Tag: piaget

Are You Adulting or Growing Up?

Adorable Handsome Black Boy Child in Baggy Business Suit laughing and walking over white background.

I’m glad childhood is a thing. For the longest time it wasn’t. When people aren’t expected to live very long, it seems inappropriate to demarcate a certain part of a lifespan as protected. Then, starting in the 17th century, folks in the “western” world were living longer and John Locke gave us childhood. We haven’t Locke(d) back. Sorry.

From childhood grew adolescence. (Thanks, Piaget.)

Now, setting aside for the moment the newish idea of late adolescence, we have childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. While puberty provides an (awkward) transition from childhood to adolescence that coincides with the rituals of many cultures, the transition from adolescence to adulthood lacks such an obvious physiological transition.

Enter, adulting.

My first adulting was early – filing my 1040-EZ form on my own. It was followed by setting up appointments with my academic advisor, finding a roommate to join me as we ventured out of the dorms in college, and a host of other small steps toward being the version of me who could stand on his own.

Adulting isn’t the same as growing up. Growing up carries with it the implicit sense of being a mature person. Adulting, on the other hand, gives the sense of dipping one’s toe in adulthood without taking on all the responsibilities the full transition would entail. Adulting sounds like a costume or set of clothes you can take off Mr. Rogers-style when you’re finished with whatever adult task needed tending to.

Whenever I put on a suit for my day gig, I get a serious sense of adulting. I’m putting on the costume without fully feeling I’ve become all the worst characters in movies like Baby Boom, Joe Versus the Volcano, or The Hudsucker Proxy. Those folks put on the costume and couldn’t remember who they’d been before.

Adulting is a putting on, while growing up is a shedding. It’s what I saw time and again as my students were thrust into life events that pulled away from them the childish pieces of their identity, forcing them to deal with death, divorce, poverty, and any number of the darker aspects of adulting.

I’m pretty grown now. Life has happened, and I’m a week away from another birthday that will raise expectations one more year beyond my shoe size. Still, I’ve got a beach ball and a collection of legos at work. I brought an assortment of crayons to the office from my last trip. I’m still not adulting full-time.

118/365 Mission Hill is What Theory Looks Like in Practice #YearAtMH

I’ve been asked by Sam Chaltain to contribute to the conversation over at EdWeek around the series A Year at Mission Hill. I’ll be offering a take on each episode and interpreting some of the research that might be relevant and trying to make it practical. This piece was originally posted at EdWeek.

One of the great joys of A Year at Mission Hill is the glimpse it provides of the entirety of the teaching and learning experience. In Chapter 5, we are provided continued access to both the planning and implementation sides of teaching as we see and hear teachers planning lessons around a school-wide investigation of Chinese culture.

We find 2nd/3rd Grade Teacher Jenerra Williams (1:40) discussing the needs of her students in a planning meeting that draws a connection between both her professional expertise and the place of educational theory in the classroom, as she explains to her colleagues that they must take into consideration the cognitive development of their students while planning the introduction of new concepts.

There is beauty in Williams’ informal connection to Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development and its application to the “concrete” thinking Williams and her colleagues notice as prominent in their group of students.

While this episode is primarily concerned with the artistry and learning of the students, it’s worth pausing to appreciate the artistry and learning of the teachers as well. Williams weaves formal and informal assessments of students into her knowledge of cognitive theory to make sure the team is pacing the learning in such a way as to provide access for everyone.

So too, is there beauty in Kindergarten and 1st Grade Teacher Kathy Clunis D’Andrea’s interaction with a student (3:09) who has a “great idea.” Not only has D’Andrea created a space where her students continue to feel the safety and freedom to share such ideas, but her response shows a dedication to letting students play such ideas out in their own heads. D’Andrea’s reaction to the student is not to judge, criticize, or question the idea, but merely to repeat it back to him as a literal sounding board and then keep the space open for him to build on it publicly from there.

Such moments are excellent embodiments of Eleanor Duckworth’s ideas of “messing about” as described in her book The Having of Wonderful Ideas. They are also spoken to in Art Teacher Jeanne Rachko’s description of how she sees her role in the classroom.

Rachko’s dedication to letting students “discover who they are as artists,” and “empowering them in their own choices,” is revealed not as some soft bohemian philosophy, but one borne out in research and educational theory.

