In the first book I wrote about teaching English Language Learners, English Language Learners: Teaching Strategies That Work, I shared an inductive learning lesson plan I use titled “I Feel Powerful When…”

Putting it concisely, students complete the sentence frame “I feel powerful when….” Then, we put all the sentences together into a data set and students divide the sentences into categories (“learning something new,” “teaching others,” etc.). In addition to language-learning, the point of the lesson is that we can all feel powerful in different ways — not everyone has to have all those qualities. Students learn the advantages of people who have those different qualities coming to together as allies to achieve a common goal.

It’s a pretty engaging and…powerful lesson.

Now, though, I’m learning about other benefits of this lesson — and others — that help students feel powerful. The Scientific American just published an interesting related article:

people who feel empowered pay more attention to rewarding information, express themselves more freely when interacting with others, and experience more positive emotion. They also tend to be more persuasive, less susceptible to the influence of others, and more confident. Power breeds optimism, higher self-esteem, and action in pursuit of goals.

The article focuses on experiments that have demonstrated that people who were asked to write about a prior experience when they felt powerful were much more successful in job interviews than others.

It got me thinking about my lesson, as well as different activities I have students do prior to taking standardized tests.

I don’t see any reason why something like this shouldn’t work in that situation, too. Another alternative is to time my lesson to right before standardized test-taking time.

You can find out more of my thoughts on test-taking at The Best Posts On How To Prepare For Standardized Tests (And Why They’re Bad).

Last week was the end of our first semester and, as always, I had my students evaluate the class and me. I’ve previously posted about the results from my ESL class and from my IB Theory of Knowledge class (you might also be interested in The Best Posts On Students Evaluating Classes (And Teachers)).

Here’s the evaluation form I use.

This double-block class is always my most challenging, and always the one where I improve the most as a teacher year and after year.

I list each question, followed by the results, ending with a short commentary:

1. In this class, I learned…. some a lot a little

I always consider this the most important question, and was pleased to see that ninety percent circled “a lot.”

We have a great curriculum, I do a lot of the life skills lessons found in my books, and I work very, very hard. I’m glad to see that it seems to be paying-off.

2. I tried my best in this class….a lot of the time all the time some of the time

One half said “all the time,” a little more than one-quarter said “a lot of the time,” and a little less than one-quarter said “some of the time.”

I wish it was more than one-half saying “all of the time” but, to tell the truth, I’m okay with this percentage by the end of the first semester. The second semester is when I do the life-skills lessons in my upcoming book, and I think that this percentage should go up considerably sooner. I will not be happy if I get these same results in June.

3. My favorite unit was…. New Orleans Natural Disasters Latin Studies

Three-fourths chose Natural Disasters and one-fourth picked New Orleans.

This is a typical result, even though my classes always have a large percentage of Latino students.

4. My least favorite unit was …. New Orleans Natural Disasters Latin Studies

Three-fourths chose Latin Studies and one-fourth chose New Orleans — again, a typical result.

5. As a teacher, I think Mr. Ferlazzo is… okay good excellent bad

One-half said I was good, one-fourth said I was excellent, one-eighth said I was okay, and one-eighth said I was bad.

I’m okay with those results.

6. Did you feel that Mr. Ferlazzo was concerned about what was happening in your life? yes no

Three-fourths said yes and one-fourth said no.

Here again, I’m okay with those results.

7. Mr. Ferlazzo is patient…. some of the time a lot of the time all of the time

Half said “some of the time” and half said “a lot of the time.”

It’s a challenging class — I’ll take it.

8. Did you like this class? Yes No

Half said yes and half said no.

This is typical at the end of the first semester when we’re just finishing the unit that is typically the least popular of the entire year — Latin Studies. By the end of the year I’m confident it will be a 70% yes and 30% no — we have some pretty interesting units coming up.

9. Would you want to take another class taught by Mr. Ferlazzo? Yes No

Fifty percent said yes and fifty percent said no.

