Month: June 2020

One-Man Book Club: Powerful Teaching

I’m a veteran of the Mental Game of Summer. Those first two weeks of June after school lets out are mine. To sit in the sun with a cold drink, wipe the hard drive clean, reminisce, forget, curse, ponder, recover. The last two weeks of June are filled with all the possibilities of play you can imagine. Carefree. Just gonna sit in the backyard and read? Sure. Sleep 11 hours on back-to-back nights? Zzzz. Impromptu road trip? Let’s Go.

The Fourth of July, America’s great national celebration of independence, is the fulcrum. The day itself is joyful. But the night brings the first hint of the Sunday Night Blues, like a chill wind on an August evening.

When I wake up on July 5, next school year is practically here.

This year the anticipation (dread?) is rearing its ugly head early. Mostly due to rampant uncertainty over what the start of school will look like in the midst of a global pandemic.

The plans, or at least a multiple-choice question involving possible plans, will start trickling out of the next few days. Governors in Texas and Michigan have both announced that school will re-open for in-person instruction.

Elsewhere:

In my district this week the interim superintendent presented details of a community survey that shows parents overwhelmingly favor face-to-face instruction when school opens in 8 weeks. No decision about re-opening school has been announced yet. And even an announcement (from a different district) that students will return to the classroom doesn’t necessarily mean seven hours a day, five days a week.

I felt like I managed the transition to emergency distance learning pretty well in the spring. But if everything I do starting in August is going to have to be convertible, and accessible to both in-person and distance learners, that planning needs to start like yesterday. Most of the wise people I follow have recommended building the online course first, then pivoting to in-person as needed since that’s an easier transition than the opposite direction. (Lengthy twitter thread opened by John Stevens here). I’m down with that.

Regardless of the setting, my main goal for the new year is to intentionally build in retrieval practice as outlined in Powerful Teaching by Pooja Agarwal and Patrice Bain. I’ve been slowly working my way through the text since February, and have been introducing some of the concepts all year. (Info and resources here, but you really sould read the book).

The authors have worked together to research and implement cognitive science, and now have teamed up to package their findings into Powerful Learning.

They refer to the four basic building blocks as “Power Tools”, and you might find that they sound famliar from your practice, even if you used a different name. I did, for sure.

  • Retrieval Practice: as the authors put it, “pulling information out of students’ heads rather than putting information in students’ heads”.
  • Spaced Practice: the opposite of cramming, spreading recall opportunities out over time.
  • Interleaving: mixing closely related topics so students have to differentiate between concepts.
  • Feedback-driven Metacognition: “providing students the opportunity to know what they know and know what they don’t know.”

So a 3-2-1 summary after a notes video, or a rousing game of “The Fast And The Curious” or a warm-up that spirals back to last week’s topic or a “Green Sheet” that students use to prepare for a test or a review package that jumbles the order of topics, all qualify.

Patrice Bain talks about asking her students to have a “pointless conversation”. That’s a little unnerving to kids who have grown used to churning out squiggles on a worksheet. But I built some “check-in/no-right-answer” questions into my emergency distance learning work this spring, and got some very thoughtful responses:

I’ve been trying to encourage my students to go beyond re-reading notes and memorizing algorithms for years, with varying levels of success. The Power Tools give me a framework for helping my students become “fluent” in the math skills we’ve learned.

Fortunately, Agarwal and Bain anticipate that teachers will need student (and parent, and admin) buy-in to make the Power Tools really pay off in class. So they wrote an entire chapter titled “Spark Conversations With Students About The Science Of Learning”. It includes six steps to starting that discussion:

  • Empower Students By Sparking A Conversation
  • Empower Students By Modeling Power Tools
  • Empower Students By Fostering An Understanding Of Why Power Tools Work
  • Empower Students To Harness Power Tools Inside The Classroom
  • Empower Students To Harness Power Tools Inside The Classroom
  • Empower Students To Plan, Implement, And Reflect On Their Power Tools

These are tough conversations, and necessary conversations. Old habits (of study and of “doing school”) are hard to break. Asking students to intentionally think about and name what they know and what they don’t know is challenging. Breaking away from the “photomath” mindset pushes students out of their comfort zone. Teachers too, if I’m gonna be honest.

I recall a moment early this past school year when a student (who I knew was really really successful grade-wise in her algebra class) looked at me for help on a quadratic equation problem that showed up in a skills review in my geometry class. She literally said “I have no idea what to do with this”. I’ll admit that deep down inside I was a little judgey. Like, “what do you mean you don’t know how to solve a quadratic equation? It was only four months ago and it was literally one of the most important skills in the whole course!” Quickly I caught myself and remembered that a lot of things we learn one time evaporate over a summer. Otherwise, why were we reviewing skills? So we sat together and I nudged her to factor the quadratic first and things fell into place.

But this is where retrieval practice and “judgements of learning” come into play. From Day One, if we are constantly thinking about what we know and what we don’t know, reaching back intentionally to recall prior learning, giving students low-stakes opportunities to test themselves before an assessment, giving them actionable feedback, we give our students the tools to learn for the long term.

When we return to school the learning loss from an extended period away from an in-person setting is going to be only one of many challenges we’ll face. Regardless of what school looks like in August, the tools I read about in Powerful Teaching can help my students organize their knowledge, prioritize their time for study, and power through the most challenging school year any of us have ever faced.

This Needs A Name

I’m a math guy who reads a lot. Maybe too much. And I’m a long-time non-fiction guy. So I love a good story. Especially the true ones. They are powerful. And powerful stories change things.

