Category Archives: Blog

Correct Learned Errors Or Live With The Consequences

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Mulligans and do overs are feel good events. A do over means that a first attempt gone awry does not count – it never happened. One says, “There, that feels better” and progresses to the next opportunity to test one’s skills. When doing a mulligan, one tends to pay more attention, focus on technique, listen to an inner voice of coaching, and the result often improves over the first. But, what about the next “first time”? Will mistakes and learned bad practices surface again? Mulligans and do overs perpetuate mistakes and these will be repeated if the cause for the error is not corrected. Do overs have consequences.

The stand-by example for learned error is usable once again. A child says “five apples” when asked the answer to the question, “How many apples will you have if you have two apples and you find two more apples?” Telling the child to “try again” will not change the conceptual arithmetic error the child made in thinking “five” is the answer. “Try again” only says, “Guess again.” Like the mulligan in golf, the child tees up her brain power and takes another swing at the question guessing “three” as the second answer and another ball slices into the woods. If we do not stop to make a correction in the child’s mental computation, or at least reframe the problem in its components so that the child can conceive of the correct answer, the child will be lost in more “threes” and “fives” for years to come.

One of the hardest things for a teacher to do is to say “Stop. We need to resolve this problem before we do anything else.” Stopping goes against the flow. Stopping requires other children to occupy themselves while the teacher focuses on correcting a problem. Stopping infers that the child with “threes and fives” is a problem. And, the answer to each of the preceding is “yes”. Stopping to correct an error in thinking or judgment or skill execution does mean that the teacher will focus immediate attention on a student or group of students and that all other students will need to work independently until the teacher has corrected the mistake.

Stopping to correct a mistake also is hard because it requires the teacher to have clinical skills in how to focus the student on the error in learning.  This begs the question “Does the teacher possess these clinical skills?” Can the teacher identify the critical attributes of the erred learning and isolate the root of the error? Can the teacher use multiple approaches to teach the correction – visuals, manipulatives, models, simulations, as well as verbals? Can the teacher check for understanding at each step to assure correction and repetition to cause retention? Can the teacher use intermittent review to further retention? Can the teacher effectively reinforce the correct learning? These are clinical steps that should be part of initial instruction, but when classmates quickly understand the new instruction it is easy for struggling learners to be left with “threes and fives.”  Expediency causes teachers to skip necessary steps in initial instruction that otherwise would promote effective learning by all children.

Stopping to correct mistakes also is a cultural problem. We seem to accept a level of error or mistake in our everyday lives. Recalls and returns to the store are so common that we accept the fact that products may not work as they are designed every time. But, student learning needs to live in a different culture; a culture that does not accept learned errors.  Recalls and returns are extremely expensive when applied to human enterprise.

A child who cannot understand that two plus to equals four is destined to make an unbelievable number of future errors in mental calculations. The number of errors will multiply and the complications of these errors will be increase geometrically.

A community culture that favors the achievements of the best and brightest children is destined to spend untold resources in the future to remediate and retrain adults who did not effectively learn when in school. Or, the community will live with adults working in local enterprises who bring their learned errors to work.

An educational culture that accepts that some children will always make calculation errors does not serve its children or its community. Perhaps it is this culture that must be corrected even before the learned mistakes of children are addressed.

Fix the cause of mulligan and stop the perpetuation of a do over mentality.

Unabashed Recruitment of Future Teachers

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How many teachers were valedictorians of their graduating class? Salutatorians? Top ten in their class? Being number one through ten in a graduating class is not a prerequisite for being a “top ten” teacher, but being an excellent student is a perfect segue into consideration of a career in education.

Our state faces a dramatic and pivotal shortage of teachers. Dramatic in the quantitative sense; pivotal in the qualitative sense. Without the number of teachers to staff classrooms, legislators are diminishing the academic pathways for being a licensed teacher.  On a parallel course, political and cultural actions dissuade many students from considering a career in education. The increasing lack of teacher candidates, diminished teacher prep requirements, and the aversion of the best and brightest students to a career in education is a dire crisis in the making. Without high quality teachers, some children will learn on their own and most children will not learn all that they could and should.

