Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

I read, hear, and even write a lot about “techniques” that are supposed to improve schools and classroom instruction. Often times, professional development books and workshops (and teacher hand-outs at staff meetings) are filled with zillions of them — how to use multiple intelligences, technology, specific instructional strategies with students that have special needs, etc.

These techniques are obviously important.

I wonder, though, if we teachers and our students, schools, and districts might be better off if we spent a little more time focusing on — for lack of being able to come up with better terms — our “cultural orientations” or basic “ways of thinking”?

What am I talking about?

Please bear with me as share my thinking on all this. Usually, I don’t post a piece like this which is more of a “process post” — I don’t necessarily have as much clarity as I would like, and, instead, am sharing my thoughts and hoping that feedback from readers will helping move my thinking along.

Last week marked the 100th anniversary of Peter Drucker’s birth. Drucker was the renowned business and management philosopher, writer, theorist, analyst. His thinking also says a lot to community organizing (my previous career) and teaching (my present one) Someone (and I’m sorry that I can’t remember who) wrote about National Public Radio’s coverage of this anniversary, which pointed out that his most important idea was:

the importance of a company having a sense of mission or a purpose, and that that’s not identical with its strategy, it’s not identical with its business model, it’s why it exists and what social good or greater good that it’s serving. That’s a very important Drucker idea.

When I’m talking about a “cultural orientation” or “way of thinking,” I think mean something like what Drucker meant. But something more than “whatever is good for kids.”

I’d like to give three examples of what I mean — in the classroom, in a school and, in the context of schools connecting with parents.

IN A CLASSROOM

In the first part of each school year, in most of my classes I lead a discussion with students asking what they want our class to be — “A Community of Learners” or a “Classroom of Students.” I write about this more extensively in my book “Teaching English Language Learners: Strategies That Work” (which will be out next summer), but I’ll give a short description here.

I write the two columns on the overhead and give some examples of the difference between the two. In a classroom of students, a teacher does most of the talking. In a Community Of Learners, students work in small groups and are co-teachers. In a “classroom” people laugh when others make mistakes, while in a “community” people are supported when they take risks. In a “classroom” the teacher has to be always be the one to keep people focused, while in a “community” students take responsibility to keep themselves focused.

Most students say their previous classes had been more like a “Classroom of Students.” I ask students to share what other differences they might see between the two types. Here are a couple of examples students said this year:

In a “classroom” “students start a fight and end up hurting each other.” In a “community” “they don’t start a fight, they talk it out.”

In a “classroom” “the only way to succeed is doing exactly what the teacher says.” In a “community” “you have more than one choice in succeeding.”

After adding to the list, students then decide which one they’d rather have. No one has every chosen a “classroom of students.”

By starting with this basic “cultural orientation” or “way of thinking,” students developed their own ways of approaching (I guess you could almost call it their own “techniques”) how the class would operate. It provided a framework for looking at numerous issues throughout the whole school year, and respected their judgment and wants.

IN A SCHOOL:

Ted Appel has done a tremendous job working with teachers over the past few years at our school to develop a “cultural orientation” or “way of thinking.”  Basically, it’s not acceptable for students to not do well — everybody succeeds.  That way of thinking operates almost universally among the faculty, and is amazingly prevalent among students as well.

Our tutoring project, where students hire (and fire) teachers of their choice, is an example of this way of thinking. We didn’t set-up an after-school tutoring center and then blame the students for not showing-up. Ted and our staff began with the thinking that some students needed help, and looked at what were the barriers to them getting the most effective assistance they could get so they could do well and thought outside the box.

IN A PARENT ENGAGEMENT STRATEGY

In my book, Building Parent Engagement In Schools, I highlight the differences between parent involvement and parent engagement.  Some of those differences include the primary “involvement” tool schools use is their mouths to talk, while the primary “engagement” tool is their ears to listen.  Involvement is often about one-way communication, while engagement can be about two-way conversation.   The invitation to involvement is often “irritating” — challenging parents to do something the schools want them to do, while with engagement it’s often “agitation” — challenging parents to do something that they say they want to do.

Obviously a few examples are useful to illustrate each of those parent engagement elements, but if schools are committed to that kind of criteria, they can judge their own possible actions against them.  They don’t necessarily need a long laundry list of what they should or shouldn’t do.

I guess all I’m wondering is how many schools and districts are skipping looking  these big kinds of cultural orientations or ways of thinking?

I wonder if there should be more of an investment in developing our compasses instead of giving us road maps?

What do you think?

I’ve only had limited success in my own personal attempts at using visualization and guided imagery in my own life, so have been reluctant to encourage others to try it.

Until last year.

I had an exceptionally challenging mainstream ninth-grade English class last year (see Have You Ever Taught A Class That Got “Out Of Control”?) and nothing I tried was successful in helping one student develop self-control. He repeatedly told me he knew he needed to make changes and that he wanted to — and I’m convinced he was sincere — but he just couldn’t do it.

