Category Archives: Blog

Suspending Reality Can Cause Learning.

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When a teacher suspends reality for the duration of an instructional unit, children have few limits to their learning.  Suspension opens possibilities for each child’s thinking and doing that the conditions of instructional normalcy and “same old” can limit.  While not quite make-believe, a suspended reality induces creativity and alternative thinking, and invites exploration and risk taking.

Close your eyes and listen.

A classroom is Never-Never Land for children when a teacher learns how to suspend reality.  She doesn’t need Tinkerbell’s dust.  As mistress of her teaching domain, she says, “Close your eyes and listen” as she walks around the classroom placing things on the tables around which children were seated.  “We are now in a place long ago when people just like you were trying to understand how to count their possessions and the things they saw in their world.  They knew there was more than one of almost everything, but they did not have any ideas about how number them.  When you open your eyes, you will find two piles of things on your table.  Your first job is to find a way to tell me how you determined how many things are in each pile.  Your second job is to tell me how you can combine the objects in the two piles into one pile without recounting them.  And your third job is to tell me how you can remove some of the items in the larger pile so that you have two equal piles with some items left over.  When you have completed each job, you will explain your thinking and reasoning to me.”  She waits while silently counting to 30.  “Oh, there is a slip of paper next to your piles with these three jobs listed.  And I expect that each table may have differing yet very appropriate explanations for me.”  She waits while silently counting to 15.  “Now open your eyes and begin.”  If children have questions, she answers the children at their table directly and not the entire class.

Problem-based learning (PBL)

I first encountered suspended realities at teacher workshops in problem-based learning at the Illinois Math and Science Academy in the late 1990s.  Our workshop team was so enthused we pursued more training and then organized a district training in PBL so that all teachers, no matter their assignment could add PBL to their instructional toolbox.  We were into building instructional toolboxes.

Although our training was only to add a possible teaching tool for each teacher, we still experienced the usual change theory pathway of new programs.  Our goal was professional development and pleasingly we experienced many teachers who found value in a new teaching strategy.  Interestingly, our secondary teachers adopted PBL more quickly and thoroughly than our elementary teachers.  ELA, social studies, and science teachers, some veterans, and some early career teachers, modified selected units for PBL applications.  Each teacher embedded initial instruction, modeling, formative assessment, and instructional adjustment in their PBL units, but these came at different places and times in their unit’s progression compared to their usual unit designs.

Twenty-plus years later veterans of our PBL training still display aspects of suspended realities.  They have refined their applications, made the teaching tool more their own, and use it wisely to cause children to learn.

Student-centeredness causes learning.

The big Duh! of suspending reality lies in the acceptance of student-centered thinking and outcomes.  Teachers assure that key skill sets, content, and concepts are taught and learned during suspended reality.  Post-assessments indicate that student learning in PBL or suspended reality units is as strong if not stronger than in traditional directed instruction units of learning.  The real differential is in student engagement.  When children understand the power that “you explain it me” it allows them to create answers, solutions, and outcomes, opens their willingness to think beyond “usual” and past “this is how I usually act/think in class”, and their level of excitement and “I can do” accelerates. 

We can only smile proudly at the conclusion of a suspended lesson or unit and a child demonstrates learning of the academic content and skills, an ability to hold out an individualized product, explain a solution that both makes sense to her and to her teacher, and be independent of other children or groups of children.

Using tools to cause children to learn – isn’t this why we became teachers of children?

When you ask a question what do you really want to know?

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Asking questions is a component of every instructional strategy.  A learning outcome may focus a teacher’s instruction, but it is the questions that drive student learning.  Some questions are raised by the teacher, and some are raised by students.  Some questions get answered and others just dangle.  At the end of the day, every assessment of the quality and quantity of what a student learns begins with questions.  To wit, when you ask a question, what do you really want to know?  Lastly, when do you stop asking questions?

Joe Friday told us, “Just the facts”.

Most teachers today were born after Detective Joe Friday on TV’s “Dragnet” gave us his famous command of “Just the facts, Ma’am, just the facts”.  Ironically, his command is at the heart of what children are asked to learn historically and today in their school lessons.  Just the facts.

