the class gets there, the kids already have some information about and experience with the concepts and can more easily add to their knowledge base.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bechtel has also found that when she does SOLE, she has less difficulty differentiating her instruction. She has many different ability levels in her class, including several with individualized education plans, some low performers, a few in the middle and several very high-achieving kids. As any teacher knows, finding challenging work for such a varied class of learners is extremely difficult. But because the SOLE is so open-ended, more advanced students are helping struggling students and kids access information in whatever way they can.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bechtel remembers one SOLE where several of her lowest achievers decided to work together. She was worried they would be frustrated, but they happily used the computer to accommodate their learning differences. They found apps that read difficult texts out loud, watched videos and examined images to find the answers to their questions. Meanwhile, some of the advanced learners were finding connections to other areas, asking related questions and researching those as well.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I hear five weeks of planning going on in the same 45 minutes,” Bechtel said. And, because the kids all present their research and analysis, every student in the classroom gets the benefit of the others’ thinking. “Now I can go deeper with it,” Bechtel said. “They own the knowledge so much more, even though they know that I came up with the question.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe src=\"https://player.vimeo.com/video/18685938\" width=\"640\" height=\"480\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"yes\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bechtel believes part of her success with SOLEs came from her deep connection to the students -- she had the same group for three years in a row when she started experimenting with the model. The students were comfortable with one another and Bechtel had already taught them a lot of the basic research skills they would need. Other teachers at Campus International are finding success with SOLE, and perhaps even more importantly, Bechtel believes it is changing how the staff thinks about students.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Seeing them take charge has really showed us that maybe we are being a little too rigid and structured, and not trusting our students enough,” she said. Other parts of her classroom are more traditional, with restrictions and supports to help reach all students. But Bechtel wonders if some of those restrictions are holding kids back.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It almost changes the way you see the world,” said Campus International principal Julie Beers. “Students are always coming up with great questions, and then you’re wondering and looking up the answer.” She says SOLEs may start out with a teacher-driven question, but kids come up with their own questions too, some of which are the best ones. One second-grader asked, “Could we hear if our ears were square?” His class did a SOLE to find out more about the physics and biology of hearing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“SOLE has been our training wheels,” Beers said. “We practice it every single week. The students know they are responsible for the information they bring.” SOLE has been a small way for teachers to test giving students more freedom and ownership over both what to learn and how to learn it. And Beers is clear that the technique could work in any school because there are curious kids everywhere.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>SOLE In High School\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://www.ibo.org/en/programmes/primary-years-programme/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">MC2 STEM High School\u003c/a> in Cleveland has a reputation for being innovative. The school sets high expectations for the students it pulls from all over Cleveland, and it then does a lot to help them meet those goals. For example, all incoming ninth-graders take Algebra 2 with an emphasis on precalculus and physics. “Our belief is everyone can learn it with the right time and support,” said principal Feowyn MacKinnon.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_42070\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg class=\"size-medium wp-image-42070\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2015/09/7thMath-800x400.jpg\" alt=\"Example search for questions on SOLE Cleveland site.\" width=\"800\" height=\"400\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/09/7thMath-800x400.jpg 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/09/7thMath-400x200.jpg 400w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/09/7thMath-960x480.jpg 960w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/09/7thMath.jpg 982w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Example search for questions on SOLE Cleveland site.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Since MC2 students come from public schools throughout the city, many are used to a much more traditional school setting. MacKinnon says SOLE has been a great way to help incoming ninth- graders learn to be independent thinkers, deep question askers and researchers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We wanted to shift it so they are carrying the load of learning,” MacKinnon said. Every year ninth-graders do an end-of-year project called \u003ca href=\"http://www.mc2stemhighschool.org/assets/documents/edutopia-stw-mc2STEM-sample-projects-rockets-robots.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">“Rockets and Robots”\u003c/a> where they eventually build both a rocket and a robot. It’s a transdisciplinary project and teachers saw SOLE as a perfect way to integrate the ethical questions about technology and society. Students did a SOLE on the question: \"Just because we can make the technology, should we?” Students delved into the ethical complexities of technology and human life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The SOLEs have really worked out well when they are value questions or questions that students can have opposing answers to,” MacKinnon said. At first students didn’t really understand how to ask their own deep questions, but as they research they get curious and the questions naturally pop up. Peers are important to this process as well. Students try hard to present a different perspective from other groups. “They saw that they were producing the same answers as some of their classmates so they dug deeper,” Mackinnon said. They went beyond their gut reaction to a question and really looked at all sides of the question.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It took ninth-graders a little while to get used to driving their own learning, but with practice they are now approaching every topic with their own essential questions. Seniors are even questioning why they have to take state standardized tests, a headache for MacKinnon, but one she says she welcomes if it means the school is producing students that question the world around them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MacKinnon has noticed SOLEs work best when the teacher is completely hands off. When teachers try to structure the research or walk around reminding students of the task, they are inadvertently bringing the focus back to themselves as authority figure. Students tend to direct questions to them about whether they’re doing the assignment correctly. When teachers step back, students step up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“A lot of my ‘worst kids,’ the kids who are behavioral challenges -- I call them pineapples (prickly but sweet) -- they really excel in the SOLE,” McKinnon said. In a SOLE about what type of renewable energy would best serve Cleveland, MacKinnon remembers how much one of her “pineapple students,” Aaron, excelled at the assignment. Aaron is that smart kid who just can’t sit still. He’s often dancing in class and usually distracting others.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The first time we did a SOLE he loved it,” MacKinnon said. He didn’t join a group, but instead went around to all the other groups trying to convince them of his answer. “Every team would give him a response, so he had 20 people in the class challenging him, but he was in his element,” MacKinnon said. “He got attention; he got to participate in everyone’s group and no one told him to sit down.” When he presented, he already knew all the counter-arguments and could rebut them. “It’s kids like that who typically thrive because they’re allowed to be that person that school is telling them not to be, and that person contributes to everyone else’s learning,” Mackinnon said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Spreading the SOLE Movement\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://www.tedxcle.com/jeffrey-mcclellan/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Jeffrey McClellan\u003c/a> is the \u003ca href=\"https://www.solecle.com/#/welcome\">SOLE Cleveland\u003c/a> evangelist. He’s the founding principal of MC2 STEM High School, but has since moved on to help more traditional schools find workable avenues to experiment with innovative techniques. He thinks SOLE could be the best way for teachers to \u003ca href=\"https://www.theschoolinthecloud.org/updates/can-cleveland-schools-hold-1-000-soles-in-six-months\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">dip their toes in student-driven learning\u003c/a>. The SOLE Cleveland website even has \u003ca href=\"https://www.solecle.com/#/questions\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">question suggestions\u003c/a> for teachers just getting started, arranged by grade level and subject.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/N9f8Lb_ugrk\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"yes\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“SOLE says I trust you to find the information and participate and contribute to the learning of this classroom,” McClellan said. “And it does it in a way that’s really different from other transformation models because it’s this one little slice.” SOLEs can be done in one period or 60 minutes in elementary schools. It’s a way to introduce lots of ideas or dig deeply into one.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Over time you actually hone in on the art of asking questions,” McClellan said. “Kids become much more inquisitive, they start to own their own learning.” And it’s a great way to show kids that the teacher doesn’t hold all the answers. Ultimately it’s up to individuals to find answers to life’s questions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MC2’s current principal, Feowyn MacKinnon, hosts many teachers interested in the SOLE model. They always ask, “What next?” Students did a SOLE, it took a whole class period when none of the formal curriculum was being covered, now how does it connect to the material the teacher is responsible for teaching?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“My response to that is you can use SOLEs as often or as little as you like, but it really challenges the way the kids are thinking and it’s going to be a tool throughout all the other subjects and curriculum pieces,” MacKinnon said. She reasons that inquisitiveness, researching and presentation skills, not to mention finding reliable evidence and citing sources, will all be useful in whatever else students do. Plus, hopefully, they will have had a joyful experience of learning.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"disqusTitle": "How To Weave Growth Mindset Into School Culture",
"title": "How To Weave Growth Mindset Into School Culture",
"headTitle": "MindShift | KQED News",
"content": "\u003cp>Adilene Rodriguez admits she has always struggled with academics. Especially in middle school she hated getting up early, found her classes boring and didn’t really see where it was all going. When she started her freshman year at \u003ca href=\"https://ahs.slzusd.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Arroyo High School\u003c/a> in San Lorenzo, California, just south of Oakland, she was a shy student who rarely spoke up in class and had little confidence in herself as a scholar.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rodriguez is now a senior and her approach to school has changed dramatically over her high school career. She attributes her shift to her freshman science teacher, Jim Clark, who taught the class about \u003ca href=\"https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/01/29/carol-dweck-mindset/\">growth mindset\u003c/a> from the very beginning and backed up the discussion with action.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“He would tell me, ‘You need to push yourself, that's how you're going to grow. Be confident. You're not always going to be successful on your first tries, but you can get there,’ ” Rodriguez said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She didn’t believe him at first; she thought she just wasn’t good at science. But with Clark’s insistence and support, she started participating in class more and struggled through difficult units.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignright\">'We're not always going to have teachers or friends or parents to depend on. And sometimes you will make mistakes on your own, and knowing how to grow from that has really helped me.'\u003ccite>High school senior Adeline Rodriguez\u003c/cite>\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>When Clark suggested Rodriguez take AP biology she resisted, scared she’d be unprepared for the challenge. She thought that if she had struggled in freshman biology, there was no way she could hack the tougher course. But Clark convinced her to challenge herself, making the case that no one grows inside their comfort zone. Rodriguez says that class changed her life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was one of those classes where the bell rings and you don’t want to leave. You want to keep discussing,” Rodriguez said. “And it’s what I want to do now for a career. I really love biology.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the summer between her junior and senior year, Rodriguez even took a college-level genetics class for fun, although she found out later she’d get college credits for it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rodriguez may have found her growth mindset in science class, but she’s applying it to all of her life. Take math, one of her least favorite subjects: “It’s not my strength, but I have to get through it to get to where I want to be,” Rodriguez said. “Sometimes you have to learn to love things you aren’t as good at. It will be hard, but you will get through it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rodriguez has also taken a whole new approach to class participation. She now sees that when she participates, she’s helping shape the direction of the class. She recognizes that it’s hard for teenagers to speak up and risk being wrong in front of their peers -- she always worried about being judged for getting the wrong answer -- but when that brave student speaks up, it empowers everyone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv style=\"float: left;margin: 0 15px 15px 0\">[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/226468768\" params=\"auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"300\" iframe=\"true\" /]\u003c/div>\n\u003cp>“Don’t be afraid to be the first one, because you can make that change in someone else and that would be awesome,” Rodriguez said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Perhaps most importantly, the growth mindset Rodriguez has learned at Arroyo will be a big help to her when she leaves high school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’m a senior, I’m going to go out into the real world soon, by myself,” she said. “We’re not always going to have teachers or friends or parents to depend on. And sometimes you will make mistakes on your own, and knowing how to grow from that has really helped me.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>GROWING CONFIDENT STUDENTS\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rodriguez is the product of four years of messaging from her high school teachers. The Academy of Health and Medicine, a small learning community within Arroyo High, has been pioneering a focused approach to teaching growth mindset that starts with Strong Start, a summer institute that incoming ninth-graders are highly encouraged to attend.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’ll purposefully try to put them in situations where they’ll be uncomfortable, and yet not feel vulnerable -- it’s a kinda fine line we walk -- and then provide opportunities for them to work their way through it and find some success,” Clark said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Students deconstruct how working through something challenging felt. Returning sophomores lead the program, many of whom the ninth-graders know from middle school, and who have already been through a year of practicing growth mindset themselves.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv style=\"float: right;margin: 0 15px 15px 0\">[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/225590350\" params=\"auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"300\" iframe=\"true\" /]\u003c/div>\n\u003cp>Students also talk about the definitions of fixed and growth mindsets and then talk through various challenges from each perspective. When the school year starts, those lessons continue in the classroom. Every teacher in the Academy of Health and Medicine has read Carol Dweck’s book, \u003ca href=\"https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/44330/mindset-by-carol-s-dweck-phd/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">“Mindset,”\u003c/a> and has discussed how to implement it in their classrooms. The school has moved to standards-based grading to emphasize that mistakes are part of learning and that understanding will come.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It just reinforces the fact that understanding the first time you hear something isn't the goal,” Clark said. “Smart isn't being right fast. It's working through things and understanding things eventually.