If You Want Students to Learn, Value Learning

Here's a little discussed fact about our education system:  We don't value learning.

We pretend to value learning.  We use the term lots.  We add it to our mission statements.  But we really don't care about it.  At least not enough to actually focus on it.

What we care about in schools are grades.  This is obvious to anyone who's spent 15 minutes in a school.

Grades reflect intelligence.  Grades reflect compliance.  Grades reflect socio-economic status.  Grades reflect parent involvement.  Grades reflect family stability.

Grades do not reflect learning.

Let's explore a few examples.

We all knew the really smart kid in school who didn't have to study but got a report card full of 'A's anyway.  Did those 'A's reflect how much that kid had learned, or how much they already knew?  Think about how much better that student would be served if we eliminated the grades and asked him/her to show evidence of new learning.

How about the kids we all know who learn early on in school that they will never be the 'A' students.  Many of them figure out early on that there is no point in exerting any effort in school.  What if we asked them to show evidence that they learned something new instead of punishing them for not complying, being smart enough, having enough family support, etc.?  Think of a system that encourages them to maximize their potential instead of pushing them toward dropping out when they hit high school.  Think of how much better they, and society would be.

If we really did value learning, that's what we would report.  Instead of a meaningless letter or number on a report card, we'd have a list created by students and their teachers of new things those students have learned along with links or other evidence to proof of that learning.

Instead of "Math - 88", we may see something like this:

Jimmy learned basic statistics and data analysis, including using the mean and median of data as a part of the decision making process.  He also learned how to write a business letter and how laws are made within his township.  This learning is evidenced by the attached letter and diagram which he sent to the Smith Township Supervisors in October in which he used traffic data he collected on Main Street to support the need for an additional traffic light.

Which do you think is more meaningful to the student?  To his/her parents?  To potential future employers?

Often I'll hear in response to this push for a more learning-centered approach to education, "Colleges don't care about all that stuff.  They only care about GPA and SAT scores."  This is not true.  Many students who come from homeschool situations and schools (like the Circle School in Harrisburg, PA) that don't give grades get into our top universities every year without having a GPA.  They get accepted because they provide those universities with detailed descriptions of what they've learned and what they've done.  They provide those universities with the same thing that others provide potential employers all the time - a good resume.

The time has come for our schools to stop pretending they value learning, and to start actually valuing learning.  It's time to stop defining students by meaningless numbers and letters.  If our students learn to love the extrinsic rewards of good grades and praise, they'll have trouble succeeding in life after school when grades are non-existent and praise is rare.

But if our students learn to love learning instead of those extrinsic rewards, their futures are bright with opportunity.  If we help them become the "life-long learners" so many mission statements describe, they will have the skills they need to meet the challenges that are inevitable in life.

Friday's Five - Our Students Need to Believe They Matter

It's human nature to want to matter.  We all have that desire.  It motivates much of what we do.  For some, it motivates them to seek financial success.  For others, it motivates them to do charity work.  For me, it was a driving factor in why I became a teacher.

Our students have this need as well.  Unfortunately, many of our traditional practices in education make students feel that they have no worth.  It's a primary reason why our students are lacking motivation.  Why work hard if you and what you produce don't matter?

Flickr/just_makayla

I've heard many educational experts tell me that the way to solve this problem is to tell students why what they are doing in school will relate to their life when they get out of school.  Our students don't care about this.  The long technical reason is that their frontal lobes aren't completely formed, and such rational, unemotional thought is not possible for them.  The short reason is that asking a kid to trust you and be motivated by something that may or may not benefit them 5, 10, 15, or 20 years down the road is absurd.  Our kids need to feel important now.  If we want them to learn, we'd better start meeting this need.  Here are five ways to allow kids to feel that they matter.