In the story of the Three Little Pigs, there are a lot of questions to ponder.  Some are facts.

  • What materials did the pigs use to build their houses?
  • What happened to the house of straw?  What happened to the house of sticks?  What happened to the house of brick?
  • What happened to the wolf at the end of the story?

A teacher can be content when children understand the facts of a story.  These are the journalist’s Five W’s – Who?  What?  Where?  When?  Why?  And an H – How?  Once children satisfactorily understand these questions, a teacher may end the lesson.  In fact, most lessons end there because much of our curriculum and teaching is just about facts. 

Every question begs a next question.

A good question is like a key in a lock.  It opens up doors that lead deeper into the story.  Of the Five W’s, it is the Why that most readily leads to a next tier of questions.

  • Why did the first pig build a house of straw?  And why did the second pig build a house of sticks?  And why did the third pig build a house of bricks?
  • Why was the wolf interested in these pigs?

Next tier.

  • Why was the story of the three pigs told told to children?  Or what is the moral of the story?

Next tier.

Consider your life.

  • Which little pig best portrays you?
  • Who are the wolves in your life?

Next tier.

  • Consider socio-economic classes.  Now, retell the story using the poor, the middle class, and the wealthy.  Put the story in the 1930s and the Great Depression and retell it.

Next tier.

  • What life lessons can you draw from the story of the Three Little Pigs?
  • Create a catch phrases or slogans characterize this story.  Something like – had work pays off.

Know when to stop asking.

A good story or rich plot or complex event is a deep well of questions and teachers can draw from such a well until the proverbial cows come home.  But enough is usually enough.  A good use of questioning brings us back to the learning outcome that focuses initial instruction.  In the movie “Moneyball”, the character Billy Beane taught us, “…when you get the answer you’re looking for, hang up the phone”.  Good curricular design and good teaching knows when a teacher has gotten the answers the teacher is looking for and thus ends the lesson.

Kindness Is As Kindness Does

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Why is assessment and measurement so important in public education?  I would like to blame No Child Left Behind, but it goes farther back than 2001.  I point at the Nation at Risk study of 1983 when federal alarm bells told us that education outcomes in the United States were decreasing, and our students lagged children in other nations in the academics.  In the 1980s and continuing today, we are besotted with comparative data and national flagellation over test scores.  For almost 40 years assessed measurement has been a painful constant in public education.  But what happened to the immeasurable?  In our current world full of cynicism and small-mindedness and alternative truths, why don’t we teach kindness and generosity and politeness to our children?  If George W indeed was a compassionate conservative, might he have signed an act prescribing amiability, graciousness, and kindness as well as mandates for improved reading and mathematics?  Maybe, but who votes for kindness when national honor is at stake!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Nation_at_Risk

https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2003/2003020.pdf

Measurement drives improvement and improvement drives us.

The thread of efficiency management runs through our national culture.  Frank Gilbreth, role model for the father figure in the movie Cheaper by the Dozen, led the time and motion studies that fueled the craze for systems and procedures in industry.  Efficiency was doing things faster and with fewer independent actions.  Gilbreth preached that there “always is a better way to do things”.  His tools were a stopwatch and record sheet, and he applied it to all forms of everyday life.  How long did it take to brush your teeth this morning and how many times did the brush touch each tooth in order to create a daily cleaning?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Bunker_Gilbreth

The efficiency movement gave educators the Carnegie Unit.  Andrew Carnegie was a proponent of Gilbreth’s work and his foundation collaborated with Harvard University to establish that one (1) academic credit equalled 120 hours of study in one subject, or a class that met five days each week for 50 minutes.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_Unit_and_Student_Hour

The rabbit hole of measurement deepens.  Efficiency studies lead us to measure how well a child learns from one credit of instruction and we assign a letter grade to that measure.  At the child level, this creates grade point averages and a ranking of all children by their gpa.  At the school level it creates school report cards using statewide or national assessments as the measurement.  Children and schools unkindly become their statistical numbers. 

Are Competition and Score Cards at Odds with Kindness?

