Author: Sam

I write books and talk about stuff.

The Art of Choosing (or, Mad Men redux)

Posted on | by Sam | 4 Comments on The Art of Choosing (or, Mad Men redux)

As some of you know, I’m in a bit of an ongoing conversation/debate about the uneasy marriage of democracy and capitalism (while still trying to clarify my own position on the issue). It began during a live audio interview with the Future of Education’s Steve Hargadon, and continued in the comments section of an Op-Ed I wrote about the popular AMC show Mad Men, which I describe as “a quintessentially American show about disembodied desire and emotion,” featuring a set of characters who “desire only the freedom to pursue whatever it is they cannot have.”

Today, as if on cue, my friend Steve Moore sent me a link to a recent TED talk by Columbia Business School professor Sheena Iyengar, who was discussing the core ideas in her new book, The Art of Choosing.

I’ve provided a link to the video below, because Dr. Iyengar’s research relates directly to the issues affecting the behavior of the characters in Mad Men — namely, the increasing meaningless of choice (the central right in a democracy) when it becomes primarily defined by the products we can purchase, not the ideas we can articulate (or the range of emotions we can feel).

The value of choice, Iyengar insists, depends on our ability to perceive differences between the options. Yet what has happened in the U.S. (the origins of which, to some degree, we see depicted in the early 1960s ad agency culture in Mad Men) is that instead of making better decisions as the number of choices available to us has grown, we have become overwhelmed by the volume, and the emptiness, of such individualized decisions. In this state, choice “no longer offers opportunities but imposes constraints. It is not a marker of liberation, but of suffocation by meaningless minutiae.”

This is the discomfort I was trying to articulate when I described the disembodied desire of the characters in Mad Men. Iyengar puts it this way: “The story Americans tell, the story upon which the American Dream depends, is the story of limitless choice. This narrative promises so much — freedom, happiness, success. It lays the world at your feet and says you can have anything, everything. But when you take a close look, you start to see the holes, and you start to see that the story can be told in many other ways.

We Need a New Set of “Words, Words, Words”

Posted on | by Sam | 4 Comments on We Need a New Set of “Words, Words, Words”

On the radio this morning, I heard three different stories about public education reform. In each story, I heard the same three words — data, testing, and accountability.

Before I get any more depressed about how uninspiring this language makes me feel, I have a proposal to make: let’s stop the madness and start identifying some new words that can more accurately describe the changes we seek for children.

Fittingly, the person who first made me aware of the power of language was none other than William Shakespeare, whose plays I used to teach in a variety of classrooms across the boroughs of New York City.

Hamlet was always my favorite. He is, like most teenagers, a searcher, occasionally brooding and introspective. He has visions of his future that don’t align with the visions the adults in his life have for him. He is an artist, an actor, and a dreamer – a person more comfortable in the world of words than the world of actions. And he is in love. But Hamlet is also the future King of Denmark, which means he is bound by custom to avenge his father’s murder – a duty that leads to his untimely death, in no small part because the act of killing goes against his very being.

No matter your age, then, to read the play is to watch a fellow human being struggle between staying true to his nature or accepting the role society has assigned him. Hamlet’s struggle also illuminates an essential question of human nature, not coincidentally posed by the first two words of the play – “Who’s there?”

This is not a question many of us choose to ask of ourselves. Instead, we keep busy with work and other distractions. We ignore the inherent, unarticulated contradictions between our internal passions and our external actions. And we wonder why we are left feeling unfulfilled.

Everything we do as individuals is determined by who we think we are — or, in the case of school reform, by what we define as our ultimate goals. And yet part of Hamlet’s challenge is that throughout his struggle, his only recourse for greater self-understanding is to “unpack [his] heart with words.”

This tension between thoughts, words and actions continues throughout the play. At one point, Hamlet finds himself standing directly behind the man who killed his father – the King’s brother, Claudius. All the young prince needs to do is unsheathe his sword and complete his duty. But Hamlet feels paralyzed, even as he struggles to talk himself into the act. He tries to “suit the action to the word, the word to the action” – but to no effect. Later, Hamlet bemoans the futility of “words, words, words” – at once his (and our) greatest resource and chief source of frustration.

Shakespeare’s exploration of the relationship between thoughts, words and actions illuminates a universal human tension, and a particular challenge I see reflected in our current efforts to create a more equitable school system: Before any of us can use our talents to make ourselves seen and heard, we must first understand how to “suit the action to the word, [and] the word to the action.” And before we can ever hope to become the most effective teacher, parent, boss or school leader, we must be willing to do the internal, reflective work necessary to answer the question, “Who’s there?”

If I apply this question to the current reform landscape, it’s unquestionable that the words we use are somehow divorced from the essence of what schooling is all about — helping children unlock the mystery of who they are by acquiring the skills and self-confidence they need to be seen and heard (at college, in their careers, and as citizens in a democracy) in meaningful, responsible ways.