1. Problem Based Learning (PBL)  If you want kids to feel that that matter, have them do something that matters.  There are a multitude of problems that need to be solved in our communities. Challenge your students to solve them.  How can we help the local food pantry raise money?  How can we effectively publicize the upcoming blood drive in our school?  What data can we collect and use to prove that there needs to be a stoplight at the intersection near the school? 
2. Publish their work. It is insulting to a student to work hard on a project, paper, or other in-depth assignment with the end result being that a teacher looks at it, judges it, and hands it back with a number or letter on top of it.  Use a class blog, wikispace, or other avenue to publish their work.  Let them share with friends and family around the globe.  Let their research be used by others.  Give them an audience other than the teacher.  Better yet, let them publish their writing in a book using a site like lulu.com and use the proceeds to solve a community problem like the ones described above.
3. Stop expecting students to be motivated by grades.  Grades are a way to rank, sort, judge, and punish students.  They are not an effective way to motivate students.  A plethora of studies show that external motivation is not lasting and will not serve our students in life.  We need to give them the experiences of learning for the pleasure of learning, feeling the joy of helping others, and being valued for reasons other than being the best hoop jumper in the class. An emphasis on grades undermines our ability as teachers to give our students those experiences and does nothing to lead our students to believe they matter. 
4. Allow students opportunities to consult, collaborate with, and learn from community members.  If you want students to believe that their math lesson is important to their life, bring in a member of the community who uses that math in their job every day to share his/her experiences with your students.  Then allow the students the opportunity to be an accountant, small business owner, mechanic, home builder, etc.  The same opportunities can be worked into classes in almost every subject area.  In addition to the valuable career awareness that comes from these types of interactions, there is the chance for students to do work that is necessary in the community.
5. Allow students to use tools current to the generation in which they are living.  Forcing students to read outdated textbooks to get information, having them spend hours answering questions that have easily "googled" answers, and not allowing them to use 21st century tools to demonstrate their learning not only makes school seem woefully irrelevant, but sends the message to our students that we don't respect them.  If we did respect them we'd allow them to share their learning using tools and in ways that are familiar to them, regardless of our traditions and comfort with those tools and methods.  This is especially true when those tools and methods are much more aligned with the expectations of the workplace they will graduate into than what we have traditionally done in schools.  A zoologist would think nothing of pulling out their phone to find out the best diet for a pica, but our students learning about mammals must wait until their weekly computer lab time slot - even though they have a very capable phone in their backpack.  An advertising executive would think nothing of sending a text of a picture to a colleague to ask for an opinion on a piece of concept art, but many of our students would get an in-school suspension for sending a similar text to a peer.  I could list examples like this all day long.  I know someone will argue, "Many students who can text their friends won't learn anything because they'll be distracted."  I'll argue, "All of our students who believe school is irrelevant and that we don't think they matter won't learn anything."  Maybe we should teach them to use technology in appropriate ways instead of banning it. 

What are your thoughts?  Do you have other ways to make students believe they matter?  Share your ideas with us in the comment section below, and share this post with others in your network so that we can hear their ideas as well.

Friday's Five - Success Stories

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Friday's Five is a feature every week where I pick a new topic and list five items that I think fit best.  Then I ask you to share your thoughts in the comment section.  For an archive of past topics, check the Friday's Five Page. 

Flickr/Loomingy1

The moment that one realizes that which they are passionate about is a special moment.  In an instant motivation and possibility are awakened, usually leading to amazing results.  If you've been lucky enough to hear Kevin Honeycutt speak, you'll recognize this as what he refers to as seeing someone "launch."

I've been lucky enough to see people around me have such moments this year: my students, other students in my building, and colleagues.  It's these successes that make teaching one of the most rewarding professions.  Here are some of the awesome successes that I've seen and heard about in my district so far this year:

1. A couple of weeks ago a teacher in the faculty room during lunch was frustrated because her students were not taking any pride in the reports they were writing.  They were totally unmotivated.  The conversation turned to Project Based Learning (PBL), and she made the decision to try something a bit out of her comfort zone. Instead of having students write reports on marine animals, she would have act as marine biologists to design an aquarium exhibit.  Students would have to learn about the animals to be able to determine which could share tanks, and how best to teach the public about them.  Today, as I walked down a stairwell, I heard a student go up to that teacher bubbling with excitement as he explained to that teacher the research he had learned about an octopus.  Another student (who is also in that teacher's class) earlier in the day asked me if she could skip her recess to research some marine animals.  I don't think that teacher has to worry about lack of engagement or interest any more. 
2. For the past few years our 5th graders have collected food for the local food pantry during November and December.  This year we wanted them to understand the importance of what they were doing in addition to simply collecting the cans.  Each of the three 5th grade classrooms was responsible for running an advertising campaign that included posters, a bulletin board, and a video commercial convincing other students that they should bring in food.  It was fantastic to see students authentically engaged in debate over how best to help others.  Below is the commercial that my students created without any help from adults.
   
