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?

This week’s “question of the week” at my Education Week Teacher blog is:

“How do you teach people to LISTEN better? Everyone seems to want very individualized instructions. They don’t listen to any of the instructions and then the minute they have a problem with the assignment they want me to explain it all over again to them personally. It seems to be almost every teacher’s number one problem — how to teach listening skills…”

Please leave your responses in the comments section of the Ed Week Teacher post.

Thanks!

How Can We “Motivate” The Unmotivated To Learn? is the first question at my teacher advice blog/column at Education Week Teacher.

Please go there and leave a comment with your best responses to that question. Next Wednesday, I’ll post my thoughts, answers from special guests, and responses from people who left comments.

In the classroom lessons on self-control I’ve written about here and in my book, I’ve cited and had students read research on the topic by Professor Roy F. Baumeister.

He’s now co-written a new book titled Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength, and an excerpt has been published in The New York Times called Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue?

Professor Baumeister’s co-author has also written a short accompanying columns to The Times excerpt called Why You Need To Sleep On It.

The underlying research of the article is grounded in the finding, which I’ve written about a lot here (check out “Self-Control As A Limited Energy Resource” In The Classroom and Giving Students “Reflection Cards”), that self-control is a resource that can be depleted, and that we need to be aware of ways to regularly replenish it.

I don’t really have time right now to discuss the Times’ excerpt right now, but will be writing a lengthy post about the book. In the meantime, I’d encourage you to read it, as well as the numerous comments left on the article. A number of them already relate to education, and John Tierney, the co-author, has specifically asked readers to respond to these two questions:

How good is your self-control and decision-making late in the day? Do you use any strategies you’d like to share for conserving willpower and avoiding decision fatigue?

What teacher wouldn’t want help figuring out how their students could learn and develop a few of those strategies? Or perhaps your students are completely focused at 2:00 and 3:00 in the afternoon?

Education Week Teacher has just published an introductory post at my new blog there, Classroom Q & A With Larry Ferlazzo.

Check it out. Subscribe. It should be useful, and a lot of fun!

Thanks to Jason Flom on Google+, I learned about a new article titled Closing The Teaching Gap.

In it, the authors describe their research and observation of mathematics teachers from around the world and compare what they saw in “high achieving” countries with what they see in United States classrooms. Even though they talk about math and, of course, the definition of “high achieving” is always debatable, they do make some important points applicable to any kind of teaching.

Here’s an excerpt:

[The was a] striking similarity among higher-achieving countries. About half of the problems in those countries emphasizing relationships [among ideas, facts & procedures] were worked on with students to do just that. The other half…were changed so that students practiced procedures or recalled information they had learned before. In contrast, few problems in the United States with the potential to emphasize mathematical relationships were used to teach those relationships. Nearly all of them were merely used to practice procedures or recall information….Students…ended up with very few opportunities to learn the concepts.”

The authors say that one tool to change this might be for teachers in the U.S. to incorporate the collaborative style of Japanese Lesson Study instead of our existing model of professional development. That sounds good to me!

I suspect their observation of teachers emphasizing recall instead of relationships between concepts holds true in a lot of classrooms besides math ones. I’ve previously posted about research from McRel using 90,000 classroom observations:

Just under two-thirds of observations (60%) indicate that instruction is at the lowest two levels of the Blooms Taxonomy.

At our school, one way we try to help make those relationships connections is through the use of inductive teaching and learning.

Do you agree with the authors’ critique? How do you help students “connect the dots”?

Five Questions That Will Improve Your Teaching is my newest article in Education Week Teacher.

Feedback — positive or critical — is welcome…

I’ve written several posts, and write extensively in my latest book, about strategies to help students develop self-control (see My Best Posts About Helping Students Develop Their Capacity For Self-Control).

A new study reports that training people through online games to strengthen their working memory results in a substantial increase in their impulse control.

This could be just one more tool in a teacher’s toolbox. I could see trying something like this out with a student who has not responded well to the multiple other strategies I might have tried — perhaps, for a couple of weeks, during the fifteen minutes of practice reading time we have at the beginning of each class, instead just inviting him to use my computer to play some memory games to see what happens (after, of course, explaining to him its purpose and the research behind it).

As always, of course, often the fact that students see that the teacher is going the extra mile to help them has as much of an impact, if not a far greater one, than any potential direct cognitive impact an intervention like this might have.