Why is the significance and power of this goal so absent from the most common vocabulary of the current reform movement? The optimistic side of me says it’s simply because we haven’t thought about it enough. The pessimistic side wonders if it’s because we’re so blinded by the current charade of labeling schools (or reform efforts) as successful or unsuccessful based on a single measure of success that we’ve come of believe our own press clippings: if the scores go up, we really are closing the achievement gap. If the scores stay stagnant or go down, we’ve made no progress whatsoever.

As anyone who has studied Shakespeare knows, a worthy plot line is more complicated than that. And so is the work we have ahead of us.

To get us started in the right direction, I have three simple proposals:

  1. Every time you find yourself wanting to say data, say information instead. It’s a good thing, for example, that we’re more concerned now with acquiring relevant information about whether or not kids are learning, and how well or poorly our schools are creating healthy learning environments for kids. But the fact that schools now talk about “Data Days” at their school suggests to me that we’ve gone a little too far in the direction of valuing the number and not the story behind the number. We need both, and information strikes me as a more neutral term.
  2. Every time you want to talk about testing, talk about learning instead. Tests will always be a component of our education system. But take a moment to reflect back on your most powerful personal learning experience, and I can guarantee you it did not involve a test. I know this because I was part of a powerful data-collection campaign — I mean, information-gathering campaign — to uncover the core conditions of a powerful learning environment, based on people’s lived experiences. After hundreds of individual stories were collected, we made a word cloud of the most essential conditions, and, no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention in their life, the top five were challenging, engaging, relevant, supportive and experiential. So let’s stop playing it safe and focusing on tests that can only skim the surface of what real learning looks like, and let’s start asking ourselves, relentlessly and collaboratively, How can we create more learning opportunities for kids that are challenging, engaging, relevant, supportive and experiential — and how will we know if we’ve succeeded?
  3. Every time you want to talk about accountability, talk about sustainability instead. What we seek is not just a system that holds people accountable — after all, the most successful systems are the ones where people are intrinsically motivated to do that for themselves. No, what we seek is a system that can sustain its capacity to use meaningful information to improve the overall learning conditions for children. And in case you think this is flowery progressivism at its worst, you should know that I’m partially basing this notion on the insights of renown business guru Jim Collins, who says the best organizations create environments where employees need no motivation, and leaders trip up when they destroy that drive.

In part, Hamlet’s story ends so tragically because it was written not by him, but by the expectations of the society in which he lived. Educators today are not similarly constrained (despite how it may feel). But we still need to learn how to use words and language to focus on the right goals – the ones that will connect us to an aspirational vision of the knowledge and skills every child will acquire over the course of his or her schooling. We need to learn to ask the right questions – the ones that will help us create optimal learning environments. “And this above all; to thine own self be true.”

Why I Like Mad Men

Posted on | by Sam

(This post originally appeared in the Huffington Post.)

It’s a recent Monday afternoon and I’m stuck in the dreaded middle seat on a cross-country flight. The woman next to me is a sixty-something Arizonan who seems determined to hold on to her youth. Her hair is in a ponytail, her skin is leathery and brown, her top is uncomfortably revealing, and she is wearing oversized Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses and Monster Beat headphones. When the stewardess comes to take our drink order, I ask for a cup of coffee. She asks for two chardonnays.

There are four and a half hours remaining in the flight.

In desperate need of diversion, I pull out my computer and decide to watch the first and last episodes of season two of the wildly popular AMC series Mad Men. I’ve been an avid watcher of the show since it debuted back in 2007. I’ve also been in a lot of conversations with friends who don’t see what all the fuss is about. As I revisit the second season from the relative discomfort of my cramped seat in the sky — my neighbor growing ever sloppier as she watches reruns of Friday Night Lights — the fuss seems clearer than ever.

Mad Men is a quintessentially American show about disembodied desire and emotion. Set in the first few years of the 1960s, the show is filled with characters living in a gilded world of manicured lawns, highly prescribed social mores, and superbly cultivated capitalist longings. As befits a group of people who work in an advertising agency, the characters of Mad Men do not desire deeper meaningfulness and connections — they desire the freedom to pursue whatever it is they cannot have.

In this sense the show is a powerful and unsettling commentary on the tenuous marriage of democracy and capitalism. In a democracy, our love of freedom ostensibly stems from our shared belief in protecting for all people the inalienable freedom of conscience. The right to say what we must say. The right to worship one God, thirty Gods or no God. The right to speak up and advocate forcefully, and peaceably, for change. In short, self-determination at its fullest.

By contrast, Mad Men unveils how the sacred goals of a democracy can become cheapened by the relentless profane efficiency of a capitalist economy. In this world, freedom comes to mean freedom to do whatever one wants. The desires are material, the feelings deeply submerged and unarticulated, the actions of the characters feral and reckless. In short, self-obsession at its fullest.