3. I remember a few years ago I had a conversation with a teacher in the faculty room about math.  She was complaining that her students were asking her why multiplying two negative numbers resulted in a positive answer.  She just wanted the students to memorize the rule so that they could get the right answer.  That same teacher has started using Number Talks, a program from Math Solutions, with her students this year.  This afternoon she was excitedly telling me how her students are understanding addition, subtraction, and multiplication, making connections, and learning so much more than just the rules she used to teach them.  She also mentioned how much she's enjoying learning some of those connections along with them.  Launch!
4. One of our special education teachers recently introduced her students to some new web 2.0 tools, including GoAnimate.  All of her students loved playing with the new tools, but one of them absolutely launched.  He's now more engaged in class and is constantly asking to share what he's learned by using the tools.  As an added bonus, the teacher told me that for the first time all year he is checking his spelling with a dictionary or the computer because he wants the pronunciation on GoAnimate and the other tools to be correct when he embeds them on the class wikispace they are building.
5. I recently shared the benefits of student blogging in a class I'm teaching on 21st century skills to other teachers.  At the same time I got my 3rd grade daughter set up with a blog to share some of the things she is learning both in and out of school.  Several teachers shared my daughter's first blog post with their students, allowed them to comment, and told them that they would have the opportunity to share their learning on a blog, too.  Those teachers have overwhelmingly reported increased interest from those students in writing, and learning in general.  Those students want to learn so that they have something to share.  Writing is no longer an assignment to be handed to the teacher, but rather a mode of communicating with the world.  

Now it's your turn.  Take a moment and share something inspiring that you have seen this year.  Have you seen a student "launch?"  What amazing things are you and your colleagues doing?  Share with us in the comment section below, and share the post on Twitter, Google+, Facebook, and Plurk so that we can hear from others as well.  

All Students Deserve the Opportunity to Love Learning

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Flickr/Gunnsi

This morning I was part of a few Gifted IEP meetings.  For those unfamiliar with the process, every year students who qualify for either special education services or gifted services have their Individualized Education Program (IEP) reviewed by a group which includes several people, including the parents and a regular education teacher (me).

While they varied slightly from each other, each student's Gifted IEP included an emphasis on "higher-level thinking," and a focus on learning topics in which they had great interest.  These students will get an education where they get to explore what they love and learn how to think.

Each set of parents that I spoke to mentioned similar stories of how their children loved school.  Their children couldn't wait to start learning again at the end of the summer. They see their time working with the gifted teacher as the highlight of their week.

I kept coming back to the same thought.  Why aren't we doing this for all children?

Don't all children deserve the opportunity to love learning?

Perhaps if we allowed children to pursue their passions and learn about what they love, a lot more of them would feel the same way about school.  Instead of force feeding the entire class some lousy textbook passage about the apple harvest (or any of the many other topics most kids find mind-numbingly boring) and beating them over the head with questions that are designed just like those on the state test, we could allow them to pick a topic they care about and let them research it.  Let them create a pamphlet for others who care about the same subject, design an awareness campaign for a charity whose mission they believe in, or share their research in any of a plethora of other ways that allow them to innovate.  Either way they learn to read non-fiction, find the main idea, generalize, and all the other skills that are in each state's standards.  Only one way allows them to enjoy the learning process, though.

Only allowing students the opportunity to learn about subjects they love will foster the life-long learning, mentioned in so many school mission statements and instilled in students by so few schools.

Perhaps if we focused on teaching all students higher-level thinking skills instead of that which is required to pass state tests we wouldn't be talking about why the United States trails so many other counties in science and math, why so many students are unprepared for college when they graduate high school, and why students see no relevance in what they learn in school.  Teaching students to think is really the most important thing we can teach them.  The attitude that only gifted students are capable of higher order thinking is both factually wrong and detrimental to the rest of our students.  The difficulty of a task and the level of thinking required are separate entities.  All students, including those in special education, kindergarten, Advanced Placement Calculus, and gifted classes should be required to use such skills on a daily basis.  Not having that expectation is akin to preparing our students to be automatons who cannot think for themselves.

Gifted students need to be allowed the opportunity to maximize their talents.  They should be allowed to follow their passions in school.  They should learn how to reason, debate, think critically, and use their unique abilities to develop innovative ways to change the world.  We should create an environment where they are able to use their God given ability to soar as high as they can.

