I did it. After fourteen years of teaching I got rid of my teacher desk. Many of my colleagues did so years ago and I have looked at their rooms in amazement. I couldn't figure out how to do it myself. Where would all my stuff go? How would I stay organized?
Thankfully Debbie Diller is no fool and she hits this issue again and again throughout. I finally had to admit to myself that the purpose of my teacher desk was so I had a place to dump stuff. Basically just a horizontal surface to collect papers and other junk. Sigh.
Praise is related to power and control. The more important the person offering praise, the more powerful it is. Praise is also related to insecurity. The more secure a person is in what he is doing, the less impact praise can have.To my mind, the easiest way to break the habit of praising all the time, is to switch to asking questions. I want to ask students how or why they did something rather than tell them 'Good job.' I want them to think about it and to verbalize for me their process or what they are proud of and why rather than me doing so.
Students in dialogic classrooms come to value their conversations because they are engaging and because they learn from them. Indeed, when Terri Thorkildson asked children in such classrooms how they viewed conversations, the children thought that the conversations were essential, particularly because of their learning. When she asked them about tests, the children felt that tests simply interfered with the conversations. When she asked the same question in a direct-instruction classroom, the children thought the reverse. Without the tests, they could see no reason to learn, and the conversations would just take up time when they could be being taught.That's from page 57. I've read that quote several times now and it alternately thrills me because of the power in students talking together and depresses me to think of how some children are being socialized by tests. First graders don't ever think the reason they need to learn is because of a test. They are curious and interested in anything. Somehow in our society we take that away from them and replace it with tests and grades.
Indeed, a poorly developed social imagination is related to misbehavior at home and at school, and to angry responses in personal interactions. Underdeveloped social imagination and moral reasoning are also linked to aggressive behavior in children.Children who regularly behave aggressively tend to have less well developed, and often distorted, social imaginations. They persistently imagine hostile intentions in others.A lot of chapter six is dedicated to how to help students develop their social imagination, mainly through books and discussions of them. I've ordered a couple of new picture books as a result of reading this chapter.
The hardest part for most of us is then keeping our mouths shut and not judging what children say.
Not being able to do something yet shows a belief that you will be able to do it at some point in the future. Not being able to do something period does not show that same belief in the ability to learn and grow.
We want to inoculate the children against infection by fixed theories; we want them to say “I’m not good at this yet” and to take steps to change that. Indeed, yet is a key word that we should regularly encourage children to add to their narratives.
I know I have said things like this to my students. In my mind I was modeling for them what to do as readers. The idea that it 'leveled the power difference' and that it also modeled ways to handle mistakes had never occurred to me. So much more is happening when we speak to students (or when we speak in general) than we realize.
And yet, when she said, “I just made a big mistake as a reader. I got distracted when someone came into the room. So I’m going to reread this section here,” she did two really important things. First, she leveled the power difference between teacher and students. She said, “I make mistakes just like you.” Second, her comment began to explain the meaning of errors. When you make a mistake, it means nothing more than that. Fix it. Learn from it. It does not mean you are incompetent, stupid, or not a good person.
Again, I have said things similar to this without recognizing how much is being heard and/or understood. It's wonderful as I read these books to notice the sorts of things I do well with language. It's depressing to think about the things I do poorly. Right now I'm noticing that with my daughters (I'll notice it with students soon enough when school starts) and it is frustrating. Hopefully it is also a chance to grow.
She immediately apologized, "I’m sorry, Shatara. I just did your job.” With a single utterance, she apologized, reviewed the normality of making errors (and of apologizing when they are social ones) , and implicitly recognized that Shatara (as everyone else) is a person who takes her responsibilities seriously.
I don't think Johnston is saying we should never tell children we are proud of them. I do think he wants us to recognize the underlying message such a phrase sends. This is similar to telling students they are smart when they do something which sends the message that they are dumb when they do something else. We need to understand that the words we say convey much more than we typically realize.
