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What do you practice as the year begins?

Our guest post today is by Rosa, a first-year teacher of fifth grade in an urban California school, who sent me these notes on her first week in the classroom. I was struck by how she had integrated the idea of “deliberate practice” into her first days with the children—carefully choosing what practice would lay a foundation for their year together, and paying close attention to her own practice, as well. I’d love to hear your own thoughts, and about what you’re practicing in your own first weeks with students!
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The main feeling I’m hanging on to from this week is the enormous responsibility and privilege of being THE 5th grade teacher to this class of students. All the energy I pour into them is returned in a way that’s so new to me–so different from student teaching last year. It feels energizing and restorative, and it reminds me why I want to do this.

Positive experiences from the week:

–LOTS of routines and procedures practice. I made a practice of timing students as they go through different transitions–we have our running times up on the board–they are motivated and excited to transition quickly and cleanly. I started the week by orchestrating those processes very closely, but as the week went on I turned over responsibility to them. The line was a struggle all week, but they are now walking in quiet, single file lines through the hallways (a major achievement for this class). I’m hoping to phase out my constant use of a clipboard and stern look in the halls.

–Students wrote about accomplishments and challenges from last year, and what they felt their most important goal for this year was. They shared this writing with partners in dyads, where one person talks and the other listens openly without commenting, and then they switch. Afterward, one girl said that she learned that she could say personal things in this class, and no one would make fun of her or talk about it with other people.

–We used that exercise as pre-writing for essays that they wrote about their hopes and dreams for this year. Each student wrote a few paragraphs about their hope for this year, one action they will take to accomplish their goal, one way their teacher can support them, a way their classmates can support them, and a way their families can support them. We will share these with partners and in author’s chair next week.

–For the first two days of school, I assigned students to eat in “lunch groups” of 4-6 students. Each lunch group had to sit and eat their lunch together and complete an assignment (I designated a leader in each group to carry a pencil and take notes on an index card). On the first day, their job was to make a list of ten things they all had in common. On Day 2, they discussed their hobbies and interests, and made a list of the most popular ones. After lunch, the leaders reported out. I stopped by the cafeteria on the second day to sit in on their conversations, and was happy to see students engaged with the assignment and each other–even the two new students in our class who came in not knowing anyone.

–We talked about what kind of class rules will support all of us in achieving our goals. We went through a process of individual brainstorming, sharing, consolidation, and voting, and ended up with 8 final class rules (too many, I know, but the vote was evenly split, and they were all great rules).

–We played “Zoom” a lot, a circle game where students pass a sound and gesture around the circle. Students love it, and often share ideas for how to make it go better and faster.

–We started every day with a “Math Talk,” where students individually write everything they can think of on a given topic (the number 24, 1/2, etc.), then share with a partner, then share with the whole group as I record their ideas exactly as they express them. They aren’t used to the idea of multiple strategies, or representing ideas in several ways, but I’m hopeful that this routine will help.

–We ended every day with a closing circle in which students reflected on one thing they learned, their favorite part of the day, something they were proud of, something they appreciated, something they’ll always remember, etc.

–Every day I read aloud “The Skirt” by Gary Soto, and they love it.

Students seem like they have a sense that this is a place where serious learning happens. They respond to my quiet signals and pointed looks, and seem to accept that I expect all of them to be engaged and on task.

And the negative…

–I focused too much on the negative this week: bench time at recess, calling parents for behavior problems, extremely strict line procedures without enough conversations about why it matters. I wanted to start off strict, clear, and consistent, but I forgot how much positive reinforcement I needed to do. I feel like we have a pretty well functioning class right now, but it doesn’t feel like a particularly family-like, safe, loving place. I feel really bad about that–it’s hard to wait until Tuesday to start making positive phone calls home, and letting the kids know how great they’re doing. I’m worried that I was too quick to give negative consequences, and I wonder if I did it calmly and non-emotionally enough. I’m obsessing about whether my teaching voice is authentic.

Even though visually it looks like the positives far outweigh the negatives, the negatives feel MUCH heavier in my heart and head right now. I need to shake off some of my self-doubt and desire for this classroom to immediately be everything that I dream of and want. These students and their families deserve the absolute best—it’s painful to be anything less.

The journey begins…

Kathleen Cushman September 8, 2010 Featured Posts , No Comments

Does your homework look like this?

What should we change about the nuts and bolts of homework, after reading Benedict Casey’s excellent article in the New York Times summarizing the cognitive research into effective studying? Here’s my short version:

Study the same thing in different locations. Varying the setting seems to enrich the information in the brain, and make it harder to forget.

Vary the type of material studied in one session, to leave a deeper impression on the brain. Math students would attack a set of problems that require different types of calculations, rather than going through many that use the same formula. Foreign language students would alternate vocabulary, reading, and speaking. Music students would do scales, practice pieces, and rehearse rhythms. Art or literature students would review pieces from different genres, not focus on one writer or painter at a time.