All other students deserve the same thing, too.

Teacher Frustration - We're Losing Great Teachers

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Last week I wrote that I'm the problem with education.  It was a post in which I expressed that teachers should spend less time complaining about things they cannot control and more time focusing on what they can do better.  That post created more conversation, debate, and discussion than any other post I've written this far.  One of the conversations I had was so meaningful and illuminating, that I felt I had to share it.

After school one day, a teacher shared that our current culture of standardized testing and pressure to "teach to the test" makes it almost impossible for those in our profession who want to be great teachers to do so.  She explained how she wants to teach her students essential skills like critical thinking, responsibility, and collaboration, but is instead forced to teach what will be on the tests that her students will have to take.  Even if she wanted to pursue something her students find interesting or important, she can't without risking some of her students failing the all-important test, which leads to the majority of her students being totally unengaged.  

fickr/Zach Klein

Basically, she complained that she is forced to teach content instead of teaching students, and this makes her job increasingly frustrating to the point that she may not be able to stay in the profession.  

I must stress here that this is an excellent teacher with whom I was talking.  This particular teacher is meticulous in her lesson planning, cares deeply about her students, routinely gives up her own time to help her students in any way she can, and is well respected by all who know her.  This is the kind of teacher that every parent would want their child to have.  This is the kind of teacher that we cannot afford to lose.  

Yet, I believe that she expressed a feeling that many in our profession are sharing right now.  We want to do what's best for our students.  We're desperate to make school meaningful and relevant for them.  We're frustrated because it's almost impossible without being almost insubordinate to administrators who are forced by the current laws to demand test results over anything else, including the very things that make school relevant and meaningful.  

flickr/HelloHiyab

As I said in a previous post, the most important things we do in school can't be measured on a test.  Show me someone who disagrees, and I'll show you someone who doesn't know what's important.

Great teachers are being forced out of teaching because they are being forced to do things in their classrooms that they know are detrimental to students.  As Sir Ken Robinson would say, we are educating the creativity and passion out of our students.  Our students believe that what we teach them in school will have no impact on their lives, and that the time they spend in our classrooms is a waste of their time.

Unfortunately, they are pretty much right. 

What's worse, teachers who want to change that feel that they can't.  Almost every teacher I know went into education because they thought they could make a difference for the next generation.  If you take that away from them, what's left?  

If we don't dramatically change what we're doing, I'm afraid we're going to find out.  

Does Grading Impede Learning?

This morning, a colleague came to me for help.  She had an assignment for a graduate ed-tech course in which she needed to create a podcast that included background music using Audacity. 

I've worked with this teacher before on using technology in her classroom.  She took the 3-credit non-graded Ed-tech course that I offered in the winter.  I've seen her explore new technologies, experiment with sites in which she had no experience, and try new things in her classroom.

This morning, though, she was very nervous about using Audacity, even though she had been exposed to it before.  She even described to me her Friday afternoon, when her anxiety over creating the podcast brought her to tears.  I was wondering why she was having such a tough time until she made the following statement to me: 

"I always get this nervous when the assignment is graded."

How many of our students feel the same way? 

Sometimes, as educators, I think that we get confused into thinking our purpose is to evaluate our students rather than foster their learning.  It's a natural pitfall that's built into our educational system.  We evaluate students to determine who makes the honor roll.  We rank students' GPA for colleges and awards.  We assess children to the point of lunacy in order to measure the success of teachers, schools, and districts. 

I'm not advocating that we eliminate grades.  I'm just wondering if there's a way to take the focus off the grades and get it back on the learning. 

My son is finishing his last year of pre-school in a few weeks.  I'm amazed by how the majority of the kids in his pre-school class love to learn in that classroom.  Unfortunately, something happens between pre-school and high school which changes that.

When I think about some of the students in my class that are toughest to motivate, I can recall many times when they've come up to me with something they found interesting on the History Channel, or the internet, or something their father told them at his shop.  I'm forced to conclude that they haven't lost the motivation to learn.  They've lost the motivation to learn at school. 

There are probably many reasons for that loss of motivation.  How much of a factor is our current focus on grading?  How can we keep the natural wonder that most kids have in pre-school from vanishing as they progress through our schools?