Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

Alice Mercer, my co-facilitator of the Classroom Management discussion group at Edutopia, is sick at home and has begun a thread on subs and classroom management.

I thought it might be a good opportunity to share my Attitude and Behavior With A Substitute Teacher grading rubric.

I only use it with classes that I’m concerned about. In those classes, a few minutes before the ending bell rings, the sub passes out the rubric. Students grade themselves, and then the sub grades them. It works quite well — subs can grade by “faces” instead of having to try to remember names (you’ll notice on the rubric there’s a caution and way to spot if students don’t put their real name on it), and pushes students to reflect on how they’ve handled themselves.

Yes, yes, I know — I’m a big believer in developing intrinsic motivation, too. I just figure that I miss class so seldom, subs have such a challenging situation anyway, and remembering how I behaved with a sub when I was a student, that using something like this is best for everybody involved.

Join in the discussion at Edutopia and share how you handle sub and classroom management issues….

At professional development trainings at our school, Kelly Young shares pictures of classrooms that he visits. One of the features he often highlights are images of students “leaning-in” at their desks working on a project and/or speaking with other students in small groups.

I used this concept in a short lesson earlier this month that seemed to work well.

First, I asked students to think of an important event in their life, and why it was important. They then jotted down a few notes.

Then, I had students divide into pairs and move their desks so they were facing each other. I asked one student to lean back — a lot. We had a lot of fun modeling and competing how far back a student could lean back in their seat without slipping through to the floor.

Next, the other student told their story to the student leaning-back. Then we reversed roles.

Then, students repeated their stories to each other, but this time, instead of leaning back, each student “leaned-in” on their desks.

I then asked students if they were listening more attentively when they were leaning-back or when they were learning forward. I didn’t get the answer I wanted (which was when they were leaning forward), and everybody said they were listening the same in both positions. However, I then asked in which position the listener was in did they feel most “listened to” when they spoke, and several students said when the other person was leaning-in. I asked students in which position they felt most alert, and practically everybody said when they were leaning-in.

We talked a bit about what advantages there might be to people feeling more listened-to — both in class and outside of school. We also talked about our natural tendencies to lean back when we’re feeling tired or sleepy, and how learning-in might help wake us up.

It wasn’t a “home-run” lesson, but since that time I’ve included “Lean-In’ in instructions for all small group activities, and it seems to me that it’s made a difference — more students seem to be “leaning-in.”

Any ideas on how I could improve it?

About a month ago, after a successful series of lessons on how learning physically makes the brain grow stronger, I wrote some preliminary thoughts on preparing a similar lesson on student “self-regulation” and self-control.

I got sidetracked by a variety of things, but then two things happened to move it up on my priority list:

First, I began thinking more about it earlier this week when Alice Mercer and I spoke, and she talked about a similar lesson she was putting together. She did the lesson, and just posted about it today. It’s a must-read, and I think it’s a great way to go, especially if you are teaching younger learners (though she’s got some great stuff there for teachers at any grade-level). It’s just another reason why educators should definitely be subscribing to her blog.  It’s definitely one of my favorites.

Secondly, yesterday I had a few relatively minor behavioral issues in my mainstream ninth-grade English class. It wasn’t a big deal, but it hadn’t happened before. It was also, I think, a result of an error I made — it was the first time this year I had students do group work in greater than a pair (we tried groups of three), and it was earliest I had ever tried that in a school year. Even for as good a class as this one is, I should have known it’s just too early in the year to do have a bigger group with ninth-graders. And since I’m not going to be in class tomorrow (I’m leading a workshop on developing parent engagement), it’ll be the first time they’ve had a sub. That combination made me decide early this morning that today would be a very good time to have a lesson on developing self-control. It’s another one of several I’m trying out that might encourage students to see how learning can more directly benefit them beyond the schoolhouse door.

The lesson went quite well. In fact, it went so well I decided to modify it and immediately do with my Intermediate English class, too.   Over the weekend I’ll write a “Part Two” to this post sharing a complete description of how things went in that class (quite well, in fact) and include examples of student work).  The title of this post comes from what a student in that class wrote about what he learned today.

NINTH-GRADE ENGLISH

Part One: Lesson Introduction (took about ten minutes):

I began by asking students to take a minute and write down what they thought “self-control” meant. After a minute, students shared their definitions with a partner, and I asked some to share what they wrote with the whole class. Here are a few examples:

“Self control is when you can control yourself, like behave when you are in a tough situation.”

“Control yourself and control your actions.”

“Control yourself from doing bad things.”

“The ability to control strong emotions.”