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Clark brought the idea of growth mindset to Arroyo after a chance encounter with Dweck at a conference. The idea that intelligence grows with effort is one that comes naturally to him as a teacher because of his experiences as a basketball coach. Now, he’s trying to get students to approach academics with the same dedication to practice and risk-taking that they bring to sports or other extracurriculars.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“At the end of the day we're trying to create successful kids, some of whom will grow up to do science and some of whom won't,” Clark said. “But if they can take what they learn in our classrooms and apply it somewhere else, that's kind of what we're here for.”\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignleft\">'When you believe it, they believe. If I didn't believe this, they wouldn't buy what I'm selling.'\u003ccite>Arroyo health teacher India Rodgers\u003c/cite>\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>He’s clear that his job is to teach science, but it’s also his job to nurture the individuals he teaches.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The kids at Arroyo often have a lot of challenges outside the classroom. Many of these students will be the first in their families to go to college. Clark knows this and it makes him even more passionate about growth mindset.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Redefining smart as something that's more effort-based than genetics-based has opened the door for kids,” Clark said. “They don't feel like they're behind other kids any longer because they feel that their future is in their own hands, and if they just work through their problems they're going to be OK.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>GROWING AS TEACHERS\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The multiyear effort to infuse growth mindset into every class is paying off in a big way for students like Rodriguez, and in smaller ways for all students. Health teacher India Rodgers said she notices slight behavior changes in her freshmen first: Quiet but competent kids speak up more and struggling kids receive help from peers more readily.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She also knows that for some kids, the message can take awhile to penetrate. She says students have come back to her years later after having an experience that finally drove the concept home. It’s also tough for some kids to transfer the idea that “it’s OK to fail” to the academic subjects students find most difficult.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_42168\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg class=\"wp-image-42168 size-medium\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2015/09/norms-800x450.jpg\" alt=\"Reminders like this one are pasted on the lab counters in Mr. Clark's science classroom.\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/09/norms-800x450.jpg 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/09/norms-400x225.jpg 400w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/09/norms-1440x810.jpg 1440w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/09/norms-1180x664.jpg 1180w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/09/norms-960x540.jpg 960w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Reminders like this one are pasted on the lab counters in Jim Clark's science classroom. \u003ccite>(Katrina Schwartz)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“It’s really easy to start with my stuff, and then I try to use what they can do here and help them in other classes,” Rodgers said. Students discuss a lot of life issues in her class, so she often has strong relationships with them. She uses those to help them shift their mindsets about classes like math.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She also tries hard to \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2015/09/24/never-too-late-creating-a-climate-for-adults-to-learn-new-skills/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">model a growth mindset\u003c/a> to her students by being open about her own struggles as a parent and a teacher.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They’re not used to teachers apologizing,” Rodgers said. “But I tell them I’m going to make mistakes all the time. And I think showing that helps them realize they can actually make mistakes.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When teachers and administrators say they want kids to have a growth mindset, the school environment has to back up that rhetoric. At Arroyo, the emphasis on growth mindset came alongside a shift to standards-based grading. Kids can see that mistakes along the way aren’t negatively affecting them and keep working to master the concepts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"When you believe it; they believe,” Rodgers said. “If I didn’t believe this, they wouldn’t buy what I’m selling.\"\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "Teachers at Arroyo High School are seeing how years of integrating growth mindset messages into every class have changed student attitudes about learning.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Adilene Rodriguez admits she has always struggled with academics. Especially in middle school she hated getting up early, found her classes boring and didn’t really see where it was all going. When she started her freshman year at \u003ca href=\"https://ahs.slzusd.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Arroyo High School\u003c/a> in San Lorenzo, California, just south of Oakland, she was a shy student who rarely spoke up in class and had little confidence in herself as a scholar.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rodriguez is now a senior and her approach to school has changed dramatically over her high school career. She attributes her shift to her freshman science teacher, Jim Clark, who taught the class about \u003ca href=\"https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/01/29/carol-dweck-mindset/\">growth mindset\u003c/a> from the very beginning and backed up the discussion with action.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“He would tell me, ‘You need to push yourself, that's how you're going to grow. Be confident. You're not always going to be successful on your first tries, but you can get there,’ ” Rodriguez said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She didn’t believe him at first; she thought she just wasn’t good at science. But with Clark’s insistence and support, she started participating in class more and struggled through difficult units.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignright\">'We're not always going to have teachers or friends or parents to depend on. And sometimes you will make mistakes on your own, and knowing how to grow from that has really helped me.'\u003ccite>High school senior Adeline Rodriguez\u003c/cite>\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>When Clark suggested Rodriguez take AP biology she resisted, scared she’d be unprepared for the challenge. She thought that if she had struggled in freshman biology, there was no way she could hack the tougher course. But Clark convinced her to challenge herself, making the case that no one grows inside their comfort zone. Rodriguez says that class changed her life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was one of those classes where the bell rings and you don’t want to leave. You want to keep discussing,” Rodriguez said. “And it’s what I want to do now for a career. I really love biology.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the summer between her junior and senior year, Rodriguez even took a college-level genetics class for fun, although she found out later she’d get college credits for it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rodriguez may have found her growth mindset in science class, but she’s applying it to all of her life. Take math, one of her least favorite subjects: “It’s not my strength, but I have to get through it to get to where I want to be,” Rodriguez said. “Sometimes you have to learn to love things you aren’t as good at. It will be hard, but you will get through it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rodriguez has also taken a whole new approach to class participation. She now sees that when she participates, she’s helping shape the direction of the class. She recognizes that it’s hard for teenagers to speak up and risk being wrong in front of their peers -- she always worried about being judged for getting the wrong answer -- but when that brave student speaks up, it empowers everyone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv style=\"float: left;margin: 0 15px 15px 0\">\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cdiv class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__shortcodes__shortcodeWrapper'>\n \u003ciframe width='100%' height='300'\n scrolling='no' frameborder='no'\n src='https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/226468768&visual=true&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true'\n title='https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/226468768'>\n \u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/div>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/div>\n\u003cp>“Don’t be afraid to be the first one, because you can make that change in someone else and that would be awesome,” Rodriguez said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Perhaps most importantly, the growth mindset Rodriguez has learned at Arroyo will be a big help to her when she leaves high school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’m a senior, I’m going to go out into the real world soon, by myself,” she said. “We’re not always going to have teachers or friends or parents to depend on. And sometimes you will make mistakes on your own, and knowing how to grow from that has really helped me.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>GROWING CONFIDENT STUDENTS\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rodriguez is the product of four years of messaging from her high school teachers. The Academy of Health and Medicine, a small learning community within Arroyo High, has been pioneering a focused approach to teaching growth mindset that starts with Strong Start, a summer institute that incoming ninth-graders are highly encouraged to attend.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’ll purposefully try to put them in situations where they’ll be uncomfortable, and yet not feel vulnerable -- it’s a kinda fine line we walk -- and then provide opportunities for them to work their way through it and find some success,” Clark said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Students deconstruct how working through something challenging felt. Returning sophomores lead the program, many of whom the ninth-graders know from middle school, and who have already been through a year of practicing growth mindset themselves.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv style=\"float: right;margin: 0 15px 15px 0\">\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cdiv class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__shortcodes__shortcodeWrapper'>\n \u003ciframe width='100%' height='300'\n scrolling='no' frameborder='no'\n src='https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/225590350&visual=true&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true'\n title='https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/225590350'>\n \u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/div>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/div>\n\u003cp>Students also talk about the definitions of fixed and growth mindsets and then talk through various challenges from each perspective. When the school year starts, those lessons continue in the classroom. Every teacher in the Academy of Health and Medicine has read Carol Dweck’s book, \u003ca href=\"https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/44330/mindset-by-carol-s-dweck-phd/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">“Mindset,”\u003c/a> and has discussed how to implement it in their classrooms. The school has moved to standards-based grading to emphasize that mistakes are part of learning and that understanding will come.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It just reinforces the fact that understanding the first time you hear something isn't the goal,” Clark said. “Smart isn't being right fast. It's working through things and understanding things eventually.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Clark brought the idea of growth mindset to Arroyo after a chance encounter with Dweck at a conference. The idea that intelligence grows with effort is one that comes naturally to him as a teacher because of his experiences as a basketball coach. Now, he’s trying to get students to approach academics with the same dedication to practice and risk-taking that they bring to sports or other extracurriculars.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“At the end of the day we're trying to create successful kids, some of whom will grow up to do science and some of whom won't,” Clark said. “But if they can take what they learn in our classrooms and apply it somewhere else, that's kind of what we're here for.”\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignleft\">'When you believe it, they believe. If I didn't believe this, they wouldn't buy what I'm selling.'\u003ccite>Arroyo health teacher India Rodgers\u003c/cite>\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>He’s clear that his job is to teach science, but it’s also his job to nurture the individuals he teaches.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The kids at Arroyo often have a lot of challenges outside the classroom. Many of these students will be the first in their families to go to college. Clark knows this and it makes him even more passionate about growth mindset.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Redefining smart as something that's more effort-based than genetics-based has opened the door for kids,” Clark said. “They don't feel like they're behind other kids any longer because they feel that their future is in their own hands, and if they just work through their problems they're going to be OK.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>GROWING AS TEACHERS\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The multiyear effort to infuse growth mindset into every class is paying off in a big way for students like Rodriguez, and in smaller ways for all students. Health teacher India Rodgers said she notices slight behavior changes in her freshmen first: Quiet but competent kids speak up more and struggling kids receive help from peers more readily.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She also knows that for some kids, the message can take awhile to penetrate. She says students have come back to her years later after having an experience that finally drove the concept home. It’s also tough for some kids to transfer the idea that “it’s OK to fail” to the academic subjects students find most difficult.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_42168\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg class=\"wp-image-42168 size-medium\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2015/09/norms-800x450.jpg\" alt=\"Reminders like this one are pasted on the lab counters in Mr. Clark's science classroom.\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/09/norms-800x450.jpg 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/09/norms-400x225.jpg 400w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/09/norms-1440x810.jpg 1440w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/09/norms-1180x664.jpg 1180w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2015/09/norms-960x540.jpg 960w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Reminders like this one are pasted on the lab counters in Jim Clark's science classroom. \u003ccite>(Katrina Schwartz)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“It’s really easy to start with my stuff, and then I try to use what they can do here and help them in other classes,” Rodgers said. Students discuss a lot of life issues in her class, so she often has strong relationships with them. She uses those to help them shift their mindsets about classes like math.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She also tries hard to \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2015/09/24/never-too-late-creating-a-climate-for-adults-to-learn-new-skills/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">model a growth mindset\u003c/a> to her students by being open about her own struggles as a parent and a teacher.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They’re not used to teachers apologizing,” Rodgers said. “But I tell them I’m going to make mistakes all the time. And I think showing that helps them realize they can actually make mistakes.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When teachers and administrators say they want kids to have a growth mindset, the school environment has to back up that rhetoric. At Arroyo, the emphasis on growth mindset came alongside a shift to standards-based grading. Kids can see that mistakes along the way aren’t negatively affecting them and keep working to master the concepts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"When you believe it; they believe,” Rodgers said. “If I didn’t believe this, they wouldn’t buy what I’m selling.\"\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"disqusTitle": "Understanding Dyslexia and the Reading Brain in Kids",
"title": "Understanding Dyslexia and the Reading Brain in Kids",
"headTitle": "MindShift | KQED News",