Here are a few online memory games I’ve found that appear decent — please share others you suggest in the comments section (I primarily want to find games that don’t have easy links to other non-memory games that could prove tempting):

Simon Says

Another Simon Says Memory Game

Short Term Memory Test

Play With Your Mind Memory Games

Brain Concentration

Sensory Concentration

BBC Explore Your Memory

Test My Brain

Name That Name

Name That Number

Objects In Order

Your Amazing Brain

Test Your Memory

Busy Bistro

Memory Matrix

Memory Games

Memory Game comes from National Geographic.

Please leave additional suggestions for memory games in the comments section of this post….

Minority Rules: Scientists Discover Tipping Point for the Spread of Ideas is today’s headline at Science Daily. It’s about a new study where researchers claim they’ve discovered that once ten percent of a population develop a strong belief in something, a majority agreement will follow.

I’m not convinced that these computational models work so well in the real world.

What they’re missing, I think, is that it’s not the initial number that’s most important. What’s key is the “who” and if they are willing to do anything about it.

Saul Alinksy, the father of modern-day community organizing and the person who founded the organization I worked with for nineteen years, believed that two percent would do the trick. Here’s what Nicholas von Hoffman, a longtime colleague, wrote:

“Alinsky sometimes explained to new organizers that if you organized two percent of the population – that energetic minority – you would have enough power to overthrow the government. Not that he had that in mind. But with that two percent a successful and powerful community organization could be established.”

And Alinsky strongly believed that that two percent needed to include many leaders — people with a following, people whose judgment others respected.

In some ways, this focus on the “who” along with their actions might be similar to what Malcolm Gladwell writes about in The Tipping Point.

In the classroom, for example, if I think I need some help in changing a classroom culture or attitude, I focus on winning over a handful of leaders, not just any two or three people. And I talk with them about being active in their help.

Having an arbitrary percentage of people believing something but not willing to do anything about it, or being able to have influence with anyone else, is unlikely to result in any change.

Coincidentally, I was reading a piece by Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach today (which I learned about via John Norton) who touches on some related points.  It’s  titled Thinking Hard While Running On Empty. She discusses Personal Learning Networks, and wonders if they sometimes can result in people just feeling good without leading to action.

Some of the “school reformers,” like Teach For America, seem to have a pretty good grasp on the importance of developing what Alinsky would consider a committed two percent. The Save Our Schools March this weekend and follow-up actions might have the potential of doing the same for effectively promoting a far different, a more fair and more inclusive vision for our schools.

Community organizers — and I was one for nineteen years — constantly emphasize the art and value of compromise. The focus of organizing is to get to the negotiating table and come away with a deal that’s “half a loaf, not half a baby.”

This perspective has served me well in the classroom, and it has informed my judgment on education policy. I’ve previously written about this topic in three posts/articles:

The importance of being unprincipled

The Art & Importance Of Compromise

Five Quotes That All Of Us (Including Self-Righteous School Reformers) Should Keep In Mind

I think working out classroom issues with students through compromise can help them learn an extremely powerful lesson, and provide them with a strategy to deal with challenges for the rest of their lives.

It’s a lesson, I fear, that has never been learned by many “school reformers” (and, I might add, some, albeit a much smaller percentage, of us on the “other side”).

The White House recently released a video of President Obama talking about the value of compromise. I think it’s a good, short analysis that’s worth watching:

Unfortunately, I don’t think he’s been very good in applying his beliefs on compromise to the world of education…

If you’re interested in learning more about the point of view of many of us who are, or who have been, community organizers, here are links to some good videos:

Saul Alinsky Explains Community Organizing as an Outside Agitator – Interview with Studs Terkel (audio only)

Encounter With Saul Alinsky — Part One

Encounter with Saul Alinsky – Part 2

Q & A With Nicholas von Hoffman (von Hoffman recently published a book about his work with Alinsky. You can read a short excerpt in a post I wrote titled “The Price Is Double” — Two Stories About School Reform & Money”)

The Democratic Promise – Saul Alinsky and His Legacy

Feedback is, as always, welcome…

A few days ago I wrote a post titled Emphasizing Pride, Not Shame, In Classroom Management. In it, among other things, I shared some of the things I say to students if I know they are going to have a sub the following day.