“Self-control means to hold yourself from doing bad things.”

I theatrically modeled self-control while sitting at a school desk stopping myself from throwing a pencil at a student (it was obvious that I was pretending to be a particular student in class and everybody was cracking-up — including that student. I also gave other examples in my own life (not eating a Reese’s Peanut Buttercup, etc.).

Next, students thought of a time when they did not have self control and wrote about it for a minute. They then shared those stories with a partner, and a few shared with the entire class. Here are a few examples:

“I lost control when I had a bad attitude with my mom and yelled at her.”

“Yesterday in school because somebody stole my iPod from the locker. I ended up socking the wall and door in the locker room.”

“When I took $5 from my Mom’s purse.”

Then, students thought of a time when they showed self-control, shared it with a partner, and then a few with the class. Here are some examples:

“Everyday when I come to school.”

“When I didn’t hit my friend.”

“When we had a sub in my other class and I was doing my work instead of talking.”

Part Two: Reading (about thirty minutes)

Students were divided into pairs. For the first time this year (and perhaps the only time) I decided to let them choose their partners, and that worked out fine.

I gave them part of The New Yorker article titled DON’T: The Secret of Self Control. The article is about the famous experiment where children were tested to see if they could wait fifteen minutes without eating a marshmallow in front of them. If they could, they’d receive a second marshmallow. With a few minor removals, I just used the first two-and-a-half pages that print-out. They took turns reading each paragraph to each other. After each one, they highlighted what they thought was the most important part of the paragraph — up to six words. After they completed the reading (they handled it pretty well — the only phrase I reviewed with them was “delayed gratification” — each pair got a sheet of paper and made a mini-poster writing what they thought were the three most important parts of the article. Then I “paired-up the pairs” and each group shared their poster, and a few shared them up-front. Some examples included:

“We can’t control the world, but we can control how we think about it.” (that’s a quote from the article.

“Kids that can’t wait have behavior problems.”

“Kids that can wait have a better mind.”

Part Three: Video (ten minutes)

I then showed the engaging six minute TED Talks video showing a replication of the experiment . Students loved it.

In-Class Experiment, Read Aloud & Modeling (ten minutes):

I put a lollipop on the desk of each student (I got that idea from Alice Mercer), and told them if it was still there thirty minutes later, I’d give them a second one. Students loved it.

I then gave copies of a later excerpt from The New Yorker article that talked about how young people can develop self-control, and read it aloud as students read along. It was particularly timely because this part mentions metacognition, and we had been discussing that word and its meaning in the context of learning reading strategies:

At the time, psychologists assumed that children’s ability to wait depended on how badly they wanted the marshmallow. But it soon became obvious that every child craved the extra treat. What, then, determined self-control? Mischel’s conclusion, based on hundreds of hours of observation, was that the crucial skill was the “strategic allocation of attention.” Instead of getting obsessed with the marshmallow—the “hot stimulus”—the patient children distracted themselves by covering their eyes, pretending to play hide-and-seek underneath the desk, or singing songs from “Sesame Street.” Their desire wasn’t defeated—it was merely forgotten. “If you’re thinking about the marshmallow and how delicious it is, then you’re going to eat it,” Mischel says. “The key is to avoid thinking about it in the first place.”

In adults, this skill is often referred to as metacognition, or thinking about thinking, and it’s what allows people to outsmart their shortcomings “What’s interesting about four-year-olds is that they’re just figuring out the rules of thinking,” Mischel says. “The kids who couldn’t delay would often have the rules backwards. They would think that the best way to resist the marshmallow is to stare right at it, to keep a close eye on the goal. But that’s a terrible idea. If you do that, you’re going to ring the bell before I leave the room.”

According to Mischel, this view of will power also helps explain why the marshmallow task is such a powerfully predictive test. “If you can deal with hot emotions, then you can study for the S.A.T. instead of watching television,” Mischel says. “And you can save more money for retirement. It’s not just about marshmallows.”

When he and his colleagues taught children a simple set of mental tricks—such as pretending that the candy is only a picture, surrounded by an imaginary frame—he dramatically improved their self-control. The kids who hadn’t been able to wait sixty seconds could now wait fifteen minutes. “All I’ve done is given them some tips from their mental user manual,” Mischel says. “Once you realize that will power is just a matter of learning how to control your attention and thoughts, you can really begin to increase it.”

I then did some theatrical role-modeling again, holding myself back from throwing a pencil and saying to myself, “I need to focus on reading so I can make my brain grow” and “I don’t want to throw the pencil because I want to do well in this class.” I talked about other things I could say to myself when the TV is yelling “Watch me now!” when I know I should be doing work instead, and gave a few other examples.