All of these subplots are brilliantly woven together in the finale of season two, “Meditations in an Emergency,” a title taken from the famous poet Frank O’Hara.

“Now I am quietly waiting for / the catastrophe of my personality / to seem beautiful again, / and interesting, and modern.”

On the outside, the characters in Mad Men are beautiful, and modern. But it goes no deeper, leaving us to watch people skimming the surface of each other, looking for a way to dive deeper, and ricocheting off the emotional carapaces that have been built up over time.

In the season two finale, Don Draper, the show’s mercurial, philandering lead and the creative genius behind his ad agency’s success, is staying in a hotel after his wife Betty discovers he has been having an affair. After Betty drops off the kids for a visit, she gazes longingly at a fancy dress in a department store display before returning to the hotel bar, grabbing a drink and having random sex with a nameless man. “To not thinking about things,” they toast, while the still-unresolved Cuban missile crisis looms in the background. Afterwards Betty returns to her empty family home. As she lingers at the back door, you expect her to break down in shame. Instead, she opens the refrigerator and casually devours a leftover chicken leg.

“The country is grey and / brown and white in trees / snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny / not just darker, not just grey.”

It may be that critics have already mined to death the way Mad Men lays bare the tendency for our society to cultivate an ersatz culture of conspicuous consumption. But the parallels between the early 1960s and today are what has propelled the show into the zeitgeist. We know, as the characters cannot, what awaits them in the second half of the 1960s — a whole-scale remaking of America as they know it, from the end of Jim Crow to the advent of mass student protests to the victory of landing a man on the moon. When someone makes a similar show in the future, and sets it in the early 21st century, I imagine future audiences will view us similarly – both aware and unaware of what awaits, dissatisfied with the current state of things, and not quite certain how to imagine anything different.

“It may be the coldest day of / the year, what does he think of / that? I mean, what do I? And if I do / perhaps I am myself again.”

Towards the end of the episode (and my flight), a character named Peggy finally shares a closely held secret with her former paramour, a married man named Pete, immediately after he drunkenly expresses his love for her.

“I had your baby and I gave it away,” she says. “I wanted other things.” Then, while Pete sits stunned and silent, she tries to explain how she feels.

“One day you’re there, and then all of a sudden there’s less of you and you wonder what happened to that part — is it living outside of you? And you keep thinking, ‘Maybe I’ll get it back.’ And then you realize, it’s just gone.”

At the same moment these lines are delivered on my computer screen, the retiree next to me begins to bob her head animatedly to the music on her ITunes – hip hop, I think – and raises her hand to the beat, audibly singing along in a drunken bliss, lost in the dream of somewhere else.

We have begun our descent.

Using Rewards in the Classroom: Short-Term Crutch or Long-Term Strategy?

Posted on | by Sam | 4 Comments on Using Rewards in the Classroom: Short-Term Crutch or Long-Term Strategy?

Today is the last day of Center for Inspired Teaching’s two-week Institute, and as the rest of the country talks about the merits and shortcomings of the Obama administration’s education plan – particularly its belief that external systems of accountability and extrinsic motivators like performance pay are an essential ingredient in reforming public education – I’m watching the same debate unfold here, on the ground, as a small group of DC teachers prepares for the coming school year.

The debate was seeded by the Institute’s two lead facilitators, Aleta Margolis and Jenna Fournel, who began one morning by asking teachers to place themselves along a continuum – in the form of a blue line that stretched from one side of the room to the other, and identified strongly agree and strongly disagree as the two poles. “I’m going to read off some prompts,” Jenna explained, “and when I do please place yourself along the continuum using your two feet.”

Before the exercise began, Jenna provided two definitions – tangible rewards (“By this we mean things like stickers, free time, extra privileges, and the like.), and punishment (“By which we mean the loss or denial or something of value.”)

  • It is more effective to reward students for good behavior than to punish them for bad behavior.
  • Tangible rewards make school more interesting for students.
  • Tangible rewards are effective teaching tools.
  • Tangible rewards motivate students to work harder.
  • Tangible rewards motivate students to behave better.
  • Tangible rewards are bribes.
  • I am motivated professionally by tangible rewards.
  • I am motivated personally by tangible rewards.
  • When a teacher offers a tangible reward for completing schoolwork the teacher is sending the message that the work itself is not important.
  • When a teacher offers a tangible reward the teacher is sending the message that doing the right thing is valuable.
  • Tangible rewards are copouts for teachers because teachers can offer rewards instead of making the curriculum interesting.

After everyone had had a chance to plot his or her own thinking on the subject, Jenna explained what was coming next: a good old-fashioned debate. “And I invite you to choose the side you don’t personally agree with,” she added. “Let’s imagine we’re creating our own new school in DC. And you the teachers must be the ones to decide whether or not we use extrinsic rewards.”