A friend saw the post on Facebook, and we were discussing how wrong — on so many levels — the idea of collective punishment is (though I’ll be the first to admit that sometimes every bone in my body wants to collectively punish), and how it’s not unusual for teachers to use that on their classes after there’s misbehavior with a substitute. I explained that in addition to talking with students, students also have to complete a Behavior With A Sub grading rubric, which I discuss and share in When You Have A Sub…. If there had been problems, the rubric identifies who caused the difficulties, and I just express to those students privately and and individually my disappointment and move on.

I also mentioned to her that when I hear angry teachers talking about inflicting collective punishment, I sometimes jokingly remind them that practicing it is against international law.

I was also prompted to write this after seeing a short video that Guy Kawasaki shared today on Google+ called “Don’t Punish Everyone For One Person’s Mistake.” It’s a bit simplistic, but it does make a similar point:

What do you think? Do you ever practice collective punishment? Why or why not? And, if you don’t, but see other teachers doing it, what do you do?

(You might also be interested in an earlier post I wrote called “Alternatives To Collective Punishment”)

As regular readers of this blog, and readers of my latest book (Helping Students Motivate Themselves), know, I have written a lot (see My Best Posts About Helping Students Develop Their Capacity For Self-Control) about helping students strengthen their capacity for self-control.

Among the strategies I’ve discussed is helping students learn about the famous marshmallow test and, as part of the lesson, encourage them to identify ways they can distract themselves when feeling the tug of temptation (for example, when they want to throw a paper wad at a friend, instead they can think of the fun times they’ve had with him/her).

The Los Angeles Times has just written about a new study that examines self-control from a slightly different perspective (see To resist temptation, forget guilt or shame and think positive). Using a piece of chocolate cake instead of a marshmallow (Boy, I can hear my students now complaining that they want cake instead of candy when we do our own version of the marshmallow test as part of our lesson on self-control ), researchers determined that having people think about the pride that they will feel in themselves after resisting temptation was a very successful self-control strategy.

And, interestingly enough, they also found that trying to encourage self-control through the use of shame or guilt actually resulted in people showing less self-control.

When I’m going to have a sub coming in, in addition to students knowing that the substitute will be grading them (and they will be grading themselves) on their behavior using a form I’ve created (see When You Have A Sub), I always make a point of telling the class, “Don’t behave well for the points, and don’t behave well because you don’t want to get sent to the office. Instead, behave well because that’s who you are and because your represent your family.” I say something similar before we go on field trips.

Of course, I am human, and there have been a few times when I’ve reached the end of my rope and I just couldn’t hold back on using shame or guilt…

But this new study, I suspect, may make me pause for reflection during those moments, and cause me to look for other opportunities to reinforce the idea of pride. For example, during the marshmallow test lesson, when asking students to think about how they can distract themselves from bad temptations, I’ll more clearly raise the idea of feeling pride in that accomplishment.  And I’m sure there are other times besides sub days and field trips where I can effectively reinforce that message.

Ah, figuring out positive classroom management strategies, and remembering to implement them in the moment, is a constant challenge…

In my previous post, How My Ninth-Grade English Classes Evaluated Me This Year, I explained I was going to have my students evaluate the class and me after they used an improvement rubric to compare an essay they wrote in September with one they wrote in May. I shared how research studies show the importance of helping students see how much they improve, and its impact. In my post, I reported that last week two-thirds of my students said they learned “some” in the class while one-third said they learned “a lot.” I also predicted, based on past experience,  that after having students evaluate the class again following their essay review that those numbers would be reversed.

Well, I decided to do that process today, and my prediction turned out to be correct. No one had any different answers to questions except for that one, and the numbers were reversed — now 2/3 say they learned “a lot” and 1/3 say they learned “some.”

Actually, there was one other change in the responses.

For some reason, I had omitted one question from the original evaluation form:

Would you want to take another class taught by Mr. Ferlazzo?

I added it to the form I passed out today.

All but two responded “yes.”

I’ve written quite a bit about Daniel Pink’s book, Drive, here on this blog (see My Best Posts On “Motivating” Students) and in my new book.

I recently saw what I think is the best short description and summary of the book’s key points. Check-out the post “What really motivates us?” at the Barking Up the Wrong Tree blog.