Poster & Final Reflection (45 minutes or so):

I showed students a poster I had made. One side was titled “When I Want To Do This:” and the other side was titled “Instead I’ll Do This:” The first side showed a drawing of me throwing a pencil at someone. The second side showed me sitting at a desk reading and thinking “I want to do well in this class.”

I told students I wanted them to think of a time when they didn’t have self-control — they could use the example they had written about or think of another time. They would draw that on the first side. On the second side I wanted them to draw what they wanted to do instead, and write in a “thought-bubble” how they could divert themselves from losing control.

Students didn’t have time to finish the poster today, and will finish them tomorrow. I’ll create an online slideshow of them as I did for the “growing the brain” culminating project and share them here.  They looked pretty interesting.

In the final few minutes I asked students to write if they found the lesson useful or interesting, and to include why or why not.

As I mentioned earlier, the title of this post is what one of my Intermediate English students wrote in response to this question. Here are a few responses from my mainstream ninth-graders:

“It was interesting because I need to learn self-control.”

“It was interesting because the project is really cool that it could tell about the kids that are successful and are not.”

“This was interesting cus it was showing us how to control our self from doing something bad.”

“It was interesting because I wanted to see if any one in our class ate the lollipop.”

In fact, no one did, so everyone got a second one. Right before the bell rang, I asked the class what it meant that they all got the second candy. Just about everybody yelled, “We’ll be successful!”

I know, that ending sounds a bit simplistic.  But I certainly can’t complain about all my students leaving class feeling like they’re going to be successful.

We don’t have to imagine the answer to that question because Freire, the famous popular educator, was indeed the Superintendent of schools in Sao Paulo, Brazil during 1989-91, and Bob Peterson has just written an article about that experience in the most recent issue of ReThinking Schools. The article is titled Big City Superintendents: Dictatorship or Democracy? Lessons from Paulo Freire .

Here’s a quote from the article:

The heart of the Freire administration’s plan to transform the schools was the movement to reorient the curriculum. This was a change that was only partially successful, uneven from school to school. But it still stands in sharp contrast to the top-down, scripted curricular reforms that are being forced on many of the large urban districts in this country.

At the core of Freire’s approach was changing the nature of teaching and learning in the classrooms. The curriculum had to be based on the realities of the students’ lives, be meaningful to their aspirations, bridge disciplinary divides, incorporate assessments that accurately reflected student learning, and be constantly reflected upon by educators during paid collaborative planning times during the work day. Teachers were being expected not to “deliver” curriculum, but to create it in collaboration with each other, their students, and the community. According to Freire, his goal was

. . . to gradually elevate the level of knowledge of the teachers, promote collective work as the privileged form of teacher formation, and afford the material conditions for all this to occur. In this manner the pedagogic innovations are appropriated, the curricular alterations fruitful, because the principal agents [of these changes], the teachers, are considered not objects of training, but elements that produce and re-elaborate knowledge.

Now, I know that you can’t just take a strategy from one country and plop it into another. And, in fact, there have been challenges in applying Freire’s methods in the United States (I’ve used it quite successfully in my ESL classes, though, and have found the best teaching strategies on how to do that come from U.S. Peace Corps ESL/EFL Training Manuals)

Given that, however, it seems to me that it would still be worth superintendents, particularly ones from urban districts, taking a serious look at Freire’s perspective.

One of my students this year has some major learning disabilities. There was discussion about moving him to a special education class but, for a variety of reasons (including the fact I had developed a solid relationship with him), we decided that keeping him in my class would be the best place for him.

He’s a good kid. One of his challenges is having difficulties focusing, and I’ve been struggling to figure out what I could need to help him do his work without necessarily having to check-in with him constantly. Nothing I had tried worked.

Last week he and I talked about the issue again. I told him that I wanted to try-out something new — every time I gave the class an assignment, I would give him full credit if he completed half of it — but only if he got right to work on it and I didn’t need to remind him to get to work. He seemed pretty excited about the idea, and readily agreed.

Much to my surprise, it worked beautifully. During the entire week, he was very focused. The one or two times he appeared distracted, I only had to say, “remember our agreement,” and he immediately got on task.

Each Friday I have students write a reflection responding to a question. Yesterday, the question was, “What was one thing you did very well this week and why do you think you did it so well?”

This student’s response was:

“I made my agreement with Mr. Ferlazzo and kept it. It was something I knew I could do.”

Assuming this continues to go well, in a few weeks I’ll consider talking with him about gradually moving up the expectations.