After 20 minutes of time to prepare their arguments and a ceremonial coin flip, the group in charge of arguing against tangible rewards went first:

“We’d like to start with quote from Alfie Kohn,” the group spokesperson began. “’At least two dozen studies have shown that people expecting to receive a reward for a task do not perform as well as someone expecting nothing.’”

“The first thing we need to do is decide what we’re trying to do? Our argument is that there is no tangible long-term benefit to using tangible rewards. It’s a short-term fix. Often rewards are not for the kids’ benefit, but for our own. It’s about control, and making our jobs easier. A large part of why teachers use tangible rewards is because they lack the skills to identify good alternatives. Additionally, tangible rewards can distract from the love of learning. Every time you give a tangible reward, you’re indirectly punishing all students who don’t receive them.

“This does not mean we’re discounting celebrations in the classroom,” she concluded. “We are saying that a child promised a treat for learning has been given every reason to stop doing so as soon as the reward goes away.”

Applause broke out in the room, a short shuffling of papers followed, and then group two took the stage.

“I would challenge you by saying that the adults referred to in your argument have chosen a profession where they’re motivated to help children. It’s vital we assist adults in being successful. We can’t only focus on kids who already have intrinsic motivation. If there are twenty kids and some of them would benefit from extrinsic motivations, we shouldn’t deny those kids the chance to become more engaged. We need to have all the tools for people in order to facilitate inclusion. There are different levels of rewards, and our goal must be to try and bring kids to a different level of functioning. We also believe rewards can trigger behavior. The first day children may need something that can feel and touch that makes them feel good. That initial feeling can then snowball in a positive way. It’s showing that we value them and their families, and are preparing them to be successful in the real world they will enter when they graduate.”

As the debate concluded (not surprisingly, no winner was named), it was clear to me that this was an issue over which there was little consensus. For some, the power of extrinsic rewards could not be denied. They have seen the changes in kids that have struggled for so long. For others, the use of tangible rewards is a crutch that only delays the deeper transformation that a powerful learning environment tries to surface.

Over lunch that day, I continued the conversation under umbrellas and a round table on the school’s rooftop balcony. “I just finished my third year teaching,” said one young woman named Heather, “and the way I motivate kids is through extrinsic awards. It’s the easiest thing to do when classroom behavior is a challenge.”

Another young woman named Lee agrees. “When you’re in a challenging environment, and you don’t have the support to create a more holistic learning environment that would support an intrinsic classroom. I feel like this is a big personal challenge, too, as a novice teacher. I‘m not sure I’m capable yet of being intentional enough day after day to provide a more purely intrinsic learning experience for my kids.”

Lee’s admission prompted another teacher at the table, a woman named Michelle, to join in. “I’ve used extrinsic awards, but not consistently. What ends up happening as a result is I have kids occasionally ask me if they’re getting a reward for what they’re doing. So I’m wondering how my inconsistency has impacted them when it comes to motivation overall. And whether or not my use of rewards has delayed their own deeper appreciation for the work they do.”

Ben, the lone male participant in the Institute, talked about the “token economy” of extrinsic awards his school uses. “I don’t really use them in my own class, but I think it’s most useful, and most used, in the non-classroom setting. In the cafeteria, for example, where the adults are less likely to know the kids they’re supervising, I think it’s extremely useful. And I’ve seen in my own kids how motivated some of them can become when they have something concrete to strive for. But I feel torn.”

What do YOU think? Are there some occasions where the use of extrinsic motivators is a sound teaching and behavioral strategy? Or must we as educators challenge ourselves to focus exclusively on building the capacity for intrinsic motivation?

Building Democratic Learning Communities

Posted on | by Sam

On July 28, I participated in a live web discussion about democratic learning communities with Classroom 2.0’s Steve Hargadon.

It was an interesting and sometimes chaotic discussion. While Steve was asking me questions, participants from all over the globe were also typing questions and comments in a dialogue box. So please excuse my occasional flightiness when Steve asked me a question — it’s because I was trying to have about ten conversations at once!

Click here to listen to the audio of the conversation, and please post any additional comments or ideas. Thanks!

A Sinking Ship?

Posted on | by Sam | 4 Comments on A Sinking Ship?

During a week in which both Education Secretary Arne Duncan and President Barack Obama will publicly defend their education reform priorities – in response to severe criticism from the country’s leading civil rights organizations – I’m trying to figure out how a set of ideas that was so close to mobilizing a quiet revolution in public education has instead led the soldiers of that revolution to passionately (and loudly) take up arms against each other.

All I can come up with is they’ve gotten some lousy advice. And I think I see where they’ve gone wrong.

Take, for example, the issue of teacher evaluations, which is a major component of the Race to the Top selection criteria. First of all, anyone who doesn’t think our current system of teacher and principal evaluation needs to be completely remade is someone you should never listen to again on any issue of consequence. Teacher and principal assessments in this country are a joke – and do nothing to advance the quality of the profession or improve the overall learning conditions for kids. So the Obama Administration’s decision to shine light on this issue is spot-on.

