4-29-11 5:47 pm Freakonomics in the Classroom

The study of economics, I agree with the authors, currently looks a little like psychology years ago. Very esoteric, and difficult for the average citizen to access. Yet theories of correlation and causality, which may apply in economics, most surly apply to real life. These guys have my full attention!

I'm starving for strategies to tease out causality. Causality may drive everything we do in life, and mistaken causality can lead to a lot of waste. Mistaken causality, as the authors describe, might sound something like: "Gee, every time it rains, a lot of people use umbrellas. If we'd stop using our umbrellas, maybe the rain would fall less frequently." Or, again as the authors describe, for the Grinch who hates Christmas: "Gee, every time December rolls around, Christmas cards show up in my mailbox. Maybe if we could stop the cards, we would stop Christmas."

These are some of the authors' attempts at showing what a ridiculously significant roll correlation can play in our attempting to determine causality. They offer research that shows sumo wrestlers cheating, that the amount of money raised in a political campaign actually doesn't relate all that closely to election results, and even bring into question the effectiveness of child car seats over seatbelts.

This thinking is new for me, and very outside of the box. I love it for its very nature of challenging conventional "wisdom". It excites me because I often feel hedged in by conventional thinking, and yet we face real challenges every day that seem to elude solutions. When might "Freakonomics" be worth exploring?

Right now, today!

The first place that grabs my attention: academic achievement! Conventional wisdom might postulate that quality instruction causes higher test scores. Really? First of all, of course instruction impacts learning, but how so and how much? The more a teacher knows may only slightly show promise for how much a student learns, particularly if the teaching and learning style are mismatched. Academic research in this area is a multi-billion dollar industry, I'm guessing.

So, what makes a person learn? Our earliest learning happens well before babies talk. We learn to cry, feed ourselves, crawl, walk, and smile all with little to no intervetion for most. Some research make bold claims like: children can lie by the time they're two or three years old, and that as early as pre-school they know among themselves who will be an achiever and who will struggle in learning.

How do they do it? Caregivers and parents don't spend hours in professional development learning the nuances of teaching their babies to crawl. I remember Anne never really rolled over. It made me crazy with worry, and crazier still when doctors and expert grandparents reassured me: "Don't worry. She'll do it when she's ready." And you know what, at 11 years-old, she'll tell you herself: she just doesn't really like rolling. She was verbal at two months, could sit up at three, entered kindergarten reading, plays both the violin and the piano, and is enrolled in the gifted program at her school. Wow.

Everyone was right, and they were all wrong. She did do things on her own time, yet she's not fine. She's excellent. So let's take the part they were right about: She does things when she's ready.

Teachers don't really teach their students. They simply design learning opportunities, and look at assessments as indicators of acquisition. In fact, their job is to design assessments and let the learning happen through a variety of opportunities which the learner directs. Sure, quality instruction supports learning and higher test scores, yet what if that's only 50% of the equation?

What if learning is easily just as much about emotion as instruction? We know a lot about the amigdula. It controls the "fight or flight" response in the brain. Feel safe, and there's fight, which in the classroom might look like effort and risk-taking to reach understanding. Feel threatened, and there's flight, which in the classroom might look like checking out or using poor behavior choices to cover up fear of failing.

What might it cost school districts to run an experiment testing my 50% theory? If we as teachers were given a directive to open every academic interaction with students using reassuring words like: "I know you can do it, and I'm here to help if you need it.", how might that impact student achievement?

Just a thought.

And what's with the home school and charter school movement? Parents obviously want something different for their learners. Maybe they're worried their kids are miserable in school. We could spend a lot of money experimenting with new schools, or we could address a possible real cause: fear of misery.

Think about it. We're all more in touch with our feelings and their origins than ever. The pain and agony of some childhood memories can feel absolutely overwhelming. How natural might it be for some parents experiencing these feelings or bad memories, to pull their children out of potentially difficult school experiences, even if those children are truly loved and nurtured in school, because of parents' own negative experiences and assumptions?

A picture is worth a thousand words. Seeing is believing. Might we retain more families in our school system by simply placing a slide show full of happy students' pictures in the front lobby of schools?

Freakonomics frees up my thinking in a brand new way. This opportunity to turn conventional thinking upside down gives me a new angle from which to view, well, everything! More importantly, I hope it lets me recognize irrelevant assumptions, and ultimately makes me a more effective professional, and a more critical thinker.

