İnsanlar tarafından anlaşılmadığını düşünen kişi

Bir Öğretmenin Öğrenciler Üzerindeki Uzun Vadeli Etkilerini Anlamak

Öğretmenler sadece içerik değil, aynı zamanda öğrencilerin başarılı yetişkinler haline gelmek için ihtiyaç duydukları çeşitli becerileri de öğretirler. Yeni bir araştırma bu becerileri geliştirmenin ne kadar önemli olduğunu gösteriyor: Öğrencilerinin öz-düzenleme gibi bilişsel olmayan becerileri geliştirmelerine yardımcı olan öğretmenler, yalnızca standart test sonuçlarını iyileştirmeye odaklanan öğretmenlerle kıyaslandığında öğrencilerinin notlarının yükselmesine ve mezun olma ihtimallerinin artmasına daha çok katkıda bulunuyor.

Araştırmacı ekipten ekonomi profesörü C. Kirabo Jackson, “İyi öğretmenler, öğrencilerinin test sonuçları başarısından çok daha fazlasını etkiler,” diyor.

Kuzey Carolina’da 570.000’den fazla öğrenciye ait veriyi inceleyen çalışmada Jackson, öğrencilerinin bilişsel olmayan becerilerini – motivasyon ve yeni durumlara uyum sağlama becerisinin yanı sıra öz-düzenleme becerisi de dahil olmak üzere – geliştirmeye yardımcı olan dokuzuncu sınıf öğretmenlerinin öğrenciler üzerinde çok büyük etkilere sahip olduğunu buldu. Bu öğrencilerin derslere daha çok katılım gösterdiği, notlarının daha iyi olduğu ve akranlarına oranla mezun olma olasılıklarının daha yüksek olduğu keşfedildi. Ayrıca, uzaklaştırma alma veya sınıf tekrarı yapma ihtimalleri de daha düşük çıktı. Bu faydalar öğrencilerin lise hayatları boyunca devam etti.

Jackson’a göre problem, gelecek başarısı için değerli olan becerilerin genellikle testlerle ölçülememesi. Öğretmenler test sonuçlarını yükselttikleri için takdir edilse de, Jackson’ın analizi, derse katılım gibi öğrenci davranışını iyileştiren öğretmenlerin bu öğrenciler için daha iyi uzun vadeli sonuçlara yol açtığını gösteriyor. Jackson, öğrencilerin bilişsel olmayan becerilerindeki iyileşmenin liseden mezun olma olasılıklarını yüzde 1.47 oranında artırdığını, test sonuçlarındaki gelişmenin ise bu ihtimali yalnızca yüzde 0.12 oranında etkilediğini buldu.

Çalışmanın ortaya koyduğu diğer uzun vadeli sonuçlarla birleştiğinde bu bulgular, gelişmekte olan öğrencilerde bilişsel olmayan becerilerin ne kadar önemli olduğunu kanıtlar nitelikte.

Öğretmenlerin önemi

Araştırmalara göre eğitimin diğer yönleriyle karşılaştırıldığında, öğrenci başarısı üzerindeki en büyük etkiye sahip olan şey öğretmenler. İyi eğitimli bir öğretmenin üniversiteye daha fazla öğrenci gönderme ve öğrencilerinin iyi bir kazanç sağlayacağı işlere girmesine yardımcı olma ihtimali daha yüksek.

Jackson, test sonuçlarındaki başarının öğretmenlerin yapabileceklerinin yalnızca bir kısmı olduğunu ve hemen gözlemlenebilir olmasa da, öğretmenlerin öğrencilerinin genel refahında çok önemli bir rol oynadığını belirtiyor. 2015 yılına ait bir araştırma, öğrencilerin sosyal ve duygusal sağlığını teşvik etmenin uzun vadeli ekonomik kazanımlara yol açtığını gösteriyor. Bunun sebebi, bu öğrencilerin sağlıklarının, eğitimlerinin ve işlerinin daha iyi; çocuk veya yetişkin suçu işleme olasılıklarının ise daha düşük olması.

“Yetişkinlikte ihtiyaç duyulan becerilerdeki yetkinlik, test sonuçlarındaki performanslara bakılarak ölçülemiyor,” diyor Jackson. Eğer bir öğretmenin değerini test sonuçlarını ne kadar yükselttiğine bakarak ölçmeye kalkarsak, büyük resmi kaçırırız.

Öğrenme bilimi

Sinirbilim ve psikoloji alanlarındaki yeni araştırmalar, bilişsel olmayan becerilerin neden uzun vadeli yararları olduğunu açıklıyor.

“Bilim bize diyor ki; beyin işlerken ve büyürken güvende olmaya, sıcaklığa ve hatta kucaklanmaya ihtiyaç duyar,” diye açıklıyor Stanford Üniversitesi profesörü Linda Darling-Gammond. “Olumsuz bir duygu haliyle karşılaştırıldığında, olumlu bir duygu hali içindeyken çok daha etkili bir şekilde öğreniriz. Okuldaki yaklaşımımızı da bu bilgi ışığında şekillendirmemiz gerekiyor.”    

