An Inspirational Teacher

Tony Wagner’s CreatingInnovators:  The Making of Young PeopleWho Will Change the World features a section on Amanda Alonzo, a truly inspirational high school biology teacher, who is a compelling advocate of inquiry science.  Tony argues that innovation, rather than knowledge, is the new engine of economic growth. Our traditional schools stifle innovation by focusing on rote, unconnected, unintegrated factual knowledge.  The skills necessary for innovation, such as questioning, observing, experimenting, networking, and integrative thinking, can be taught.  They can only be learned in an environment that focuses on how to think, rather than what to think.

Tony discovered that Amanda had been the teacher of two of the top forty finalists at the 2010 Intel Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF).  How did Amanda get started in coaching students who, under her guidance, consistently place highly in science fairs?  “Every other teacher at the school who had been asked had declined, but I felt I couldn’t say no as a first-year teacher.” Amanda’s previous experience with science fairs was discouraging.  “What I’d seen wasn’t really science, wasn’t powerful learning, and parents were doing most of the work.” 

Drawing on her experience with inquiry learning, Amanda created an authentic encounter with science for her students.  She focused on the process of doing science, rather than simply passing on science content.  Ironically, her best teaching was in her science fair seminars during lunchtime or after school when she was free to teach questioning, creative thinking, and problem solving in the context of science projects of genuine interest to her students.  “In my classes, I have state standards that I have to teach, which are all about content knowledge.”  Amanda believes that many science teachers think that in order to cover the standards they must give the students all the answers, instead of allowing the time for students to figure out the answers for themselves.  This type of inquiry requires more effort from both the students and the teachers and it needs the time for questioning, experimenting, failing, and trying again.  However, Amanda’s experience, which is solidly backed by educational research, shows student actually learn more and retain more content this way (HowPeople Learn, National Research Council).

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.

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.”