Titles That Don't Quite Make It

Background art: Metz's "Planetary Porpoises."

For the last couple of days, Dan and I have been kicking back and forth a little Twitter game under the tag #TitlesThatDontQuiteMakeIt. We're not the only ones out there playing it, and the game appears to have originated on Salman Rushdie's Twitter. It's been a bit of a distraction from writing college recs (I have something like twelve left to go), and we're having a little too much fun with it. Here's a few of my favorites so far:

Kafka's Mega-Porpoises: "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic cetacean."

Joseph Heller's absurdist tale of the Golden Retriever who didn't know where to bring the ball: Fetch-22.

Edgar Allen Bro's "The Telltale Popped Collar."

Shakespeare's Brothello.

Krakauer's Into Thin Hair (truly a harrowing read).

There are lots more on Dan's and my feeds if you're amused and want to read more, and definitely join the game if it sounds like fun to you. Just tag your tweet with #TitlesThatDontQuiteMakeIt and add @tippyunbound and/or @CPTRooster to make sure we see it.

The IQ Fallacy

Too often, we think of intelligence as a fixed quantity, as if we have a certain amount of a magical substance in our heads, and that amount can not be essentially changed. It's a dangerous, damaging, depressing fallacy, and in my experience, it's one of the greatest obstacles to student learning.

David Shenk nicely debunks this fallacy in a 2009 article for The Atlantic. He argues, rather convincingly, that while our genes may theoretically influence our intelligence, our development is a much larger agent in our problem solving ability. IQ is a measurement of a particular set of skills, and those skills can be improved.

Let's not also forget that the IQ test is intentionally narrow in its measurement. It quantifies a particular kind of problem solving, and it does it well, but it makes no attempt to measure intelligence types that are at least as important.

So the next time your student, your colleague, your family member says he's "not smart" or is "bad at that," it might help to remind him that his disposition toward himself or to the subject is much more predictive of his success than the jar of quicksilver ability he believes has been doled out to him by his genes or his creator.

It's not his fault, of course. Western society (and probably others) is absolutely replete with institutional and cultural building blocks that encourage us to think of our abilities as fixed and immovable. Impressive people have "genius;" struggling students are "weak." We separate kids by abilities early in their lives, and we might even refer to some of them as "gifted," as if the others didn't receive the gene as their first birthday present.

This mindset both encourages mediocrity and devalues achievement. A student who demonstrates brilliance in a paper has brought a lifetime of dispositions, opportunities, choices, and yes, talents. But let us not confuse a knack that allows a student to progress quickly for an irreproducible gift that the student has received through some genetic sorcery.

"But," you say, "I have students who work incredibly hard who don't make as much progress as students who do less work. Is that not proof of the existence of talent, raw intelligence, and a gift?" Maybe, and I don't claim to understand every aspect of the interaction between genes, brains, and choices. There probably are starting lines drawn in some ways in our abilities. But I'm also willing to bet dollars to donuts that your hardworking student also has limiting dispositions in his work and that your lessworking student has advantages that have little to do with raw intelligence.

What we mistake for a static gift is actually a combination for factors, the majority of which we can change, and we can influence. Your student has a measurable IQ, but the question isn't "what's your IQ?" The question is "what are you doing to raise it?"

The Grand Design

The Unbound Project has gone from a district-funded experiment to a less formal group of like-minded reformers working mostly on their own time, but that doesn't mean we can't do some real good for this district. The next stage for us is to continue putting our money where our mouths are and to put some of our best conceptual work into practice.

A big part of our central philosophy is our faith in public, formal, specific self-assessment and subsequent collaboration. We do it with the kids, and we do it ourselves. To push ourselves to reflect more formally and specifically, we've developed a large-scale, formal self-assessment for teachers that's designed to help them set up a unit or any large-scale chunk of teaching and then to look back at it afterwards in order to improve future teaching.

It takes you through pre-assessment, setting goals and assigning material, focusing on process, assessing midway, assessing at the end, and connecting the material to the next steps in the class. It tries to help you understand kids' learning as a longer-term process, to push you to put as much as possible into the kids' hands, to shift student and teacher focus to mastery instead of scores, and to encourage all stakeholders to be reflecting on the ways in which habits and process affect outcomes.

To that end, I'll be publishing sections of the self-assessment, one at a time, and using them to reflect on my real-world teaching. We'll see if the assessment leads to better teaching and have an opportunity to improve it at the same time. There should be other Unbound folks doing the same thing, so we'll be able to see it work across different disciplines. I'll give an overview of it this week and begin posting my real-world results as soon as next week, assuming everything plays out as expected. My plan, as of now, is to use the self-assessment on the first major analytical paper for my 10th graders. It's perfect, because there are pre-assessment elements, discussions of process, midway assignments (parts of the paper), a summative assessment (a full draft and a rewrite), and a connection to the next paper.

You can find our current version of the assessment right here as a Google Doc. I've enabled Unbound members to edit the document and I've opened it up as read-only to the whole world. So take a look, and if you have ideas, leave me a comment.