In a sense, Rachko is co-discovering who her students are alongside them. Such practice answers the call made by Dave Rose in his book Why School?, when he wrote that “teaching carries with it the obligation to understand the people in one’s charge, to teach subject matter and skills, but also to inquire, to nurture, to have a sense of who a student is.”

Such an obligation is fulfilled in each of the considerations Mission Hill makes because the school attends to both the needs and the curiosities of its students. It motivates by creating situations that invite students to play and include the four key tenets of situated motivation as described by Scott Paris and Julianne Turner: choice, challenge, collaboration, and control.

Making room for each of these components, co-discovering who their students are, and applying educational theory to what they discover allows Mission Hill’s teachers, and others like them, to make practical decisions that are artfully executed.

9/365 We Must Blend Theory and Practice

Blender

A movement is afoot in some parts of the country to prepare future classroom teachers without regard to those educational thinkers who have come before. In order to build the schools we need, that regard is paramount. Only through the blending of theory and practice can we move toward teachers who are both thoughtfully reflective about their practice as well as adept at developing new practices based on their students’ needs. Graduate education programs that focus primarily on practice and turn a blind eye to the study of pedagogical theory cite the needs of beginning teachers to enter their classrooms with tools to help their students learn. Yes, this is important.

What, though, when the novice teacher has tried each of the 49 techniques offered in Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion and finds himself in need of a fiftieth? It is possible this teacher will begin to look more deeply at the 49 practices in his repertoire and then begin to suss out the underlying theories of learning guiding those practices. This should not be left to chance.

The study of great and deep thinkers like Dewey, Piaget, Papert, Lampert, Sizer, Lawrence-Lightfoot, and Dweck alongside the learning of a collection of beginning practices will prepare beginning novice teachers to enter the classroom feeling prepared as well as prepare them to think critically about their own practice when the tools with which they left their graduate programs are found lacking. These teachers who might otherwise feel they are discovering the practice of teaching and learning in a vacuum would do well to carry with them reminders that wise minds have spent their careers thinking and writing on those very dilemmas facing teachers in modern classroom.

Such a reminder would do well to help with the psychological health of teachers, but a reason stands for such historical understanding that is greater still than letting teachers know they are not going it alone when they enter their classrooms. Understanding the theories of learning, the theorists who developed them, and then working to synthesize that knowledge into a coherent personal philosophy and teaching practice asks teachers to be more thoughtful about their practice, to make choices through critical analysis of evidence, and to back their practice in reasoned arguments. In short, they will engage in the type of thinking we would hope they seek to elicit from their students.

By asking how children learn, how others have suggested children learn, and how teaching might assist in that learning, teachers are driven to train their minds to think critically and putting a premium on the asking of questions and the seeking of answers. This is different than a practice built around the largely unthinking deployment of a set of pre-packaged “tools” delivered absent any question of why they are being deployed.

Teaching is complex; so do not take this to be an argument that teachers well-versed in the study of the history of learning theory and various pedagogies would be able to enter a classroom, develop a curriculum, and implement that curriculum such that all students in the class are enthralled, enlightened, and driven to answer questions. Quite the opposite. This is an argument that teachers should learn the pedagogy of those who have come before concurrently with their learning of those practices thought to be most basic and effective in the hands of beginning teachers.

With such an approach, novice teachers will feel prepared to take on their first days and weeks of teaching and be prepared to meet the critical challenges guaranteed to arise later in their careers. What’s more, it is likely that the critical thinking required to blend pedagogy and practice in whatever context a teacher finds himself will lead to an inquiry-driven practice. While such inquiry within teachers does not assure that those teachers will include such inquiry and critical thought in their classrooms, it does make such an overflow more likely than the plug ‘n’ chug method of practice without theory.

How do you say what your kids say?

A few weeks ago, I was observing a student teacher. In our debrief, I said, “When you’re asking students for answers, you put those answers into your own words much of the time. What might that say to the students?”

We then had a conversation about the possible implication that changing the students’ words could be perceived as correcting them – that what they were saying wasn’t good enough to be repeated as stated or written on the board verbatim during class notes.

My thinking has been that such switching of language could lead to decreased participation from students:

When I speak, she changes my words. This must mean that my answers are wrong. I should stop speaking so I don’t sound stupid.

I challenged the student teacher to make an effort to repeat answers as given and start writing them on the board verbatim.