"content": "\u003cp class=\"p2\">At a recent talk for special education teachers at the Los Angeles Unified School District, child development professor Maryanne Wolf urged educators to say the word dyslexia out loud.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">“Don’t ever succumb to the idea that it’s going to develop out of something, or that it’s a disease,” she recalled telling teachers. “Dyslexia is a different brain organization that needs different teaching methods. It is never the fault of the child, but rather the responsibility of us who teach to find methods that work for that child.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">Wolf, who has a dyslexic son, is on a mission to spread the idea of “cerebrodiversity,” the idea that our brains are not uniform and we each learn differently. Yet when it comes to school, students with different brains can often have lives filled with frustration and anguish as they, and everyone around them, struggle to figure out what is wrong with them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">\u003cstrong>Diagnosing Dyslexia \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">“Oh, she just hasn’t caught up yet,” is what Zanthe Taylor recalled her daughter Calliope’s teachers saying throughout first and second grades. Calliope, now 12, was in the slowest reading group at her Brooklyn private school, but teachers assured Taylor that Calliope was very bright and would catch up shortly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">In truth, Calliope wasn’t catching up. As peers began whizzing past her in reading, Taylor became more anxious and worried. Their collective frustration levels — both Calliope’s and her parents—soon reached a breaking point, especially after they’d hired a private tutor to help speed up her reading in the fall of second grade.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">“She’d have massive tantrums over homework,” Taylor said. Calliope would be happy and fine all afternoon, but when it came time to do homework, she would refuse to begin. “She would scream and cry, then I would scream and cry,” Taylor said. “I once crumpled up the whole assignment and yelled, 'What are we going to do?' ”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">Then one night, after four months of intensive (and expensive) tutoring, Taylor’s husband, Matthew, was talking to Calliope’s tutor on the phone when she mentioned the word “dyslexia.” A light went on. Taylor recalled that up to that point, everyone had been very careful not to say the word, but the tutor suggested that it might be time to have Calliope officially evaluated in order to receive more targeted instruction.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">An intensive two-day battery of tests provided the data that Taylor, by this time, already knew: Calliope had dyslexia. Although she was very bright and displayed above-average social skills, without intense and specific intervention, she would never “catch up” in reading.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">Taylor now knows that an overly emotional response to homework is common in those with dyslexia: Calliope didn't know why she couldn't read either. Now with a diagnosis and intensive intervention, Calliope is entering seventh grade with her peers. She's able to accomplish all the work, although she requires more time. \"I always disliked the words 'learning differences,' \" Taylor said. \"But the more I get to know about this, the more I think it's true.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">This kind of anxiety and frustration can be largely avoided, said Wolf, who is also director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University and author of \"\u003ca href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Proust-Squid-Story-Science-Reading/dp/0060933844\">Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain\u003c/a>.\"\u003ci> \u003c/i>She and colleague Martha Denckla designed a simple test to quickly know whether there is a problem in the reading circuit very early on, as early as kindergarten or first grade. Called the \u003ca href=\"http://ase.tufts.edu/crlr/documents/2012arop-rapidautomatizednaming.pdf\">RAN/RAS test\u003c/a> (Rapid Automatized Naming/Rapid Alternating Stimulus), students are timed on how fast they can name letters, numbers, colors and objects.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">RAN/RAS or a comparable evaluation is one of the single best predictors that there’s something different in how the brain is putting together letters with their name, which is like a mini-version of the later reading circuit. While RAN/RAS cannot diagnose a reading problem, it does provide educators with a red flag, suggesting that students may need further evaluation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">In \"Proust and the Squid,\" Wolf writes that if she were given five minutes with all teachers and parents everywhere, she’d want them most to know that “learning to read, like Red Sox baseball, is a wonderful thing that can go wrong for any number of reasons.” For students accused of being stubborn or not working to their potential, often neither is true: Children with dyslexia need immediate and intensive intervention to connect the pieces of the reading circuit.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">\u003cstrong>The Science of Reading and Dyslexia\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">The act of reading itself is anything but natural. Human brains weren’t designed to read: There is no “reading center” of the brain, and there are no “reading genes.” Instead, in order to read, each brain must fashion new circuits between parts originally designed to do other things, like retrieving the names for objects. These new circuits must not only combine many processes from different areas of the brain to form a specialized circuit just for reading -- in order to become a fluent reader, the circuit also needs to run lightning-fast, nearly automatic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">Wolf has spent her career studying how the brain reads and, in some cases, how it doesn’t. “Because we have no pre-programmed wiring for reading [in the brain], we have to do something very different,” Wolf said\u003ci>.\u003c/i> “What the brain does have -- which is fantastic -- is the ability to make new circuits based on new connections among its already-there parts. So, when I said [in the book] we were never born to read, that is the absolute truth. We weren’t. Each child has to do it by themselves.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">Since each brain must learn to read from scratch, as Wolf put it, “many things can happen along the way.” Dyslexia, originally called word-blindness, is a neurobiological condition describing the failure to read words and letters affecting an estimated 10-20 percent of schoolchildren, depending on whom you ask.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">While classified as a “learning disability,” dyslexia is not a brain disorder or a disease, nor is it flipping letters backward. Often the failure to read is in direct opposition to a brain’s cognitive ability, leaving parents and teachers stymied when an otherwise intelligent child can’t spell words they’ve seen a thousand times, or put a sentence together.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">Dyslexia, Wolf said, is the result of a brain that’s organized in a different way. In many children, this is because the right hemisphere tries to muscle the strengths of the left, specifically at tasks that are the domain of the left, like many language functions. When the reading circuit is being dominated by the right hemisphere, it takes longer for the information that goes to both hemispheres to get together.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">In the dyslexic brain, there are several major areas that could develop problematically. (While there is no singular form of dyslexia, there are several profiles that appear most prominently.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">* \u003cb>Phoneme awareness, or knowing the sounds that correspond with letters and words, is the No. 1 deficiency in the dyslexic brain\u003c/b>. “Our language is made up of 44 sounds called phonemes,” Wolf said. “English is trickier because we have phonemes that can be expressed in different letters, and we have letters that can stand for different phonemes. It’s an irregular language, and that adds to the complexity, but the underlying issue for many, but not all, children is problems in the basic representation of those phonemes.” Wolf said there are multiple areas of the brain contributing to our ability to represent phonemes, and that many dyslexic children have issues with developing phonemes, as well as knowing which sounds are assigned to which letters.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">* \u003cb>Fluency, or getting the reading circuit to work together quickly, is the second-biggest issue.\u003c/b> “Children can have perfectly represented phonemes, but can’t get the phonemes together with the letters, because there’s a speed-of-processing issue,” Wolf said. “And part of that may well be because that right hemisphere is taking a longer time and trying to do what the left hemisphere usually does, in getting that circuit to work very fast together. That can mean not just the phonemes aren’t represented very well. It might also mean that letters aren’t getting represented very well, and that the circuit is not becoming automatic.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">* \u003cb>Comprehension is the third but no less crucial issue to reading.\u003c/b> “After making letters and sounds work together, and getting the whole circuit to work in time, then words have to be connected to meanings and functions of grammar,” Wolf said. “It takes explicit work to get the visual representation, meaning, sound and grammatical function all working together, and that’s what dyslexic children must do.” Wolf said that often this kind of dyslexia doesn’t show itself until the child is older, third grade and up, when a child switches from learning to read to reading to learn.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">“Some of our children can read words, but read them laboriously,” Wolf said. “And by fourth grade they’re a major failure and have never become fluent.” Many of these children are bright and have compensated up to this point by memorizing words, but have never learned to read fast enough to comprehend what they’re reading.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">Understanding that these developments are nothing more than brain differences that can be aided with systematic and explicit instruction, Wolf said, is a large but necessary step for everyone involved: students, parents and teachers. When children find they’re unable to read or read with much difficulty, they often believe that it's the result of a bad or broken brain. Some teachers may also unwittingly hold beliefs that reading happens for all children by a kind of osmosis.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">Wolf insists that three decades of research has shown that neither are true, but keeping the truth about dyslexia hidden or misunderstood only hurts the students, their parents and the educators trying desperately to help them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">\n\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp class=\"p2\">At a recent talk for special education teachers at the Los Angeles Unified School District, child development professor Maryanne Wolf urged educators to say the word dyslexia out loud.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">“Don’t ever succumb to the idea that it’s going to develop out of something, or that it’s a disease,” she recalled telling teachers. “Dyslexia is a different brain organization that needs different teaching methods. It is never the fault of the child, but rather the responsibility of us who teach to find methods that work for that child.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">Wolf, who has a dyslexic son, is on a mission to spread the idea of “cerebrodiversity,” the idea that our brains are not uniform and we each learn differently. Yet when it comes to school, students with different brains can often have lives filled with frustration and anguish as they, and everyone around them, struggle to figure out what is wrong with them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">\u003cstrong>Diagnosing Dyslexia \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">“Oh, she just hasn’t caught up yet,” is what Zanthe Taylor recalled her daughter Calliope’s teachers saying throughout first and second grades. Calliope, now 12, was in the slowest reading group at her Brooklyn private school, but teachers assured Taylor that Calliope was very bright and would catch up shortly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">In truth, Calliope wasn’t catching up. As peers began whizzing past her in reading, Taylor became more anxious and worried. Their collective frustration levels — both Calliope’s and her parents—soon reached a breaking point, especially after they’d hired a private tutor to help speed up her reading in the fall of second grade.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">“She’d have massive tantrums over homework,” Taylor said. Calliope would be happy and fine all afternoon, but when it came time to do homework, she would refuse to begin. “She would scream and cry, then I would scream and cry,” Taylor said. “I once crumpled up the whole assignment and yelled, 'What are we going to do?' ”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">Then one night, after four months of intensive (and expensive) tutoring, Taylor’s husband, Matthew, was talking to Calliope’s tutor on the phone when she mentioned the word “dyslexia.” A light went on. Taylor recalled that up to that point, everyone had been very careful not to say the word, but the tutor suggested that it might be time to have Calliope officially evaluated in order to receive more targeted instruction.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">An intensive two-day battery of tests provided the data that Taylor, by this time, already knew: Calliope had dyslexia. Although she was very bright and displayed above-average social skills, without intense and specific intervention, she would never “catch up” in reading.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">Taylor now knows that an overly emotional response to homework is common in those with dyslexia: Calliope didn't know why she couldn't read either. Now with a diagnosis and intensive intervention, Calliope is entering seventh grade with her peers. She's able to accomplish all the work, although she requires more time. \"I always disliked the words 'learning differences,' \" Taylor said. \"But the more I get to know about this, the more I think it's true.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">This kind of anxiety and frustration can be largely avoided, said Wolf, who is also director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University and author of \"\u003ca href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Proust-Squid-Story-Science-Reading/dp/0060933844\">Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain\u003c/a>.\"\u003ci> \u003c/i>She and colleague Martha Denckla designed a simple test to quickly know whether there is a problem in the reading circuit very early on, as early as kindergarten or first grade. Called the \u003ca href=\"http://ase.tufts.edu/crlr/documents/2012arop-rapidautomatizednaming.pdf\">RAN/RAS test\u003c/a> (Rapid Automatized Naming/Rapid Alternating Stimulus), students are timed on how fast they can name letters, numbers, colors and objects.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">RAN/RAS or a comparable evaluation is one of the single best predictors that there’s something different in how the brain is putting together letters with their name, which is like a mini-version of the later reading circuit. While RAN/RAS cannot diagnose a reading problem, it does provide educators with a red flag, suggesting that students may need further evaluation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">In \"Proust and the Squid,\" Wolf writes that if she were given five minutes with all teachers and parents everywhere, she’d want them most to know that “learning to read, like Red Sox baseball, is a wonderful thing that can go wrong for any number of reasons.” For students accused of being stubborn or not working to their potential, often neither is true: Children with dyslexia need immediate and intensive intervention to connect the pieces of the reading circuit.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">\u003cstrong>The Science of Reading and Dyslexia\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">The act of reading itself is anything but natural. Human brains weren’t designed to read: There is no “reading center” of the brain, and there are no “reading genes.” Instead, in order to read, each brain must fashion new circuits between parts originally designed to do other things, like retrieving the names for objects. These new circuits must not only combine many processes from different areas of the brain to form a specialized circuit just for reading -- in order to become a fluent reader, the circuit also needs to run lightning-fast, nearly automatic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">Wolf has spent her career studying how the brain reads and, in some cases, how it doesn’t. “Because we have no pre-programmed wiring for reading [in the brain], we have to do something very different,” Wolf said\u003ci>.\u003c/i> “What the brain does have -- which is fantastic -- is the ability to make new circuits based on new connections among its already-there parts. So, when I said [in the book] we were never born to read, that is the absolute truth. We weren’t. Each child has to do it by themselves.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">Since each brain must learn to read from scratch, as Wolf put it, “many things can happen along the way.” Dyslexia, originally called word-blindness, is a neurobiological condition describing the failure to read words and letters affecting an estimated 10-20 percent of schoolchildren, depending on whom you ask.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">While classified as a “learning disability,” dyslexia is not a brain disorder or a disease, nor is it flipping letters backward. Often the failure to read is in direct opposition to a brain’s cognitive ability, leaving parents and teachers stymied when an otherwise intelligent child can’t spell words they’ve seen a thousand times, or put a sentence together.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">Dyslexia, Wolf said, is the result of a brain that’s organized in a different way. In many children, this is because the right hemisphere tries to muscle the strengths of the left, specifically at tasks that are the domain of the left, like many language functions. When the reading circuit is being dominated by the right hemisphere, it takes longer for the information that goes to both hemispheres to get together.