As a last resort, I suggested that he go outside to read his book during our silent reading time (which began each class) and, before he began to read, close his eyes for a couple of minutes and see himself acting as the student he wanted to be — cooperative, focused, not always reacting to provocations. He was willing to give it a try, and it had an immediate positive effect and produced much better results than anything else we had tried. We continued with this daily practice for the rest of the school year and, even though he wasn’t the “perfect” student, he handled himself much, much better.

After having that experience last year, I was certainly open to a recent idea from Jim Peterson, a talented Vice-Principal at our school.

He wanted to know if I would be interested in trying out some visualization techniques with my ninth-grade class this year — not around behavior issues (I don’t have those problems with this year’s class), but with helping them use it to become better readers and writers.

So, between my positive experience with my challenging student last year and my super-duper positive experience following Jim’s advice in the past (Have You Ever Taught A Class That Got “Out Of Control”?), of course I agreed to give it a try.

I became even more enthusiastic after Jim had me do a quick and simple visualization technique to demonstrate what he was talking about. He had me stand straight with one of my arms sticking outward in front of me. Then he had keep my arm outstretched and straight, and move it to the back as far as I could without straining. Next, he asked me to note the location my hand was pointing to at its limit.

After that, he had me close my eyes and mentally visualize (without doing the physical movement) doing the same thing several times — stretching as far as I could — starting off doing it slowly and then repeating it several times faster. Each time I would move my arm back to the front and then back again. After doing that for perhaps a couple of minutes, he told me to open my eyes and physically repeat the movement. Much to my surprise, I was able to easily move my arm much farther back than I had the first time.

This was a great example of his idea for making it work in the classroom — if students could visualize becoming better readers and writers, perhaps it would help them actually become ones.

Jim came to my classroom (he’s also working with another teacher who’s trying it out) and did a short interactive presentation on the conscious and subconscious mind, and combined it with visualization exercises like the one he did with me. Students seemed pretty enthusiastic — they are priding themselves on being “guinea pigs” for lessons that get replicated by other teachers (see “I Know My Brain Is Growing…” and “I Like This Lesson Because It Make Me Have a Longer Temper” (Part One)).

Twice a day prior to beginning a writing or reading activity I’ve begun to ask students to take twenty seconds to either close their eyes or keep their eyes open and visualize themselves being excellent readers or writers in the upcoming activity. After a few days, it appears that most are taking it seriously.

I’ll be asking students to incorporate some specific reading goals in the weekly goal-setting students do (see The Best Part Of The President’s Speech & How I’ll Use It). We’ll be doing some simple assessments twice a month to see what kind of progress students are making.

There’s more to the preparation that we did for that class, but I can share those details in a later post.

I did want to say that I was so impressed with my ninth-grade students’ reaction that I tried something similar with my Intermediate English class. I was surprised to find that they were not as enthusiastic as my ninth-graders, but were willing to give it a try. Thanks to Diarmuid Fogarty, I was also able to find some intriguing literature on the use of visualization with English Language Learners (see Zoltán Dörnyei, scroll down to “Chapters in edited volumes” and look at Chapters 2-5).

With my Intermediate English class, I’ll be giving monthly assessments to both my class and another class using the same curriculum that will function as a control group.

We’ll see what happens. My belief is that it might very well help the students who think it will help them. And that taking a few seconds to focus more certainly can’t hurt.

Have you tried anything like this with your students?

I recently began began a thread on the Edutopia Classroom Management Group (Alice Mercer and I facilitate it) asking people to share the best classroom management advice they’ve ever been given.

I’ve posted about my own choice earlier, but since I’ve been thinking more about it over the past few weeks because of some classroom issues that have come-up, I thought people might find it helpful to share again.

It comes from Marvin Marshall, one of my favorite writers on positive methods of classroom management.

He wrote:

Will what I am about to do or say bring me closer or will it push me away farther from the person with whom I am communicating?

Sometimes — not often, but sometimes — I can lose my temper a bit with a student. Each time that has happened since I read that line, I have been able to remember that wise piece of advice and shift gears. Obviously, it would have been better for me not to get upset in the first place but, of course, I am only human…

It’s similar to the old community organizing adage I often used during my nineteen year community organizing career — after you polarize, always depolarize.

When I first posted about this piece of advice, I included a useful link to a New York Times article titled When The Heart Pays The Price of Anger. The last line of that article is “Life is very lonely when you are always right.”

Feel free to share the best piece of classroom management advice you’ve ever read or heard — either in the comments here or in the Edutopia Classroom Management Discussion Group.

Our very talented and innovative principal Ted Appel (you’ll be able to read an interview with him in Public School Insights that Claus von Zastrow will post there in a couple of weeks) recently came up with another excellent idea — this one related to students getting tutors.

Our school is a recipient of a multi-year federal grant to support Small Learning Communities (we have seven SLC’s which are made up of roughly 300 students and twenty teachers each — those students pretty much stay in those groupings for their high school career). Part of that grant provides substantial funding for “tutoring.”

