John Hattie and Gregory Yates' book, Visible Learning and the Science of How we Learn, ends with a section called "Know Thyself." He shares how important it is for people to be self-aware in order to learn. A few standout points center on perception and attention.
"As you become skilled, your perception changes, and you cannot appreciate how inherently difficult a task is for others" (p. 235). As teachers it is important to keep in mind what a challenging thing we are asking of students- learning new things, modifying schema, reaching beyond their life experiences to untried territory. My sister had a math professor who was known for showing the first few steps of a problem and then saying, "and thus it is intuitively obvious the answer is …" The problem was that the answer was not intuitively obvious to the group. We often move too fast for our students, not giving them the processing and thought time they need to absorb material. We are driven by a pacing guide, not by learning.
Inattentional blindness- missing things right in front of your face. The more we are focused on one thing, the less we notice others. This is, in part, why cell phones are so bad for driving. Diving our attention, even with hands free mechanisms, makes us poorer drivers. Simons and Chabris explored this phenomenon with the invisible gorilla test- people were asked to watch a video and then answer questions. when they were asked to complete a task about the video, their ability to notice other details significantly was reduced. Our students think they can listen to music, watch videos and/or use social media without it impacting their ability to learn material. Much research contradicts this idea. Perhaps the videos Simons has posted could be used to showcase to students how their divided attention impairs their ability to notice and learn.
When I was in junior high I had a teacher write two words on the chalkboard- yes I am dating myself- "PAY ATTENTION." He then had us brainstorm what each word meant and recorded our responses. Ultimately he drew from us that to pay attention we had to give up something of value- the ability to do other things- and focus on what was at hand. That lesson has stayed with me all these years because of its powerful implications. Students need to learn that paying attention means just that- they need to focus on something and give up attending to others. Hattie and Yates point out "Attention is not in itself such an automatic process as you might presume. To make it work, it has to be activated, and if not the opportunity to learn slips past" (p. 286). When we fail to do this, inattentional blindness inhibits our ability to learn effectively. While some students come to us with great attentional skills, many need to be taught how to attend.
This book is loaded with lots of research. A good broad scoped book that could easily be used in its entirely or in part to focus a PLC for a variety of teachers.
Tuesday, August 27, 2019
Thursday, August 22, 2019
Visible Learning and personalized learning
Around where I live there has been a move toward personalized learning using Education Element's Core Four. Two elements of the program are flexible content and student reflection. Flexible content leans heavily on student voice and choice. Reading Visible Learning and the Science of How we Learn by John Hattie and Gregory Yates has made me think about these two concepts.
Hattie and Yates point out:
This has interesting implications for personalized learning. The CDC says that in 2012 over 8% of students had an anxiety disorder (increasing every year) with approximately 60% receiving treatment. A Pew study indicated that 70% of teens felt anxiety was a major problem among their peers. This being the case, that idea of choice is a concern. Perhaps a very limited choice of two or three might be valuable, but a list of 10 project ideas would clearly be too many. In our zeal we may make things more difficult for a large number of our kids. Balancing choice lists for anxious and not anxious students may mean separate lists.
This also has implications on our students by ability level. More knowledgeable students benefit from problem solving approaches but our struggling learners do not. We need to adjust presentation of information to fit the knowledge level of our students. The use of pre-assessments could determine who would benefit from problem solving and who needs a more direct approach. We need to be flexible, but it may not be the students themselves who are best able to determine what the best learning approach would be.
Self-reflection seems like an innately useful skill. Socrates admonished people to know thyself. If you have ever asked a student how they did on something, the typical response is ok. Many studies identify self-assessments as poor indicators of ability or success (p. 231). The top quartile of students tend to underestimate achievement and difficulty of a task and everyone else overestimates their ability- often grossly (p. 233). This means that blanket self-reflection tasks are likely to be poor measures. In order to make self-reflection valuable, we need to make it far more objective and pointed. For example, if we want students to self-reflect on their ability to utilize a strategy to solve a word problem we probably do not want to ask "Can you solve the problem on your own?" We probably want them to attempt the problem, compare with a correct example and then answer a series of questions:
We need to be very careful with personalized learning so that we do not hinder progress of students. Personalized learning has had very mixed results. I suspect part may be relate to choice availability for anxious and non-anxious students and students with varying knowledge levels as well as a poor ability to self-reflect. We need to apply this well-researched information in the arena of how we teach, especially as it applies to the "fad of the day" as is so often the case in education.
