Inspirational Teaching

Steven Farr of Teach for America published a 2010 book called Teaching as Leadership  Amanda Ripley profiles Farr's book and his findings in an Atlantic Monthly article, "What Makes a Good Teacher." For ten years, Teach for America has been tracking data on hundreds of thousands of students. These students taught by it 7,000 teachers are mostly in poor urban districts.  During that time, they have found that some teachers are far more effective than the norm in raising student achievement as measured by standardized test scores. While standardized test scores are not at all the best measure of student learning, this was the measurement available to Farr. Teaching as Leadership highlights and seeks to explain the specific traits and practices of the high performing teachers.

Far identifies five success factors:

1. Set big goals for your students
2. Recruit students and families into the process
3. Maintain the focus on learning and tie all activities to your goals
4. Plan exhaustively, working backwards from your goals
5. Work relentlessly to overcome the barriers to your goals.

The finding that some teachers are much more effective than others links well to the general findings on expertise in any domain from brain surgery and rocket science to sales and sports. Farr’s findings about goals, planning, and communication connect well to the general research on leadership.  In fact, all five of these steps grow out of the goal setting step, not only for the students but for the teacher as well.

Though not listed, the teacher’s own goals are an implicit foundation for the planning step, the focus on learning step, and the working relentlessly to overcome barriers.  And you can only recruit others into a process where you can spell out the goals and the personal benefits.  The process of translating a teacher’s vision into clear learning outcomes for students is the essence of planning and goal setting for a teacher.  Sharing that vision in a way so compelling that it becomes a personal vision and a set of goals for each student is the essence of teacher leadership.

You Can See a Lot Just by Observing

Yogi Berra's famous malapropism takes on new meaning in learning and teaching science. Science really does begin with observation. Some recent work with a pre-kindergarten class that had become fascinated with fungus illustrated this for me. Their classroom teacher and I were taking them on a walk through a wooded area near their classroom to look more closely at the woodrat nests we had seen on an earlier visit. Looking for woodrat nests is a bit like looking for green cars; at first you don't see any, but once you start thinking about them, you see them everywhere.

There is an even earlier step when you first learn to recognize an object, such as a woodrat nest or a fungus. This too is a learning process. Usually when viewing something new, such as the woods, people see an undifferentiated blur. Then when someone points something out to you, shows you how that this thing, this rock, this nest, this lichen, can be separated from the blurry mass, it springs into reality. You can now see it where before you could not.

As we walked, one of the children pointed out a lichen on a tree and asked, "What's this?" We all looked at it and told the children it was a lichen. We told them that lichen was pretty interesting as it is a double organism, a partnership between an alga, which makes food, and a fungus, which provides the protective structure or home for the partnership. Most of them has seen algae on a pond and almost everyone knew about mushrooms, a very familiar type of fungus. Now that lichen had an image, a name, and some information connected with it, they started spotting lichen everywhere on our walk and wherever they went in the following days.

This strand of our curriculum emerged as the children began to see other organisms that resembled the lichen they had first seen. Some of these are lichen, too, we told them, but of a different kind. The first one we had seen was a foliose lichen. They were now looking at crustose lichen, which lie flat on a bare rock or tree trunk. Once you start seeing two types of something, you have a deeper concept or what the organism is, as well as what it is not. This is also the start of classification and taxonomy.

Crustose lichen. source:  Wikipedia

The PK class was on fire and the study deepened and broadened as they started looking at mushrooms as well and learning about the different types of mushrooms. The classroom teacher found nature books about mushrooms, as well as stories about mushrooms. We found that a husband-and-wife team of naturalists in our community that specialized in mushrooms and we learned the terms mycology and mycologists. They walked with the class in the woods and took the class much deeper into the study of mushrooms: how they get food, how they propagate, how they fit into the larger ecosystem. They class then delved into learning the parts of mushrooms and how these parts work together, structure and function. We dissected mushrooms in class and looked at them closely with our eyes and hand lenses.  We looked at slices of the mushrooms under microscopes, taking slices from caps, gills, stem, and any other part that looked interesting to them.

Observation is fundamental to all science.  All science begins with observation and it had long been the first among the process skills of science.  I like a great deal about the new Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), but I am puzzled why the framers left observation out of the new Practices of Science and Engineering.  I've heard it said that they just presumed that observation was so obvious that it needed no mention.  I would agree that it should be obvious, but so is Asking Questions, which made the cut.  So is Analyzing and Interpreting Data.  So I am still puzzled.   Meanwhile, I continue to teach my students to observe the world around them.  Woodrat nests and lichen are good starting points.

Child Prodigies and Creativity

Adam Grant writes about How to Raise a Creative Child in his Sat-30-Jan-2016 column in the New York Times.  He sums up his advice in two words in his extended title:  Step One.  Back Off.  Grant asserts that child prodigies rarely grow up into the highly creative people who revolutionize their field.  By way of example, he notes that fewer than one percent of the finalists in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, during the time it was considered, as Grant says, the Super Bowl of science prowess, from 1942 to 1994, became members of the National Academy of Sciences, the nation’s elite honorary body of scientists. And, out of the more than 2000 Westinghouse finalists, only eight have won Nobel prizes.  Although, he says, they often go on to become highly respected practitioners and leaders in their fields, they don’t become “adult geniuses” who change the world.

