All Students Deserve the Opportunity to Love Learning

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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.

What I Hope My Students Learned

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Today is the first day of June.  The school year is winding down, and in a week or two the state assessment scores will come back.  We'll look at the data and determine which students learned math, which were proficient in reading, and which students are good at "being students."

To tell you the truth, though, I really don't care all that much.  To start with, I'm pretty confident that my students learned the content they were supposed to this year.  I don't need a standardized test to tell me that.  The formative assessments that I build into my lessons give me that data all year long.  There's a bigger reason that I'm a bit apathetic about the results, though.

The most important things I want my students to have learned this year weren't on those tests.  These things can't be measured by filling in bubbles with a #2 pencil.

I hope my students learned that learning isn't something that happens only in school, but is something that can and should happen all the time.  I hope they learned the habit of learning.

I hope my students learned that being right isn't as important as being able to think.  Our history books are full of individuals who failed many times and still rose to greatness.

I hope that my students learned to question the validity and bias of all information that is being sold to them, even if a teacher is the one selling it.  I hope they continue to ask "why?"

I hope that my students learned to seek their passion when choosing a career path.  5th grade is not too early to start thinking about your future, and doing what you love and what is rewarding to you is worth more than all the money in the world. 

Most of all, I hope that my students learned that the score that comes back on that state test, whether high or low, doesn't define them any more than their height or eye color.  It's what they do with their given talents that will be their legacy.

Thinking: It's Not Just for the Smart Kids

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Today I had the pleasure of spending the day at the Northeastern Intermediate Unit at a math training for elementary teachers.  The two Math Curriculum Specialists at NEIU, Karla and Leeta, do a great job and today was no exception.  There was lots of great discussion on how to structure lessons in ways that make math more rigorous and build conceptual understanding for students.

At one point in the training we were asked to classify different mathematical problems as requiring either "low-level thinking" or "high-level thinking."  At the conclusion of this we discussed why we chose the categories for each problem.  This conversation concerned me.

Many times other participants reasoned that a problem required high-level thinking for reasons such as these:

• "None of my students could do that"
• "That problem is really hard"
• "There was more than one step"

To explain why they thought problems were low-level thinking problems, these explanations were given:

• "My second graders can do that, so it can't require high level thinking"
• "Everybody in my class could do this"
• "That's something that's taught in the earlier grades"

What worries me about the above comments is that they imply that any multi-step problem makes students think at a higher level, that younger students shouldn't be required to think at higher levels, and that only our best students can reason mathematically.  These assumptions are simply false.

False assumption #1 - All multi step problems require higher thinking

It's dangerous to confuse the number of steps in a problem with how rigorous it is.  Higher-level thinking is analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating.  A bunch of steps that require nothing more than computation still allow a child to know nothing more than memorized procedures.  Little mathematical understanding is required.

We shouldn't confuse how difficult a problem is with how rigorous it is.  Students can struggle with problems for a variety of reasons: lack of vocabulary knowledge, reading problems, etc.  If you asked me to find the square root of (45x - 3/π), I would have a great deal of difficulty.  That doesn't mean that it requires analysis, synthesis, or evaluation.

False assumption #2 - High-level thinking should only be done in the upper grades

If we don't teach our students to think when they are in the lower grades, what makes us think that they will know how to do it when they get older?  One of the hardest things for me as a teacher is to get my students used to having to analyze and evaluate their thinking when I ask them "why?"  Students should be required to think at all times.

Too often we only give first grade students questions such as, 4+3=?

We should spend more time asking, "How many different ways can you make the number seven?"

The latter question is just as grade-level appropriate, and it allows students to think instead of just manipulating numbers to find the right answer.  It allows for learning, and not just memorizing. 

Don't think I'm saying that knowing math facts is not important.  It is.  But understanding math is important, also, and often ignored.

False assumption #3 - Only the smart kids are capable of mathematical reasoning

Again, I think this misunderstanding comes from the confusion between difficulty and rigor.  I would think that even struggling 5th grade students would be able to come up with several answers to the second question above with little difficulty.  That doesn't change the fact that it requires a different level of thinking than basic recall and/or calculation problems.  

Many elementary teachers struggle with math.  Many would even admit that they are not great at math.  We'll ignore the fact for right now that we'd find an elementary teacher who claims to not be able to pass an 8th grade reading test to be completely incompetent, but an elementary teacher who claims to not be able to do 8th grade math completely normal.  I'm sure that will be the subject of a future blog post.

Because of their own background, the way they were taught, and/or their perception that math is about numbers and getting correct answers (it's not), the belief is out there that our "smartest" kids are the only ones who are capable of being good at math. 

Math is not about numbers.  Being able to multiply numerators and denominators may get you the correct answer to a fraction multiplication problem, but it does not show that you understand what multiplying fractions really is, or what problems you face in your life that may require you to use this skill.  Being able to Divide, Multiply, Subtract, and Bring Down may get you the correct answer to a division problem, but it won't show that you know that division is putting items into equal groups. 

These memorized procedures aren't math, but in the United States we rarely require more than that from our students.  This was shown pretty clearly in the 2007 TIMMS study in which math and science teaching and learning were examined in countries around the globe.  The kids who aren't good at memorizing these procedures that we often teach out of context and without relevance are not bad at math. 

All students are capable of higher-level thinking.  Some are capable of doing this higher-level thinking with more difficult problems, but all students should be required to think.

The alternative is that we develop a generation of students who can't. 

Photo Credit - flickr.com: Sidereal