Making individual “deals” with students, I’ve found, is a key to a successful classroom (see “I’ll Work If You Give Me Candy”).

Have you had similar experiences?

Alice Mercer and I (with Alice being the lead) will be co-facilitators of an online discussion group on classroom management issues hosted at Edutopia. It just “opened” today.

Feel free to jump in the present discussions on use of the phrase “shut-up” and on sharing how you control your temper in the classroom. Or start another topic!

My mainstream ninth-grade English class has been really exceptional so far this year — very hardworking and clearly wanting to learn. They were the ones who responded so positively to the lessons on “exercising your brain.” I haven’t experienced the challenges I had with last year’s class.

Yesterday, though, the ferocious rainstorm that drenched northern California “set-off” kids in many classes at our school, and my ninth-grade class was no exception. There were several incidents of students throwing paper balls or markers at each other — nothing too terrible, but still unacceptable and the first kind of behavior issues I’ve had to deal with this year.

Every ounce of my being wanted to really “tell-off” and punish students (which I’ve certainly done on occasion), but I knew that kind of reaction never works, so I held my tongue and told them we’d talk about it today.

I began the class today calmly telling students that I was disappointed in what happened yesterday, though I didn’t “name names.” I pointed out how positively I’ve felt about them because of how they’ve handled themselves this year and how hard they’ve worked, and that they’ve heard me speak highly of them to other teachers and administrators. I reminded them about the “marshmallow” story we had discussed, and how important having self-control is to their future.

I wasn’t planning on ending my very, very brief talk with a question — I generally believe you shouldn’t ask the whole class questions in a situation like this unless you’re pretty darn positive you’re going to get the response you want. However, it just came out:

“Can I count on this not happening again?”

Much to my surprise, I immediate heard five students say “yes” — the five boys who had been the ones directly responsible for the paper and marker-throwing the previous day.

In terms of effectiveness, I suspect handling things this way is going to have a much more postive longer-term impact than an angry reaction and punishment would have the previous day. It’s probably a good argument for us teachers to have some self-control, too — something I’m not always successful at displaying…

Be lucky – it’s an easy skill to learn is a fascinating article on research about “luck” and how people can learn to be more “lucky.” It’s from the British paper “The Telegraph.”

I’m going to plan a classroom lesson using it, and will let readers know how it goes.

I’ve posted before about how rewards can damage intrinsic motivation (My Thoughts On A Very Intriguing Video On Motivation & Incentives) and how I try to achieve a balance in my own classroom (Have You Ever Taught A Class That Got “Out Of Control”?)

I’ve just found a short and simple post that doesn’t really contribute a whole lot new to the discussion, but does a very good job of summarizing the research. It’s called “How Rewards Can Backfire And Reduce Motivation.”

I was intrigued by a finding in one study that showed that receiving an “unexpected” reward (I would compare it to end-of-year student recognition) did not damage intrinsic motivation. In fact, and I don’t really understand how this would work & how this could be measured, those who received unexpected rewards actually appeared to have increased intrinsic motivation.

The graph showed the results of children drawing. Those who received rewards drew for the least time. Those who didn’t receive any reward drew for the second-longest time. Those who received a reward after the activity was completed drew for the longest time. Those who received an unexpected reward wouldn’t know that they were getting a reward, so how would that have any effect on them?

I would be grateful if anyone could check out the article and can explain to me how this would be possible…

Po Bronson has written a very interesting piece at Newsweek’s site titled Motivation and Flow: The Teenager Edition.

He talks about Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s famous research on the best experiences, which he called being in the “flow.”

Bronson then highlights Csikszentmihalyi’s research specifically with middle and high school students. Where did classtime rate in terms of “flow’?

“On average, flow is lower in class than at any other time during the week, except for when doing their paid job,” says Shernoff (one of the researchers who worked on the project).

I’d strongly recommend you read Bronson’s entire piece, but wanted to share a short excerpt here:

His research, though, suggested a way to fix this sorry state. Shernoff recognized that students were most flowlike in moments where they were doing group work or individual work. They were active and participating. The opposite was true for lectures and watching videos.

Unfortunately, classrooms where there was the most participation, such as art class, were usually the least challenging. The classes that were the most challenging, such as science, required students to spend the most time being lectured to. His deduction: we need to combine the methods of how art and social science are taught with the demanding nature of math and science classes.

“Only 15 percent of the time students spend in class was interactive, allowing for discussion or group activities,” notes Shernoff. “The abundance of lectures and taking notes leaves little time for active engagement. When active participation is so rarely invited, it’s no wonder students can’t engage.”

Surprise, surprise….