Why, then, has that issue transmogrified into a bold push for using financial incentives to boost teacher motivation? Who thought that was a good idea, and why did anybody listen? As I’ve written previously, the leading thinkers in the business community have recognized for years the limitations of this strategy (Enron, anyone?). Dan Pink has posted a useful video in which he cites a study by, of all entities, the Federal Reserve, showing how cash incentives work well – as long as the desired behaviors are simple and non-cognitive. Yet this is an issue the administration continues to try and defend. They should drop it like it’s hot.

Similarly, there’s the push to adopt a common set of academic standards across all fifty states. This, too, is something I’ve written about previously, and this, too, is an issue I’m ready to support, provided the projected purpose for the use of the standards is in line with what other high-achieving countries around the world have used them for – namely, to provide guidance, clarity and quality control, not to enforce a strict set of restrictions that prescribe the actions of local educators. We need standards that are viewed as indicators of wisdom our students will need to be successful in college and the workplace, not shards of knowledge that make it easier to devise uniform tests and mandate standardized modes of instruction.

Is this the path the Obama administration and the National Governors Association seek as well? I’m not sure, but I can see why some people feel nervous.  We are, after all, still a culture intent on overvaluing the illusory certainty that basic-skills test scores provide us. We still seek linear progress in the most nonlinear of professions and experiences. And we still operate in a society where powerful forces driven by the bottom line have the capacity to steer policy decisions to their liking. So although the jury is still out on this one, I feel more nervous than confident.

Finally, there’s the issue of making federal money for states a competitive, rather than strictly a formula-driven, process. If you want to view this one purely by its ability to engineer massive changes in how states operate, it’s a runaway success. States have revised laws to lift caps on the number of charter schools, adopted the new common standards, and poured thousands of hours into finalizing their grant proposals. Initially, two states were awarded money in the first round. Today, 18 more states and the District of Columbia were named finalists for the remaining $3.4 billion in funding.

This aspect of the Obama administration’s proposals is what particularly rankled the civil rights groups. As Schott Foundation president John Jackson put it, “No state should have to compete to protect the civil rights of their children in their states.”

Hard to argue with that point, but in the interest of moving forward, I want to offer three simple pieces of START STOP KEEP advice to the Obama team:

  1. KEEP focusing on teacher and principal quality and evaluation, but STOP doing it via the 20th century notion of carrots and sticks, and START investing deeply in quality teacher preparation programs and evaluation systems.
  2. KEEP emphasizing the utility of a stronger, clearer and leaner set of national standards that can guide instruction and provide quality control to a system that sorely needs it, but STOP viewing it as a way to impose more national standardized exams, and START heeding both the civil rights groups’ recommendation for common resource opportunity standards, and the need for a long term goal (once the aforementioned teacher preparation programs are up to snuff) of having national content standards provide guidance for teachers, who then devise locally-administered assessments based on their detailed knowledge of what they’ve taught and who they’ll be testing. (This is what many of the highest-performing countries in the world do, by the way.)
  3. KEEP saying that providing a high-quality public education to all children is the civil rights issue of our time, but STOP trying to do so by incentivizing competition that results in winners and losers, and START advocating for a Constitutional amendment that makes the guarantee of an equal opportunity to learn for all children something the states cannot ignore.

I think that would help a lot. What do YOU think?

Judicial Activism & the Yelp-ification of Voting?

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As someone who never travels without his pocket U.S. Constitution, I loved that yesterday’s New York Times forced me to revisit the two sections that deal with Judicial and Executive power — Articles III and II, respectively.

The article about judicial power was a detailed analysis of the first five years of the U.S. Supreme Court under John Roberts’ leadership. (Spoiler alert: it was really conservative). What interests me more, though, is the ongoing tension between the lofty principles of our common law system (in which our law evolves over time, thanks to the wisdom and restraint of judges who interpret it) and the reality of how those principles get played out in real time (i.e., to the victor go the spoils, stare decisis — or the rule that judges aren’t supposed to go against prior precedent — be damned).

Now that the Court’s makeup favors a conservative bent, the left is up in arms and crying foul.  And yet this is exactly what happened a few generations ago, under the Earl Warren-led Court of the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, under Warren’s leadership the left-leaning Court forged myriad new doctrines regarding civil rights and civil liberties and the very nature of the political system (Thank God!). And so, although I personally disagree with the direction this Court is taking us, I don’t see behavior that runs afoul of the Constitution. It’s an imperfect system, but you can’t only support judicial muscularity when it serves your own purposes. (On a related note, I have a new book coming out later this year on the First Amendment and how our understanding of it has evolved over time. Want to reserve an advance copy?)

