I’ve previously posted about my classroom practice of having students share three good things that have happened to them during the week, and shared studies that demonstrate its value in enhancing a positive classroom environment. At the same time, I ask students to share about something that was “not so good” and what they could have done to make it better.

It’s always gone very well.

Today, though, I read about an exercise that I think can make it even better.

Tom Peters wrote about an idea called the “Three Good Things Exercise” from Martin Seligman, founder of the Positive Psychology Movement. Here is how Peters described it:

Each night before you go to sleep:

1. Think of three good things that happened today.

Anything from the most mundane to the most exalted works, as long as it seems to you like a good, positive, happy thing.

2. Write them down.

3. Reflect on why they happened.

Determining the “why” of the event is the most important part of the exercise, and can open up your mind to ways you can increase the positive experiences you have.

As I read this, I realized that though I have asked my students to reflect on why an event didn’t go very well, I’ve never asked them to think about why their three positive experiences were so positive.

Duh! In retrospect, I’ve clearly missed a great opportunity for reflection and metacognition.

But it’s never too late to learn. I’ll start trying this out and blog about the results.

I’m adding this post to My Best Posts On Why It’s Important To Be Positive In Class.

(NOTE: You can see videos of my student’s final projects for this unit here)

As regular readers, I’m a fan of Carol Dweck’s work, notwithstanding my critique of her recent New York Times op ed on willpower.

I was recently watching a video of a group discussing Professor Dweck’s book, with her participating via Skype. I was struck by one comment she made, saying “we should celebrate mistakes.”

So, today I began to experiment with a lesson on doing just that. I’m going to refine it a lot more, and I think my colleagues might try it out in a number of different classes and make it even better. Here’s what I’m doing — I’m all ears if you have some ideas. My final version will be adaptable to all levels of students — mainstream and ESL:

Today, I began to very briefly talk about how we learn from our mistakes and, if we aren’t making any, then we’re not taking enough risks. I asked my ESL Beginners to write down what they felt were two common mistakes they made in learning English. They were all pretty broad — pronunciation, remembering new words, etc. They then shared what they wrote in groups of three.

Tomorrow, I’ll ask them to review what they wrote, and then try to remember specific times when they made mistakes in those more general categories. Then, I’ll ask them to write what they learned from each of those experiences. I’ll give the example of “I said ‘bottle’ the wrong way and people couldn’t understand me. My friend helped me learn the correct way to say it.” Students will then share what they wrote in small groups.

Later tomorrow, I’ll create an inductive data set (read more about inductive data sets here) listing each specific example and what they learned from it separately.

On Wednesday, students will need to cut each item out and paste them on a sheet in categories (I’ll probably just use the common general problems they wrote today for the categories they’ll use). I’ll use the typical “moves” of an inductive data set (see the earlier link for information about those, or see my books).

Thursday, they will review the content of each category, think about them, and add new examples they can think of — including mistakes they made and what they learned from each one. Students will share them in groups, and I hope students will see what a vast amount of knowledge they have learned from making mistakes.

Friday, each student will get a Post-It. I’ll ask them to pick one mistake they listed and what they wrote they learned, have them share in the Friday groups where we review weekly homework, and paste them on a “Mistake Wall.” We’ll make this a regular weekly event.

What do you think?

I’ve written a lot about positive ways to provide student feedback, including applying Carol Dweck’s research. You can find those thoughts at The Best Resources For Learning How To Best Give Feedback To Students and in my book.

Ms. Dweck recently spoke at a San Francisco conference and, though it sounds like she didn’t share anything substantial she hasn’t reported before, I though one quote in particular from the column reporting her talk was the best summary I had seen of her research:

Praise for intelligence instead of praise for effort sends the wrong message. People who are praised for being smart “don’t want to risk their newly minted genius status,” and that fosters static, rigid organizations. Praise for effort keeps people engaged and willing to work hard.

Short and sweet!

The New York Times has a fascinating article today about Lincoln and The Mormons. It explains that he basically made a deal to leave them alone and they left him alone. This is what he told a Mormon leader:

When I was a boy on the farm in Illinois there was a great deal of timber on the farm which we had to clear away. Occasionally we would come to a log which had fallen down. It was too hard to split, too wet to burn, and too heavy to move, so we plowed around it.

In other words, there are some battles not worth fighting, which also happens to be a community organizing axiom.

I also think it’s also a good classroom management guide. We need to “keep on our eyes on the prize” and not get sucked into distracting conflicts.

If a student just keeps on forgetting to bring a pencil to class, I just give him one from a big box of golf pencils I buy at the beginning of each school year. If they don’t have paper, I have stack. I’ve got bigger fish to fry, like helping them developing intrinsic motivation to read the first book in their lives and develop an appetite for learning.

Response: Several Ways To Respond To “Unpredictable” Student Behavior is the title of my newest post at Education Week.

I think people might find it helpful…

Several Ways To Help Students Develop Self-Control is the title of my newest column at Education Week Teacher.

I think teachers might find this one particularly useful…..

How Can We Help Students Develop Self-Control? is the new “question of the week” over at my Education Week column.

Please consider visiting there and leaving a response….

Three intriguing articles have been published in the past week about homework. I’m adding them to The Best Resources For Learning About Homework Issues:

Why have homework? appeared in The Boston Globe. It discusses a new study which states that homework can improve academic achievement in math, but not in other subjects. I posted about this research a few months ago, and it’s worth checking out that post for the comments that readers left. Note that the Globe just instituted a paywall, though, for now, you can get around it by quickly registering for free at the site.