This was the biggest surprise for me. Even at this point in the year, the yes percentage is usually higher and grows to June. I’ve got a fair number of students who are not generally positive about anything related to school, so that might have some influence here. However, I don’t want to dismiss it either. It’s a little puzzling — Ninety percent said they learned a lot, and two-thirds said I was either a good or excellent teacher, yet half would not want to have me as a teacher again. Do readers have any thoughts on this difference?

10. What was your favorite activity in this class?
Practice Reading Data Sets Make-and-Breaks Read Alouds Clozes
Writing essays Working in groups

It was a three way tie between working in groups, data sets (inductive learning, which is typically done in groups), and clozes.

No big surprises here, except that “practice reading” (reading for pleasure) usually is near the top, but not this year so far.

11. What could you have done to make this class a better learning experience?

Talk less

Get a different teacher

Help others

Not get mad at Mr. Ferlazzo sometimes.

Pay attention

Do what Mr. Ferlazzo tells me to do.

Be more patient.

12. What could Mr. Ferlazzo have done to make this class a better learning experience

Give less work.

Help more.

Make it more fun.

Let us listen to music

I think they have something with the “make it more fun” comment. There are easy ways for me to add a little more of that into the class. Sometimes I get so focused on covering the material and on classroom management issues that I miss some opportunities for fun.

Your comments are welcome….

I have written tons in my books and in this blog about the effectiveness of inductive learning.

It’s the idea of pushing students, and ourselves, to see patterns and concepts in a list of examples, as opposed to telling students the concepts and then giving the examples that fit in them.

TIME Magazine has just published Q&A with Consciousness Researcher Daniel Bor, and he talks about why our minds learn so much from this kind of pattern-seeking. Here’s an excerpt:

So what do you think the purpose of consciousness is?

I think the purpose of it is to draw all the relevant information together in a larger space. It’s almost as if we can’t spot it because we are doing it all the time. Why do we love crossword puzzles and why are people addicted to sudoku? That’s what a huge bit of the cortex is primed to do — to spot [patterns] — and once we spot them we can assimilate them into our pyramid of knowledge and build more layers of strategy, and knowing how to do that makes us incredibly successful at controlling the world.

And that’s why solving puzzles or finding a useful bit of information feels so good?

We get streams of pleasure when we find something that can really help us understand some deep pattern. Sudoku isn’t the most [fun activity], but it sure feels good when you put in that last number. It’s why scientists love doing research. The way I approach my job, it’s like trying to solve a really big fuzzy crossword puzzle and when you do put in that new clue and see the deeper pattern, that’s incredibly pleasurable.

If our brains are hungry for information, then why do we tend to see learning as a chore and fail to recognize it as a huge source of pleasure?

I don’t know. Obviously, more intelligent people get more pleasure from spotting these patterns, but I think almost every normal person does this. I think it’s a pretty pervasive thing but it’s almost as if we can’t notice it because it’s so pervasive.

Today’s New York Times Magazine has a pretty scary article about how the retail giant Target tracks what’s going on in the lives of customers and uses that information to get us to buy more stuff from them.  It’s definitely worth reading the whole piece.

As I mentioned, it’s scary — in addition to being creepy. Nevertheless, the article does highlight some strategies that can be used for good in the classroom and not only for not-so-good things in the quest for corporate profit.

Here are three points that struck me in the article:

The Effectiveness of Inductive Learning: Target uses inductive learning to analyse information, look for information, and apply and extend what it learns — the typical steps in the inductive learning process:

For companies like Target, the exhaustive rendering of our conscious and unconscious patterns into data sets and algorithms has revolutionized what they know about us and, therefore, how precisely they can sell.

Inductive learning is an extremely effective teaching and learning process that’s used by other companies as well, including Google Translate. Last year, a major study written about by Robert Marzano found inductive learning to be far more effective than direct instruction in the classroom.