Infants and pre-school children appear to be innately kind.  We see their kindness in the way they act.  They smile at each other.  They readily share toys and cookies among themselves.  They scoot over to make room so another child to join their group.  They show concern when one is crying or upset.  Given a choice, they gather rather than spread out.  Our youngest selves understand and value their common good.

Over time many children lose their innate kindness.  It is suborned by competitive activities, even learning to read, write and do arithmetic, where children who learn faster are rewarded and recognized.  As soon as adults begin to value and teach specific activities, those activities become important to young children.  And as adults value selected activities they also value children who do well in those activities.  Competition and self-interest are not kind to kindness.  We do more to unteach kindness than we do to teach it.

A Kindness Score.

Gilbreth could not put a stopwatch or measuring stick to kindness.  Ambiguity is the enemy of measurement.  We crap out on measuring kindness because there is no single, agreed upon definition of what kindness is.  The closest we get to measuring kindness is the Kindness Score.  This is the number of truly kind acts a person performs in one day divided by the number of unkind acts + the number of artificial or forced acts that resemble kindness.  This ratio is a Kindness Score.  Most people discover their Kindness Score is a fraction, meaning they perform more unkind and artificially kind acts in a day than kind acts.

Here is a challenge.  Calculate your Kindness Score for one week.  Are you a whole number or a fraction?  How happy are you with your kindness quotient? 

We know kindness when see it.

The other President Bush asked for a “kinder and gentler nation” and believed that we can assist others to be kind with our own acts of kindness.  President Bush also spoke of “a thousand points of light” and the use of exemplary examples that can help is to be better than we are.

Our local school sets a very good example.  The HS Peer Leaders and PBIS committee recommends children every week who are “caught being kind”.  A “kind” student’s picture and story are publicized in school and spotlighted on its web site.  While schools role model children with high grade points and athletes on winning teams and students who go to state competitions, role modeling kind children sets another example of exemplary performances in school and life.

Of interest, kindness is observed and recognized for what it is.  Kindness is not the same act by all children but a wide variety of acts by a great number of children. 

Kindness as implicit lessons.

Immediately there is the argument that schools suffer from too many mandates already.  As an immeasurable subject, kindness also lacks a concrete curriculum.  Instead of teaching kindness, schools can contribute to the greater good will of their communities by role modeling kind and caring cultures.  Schools can raise awareness and a valuing of kindness by just talking about and recognizing kind people and their acts.  There are many implicit lessons in school that are not explicitly taught.

Paraphrasing Forrest Gump, “Kindness is as kindness does”.

Should I Know or Just Google It?

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A daily deluge of information from more than a thousand possible media sources requires a person to either have a broad background knowledge or constantly Google everything that is not familiar.  What a gift children receive from schools that intentionally teach a breadth and depth of academic subjects.  While graduation plans focus on post-secondary and career goals, it is a child’s knowledge of a broad range of subjects developed in grades 4 – 12, when they read to learn, that serves them on a daily basis in life after school. 

Today’s news – a case in point.

News comes to us in snippets.  Quick, short bursts of information that assume we have contextual knowledge within which to understand the momentary news flash.

  • The Houthis in Yemen are attacking merchant vessels in the Red Sea.  The Houthis, backed by Iran, are supporting the Palestinian cause in Gaza. 
  • The jet stream has drifted so far north that temps in Alaska will be in the 40s in January. 
  • Ozempic, developed to control type 2 diabetes, can assist others in dramatic weight loss. 
  • More than 350,000 jobs were added to the US economy in the past month.
  • The House may refuse to consider a bi-partisan bill passed by the Senate and kill an attempt to resolve border problems.

Being informed about current events requires an ever-broadening background knowledge of geography, politics, culture and religion, history, climate, meteorology, and prescriptive medicine to name only a few topics.  The news snippets jump from one to another so quickly and without providing context that a casual observer can easily throw up their hands with a “This is too much for me!”.  Of course, this is said assuming folks want to be informed. 

Scaffolds and spirals power background knowledge development.