Historically, the teaching profession has not been self-promoting. We listen neutrally to students’ talk about their life and career goals. We smile and wish them well. Instead, we should be unabashed promoters of education as a professional choice to fulfill life and career goals. Teacher, counselor, principal, psychologist, school nurse, social worker, nutritionist, school law, school architect, school business manager, college professor, educational writer, pedagogical theorist – there is a myriad of professional opportunities in the field of education. And, an academically successful high school student will find appropriate academic challenges and rewards in a career and life in education.

Start today. Send a text or have a conversation with high achieving students in your classes or school about education as a career choice. Persist. Send or talk about an article you have read or a story you can share about the personal and professional satisfaction that rises from work in education. Allow a future educator to use you as their reason for choosing education as their career.

Educators must recruit future educators. No one can be as effective.

Unteach To Unlearn or Befriend Your Mistakes

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“That’s wrong!”

“Don’t do it that way!”

“Stop! Don’t repeat that again.”

Learning something new is a triumph. Learning, meaning the ability to internalize an idea so that one can recall, restate, compare and contrast the idea against other ideas, and use the idea to justify future actions is a significant intellectual achievement. Learning a physical or manipulative skill to the degree that one can repeat the skill with efficiency and accuracy is equally significant. We celebrate these types of learning.

But – what if the idea learned is incorrect? What if the reasoning behind the idea is flawed and wrong? What if the outcome that a learned skill produces no longer is the outcome wanted? Properly learned ideas and skills are strategically developed with practice and reinforcement so that they are ingrained in our intellectual and muscle memories. Proper repetition makes these learnings stronger. That is what education for the purpose of causing learning is designed to do.

How then do we unlearn an idea that we do not want to know or a skill set we do not want to repeat?

I find support for this dilemma in the Harvard Business Review.

“Unlearning is not about forgetting. It’s about the ability to choose an alternative mental model or paradigm. When we learn, we add new skills or knowledge to what we already know. When we unlearn, we step outside the mental model in order to choose a different one.

As an example, last summer I rented a car to travel around Great Britain. I had never driven this kind of car before, so I had to learn the placement of the various controls. I also had to learn how to drive on the left side of the road. All of that was relatively easy. The hard part was unlearning how to drive on the right. I had to keep telling myself to “stay left.” It’s the reason crosswalks in London have reminders for pedestrians to “look right.” It’s not easy to unlearn the mental habits that no longer serve us.”

“The good news is that practicing unlearning will make it easier and quicker to make the shifts as your brain adapts. (It’s a process called neuroplasticity.)”

https://hbr.org/2016/11/why-the-problem-with-learning-is-unlearning

Consider a child who inadvertently learns that 2 + 2 = 5. Somehow, when counting on fingers or manipulating sticks or doing simple addition problems, the child always arrived at the answer “5.” When asked how many dollars a person who has two dollars and is given two more dollars would have, the child always says, “Five dollars.” This is an idea that has been intellectually learned but it is a wrong and incorrect idea.

Try telling this child that the correct answer is “four” and that whenever he or she is confronted with 2 + 2 in the future, the correct answer is 4. Like a rubber band snapping back to its original shape, the child will say “2 + 2 = 5.” Learning is powerful because it is meant to be remembered and repeatable.

Unteaching is required for unlearning. We need to expend as much effort in teaching a child to unlearn a wrong idea or unwanted skill set as we initially expended in the initial learning. Unteaching is purposeful. Unteaching is based upon sound learning theories and practices. Unteaching takes time and almost always is a one-to-one proposition. Unteaching is essential if we want students to have correct and accurate understandings and contemporary and required skill sets.

I find no research that illuminates the quantity of learning that is incorrect or inaccurate or wrong. Research typically points in the other direction – learning achievements. However, any school person with reasonable hearing and vision and a sensitivity to accurate and supported ideas and refined, purposeful skill sets cringes with frequency when incorrect facts, unsupported reasoning, mispronunciation, incorrect answers and misshaped products are slung about without correction.

The requirement is this: When educators discern learning that is wrong, incorrect, unsupported, incomplete, and that creates errors in judgement and productivity, educators must take the time to unteach what is wrong and then teach what is right.