The Importance Of Automaticity & Chunking: The article discusses Target’s efforts to shape shopping habits, and discusses automaticity and chunking. It includes a good story that I will be using with my students when we discuss why I ask them to use explicit reading strategies (asking a question, visualizing, etc.) often when we’re reading texts:

Take backing your car out of the driveway. When you first learned to drive, that act required a major dose of concentration, and for good reason: it involves peering into the rearview and side mirrors and checking for obstacles, putting your foot on the brake, moving the gearshift into reverse, removing your foot from the brake, estimating the distance between the garage and the street while keeping the wheels aligned, calculating how images in the mirrors translate into actual distances, all while applying differing amounts of pressure to the gas pedal and brake.

Now, you perform that series of actions every time you pull into the street without thinking very much. Your brain has chunked large parts of it.

Reflecting On Cues & Rewards: The author’s discussion of cues and rewards, and how to use them to create habits, was particularly intriguing to me:

The process within our brains that creates habits is a three-step loop. First, there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future. Over time, this loop — cue, routine, reward; cue, routine, reward — becomes more and more automatic…..

Luckily, simply understanding how habits work makes them easier to control. Take, for instance, a series of studies conducted a few years ago at Columbia University and the University of Alberta. Researchers wanted to understand how exercise habits emerge. In one project, 256 members of a health-insurance plan were invited to classes stressing the importance of exercise. Half the participants received an extra lesson on the theories of habit formation (the structure of the habit loop) and were asked to identify cues and rewards that might help them develop exercise routines.

The results were dramatic. Over the next four months, those participants who deliberately identified cues and rewards spent twice as much time exercising as their peers. Other studies have yielded similar results. According to another recent paper, if you want to start running in the morning, it’s essential that you choose a simple cue (like always putting on your sneakers before breakfast or leaving your running clothes next to your bed) and a clear reward (like a midday treat or even the sense of accomplishment that comes from ritually recording your miles in a log book). After a while, your brain will start anticipating that reward — craving the treat or the feeling of accomplishment — and there will be a measurable neurological impulse to lace up your jogging shoes each morning.

Charles Duhigg, the article’s author (who also is publishing a book on the topic) made this personal:

I wanted to lose weight.

I had got into a bad habit of going to the cafeteria every afternoon and eating a chocolate-chip cookie, which contributed to my gaining a few pounds. Eight, to be precise. I put a Post-it note on my computer reading “NO MORE COOKIES.” But every afternoon, I managed to ignore that note, wander to the cafeteria, buy a cookie and eat it while chatting with colleagues. Tomorrow, I always promised myself, I’ll muster the willpower to resist.

Tomorrow, I ate another cookie.

When I started interviewing experts in habit formation, I concluded each interview by asking what I should do. The first step, they said, was to figure out my habit loop. The routine was simple: every afternoon, I walked to the cafeteria, bought a cookie and ate it while chatting with friends.

Next came some less obvious questions: What was the cue? Hunger? Boredom? Low blood sugar? And what was the reward? The taste of the cookie itself? The temporary distraction from my work? The chance to socialize with colleagues?

Rewards are powerful because they satisfy cravings, but we’re often not conscious of the urges driving our habits in the first place. So one day, when I felt a cookie impulse, I went outside and took a walk instead. The next day, I went to the cafeteria and bought a coffee. The next, I bought an apple and ate it while chatting with friends. You get the idea. I wanted to test different theories regarding what reward I was really craving. Was it hunger? (In which case the apple should have worked.) Was it the desire for a quick burst of energy? (If so, the coffee should suffice.) Or, as turned out to be the answer, was it that after several hours spent focused on work, I wanted to socialize, to make sure I was up to speed on office gossip, and the cookie was just a convenient excuse? When I walked to a colleague’s desk and chatted for a few minutes, it turned out, my cookie urge was gone.

All that was left was identifying the cue.

Deciphering cues is hard, however. Our lives often contain too much information to figure out what is triggering a particular behavior. Do you eat breakfast at a certain time because you’re hungry? Or because the morning news is on? Or because your kids have started eating? Experiments have shown that most cues fit into one of five categories: location, time, emotional state, other people or the immediately preceding action. So to figure out the cue for my cookie habit, I wrote down five things the moment the urge hit:

Where are you? (Sitting at my desk.)

What time is it? (3:36 p.m.)