2017 yılında okurlarımıza, öğrenci hayatını değiştirecek potansiyele sahip bir öğretmenin hangi özelliklere sahip olması gerektiğini sorduk. Aldığımız cevaplardan çok azı sınav sonuçları ya da akademik başarıyla ilgiliydi. Cevapların büyük çoğunluğu harika öğretmenlerin öğrencilerine güven verdiğini, onlara sevildiklerini hissettirdiğini, inandığını, sabırlı olmayı öğrettiğini ve potansiyellerini gerçekleştirmelerine yardım ettiğini belirtiyordu. Ve bu özellikler testlerle ölçülemez.

Öğrencinin uzun vadeli başarısı, akademik bilgiden çok davranışla ilgili. Bir araştırma, öğrencilerin liseyi bırakmasının sebebi olarak disiplin problemlerini ya da ekonomik veya ailesel sıkıntıları işaret ediyor. Öğrenciler okulu akademik sorunlar nedeniyle bıraksa bile bunun nedeni genelde katılım eksikliği. Bu yüzden, öğrencileri okulda tutmanın en iyi yolu sınav sonuçlarını yükseltmelerine yardımcı olmak değil; onlara okula ait olduklarını ve bir şeylere etki edebileceklerini hissettirmek.

Ana fikir: Öğretmenin değerini “ölçmek” için, sınav sonuçlarına olan etkisinden daha öteye bakmak gerekiyor. Öğrencilerinin bilişsel olmayan becerilerini geliştiren öğretmenler, liseden mezun olma ihtimali gibi öğrencilere uzun vadede etki edecek sonuçları da iyileştirmeyi başarıyor.

Kaynak: Eğitimpedia, Edutopia

Middle School Misfortunes Then and Now

By: Benjamin Conlon, waituntil8th

Let’s imagine a seventh grader. He’s a quiet kid, polite, with a few friends. Just your ordinary, run-of-the-mill twelve-year-old. We’ll call him Brian. Brian’s halfway through seventh grade and for the first time, he’s starting to wonder where he falls in the social hierarchy at school. He’s thinking about his clothes a little bit, his shoes too. He’s conscious of how others perceive him, but he’s not that conscious of it. 

He goes home each day and from the hours of 3 p.m. to 7 a.m., he has a break from the social pressures of middle school. Most evenings, he doesn’t have a care in the world. The year is 2008. 

Brian has a cell phone, but it’s off most of the time. After all, it doesn’t do much. If friends want to get in touch, they call the house. The only time large groups of seventh graders come together is at school dances. If Brian feels uncomfortable with that, he can skip the dance. He can talk to teachers about day-to-day problems. Teachers have pretty good control over what happens at school.

Now, let’s imagine Brian on a typical weekday. He goes downstairs and has breakfast with his family. His mom is already at work, but his dad and sisters are there. They talk to each other over bowls of cereal. The kids head off to school soon after. Brian has a fine morning in his seventh grade classroom and walks down to the lunchroom at precisely 12 p.m.

There’s a slick of water on the tiled floor near the fountain at the back of the cafeteria. A few eighth graders know about it, and they’re laughing as yet another student slips and tumbles to the ground.

Brian buys a grilled cheese sandwich. It comes with tomato soup that no one ever eats. He polishes off the sandwich and heads to the nearest trashcan to dump the soup. When his sneakers hit the water slick, he slips just like the others. The tomato soup goes up in the air and comes down on his lap. 

Nearby, at the table of eighth graders, a boy named Mark laughs. He laughs at Brian the same way the boys around him laugh at Brian. They laugh because they’re older, and they know something the younger kids don’t. They laugh at the slapstick nature of the fall. The spilled tomato soup is a bonus. The fall is a misfortune for Brian. That’s all. It’s not an asset for Mark. A few kids hear the laughter and look over, but Brian gets up quickly and rushes off to the bathroom to change into his gym shorts.

Mark tries to retell the story to a friend later. The friend doesn’t really get it because he wasn’t there. He can’t picture it. In fact, Mark seems a little mean for laughing at all.

After lunch, Brian returns to homeroom in his gym shorts. No one seems to notice the change. He breathes a sigh of relief. The cafeteria fall is behind him. He meets his sisters at the end of the day and they ask why he’s wearing gym shorts. He tells them he spilled some tomato sauce on his pants. They head home and spend the afternoon and evening together, safe and sound, home life completely separate from school life. Brian doesn’t think about the incident again. Only a few people saw it. It’s over. 

Now, let’s imagine Brian again. Same kid. Same family. Same school. He’s still in seventh grade, but this time it’s 2018. 