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">In the dyslexic brain, there are several major areas that could develop problematically. (While there is no singular form of dyslexia, there are several profiles that appear most prominently.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">* \u003cb>Phoneme awareness, or knowing the sounds that correspond with letters and words, is the No. 1 deficiency in the dyslexic brain\u003c/b>. “Our language is made up of 44 sounds called phonemes,” Wolf said. “English is trickier because we have phonemes that can be expressed in different letters, and we have letters that can stand for different phonemes. It’s an irregular language, and that adds to the complexity, but the underlying issue for many, but not all, children is problems in the basic representation of those phonemes.” Wolf said there are multiple areas of the brain contributing to our ability to represent phonemes, and that many dyslexic children have issues with developing phonemes, as well as knowing which sounds are assigned to which letters.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">* \u003cb>Fluency, or getting the reading circuit to work together quickly, is the second-biggest issue.\u003c/b> “Children can have perfectly represented phonemes, but can’t get the phonemes together with the letters, because there’s a speed-of-processing issue,” Wolf said. “And part of that may well be because that right hemisphere is taking a longer time and trying to do what the left hemisphere usually does, in getting that circuit to work very fast together. That can mean not just the phonemes aren’t represented very well. It might also mean that letters aren’t getting represented very well, and that the circuit is not becoming automatic.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">* \u003cb>Comprehension is the third but no less crucial issue to reading.\u003c/b> “After making letters and sounds work together, and getting the whole circuit to work in time, then words have to be connected to meanings and functions of grammar,” Wolf said. “It takes explicit work to get the visual representation, meaning, sound and grammatical function all working together, and that’s what dyslexic children must do.” Wolf said that often this kind of dyslexia doesn’t show itself until the child is older, third grade and up, when a child switches from learning to read to reading to learn.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">“Some of our children can read words, but read them laboriously,” Wolf said. “And by fourth grade they’re a major failure and have never become fluent.” Many of these children are bright and have compensated up to this point by memorizing words, but have never learned to read fast enough to comprehend what they’re reading.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">Understanding that these developments are nothing more than brain differences that can be aided with systematic and explicit instruction, Wolf said, is a large but necessary step for everyone involved: students, parents and teachers. When children find they’re unable to read or read with much difficulty, they often believe that it's the result of a bad or broken brain. Some teachers may also unwittingly hold beliefs that reading happens for all children by a kind of osmosis.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">Wolf insists that three decades of research has shown that neither are true, but keeping the truth about dyslexia hidden or misunderstood only hurts the students, their parents and the educators trying desperately to help them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Despite the increasing emphasis on technology as a learning tool in the classroom, many school districts still aggressively filter the Internet that teachers and students can access. While the federal \u003ca href=\"https://www.fcc.gov/guides/childrens-internet-protection-act\" target=\"_blank\">Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA)\u003c/a> requires that schools filter for pornographic images, many districts are over-filtering, blocking sites that can be used positively for education. There are a \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2011/04/26/straight-from-the-doe-facts-about-blocking-sites-in-schools/\" target=\"_blank\">lot of myths\u003c/a> about how tight these required filters must be.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s common for school districts to block social media, chatting services, online games and video services. That means some teachers spend hours downloading YouTube videos to use in their classrooms the next day -- energy that could be better spent elsewhere. Educators argue that a highly filtered Internet \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/06/26/whats-the-impact-of-overzealous-internet-filtering-in-schools/\" target=\"_blank\">restricts the intellectual freedom of students\u003c/a> to read and share ideas where the conversation is happening, often on social media. And perhaps most troubling, kids without Internet access at home rely on school Internet for their digital needs and may be missing out on what has become a big part of being an active citizen.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignright\">'We usually think about the freedom to read or access other people’s points of view. But the freedom to speak and be heard is the flip side of that coin.'\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>“The more I work with technology, the more I see that the same rights that apply to printed texts should apply to the Internet as well,” said \u003ca href=\"http://www.doug-johnson.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Doug Johnson\u003c/a>, tech director of the Burnsville-Eagan-Savage school district outside Minneapolis.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Johnson is in charge of filtering in his district and tries to maintain the lowest level of filtering possible, while still keeping inappropriate material out of kids’ hands. Trained as a librarian, Johnson has a much more nuanced view of banning websites than many tech directors. He feels librarians have a duty to fight for digital access in the same way they do for books.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I feel they’ve totally underestimated the importance of making sure students have access to a variety of viewpoints and digital resources as well,” Johnson said of the traditional librarian focus on printed texts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In fact, in an age when presidential candidates are being interviewed on YouTube and most of the political debate happens on social media channels, Johnson argues that prohibiting access to these sites actually denies students the opportunity to practice being engaged citizens with a valued voice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We usually think about the freedom to read or access other people’s points of view,” Johnson said. “But the freedom to speak and be heard is the flip side of that coin.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He’s worried that if websites that give students voice, like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, are blocked by schools, then some students will never have the opportunity to be heard. And worse, kids who have free and open access to the Internet at home will have the opportunity to participate, while students without home access will have only a filtered online experience.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When you think about all the ways students are denied voice or do not have the ability to see themselves in their learning, it becomes very arbitrary,” high school librarian Michelle Luhtala said on an American Association of School Librarians webinar. She’s a passionate advocate for less administrative filtering and more focus on \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/10/04/teach-kids-to-be-their-own-filter/\" target=\"_blank\">teaching students how to be their own filters\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Johnson said he knows from personal experience that filtering companies tend to be overzealous out of caution and lack of understanding about the education context. If any teacher in Johnson’s district asks for a site to be unblocked for a curricular reason, he does so -- no questions asked.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>GROWING DIGITAL LEADERS\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many districts block social media and video sites because they want to limit distractions. That’s not a good enough reason, said \u003ca href=\"http://blogs.slj.com/neverendingsearch/\" target=\"_blank\">Joyce Valenza\u003c/a>, assistant professor at Rutgers University, where she trains the next generation of school librarians.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’ve \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/12/05/age-of-distraction-why-its-crucial-for-students-to-learn-to-focus/\" target=\"_blank\">always had distractions\u003c/a> in our classrooms,” Valenza said. “We had magazines in our desks; we were throwing notes at each other; we were looking out the window. Teachers need to manage a classroom that doesn’t necessarily have four walls.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She said teaching students to responsibly use their technology in appropriate ways and times should be a crucial part of a school’s mission. They are nurturing not only digital citizens but also digital leaders.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“These are things we need to newly learn, but we can’t ignore them,” Valenza argues. “If we ignore them, then [students will] be doing them behind our backs.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Students need to be part of the discussion about classroom norms and can help set the consequences for breaking them. But prohibiting students from accessing the tools to create digital stories, share and access other people’s ideas on current events, and watch video lessons restricts their intellectual rights.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We are not learning in isolation anymore. We learn in networks,” Valenza said. It’s the job of educators to help students learn to use these networks wisely.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She points out that while a student may have access to a smartphone outside school, and may be making videos on her own, the experience of digital media is much different when guided by a skilled professional. And when kids have a chance to share their academic work on social networks, their digital footprint represents not just their social activities but their learning as well.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>MORE FILTERING IN BIG DISTRICTS\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Both Valenza and Johnson believe over-filtering is an urgent issue for all educators, especially librarians. “You are the only person who’s trained to stand up for intellectual freedom,” Valenza said. If librarians safeguarded access to digital information as carefully as they do the library’s book collection, kids would have advocates.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many larger districts, which also tend to be urban, have the most restrictive filtering policies and often serve more low-income students, according to Valenza. “Learners that need the resources the most are the ones less likely to have anyone fighting on their behalf,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Valenza advocates for a clear line of communication between classroom teachers and the person controlling the filter. Right now, many big districts have burdensome bureaucracy making it almost impossible to unblock a site in a reasonable amount of time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Teachers working in smaller districts are more likely to have a personal relationship with the person controlling the filter, giving them the power to tinker with it. But most importantly, districts need to make careful decisions about what is blocked and why.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“These are really important philosophical issues in the educational environment, and very often these conversations aren’t being had,” Valenza said.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Despite the increasing emphasis on technology as a learning tool in the classroom, many school districts still aggressively filter the Internet that teachers and students can access. While the federal \u003ca href=\"https://www.fcc.gov/guides/childrens-internet-protection-act\" target=\"_blank\">Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA)\u003c/a> requires that schools filter for pornographic images, many districts are over-filtering, blocking sites that can be used positively for education. There are a \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2011/04/26/straight-from-the-doe-facts-about-blocking-sites-in-schools/\" target=\"_blank\">lot of myths\u003c/a> about how tight these required filters must be.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s common for school districts to block social media, chatting services, online games and video services. That means some teachers spend hours downloading YouTube videos to use in their classrooms the next day -- energy that could be better spent elsewhere. Educators argue that a highly filtered Internet \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/06/26/whats-the-impact-of-overzealous-internet-filtering-in-schools/\" target=\"_blank\">restricts the intellectual freedom of students\u003c/a> to read and share ideas where the conversation is happening, often on social media. And perhaps most troubling, kids without Internet access at home rely on school Internet for their digital needs and may be missing out on what has become a big part of being an active citizen.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignright\">'We usually think about the freedom to read or access other people’s points of view. But the freedom to speak and be heard is the flip side of that coin.'\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>“The more I work with technology, the more I see that the same rights that apply to printed texts should apply to the Internet as well,” said \u003ca href=\"http://www.doug-johnson.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Doug Johnson\u003c/a>, tech director of the Burnsville-Eagan-Savage school district outside Minneapolis.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Johnson is in charge of filtering in his district and tries to maintain the lowest level of filtering possible, while still keeping inappropriate material out of kids’ hands. Trained as a librarian, Johnson has a much more nuanced view of banning websites than many tech directors. He feels librarians have a duty to fight for digital access in the same way they do for books.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I feel they’ve totally underestimated the importance of making sure students have access to a variety of viewpoints and digital resources as well,” Johnson said of the traditional librarian focus on printed texts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In fact, in an age when presidential candidates are being interviewed on YouTube and most of the political debate happens on social media channels, Johnson argues that prohibiting access to these sites actually denies students the opportunity to practice being engaged citizens with a valued voice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We usually think about the freedom to read or access other people’s points of view,” Johnson said. “But the freedom to speak and be heard is the flip side of that coin.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He’s worried that if websites that give students voice, like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, are blocked by schools, then some students will never have the opportunity to be heard. And worse, kids who have free and open access to the Internet at home will have the opportunity to participate, while students without home access will have only a filtered online experience.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When you think about all the ways students are denied voice or do not have the ability to see themselves in their learning, it becomes very arbitrary,” high school librarian Michelle Luhtala said on an American Association of School Librarians webinar. She’s a passionate advocate for less administrative filtering and more focus on \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/10/04/teach-kids-to-be-their-own-filter/\" target=\"_blank\">teaching students how to be their own filters\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Johnson said he knows from personal experience that filtering companies tend to be overzealous out of caution and lack of understanding about the education context. If any teacher in Johnson’s district asks for a site to be unblocked for a curricular reason, he does so -- no questions asked.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>GROWING DIGITAL LEADERS\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many districts block social media and video sites because they want to limit distractions. That’s not a good enough reason, said \u003ca href=\"http://blogs.slj.com/neverendingsearch/\" target=\"_blank\">Joyce Valenza\u003c/a>, assistant professor at Rutgers University, where she trains the next generation of school librarians.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’ve \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/12/05/age-of-distraction-why-its-crucial-for-students-to-learn-to-focus/\" target=\"_blank\">always had distractions\u003c/a> in our classrooms,” Valenza said. “We had magazines in our desks; we were throwing notes at each other; we were looking out the window. Teachers need to manage a classroom that doesn’t necessarily have four walls.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She said teaching students to responsibly use their technology in appropriate ways and times should be a crucial part of a school’s mission. They are nurturing not only digital citizens but also digital leaders.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“These are things we need to newly learn, but we can’t ignore them,” Valenza argues. “If we ignore them, then [students will] be doing them behind our backs.