Hattie and Yates point out:
Anxious students respond well to strong guidance, direct supervision and a restriction on choices. But non-anxious people respond well to almost the opposite conditions. It is also well established that in acquiring knowledge, beginners benefit from clear step-by-step instructions and an absence of problem solving tasks. On the other hand, highly knowledgeable learners may benefit from working on problems to solve and are held back by step-by-step instructions. (p. 181)
This has interesting implications for personalized learning. The CDC says that in 2012 over 8% of students had an anxiety disorder (increasing every year) with approximately 60% receiving treatment. A Pew study indicated that 70% of teens felt anxiety was a major problem among their peers. This being the case, that idea of choice is a concern. Perhaps a very limited choice of two or three might be valuable, but a list of 10 project ideas would clearly be too many. In our zeal we may make things more difficult for a large number of our kids. Balancing choice lists for anxious and not anxious students may mean separate lists.
This also has implications on our students by ability level. More knowledgeable students benefit from problem solving approaches but our struggling learners do not. We need to adjust presentation of information to fit the knowledge level of our students. The use of pre-assessments could determine who would benefit from problem solving and who needs a more direct approach. We need to be flexible, but it may not be the students themselves who are best able to determine what the best learning approach would be.
Self-reflection seems like an innately useful skill. Socrates admonished people to know thyself. If you have ever asked a student how they did on something, the typical response is ok. Many studies identify self-assessments as poor indicators of ability or success (p. 231). The top quartile of students tend to underestimate achievement and difficulty of a task and everyone else overestimates their ability- often grossly (p. 233). This means that blanket self-reflection tasks are likely to be poor measures. In order to make self-reflection valuable, we need to make it far more objective and pointed. For example, if we want students to self-reflect on their ability to utilize a strategy to solve a word problem we probably do not want to ask "Can you solve the problem on your own?" We probably want them to attempt the problem, compare with a correct example and then answer a series of questions:
- Did you dissect the question- (circle the numbers, underline what you need to find,...)?
- Did you write the correct number problem?
- Were you able to solve the number problem correctly?(This might be broken into the steps to solve the particular problem.)
- Did you check your answer?
- Did you write your answer in a sentence?
We need to be very careful with personalized learning so that we do not hinder progress of students. Personalized learning has had very mixed results. I suspect part may be relate to choice availability for anxious and non-anxious students and students with varying knowledge levels as well as a poor ability to self-reflect. We need to apply this well-researched information in the arena of how we teach, especially as it applies to the "fad of the day" as is so often the case in education.
Thursday, August 15, 2019
Visual Learning and the science of how we learn part 1
I am about a third of the way through John Hattie and Gregory Yates' book Visible Learning and the Science of How We Learn. Two main principles have stuck out as important: cognitive load and prior knowledge. They are interesting, in part, because in today's schools we seem to be minimizing their impact on student achievement.
"A major determinant of knowledge acquisition will be what the mind already knows" (p. 114). When the CCSS emerged, the reading people suggested that teachers should not work at actively activating prior knowledge and that through close reading all would be revealed. You might be able to learn it through close reading of a passage that you know little about, but we do not have to make ourselves work that hard. Teach strategies to help students approach a text by pulling what they know from their background. If they know nothing, the passage will be meaningless. (I keep thinking about a book my son brought home in kindergarten to read. It was about a bunny doing lots of different dances- fox trot, waltz, rumba, etc. Oddly, my son who had little knowledge about dancing, did not really get the book, even though he could read it. His vocabulary was not up to the task of comprehension.) Hattie points out that "prior knowledge effects readily outweigh the effects due to IQ or … 'learning styles'"(p. 114). We need to develop a foundation on which to build information. If you do not have a tree, it is hard to hang ornaments. Sometimes this means we need to watch a video clip, hear a story, go on a field trip, work with realia, read an easier passage first or preview vocabulary to help understand what we are going to try to learn. Using these strategies helps us to get the information into our heads in a meaningful way. We get things into long term memory by linking to things that are similar and retrieve them based on how they are different. Without a system to encode, we will struggle to meaningfully interact with the material.
My least favorite part of teaching is unteaching- taking some misconception that a student has and replacing that knowledge with the truth. It takes twice as long to actively unlearn as to learn. This is prior knowledge showcasing its power. I would way rather build the foundation than have to tear down someone else's work. We need to be very careful with what we teach. You can actually subtract a bigger number from a smaller number, in spite of what our first grade teachers tell us. You just get a negative number. Contrary to what the movie Ice Age portrays, glacial movement is really slow and the density of animals on glaciers is really low. Veins are not blue, nor is deoxygenated blood. The Sun is not closer to the Earth during summer than winter. Columbus landed in the Caribbean and never knew he had not landed in the East Indies. Need I go on?