Ted thought, “Why not use the money to have students hire teachers of their choice as tutors and they can arrange the time (before –school, lunchtime, after-school, weekends) and location?”

As Ted explained it to me, many schools might use these kinds of funds for “tutoring centers” that don’t easily offer the flexibility that might be needed to make tutoring an attractive idea to students.

Of course, the National No Child Left Behind Act also requires all schools in Program Improvement to offer the students the option of receiving tutoring paid by NCLB funds (known as supplemental educational services, SES). There has been a fair amount of criticism of the unevenness of those providers (see Research shows key NCLB provision not helping students and Evidence Thin on Student Gains From NCLB Tutoring ), and often it’s difficult for those tutors to really communicate well with students’ teachers to coordinate on curriculum and student strengths and challenges.

The way that our school has set it up has teachers identifying students who appear that they might need tutoring and initiating a discussion about how the program works. It’s quite simple — we have a list of teachers at the school who have said they’d be open to being a tutor; the student can review the list (with help from a teacher who knows him/her and who can provide suggestions on who might be a good fit); the student arranges to “interview” potential tutors; and then they develop a contract that is agreed to by all parties (including parents). There can be one or twenty sessions, and the teacher is paid the regular hourly rate paid by the District for extra activities.

I love the way it has transformed some conversations I’ve had with students. Several of my students are having major challenges in their math classes. I’ve been able to approach them to share my concern about what I hear from their math teacher, and explain to them that they could get their own individual tutor; they could hire a teacher of their choice; they can interview several if they want; and then they help determine when and where the tutoring takes place.  If they try it out, and don’t like it, then they can fire their tutor and find someone else.  We review the names of available teachers, and I can help them narrow down who might be a good fit — temperamentally and language and content-wise.  It sends a message, I believe, that we really are going the extra mile, and that they have power in their hands.   It maximizes the benefit for students as well, since it’s very easy for teachers to communicate with each other about the individual student, and since we have common curriculum in many of our classes,  students won’t using content that is “parachuted” in by an outside provider.

As Ted puts it,  “It reflects our school’s thinking.  We don’t just want to put on a tutoring center after school,  say we provided it,  and then blame the kids for not coming. ”

Even if some students don’t follow-through, it removes an excuse that they can give themselves (and others) for why they aren’t doing well.

Are any of your schools doing anything like this?

I regularly try to reflect on various aspects of my teaching practice, and one of the things I look at it is the kind of feedback I give to students.

I’ve written about this before in “What Kind Of Feedback Should We Give Our Students?” In that post, I share resources about Carol Dweck’s research on the importance of praising effort instead of intelligence.

Marvin Marshall, who writes a lot about positive classroom management strategies, just wrote about the topic in his email newsletter. Since it’s only available via email, and I can’t link to it, I’ll reprint a portion here. He frames it as the difference between praise and acknowledgment (I’d also call it recognition):

QUESTION:

Can you explain the difference between praise and acknowledgment?

RESPONSE:

It’s important to be aware of the difference between praise
and acknowledgment because so often we praise when we would
really rather create the outcome that acknowledgment
accomplishes. Acknowledgments encourage and motivate. They
serve to give recognition without the disadvantages of
praise.

The following two characteristics usually determine whether
a comment is one of praise or one of acknowledgment:

1. Praise often starts with a reference to oneself, as in
-”I am so proud of you for…. ”
-”I like the way….”

2. Praise is patronizing.

Praise has a price. It implies a lack of acceptance and
worth when the youth does not behave as the adult wishes.
Using a phrase which starts with, “I like,” encourages a
young person to behave in order to please the adult. By
contrast, acknowledgment simply affirms and fosters
self-satisfaction in the young person.

Notice the difference in the following examples:

Praise:
“I am so pleased with the way you treated your brother.”

Acknowledgment:
“You treated your brother very well.”
———

Praise:
“I like the way you are working.”

Acknowledgement:
“Your working shows good focus and control.”
———

Praise:
“I’m so proud of you for your good grades.”

Acknowledgment:
“Your grades show success in school. How do you feel about
that?”

Here is something to consider:
If you would not make the comment to an adult, then think
twice before making it to a young person.

I find this concept incredibly difficult to remember “in the moment.”  I know it’s the correct way to go, but I don’t think I’m alone in this.  Does anybody have any “tricks” to help prompt you to keep this difference in mind when you’re in the classroom?

Angela Maiers has written a great post about the power our language has as teachers. She talks particularly about using the phrase “I notice…” with students. I would very strongly recommend you read her entire post, titled “Two Powerful Words: I Notice.”

One quote she includes is something said by Susan Sarandon in the movie “How We Dance”:

“We need a witness to our lives. There’s a billion people on the planet… I mean, what does any one life really mean? But in a marriage, you’re promising to care about everything. The good things, the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things… all of it, all of the time, every day. You’re saying ‘Your life will not go unnoticed because I will notice it. Your life will not go un-witnessed because I will be your witness’.”

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)