Spread out the studying over time. Every time the brain revisits something after a break, its effort to “relearn” it seems to increase long-term recall. As Casey puts it, “The harder it is to remember something, the harder it is to later forget.”

Use frequent practice tests or quizzes. “Desirable difficulty,” as the researchers call it, makes things stick in the mind. The very effort of pulling out what we’ve learned means we’ll remember it later on.

If we take this research seriously, what would teachers do differently in assigning homework? What would parents change about the way they supervise it? Could students make such changes on their own, or do they need adults to cooperate? I’ll send a complimentary copy of Fires in the Mind to the best comments that come in this week.

Kathleen Cushman September 7, 2010 Featured Posts , No Comments

Homework and the middle-school mind

My guest today is Dina Strasser, who teaches seventh grade English in upstate NY and whose blog The Line I depend upon for consistent and thoughtful insights on life in the middle school classroom. Dina’s taking my previous post on homework another welcome step here, as do several other teachers who comment on my original homework post here. Keep your ideas coming!
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Middle-school readerHOMEWORK! I think I may struggle with this morally more than other teachers, as my formative experience with assigning work outside of school came from my eight years as an ESL instructor. I started to call it the Second Shift Principle. If an ESL kid couldn’t do the homework around a parent’s absence due to a second job (or the student’s own “second shift,” often a load of housework and child care), then the homework wasn’t worth doing.

I transferred this philosophy to my new mainstream English classroom three years ago, and am deeply influenced by the complementary work of Cathy Vatterott at ASCD—her book Rethinking Homework is essential reading. My school, also, has a “no zero” policy, and de-emphasizes homework in the calculation of grades. I myself explicitly assign homework very sparingly, and grade homework minimally (5-10% of a grade), and only for completion. As Nicholas says so poignantly in Fires in the Mind, you don’t want homework to be like “a test that comes at the wrong time.”

As an English teacher, in fact, the only homework I assign on a regular basis is—you guessed it—reading. However, my reading follows the recommendations of Nancie Atwell; it is a pre-set time of 30 minutes per day, to be completed anywhere at any time, on the book or reading material of their choice. I like this kind of work because it solves so many homework issues right off the bat: it is (hopefully) enjoyable, flexible in how it can be completed (who doesn’t read on the bus once in a while?), and automatically differentiated for the kid.

Here, too, however, I struggle with some completion issues. Even self-directed reading, in a book a kid will enjoy, sometimes plays second fiddle not only to the scheduled lives our kids lead outside of school, but to much more sexy technological reading. In addition, and in a complicated twist on the information in Fires in the Mind, I find that if my kids don’t get some kind of grade on the reading, they have trouble seeing its worth. This is even if I explain every single day (and I do) that reading is just like free throws—it has to happen in order for it to improve. This is a shadow side of teaching middle school kids. They’ve been conditioned for several years by a learning culture which pins total value on extrinsic motivators such as grades, and they may not know how to articulate their desire for choice and meaning otherwise, like the older kids in Fires in the Mind.

So, as a middle school teacher experimenting with homework, I would be especially sensitive to the fact that while your kids are conducting “triage” based on what’s graded or not, what they’re actually expressing is a desire for the meaning and impact of the work to be clear. I hope to improve on my own homework in the coming year by asking for short reflections on the daily reading which we go over in conference weekly, targeted to what the kids individually feel they need practice on in reading, and including text and email options for turning those in. I am also excited to explain the differences between tech reading and “slow” reading for them, and validate them both—maybe by including a week’s worth of deliberate on-line reading practice for them each month. I’m sure that will get done!

Kathleen Cushman September 5, 2010 Featured Posts , , , , 1 Comment

Is homework “deliberate practice”?

Ideally, homework should be “deliberate practice,” targeting individual areas of need and pushing each student to a new place just within reach. But students tell me it rarely works that way.

The kids make their case in Chapter 8 of Fires in the Mind, part of which is adapted as “Show Us What Homework’s For” in the new September issue of Educational Leadership magazine. (If you can’t access the magazine article, you can download a free PDF of Chapter 8 on the Resources section of this blog.)

Cognitive researchers have specific criteria for the kind of practice that steadily makes people better at what they do. It would make sense if homework matched those criteria, but my research for “Fires in the Mind” shows that it usually doesn’t. For example:

  • Deliberate practice always has an express purpose, but students say they usually don’t know what its point is.
  • Deliberate practice is geared to the individual, but typically everyone gets the same homework tasks, no matter what they need to work on.
  • Deliberate practice involves attention and focus, but kids say they usually do their homework without thinking.
  • Deliberate practice requires repetition or rehearsal, but often kids tell me that they are repeating something just to get it over with, not to perfect and remember it.
  • Timing is important in deliberate practice, yet homework often takes more time than kids have for it.
  • Finally, although deliberate practice should lead to new skills, students say they don’t use it for anything after it’s done.

What would it take to turn homework into the kind of practice that would help students strengthen their skills and knowledge in academic subjects? Perhaps the most powerful steps in that direction would occur, I propose, when students think of homework as “getting good” at something–much like practice in athletics or the arts.