The work it takes to achieve our mistakes requires double the work to achieve our successes, because we must first unlearn what is wrong. If we are not willing to engage in unteaching for unlearning as a requisite for new learning, then we must befriend our mistakes and every future error that our mistakes will create.

Finding A Teacher

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Teacher.  A noun.  The word means “a person who educates.”  Synonyms for the word teacher include these nouns: abecedary, advisor, coach, disciplinarian, educator, faculty member, guide, instructor, lecturer, mentor, pedagogue, scholar, trainer, and tutor.

Teach.  A verb.  The word means “to educate or instill knowledge.”  Synonyms for teach include these verbs: advise, break in, brief, catechize, coach, communicate, demonstrate, develop, direct, discipline, drill, edify, enlighten, exercise, explain, expound, form, give instruction, ground, guide, illustrate, imbue, impart, implant, improve mind, inculcate, indoctrinate, inform, initiate, instruct, interpret, lecture, nurture, open eyes, pound into, prepare, profess, read, sharpen, show, train, tutor.

Today there is a shortage of people who want to be teachers.  There is even a more critical shortage of people who can teach.

“Currently, there are not enough qualified teachers applying for teaching jobs to meet the demand in all locations and fields,” said the Learning Policy Institute, a national education think tank, in a research brief in September (2017).  The institute estimated last year that if trends continue, there could be a nationwide shortfall of 112,000 teachers by 2018.

https://www.cnn.com/2017/08/21/health/teacher-shortage-data-trnd/index.html

The scarcity of teachers has caused a variety of responses by school district and state educational leaders.  Substitute teachers are the first local school district response.  When a licensed teacher cannot be found for a classroom assignment in September, substitute teachers become classroom teachers.  Daily subs are hired to be short-term subs, short-term subs are stretched into long-term subs and long-term subs become year-long teachers.  Another local response is to drop courses.  If the course is elective and and not required by statute or local promotion or graduation requirements and there is no teacher, then the course is removed from the daily schedule of classes.  Or, classes without teachers are combined with classes with teachers.  Class sizes are increased with the apology that “at least the course is not dropped.”  These are local responses.  They do not address the underlying issue that there are not enough qualified, trained, licensed teachers.  These responses only meet the daily needs when the school bell rings.

State educational leaders take a different tack.  In Wisconsin, the legislature is liberalizing the professional preparation requirements for classroom teachers.  Traditional teacher preparation is part of a baccalaureate degree program, often in the liberal arts.  A baccalaureate teacher prep program requires an academic major, statutory courses in human relations, cultural sensitivity, conflict resolution, and working with students challenged with disability or disadvantage, teaching methodology and instructional design courses, and a semester of student teaching. A baccalaureate typically is a four-year endeavor.  For a variety of reasons, including low career salary status and decreasing esteem for public employees, fewer college students select education as their career choice.

The Wisconsin legislature has created alternative “pathways” to classroom teaching. A new pathway, for example, connects academic-based vocations to public education teaching.  The connection:  schools teach math and science and technologies and there are non-educational careers that significantly apply math, science and technologies.  The concept is that a person trained as an engineer, almost any field of “engineering,” applies concepts of mathematics and science.  Hence, this person can be a math or a science teacher.  A person trained and working in laboratory or field sciences can become a science teacher.  A degree in computer science is a pathway to teaching mathematics and computer applications instruction.

Pathway requirements include a baccalaureate degree in a math or science-related field, five years of verified work experience in a math or science related job, and 100 hours of training in “modern curricular applications” in math or science.  With the exception of the 100 hours of training, a would-be-teacher does not not need any further education or preparation to be a teacher.

Liberalization assures several important attributes of teaching and reduces others.  Specifically, liberalization values content knowledge and disciplinary skills sets and devalues trained teaching skills.

The issue is this:  We are improving the quantity of people willing to be the noun “teacher,” but not giving equal attention to the quality of the verb “to teach.”

