A Handy Weight Loss Metaphor

When you're trying to lose weight, you shouldn't focus on the scale. If you weigh yourself each day and put your focus on the weigh-in, you're going to see fluctuations that distract you from your goal. You might do exactly the right thing with your diet and exercise plan one day, but see your weight go up slightly the next. It might simply be that you're better hydrated today, but it looks like you've gained a pound. You did exactly what you should do, but by focusing on the measurements instead of on the actions, you've undercut your success. You'll experience frustration that will decrease your ability to continue making the right choices for the rest of the day.

Instead, you should have relied on less frequent weigh-ins, or—if you're like me and love playing around with data—you should have averaged your daily weight over a longer period. Then, blips in the data—things that human psychology might overstate or misinterpret—take a more accurate place in context.

I'm sure you saw the grading metaphor coming a mile away. By encouraging kids to obsess over the measurements of academic success rather than the process that leads to it, we undercut their potential. If I want an A on the Lord of the Flies paper in three weeks, focusing on wanting an A and stressing out about it are not productive.  Instead, I should focus on developing and following the daily process that would lead to the best possible performance. I should take notes during class discussion; I should mark quotations during each night's reading. I should plan the paper early, start writing the day it's assigned, and meet with my teacher at least once before the first draft is due.

And even then, the single paper might have glitches that were beyond my control. Or, like the hypothetical hydrated individual on the scale, I might have done something right—like experimenting with my paper's structure—that seems to have moved me away from my goal, even though it was actually a great move for my longer-term growth as an intellectual. If the grade defines my experience, then I've failed. If my work process and my mastery define my experience, I've succeeded.

Believe it or not: it's easier to continue behavior that makes you feel stressed than to follow through on a plan which will ultimately make you feel better and more relaxed in the long term. In fact, in my experience, stress gives students a reason to engage in avoidance behavior, and they often end up doing less work. The work they actually do is less efficient and less useful. It's Psych 101 that the mind will prefer a distraction to a stressful, unpleasant confrontation, and it's Psych 102 that the emotions associated with stress interfere with our ability to reason and remember.  That's the basis of procrastination, and it's one of the reasons a kid will spend ten hours in a week poring over Facebook or grinding out an obscure achievement in a video game rather than spending one hour devoting attention to a simple task that will pay off in happiness and respect down the road.

If you want to lose weight, you need to focus on getting yourself into your running shoes, not on beating yourself up at the weigh-in. If you want to gain intellectual ability, you need to focus on the daily process and trust that doing things right will make you a better intellectual in the long run. Then, the longer term measurements (e.g., quarter grades), can actually make some sense as useful benchmarks of your progress. Mastery may be harder to benchmark than a GPA, but that's where our kids' focus needs to be.

Top-Down Reform is an Oxymoron

In the coming weeks, I'm going to be test-driving a teacher self-assessment system I'm designing with some colleagues, but today I wanted to share an LA Times Op-Ed whose theme is the involvement—more, more accurately, the lack of involvement—of teachers in the school reform process.

While the article primarily addresses national school reform in ways most relevant to failing schools, in exploring the problems with the top-down approach to improving schools, it draws some lessons that absolutely apply to Westport:

Instead of seeing teachers as key contributors to system improvement efforts, reformers are focused on making teachers more replaceable. Instead of involving teachers and their unions in collaborative reform, they are being pushed aside as impediments to top-down decision-making. Instead of bringing teachers together to help each other become more effective professionals, district administrators are resorting to simplistic quantified individual performance measures. In reality, schools are collaborative, not individual, enterprises, so teaching quality and school performance depend above all on whether the institutional systems support teachers' efforts.

Now, in Westport, the theme certainly isn't "making teachers more replaceable." There is a substantial honoring of teacher autonomy and quality in this community and in the district's attitude. However, the district is still heavily focused on a top-down approach to improving itself, and that approach absolutely wastes teacher talent and creates more frustration and gridlock than it does substantive reform. The recent issues with the social networking policy are a perfect example of a problem created by "top-down decision-making" when "involving teachers and their unions in collaborative reform" could easily have produced a more sensible, precisely-worded policy to better protect students and teachers. Despite the best of intentions, the top-down approach is doomed by its nature to expend most of its energy in meetings, producing policy changes that often do more harm than good.

The district has launched a "Westport 2025" initiative to examine reform possibilities for the school system. There's some good work happening around this initiative, but it's primarily a top-down, administrative push run by people who aren't in the classroom. There are some teachers on the initiative's committee, but it's unclear what their role really is or what the committee's specific purpose might be.

Teachers hold the curriculum in their hands every day, and every day they stand in front of the students and work with it. They know what's getting in the way of real learning and what supports it. They see qualitative data every day, while administrators are largely limited to the quantitative data they can gather. It's no fault of any particular administrator; in fact, my experience with the administrative team is that they are good-hearted people who want to support their teachers and make positive changes. It's the nature of the beast itself that's the problem.

If you want to change schools for the better, and if you want to change this district for the better, you need to provide teachers with opportunities to collaborate on reform. They need to be involved from the first steps to the last, and they need to have the time to do so. Yes, that means money. Teachers are already working full-time just teaching the curriculum in its current form. If you want them to work on revolutionizing it, you need to give them the money and the time they need to work on that part-time job on top of their full-time job.

Even more than money, though, it means reaching out and putting the teachers in control of reform. You don't write new policy or curriculum and put it in place and then see if the teachers are upset enough to protest. You need to put your ideas on the table and ask the teachers where they would go with the reform, and you need to compensate them for the substantial amount of time it takes to reinvent a school properly. If the district is serious about reform, it needs to get serious about structuring and funding that reform, or "Westport 2025" is going to produce a lot of good-sounding concepts and little fundamental change.

Mixing Up Instructional Style

I love finding articles that challenge common wisdom, like this recent NPR piece that upends the notion of "visual" and "auditory" learners. I've always thought that tailoring your instruction to an auditory learner, even if he actually exists, doesn't necessarily do him a great service. As long as our central mission is to teach kids how to learn autonomously, catering to their strengths is only one piece of the puzzle. It's just as important to help them expand the ways they learn. An auditory learner should be working on learning better with visuals.

In these first weeks of school, I have kids setting goals for themselves and their year. One girl said that she wasn't very visual and had trouble imagining the details of setting in certain books. She felt it was impeding her ability to enjoy those books and to understand them as deeply as she wanted to. She didn't demand books that better suited her strengths. She recognized that if she wanted to access an important text that didn't play to her reading style, she'd need to adapt. 

So it's great to hear some brain scientists sending us a message that underscores the importance of a varied teaching style. Whether or not the purported "auditory" and "visual" learners really exist, good teaching is going to constantly mix up the ways kids are asked to engage with material. They need to read, to draw, to visualize, to move, to argue, to listen, and to do the million other things a great intellectual does to grapple with a meaningful set of concepts.

And I love that this piece challenges our bias towards the status quo. The human brain always runs under assumptions—without which we couldn't function effectively—but some of the most deeply embedded common wisdom is probably false, so we need to be questioning those obvious things that we take for granted, at least once in a while.

I'm challenging myself this week to mix it up. I tend to rely heavily on writing-as-thinking and discussion as a sort of default mode for approaching a text, but I'm going to challenge myself to get my kids moving, drawing, flow-charting, or carving wax sculptures.

Sample Student Blog Update

Since Google/Blogger has updated its software, some of the important settings are in new places. I've created a new set of blog setup instructions for students on the Sample Student Blog. I'm starting off all my kids in the new interface, but Blogger still allows you to use the old interface, so if you need the old instructions, they're still available here.