Far more complicated was the recent New Yorker article about voting systems, and about how the U.S. lags behind other countries in its efforts to provide a fairer system. The antediluvian nature of our system will become even more pronounced when the stodgy old Brits, of all people, hold a May 2011 referendum on how Britain elects its leaders, likely resulting in an abandonment of the “first-past-the-post” system whereby whoever has the most votes wins. As the article points out, this sort of system only really makes sense if you always have two candidates. But anytime you have three or more, it’s a pretty lousy way to capture the true will of the people. And, not surprisingly, of democracies without any significant past era of British influence, only Nepal has chosen to elect its leaders this way.

As the article points out, the misbehavior of voting schemes in general has been known to social scientists since the mid-twentieth century. “That was when Kenneth Arrow, an economist at Stanford, examined a set of requirements that you’d think any reasonable voting system could satisfy, and proved that nothing can meet them all when there are more than two candidates. So designing elections is always a matter of choosing a lesser evil.”

So what should we do instead? Interestingly, one idea put forth is to rate our candidates the same way we rate restaurants or books online — by rating them across the range of a 4- or 5-point scale — and by using the 2000 election as an example of how it might work. “If a voter likes Nader best, and would rather have Gore than Bush, he or she can approve Nader and Gore but not Bush.” Both schemes give voters more options, and “would elect the candidate with the most over-all support, rather than the one preferred by the largest minority.”

I’m not saying I recommend this, but it’s an interesting idea, isn’t it? And just to provide some perspective, it’s not like changing how we vote in this country is a foreign concept. In fact, nearly one-fourth of our country’s total amendments to the Constitution (or 6 out of 27) have been about changing how we vote — and who can do it.

Which leads to a Monday trivia question — can you name the six voting-related amendments without looking? If you can (and we’re going strictly honor code here), I’ll send you a pocket Constitution of your very own. . .

Here Comes the Judgment

Posted on | by Sam | 3 Comments on Here Comes the Judgment

On the fourth day of a two-week summer institute, in the haze of post-lunch hour fatigue, I watched something magical and uncomfortable transpire. And I don’t think I’ll ever see the role of the teacher the same way again.

Center for Inspired Teaching founder Aleta Margolis, the lead facilitator for the institute, brought the 28 participants to the middle of the room, with each person seated in a circle.  “We’re going to start back up with a simple group exercise,” she began. “Our goal is to bring the group closer together, sharpen our individual awareness, undertake a significant challenge together – and count as high as we can as a group.”

A few people tilted their heads inquisitively. Did she just say we’re going to do a counting game? “There’s only one rule,” Aleta continued. “When two people speak at once, we have to start over as a group. OK. Let’s begin.”

Despite several attempts, the group could climb no higher than six. Awkward laughter filled the room with each failed attempt, and more than one person shifted embarrassingly. Each time this happened, Aleta, in the same measured voice, calmly and clearly repeated the same opening line.

“Ready, one.”

Eventually, after a few more rounds of frustration, the group happened upon an innovation – people raised their hands when they were ready to say a number. The results improved, but still the group could get no higher than fifteen. Then the group ad-libbed another innovation – simply going in a circle.

In seconds, the group reached 100. Mission accomplished! Or was it? No one seemed to feel much of a sense of accomplishment. “That way is no fun,” said one woman. “There’s no challenge at all.”

Aleta asked another question of the group. “When does it enhance the experience to make something easier, and when does it enhance the experience to make something more difficult?”

A young teacher volunteered an idea. “If our goal is simply to count as high as we can, going in a circle is clearly the most efficient way. If it isn’t, however, this method inhibits our ability to achieve other goals.”

“It’s like with test scores,” added someone else. “If that’s our only goal, we can take some short cuts to raise our numbers.  But if we have other goals, it’s more complicated. We can’t only focus on one thing.”

Aleta returned the focus to the game, but not before adding a few more rules – no hand signals, and no patterns allowed. “Let’s see what happens, and let’s see what skills it takes this time.”

As the game resumed and frustration mounted, I found myself becoming more aware of how subtly but relentlessly the activities of the Inspired Teaching Institute are designed to build in the participants the skills of close and careful observation – and a form of observation that can occur without judgment. What difference did it make, after all, how high the group could count? The point was simply to see what the exercise could reveal about human behavior. And yet I watched the ways in which, for whatever reason, this simple afternoon warm up activity had provided the perfect platform for the participants to grapple with the challenge of closely observing something, and participating in it, without judgment.

“What skills are you needing to use to be successful at the game?” Aleta asked.

“Restraint.”

“Self control.”

“Focus.”

“Anticipation. “

One participant articulated a growing mood of discomfort in the room. “I don’t like this game anymore,” she shared, “because I spoke twice when someone else spoke, and I feel like I’m letting the group down.”

“What skill might it take to get yourself back in the game?” Aleta asked.