We only have to mark one end of the proud/disappointed conversation for the children to be pulled into that conversation. If we say “I’m proud of you” when they’re successful, they will fill in the other end of the conversation and infer our disappointment when they are unsuccessful. We don’t have to say anything. They are learning that, in this domain, we judge people.
If you didn't read that really carefully, go back and read it again. That is profound.
Within a fixed-performance perspective, people can be judged quite quickly. Indeed, people who take up fixed theorizing form stereotypes more quickly than those choosing dynamic theorizing, they are more inclined to apply trait thinking in describing group members, and they make more extreme trait judgments, whether positive or negative. In fact, people choosing fixed theorizing focus on information that confirms their stereotypes, ignoring disconfirming information. The more information goes against their stereotype, such as a poor, low-achieving boy doing well on a test, the less attention they give to that information. Within a fixed theory, once a student in judged as lazy (or friendly or learning disabled, etc.) we start to see evidence of it everywhere in their behavior. Their situation and psychological processes, such as intentions and feelings, take a back seat.
Having finally finished (re)reading Choice Words, I got rolling with Opening Minds. I'm glad I spent the time with Choice Words first as reading them together is really powerful.I'm back to thinking that every word I say (and even those I don't say) can have such a significant impact. While I'm grateful for the chance to make my words count, I do feel some pressure as a result.
Teaching requires constant improvisation. It is jazz. A child asks a question. Do we answer it? If so, how? How long do we wait before we answer it? If not, what do we say? A child successfully accomplishes something – or fails to. We have another opportunity to say something, but what? My intention with this book is to offer a basis for choosing more productive talk – how to make the most of those opportunities children offer us. Most important, I hope to show you that, given that we are playing improvisational jazz, it is important that we choose a productive key in which to improvise.
The point being that when we tell kids how smart they are it also tells them, that at times when they do the opposite or different from what they are currently doing, they are dumb.
We might even point to the child’s successes as evidence that he is smart. But if successes can be indicators of smartness, then failures, errors, or struggles can be evidence of stupidness. Heaping such praise upon these students to build their self-esteem won’t solve the problem, it will only deepen it.
Suddenly, helping students have a dynamic or growth mindset can significantly impact the classroom community, the way students interact with one another, and the level of risks they are willing to take. If I can control all those things simply by being thoughtful about my language choices that is a small price to pay.
When faced with transgressions, people holding dynamic theories try to understand the thinking and the context of the transgression, to educate and forgive the transgressor. They think the misbehavior is more likely temporary and they are inclined to help make it so. In a classroom, this position leans toward a restorative justice stance – repairing an error rather than simply judging and punishing the perpetrator. This view is consistent with all error in the classroom. When a child makes a spelling error, the idea is to understand what went into the production of the error and to educate.
As a family we are currently reading Peter and the Starcatchers. For the past few nights, since reading this, I have been pushing my girls to notice how different characters have changed and grown throughout the book. I don't know what that will really do for them longterm but it isn't costing me much and I'm fascinated by what we, all of us, are noticing as we do this.
If we are going to resist searching for fixed “character traits” in the classroom, we probably shouldn’t search for them in the literature the children encounter in school. Rather, in discussions of books we should cast characters not in terms of stable character traits, but in terms of internal states, feelings, intentions, contexts, and change.
Everything we do is, I would hope, geared toward helping students be independent thinkers and learners. We want them to do this all without us. Not only do they need the skills to do this, but they need the sense that they can and belief in their right to do so. In short, they need agency.
I chose the particular examples in this chapter to emphasize the fact that much of the feedback children experience comes from their peers. We have to remember that we are not just giving students feedback; we are also teaching them to provide it. In a way, we are teaching them to teach.