Some time ago, in our never-ending quest to Do Something Different™ we made a day trip to the Gilmore Car Museum outside Kalamazoo, MI.

It was a day of history and hot rods. But there was more than just old cars. Several exhibits sought to help visitors see how the automobile influenced 20th century America. There was a Dust Bowl exhibit with the broken down skeleton of an old Ford that might have carried a family across the country 90 or so years ago. Prints of Dorothea Lange photos helped tell the story.

And around the corner: the Green Book.

Way before there was a movie. Way before I had a clue what it was. The museum owns a copy of the actual book, and the exhibit includes a video with first-person stories of people recalling incidents of racism and discrimination from their youth.

It was powerful. Even if you know that racism was (and is) pervasive in our country. Even if you had read about slavery and Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement and the Edmund Pettus Bridge and Rosa Parks and Dr. King and Fred Hampton and Malcolm X.

Looking at someone right in the eye (even on video) as they tell you how their humanity was stolen from them changes you. I know my youngest son understood it in a way far deeper than what he had learned in school. He had a similarly moving experience when he and members of the St. Paul Junior Choir sat on the Rosa Parks bus at the Henry Ford Museum and heard a recording of Ms. Parks’ own words describing the moment she made her stand.

There are a million things that need to be done. Like cops could stop killing innocent Black men and women. Driving While Black could stop being a thing. We could end the practice of throwing non-violent drug offenders in jail for a million years, especially as more and more states legalize weed. We could take a long hard look at how students of color are disciplined and suspended at disproportionate rates. We could examine whether we are offering students of color the same academic opportunities and post-secondary options as their White peers.

But Step One: we need to teach our kids what racism is and what it does. I wish I could say I planned all these adventures to help my son be anti-racist. But they just kind of happened. I’m glad they did. It probably helped him understand the concept far better than me preaching at him.

In recent days a couple of writers I follow online have dug deep into places of pain to share their stories. I’ll start with James Boyd of the Northwest Indiana Times.

“When I was in sixth grade, I remember standing outside of my middle school waiting for it to open and being accused of sagging my pants by one of the deans.

Back then, I was on the basketball team, and it was cool to wear shorts underneath your jeans. I’m sure anyone who has ever played a lot of basketball can relate. Because of this, my shorts were visible above the waistline of my pants. I wasn’t sagging. I’ve never sagged a day in my life.

But as I stood with a group of friends, ones who didn’t look like me, this dean — who also didn’t look like me — pulled me aside and reprimanded me in front of everyone. He tried labeling me a “thug.”

To this day, I hate that word.

I can’t recall exactly what happened in the moments afterward, but thankfully I have parents who stood up for their son’s character and integrity. Eventually, it blew over — or rather I moved on. But I NEVER forgot. That was probably one of the first times in my life that I had been stereotyped.

I was 12.”

In case you doubted that racism exists in school, and how it affects our kids.

And then Javonte Anderson of the Chicago Tribune. (Trigger warning: Anderson uses the n-word in his column as he processes his response to a series of unarmed Black people killed by police).

Seeing an officer kill another Black man is like watching my own funeral. Or my brother’s. Or my father’s.

It highlights the frailty of my existence. It conjures up thoughts of slavery, lynchings, fire hoses, Jim Crow and Rodney King. It opens up emotional scars. It forces me to question my worth. It makes me realize that the complexion of my skin denies me the chance of making even one misstep.

It’s why my hands trembled on the steering wheel the last time a white police officer pulled me over. For him, it was a routine traffic stop. For me, it was life or death.

It makes me feel more like a n****r and less like a man.

Jesus.

The Chicago Bears’ Akiem Hicks laid himself bare on a conference call with reporters last week too.

Among my online PLN there are many people who have faced the same types of racism their entire lives. Their recommendation to white people who want to become anti-racist but aren’t sure where to start is not to come to them asking for guidance or a “to-do” list, but to do their own reading.

It’s the same thing we ask our students to do – to own their own learning.

And in this case, to learn from men and women who have shared their humiliation and anger from their personal encounters with our national sin.

One of the critical starting points is – checking who I’m connected to online. Many of these powerful narratives would not have come into my timeline if I wasn’t already following Boyd and Anderson. Or Carron Phillips or José Luis Vilson or Kelly Hurst or Jemele Hill or Chevin Stone. If I’m going to learn, I need to make sure I’m listening to the right people.

One last thing. I’m Catholic. I believe in heaven. And I believe in hell. Racism is a mortal sin. The destination of my soul is on the line. Period. I like to believe that my co-religionists believe that too, and act accordingly. God knows our bishops have not always done the right thing in the last few decades in terms of protecting children. But at this moment several are stepping up to shepherd their flock regarding racism in America. My bishop is one of them. Then here’s Joseph Cardinal Tobin of Newark, NJ.

The necessity of naming the evil of racism humiliates us, since so many events in our lifetime, let alone the history of our nation, have compelled us to shamefully recognize the national sin
that obliges African Americans to endure unique and relentless humiliation, indignity, and unequal opportunity. Our tolerance of racism as well as collective deafness to the cry of those so grievously offended and the conscious and unconscionable promotion of divisions in this nation has encouraged the heinous evil of racism to propagate.

Cardinal Tobin could not have made it more clear. Nothing will change until we can name it. And then admit it. And then work to right it. And if we need help comprehending the evils of racism – listening to how the pain leaps off the page and the video screen will give us the guidance to call it out.