“I think you need to feel like you’re in an environment that makes it safe to take risks and make mistakes, and that’s hard to do,” said another participant.

“Let’s try playing again in a moment,” Aleta added, “but before we do I want everyone to have the following questions in mind: First, what skill does it take to get to a position of fearless participation as a learner? And second, when it comes to this game in particular, how do you know when to go?”

The game resumed, and familiar challenges returned; the group could still count no higher than 15. “Why can’t we do this?” screamed the body language of several participants, clearly frustrated with the slow pace of their progress.

Aleta, sensing the rising level of anxiety, asked everyone to take two deep audible breaths. “Now let’s consider those two questions.”

“I think the essential skill is not getting angry at yourself if you screw up,” said one woman, before another wondered aloud: “If we had simplified the game, how might that have changed the tenor of this conversation we’re having? Would it be more or less rich?”

I typed furiously, struggling to keep up with the comments and the collective effort to unlock what was leaving people feeling so frustrated. As I did, I thought how notable it was that even on the fourth day of an institute that has intentionally and steadily given a group of adults myriad opportunities to work intimately with each other and develop a trusting climate, the default emotion the game evoked was the fear of being judged for “failing”.

“I’m starting to wonder if my role as a teacher needs to be more about staying open,” opined one teacher, “so I can be more receptive to everything that happens in my classroom. It doesn’t mean there stops being right and wrong answers. But maybe it means I need to shift the way I view the pursuit of knowledge itself, and allow in my own mind for a greater possibility of interpretation. If I do this, will it help my children feel safer to be more curious and fearless about what we study?”

Aleta wrapped up the activity by writing a short statement on a piece of butcher paper: Uncomfortable v. unsafe.

“This is the most uncomfortable you’ve been since we started our work together,” she offered. “But look at how rich the conversation has been. Just remember – in this institute and in your own classrooms there’s a crucial distinction between feeling uncomfortable, which is the space where real learning occurs, and feeling unsafe, which is the space where we shut down and no learning occurs.”

It’s the Relationships, Stupid . . .

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on It’s the Relationships, Stupid . . .

I’m spending my days observing the two-week summer session of the Inspired Teaching Institute, a yearlong professional development program from Center for Inspired Teaching, a remarkable organization that prepares and supports DC teachers. The institute, described as “a 100% physical, intellectual, and emotional process through which teachers explore the art of teaching in an energetic and safe environment,” is taking place each day in the wrestling room of a DC high school in a leafy green neighborhood of Washington, DC.

The room is large and open. There are no seats, and homemade signs and placards, most of which feature memorable ideas about teaching and learning, cover the walls:

“A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on cold iron.”

”It is the mark of an educated mind to entertain a thought without accepting it.”

“To be prepared against surprise is to be trained; to be prepared for surprise is to be educated.”

“The questions which one asks oneself begin, at last, to illuminate the world – and become one’s key to the experience of others.”

Although I’ll be producing several longer pieces about Inspired Teaching and their summer Institute, I want to briefly share an activity from yesterday that sparked an essential insight into the nature of teaching and learning – and what it is we adults must prioritize in our efforts to help all children learn.

Towards the end of the day, Inspired Teaching founder Aleta Margolis, a veteran educator and former actor with an aura of presence that stems from her previous time on stage, asked the participants to brainstorm the first things they thought of in response to the following prompt: “What are the questions kids ask when they’re in school?”

A torrent of predictable answers greeted her request:

What’s that? Why are we doing this? What are we supposed to do? Can I go to the bathroom? Can I get up now? How is this going to help me in real life? Can I go with you? How much do you get paid? Do you have a boyfriend? Can I go home with you? Where are we going? How much longer? Can I have this? Do you sleep here? Can I go to the nurse? What if? Can I have some water? Can you get him to stop? Why is that teacher so mean? Is it time to go? Can we go outside? Can we have extra recess? What’s my grade? Can I do extra credit? Why’d you call my house? When is that due? Can I sit by you? Are you allowed to do that? How old are you? Is she OK? Are you getting fired? Do you love me?

Then Aleta asked a different question – “What are the questions kids ask when they’re curious and wondering about the world around them?”

Can you show me? Did you see that? Can I try? Am I doing it right? Can I take it home? What does this do? How do I stop? Will I get hurt? Will you catch me? How fast can I go? Why isn’t it working? Why is it like this? Will you be watching me? Let me do it.

After both lists were generated, Aleta led the group through a process of labeling every question on both lists into one of three categories:  P – a procedural question; N – a question relating to a personal need; or C – a question reflecting innate curiosity.

Notably, the majority of the questions received either P’s or N’s, and there were few C’s in the bunch. The disconnect between what children ask in school and what they ask when they’re curious about the world was clear. “We’re going to spend the next week and a half and throughout the school year,” said Aleta, “getting students to generate more curiosity questions, and less questions that relate to purely procedural needs.”