When Brian sits down for breakfast, his dad is answering an email at the table. His older sister is texting, and his younger sister is playing a video game. Brian has an iPhone too. He takes it out and opens the Instagram app. The Brian from 2008 was wondering about his position in the social hierarchy. The Brian from 2018 knows. He can see it right there on the screen. He has fewer ‘followers’ than the other kids in his grade. That’s a problem. He wants to ask his father what to do, but there’s that email to be written. Instead, Brian thinks about it all morning at school. While his teacher talks, he slips his phone out and checks to see how many ‘followers’ the other kids in class have. The answer doesn’t help his confidence. At precisely 12 p.m., he heads to the cafeteria. He buys a grilled cheese. It comes with tomato soup that no one ever eats. 

At the back of the lunchroom, Mark sits with the other eighth graders. He holds a shiny new iPhone in one hand. Mark has had an iPhone for five years. He’s got all the apps. Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat. He’s got lots of followers too. He doesn’t know all of them, but that’s okay.

A few years ago, Mark made his first Instagram post. It was a picture of his remote control car. Mark used to really enjoy remote control cars. Mark checked Instagram an hour after putting up that first picture. A bright red dot showed at the bottom of the page. He clicked it. Someone had ‘liked’ the picture of the car. Mark felt validated. It was good that he posted the picture. A little bit of dopamine was released into Mark’s brain. He checked the picture an hour later. Sure enough, another ‘like’. More dopamine. He felt even better. 

For a while, pictures of the remote control car were sufficient. They generated enough ‘likes’ to keep Mark happy. He no longer got much joy from actually driving the remote control car, but he got plenty from seeing those ‘likes’ pile up. 

Then something started to happen. The ‘likes’ stopped coming in. People didn’t seem interested in the pictures of the car anymore. This made Mark unhappy. He missed the ‘likes’ and the dopamine that came with them. He needed them back. He needed more exciting pictures, because exciting pictures would bring more views and more ‘likes’. So, he decided to drive his car right out into the middle of the road. He had his little brother film the whole thing. He filmed the remote control car as it got flattened by a passing truck. Mark didn’t bother to collect it. He just grabbed his phone and posted the video. It was only a few minutes before the ‘likes’ started coming in. He felt better. 

Now it’s eighth grade and Mark has become addicted to social media.  Sure, he needs a lot more ‘likes’ to get the same feeling, but that’s okay. That just means he needs more content. Good content. Content no one else has. That’s the kind that gets a lot of ‘likes’, really, really fast. Mark has learned the best content comes from filming and posting the embarrassing experiences of classmates. 

When he notices that water slick at the back of the cafeteria, he’s ready.  Each time someone walks by and falls, their misfortune becomes an asset for Mark. A part of Mark wants them to fall. He hopes they fall.

Brian walks across the cafeteria with his soup, minding his own business. Suddenly, his feet slide out from under him. The tomato soup goes up in the air and comes down on his lap. He’s so embarrassed, that when he stands up and rushes off to the bathroom, he doesn’t notice Mark filming.

Mark’s fingers race over his iPhone screen before Brian is out of sight. That was a great video he just took, and he wants to get it online. Fast. He knows he’s not supposed to have his cell phone out in school, but the teachers really only enforce that rule during class. They all use Twitter and Instagram too. They understand. 

Mark doesn’t know who he just filmed, and he doesn’t care. It’s not his fault the kid fell on the floor. He’s just the messenger. The video is a kind of public service announcement. He’s just warning everyone else about the water spot in the cafeteria. That’s what Mark tells himself.

He gets the video uploaded to Snapchat first. No time for a caption. It speaks for itself. He has it up on Instagram seconds later. By then, the ‘likes’ are already coming in. Dopamine floods into Mark’s brain. There’s a comment on Instagram already! “What a loser!” it says. Mark gives the comment a ‘like’. Best to keep the audience happy. 

This has been a rewarding lunch. The bell’s going to ring in a few minutes. Mark sits back and refreshes his screen again and again and again until it does.

Meanwhile, Brian heads back from the bathroom, having changed into his gym shorts. He’s still embarrassed about the fall. It happened near the back of the cafeteria, though. He doesn’t think many people saw. He hopes they didn’t. But when he walks into the classroom, a lot of people look at him. One girl holds her phone up at an odd angle. Is she…taking a picture? The phone comes down quickly and she starts typing, so he can’t be sure. 

Class begins. Brian is confused because people keep slipping their phones out and glancing back at him. He asks to go to the bathroom. Inside a stall, he opens Instagram. There he is on the screen, covered in tomato sauce. How could this be? Who filmed this? Below the video, a new picture has just appeared. It’s him in his gym shorts. The caption reads, “Outfit change!”

Brian scrolls frantically through the feed trying to find the source of the video. He can’t. It’s been shared and reshared too many times. He notices his follower count has dropped. He doesn’t want to go to class. He just wants it to stop. 

He meets his sisters outside at the end of the day. Several students snap pictures as he walks by. Neither sister says a word. Brian knows why. 

Home was a safe place for Brian in 2008. Whatever happened in school, stayed in school. Not now. Brian arrives at his house, heart thundering, and heads straight to his bedroom. He’s supposed to be doing homework, but he can’t concentrate. Alone in the dark, he refreshes his iPhone again and again and again and again.