Good curricular design in schools is built upon a planned instruction of subjects at the right time and at the right developmental level.  Coupled with teaching strategies that reinforce, expand, and grow a child’s knowledge base, children gain an active and working contextual knowledge of their world.  Graduates obviously do not know everything; they are not walking encyclopedias.  But their background knowledge is adequate for them to know that the issue of Israel and an independent Palestinian state has been a continuing and unresolved conflict since the end of WW2.  They know where the Red Sea is on the globe and how the Red Sea fits into global maritime routes.  And they know that the west-to-east jet stream directs weather patterns across North America and a jet stream across Alaska will cause the lower 48 states to have warmer to hotter temperatures.

Instruction of background knowledge is scaffolded beginning in early elementary classes so that all children have access to general information. Scaffolding ensures that all children receive developmentally appropriate learning.  Initial instruction provides facts that are developed into generalizations and generalizations are applied to newer information so that similarities and differences can be analyzed and evaluated.  Across grade levels information is spiraled from simple facts to increasingly complex and sophisticated knowledge.  Although children learn about United State history in elementary, middle school, and high school, each new rung on the social studies spiral causes more extensive understanding and consideration of our historical events and their importance to what is happening in our country today.

Taken as a whole, social studies, sciences, the arts, language and communications, human relationships each play a part in completing a child’s background knowledge.  It is impossible to sort out, to overvalue or devalue any educational experience, as all experiences lead to a better educated graduate – one who is prepared for a greater understanding of their world.

What knowledge is essential?

Robert Marzano in “Building Background Knowledge for Academic Achievement: Research on What Works in Schools (ASCD, 2004) wrote that our capacity to access and use background knowledge relies upon innate fluid intelligence and the frequency and repetition of our academic experiences or intentional learning episodes.  Marzano provides educators in this work and others with both the research and the “game plan” for instructional designs that will teach all children a wealth of content knowledge.  He addresses how educators can develop deep and meaningful academic experiences that will enrich a child’s mental storehouse of background knowledge.  In the book’s appendix, Marzano categorizes background/content knowledge in groupings that make learning of associated facts more effective and efficient.  I am a great fan of Marzano and his clinical approach to presenting strategies for improving the education of all children. 

The issue of fluid intelligence is child centric.  Ken Jennings, the GOAT of TV’s Jeopardy! may best personify the combination of fluid intelligence and intentional learning.  His quick-fire knowledge of trivia displays a phenomenal cache of specific AND background knowledge and his gift of instant recall.

Another author, E. D. Hirsch, Jr., wrote and later updated his take on “Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know”.  Hirsch makes a compelling argument that for a person today to understand current events and trends in the news a person must have contextual background knowledge.  Without background everything is new news.  A reading of Cultural Literacy is a wonderful checkpoint of what one knows, knew but forgot, or should relearn. 

Google and Siri are great!

When I was a child, my parents invested in a set of encyclopedias.  Our 1958 set of the Compton’s Encyclopedia truly was a financial investment as well as the purchase of “the” family source for things we did not know about.  We “dog eared” too many pages believing that turning down the corner of the page would always allow us to get right back to the latest facts we had learned.  Whether at home or in a library, sets of encyclopedias were our go to source for information.  However, like the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, encyclopedias and almanacs were as up to date as the day of the first printing and today they are museum pieces.

The Internet and search engines changed the world.  With a few keystrokes or spoken words, facts and information are at our fingertips.  Many children today tell me that it is not worth their time to study school subjects, because Google or Siri will tell them what they need to know.  In fact, I often am told that a college education is a waste of time and money, because “Google will tell me everything I need to know”.

Google or ask Siri to know but develop background knowledge to understand. 

I confess to being an avid Googler and asker of Siri.  There are facts and information I do not know or have forgotten and these two are always willing to inform me.  My tablet, phone, and watch are conduits to a world of facts.  I ask and am told, but I do not always understand. 