I have observed persons who love mathematics and are very successful students of mathematics.  They thrive on the challenge of understanding mathematical concepts, solving math problems and frequently choose to extend their math learning beyond a high school math curricula.  When the rest of use “hit the math wall” in Pre-Calc, these math wizards breezed on through.  They major in mathematics in college, because they are mathematicians.  However, these same persons frequently are fully incapable of teaching another person to understand math concepts and solve math problems.  They frown when a person they are trying to teach says, “I don’t understand.”  When mathematics comes so easily to a mathematician, they often cannot comprehend why it is difficult for others.

I hear mathematicians telling non-mathematicians, “Let’s do it again.”  “Do these problems tonight for your homework.”  “Do what I do.”  “Copy this down.”  “Memorize this.”

I hear science majors explaining the scientific method to science-shy students who do not reason deductively.

Mathematicians, lab and field scientists, and computer scientists achieved their degrees and employment based upon their learned knowledge and skill sets, not their ability to teach others to be mathematicians or scientists.

This said, 100 hours of “modern curricular applications” may provide the label of teacher but will not prepare a person to teach.  Pedagogy did not achieve “-ogy” status because it could be learned in two and a half weeks time.  It is an “-ogy” because it is based upon the theories and practices that influence a person to learn.  Pedagogy that works for one student may not work for another.  Pedagogy that works for unchallenged students may not work for challenged students.  Pedagogy that works for motivated students may not work for unmotivated students.  Teaching methodologies and instructional designs are learned and developed over time and they are the heart of the verb teach.

It is very likely that a shortage of teachers will be the new status quo.  It will take solutions far beyond licensing pathways to make teaching a career of choice.  A shortage of numbers however is not a reason for accepting teachers who cannot teach.

The focus of finding teachers must be on finding people who can teach.

Bring Your Cell Phones To Class, Please

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“I read this morning that the 2018 hurricane season will bring one of the strongest cycles of storms in the last 50 years to the east coast. This caused me to wonder what I should tell my family who live on Hilton Head Island, an island on the coast of South Carolina. Should they be worried about hurricanes this summer, especially if the storm surge is more than six feet?”

So said a middle school teacher to her class on a Tuesday morning. Her query suggests a need for children to understand weather, geography, data and predictions in order to formulate an informed answer. The question about a storm surge is more detailed. What is a storm surge and how significant is a six-foot surge to a coastal island?

But, to what extent are children in Wisconsin concerned with a hypothetical question about hurricanes and storm surges in South Carolina? Students obviously listened intently because the teacher was talking to them; some let their attention slip when she mentioned South Carolina. This was not their problem.

What the teacher said next, however, caused all students to become interested.

“Take out your cell phones. Use your cell phone and only your cell phone to get all of the information you need to answer my question. No laptops, IPads or reference books. Please feel free to share any information you find with another student in class, but only do so using a social media app.

Use your note taking app on your cell phone to record all of the data you collect or share. When you and your network of classmates have enough data to answer my question, attach your data record to a text message and send it to me.

Finally, write a letter to my family on Hilton Head. Summarize the most important data you have collected. Make a prediction about how hurricanes may affect Hilton Head Island this year. Suggest what they need to do to “survive” this year’s hurricane season. And, specifically tell them how a storm surge of more than six feet will affect Hilton Head Island given its elevation and local tides.

Write this letter on your laptop. Edit the letter to make it as informative and data-based as you can, and then e-mail your final draft to me.

Now, let’s talk about your initial ideas of how you will accomplish this assignment.”

What made the children in her class become interested in hurricanes and South Carolina is the requirement that they use their cell phones as their only tool for seeking information, recording the information they find, sharing their data with other children, and submitting a final data set to their teacher. Additionally, they are encouraged to use social media to share data with others.

The conceptualization of this assignment is classic school work. The teacher raises a question and sets a parameter for how children are to resolve the question. The difference that marks this assignment is that, instead of keeping their cell phones in their pockets or backpacks and prohibited from using social media in school, they are required to use these everyday technologies to complete a school assignment.

And, why not? When we prepare all children for success in college and career, that preparation needs to be real world and the real world uses everyday technology. Instead of forbidding cell phone and social media in school, this teacher is instructing children how to use these to achieve important learning objectives.