This past Friday, I asked students in my mainstream ninth-grade English class to write a response to this question:

What would you tell your parents you learned in class this month?

We’ve spent most of the month learning about Natural Disasters and, as I had expected, practically everybody wrote about something related to that topic.

I was, however, surprised by two other things.

We spent less than two periods on the lessons related to the brain and how it physically grows when it learns. However, practically every student wrote something about that lesson — in addition to something about natural disasters. Here are a few examples:

I learned about the brain and how it works.

I learned that when the brain is learning it’s growing neurons and it’s like a muscle.

I learned that the brain is like a muscle, if you exercise it it gets bigger.

The brain grows and you’re not just born with it and that’s it.

I learned that the brain is like a muscle and if you exercise it, it grows.

I really didn’t expect that it would have such an impact on students, and it reinforces my desire to have similar lessons related to issues that might tie in to students’ long-term self-interest (Helping Students Develop Self-Control). As I’ve shared, it’s quite easy to use that content to cover English reading and writing lessons.

The other surprise came when I saw that several students wrote something like this:

I learned to say, “I’m not sure, but I think that….” instead of saying “I don’t know” when I’m asked a question.

I learned this strategy from Magical Mystery Teacher (formerly California Teacher Guy). There’s a big poster on the classroom wall emphasizing it, and I only spent a few minutes going over it on the first day of school.

It’s interesting to see what “sticks.”

Regular readers are familiar with my recent series of posts about my “growing your brain” lessons. These are ones where students learned why physically happens to their brains when they learn.

I just made a very “quick and dirty” slideshow of a few examples of my students’ culminating activity — showing how they perceive the brain when it’s not learning and when it is learning using either literal or figurative language.

I’m putting together an article that will probably run in “Teacher Magazine” to summarize the whole series of what we did. You can also read about its progression in these four posts:

Reading Logs — Part Two (or “How Students Can Grow Their Brains”)

“Now I Know My Brain Is Growing When I Read Every Night”

“This Is Your Brain On Learning”

“What Would You Tell You’re Parents You Learned In Class This Month?”

The success of my lessons on learning’s physical impact on the brain has prompted me to think of creating similar lessons that might encourage students to see how learning can more directly benefit them beyond the schoolhouse door.

I’ve begun developing a lesson on the importance of having self-control. Studies show that the ability to have self-discipline (also known as self-regulation) can result in tremendous learning and life benefits.

I’ve just begun to think about it, and am open to hearing ideas.  I’ll be posting what my final plans look like.  Here are the resources I’m reviewing now:

A TED Talk by Joachim de Posada focused on the lessons from famous marshmallow experiment. A marshmallow was put in front of children, the researcher left the room after telling the child he/she would be back shortly and if the child could resist grabbing the one marshmallow she/he would get more upon the researcher’s return. Years later, those who showed self-control were much more successful in their lives.

I briefly explained this study to a joint class we were training to use a web tool to make a slideshow yesterday. The application requires that students email their final creation to themselves in order to obtain the url address of the finished product, which in turn students can then post on our class blog. After taking a minute to summarize the researchers findings, I talked about how tempting it would be once they went to their personal email to open-up other messages from friends in addition to the one from the slideshow site. But I wanted them to “remember the marshmallow.”

These students actually do work for our English classes in a different computer applications class. I spoke to the teacher after school, and he told me that — as far as he could tell — no students did anything other than open up the one email from the slideshow site.

Three other excellent resources on this topic are:

DON’T: The Secret of Self-Control from The New Yorker magazine.

Self-Regulation Supports Student Learning and Achievement by Kevin Washburn

Just today, The New York Times published Can the Right Kinds of Play Teach Self-Control?

Any other suggestions of resources or ideas are welcome.

Tomorrow, I’ll be having my mainstream ninth-grade English students do another activity to follow-up the lesson we did on Monday on how reading and learning literally helps neurons in the brain grow and get stronger (“Now I Know My Brain Is Growing When I Read Every Night”).

First, I’m going to explain the difference between “literal” language (I’m very hungry) and figurative (”I’m so hungry I could eat a horse”). I’ll also give a few examples of metaphors and similes.

Then I’m going to ask students to take a piece of paper and draw a line down the middle. They will title the left-side “This Is Your Brain When It’s Not Learning.” They’ll label the right side “This Is Your Brain When It Is Learning.”

I’m going to give them the choice of either drawing it literally (using images from the video we used showing neurons growing and from pictures in the article we read) or figuratively (maybe they’ll draw something like a dying plant on the left and a blooming one on the right). I’ll show the short brain video again, and also show the famous “This Is Your Brain On Drugs” Public Service Announcement as an example of figurative language.