Some teachers are particularly good at building learning communities in which individuals feel valued and supported, and that sustain productive and critical learning. Children must have the experience of such communities if they are to know what to aim for in constructing their own learning environments.We're back, as always, to the idea of agency, just on a slightly grander scale. We have to model for students how to do what they will need to do for themselves. In this case, construct a learning environment that will help them continue learning outside of and beyond school.
how to manage not just one's own cognition, but the source of one's cognition in the learning environmentAs reflection has been a big focus of mine I was especially interested in these ideas.
You have probably had someone talk to you in a way that made you think, "Who do you think you're talking to?" or, equally, "Who do you think you are?" When this happens to us, the other person has clearly communicated, by the way they talk to us, who they think we are. We become conscious of it because who they think we are conflicts with who we think we are.As adults we are capable of dealing with this, often through immense frustration, but dealing all the same. Children, on the other hand, are still developing who they think they are and use all they take in to do so. Our language and all that goes with it, are often shaping a student's self-concept. That's a large burden but also a wonderful opportunity. We can, if we are thoughtful, help students see themselves as learners, caring individuals, writers, mathematicians, scientists, activists, etc.
If we want to change our words, we need to change our views.
We hear a lot about teaching children strategies, but we often encounter classrooms in which children are being taught strategies yet are not being strategic (Ivey, Johnston, and Cronin 1998). Teaching children strategies results in them knowing strategies, but not necessarily in their acting strategically and having a sense of agency.That distinction between knowing strategies and acting strategically is a critical focus and there is such a huge difference there. He continues on citing work from Marie Clay about having students generate strategies themselves. One more quote, on the next page, helps me clarify why this feels so important.
The strategy of arranging for a student to figure something out independently, without full awareness, and then reflecting on it, has been called "revealing." Courtney Cazden (1992) contrasts this with "telling," in which the teacher is explicit up front and then the student practices what he has been taught to do by someone else.Johnston considers the possibility that revealing is a harder skill for teachers than telling and I think he is probably right. I often feel that doing the right thing as a teacher, for my students, is harder than traditional teaching methods.
So important is the feeling of confusion, writes D'Mello, that parents and teachers shouldn't try to help children avoid it, or even simply accept its presence. They should deliberately induce confusion in learners. Not "hopeless confusion," of course, which occurs when "the impasse cannot be resolved, the student gets stuck, there is no available plan, and important goals are blocked." Rather, "productive confusion" should be the aim. It's achieved by helping the student recognize that the way out of confusion is through focused thought and problem solving; by providing necessary information and suggesting strategies when appropriate; and by helping the student cope with the negative emotions that may arise.This sounds an awful lot like what Johnston is talking about regarding agency. Allowing students to take their confusion and work through it not only helps them truly learn something but it shows them that they are capable of doing so and of solving their own confusion.
Robert A. Bjork, the director of the Learning and Forgetting Lab at UCLA, calls this sort of challenge "desirable difficulties." Just as in physical exercise, the more students have to exert their mental muscles to learn a new concept or recall and idea, the stronger their memory and learning will become.The analogy to physical exercise helps this make more sense for me. All of this: Johnston's book, these articles and these studies, reminded me of my husband's (a college professor) mantra: "Uncomfortable, but not paralyzed." This is how he wants his students to be. Pushed out of their comfort zone but just enough so that they work to make these new skills or new content comfortable for themselves.
Once a child incorporates into his identity a sense that he is a writer doing writerly things (or a scientist, mathematician, and so forth), he can ask himself in a new situation (not necessary consciously) what he might do as a writer, since those roles do not stop at the border of a single activity setting.Another piece that struck me was using the word like. Johnston says on page 46:
This means thinking beyond the literal to the metaphorical, and the word like is very good for invoking metaphors.If I remember correctly, and I'm being lazy and just going with my memory rather than any research, metaphors were one of the, if not the most, powerful tool Marzano wrote about in Classroom Instruction that Works. Johnston goes on to talk about the power of metaphor because it allows one to take what is known and stretch to what is unknown. I have clearly not thought enough about how and why to use metaphor in my classroom.