Brian’s family is having his favorite dish for dinner, but he doesn’t care. He wants it to be over so he can get back to his phone. Twice, he goes to the bathroom to check Instagram. His parents don’t mind, they’re checking their own phones.

Brian discovers that two new versions of the video have been released. One is set to music and the other has a nasty narration. Both have lots of comments. He doesn’t know how to fight back, so he just watches as the view counts rise higher and higher. His own follower count, his friend count, keeps going in the opposite direction. Brian doesn’t want to be part of this. He doesn’t like this kind of thing. He can’t skip it though. It’s not like the dance. And he can’t tell a teacher. This isn’t happening at school.

He stays up all night refreshing the feed, hoping the rising view count will start to slow. Mark is doing the same thing at the other side of town. He has lots of new followers. This is his best video ever. 

At 3 a.m., they both turn off their lights and stare up at their respective ceilings. Mark smiles. He hopes tomorrow something even more embarrassing happens to a different kid. Then he can film that and get even more ‘likes’. Across town, Brian isn’t smiling, but sadly, he’s hoping for exactly the same thing. 

From the Author

I started teaching in 2009. At that time, public school was very much the way I remembered it. That’s not the case anymore. Smartphones and social media have transformed students into creatures craving one thing: content. It’s a sad state of affairs. 

But there’s hope. 

Over the last few years, my students have become increasingly interested in stories from the days before smartphones and social media. In the same way many adults look back fondly on simpler times, kids look back to second and third grade, when no one had a phone. I think a lot of them already miss those days. 

Smartphones and social media aren’t going anywhere. Both are powerful tools, with many benefits. But they have fundamentally altered how children interact with the world and not in a good way. We can change that. In addition to the “Wait Until 8th” pledge, consider taking the following steps to help your children reclaim childhood.

1. Propose that administrators and teachers stop using social media for school related purposes. In many districts teachers are encouraged to employ Twitter and Instagram for classroom updates. This is a bad thing. It normalizes the process of posting content without consent and teaches children that everything exciting is best viewed through a recording iPhone. It also reinforces the notion that ‘likes’ determine value. Rather than reading tweets from your child’s teacher, talk to your children each day. Ask what’s going on in school. They’ll appreciate it.

2. Insist that technology education include a unit on phone etiquette, the dark sides of social media and the long-term ramifications of posting online. Make sure students hear from individuals who have unwittingly and unwillingly been turned into viral videos.   

3. Tell your children stories from your own childhood. Point out how few of them could have happened if smartphones had been around. Remind your children that they will some day grow up and want stories of their own. An afternoon spent online doesn’t make for very good one.

4. Teach your children that boredom is important. They should be bored. Leonardo Da Vinci was bored. So was Einstein. Boredom breeds creativity and new ideas and experiences. Cherish boredom. 

5. Remind them that, as the saying goes, adventures don’t come calling like unexpected cousins. They have to be found. Tell them to go outside and explore the real world. Childhood is fleeting. It shouldn’t be spent staring at a screen.

Mathematical Mindsets [Jo Boaler] (3):The Power of Mistakes and Struggle

Every time a student makes a mistake in math, they grow a synapse. (Carol Dweck)

Psychologist Jason Moser studied the neural mechanisms that operate in people's brains when they make mistakes (Moser et al., 2011).

Moser's study shows us that we don't even have to be aware we have made a mistake for brain sparks to occur. When teachers ask me how this can be possible, I tell them that the best thinking we have on this now is that the brain sparks and grows when we make a mistake, even if we are not aware of it, because it is a time of struggle; the brain is challenged, and this is the time when the brain grows the most.

**

In Moser and his colleagues' study, the scientists looked at people's mindsets and compared mindsets with their ERN and Pe responses when they made mistakes on questions. Moser's study produced two important results. First, the researchers found that the students' brains reacted with greater ERN and Pe responses—electrical activity—when they made mistakes than when their answers were correct. Second, they found that the brain activity was greater following mistakes for individuals with a growth mindset than for individuals with a fixed mindset. Figure 2.1 represents brain activity in individuals with a fixed or growth mindset, with the growth mindset brains lighting up to a much greater extent when mistakes were made.

**

The fact that our brains react with increased activity when we make a mistake is hugely important. I will return to this finding in a moment.

The study also found that individuals with a growth mindset had a greater awareness of errors than individuals with a fixed mindset, so they were more likely to go back and correct errors. This study supported other studies (Mangels, Butterfield, Lamb, Good, & Dweck, 2006) showing that students with a growth mindset show enhanced brain reaction and attention to mistakes. All students responded with a brain spark—a synapse—when they made mistakes, but having a growth mindset meant that the brain was more likely to spark again, showing awareness that a mistake had been made. Whether it is mathematics, teaching, parenting, or other areas of your life, it is really important to believe in yourself, to believe that you can do anything. Those beliefs can change everything.