As the participants nodded their heads enthusiastically at the thought of the new pedagogical skill they would soon acquire, I found myself noticing something else. The overwhelming majority of the questions, regardless of which category they were in, related to personal needs, and underscored the transformative power of interpersonal relationships between teachers and students.

Will you catch me? Did you see that? Can I sit by you? Do you love me?

Some among us may want to resist this fact and stay focused squarely on instructional strategies and the bottom line of school reform – improving student test scores. I’m reminded of the controversial Charles Barkley “I am not a role model” commercial from a few years back. But just as all athletes surely are role models (whether or not they choose to fulfill the responsibility), all teachers are role models, too, and adults with a disproportionate influence on the lives and priorities of their students.

This simple truth reminded me that although our students need us to provide engaging content, clear structures and probing questions, the overriding quality they need from us is nurturance, support, and a place where they can be seen and heard. It’s about relationships – first and foremost. And strengthening the quality and quantity of relationships between adults and children in a school building should always be our primary improvement strategy.

Are National Standards a Good or a Bad Idea?

Posted on | by Sam | 6 Comments on Are National Standards a Good or a Bad Idea?

Today, a Washington Post story reported that the push for common national standards in reading and math is gaining ground. Twenty-eight states and the District of Columbia have now agreed to adopt the standards as their own.

This is notable progress when one considers how all prior efforts to promote a common set of academic standards in the United States have failed. But as the Post’s Nick Anderson reports, the Obama administration, working in concert with the National Governors Association, has been effective where others have failed by “encouraging the movement and dangling potential financial incentives for states to join.” The administration has also opted not to fund the actual work of the groups that drafted the standards, relying instead on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and other private donors.

As with many other major issues, the question of standards has become a polarizing issue with starkly divided camps. On one side are advocates like Massachusetts state education commissioner Mitch Chester, who believe the proposed standards would provide “clearer signals to K-12 students about their readiness for success at the next level, including readiness for college or careers.” On the other side are folks like the Cato Institute’s Neal McCluskey, who worry that the push for common standards “is opening the door to federal control. It is the most alarming centralization of power in education you can come up with.”

Who’s right?

Well, as is usually the case, I think you can quickly dismiss the folks who inhabit the extreme poles of each camp. Clearly, standards by themselves will achieve nothing but, well, a new set of standards. Just as clearly, a set of common standards need not mean the end of local control and teacher autonomy, or the arrival of full-scale standardization.

Looking around the world is instructive here. Finland, the country with the best education system in the world, has national standards (in all subjects), but it uses them to provide guidance, clarity and quality control, not to enforce a strict set of restrictions that prescribe the actions of local educators. Furthermore, standards are viewed as indicators of wisdom that students will need to be successful in college and the workplace, not shards of knowledge that make it easier to devise uniform tests and mandate standardized modes of instruction. In fact, Finland has no national exams, and student assessments are devised and implemented locally, thanks to the deep investments that country has made in its teachers.

This is a good model for how national standards should be used, says Andreas Schleicher, who heads the OECD’s Education Indicators and Analysis Division in Paris. “The question for the U.S. is not just how many charter schools it establishes,” he said, “but how to build the capacity for all schools to assume charter-like autonomy, as happens in some of the best-performing education systems.” Schleicher also points out how the U.S. relies disproportionately on “external accountability, ” or tests and consequences for poor performance, to improve schools.  By contrast, other countries do more to build their schools’ overall capacities for success, and rely on a variety of measures to gauge their progress.

Viewed in this way, national standards become helpful guideposts that contribute to a greater sense of shared clarity about what children should generally know and be able to do, not hurtful hitching posts that circumscribe local creativity, personalization, and autonomy.

Is this the path the Obama administration and the National Governors Association seek as well? I’m not sure, but I can see why some people feel nervous.  We are, after all, still a culture intent on overvaluing the illusory certainty that basic-skills test scores provide us. We still seek linear progress in the most nonlinear of professions and experiences. And we still operate in a society where powerful forces driven by the bottom line have the capacity to steer policy decisions to their liking. (Just look at the recent financial reform bill, and the last-minute changes made to it that will continue to allow banks to engage in the sorts of activities that led to the global economic crisis in the first place!)

Princeton economist Allan Blinder echoes a similar note of caution. “It is clear that the U.S. and other rich nations will have to transform their educational systems so as to produce workers for the jobs that will actually exist in their societies. Simply providing more education is probably a good thing on balance, especially if a more educated labor force is a more flexible labor force that can cope more readily with non-routine tasks and occupational change. But it is far from a panacea. In the future, how we educate our children may prove to be more important than how much we educate them.”

Done correctly, I believe a new set of national standards (in all subjects) can help us clarify both how and what we teach our children, just as it has in other countries around the world. But if the end result of this movement is little more than a new set of national exams, we will do little more than fall further behind.