Grant goes on to dismiss the charge that perhaps these prodigies are social or emotional wrecks who cannot work and play with others.  He refers to evidence, though not cited, that “less than a quarter of gifted children suffer from social and emotional problems.”  This is approximately equal to the often-touted figure of around twenty percent for the population as whole who suffer from serious social or emotional problems. 

The real problem, according to Grant, is that child prodigies do not learn to be original.  They conform to the expectations of their parents, teachers, and coaches, and so are inculcated in the status quo, the current paradigm. “Practice makes perfect, but it doesn’t make new,” as Grant so aptly put it.  When children grow up simply conforming to “how it is done,” they do not question that way.  They become overly committed to existing methods, tools, techniques, and technologies.  He quotes Ellen Winner, a Harvard psychologist specializing in studying giftedness, that gifted children rarely go on to revolutionize their field and those that "those who do must make a painful transition" before they make profoundly original contributions.  Grant goes on to discuss what economist Thorstein Veblen called “trained incapacity.”

Amabile’s Three Rings of Creativity

Theresa Amabile, a professor at Harvard Business School, has devoted much of her research to studying creativity, productivity, and innovation.  One of her most famous articles is “How to Kill Creativity.”  In this article, Amabile outlines a model of creativity with a Venn diagram of three overlapping circles, very reminiscent of Robert Sternberg’s triarchic model of intelligence.  Tony Wagner uses Amabile’s model in discussing the topic of innovation in his excellent book Creating Innovators.

The three domains making up Amabile’s model are Creative Thinking Skills, Expertise, and Motivation.  The area of overlap in the center is Creativity (or Innovation, as Wagner refers to it in his book).  Creative thinking skills, for Amabile, refer to flexibility of thought, imagination in approach to a problem, divergence from the status quo, and perseverance in times when new ideas are scarce. 

Expertise is deeply compile knowledge about a domain, such as writing computer code or performing brain surgery.  It is the result of extended deliberate practice (10,000 hours in the studies cited in Gladwell’s Outliers) and includes highly developed automated schema comprised mostly of procedural knowledge (how to do something) studded with chunks of declarative knowledge (knowledge you know that you know).  Experts are highly fluid in their performance of a domain task or in solving a problem in that domain.  They can flexibly assemble skills they’ve practiced in order to create new solutions to problems.  However, outside of their domain, perform about like everyone else, as demonstrated in a famous study comparing chemistry professors to undergraduates in solving problems in introductory economics.

Amabile’s third ring, the most powerful she says, is Motivation, which is the determination to actually do something, to accomplish a goal.  She divides motivation into two parts, extrinsic and intrinsic.  Extrinsic motivation is what comes from outside a person to induce them to perform – the classical carrot-or-stick approach to managing people.  Much study has gone into extrinsic motivation, some of which is referenced in Daniel Pink’s well-written book, Drive. The consensus is that extrinsic motivation can work for getting standard results on standard tasks as long as the incentives and penalties are in place and relevant to the person.  What extrinsic motivation does not do well is produce long-lasting change or lead to creative new approaches. 

Intrinsic motivation is that drive that comes from within the person, her or his own desire to do something, like run a four-minute mile or invent an electric light.  We tend to call intrinsic motivation passion or purpose.  Not surprisingly, intrinsic motivation leads to the most creativity and productivity in people.  As Mark Twain said, play is what you want to do and work is what you are obliged to do, whether painting a fence or designing a bridge.  The most creative work results from intrinsically motivated behavior. 

Creativity by Design

Can creativity be taught?  Yes, it can be, as the developers of the field of Design Thinking have shown.  Now, the applied study of creativity is becoming an academic discipline as Lauren Pappano reports in Learning to Think Outside the Box:  Creativity Becomes an Academic Discipline in the New York Times on February 5, 2014.  In addition to the d. school at Stanford, several universities are beginning to add studies in creativity to curricula.  Many of these courses are not just which traditional academic courses defining the concept, recounting the history of thought on creativity, and examining the impact of creativity on economies or the lives of highly creative people.  These course teach their students methods for being more creative themselves.

Buffalo State College in upstate New York may have the oldest program in creative studies, which were first offered in 1967.  Whereas critical thinking was once regarded as the highest level interdisciplinary skill and the hallmark of an excellent liberal arts graduate, creative thinking is now jostling for position in the pantheon of intellectual attainment.  Gerard J. Puccio, chairman of the International Center for Studies in Creativity, asserts that universities are offering it because the marketplace is demanding it.  Most businesses understand that creativity is required to survive and thrive in our ever-faster changing world.

Critical thinking focuses on analysis, synthesis, and then evaluation.  The critical thinker dissects an idea, looks at the parts and pieces to see how the idea works, as you might a piece of machinery.  Then the critical thinker puts the pieces back together, perhaps in a better configuration, and then makes a judgment on the worth or applicability of the idea.  This is a tremendously valuable skill.  Creative thinking, however, goes beyond this to focus on human problems, human needs, and drawing from a wide and, perhaps a bit wild, trove of ideas to design a new and better solution.  The goal is to help us all apply new ideas to our everyday life, both at home and at work.