Posting these student-created posters on the classroom wall might be one way to help students remember what they learned.  Plus, I think it’ll be interesting to see which ones choose to show it literally and which go the figurative way.  Finally, it will be a good introduction to that vocabulary and concept.

I might post a collection of their drawings as a slideshow.  If it goes well, we might make videos illustrating the same concept.

Reactions are welcome, including suggestions on how to make it better.

(This lesson went great, and you can see examples of what students came-up with in this slideshow)

The Ten Worst Teaching Mistakes is an excellent post by by Richard M. Felder, North Carolina State University and Rebecca Brent, Education Designs, Inc.

It’s geared towards college-teaching, but much that’s discussed in applicable to K-12.

Thanks to Jason Flom for the tip.

Alice Mercer has posted an excellent post describing a lesson she’s done about helping students learn that the can “grow” their brains.

I highly recommend that you take a look at Is your brain grass or a glass?

I have also added the link to my last two posts on my lessons that have a similar purpose.

This past weekend I wrote a post — Reading Logs — Part Two (or “How Students Can Grow Their Brains”) — sharing some  research and reflections on helping students see that it is in their self-interest to read at home each night. In that same piece I shared a lesson I was going to use  in my ninth-grade mainstream English class that I hoped would let students see that intelligence is not innate, and that when they read each night they literally helped their brain grow by creating and strengthening neurons.

It was one of those lessons that I thought was either going to be a huge success or a total fiasco (and I certainly have had my share of the latter).

I can happily report, however, that it definitely exceeded my expectations — so much so that, after sharing what happened with a number of my colleagues, it looks like some colleagues may be trying it out in their classes.

I stuck pretty much to the plan I laid-out in my previous post — with a couple of exceptions.

One change occurred at the start.  I began with the question I had originally planned:

“Some people say you’re born with a certain amount of intelligence – you’re either smart, average, or below-average — and that’s just the way it is and always will be.  Others say we’re all pretty much born with the same amount, and that people who work harder at learning just become more intelligent.  Take a minute and think about those two perspectives.  Write down which one you think is right and why.”

However, even as I was saying it, I had doubts that students would get “it,” and I was right.  So I quickly rephrased  and put two questions on the board — asking them to choose one and explain why:

Option One:

Yes, I think the brain is like a muscle and the more you exercise it, the stronger it gets.

Option Two:

You are born with being however smart or dumb you are and that’s the way it is.

One would expect that most students would choose Option One and that’s what happened.  However, and this is where I gained an incredible insight:

The students in class who faced a number of academic challenges and who I’d lay odds have been inappropriately and inaccurately labeled “dumb” in the past all chose Option Two.

The other change was that I asked students to write a short reflection at the end of the lesson sharing what they thought of it.  They universally liked it, and the video that actually showed neurons forming made a huge impact (the link to that video is in my previous post).

One of the students who initially said that people are either born smart or dumb wrote the headline of this post:

“Now I know my brain is growing when I read every night.  It creates neurons.”

Here are some other examples:

“This was interesting because the more you learn, the bigger your brain muscle will get.  Now I know how to exercise it.”

“I liked it because it showed how you learn and your brain grows.”

“It was interesting to watch because now I know what happens when I learn.”

“I should start using my brain as much as possible.”

“It was interesting to learn about brain cells and what happens when you learn.”

Of course, we’ll see how much impact this will have over the long-term.  But I’m hopeful, and will continue to refer to it throughout the year.

(“This Is Your Brain On Learning” tells about a follow-up lesson to this activity.)

I’ll also be modifying the lesson so that it’s accessible to my English Language Learners, and will share that when it’s completed.

(Alice Mercer has posted an excellent post describing a lesson she’s done with a similar purpose. I highly recommend that you take a look at Is your brain grass or a glass?)

A couple of days ago I wrote a post titled Do You Require “Reading Logs” For Homework?

It shared a link to another blog’s post where a mother spoke very strongly against that kind of homework, and I shared the very simple “logs” I have my students complete and my reasoning behind them.  I invited readers to share if and how they used them.

I received many excellent responses, which you can read in the comments section of that post.  I was especially struck by something that Teresa Ilgunas wrote:

“We will have discussions over the year about being honest with your log …. and also we talk about how much their intelligence increases if they actually do read 30 min. a day…”

That reminded me about Carol Dweck’s work on the brain being a muscle that can grow with exercise, and how I did a very short, but seemingly engaging, lesson with my students a couple of years ago about that concept.