News about Red Sea connects with me because I live near the bay of Green Bay, WI.  Green Bay is about 17 miles wide from where I live in Door County to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.  I was standing at a Door County overlook seeing the coast of the UP in the distance when I Googled the width of the Red Sea near Yemen.  I learned the narrowest width is 20 miles.  I have seen 1000-foot ore boats on the Great Lakes and Maersk cargo ships sea.  A Maersk is about 1300 feet in length.  As I looked to the north over the bay, I could visualize a cargo ship and its vulnerability to attack along the gauntlet of the Red Sea.  Google gave me the Red Sea dimension.  Background knowledge provided a context against which that dimension could be compared and an appreciation of what is happening in the Red Sea today.

Finally, background knowledge helps us to answer “so what” questions.  Facts are just facts outside of the framework of contextual question.  It is a fact that the world produces enough food each year to feed the entire population.  It also is a fact that people die of starvation every day.  Background knowledge sadly fills in the story between these two facts. 

Whenever I am in conversation with children, I listen to what they have to say and almost always respond with “… what do you think (or how do you feel) about that?”.  As children learn new information, we must assist them to put their new learning into context.  It starts with their thinking and feeling.  Once they begin to personally relate to the information, that information moves into Marzano’s field of background knowledge.

A child can Google or ask Siri anything, but only the child can make sense of what Google or Siri says.

Gone:  Three-sport Athletes and Bench Jockeys

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The Dodo Bird is our classic example of an extinct species.  Now add the traditional three-sport high school athlete and the bench jockey.  These well-defined categories in both boys and girls high school athletics are nearing extinction.  Their death knell is not due to predation or climate change or a meteor slamming earth.  They are on their way into the history book of school athletics due to specialization, elitism, and family self-interest.  Today’s athletic bench is reserved for boys and girls who specialize in one sport, are driven to be elite athletes, and have access to personal training, camps, and significant travel expenses.  Say it ain’t so, Joe, but it is.

Three-sport athletes were the backbone of athletic programs.

A three-sport athlete in the last century participated consecutively in fall, winter, and spring/summer sports.  Historically, and before Title 9, a three-sport athlete was a male who played football, basketball, and baseball.  Variants included cross country, wrestling, swimming, and track.  Each sport had a concise season and schedule of practices and games.  When one season ended another began and their game schedules never conflicted.  The most talented athletes were awarded twelve athletic letters, and their letter jackets were miniature and portable trophy cases.  Kids grew up seeing themselves on the high school teams and many made it happen.

Title 9 provided parallel opportunities for girls to be three-sport athletes.  Their variants include volleyball, gymnastics, basketball, softball, track, and soccer.  And today we add girls wrestling. 

Three-sport athletes were the backbone of a high school’s athletic teams.  Their athleticism and natural gifts allowed them to be starters at each of the school’s developmental level teams if not immediately on the varsity team.  Three-sport varsity athletes carried the Big Man/Woman On Campus moniker for generations.

Most three-sport athletes were not stars.  In fact, this high percentage were yeoman athletes and bench jockeys who played both for their love of the sport and a personal desire to be on their various teams.  Team membership, even just sitting the bench, was a big deal.

Winning became all that mattered.

In the 1990s our high school’s athletic leadership constructed a competitive scenario answering the question, “what is the optimal combination of athletes for a championship team”.  We considered three categories of athletes, boys and girls, and used basketball as our scenario sport.  A gifted athlete had five skill sets.  They were skilled ball handlers, shot with consistent accuracy, jumped high, had real foot speed, and were always aware of everyone on the court.  A highly competitive athlete had three or four of the five skill sets.  A good athlete had two or three of the five skill sets.

Given this scenario, if a basketball team had four gifted athletes and one highly competitive athlete, we believed a team was on track to a conference championship and WIAA play offs.  If a team had three gifted and two highly competitive athletes, they were championship contenders.  If a team had one gifted athlete, two highly competitive athletes, and two good athletes, they could make a good showing on game night. 

The scenario was premised on averages and the natural abilities of athletes. This scenario worked for decades.  Our school parlayed this scenario into state championships and multiple trips to the state tournament.  It worked until making a good show and being contenders were not good enough for parents of athletes.  The scenario, based on the skill sets athletes naturally brought to the team, worked until the obsession to win overrode the usual distribution of gifted, highly competitive, and good athletes.

The edge.