What’s your emotional state? (Bored.)

Who else is around? (No one.)

What action preceded the urge? (Answered an e-mail.)

The next day I did the same thing. And the next. Pretty soon, the cue was clear: I always felt an urge to snack around 3:30.

Once I figured out all the parts of the loop, it seemed fairly easy to change my habit. But the psychologists and neuroscientists warned me that, for my new behavior to stick, I needed to abide by the same principle that guided Procter & Gamble in selling Febreze: To shift the routine — to socialize, rather than eat a cookie — I needed to piggyback on an existing habit. So now, every day around 3:30, I stand up, look around the newsroom for someone to talk to, spend 10 minutes gossiping, then go back to my desk. The cue and reward have stayed the same. Only the routine has shifted. It doesn’t feel like a decision, any more than the M.I.T. rats made a decision to run through the maze. It’s now a habit. I’ve lost 21 pounds since then (12 of them from changing my cookie ritual).

I think this point can be very, very helpful in the classroom with students who want to break habits they have identified as ones they want to change (not to mention with us teachers who might have a few, too).

I’m going to put some thought into it and develop a lesson plan, which I’ll share here at a later date.  If you have some ideas of what I should considering including, please leave a comment.

I guess many things can be applied for ill… or for good…..

Patterns and Punctuation by Elizabeth Schlessman appears in the most recent issue of Rethinking Schools. It is clearly the best lesson plan I’ve ever heard about for teaching punctuation.

I’m not going to go into depth on it since the article is available for now and is not behind a paywall. In summary, it Elizabeth used inductive teaching and learning to have students identify punctuation in what they were reading, identify patterns, and then apply what they learned to their own writing.

In many ways, it’s similar to the inductive learning strategies I’ve often discussed in this blog and in my books. I’ve constantly used “data sets” — a list of 10-30 examples of writing — that students categorize and then expand. I’ve just never thought before about using them to teach punctuation, but it makes perfect sense. In fact, as soon as I’m done writing this post I’m going to create a simple data set to use with my Beginning English Language Learners on Monday.

The article is just the latest reason why I’ve read Rethinking Schools for many, many years….

The title of this post is a abbreviated quote from one of the authors of a study that was released today, and you can read about it at Don’t show, don’t tell?

The research involved giving a toy to children, with different instructions. You can read the details in the article, but here are the conclusions:

These results suggest children are extremely sensitive to the subtleties of a teaching scenario, Schulz says: What matters is not if children are shown a function, but how they are shown that function. If they believe that an informed teacher has taught them everything, they will be less motivated to explore.

…the study underscores the real-world trade-offs between education and exploration, and the importance of acknowledging what is unknown even while imparting what is known. Teachers should, where possible, offer the caveat that there may be more to learn.

“Teachers can say things like, ‘I’m showing you what we think is true, but there are a lot of other possibilities you should consider,’” Schulz says.

This is one of the reasons I’m such a fan of inductive learning, which I discuss at length here in my blog and in my newest book.

Perhaps my brain is “fried” by this time of the school year, but — hot on the heels of not really “getting” what one publicized study meant (see Help Me Understand The Significance Of This New Study That “Finds Sudden Insights Key to Learning Words”), The New York Times has written about another one with which I am having the same difficulty.

Brain Calisthenics for Abstract Ideas is the title of the article.

It seems to me to say that inductive learning — pushing students to identify patterns and rules from what they see — can be a more effective instructional strategy than deductive learning — giving students “rules” and having them apply those to examples. If that is an accurate understanding of the study the article discusses, I don’t really understand the big deal. Tons of studies and teachers, including me, already know this, and many people have already written about how to apply the brain’s desire to seek patterns to teaching and learning. I’ve written extensively about it in two of my books, Helping Students Motivate Themselves and English Language Learners: Teaching Strategies That Work. In both those books I document multiple studies backing-up its importance and effectiveness.

However, I freely admit I might be missing something here. If so, it won’t be the first time and certainly won’t be the last, either. Please let me know — either way — your interpretation of the study.