The Trouble With Homework appeared in The New York Times is by Annie Murphy Paul. It’s interesting but, to tell you the truth, I found the follow-up commentary left by students at The New York Times Learning Network to be more intriguing.

The Zits comic strip makes a good point today — you never know what can make a big difference in a kid’s day — a cookie, a kind word, asking a question about his/her life and listening to the response…

I’ll soon be publishing a “The Best…” list on resources to learn about the brain. An article just published in National Geographic, though, is probably the most readable one I’ve seen. It’s titled Teenage Brains and was written by David Dobbs.

I was particularly struck by his analysis of research and experiments about how teens are particularly motivated by social rewards — connecting with their peers (of course, this is no great revelation to those of us who are parents or high school teachers):

The teen brain is similarly attuned to oxytocin, another neural hormone, which (among other things) makes social connections in particular more rewarding. The neural networks and dynamics associated with general reward and social interactions overlap heavily. Engage one, and you often engage the other. Engage them during adolescence, and you light a fire.

He then talks (a little less convincingly — at least to me) about its evolutionary purpose:

Yet teens gravitate toward peers for another, more powerful reason: to invest in the future rather than the past. We enter a world made by our parents. But we will live most of our lives, and prosper (or not) in a world run and remade by our peers. Knowing, understanding, and building relationships with them bears critically on success. Socially savvy rats or monkeys, for instance, generally get the best nesting areas or territories, the most food and water, more allies, and more sex with better and fitter mates. And no species is more intricately and deeply social than humans are.

But, whether you “buy” the second part or not, it’s just another reminder to us teachers about the advantages of having students work in small groups. Earlier in the article, Dobbs quotes a researcher saying that teens give “more weight to the payoff” of social connections than adults do. Given this scientific evidence, and most of what we just see in the classroom, why wouldn’t we teachers try to take advantage of it by incorporating small group work in our lessons as much as possible?

I’ve previously posted The Best Sites For Cooperative Learning Ideas. Tomorrow, I’ll be posting a more specific “The Best…” list sharing posts about the nuts and bolts of using small groups effectively in the classroom.

I went to high school in Milwaukee at about the time the television series, Happy Days, was popular. Of course, everyone’s favorite character was Fonzie. And the clique I was a member of in those days had its own Fonzie-like character by the name of Eric.

My classmate Eric was the coolest of the cool. Everything and anything came easily to him. And he shared one other key quality with The Fonz (at least, in my memory of Fonzie) — he relished helping the rest of us look good. And that was the primary source of our respect for him. If we were hoping to take out a particular girl, he would use all his “coolness” to help us be successful. If we wanted our parents to hear how responsible we were acting when we went out at night, he would use all his charms and successfully reassure our parents.

He seemed to be happiest when he was helping us be successful.

I play basketball a lot, though my skill level peaked at mediocre about thirty-five years ago. There are a lot of good basketball players out there, but the ones who get the most respect on the court are the few who are clearly extraordinarily skilled, but use their ability to make the rest of us look good.

They seem to enjoy the game the most by making the rest of us look good.

It seems to me that this quality is beyond empathy, but I don’t know what you’d call it (help me out if you can). And maybe it’s a quality that, no matter what we do, will always be limited to a small number of people.

But I wonder what specific things we can do to help students learn to derive joy not just from helping people, but from helping others look good — from helping others get credit for success.

What do you think?

Response: Several Ways To Help Students Become Better Listeners is the title of my newest weekly column at Education Week Teacher.

Check-out the responses and share your own experiences!

This month’s issues of ASCD Educational Leadership has just been published, and in it Robert Marzano reports on a study that may be the most important one that’s come out this year.

Here is a very simple summary of his study, which was a “meta-analysis” of hundreds of others: It found that “direct instruction” was a more effective instructional method than “unassisted discovery learning.” And it found that “enhanced discovery learning” trumped them both.

I personally think this idea of “unassisted discovery learning” is a bit of a “straw man.” It basically means that students have to learn on their own with very little assistance from a teacher. As example might be how I started a science lesson once on the scientific method — I gave students two cups — one half filled with water, and scissors and asked them to figure out how they would tell time with it. I call the issue a “straw man,” though, because I, and many other teachers, might start off a lesson like this (plenty of research has shown that the use of “novelty” like this is effective), I’m not convinced many would make the whole lesson “unassisted.”

What’s important, though, about the study, I think, is that it highlights that “enhanced discovery learning” was particularly effective.

Here’s how the study itself (you have to pay $12 to gain access to it) defined “enhanced discovery learning”:

…generation, elicited explanations, and guided discovery conditions. Generation conditions required learners to generate rules, strategies, images, or answers to experimenters’ questions. Elicited explanation conditions required that learners explain some aspect of the target task or target material, either to themselves or to the experimenters. The guided discovery conditions involved either some form of instructional guidance (i.e.,scaffolding) or regular feedback to assist the learner at each stage of the learning tasks.

That certainly sounds like the exact definition of inductive teaching and learning. a strategy which our school uses a whole lot, and about which I have written a great deal on this blog and in my books.

Plus, it gets the Marzano “imprimatur”!

What do  you think — am I exaggerating the potential importance of this study?