Gifted athletes are just that, naturally gifted.  Coaching and training do not create total giftedness.  However, for highly competitive athletes, foot speed, hand/eye coordination, and perceptiveness can be honed with coaching and training.  Ball handling and shooting skills also can be improved with coaching.  Specific skill sets can be improved.  The obsession to improve the skill sets of highly competitive athletes became the death knell for three-sport and bench jockey athletes.

The championship scenario changed when multi-sport athletes committed to the edge of improving their skills in just one sport and and became year-round athletes in that sport only. 

The championship scenario changed with commercial coaching and training.  Lay coaches grow athletic skills sets, but professional or commercial coaching and training add a new and higher level of skill set development.  A niche industry developed in specific sport training centers, clinics, and practice facilities. 

The championship scenario changes when a one-sport athlete competes on a regional or national level not just within the local community or athletic conference.  They are exposed to a higher level of competition amongst other highly competitive athletes who hold the same goal – personal improvement.  Elite training and competition are gifted and talented education in sports.

These three changes create the edge.  Each creates an advantage for a single or select group of athletes that grows their ungifted skill sets to an extremely highly competitive level.  With these advantages schools that traditionally not been champion contenders became champions or competed annually for championship trophies.

The final key to creating a greater number of highly competitive athletes is parental commitment of time and money.  Time and money are the engines that gives children access to professional training, camps, and clinics, to compete in regional and national events, and to sustain commitment over time.  There is a very real “keeping up with the Joneses” when it comes to family time and financial commitment.  “If my child is not getting superior coaching, clinics, and camps and is not traveling for competition, all the Jones children who do will have an advantage over my child.” 

Achieving the edge advantage begets elitism and in the arena of high school sports elite athletes get play time and recognition and non-elite athletes do not.  College coaches attend more camps and clinics and regional and national competitions than go to high school games because camps and clinics is where the elite athletes showcase themselves against other elite athletes.

The Dodo Birds are crowded off the bench.

Truly gifted athletes still can compete in multiple sports and be recognized.  They are the top 1-2% of all school athletes.  We see them annually ranked as Five Star Athletes on rosters of the nation’s high school athletes.  University and college teams subsequently are ranked by the number of Five Star Athletes they sign.  The non-gifted athlete who dreams of playing in college or professionally must commit to a single sport and with personal grit and family support grind through camps and clinics and regional showcasing.  

The only remaining multiple sport athlete is the kid who just wants to play and to be on the team.  But, for this kid, the bench is getting crowded.  Most school teams work with a given number of players on the team roster.  Post-season playoffs limit the roster, so rosters for the preceding season begin to reflect playoff rosters.  Bench seats are institutionally limited.

Further, the more single-sport athletes on a team who are committed to the edge, the fewer spots on the bench for the multiple-sport athlete and perennial bench jockeys.  It is a matter of numbers.  School coaches know that using a cut policy creates student and parent problems, but they also know that keeping a child who will never play on the bench creates a deeper problem.  Hence, bench seats are limited to competitive players and the higher percentage of competitive players are single-sport, edge players.

The athletic pyramid is getting steeper.

All athletes empty their athletic locker sooner or later.  They know or are told that their competitive athletic time has come to an end.  The statistical distribution of this “knowing” resembles a pyramid.  A great number of kids drop out of sports at the natural break points of elementary to middle school and middle school to high school and high school to college.  These are invisible departures; they just don’t show up for the next season. 

Other athletes depart when the increased competition pinches them off from bench seats and playing time.  It is an equation of time and resources versus perceived reward.  The diminishing reward of play time and team membership no longer motivates a child to continue with the grind of competing with edge athletes.  Regardless of what children are told about the intangible benefits of sports participation, they know their own realities in the changing world of elite athletes.

The edge advantages of single-sport athletes have made the dimensions of the pyramid grow very steep.  Fewer children either have meaningful access to school teams or game play time.  There are fewer multiple-sport athletes and fewer kids who are able to hang around the game sitting on the bench.

There are no roosting places on the steep pyramid for Dodo birds.

Change is inevitable; extinction is hard to bear.