**

Moser's study, showing that individuals with a growth mindset have more brain activity when they make a mistake than those with a fixed mindset, tells us something else very important. It tells us that the ideas we hold about ourselves—in particular, whether we believe in ourselves or not—change the workings of our brains. If we believe that we can learn, and that mistakes are valuable, our brains grow to a greater extent when we make a mistake. This result is highly significant, telling us again how important it is that all students believe in themselves—and how important it is for all of us to believe in ourselves, particularly when we approach something challenging.

**

“Peter Sims, a writer for the New York Times, has written widely about the importance of mistakes for creative, entrepreneurial thinking (Sims, 2011). He points out: 

“Imperfection is a part of any creative process and of life, yet for some reason we live in a culture that has a paralyzing fear of failure, which prevents action and hardens a rigid perfectionism. It's the single most disempowering state of mind you can have if you'd like to be more creative, inventive, or entrepreneurial.”

He also summarizes the habits of successful people in general, saying that successful people:

Feel comfortable being wrong

Try seemingly wild ideas

Are open to different experiences

Play with ideas without judging them

Are willing to go against traditional ideas

Keep going through difficulties”

**

One of the most powerful moves a teacher or parent can make is in changing the messages they give about mistakes and wrong answers in mathematics.

**

Another strategy for celebrating mistakes in class is to ask students to submit work of any form—even test papers (although the less we test students the better); teachers then highlight their “favorite mistakes.” Teachers should share with students that they are looking for their favorite mistakes, which should be conceptual mistakes, not numerical errors. Teachers can then share the mistakes with the class and launch a class discussion about where the mistake comes from and why it is a mistake. This is also a good time to reinforce important messages—that when the student made this mistake, it was good, because they were in a stage of cognitive struggle and their brain was sparking and growing. It is also good to share and discuss mistakes, because if one student makes a mistake we know others are making them also, so it is really helpful for everyone to be able to think about them.

Mathematical Mindsets [Jo Boaler] (2):The Brain and Mathematics Learning

In the last decade we have seen the emergence of technologies that have given researchers new access into the workings of the mind and brain. Now scientists can study children and adults working on math and watch their brain activity; they can look at brain growth and brain degeneration, and they can see the impact of different emotional conditions upon brain activity. One area that has emerged in recent years and stunned scientists concerns “brain plasticity.” It used to be believed that the brains people were born with couldn't really be changed, but this idea has now been resoundingly disproved. Study after study has shown the incredible capacity of brains to grow and change within a really short period (Abiola & Dhindsa, 2011; Maguire, Woollett, & Spiers, 2006; Woollett & Maguire, 2011).

When we learn a new idea, an electric current fires in our brains, crossing synapses and connecting different areas of the brain.

 
**

If you learn something deeply, the synaptic activity will create lasting connections in your brain, forming structural pathways, but if you visit an idea only once or in a superficial way, the synaptic connections can “wash away” like pathways made in the sand. Synapses fire when learning happens, but learning does not happen only in classrooms or when reading books; synapses fire when we have conversations, play games, or build with toys, and in the course of many, many other experiences.

**

The new findings that brains can grow, adapt, and change shocked the scientific world and spawned new studies of the brain and learning, making use of ever-developing new technologies and brain scanning equipment. In one study that I believe is highly significant for those of us in education, researchers at the National Institute for Mental Health gave people a 10-minute exercise to work on each day for three weeks. The researchers compared the brains of those receiving the training with those who did not. The results showed that the people who worked on an exercise for a few minutes each day experienced structural brain changes. The participants' brains “rewired” and grew in response to a 10-minute mental task performed daily over 15 weekdays (Karni et al., 1998). Such results should prompt educators to abandon the traditional fixed ideas of the brain and learning that currently fill schools—ideas that children are smart or dumb, quick or slow. If brains can change in three weeks, imagine what can happen in a year of math class if students are given the right math materials and they receive positive messages about their potential and ability.

 
**

The new evidence from brain research tells us that everyone, with the right teaching and messages, can be successful in math, and everyone can achieve at the highest levels in school. There are a few children who have very particular special educational needs that make math learning difficult, but for the vast majority of children—about 95%—any levels of school math are within their reach. And the potential of the brain to grow and change is just as strong in children with special needs. Parents and teachers need to know this important information.

 
**

I am often asked whether I am saying that everyone is born with the same brain. I am not. What I am saying is that any brain differences children are born with are nowhere near as important as the brain growth experiences they have throughout life. People hold very strong views that the way we are born determines our potential; they point to well-known people who were considered geniuses—such as Albert Einstein or Ludwig van Beethoven. But scientists now know that any brain differences present at birth are eclipsed by the learning experiences we have from birth onward (Wexler in Thompson, 2014). Every second of the day our brain synapses are firing, and students raised in stimulating environments with growth mindset messages are capable of anything. Brain differences can give some people a head start, but infinitesimally small numbers of people have the sort of head start that gives them advantages over time. And those people who are heralded as natural geniuses are the same people who often stress the hard work they have put in and the number of mistakes they made. Einstein, probably the most well known of those thought to be a genius, did not learn to read until he was nine and spoke often about his achievements coming from the number of mistakes he had made and the persistence he had shown. He tried hard, and when he made mistakes he tried harder. He approached work and life with the attitude of someone with a growth mindset. A lot of scientific evidence suggests that the difference between those who succeed and those who don't is not the brains they were born with, but their approach to life, the messages they receive about their potential, and the opportunities they have to learn. The very best opportunities to learn come about when students believe in themselves. For far too many students in school, their learning is hampered by the messages they have received about their own potential, making them believe they are not as good as others, that they don't have the potential of others. 