Cognitive load is the level of effort the brain is asked to engage in. The brain can only do so much. This is why prior knowledge is so important. When you have something learned to an automatic level, it loads the brain in a limited manner. When you are working with new things, problem solving, or doing higher level thinking, your cognitive load is high. So we need to be careful not to overload students' cognitive capacity at any one time or they will be unable to function with any level of efficiency. When it comes to inquiry learning the "additional load imposed by the need to explore and find thigs out can detract from our capacity to assimilate the information" (p. 78). That is why inquiry approaches require so much time and scaffolding- "the effort involved [in problem solving] detract from the overall knowledge building process and can make further less likely" (p. 152). Lecture can be powerful because, done right, it presents small chunks of information in a meaningful framework so that students can learn it. The more a student knows, the more they can "discover" on their own. While short term memory can hold 7 pieces of information, working memory can only operate or use 2-4 pieces of new information, it can use more items if they are from long term memory (p. 146).
We know that students with ASD struggle with generalization. Perhaps cognitive load explains a great deal of this. They are less adept at processing sensory information so their working memory is overloaded. Consequently they cannot generalize from the problem solving involved in socialization. This leads one to conclude that explicit learning needs to be used to take a skill to the automatic level before it is combined with other skills.
When we teach, we need to aware of these two concepts because they determine what a student will get out of instruction. They require careful and thoughtful building from the student's individual place, not the curriculum's place.
"A major determinant of knowledge acquisition will be what the mind already knows" (p. 114). When the CCSS emerged, the reading people suggested that teachers should not work at actively activating prior knowledge and that through close reading all would be revealed. You might be able to learn it through close reading of a passage that you know little about, but we do not have to make ourselves work that hard. Teach strategies to help students approach a text by pulling what they know from their background. If they know nothing, the passage will be meaningless. (I keep thinking about a book my son brought home in kindergarten to read. It was about a bunny doing lots of different dances- fox trot, waltz, rumba, etc. Oddly, my son who had little knowledge about dancing, did not really get the book, even though he could read it. His vocabulary was not up to the task of comprehension.) Hattie points out that "prior knowledge effects readily outweigh the effects due to IQ or … 'learning styles'"(p. 114). We need to develop a foundation on which to build information. If you do not have a tree, it is hard to hang ornaments. Sometimes this means we need to watch a video clip, hear a story, go on a field trip, work with realia, read an easier passage first or preview vocabulary to help understand what we are going to try to learn. Using these strategies helps us to get the information into our heads in a meaningful way. We get things into long term memory by linking to things that are similar and retrieve them based on how they are different. Without a system to encode, we will struggle to meaningfully interact with the material.
My least favorite part of teaching is unteaching- taking some misconception that a student has and replacing that knowledge with the truth. It takes twice as long to actively unlearn as to learn. This is prior knowledge showcasing its power. I would way rather build the foundation than have to tear down someone else's work. We need to be very careful with what we teach. You can actually subtract a bigger number from a smaller number, in spite of what our first grade teachers tell us. You just get a negative number. Contrary to what the movie Ice Age portrays, glacial movement is really slow and the density of animals on glaciers is really low. Veins are not blue, nor is deoxygenated blood. The Sun is not closer to the Earth during summer than winter. Columbus landed in the Caribbean and never knew he had not landed in the East Indies. Need I go on?
Cognitive load is the level of effort the brain is asked to engage in. The brain can only do so much. This is why prior knowledge is so important. When you have something learned to an automatic level, it loads the brain in a limited manner. When you are working with new things, problem solving, or doing higher level thinking, your cognitive load is high. So we need to be careful not to overload students' cognitive capacity at any one time or they will be unable to function with any level of efficiency. When it comes to inquiry learning the "additional load imposed by the need to explore and find thigs out can detract from our capacity to assimilate the information" (p. 78). That is why inquiry approaches require so much time and scaffolding- "the effort involved [in problem solving] detract from the overall knowledge building process and can make further less likely" (p. 152). Lecture can be powerful because, done right, it presents small chunks of information in a meaningful framework so that students can learn it. The more a student knows, the more they can "discover" on their own. While short term memory can hold 7 pieces of information, working memory can only operate or use 2-4 pieces of new information, it can use more items if they are from long term memory (p. 146).
We know that students with ASD struggle with generalization. Perhaps cognitive load explains a great deal of this. They are less adept at processing sensory information so their working memory is overloaded. Consequently they cannot generalize from the problem solving involved in socialization. This leads one to conclude that explicit learning needs to be used to take a skill to the automatic level before it is combined with other skills.