4-14-11 5:44 pm Workbooks Be Damned, Death by the Filing Cabinet, and Other Naked Truths about Learning

The Colorado State Department of Education Standards currently specify that 1st graders, by the end of 1st grade, need to be able to count to 120. That they must be able to create equal shares (fractions) to 1/4, 1/2, and 3/4. They must be able to use addition or subtraction operations to solve problems. Of course, there's more. They need to show repeating patterns, record data, and other more abstract concepts. Today my 1st graders counted to 56,000,000,000. (More on that later.) They proved they could create unequal shares that combine to make a perfect whole. Yesterday they solved two-part story problems using both addition and subtraction in the same problem. The class recently surveyed themselves to see how old their moms were. Turns out "most" of their moms are in their 30's. They now work in fractals, or patterns within patterns. And we did other amazing stuff like hang a chain off the roof, and build a 1,000-piece cube with units of one. My mathematicians came to me as a group of mixed-ability students. They'll leave as such, only my most struggling students will far-exceed state standards in their abilities. And this is my first year teaching this grade-level in math. So, what's going on? I'm not a "super-teacher", with "super-students". Teaching, as an industry, has morphed in the last 20 years from institutionalized routines of worksheet packets which teachers lovingly (or not-so-lovingly) supported their students through, to an array of experiences which support connections taking students from what they already know to creating new knowledge. Students, through experiments and memorable activities, create their own learning in an environment that gives them necessary tools to create new understandings. All of my students, the lowest of the low included, can read and write their numbers well over 120. With no reversals. They may make them, yet they know how to fix them. Sure I planned strategically. Of course I gave assessments, and used the results to inform my next instruction. Yet their more amazing feats, the times they've far exceeded state standards are just as much planned as not. Here's an example: We began the year with building a chain, link by link. Each day we added one link, so now it's reached the prodigious length of 143 links. "I wonder how far it will reach?" someone asked one day. That got me wondering the outrageous (it takes little to get me in the nether-regions of fantastical curiosity) and I asked my class: "Do you think it's as tall as the school?" We decided that the prudent thing would be to wait until its length doubled when reaching from the projection screen handle (with the screen rolled up) to the floor, and back again. Guess who couldn't wait? Me! I kept asking, in the last weeks we waited, "Do you think we could give it a try today?" The class made me wait. Finally, last Friday, I convinced them that surely it would reach from the roof to the ground, even though it didn't quite reach our planned length-before-trying. Plus, I'd already checked with our custodian, "T", who jumped right on board with whole idea. I guess climbing up onto the roof is her idea of a good time. We lined up at the door, quietly walked outside, and made a semi-circle around the flagpole. "T" appeared, and all my students waved excitedly. "How did you get up there?" they wanted to know. Then she dropped one end of the chain down. At first it just bounced of its own weight, without touching the ground. My heart sank. The children were silent and held their breath in anticipation. We were all frozen in place and time. Then she started to let it out. Not only was it long enough to touch the ground, it had 12 links to spare. The cheer that went up when that chain touched the sidewalk gave me a buzz that still has me over-the-moon. They went wild. Beatles-frenzy wild. Ice-cream truck to the 10th power wild. They were hysterical to watch. Such joy. A feeling of accomplishment saturated the whole group. No labels. No worksheets. No scores. Just an almost complete year of 1st grade, under their belts in a way they could see, touch, and feel. "Awesome" doesn't begin to describe it. And that chain has patterns within patterns, represents skip-counting, and the links required dexterity and strength to connect. Can they measure? Sure. They can use inches, feet, baby-shoes, fish, giant shoes, any tool you like. Can they record it? Sure. Tally marks, pie charts, bar charts, you name it. All of them. Why? Well, at least in part because they made up the questions fro our measurement unit: "How old is your mom?", "Do you own a Bakugon?" (what is that, anyway?), "Which is your favorite dinosaur, T-Rex, Bracheosoris, or Triceritops?" And what do they remember most about measuring? I'm thinking the chain that was as tall as the school. We now know our school is over 280 inches tall. Wow. A file cabinet, a worksheet, a cute project, all would have been tolerated. My students make a lovely group of people who want to accomplish their best learning. And I think what helps support that spirit, that drive, is their ownership of what we do every day. Recently we were building numbers with number cubes. I have a few show-off students who beat my challenge of making a 100's number, and built first a 300's number. Then it was a 900's number. You can imagine: "Alright boys, very good. Now let's move on." Well, of course they wouldn't leave it alone. They had to keep pushing. They finally, using 100's flats, built 1,000. "Is there a 1,000 block?" someone asked. Well, then we did it. We began counting beyond 1,000. We began building 1,000 using different tools, in different denominations, and now, yes, we're building a 1,000 cube using 1's blocks. Teachers who "grew-up" using worksheets are good people who genuinely want our kids to learn. And it's very safe. You know what you've covered. You know what still needs to be taught. When students start taking learning into their own hands, you really have to guide them carefully. Intentional evaluation of what they're learning requires knowing standards inside and out, and possessing keen powers of observation. You've got to be on your game. And it's tough to do that and manage everything else. Thing is, everything else sort of starts taking care of itself. When students write their own survey questions, they want them answered. When they are figuring out how many more blocks they need, they're happy to take 440 away from 1,000 to see what's left. (That's what led to the 560, and then we had to have some 'place-value' fun and talk about what 56, 560, 5,60, etc. all had in common and what was different about them. We got to 56,000,000 before they began to fidget.) Behavior issues melt into the excitement of discovery. It's unpredictable. And it's the best learning I know how to support. Plus, it's a blast! Thank you, Colorado Department of Education, for giving me a baseline. I wonder how much more we'll cover?