When students are given fixed praise—for example, being told they are smart when they do something well—they may feel good at first, but when they fail later (and everyone does) they think that means they are not so smart after all.

 
**

The impact of the praise students receive can be so strong that it affects their behavior immediately. In one of Carol's studies, researchers asked 400 fifth graders to take an easy short test, on which almost all performed well. Half the children were then praised for “being really smart.” The other half were complimented on “having worked really hard.” The children were then asked to take a second test and choose between one that was pretty simple, that they would do well on, or one that was more challenging, that they might make mistakes on. Ninety percent of those who were praised for their effort chose the harder test. Of those praised for being smart, the majority chose the easy test (Mueller & Dweck, 1998).

Praise feels good, but when people are praised for who they are as a person (“You are so smart”) rather than what they did (“That is an amazing piece of work”), they get the idea that they have a fixed amount of ability. Telling students they are smart sets them up for problems later. As students go through school and life, failing at many tasks—which, again, is perfectly natural—they evaluate themselves, deciding how smart or not smart this means they really are. Instead of praising students for being smart, or any other personal attribute, it's better to say things like: “It is great that you have learned that,” and “You have thought really deeply about this.”

 

**

There is no preordained pace at which students need to learn mathematics, meaning it is not true that if they have not attained a certain age or emotional maturity they cannot learn some mathematics. Students may be unready for some mathematics because they still need to learn some foundational, prerequisite mathematics they have not yet learned, but not because their brain cannot develop the connections because of their age or maturity. When students need new connections, they can learn them.

Styles, Abilities and Multiple Intelligences

Research by cognitive scientists into the differences among students can shed light on this question, but before I get into that research, it is important to clarify whether I’m talking about differences in cognitive abilities or differences in cognitive styles. The definition of cognitive ability is straightforward: it means capacity for or success in certain types of thought. If I say that Sarah has a lot of ability in math, you know I mean she tends to learn new mathematical concepts quickly. In contrast to abilities, cognitive styles are biases or tendencies to think in a particular way, for example to think sequentially (of one thing at a time) or holistically (of all of the parts simultaneously). Abilities and styles differ in a few important ways. Abilities are how we deal with content (for example, math or language arts) and they reflect the level (that is, the quantity) of what we know and can do. Styles are how we prefer to think and learn.We consider having more ability as being better than having less ability, but we do not consider one style as better than any other style. One style might be more effective for a particular problem, but all styles are equally useful overall, by definition.

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Everyone can appreciate that students differ from one another.What can (or should) teachers do about that? One would hope we could use those differences to improve instruction.Two basic methods have been suggested. One approach is based on differences in cognitive style—that is, if one matches the method of instruction to the preferred cognitive style of the child, learning will be easier. Unfortunately, no one has described a set of styles for which there is good evidence. 

The second way that teachers might take advantage of differences among students is rooted in differences in abilities. If a student is lacking in one cognitive ability, the hope would be that she could use a cognitive strength to make up for, or at least bolster, the cognitive weakness. Unfortunately, there is good evidence that this sort of substitution is not possible.To be clear, it’s the substitution idea that is wrong; students definitely do differ in their cognitive abilities (although the description in Gardner’s multiple intelligences theory is widely regarded as less accurate than other descriptions).

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I admit I felt like a bit of a Grinch as I wrote this chapter, as though I had a scowl on my face as I typed “wrong, wrong, wrong” about the optimistic ideas others have offered regarding student differences. As I stated at the start of the chapter, I am not saying that teachers should not differentiate instruction. I hope and expect that they will. But when they do so, they should know that scientists cannot offer any help. It would be wonderful if scientists had identified categories of students along with varieties of instruction best suited to each category, but after a great deal of effort, they have not found such types, and I, like many others, suspect they don’t exist. I would advise teachers to treat students differently on the basis of the teacher’s experience with each student and to remain alert for what works.When differentiating among students, craft knowledge trumps science.

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Learning-style theories don’t help much when applied to students, but I think they are useful when applied to content.Take the visual-auditory-kinesthetic distinction. You might want students to experience material in one or another modality depending on what you want them to get out of the lesson; a diagram of Fort Knox should be seen, the national anthem of Turkmenistan should be heard, and the cheche turban (used by Saharan tribes to protect themselves against sun and wind) should be worn. The distinctions in Table 1 provide a number of interesting ways to think about lesson plans: Do you want students to think deductively during a lesson, or to free-associate creatively? Should they focus on similarities among concepts they encounter, or should they focus on the details that differentiate those concepts? Table 1 may help you to focus on what you hope your students will learn from a lesson and how to help them get there.