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Students need to be part of the discussion about classroom norms and can help set the consequences for breaking them. But prohibiting students from accessing the tools to create digital stories, share and access other people’s ideas on current events, and watch video lessons restricts their intellectual rights.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We are not learning in isolation anymore. We learn in networks,” Valenza said. It’s the job of educators to help students learn to use these networks wisely.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She points out that while a student may have access to a smartphone outside school, and may be making videos on her own, the experience of digital media is much different when guided by a skilled professional. And when kids have a chance to share their academic work on social networks, their digital footprint represents not just their social activities but their learning as well.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>MORE FILTERING IN BIG DISTRICTS\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Both Valenza and Johnson believe over-filtering is an urgent issue for all educators, especially librarians. “You are the only person who’s trained to stand up for intellectual freedom,” Valenza said. If librarians safeguarded access to digital information as carefully as they do the library’s book collection, kids would have advocates.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many larger districts, which also tend to be urban, have the most restrictive filtering policies and often serve more low-income students, according to Valenza. “Learners that need the resources the most are the ones less likely to have anyone fighting on their behalf,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Valenza advocates for a clear line of communication between classroom teachers and the person controlling the filter. Right now, many big districts have burdensome bureaucracy making it almost impossible to unblock a site in a reasonable amount of time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Teachers working in smaller districts are more likely to have a personal relationship with the person controlling the filter, giving them the power to tinker with it. But most importantly, districts need to make careful decisions about what is blocked and why.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>If there’s any video game that has successfully made its way into the classroom, it’s Minecraft. There’s a small subset of teachers using all kinds of digital games in interesting ways, but the blockbuster hit Minecraft and its educational counterpart \u003ca href=\"http://minecraftedu.com/about\" target=\"_blank\">MinecraftEDU\u003c/a> have reached much wider audiences. But getting started with MinecraftEDU can be intimidating for teachers who don’t consider themselves “gamers” and aren’t sure how to harness the engagement and excitement of Minecraft. Luckily, there’s a robust and global Minecraft teacher community to supply tips, support and even lesson plans.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Teachers who already use Minecraft in the classroom love it because of the flexibility it offers -- almost any subject can be taught with a little creativity. And like other powerful learning games, well-structured Minecraft lessons give students opportunities to fail and try again, improve their skills, and participate in an immersive environment that aids retention because students can attach the academic concepts to their personal experiences within the game.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignright\">“It’s surprising how much is out there and the vast majority of it is free.\"\u003ccite>John Miller, 7th Grade Social Studies teacher\u003c/cite>\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>“When you are in a game, all that information in the immersive world is tied to your heart and your emotions and that becomes a very powerful retention tool,” said Garrett Zimmer, president of \u003ca href=\"http://www.minegage.com/\" target=\"_blank\">MineGage\u003c/a>, a company that makes Minecraft lessons with extra programming to track progress. Zimmer became famous among Minecraft players for \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/user/PitchblackItai\" target=\"_blank\">videos of his own play\u003c/a> and has since turned his coding abilities and Minecraft prowess towards creating pre-made worlds and lessons for teachers to use.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Zimmer and other experienced Minecraft teachers say it’s important to manage expectations when using Minecraft in the classroom. Many students already have experience playing the game for fun, so the teacher needs to explicitly set the goals and expectations for conduct within the game at the outset. Zimmer says most kids will be so excited to be playing the game in school that they won’t mind the extra rules.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>MINECRAFT IN HISTORY\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>John Miller has been using Minecraft to teach 7th grade history at Chalone Peaks Middle School in California for the past three years. Designing lessons in Minecraft has reinfused his teaching style with creativity and has helped his students become independent thinkers. “We're not really teaching them to be independent,” Miller said. “So that’s what got me thinking about putting kids in a virtual world and letting them explore.”\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignleft\">\"I've gotten the best writing I've ever gotten in 21 years from kids.\"\u003ccite>John Miller\u003c/cite>\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>Teachers are finding ways to use Minecraft in every subject, but in some ways the game is best suited to history because it’s so easy to download worlds other people have already made in Minecraft. Without much effort or time, a teacher can have a three-dimensional, accurate map of medieval London at his fingertips. Students can then see and experience the time and place in a new way, bringing history to life and giving them a personal stake in it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Miller’s students are generally poor at reading and writing, so it was important for him to \u003ca href=\"http://minecraft.edtecworks.com/2015/02/16/literacy-through-minecraft-lesson-design-model/\" target=\"_blank\">inject lots of literacy skills\u003c/a> into his content teaching about medieval world history. He collaborated with \u003ca href=\"https://chaosgatebook.wordpress.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Robert Walton\u003c/a>, a former teacher and current young adult fiction writer, to write vignettes introducing each part of his curriculum. Then he’d set his students loose in Minecraft to explore a “map” that he’d downloaded from the MinecraftEDU website and customized for his purposes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Each vignettes tells a loose story about some aspect of Dark Ages history. The quests Miller designed take the narrative further and ultimately lead students through the Minecraft map and into the next story and part of history. For example, Walton wrote \u003ca href=\"https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jNqYmMklwPbdOApGsHGIbRdI5L1oc2lbz3srkioJ3aA/edit\" target=\"_blank\">a story\u003c/a> about the first Viking raid in England, told from the Viking viewpoint. Miller had his students close-read and annotate the story to be sure they understood it. Then he set the kids loose in Minecraft to wander around the village post-raid, interacting with various characters who told them a different side of the story.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Miller asked his students to write reflections about what they’d seen and learned about each period of history. “I’ve gotten the best writing I’ve ever gotten in 21 years from kids,” Miller said. Normally he would dread reading 160 essays about the same moment in history, but because each kid wrote from his or her own perspective, each piece of writing was different. “I enjoyed it so much because every kid wrote from a different perspective, from how they saw it,” Miller said. And by the end, kids had written much more than they ever thought they could.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Kids who were struggling to write a paragraph at the beginning of the year had written 40 pages of amazing storytelling,” Miller said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like many public schools, Chalone Peaks doesn’t have an art or music program. Miller has found that Minecraft has not only helped fuel a passion for history in some of his students, but it also provides a creative outlet for them. When he teaches about medieval Japan, he asks students to write \u003ca href=\"http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/poetic-form-tanka\" target=\"_blank\">Tanka poems\u003c/a>, a precursor to the haiku usually focusing on nature of emotions. Then in Minecraft, students built paths that represented the themes of their poem. As a player moved down the path and stepped on each block a line from the poem would pop up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/uWTKlfynSuo?list=PL41iJfA2iBPHyuNHpxsa80hJaXKvZDdWH\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"yes\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When the kids are creating these things, I’m not only seeing on the screen what they are creating, but in a way I can see their thinking,” Miller said. He plays the game with them, interacting with them there, which also allows him the time to build relationships through a medium that they like. Talking with them about what they are making and why is also a great way to assess their learning. The game also allows for differentiation - more advanced students are free to make more detailed and impressive projects.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The creative aspect was critical to see if they really understood what the words of the poem really meant,” Miller said. Even though his students speak English, about half of them come into 7th grade writing and reading at a 3rd grade level. Writing verse is a particularly hard task for them. The middle school textbooks and primary source documents are often inaccessible to them, but Miller has found that Minecraft helps them experience the history and then participate more in constructing new knowledge about it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Miller understands that some teachers may feel intimidated to get started with Minecraft, but he’s never regretted taking the leap. He suggests starting a Minecraft club after school to build interest and give the teacher time to familiarize herself with the game. The \u003ca href=\"https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/minecraft-teachers\" target=\"_blank\">MinecraftEDU teacher community\u003c/a> is also \u003ca href=\"http://minecrafteduclassroom.weebly.com/teacher-resources.html\" target=\"_blank\">robust and generous\u003c/a>. Most teachers freely allow downloading of worlds and lessons they’ve created and Miller often copies parts of other worlds and then positions them in his own map for a specific lesson.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s surprising how much is out there and the vast majority of it is free,” Miller said. And if it doesn’t already exist, many Minecraft enthusiasts are happy to build it. That network of educators has also been an inspiration to Miller who likes having a cohort of colleagues with whom he shares ideas and gets feedback. He does note that schools need computers to run the MinecraftEDU software, not iPads or Chromebooks. But MinecraftEDU is affordable (\u003ca href=\"http://minecraftedu.com/faq#question_1-4\" target=\"_blank\">roughly $18 per seat\u003c/a>) and doesn’t require that a school have its own server.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>MINECRAFT IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Minecraft might not be an obvious teaching tool for a Spanish language teacher, but \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCk56bQDNBHv8bc6G7Nahc2A\" target=\"_blank\">Glen Irvin\u003c/a> has found that his high school students are using language more often and in more complex ways since he started using the game. He was worried teenagers would find Minecraft stupid, but was blown away by its success when he gave it a try.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There’s nothing built for second language teachers, so I had to come up with some scenarios myself,” Irvin said. For example, in a unit about the language of business, Irvin asked students to collect resources like lumber and iron in Minecraft’s “creative mode.” Students then set up businesses, bartered with one another and posted prices in Spanish, all the while speaking to each other and conducting business in Spanish.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/kIbuSM_nZoc?list=PLXIHcDHyXD4hEZyekIdl2_uElIjDa23ys\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"yes\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was way better than what we normally what we would have done, which would be a fake skit,” Irvin said. “It blew that thing away.” Students were so into the project they even started looking up extra vocabulary words and grammatical constructions so they could communicate better with one another. Irvin also always stops the play with enough time for students to write a reflection of what they’ve done in the game in their online journals. He finds the reflection helps solidify their learning and gives them practice with both oral and written communication skills.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Because none of the pre-built lessons in MinecraftEDU are explicitly for language teachers, Irvin finds himself purusing what’s out there and generating lots of creative ways to work his curriculum into what he finds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For example, in an upper level Spanish course students take for college credit, Irvin assigned a survival world created by MinecraftEDU founder \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUZUXHA7owwfnld4U8mWY3A\" target=\"_blank\">Joel Levin\u003c/a> for the unit on environmental conservation. In Levin’s scenario, classmates are the last remaining people on earth and there is only one tree still alive. The rest of the human race is waiting for the world to be inhabitable in outer space. To win the challenge the team must repopulate the forest and make earth safe for life again. But the only way the class can alert survivors in space that earth is safe again is to send up a rocket, which they must make by smelting iron. That can only be done by burning trees to make a hot fire. The goals are at cross purposes and students have to decide the best course of action.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“In my class they’re discussing all these scenarios and what to do or not do in Spanish, which is awesome because it’s super high level thinking,” Irvin said. “It’s way beyond anything I would have expected them to do.” And it was easy for Irvin to set up. He downloaded the pre-built world and then went in and changed all the signs from English to Spanish. It took him ten minutes and he got an engaging lesson that gave students a chance to use new vocabulary and language skills to argue their position.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“A teacher who doesn’t really have experience playing a lot can still do awesome things because the kids are going to be so fired up,” Irvin said. Experienced players in his classes often offer to be teaching-aids, helping other students hone their basic Minecraft skills. Irvin often records what his students do in the game, both for assessment and to keep a record of the awesome things they’ve built.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Irvin says it’s easy to keep students on task in the game because as a teacher-player in the game he has more powers than other players. He can instantly teleport to wherever a student is working and remind them to stay on task, or freeze a player who has wandered. He can also go into an invisible mode to see what students are doing when they don’t know he’s there.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Irvin has three tips for teachers looking to get started.\u003c/p>\n\u003col>\n\u003cli>Use MinecraftEDU. It’s cheap, easy, and there are a lot of worlds to steal from or use, along with lesson tips.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Get a more experienced player to walk you through the basics and mess around a little in the game to become familiar.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Start with a single project that you’d like to improve, maybe a poster project. Tell the students they will be able to demonstrate their knowledge in three dimensions instead. Set parameters and guidelines for how students should interact within the game.\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ol>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>MINECRAFT WITH MATH AND SCIENCE\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Minecraft \u003ca href=\"http://services.minecraftedu.com/worlds/\" target=\"_blank\">lends itself well to teaching math\u003c/a> because everything is built out of blocks, making it easy to do geometry. Area and volume problems at the bare minimum. Math is also a subject many students find difficult and a different way of engaging them could help spark enthusiasm.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/user/EduElfie\" target=\"_blank\">Stephen Elford\u003c/a> is a secondary math and science teacher at a rural public school in Victoria, Australia. He played Minecraft for fun at first, but then realized how much math was involved and began experimenting with using it as a classroom tool.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Elford has found Minecraft’s “crafting mode” to be an effective way to teach basic algebra because Minecraft players have to craft all the tools they use to build out of raw materials harvested in the world. Different implements like an axe or a torch require different raw material recipes. Elford’s students wrote their own recipes (which look a lot like equations) using base materials. For example, one log = 4 planks. If you had 52 logs how many planks would you have and what formula would be used to represent the problem?