Never believe everything I say. Never believe everything any adult says.I firmly believe that as a teacher and as a parent one of my jobs is to help my kids question things, not accept things at face value. Actually saying something as explicitly as this has never occurred to me however.
To understand children's development of a sense of agency, then, we need to look at the kinds of stories we arrange for children to tell themselves. For example, I expect that a child who has a history of telling himself stories about being a failure in writing is unlikely to face a new writing challenge with, "Yes, I imagine I can do this." Similarly, just as we can put ourselves into stories in which we are the protagonists, the ones with agency, we can plot ourselves in the same story and attribute the agency to another, as in, "The reason my poem was good is that the teacher helped me." Telling such stories in which we relegate ourselves to a passive role is the inverse of agency.The language around agency should push students to reflect on how they have been successful and plans to continue that way. Not to say that there should never be discussions of things that didn't go well because that is necessary as well. In addition, students should be pushed to think about problems they faced and how they can tackle problems in the future.
Drawing their attention to their effort ("You worked really hard at that") or their intellect ("You are so smart") will not generate sufficiently useful narratives.I have been fascinated by Carol Dweck's book, Mindset, and this pushes it farther. For some time now I have been conscious of my language in the hopes of using phrases that emphasize effort over intelligence. Now I am going to have to work harder to use language that is more specific about their effort to build agency.
Here’s how her immigration project works: Her students are grouped into make-believe families. They pretend they are immigrating here in about 1900. In language arts, they blog about the experience. In science, they study the diseases that afflicted immigrants. In social studies, they analyze immigration laws. In foreign language, they take a look at countries that provided the most immigrants.I love this project. It is engaging, builds connections, and allows for student choice. I would love to see projects like this happening all over the place.
As teachers we have to decide what to be explicit about for which students, and when to be explicit about it.Then on page nine he continues this idea:
Language, then, is not merely representational (though it is that); it is also constitutive. It actually creates realities and invites identities.When we explicitly use language thoughtfully we help students see themselves and their world anew and identify possible futures. Just through the words we chose. Amazing.
many children graduate high school with little change in their level of awareness, leaving them unprepared to manage the effects language has on them and on others.It seems that we, as teachers, need to not only be very purposeful about how we use language but we also need to be helping our students recognize that and analyze language around them. A big task.
Focusing on the positive is hardly a new idea. It is just hard to remember to do it sometimes, particularly when the child's response is nowhere near what you expected. Indeed, the more we rely on expectations and standards, the harder it is to focus on what is going well.He explains that helping students see what they can do well encourages agency. It helps students continue to grow. It is too easy in education to work from a deficit model, to notice and focus on all the things our students cannot do or cannot do well. In some ways it is natural as our job is to help them learn to do those things. It is detrimental however as it means we miss all they can do and often end up setting lower expectations as a result. Focusing on the positive helps them and keeps us moving forward as well.
The problem with this line of thinking is that it's unfair and unrealistic to expect children who are being bullied to address the situation on their own. When all the children involved have equal social power, it makes sense to teach them how to resolve conflicts among themselves, but in situations where there's an imbalance of power, it does not.As a teacher I am often so focused on my students' academic growth that I do not pay enough attention to these sort of issues and concerns. It is something I need to be more aware of and careful about.
Here I agree with Gary about 95%. The only place I feel a need to nitpick is that I think children often have a wisdom born from their youth and inexperience from which we adults can learn. They are not yet jaded and cynical in the same ways as adults and, as a result, see things we don't. When I think of all I have to learn from my first graders, I am thinking of seeing the world from their perspective and learning from that.The motivation behind uttering such banalities is likely positive. It acknowledges that children are competent and encourages adults to learn with them.However, these clichés suggest a power relationship in which all adults (particularly teachers) are resigned to the role of bumbling TV dad while the kids rule the roost. In education, this often serves as a justification for why teachers irrationally fear computers and modernity or appear to have stopped learning.