Then, earlier today, I read a post by Lisa Thumann where she shared, among other resources, this short piece titled Why Can’t I Skip My Twenty Minutes of Reading Tonight?
So, after reflecting on those ideas,  I’ve concluded that though I feel good about the simple reading log practice I’m using, it’s not quite enough. Going the extra mile, which I think I do, to help students find just the right book for them; hoping they will indeed develop a desire to read it and others; and adding some accountability with a parent signature, is good, but not good enough. The many reluctant readers in my mainstream ninth-grade English class need, I think, to see an even clearer “self-interest” in making the time to read, especially those for whom the act of just basic decoding can be a chore.

And there’s no better time to help them identify that self-interest than at the beginning of the school year before some bad habits get “fossilized.”

So I decided to get to work and figure out some lessons that I can do this week to help students learn about — and “own”– the idea that the brain is indeed a muscle that can grow and get stronger by exercising. It is not fixed. And that exercise can include reading (as well as other academic “stretches.”

After searching the Web for potential lessons related to Carol Dweck’s research, and then searching my own brain (which was working less and less efficiently as the night grew later), I think I came up with an okay plan for my mainstream ninth-grade English class that I hope readers here will make better.

First, though, I think some background on Dweck’s research might be helpful.  I should be clear that though a key part of her work has been the importance of praising the effort and not the intelligence of children, I’m not really going to get into that here — though it’s obviously connected to the topic of this post.  You can read more about that aspect in a post I wrote earlier this year.

This particular post is going to be focused on how students themselves can learn the explicit knowledge that by working harder academically, they can make their brains grow stronger. A number of people in addition to Dweck have been writing about this topic in similar terms (including Malcolm Gladwell), but I’ve found Dweck’s perspectives to be most directly applicable to the classroom situation.

BACKGROUND:

Here are some excerpts from an Education World interview with her (it’s definitely worth reading the whole thing):

“Students who believe that intelligence is a potential that they can develop do fare better when faced with challenge. For example, they often blossom across a challenging school transition when their fellow students with the fixed view are busy doubting themselves and losing their edge.

We have found with students of all ages, from early grade school through college, that the changeable view can be taught. Students can be taught that their intellectual skills are things that can be cultivated — through their hard work, reading, education, confronting of challenges, etc. When they are taught this, they seem naturally to become more eager for challenges, harder working, and more able to cope with obstacles.”

And here’s an excerpt from an article about her work titled How Not To Talk With Your Kids:

“Life Sciences is a health-science magnet school [in East Harlem] with high aspirations but 700 students whose main attributes are being predominantly minority and low achieving. Blackwell [Dweck's "protegee"] split her kids into two groups for an eight-session workshop. The control group was taught study skills, and the others got study skills and a special module on how intelligence is not innate. These students took turns reading aloud an essay on how the brain grows new neurons when challenged. They saw slides of the brain and acted out skits. “Even as I was teaching these ideas,” Blackwell noted, “I would hear the students joking, calling one another ‘dummy’ or ‘stupid.’ ” After the module was concluded, Blackwell tracked her students’ grades to see if it had any effect.

It didn’t take long. The teachers—who hadn’t known which students had been assigned to which workshop—could pick out the students who had been taught that intelligence can be developed. They improved their study habits and grades. In a single semester, Blackwell reversed the students’ longtime trend of decreasing math grades.

The only difference between the control group and the test group were two lessons, a total of 50 minutes spent teaching not math but a single idea: that the brain is a muscle. Giving it a harder workout makes you smarter. That alone improved their math scores.”

The last excerpt I’d like to share is from an article she wrote titled Brainology: Transforming Students’ Motivation To Learn. In these paragraphs, she compares how students who believed intelligence can be grown with effort did compared to those who believed it was innate:

“Those with growth mindsets reported that, after a setback in school, they would simply study more or study differently the next time. But those with fixed mindsets were more likely to say that they would feel dumb, study less the next time, and seriously consider cheating. If you feel dumb — permanently dumb — in an academic area, there is no good way to bounce back and be successful in the future. In a growth mindset, however, you can make a plan of positive action that can remedy a deficiency.”

Dweck has started a website called Brainology which offers an online interactive series of activities for students to learn these concepts. Though she offers quite a few resources for free, the cost for the online program is $20 per student.

Since purchasing the program isn’t economically feasible for me, I developed an alternative and very strategy which I suspect will not be as effective as using the online system, but which will, I hope, be somewhat helpful.  I’d also be very interested in hearing feedback from readers –including critique and suggestions on how to make it better.