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Elford doesn’t ever force students to use Minecraft for projects, but he likes to offer it as an option because he’s noticed that some of his most disengaged learners excel when given an alternative to traditional pen and paper equations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The four students who did that project got a very good understanding of how algebra can be used in virtual life situations and how to go about converting and simplifying units,” Elford said. In other lessons Elford has used a more straightforward method, asking students to solve problems to earn access to new parts of the world. Elford says one student in particular stands out because he had done almost no work in school for more than three years. But when Minecraft was involved he perked up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“He showed a depth of understanding that I just didn’t think was possible given his participation,” Elford said. “It blew my mind.” It was that “ah ha” moment many teachers live for, but that doesn’t always come easily or often.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Elford has found Minecraft to be powerful in science as well, where he mostly uses the game to simulate scientific experiences that kids wouldn’t otherwise get in public school. For example, in his senior biology class, Elford uses Minecraft to give students a tour of an animal cell. Then, they get to watch as a single strand of DNA is transcribed into mRNA, which conveys the instructions to create complex proteins that do most of the work in the body.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/kBUesxvMw74?rel=0\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"yes\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When I’ve done this lesson in the past it’s been a lot more powerful and longer lasting for the students,” Elford said. He’s also uses Minecraft to start discussions. For example, his rural school doesn’t have the tools to measure Earth’s gravity, but his students can measure the gravity in Minecraft and then discuss what their findings mean for earth. Or, Elford might let students destroy the world with a plague in Minecraft as a way to discuss evolution.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Elford, like Irvin and Miller, is clear that Minecraft is just one more tool he can use to effectively communicate his content and the skills that accompany it. However, he’s encouraged by the staying power of lessons he’s taught using Minecraft and by the excitement even poor students often show for projects within the game.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>GET STARTED\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Any new initiative feels daunting, but the only way to get started is to jump in. The educators profiled here saw Minecraft as a potentially powerful tool and started experimenting with how it could fit their pre-determined curriculum. They continue to seek help and ideas from peers and use the many free resources available to them. In addition to the positive changes they describe in their students, many teachers noted that Minecraft has helped reignite the creativity and passion that first brought them to teaching.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>If there’s any video game that has successfully made its way into the classroom, it’s Minecraft. There’s a small subset of teachers using all kinds of digital games in interesting ways, but the blockbuster hit Minecraft and its educational counterpart \u003ca href=\"http://minecraftedu.com/about\" target=\"_blank\">MinecraftEDU\u003c/a> have reached much wider audiences. But getting started with MinecraftEDU can be intimidating for teachers who don’t consider themselves “gamers” and aren’t sure how to harness the engagement and excitement of Minecraft. Luckily, there’s a robust and global Minecraft teacher community to supply tips, support and even lesson plans.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Teachers who already use Minecraft in the classroom love it because of the flexibility it offers -- almost any subject can be taught with a little creativity. And like other powerful learning games, well-structured Minecraft lessons give students opportunities to fail and try again, improve their skills, and participate in an immersive environment that aids retention because students can attach the academic concepts to their personal experiences within the game.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignright\">“It’s surprising how much is out there and the vast majority of it is free.\"\u003ccite>John Miller, 7th Grade Social Studies teacher\u003c/cite>\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>“When you are in a game, all that information in the immersive world is tied to your heart and your emotions and that becomes a very powerful retention tool,” said Garrett Zimmer, president of \u003ca href=\"http://www.minegage.com/\" target=\"_blank\">MineGage\u003c/a>, a company that makes Minecraft lessons with extra programming to track progress. Zimmer became famous among Minecraft players for \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/user/PitchblackItai\" target=\"_blank\">videos of his own play\u003c/a> and has since turned his coding abilities and Minecraft prowess towards creating pre-made worlds and lessons for teachers to use.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Zimmer and other experienced Minecraft teachers say it’s important to manage expectations when using Minecraft in the classroom. Many students already have experience playing the game for fun, so the teacher needs to explicitly set the goals and expectations for conduct within the game at the outset. Zimmer says most kids will be so excited to be playing the game in school that they won’t mind the extra rules.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>MINECRAFT IN HISTORY\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>John Miller has been using Minecraft to teach 7th grade history at Chalone Peaks Middle School in California for the past three years. Designing lessons in Minecraft has reinfused his teaching style with creativity and has helped his students become independent thinkers. “We're not really teaching them to be independent,” Miller said. “So that’s what got me thinking about putting kids in a virtual world and letting them explore.”\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignleft\">\"I've gotten the best writing I've ever gotten in 21 years from kids.\"\u003ccite>John Miller\u003c/cite>\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>Teachers are finding ways to use Minecraft in every subject, but in some ways the game is best suited to history because it’s so easy to download worlds other people have already made in Minecraft. Without much effort or time, a teacher can have a three-dimensional, accurate map of medieval London at his fingertips. Students can then see and experience the time and place in a new way, bringing history to life and giving them a personal stake in it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Miller’s students are generally poor at reading and writing, so it was important for him to \u003ca href=\"http://minecraft.edtecworks.com/2015/02/16/literacy-through-minecraft-lesson-design-model/\" target=\"_blank\">inject lots of literacy skills\u003c/a> into his content teaching about medieval world history. He collaborated with \u003ca href=\"https://chaosgatebook.wordpress.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Robert Walton\u003c/a>, a former teacher and current young adult fiction writer, to write vignettes introducing each part of his curriculum. Then he’d set his students loose in Minecraft to explore a “map” that he’d downloaded from the MinecraftEDU website and customized for his purposes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Each vignettes tells a loose story about some aspect of Dark Ages history. The quests Miller designed take the narrative further and ultimately lead students through the Minecraft map and into the next story and part of history. For example, Walton wrote \u003ca href=\"https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jNqYmMklwPbdOApGsHGIbRdI5L1oc2lbz3srkioJ3aA/edit\" target=\"_blank\">a story\u003c/a> about the first Viking raid in England, told from the Viking viewpoint. Miller had his students close-read and annotate the story to be sure they understood it. Then he set the kids loose in Minecraft to wander around the village post-raid, interacting with various characters who told them a different side of the story.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Miller asked his students to write reflections about what they’d seen and learned about each period of history. “I’ve gotten the best writing I’ve ever gotten in 21 years from kids,” Miller said. Normally he would dread reading 160 essays about the same moment in history, but because each kid wrote from his or her own perspective, each piece of writing was different. “I enjoyed it so much because every kid wrote from a different perspective, from how they saw it,” Miller said. And by the end, kids had written much more than they ever thought they could.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Kids who were struggling to write a paragraph at the beginning of the year had written 40 pages of amazing storytelling,” Miller said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like many public schools, Chalone Peaks doesn’t have an art or music program. Miller has found that Minecraft has not only helped fuel a passion for history in some of his students, but it also provides a creative outlet for them. When he teaches about medieval Japan, he asks students to write \u003ca href=\"http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/poetic-form-tanka\" target=\"_blank\">Tanka poems\u003c/a>, a precursor to the haiku usually focusing on nature of emotions. Then in Minecraft, students built paths that represented the themes of their poem. As a player moved down the path and stepped on each block a line from the poem would pop up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/uWTKlfynSuo?list=PL41iJfA2iBPHyuNHpxsa80hJaXKvZDdWH\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"yes\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When the kids are creating these things, I’m not only seeing on the screen what they are creating, but in a way I can see their thinking,” Miller said. He plays the game with them, interacting with them there, which also allows him the time to build relationships through a medium that they like. Talking with them about what they are making and why is also a great way to assess their learning. The game also allows for differentiation - more advanced students are free to make more detailed and impressive projects.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The creative aspect was critical to see if they really understood what the words of the poem really meant,” Miller said. Even though his students speak English, about half of them come into 7th grade writing and reading at a 3rd grade level. Writing verse is a particularly hard task for them. The middle school textbooks and primary source documents are often inaccessible to them, but Miller has found that Minecraft helps them experience the history and then participate more in constructing new knowledge about it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Miller understands that some teachers may feel intimidated to get started with Minecraft, but he’s never regretted taking the leap. He suggests starting a Minecraft club after school to build interest and give the teacher time to familiarize herself with the game. The \u003ca href=\"https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/minecraft-teachers\" target=\"_blank\">MinecraftEDU teacher community\u003c/a> is also \u003ca href=\"http://minecrafteduclassroom.weebly.com/teacher-resources.html\" target=\"_blank\">robust and generous\u003c/a>. Most teachers freely allow downloading of worlds and lessons they’ve created and Miller often copies parts of other worlds and then positions them in his own map for a specific lesson.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s surprising how much is out there and the vast majority of it is free,” Miller said. And if it doesn’t already exist, many Minecraft enthusiasts are happy to build it. That network of educators has also been an inspiration to Miller who likes having a cohort of colleagues with whom he shares ideas and gets feedback. He does note that schools need computers to run the MinecraftEDU software, not iPads or Chromebooks. But MinecraftEDU is affordable (\u003ca href=\"http://minecraftedu.com/faq#question_1-4\" target=\"_blank\">roughly $18 per seat\u003c/a>) and doesn’t require that a school have its own server.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>MINECRAFT IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Minecraft might not be an obvious teaching tool for a Spanish language teacher, but \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCk56bQDNBHv8bc6G7Nahc2A\" target=\"_blank\">Glen Irvin\u003c/a> has found that his high school students are using language more often and in more complex ways since he started using the game. He was worried teenagers would find Minecraft stupid, but was blown away by its success when he gave it a try.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There’s nothing built for second language teachers, so I had to come up with some scenarios myself,” Irvin said. For example, in a unit about the language of business, Irvin asked students to collect resources like lumber and iron in Minecraft’s “creative mode.” Students then set up businesses, bartered with one another and posted prices in Spanish, all the while speaking to each other and conducting business in Spanish.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/kIbuSM_nZoc?list=PLXIHcDHyXD4hEZyekIdl2_uElIjDa23ys\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"yes\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was way better than what we normally what we would have done, which would be a fake skit,” Irvin said. “It blew that thing away.” Students were so into the project they even started looking up extra vocabulary words and grammatical constructions so they could communicate better with one another. Irvin also always stops the play with enough time for students to write a reflection of what they’ve done in the game in their online journals. He finds the reflection helps solidify their learning and gives them practice with both oral and written communication skills.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Because none of the pre-built lessons in MinecraftEDU are explicitly for language teachers, Irvin finds himself purusing what’s out there and generating lots of creative ways to work his curriculum into what he finds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For example, in an upper level Spanish course students take for college credit, Irvin assigned a survival world created by MinecraftEDU founder \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUZUXHA7owwfnld4U8mWY3A\" target=\"_blank\">Joel Levin\u003c/a> for the unit on environmental conservation. In Levin’s scenario, classmates are the last remaining people on earth and there is only one tree still alive. The rest of the human race is waiting for the world to be inhabitable in outer space. To win the challenge the team must repopulate the forest and make earth safe for life again. But the only way the class can alert survivors in space that earth is safe again is to send up a rocket, which they must make by smelting iron. That can only be done by burning trees to make a hot fire. The goals are at cross purposes and students have to decide the best course of action.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“In my class they’re discussing all these scenarios and what to do or not do in Spanish, which is awesome because it’s super high level thinking,” Irvin said. “It’s way beyond anything I would have expected them to do.” And it was easy for Irvin to set up. He downloaded the pre-built world and then went in and changed all the signs from English to Spanish. It took him ten minutes and he got an engaging lesson that gave students a chance to use new vocabulary and language skills to argue their position.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“A teacher who doesn’t really have experience playing a lot can still do awesome things because the kids are going to be so fired up,” Irvin said. Experienced players in his classes often offer to be teaching-aids, helping other students hone their basic Minecraft skills. Irvin often records what his students do in the game, both for assessment and to keep a record of the awesome things they’ve built.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Irvin says it’s easy to keep students on task in the game because as a teacher-player in the game he has more powers than other players. He can instantly teleport to wherever a student is working and remind them to stay on task, or freeze a player who has wandered. He can also go into an invisible mode to see what students are doing when they don’t know he’s there.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Irvin has three tips for teachers looking to get started.\u003c/p>\n\u003col>\n\u003cli>Use MinecraftEDU. It’s cheap, easy, and there are a lot of worlds to steal from or use, along with lesson tips.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Get a more experienced player to walk you through the basics and mess around a little in the game to become familiar.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Start with a single project that you’d like to improve, maybe a poster project. Tell the students they will be able to demonstrate their knowledge in three dimensions instead. Set parameters and guidelines for how students should interact within the game.\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ol>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>MINECRAFT WITH MATH AND SCIENCE\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Minecraft \u003ca href=\"http://services.minecraftedu.com/worlds/\" target=\"_blank\">lends itself well to teaching math\u003c/a> because everything is built out of blocks, making it easy to do geometry. Area and volume problems at the bare minimum. Math is also a subject many students find difficult and a different way of engaging them could help spark enthusiasm.