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Every teacher knows that change during a lesson invigorates students and refocuses their attention. If the teacher has been doing a lot of talking, something visual (a video or a map) offers a welcome change.Table 1 provides a number of ways to think about change during the course of a lesson. If the students’ work has demanded a lot of logical, deductive thinking, perhaps an exercise that calls for broad, associative thinking is in order. If their work has required many rapid responses, perhaps they should do another task that calls for thoughtful, measured responses. Rather than individualizing the required mental processes for each student, give all of your students practice in all of these processes, and view the transitions as an opportunity for each student to start fresh and refocus his or her mental energies.


If you have felt nagging guilt that you have not evaluated each of your students to assess their cognitive style, or if you think you know what their styles are and have not adjusted your teaching to them—don’t worry about it.There is no reason to think that doing so will help. And if you were thinking of buying a book or inviting someone in for a professional development session on one of these topics, I advise you to save your money. 

If “cognitive styles” and “multiple intelligences” are not helpful ways to characterize how children differ, what’s a better way? Why do some children seem to breeze through mathematics while others struggle? Why do some children love history, or geography? The importance of background knowledge has come up again and again in this book. In Chapter One I argued that background knowledge is an important determinant of what we find interesting; for example, problems or puzzles that seem difficult but not impossible pique our interest. In Chapter Two I explained that background knowledge is an important determinant of much of our success in school. Cognitive processes (such as analyzing, synthesizing, and critiquing) cannot operate alone.They need background knowledge to make them work. 

Still, background knowledge is not the only difference between students.There is something to the idea that some students are simply really clever.

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It’s not just that there is a lot of information in an expert’s long-term memory; it’s also that the information in that memory is organized differently from the information in a novice’s long-term memory.

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This generalization—that experts have abstract knowledge of problem types but novices do not—seems to be true of teachers too.When confronted with a classroom management problem, novice teachers typically jump right into trying to solve the problem, but experts first seek to define the problem, gathering more information if necessary. Thus expert teachers have knowledge of different types of classroom management problems. Not surprisingly, expert teachers more often solve these problems in ways that address root causes and not just the behavioral incident.

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...that transfer is so difficult because novices tend to focus on surface features and are not very good at seeing the abstract, functional relationships among problems that are key to solving them. Well, that is what experts are great at. They have representations of problems and situations in their long-term memories, and those representations are abstract.That’s why experts are able to ignore unimportant details and home in on useful information; thinking functionally makes it obvious what’s important.That’s also why they show good transfer to new problems. New problems differ in surface structure, but experts recognize the deep, abstract structure. That’s also why their judgments usually are sensible, even if they are not quite right.

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The second way to get around the limited size of working memory is to practice procedures so many times that they become automatic.That way the procedures don’t take space in working memory.Tie your shoes a few hundred times and you no longer need to think about it; your fingers just fly through the routine without any direction from thought processes that would crowd working memory. Experts have automatized many of the routine, frequently used procedures that early in their training required careful thought. Expert bridge players can count the points in a hand without thinking about it. Expert surgeons can tie sutures automatically. Expert teachers have routines with which they begin and end class, call for attention, deal with typical disruptions, and so on. It’s interesting to note that novice teachers often script their lessons, planning exactly what they will say. Expert teachers typically do not.They plan different ways that they will discuss or demonstrate a concept, but they don’t write out scripts, which suggests that the process of translating abstract ideas into words that their students can understand has become automatic.

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Over the last fifty years there have been a few instances in which a researcher has gained access to a good number (ten or more) of prominent scientists, who have agreed to be interviewed at length, take personality and intelligence tests, and so forth.The researcher has then looked for similarities in the backgrounds, interests, and abilities of these great men and women of science.The results of these studies are fairly consistent in one surprising finding.The great minds of science were not distinguished as being exceptionally brilliant, as measured by standard IQ tests; they were very smart, to be sure, but not the standouts that their stature in their fields might suggest.What was singular was their capacity for sustained work. Great scientists are almost always workaholics. Each of us knows his or her limit; at some point we need to stop working and watch a stupid television program, read People magazine, or something similar. Great scientists have incredible persistence, and their threshold for mental exhaustion is very high

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Experts are not simply better at thinking in their chosen field than novices are; experts actually think in ways that are qualitatively different.

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They have worked in their field for years, and the knowledge and experience they have accumulated enables them to think in ways that are not open to the rest of us. Thus, trying to get your students to think like them is not a realistic goal.Your reaction may well be, “Well, sure. I never really expected that my students are going to win the Nobel Prize! I just want them to understand some science.” That’s a worthy goal, and it is very different from the goal of students thinking like scientists.

Styles, Abilities and Multiple Intelligences

Why Is It Hard to Make Students Think Like Experts?

Why Is It So Hard for Students to Understand Abstract Ideas?

Why Do Students Remember Everything That’s on Television and Forget Everything I Say?