As I read the second essay in Eleanor Duckworth’s “The Having of Wonderful Ideas” and Other Essays on Teaching and Learning. I’m starting to question this thinking. Discussing the work of one linguist, Duckworth writes:

If the children were asked to repeat a sentence of a form that did not correspond to their grammar (for instance, “I asked Alvin whether he knows how to play basketball”), they repeated the sentence, but with their own grammar (“I asked Alvin do he know how to play basketball”). It was not the words they retained, it was the sense. Then the sense was translated back into words, words that said the same thing but were not the same words.

That sound you might be hearing is my brain bubbling with questions:

  • If we accept that children’s retention of meaning, but discarding of words is a valid communication of meaning, does the same hold true for teacher’s repetition of children’s words?
  • Given the power structure of the classroom, does the teacher’s re-phrasing of a student’s response mean something different (or negative) than a student’s re-phrasing?
  • When do we decided re-phrasing student responses is teaching and when do we decide not to in favor of letting students know they’re free to share and expand on ideas?

I don’t have answers here, and would definitely benefit from hearing how other people think about how they accept student answers.

What does this look like in your practice?

Thoughts on “The Having of Wonderful Ideas”

Outside of the general curriculum of my doc program, I’m trying to pick up other texts from time to time. One of those texts has been “The Having of Wonderful Ideas” and Other Essays on Teaching and Learning by Eleanor Duckworth.

Duckworth, a professor at HGSE and student of Jean Piaget, retired from professing at the end of last year. I missed taking her class and continue to kick myself.

Before I get into the book, a moment of the evidence of the kind of character Duckworth possesses. Standing in line last year for the Harvard-wide commencement ceremony, my friend and I were joined by Duckworth dressed in full doctoral regalia. She told us she’d never walked with students before and figured this would be her last chance. She stood in the sun with us as we waited to file in and sat amongst us during the ceremony. To my knowledge, she was the only faculty member to do so and was driven simply by curiosity.

“The Having of Wonderful Ideas” opens the book and presents several key ideas for how people can approach teaching other people. Not the least of these is Duckworth’s statement, “The having of wonderful ideas is what I consider the essence of intellectual development.” I can’t imagine a better stated purpose for teaching and learning.

Below are some key points:

He was at a point where a certain experience fit into certain thoughts and took him a step forward…The point has two aspects: First, the right question at the right time can move children to peaks in their thinking that result in significant steps forward and real intellectual excitement; and, second, although it is almost impossible for an adult to know exactly the right time to ask a specific question of a specific child–especially for a teacher who is concerned with 30 or more children–children can raise the right question for themselves if the setting is right. Once the right question is raised, they are moved to tax themselves to the fullest to find an answer.

It’s a dangerous notion not all teachers are willing to adopt – that children might be able to ask the right questions or that teachers might not know the right questions.

Duckworth has some guidance for the creation of “the right time” for the development of these questions:

There are two aspects to providing occasions for wonderful ideas. One is being willing to accept children’s ideas. The other is providing a setting that suggests wonderful ideas to children–different idas to different children–as they are caught up in intellectual problems that are real to them.

and

When children are afforded the occasions to be intellectually creative–by being offered matter to be concerned about intellectually and by having their ideas accepted–then not only do they learn about the world, but as a happy side effect their general intellectual ability is stimulated as well.

and

If a person has some knowledge at his disposal, he can try to make sense of new experiences and new information related to it. He fits it into what he has. By knowledge I do not mean verbal summaries of somebody’s else’s knowledge.

The key sentiment here and throughout the text is listening to children – listening to their thinking, their questions, and the manners by which they work to answer their questions.

Doing this requires a relinquishment of the notion that all children should be doing and learning the same things at the same times based on their born-on date. It’s a tough idea to relinquish and an easy one to cling to when standards, textbooks and curricula are all built to suggest chronology, not development, should decide rule the day-by-day learning.

It’s not impossible to create such spaces in district with more stringent requirements. Subversion of the system need not mean destroying it. Much can be accomplished through co-opting language. If Duckworth is correct, the right questions will arise. If curricula are correct, the standards will be uncovered by the naturally-occurring questions.

Listening (to understand) is necessary.

For more on Duckworth, watch her HGSE commencement speech below or head to Constructing Modern Knowledge 2013 in NH July 9-12.