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/user/EduElfie\" target=\"_blank\">Stephen Elford\u003c/a> is a secondary math and science teacher at a rural public school in Victoria, Australia. He played Minecraft for fun at first, but then realized how much math was involved and began experimenting with using it as a classroom tool.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Elford has found Minecraft’s “crafting mode” to be an effective way to teach basic algebra because Minecraft players have to craft all the tools they use to build out of raw materials harvested in the world. Different implements like an axe or a torch require different raw material recipes. Elford’s students wrote their own recipes (which look a lot like equations) using base materials. For example, one log = 4 planks. If you had 52 logs how many planks would you have and what formula would be used to represent the problem?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Elford doesn’t ever force students to use Minecraft for projects, but he likes to offer it as an option because he’s noticed that some of his most disengaged learners excel when given an alternative to traditional pen and paper equations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The four students who did that project got a very good understanding of how algebra can be used in virtual life situations and how to go about converting and simplifying units,” Elford said. In other lessons Elford has used a more straightforward method, asking students to solve problems to earn access to new parts of the world. Elford says one student in particular stands out because he had done almost no work in school for more than three years. But when Minecraft was involved he perked up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“He showed a depth of understanding that I just didn’t think was possible given his participation,” Elford said. “It blew my mind.” It was that “ah ha” moment many teachers live for, but that doesn’t always come easily or often.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Elford has found Minecraft to be powerful in science as well, where he mostly uses the game to simulate scientific experiences that kids wouldn’t otherwise get in public school. For example, in his senior biology class, Elford uses Minecraft to give students a tour of an animal cell. Then, they get to watch as a single strand of DNA is transcribed into mRNA, which conveys the instructions to create complex proteins that do most of the work in the body.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/kBUesxvMw74?rel=0\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"yes\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When I’ve done this lesson in the past it’s been a lot more powerful and longer lasting for the students,” Elford said. He’s also uses Minecraft to start discussions. For example, his rural school doesn’t have the tools to measure Earth’s gravity, but his students can measure the gravity in Minecraft and then discuss what their findings mean for earth. Or, Elford might let students destroy the world with a plague in Minecraft as a way to discuss evolution.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Elford, like Irvin and Miller, is clear that Minecraft is just one more tool he can use to effectively communicate his content and the skills that accompany it. However, he’s encouraged by the staying power of lessons he’s taught using Minecraft and by the excitement even poor students often show for projects within the game.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>GET STARTED\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Any new initiative feels daunting, but the only way to get started is to jump in. The educators profiled here saw Minecraft as a potentially powerful tool and started experimenting with how it could fit their pre-determined curriculum. They continue to seek help and ideas from peers and use the many free resources available to them. In addition to the positive changes they describe in their students, many teachers noted that Minecraft has helped reignite the creativity and passion that first brought them to teaching.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"disqusTitle": "10 Tips For Launching An Inquiry-Based Classroom",
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"content": "\u003cp>Transforming teaching practices is a long, slow road. But increasingly schools and teachers experiencing success are sharing their ideas online and in-person. \u003ca href=\"https://www.scienceleadership.org/\">Science Leadership Academy\u003c/a> opened as a public magnet school almost ten years ago in Philadelphia. The educators that make up the school community have spent nearly half that time sharing best practices through a school-run conference each year and more recently by opening a second school in Philadelphia. Diana Laufenberg was one of the first SLA teachers and has gone on to help foster inquiry at schools around the country, most recently by starting the non-profit \u003ca href=\"http://inquiryschools.org/\" target=\"_blank\">Inquiry Schools\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It takes time to build up a strong inquiry-based teaching practice, to learn how to direct student questions with other questions, and to get comfortable in a guiding role. But when Laufenberg talks about what it takes, she makes it sound easy. We've broken her advice down into digestible tips for anyone ready to jump in and try for themselves.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>1. Don’t teach the content standards; help kids find their own path towards the information they need to know.\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Every teacher has a “bucket” of stuff she is responsible for teaching her students, known as standards. The best way to get students to understand and remember that content is to help them \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/03/12/how-to-teach-the-standards-without-becoming-standardized/\" target=\"_blank\">build their own path of questions towards the information\u003c/a> they need to know.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The brain is so primed for questions,” said Laufenberg, managing director of Inquiry Schools and a former 11th and 12th grade history teacher at SLA. “It learns better that way and remembers better that way.” Unfortunately, many educators and schools are so focused on achieving standardized outcomes that they don’t leverage the best tool at their disposal -- students’ natural curiosity. School is full of questions, but for the most part those questions imply students should only know more about what teachers are asking them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“At the end of it they may have consumed less content, but remember more of the sum total,” Laufenberg said. “And they end up in a better place.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>2. Don’t tell students what they should know; create the structure for them to experience it on their own.\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Inquiry at its best happens when the teacher is doing very little other than creating the architecture for the experience to happen,” Laufenberg said. “It’s asking the first question, putting up the provocative primary document or playing the two minute video.” After that, the room should be full of kid questions. And if a student gets truly stumped and asks for help from the teacher, her job is to ask another question that pushes the students’ thinking forward or raises new questions for the student to investigate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Laufenberg has worked with well-intentioned, hard working teachers all over the country to infuse more inquiry into their teaching. Many of them find this model destabilizing because for a long time they believed their job was to teach content. To make inquiry-based learning work, teachers have to instead become experts at \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2015/02/02/what-do-we-really-mean-when-we-say-personalized-learning/\" target=\"_blank\">listening to how a student is thinking\u003c/a> and then ask the one question that will “un-stick” the students’ thinking and set them off and running again.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You know it’s happening when there’s very little telling of things, but rather leading of questions and experiences so the students discover those on their own,” Laufenberg said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ted id=1034]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>3. Use class time to make connections between pieces of information.\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Especially with AP classes, students are motivated or else they wouldn’t be there. So give them a list of questions, tell them what to study and let them do so outside of class. They can use the textbook, the Internet and many other sources to find that information more efficiently and effectively than a lecture.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Inside of class, use that time to make connections between information,” Laufenberg said. After all, what good are facts if they aren’t connected to anything else? “Give them [students] compelling things to do that have them analyze and talk to each other, and grapple with the difficulty of what’s going on in whatever it is you happen to be teaching. But stop using your minutes in class to just tell them things.” Teachers have the tremendously important role of helping students make sense of the facts they’ve learned and see connections to other issues.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>4. Many kids struggle with reading, so hook them with the non-written word.\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When Laufenberg taught at Science Leadership Academy she had a student in her class who was an advanced analytical processor, a great critical thinker and a wonderful problem solver, but she struggled to read and write because of learning differences. Laufenberg wanted her to be able to engage with the class content at the high level of which she was capable, and not be limited by her second grade reading level. She developed the habit of introducing lessons with something visual so the student wouldn’t be left out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I needed to do this because there was an acute situation I wanted to handle, but what it was doing was inviting all the kids to the table with a level playing field of comprehension, not putting the barrier in front of them to start with, which is the written word for comprehension,” Laufenberg said. She would show students something interesting or puzzling, even using 90 second videos to grab their attention. This strategy got students wondering and gave them a little background so that even if they were doing the reading Laufenberg assigned, they came to it with their own questions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Your reluctant readers are more likely to make an attempt,” Laufenberg said, because they are curious to find the answer to their questions. Laufenberg would often try to give students the baseline information they need to know in the quickest way possible. “We would background build, but it wouldn’t be, ‘I’m going to tell you a few things today,’” Laufenberg said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If a complex idea can be imparted through a short video or other means, Laufenberg uses it so the majority of class time can be spent diving into deeper questions and analysis. Laufenberg always got at the background information through questions; she never just told students information.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It isn’t less reading; it’s less reading of the least interesting information to yield the more in-depth reading and invested reading,” Laufenberg said. She still requires students to read, but if they aren’t reading for the background information then they can be engaging more complex and interesting texts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>5. Stop giving struggling kids the most boring version of the work to repeat over and over again.\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We do a really interesting thing in American education; when kids are struggling with something, we just give them the most boring version of it and more of it, over and over and over again,” Laufenberg said. There’s no way that tactic is going to get students excited about the subject they struggle to understand.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Math teachers commonly say they have to get through some basics in order to get to the interesting content. But if students aren’t interested in knowing, they’ll never get to the good stuff. “Getting kids to understand that math is not just computation, that math is this whole other thought process and way of thinking about the world, and really trying to understand the bigger picture of math,” is the key Laufenberg said. Kids have to care. “Give them a puzzle to figure out to then lead them towards the math that they need to know,” Laufenberg said. They need to \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/02/03/math-and-inquiry-the-importance-of-letting-students-stumble/\" target=\"_blank\">figure it out on their own, or at least grapple\u003c/a> with it to care.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She doesn’t think it’s that different from history. If the goal of teaching history is for kids to chronologically place events on a timeline, we’ve missed the full potential for the learning experience. If the purpose of math is only to compute, we’ve missed something.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And with reading, don’t give reluctant readers boring passages to read. Let them read whatever they want. No one wants to read things that are boring to them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>6. Surprise students.\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Laufenberg would often start class by putting a primary source document up on the screen with no context. Students would come in and immediately get to work trying to figure out what the document was and where it came from. She says it was a great window into their thinking and questioning skills.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Sometimes you can use really little projects to get their minds spinning on all the ways of knowing, and then model those for each other,” Laufenberg said. Not all the students will find the answer, but they’ll be curious to know how others did. Laufenberg calls activities like this “micro bursts of inquiry.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>7. The traditional model of imparting knowledge isn’t working very well, so don’t be afraid to try out inquiry.\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When people don’t want to do it I always tell them to pick the unit you know always falls flat,” Laufenberg said. “You’re not going to lose; they’re already not with you.” It’s a safe place to start because it can’t get worse and maybe some learnings will come out of the experiment that can inform other lessons.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>8. Find the “bend” in the outcomes and abandon the prescriptive path.\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Laufenberg recommends finding “the bend” by paring down the content to the most essential pieces and focusing on them thematically. That will help open up as many paths as possible for students to arrive at the big ideas that kids need to learn. When teachers assign a “project” that follows the pacing guide, has a definable outcome and which results in 30 assignments that all look the same, it’s not inquiry. SLA principal Chris Lehmann calls that “the recipe.” In a true inquiry-based assignment students will travel different paths to and produce different products, but learn along the way.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“In a non-inquiry classroom the kids will all walk the same path because the teacher has decided where everybody is going and nothing that anybody says all day long will alter that,” Laufenberg said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>9. Indulge interesting student questions even if it doesn’t fit the pacing guide.\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Laufenberg has seen classrooms where a student asks a fascinating question that the teacher brushes off because there’s not enough time. Kids know when there’s nothing they can do to influence the direction of the lesson, a distinctly disempowering experience.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Who that child is isn’t informing the path and that’s the most devastating part,” Laufenberg said. Listening to student questions and validating them by asking them of the whole group has the added value of building student confidence and highlighting the value of wondering.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>10. Approach the practice of teaching with inquiry and use that meta-practice to improve.\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Most professional development has not asked the teachers to examine their own practice with inquiry,” Laufenberg said. But using inquiry to create inquiry-based practices is a great tactic to think through the essential questions teachers face.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"headline": "10 Tips For Launching An Inquiry-Based Classroom",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Transforming teaching practices is a long, slow road. But increasingly schools and teachers experiencing success are sharing their ideas online and in-person. \u003ca href=\"https://www.scienceleadership.org/\">Science Leadership Academy\u003c/a> opened as a public magnet school almost ten years ago in Philadelphia. The educators that make up the school community have spent nearly half that time sharing best practices through a school-run conference each year and more recently by opening a second school in Philadelphia. Diana Laufenberg was one of the first SLA teachers and has gone on to help foster inquiry at schools around the country, most recently by starting the non-profit \u003ca href=\"http://inquiryschools.org/\" target=\"_blank\">Inquiry Schools\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It takes time to build up a strong inquiry-based teaching practice, to learn how to direct student questions with other questions, and to get comfortable in a guiding role. But when Laufenberg talks about what it takes, she makes it sound easy. We've broken her advice down into digestible tips for anyone ready to jump in and try for themselves.