I Wish I Had This Assignment in High School

One of the most fun things about being a teacher in a district that supports—or at least allows—creative assignments and curricular choices is that you can use or create assignments that you wish somebody had given to you in high school. I had some wonderful, creative teachers, but contemporary practices in my school system in the 90s would never have allowed for the kind of choice reading assignments I can give to my students now.

Our ninth grade curriculum has "outside reading" as one of its components, and while teachers each implement it in their own unique ways, it typically involves having students read a text independently with little or no class time devoted to it. My implementation of outside reading for the last few years has shifted to allowing students as much choice as possible.

There's no better way to improve your writing than a good book
and the right spot to read it in (me in Auke Bay, Alaska in 2006).

That goes for all levels of students. For strong readers, choice allows them to take some risks in expanding their horizons. Too often, the strong students are crushed with so much work that the joy of reading that made them strong in the first place starts to sap away as it becomes a chore. For readers who struggle, choice is an opportunity to find a book that they might really enjoy, and enjoyment is often the quality that's missing from a struggling reader's world. If reading has always been a source of boredom and frustration, the student doesn't read, and the cycle spirals downwards as the school books become more challenging. Choice can allow the kid to pick something that's genuinely interesting to him or her, which can help break that cycle.

The research absolutely supports the idea that the amount a child reads is a key part of expanding vocabulary, increasing fluency, improving writing skills, and hitting pretty much every goal and standard you could have for a high school student. For all the important work we do teaching grammar, vocabulary, and organization, I'm not sure there's any more effective way to improve a kid's language skills than getting a kid to read more stuff with more interest. Kids who read more also get higher standardized test scores in a way that doesn't suck the fun out of learning. Here's an article from the American Association of School Librarians that gathers together a massive amount of research supporting these findings.

For parents wondering how to improve your kids' SAT scores, ACT scores, CAPT scores, grades in the humanities, college admissions prospects, and all the other metrics that sometimes overshadow the the passion, excitement, and engagement of learning: let the kid read whatever he'll read and support it however you can. If it's in standard English, it'll expand his understanding of grammar, complex vocabulary, and sentence structure. The people with the big vocabularies generally got them from books, not from flash cards.

In order to support kids in this endeavor from within the curriculum, I start the process with the summer reading book. Students write reviews of their independently chosen summer reading books, and we kick off outside reading by reading each other's reviews. We also spent a day in the library with Mr. Neenan (@neenanc) learning about ways to find books to enjoy. We asked ourselves, "what skills and knowledge do you need to navigate a bookstore or a library to find something you love?" and shared our answers with the kids. Also, Mr. Neenan and I both spent some time curating a selection of books on GoodReads we've read and loved or hated (here's mine). So based on all of that input from their peers and teachers, students get to pick a new book that they might love, they review it, and the process continues.

So for quarter 3, students pick a book and blog about why and how they picked it. Then, a review of the book is due in a few weeks. Here's the first step:

Take some time to browse the library catalog, GoodReads, and the library itself and pick a new book for your outside read. Really think outside your traditional choices in order to see if you can find a new genre or style that might fascinate and engage you. You can certainly pick a book from a genre or series that you already know you like, since the most important thing is that you end up with a book you'll enjoy, but you should at least consider the less familiar territory first. 

Once you pick a book, write a blog post that explains why you chose the book you did. You need to be specific. If you're wondering what to write about, use these questions to get you started. 

What specific qualities of the book drew you to it? What ultimately made you choose it over other books? What do you hope to get out of reading it? What do you think you will enjoy? How might this book challenge you?

I wish I had this assignment when I was is in high school. There's a ton of benefit to reading classic books together, and that's still a lot of what we do in English 9, but if I can make some space for kids to become independent readers who enjoy it—at least more than they currently do—I've won bigtime.

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?"

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.

A nation engaged in real reform?

Finland's Educational Success? The Anti-Tiger Mother Approach

Apparently, Finland's educational system focuses on developing teacher talent with competitive salaries and programs, and then they get out of the way. They don't pretend standardized testing is the be-all and end-all of teacher performance measurement, and they don't track kids. Sound familiar?

My favorite quote? Glad you asked:

You don't buy a dog and bark for it," says Dan MacIsaac, a specialist in physics-teacher education at the State University of New York at Buffalo who visited Finland for two months. "In the U.S., they treat teachers like pizza delivery boys and then do efficiency studies on how well they deliver the pizza."

One caveat: there's a little bit of an apples and oranges problem when you compare a nation like Finland to the US. Our problems are very different than theirs, and they have an across-the-board investment in education that makes their adult population pretty different than ours. So not everything Finland does for their kids is automatically good or automatically something that would work here. But there's certainly some food for thought.

Re-form

The central pillar of what we've been doing with our pilot program is a faith—a hope? an assumption?—that our best ideas and practices will find traction in the school's policy and direction. The optimism coexists with a highly realistic sense of the practicality of institutional change. When it comes to changing directions, even moderately sized institutions are like aircraft carriers at full steam.

Unfortunately, it's much harder than just spinning the wheel to port, and the metaphor breaks down here anyway. We don't just want to nudge the aircraft carrier. We want to reorganize the sailors, redesign the engine, and refit the hull. Ever try to swap out the propeller of your carrier without slowing the ship down?

We got to visit the Ross School, and what they have is the kind of school you'd end up with if you had a billionaire benefactor and could build from the ground up. Even the architecture matches the ambition of the educational mission. They have a cultural history curriculum that's the core of each year, and science and English classes are content-connected to that cultural history. Your science, English, and history teacher all get together to discuss cross-disciplinary projects, so you don't end up bouncing from class to unrelated class all day.

They also rely on project-oriented assessment throughout their curriculum, all the way from elementary school up through a culminating senior project at the end of high school. Students are involved even in the assessment of their own projects, typically by developing their own rubrics early in the process.

So after this day of being bombarded with very cool ideas and best practices, we're left with the daunting task of thinking about what we can bring back to a school that's structured fundamentally differently. How do we replicate what's great about the interdisciplinary class structure when are class sizes are literally twice as large as Ross's? And when we have 450 kids in a grade instead of 60? And when we have a tracked curriculum?

Sometimes I despair about discussing meaningful, substantive reform when it would almost certainly require at least a modest reduction in class size. The district is actually talking about reducing the teaching staff, so it can feel hopeless to discuss a more student-centered approach when I'm imagining my class of twenty-seven eleventh graders growing to a class of thirty or more.

Still, we soldier on, right? This community has a strong history of supporting its educational system, and investments made in class size, reform, and better teaching more pay for themselves on a dollar-for-dollar basis in the long run by increasing property values, lowering crime, and upping students' earning power. And they also pay off in non-economic ways that are harder to measure and more elusive, like happiness, better options for schools and careers, and the satisfaction of a life steeped in knowledge.