When we teach, we need to aware of these two concepts because they determine what a student will get out of instruction. They require careful and thoughtful building from the student's individual place, not the curriculum's place.
Wednesday, August 14, 2019
Emotional Intelligence
More than two decades ago Daniel Goleman wrote Emotional Intelligence: Why it Can Matter More Than IQ. Since then there have been an assortment of character education and affective learning programs scattered through the education universe. Today's focus on whole child learning, social emotional programing, restorative justice, trauma informed education and mindfulness continue the trend. In the intervening decades we have learned even more about neuroscience and yet, we still struggle with implementing these skills into the classroom even though we know they have positive impact.
I managed to get an audiobook version from 2005. Again I struggled with listening to deep content. In part because I was driving for most of the book and in part because maintaining listening attention and focus without taking notes is extremely challenging. When I listen to a deep text, I am constantly reminded of how students should follow along, annotate and take notes when they listen to texts from which we hope they will learn.
Goleman focuses on five main elements of emotional intelligence:
- self-awareness
- self-regulation
- motivation
- empathy
- social skills.
The part that I found fascinating was the application chapters. He talks about the role of the family in developing emotional sophistication, trauma and how it impacts emotions and self-regulation, and the role of temperament. He discusses how emotional skills improve health by virtue of improved immune systems.
Being bathed in the world of Autism, I see the parallels between the challenges of emotional intelligence and the struggles of those on the spectrum.
- Self-awareness- people on the spectrum tend to have weak emotional vocabularies and abilities to identify emotions they feel. They tend to use few levels of emotions, which may result in wild swings in mood.
- self-regulation- if you do not know how you feel, you will struggle with managing yourself.
- motivation- being able to engage in long-term planning and follow through is difficult for many children. People on the spectrum often find time difficult- my son is rigid about everyone following timelines. He needs to organize his life on the clock. Changing his schedule is getting easier, but still presents a challenge.
- empathy- if you cannot recognize your own feelings, doing so in others is nearly impossible. Thomas the Train is remarkably successful with youngsters on the spectrum because the facial expressions are so clear. The program can be used in therapeutic settings to help youngsters.
- social skills- the entire pragmatic, social language is the core of the disorder. Developing these skills is essential to productive futures.
The part that resonated most with me was the chapters on training the skills. In schools we have started to put this in the forefront but our schools of education, where teachers learn their craft, do not require training in developing emotional intelligence in students. He identifies a variety of programs that have been used to help develop skills, emphasized the role of having a long term coherent programs that empirically are effective. He criticizes the drug prevention program reliance on DARE as popular but ineffective and stresses the importance of locating successful programs and implementing them in developmentally appropriate ways.
This should be a baseline reading for all teachers. It provides the rationale for any other social-emotional program that a district choses to implement. It points the way for deeper and more intense programing to help our children become successful. In today's world where people are increasingly isolated, where attention to anything beyond a sound byte is monumentally challenging, where technology is taking the place of interactions, we need to focus on emotional aptitude more than ever.
Thursday, August 1, 2019
Neuroworld
In my previous post I talked about Donna Volpitta's book on resilience. Here children's book, Neuroworld: A Guide for teaching the Brain Science of Resilience, is meant to explain to children four sections of the brain: cortex, limbic system, amyglada and prefrontal cortex, that influence our decision making and behavior. She relates each region to a bug and explains the role it plays and how they interact with each other.
The book is meant to be shared with children to introduce them to concepts about self-control and help them on the way to being more successful with their emotions. Children would need multiple exposures to the text to understand the concepts. Exploring these concepts with calm children will help them to be more responsive to scripting that encourages them to take charge of their emotions and behavior. An interesting approach to metacognition.
|
region
|
information
|
|
Cortex
(ant)
|
·
Involved in planning and working hard
·
Influenced by adequate rest, nutrition and
exercise
·
Social skills, focus and routines
|
|
Limbic system
(grasshopper)
|
·
Early to develop
·
Emotions
·
Short term survival and rewards
|
|
Amygdala
(glowworm)
|
·
Part of limbic system on alert for threats
·
Being alert and looking for threats
|
|
Prefrontal cortex
(dragonfly)
|
·
Can override the limbic system Last part of
the brain to develop
·
Conscious choices
·
Executive function
|
The book is meant to be shared with children to introduce them to concepts about self-control and help them on the way to being more successful with their emotions. Children would need multiple exposures to the text to understand the concepts. Exploring these concepts with calm children will help them to be more responsive to scripting that encourages them to take charge of their emotions and behavior. An interesting approach to metacognition.
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