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>1. Don’t teach the content standards; help kids find their own path towards the information they need to know.\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Every teacher has a “bucket” of stuff she is responsible for teaching her students, known as standards. The best way to get students to understand and remember that content is to help them \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/03/12/how-to-teach-the-standards-without-becoming-standardized/\" target=\"_blank\">build their own path of questions towards the information\u003c/a> they need to know.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The brain is so primed for questions,” said Laufenberg, managing director of Inquiry Schools and a former 11th and 12th grade history teacher at SLA. “It learns better that way and remembers better that way.” Unfortunately, many educators and schools are so focused on achieving standardized outcomes that they don’t leverage the best tool at their disposal -- students’ natural curiosity. School is full of questions, but for the most part those questions imply students should only know more about what teachers are asking them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“At the end of it they may have consumed less content, but remember more of the sum total,” Laufenberg said. “And they end up in a better place.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>2. Don’t tell students what they should know; create the structure for them to experience it on their own.\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Inquiry at its best happens when the teacher is doing very little other than creating the architecture for the experience to happen,” Laufenberg said. “It’s asking the first question, putting up the provocative primary document or playing the two minute video.” After that, the room should be full of kid questions. And if a student gets truly stumped and asks for help from the teacher, her job is to ask another question that pushes the students’ thinking forward or raises new questions for the student to investigate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Laufenberg has worked with well-intentioned, hard working teachers all over the country to infuse more inquiry into their teaching. Many of them find this model destabilizing because for a long time they believed their job was to teach content. To make inquiry-based learning work, teachers have to instead become experts at \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2015/02/02/what-do-we-really-mean-when-we-say-personalized-learning/\" target=\"_blank\">listening to how a student is thinking\u003c/a> and then ask the one question that will “un-stick” the students’ thinking and set them off and running again.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You know it’s happening when there’s very little telling of things, but rather leading of questions and experiences so the students discover those on their own,” Laufenberg said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ted id=1034]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>3. Use class time to make connections between pieces of information.\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Especially with AP classes, students are motivated or else they wouldn’t be there. So give them a list of questions, tell them what to study and let them do so outside of class. They can use the textbook, the Internet and many other sources to find that information more efficiently and effectively than a lecture.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Inside of class, use that time to make connections between information,” Laufenberg said. After all, what good are facts if they aren’t connected to anything else? “Give them [students] compelling things to do that have them analyze and talk to each other, and grapple with the difficulty of what’s going on in whatever it is you happen to be teaching. But stop using your minutes in class to just tell them things.” Teachers have the tremendously important role of helping students make sense of the facts they’ve learned and see connections to other issues.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>4. Many kids struggle with reading, so hook them with the non-written word.\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When Laufenberg taught at Science Leadership Academy she had a student in her class who was an advanced analytical processor, a great critical thinker and a wonderful problem solver, but she struggled to read and write because of learning differences. Laufenberg wanted her to be able to engage with the class content at the high level of which she was capable, and not be limited by her second grade reading level. She developed the habit of introducing lessons with something visual so the student wouldn’t be left out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I needed to do this because there was an acute situation I wanted to handle, but what it was doing was inviting all the kids to the table with a level playing field of comprehension, not putting the barrier in front of them to start with, which is the written word for comprehension,” Laufenberg said. She would show students something interesting or puzzling, even using 90 second videos to grab their attention. This strategy got students wondering and gave them a little background so that even if they were doing the reading Laufenberg assigned, they came to it with their own questions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Your reluctant readers are more likely to make an attempt,” Laufenberg said, because they are curious to find the answer to their questions. Laufenberg would often try to give students the baseline information they need to know in the quickest way possible. “We would background build, but it wouldn’t be, ‘I’m going to tell you a few things today,’” Laufenberg said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If a complex idea can be imparted through a short video or other means, Laufenberg uses it so the majority of class time can be spent diving into deeper questions and analysis. Laufenberg always got at the background information through questions; she never just told students information.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It isn’t less reading; it’s less reading of the least interesting information to yield the more in-depth reading and invested reading,” Laufenberg said. She still requires students to read, but if they aren’t reading for the background information then they can be engaging more complex and interesting texts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>5. Stop giving struggling kids the most boring version of the work to repeat over and over again.\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We do a really interesting thing in American education; when kids are struggling with something, we just give them the most boring version of it and more of it, over and over and over again,” Laufenberg said. There’s no way that tactic is going to get students excited about the subject they struggle to understand.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Math teachers commonly say they have to get through some basics in order to get to the interesting content. But if students aren’t interested in knowing, they’ll never get to the good stuff. “Getting kids to understand that math is not just computation, that math is this whole other thought process and way of thinking about the world, and really trying to understand the bigger picture of math,” is the key Laufenberg said. Kids have to care. “Give them a puzzle to figure out to then lead them towards the math that they need to know,” Laufenberg said. They need to \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/02/03/math-and-inquiry-the-importance-of-letting-students-stumble/\" target=\"_blank\">figure it out on their own, or at least grapple\u003c/a> with it to care.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She doesn’t think it’s that different from history. If the goal of teaching history is for kids to chronologically place events on a timeline, we’ve missed the full potential for the learning experience. If the purpose of math is only to compute, we’ve missed something.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And with reading, don’t give reluctant readers boring passages to read. Let them read whatever they want. No one wants to read things that are boring to them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>6. Surprise students.\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Laufenberg would often start class by putting a primary source document up on the screen with no context. Students would come in and immediately get to work trying to figure out what the document was and where it came from. She says it was a great window into their thinking and questioning skills.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Sometimes you can use really little projects to get their minds spinning on all the ways of knowing, and then model those for each other,” Laufenberg said. Not all the students will find the answer, but they’ll be curious to know how others did. Laufenberg calls activities like this “micro bursts of inquiry.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>7. The traditional model of imparting knowledge isn’t working very well, so don’t be afraid to try out inquiry.\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When people don’t want to do it I always tell them to pick the unit you know always falls flat,” Laufenberg said. “You’re not going to lose; they’re already not with you.” It’s a safe place to start because it can’t get worse and maybe some learnings will come out of the experiment that can inform other lessons.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>8. Find the “bend” in the outcomes and abandon the prescriptive path.\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Laufenberg recommends finding “the bend” by paring down the content to the most essential pieces and focusing on them thematically. That will help open up as many paths as possible for students to arrive at the big ideas that kids need to learn. When teachers assign a “project” that follows the pacing guide, has a definable outcome and which results in 30 assignments that all look the same, it’s not inquiry. SLA principal Chris Lehmann calls that “the recipe.” In a true inquiry-based assignment students will travel different paths to and produce different products, but learn along the way.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“In a non-inquiry classroom the kids will all walk the same path because the teacher has decided where everybody is going and nothing that anybody says all day long will alter that,” Laufenberg said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>9. Indulge interesting student questions even if it doesn’t fit the pacing guide.\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Laufenberg has seen classrooms where a student asks a fascinating question that the teacher brushes off because there’s not enough time. Kids know when there’s nothing they can do to influence the direction of the lesson, a distinctly disempowering experience.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Who that child is isn’t informing the path and that’s the most devastating part,” Laufenberg said. Listening to student questions and validating them by asking them of the whole group has the added value of building student confidence and highlighting the value of wondering.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>10. Approach the practice of teaching with inquiry and use that meta-practice to improve.\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Most professional development has not asked the teachers to examine their own practice with inquiry,” Laufenberg said. But using inquiry to create inquiry-based practices is a great tactic to think through the essential questions teachers face.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"info": "What kind of no sabo word is Hyphenación? For us, it’s about living within a hyphenation. Like being a third-gen Mexican-American from the Texas border now living that Bay Area Chicano life. Like Xorje! Each week we bring together a couple of hyphenated Latinos to talk all about personal life choices: family, careers, relationships, belonging … everything is on the table. ",
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"info": "Our flagship program, helmed by Kai Ryssdal, examines what the day in money delivered, through stories, conversations, newsworthy numbers and more. Updated Monday through Friday at about 3:30 p.m. PT.",
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"mindshift": {
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"info": "The MindShift podcast explores the innovations in education that are shaping how kids learn. Hosts Ki Sung and Katrina Schwartz introduce listeners to educators, researchers, parents and students who are developing effective ways to improve how kids learn. We cover topics like how fed-up administrators are developing surprising tactics to deal with classroom disruptions; how listening to podcasts are helping kids develop reading skills; the consequences of overparenting; and why interdisciplinary learning can engage students on all ends of the traditional achievement spectrum. This podcast is part of the MindShift education site, a division of KQED News. KQED is an NPR/PBS member station based in San Francisco. You can also visit the MindShift website for episodes and supplemental blog posts or tweet us \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MindShiftKQED\">@MindShiftKQED\u003c/a> or visit us at \u003ca href=\"/mindshift\">MindShift.KQED.org\u003c/a>",
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"order": 12
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"info": "\u003cem>Morning Edition\u003c/em> takes listeners around the country and the world with multi-faceted stories and commentaries every weekday. Hosts Steve Inskeep, David Greene and Rachel Martin bring you the latest breaking news and features to prepare you for the day.",
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"onourwatch": {
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"info": "For decades, the process for how police police themselves has been inconsistent – if not opaque. In some states, like California, these proceedings were completely hidden. After a new police transparency law unsealed scores of internal affairs files, our reporters set out to examine these cases and the shadow world of police discipline. On Our Watch brings listeners into the rooms where officers are questioned and witnesses are interrogated to find out who this system is really protecting. Is it the officers, or the public they've sworn to serve?",
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"info": "Our weekly podcast explores how the media 'sausage' is made, casts an incisive eye on fluctuations in the marketplace of ideas, and examines threats to the freedom of information and expression in America and abroad. For one hour a week, the show tries to lift the veil from the process of \"making media,\" especially news media, because it's through that lens that we see the world and the world sees us",
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},
"perspectives": {
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"info": "The economy explained. Imagine you could call up a friend and say, Meet me at the bar and tell me what's going on with the economy. Now imagine that's actually a fun evening.",
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"title": "Political Breakdown",
"tagline": "Politics from a personal perspective",
"info": "Political Breakdown is a new series that explores the political intersection of California and the nation. Each week hosts Scott Shafer and Marisa Lagos are joined with a new special guest to unpack politics -- with personality — and offer an insider’s glimpse at how politics happens.",
"airtime": "THU 6:30pm-7pm",
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"possible": {
"id": "possible",
"title": "Possible",
"info": "Possible is hosted by entrepreneur Reid Hoffman and writer Aria Finger. Together in Possible, Hoffman and Finger lead enlightening discussions about building a brighter collective future. The show features interviews with visionary guests like Trevor Noah, Sam Altman and Janette Sadik-Khan. Possible paints an optimistic portrait of the world we can create through science, policy, business, art and our shared humanity. It asks: What if everything goes right for once? How can we get there? Each episode also includes a short fiction story generated by advanced AI GPT-4, serving as a thought-provoking springboard to speculate how humanity could leverage technology for good.",
"airtime": "SUN 2pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Possible-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.possible.fm/",
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"source": "Possible"
},
"link": "/radio/program/possible",
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},
"pri-the-world": {
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"title": "PRI's The World: Latest Edition",
"info": "Each weekday, host Marco Werman and his team of producers bring you the world's most interesting stories in an hour of radio that reminds us just how small our planet really is.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 2pm-3pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/The-World-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
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},
"radiolab": {
"id": "radiolab",
"title": "Radiolab",
"info": "A two-time Peabody Award-winner, Radiolab is an investigation told through sounds and stories, and centered around one big idea. In the Radiolab world, information sounds like music and science and culture collide. Hosted by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, the show is designed for listeners who demand skepticism, but appreciate wonder. WNYC Studios is the producer of other leading podcasts including Freakonomics Radio, Death, Sex & Money, On the Media and many more.",
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},
"reveal": {
"id": "reveal",
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