MY TEACHING PLAN:

My plan is simple.  I’m thinking of starting off with something like this:

“Some people say you’re born with a certain amount of intelligence – you’re either smart, average, or below-average — and that’s just the way it is and always will be.  Others say we’re all pretty much born with the same amount, and that people who work harder at learning just become more intelligent.  Take a minute and think about those two perspectives.  Write down which one you think is right and why.”

I’ll then have people share in partners and, while that’s going on, identify a few people to be prepared to share what they wrote to the whole class after the partner-sharing is complete.  I won’t given an “answer” to the question.

Then I’ll distribute this You Can Grow Your Intelligence hand-out that’s free from the Brainology site. It’s four pretty simple pages. Students will read the first page on their own, highlight what they think are the twelve most important words that convey the main idea, and write a one sentence summary on the page. They’ll then share what they wrote with a partner. I’ll ask some to share with the entire class.

Next, they’ll take turns reading the second page aloud to their partner, again highlight no more than twelve words, and write a summary. I’m also going to have them write down a question. Again, I’ll ask one or two to share with the class.

Students will change partners again, and then do the same thing with page three as they did with page two. In addition, they’ll demonstrate the reading skill of visualizing and draw what they are seeing in their mind when they read the page. They will also write a sentence describing their drawing. I’ll ask one or two to share with the class, and bring their drawing up to the document camera.

With the same partner this time, they read the last page, repeat the same highlighting and summarizing steps, and then demonstrate the “evaluating” reading strategy by writing if they agree or disagree with what the article says and why. Again, one or two will share with the class.

I’ll ask students to take a minute to think about if and how this article might relate to them, share it with a partner, and a few with the class.

Next, I’ll show a short video titled Neurons and How They Work. I found it on YouTube, but uploaded it to Edublogs.tv so that it’s accessible at our school. It’s a short video that shows how neurons (the article the students will have just read talks about how learning strengthens and multiplies neurons) work.

Then I’ll share the Why Can’t I Skip My Twenty Minutes of Reading Tonight? piece (explaining that the concept is the same even if the specifics are not).

I’ll ask for a show of hands then to see how many feel that intelligence is innate or can be grown, and then ask them to write anonymously if they think they’ll do anything differently after having learned this information.

Depending on how it’s going, I may do it all in one day or split it into two.

I’m also considering somehow using this diagram, which shows what Dweck describes as a “fixed” mindset as opposed to a “growth” mindset.

What do you think?  Am I on the right track?  How can I make it better?

You can read how this lesson actually went in “Now I Know My Brain Is Growing When I Read Every Night”

(Alice Mercer has posted an excellent post describing a lesson she’s done with a similar purpose. I highly recommend that you take a look at Is your brain grass or a glass?)

A blog post titled “I Hate Reading Logs,” says FedUp Mom has been making the rounds on Twitter (thanks to Dawn Morris for the tip).  In it, a mother speaks strongly against the idea of signing-off on her child’s reading each night.

Pretty much the only homework that I require in my classes that is actually done at “home” (I always provide classtime for other “homework”) is that students read a book — any book — for at least thirty minutes, four nights each week. They can write down the title of the book in their school-supplied calendar or even just on a sheet of paper if they don’t have their planner. Then parents have to sign-it — that’s it — the title of the book and the parent signature.   I check the “log” each Friday.  I think the parent signature helps a bit for accountability.

I figure that this minimal requirement is not too onerous, and that students who are readers already probably do this amount of reading on their own, and that it gives those who are not readers enough of a push that they might be pleasantly surpised they like it.

What’s your perspective on this?  Do I think I should do something differently?

Every year I have all the students in my classes create “Who I Am” posters and present them to the entire class at the beginning of the year. It includes sharing their strengths, worries, love, and their hopes and dreams — along with other information. I also do a model presentation.

Every year I’m struck by two things:

* that the students in my English Language Learner classes have very high “hopes and dreams” for themselves and their lives after high school.

* that most of my mainstream students say the same “hope and dream” — “I want to pass this class.”

It’s disconcerting to me that so many of them have “hopes and dreams” at such a low level — not about a potential career, and not even wanting to do more than “pass the class” (even though most are doing really exceptional class work).

Even though I ‘ve tried to have conversations with students about why they seem to have such low-expectations of themselves, I’ve never been successful in trying to get to the bottom of it.

Now, I’m thinking that even though I can’t seem to find-out the “why” of the issue,  there must be something I can do to systematically during the year try to help students develop and articulate a broader vision for themselves.

I’m still trying to figure out how to do it, and would welcome suggestions about what you think I can do, as well as your thoughts about the likely causes of the low-expectations.