Factual knowledge must precede skill

Why Don't Students Like School?

Why Do Students Remember Everything That’s on Television and Forget Everything I Say?

Your memory system lays its bets this way: if you think about something carefully, you’ll probably have to think about it again, so it should be stored.Thus your memory is not a product of what you want to remember or what you try to remember; it’s a product of what you think about.

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Memory is the residue of thought. To teach well, you should pay careful attention to what an assignment will actually make students think about (not what you hope they will think about), because that is what they will remember. 

The Importance of Memory  

Every teacher has had the following experience: you teach what you think is a terrific lesson, full of lively examples, deep content, engaging problems to solve, and a clear message, but the next day students remember nothing of it except a joke you told and an off-the-subject aside about your family—or worse, when you say, struggling to keep your voice calm, “The point of yesterday’s lesson was that one plus one equals two,” they look at you incredulously and say, “One plus one equals two?” Obviously, if the message of Chapter Two is “background knowledge matters,” then we must closely consider how we can make sure that students acquire this background knowledge. So why do students remember some things and forget other things? Let’s start by considering why you fail to remember something. Suppose I said to you, “Can you summarize the last professional development seminar you attended?” Let’s further suppose that you brightly answer, “Nope, I sure can’t.”Why don’t you remember? 

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If you don’t pay attention to something, you can’t learn it! You won’t remember much of the seminar if you were thinking about something else.

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For material to be learned (that is, to end up in long-term memory), it must reside for some period in working memory—that is, a student must pay attention to it. Further, how the student thinks of the experience completely determines what will end up in long-term memory.

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What Good Teachers Have In Common

Trying to make the material relevant to students’ interests doesn’t work. As I noted in Chapter One, content is seldom the decisive factor in whether or not our interest is maintained. For example, I love cognitive psychology, so you might think, “Well, to get Willingham to pay attention to this math problem, we’ll wrap it up in a cognitive psychology example.” But Willingham is quite capable of being bored by cognitive psychology, as has been proved repeatedly at professional conferences I’ve attended. Another problem with trying to use content to engage students is that it’s sometimes very difficult to do and the whole enterprise comes off as artificial. How would a math instructor make algebra relevant to my sixteen-year-old daughter? With a “real-world” example using cell phone minutes? I just finished pointing out that any material has different aspects of meaning. If the instructor used a math problem with cell phone minutes, isn’t there some chance that my daughter would think about cell phones rather than about the problem? And that thoughts about cell phones would lead to thoughts about the text message she received earlier, which would remind her to change her picture on her Facebook profile, which would make her think about the zit she has on her nose . . . ? So if content won’t do it, how about style? Students often refer to good teachers as those who “make the stuff interesting.” It’s not that the teacher relates the material to students’ interests—rather, the teacher has a way of interacting with students that they find engaging. Let me give a few examples from my own experience with fellow college-level teachers who are consistently able to get students to think about meaning.

Teacher A is the comedian. She tells jokes frequently. She never misses an opportunity to use a silly example. Teacher B is the den mother. She is very caring, very directive, and almost patronizing, but so warm that she gets away with it. Students call her “Mom” behind her back. Teacher C is the storyteller. He illustrates almost everything with a story from his life. Class is slow paced and low key, and he is personally quiet and unassuming. Teacher D is the showman. If he could set off fireworks inside, he would do it. The material he teaches does not lend itself easily to demonstrations, but he puts a good deal of time and energy into thinking up interesting applications, many of them involving devices he’s made at home. 

Each of these teachers is one to whom students refer as making boring material interesting, and each is able to get students to think about meaning. Each style works well for the person using it, although obviously not everyone would feel comfortable taking on some of these styles. It’s a question of personality. 

Style is what the students notice, but it is only a part of what makes these teachers so effective. College professors typically get written student evaluations of their teaching at the end of every course. Most schools have a form for students to fill out that includes such items as “The professor was respectful of student opinions,” “The professor was an effective discussion leader,” and so on, and students indicate whether or not they agree with each statement. Researchers have examined these sorts of surveys to figure out which professors get good ratings and why. One of the interesting findings is that most of the items are redundant. A two-item survey would be almost as useful as a thirty-item survey, because all of the questions really boil down to two: Does the professor seem like a nice person, and is the class well organized?  Although they don’t realize they are doing so, students treat each of the thirty items as variants of one of these two questions.

Although K-12 students don’t complete questionnaires about their teachers, we know that more or less the same thing is true for them.The emotional bond between students and teacher—for better or worse—accounts for whether students learn.The brilliantly well-organized teacher whom fourth graders see as mean will not be very effective. But the funny teacher, or the gentle storytelling teacher, whose lessons are poorly organized won’t be much good either. Effective teachers have both qualities. 

They are able to connect personally with students, and they organize the material in a way that makes it interesting and easy to understand.



READ MORE:

Styles, Abilities and Multiple Intelligences

Why Is It Hard to Make Students Think Like Experts?

Why Is It So Hard for Students to Understand Abstract Ideas?

Factual knowledge must precede skill

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