Let’s use this space to brainstorm some new ways to lift homework to a new level of deliberate practice. How are you already designing homework that accomplishes this? I’ll send a complimentary copy of Fires in the Mind to the first three commenters who offer good examples here!

Kathleen Cushman August 23, 2010 Featured Posts , 10 Comments

Basic skills, in a new light

Anyone who cares about things done well—and what kind of practice goes into that—should take a look at Mike Rose’s call for “a sea-change in the way we think about instruction in basic skills” to under-prepared young adults.

His inspiring commentary, just published in the Chronicle of Higher Education and on his blog, pushes back against the prevailing belief that remediation in math, reading, and writing academic is low-status teaching to low-status students. And he challenges the assumption that students must plow through the smallest units of learning before they work up to challenging thinking.

Rose knows better. A brilliant writer himself, he has also long taught remedial college writing. His many books (such as Possible Lives) reveal how alive he is to the intelligence evidenced in the actions and insights of people of every background, whether or not it comes from formal schooling.

Here he calls for a prestigious national institution—“The Smithsonian of Basic Skills”—that would devote itself to the theory and practice of how we develop and learn these critical skills. He asks:

If a young adult is having trouble with fractions, for example, how did his misunderstandings and flawed procedures develop? What formal or informal mathematical knowledge does he have that can be tapped? How does one access that cognitive history and lead the student to analyze and remedy it? How, then, does one proceed to teach in a way appropriate to an adult with that history?

I love these questions, and of course they also apply to teaching students at earlier ages. They are, in fact, fundamental to the purpose of our Practice Project at WKCD.

We start with conversations that draw forth what students already know and care about. Then we lead the student to analyze and remedy that cognitive history. With practice—at the important things, in the right way—students get better and better at the fundamental concepts that transcend academic disciplines and fields of work.

So what are the important things, and what’s the right way to practice them? For my part, I want to spend time in “The Smithsonian of Basic Skills” finding out! Meanwhile, how do you teach basic skills to your students, while keeping them deeply involved in interesting work? I’ll send a complimentary copy of Fires in the Mind to the best replies we receive.

Kathleen Cushman August 16, 2010 Featured Posts , , No Comments

Robots for teachers

Am I the only one who gets a weird, sad feeling when I read quotes like these, in the recent New York Times piece on how well kids learn from robots?

Preliminary results suggest that these students “do about as well as learning from a human teacher,” said Javier Movellan, director of the Machine Perception Laboratory at the University of California, San Diego. “Social interaction is apparently a very important component of learning at this age.”

Ahh! And wouldn’t that make kids want to have more of that social interaction with a human adult who actually cared about them?

If robots are to be truly effective guides, in short, they will have to do what any good teacher does: learn from students when a lesson is taking hold and when it is falling flat.

Scientists could equip a machine to understand the nonverbal cues that signal “I’m confused” or “I have a question” — giving it some ability to monitor how its lesson is being received.

So shouldn’t new teachers also learn that, with those good teachers at their side? Instead, TFA runs a prestige contest to see which top grads can parachute in for two years, after a summer’s training, then leave for their real careers.

If robots can learn to learn, on their own and without instruction, they can in principle make the kind of teachers that are responsive to the needs of a class, even an individual child.

Parents may have more pointed [questions]: Does this robot really “get” my child? Is its teaching style right for my son’s needs, my daughter’s talents?

The right question. A teaching practice is profoundly human, to my mind the most honorable profession of all, with the most enduring effects. It depends on someone being able to “get” each child in his or her living, breathing, maddening, frustrating glory.

I just posted a wonderful example of this on our Resources page—a glimpse of how students are growing into strong and independent learners under the guidance of some wonderful adult humans at Phoenix High School, a small high school in western Washington State. You’ll see the projects these students imagined and executed, which emerged from their own individual affinities and curious minds. You’ll see the discipline their school fostered in them as the kids created every day’s work plan for themselves. And you’ll see the thoughtful back-and-forth they have with teachers like Tracy Money, as human and inspiring and honorable a guide as any of us could ask for.

I’m all for technology in learning, but after reading through that document, the thought of turning learners over to robots chills my blood. What about you? Please, write in and tell us!

Kathleen Cushman July 15, 2010 Featured Posts , No Comments

What sticks with you from school?

As the school year ends in this “accountability” era, we’re pressed even more to test and summarize and analyze what students know and can do. But it’s also the season of high school reunions—and I’m always struck by what people remember most, 5 and 10 and 20 years out, about their learning in those adolescent years.

A friend passed along this email from her brother (class of 1992), who went with a few of his high school drama club friends to take a last look at their old auditorium, slated for demolition in a major renovation. “The evening proved to be much more emotional than I had expected,” he writes:

It didn’t hit me in the lobby, or even when I walked into the auditorium with the orange seats. But it started to hit me when I walked up the stairs on far stage right, the same stairs that G. walked up after he fell off the stage at the end of “You Can’t Take It With You.” It hit me when I walked backstage and saw that it looked almost identical … the toolroom in which something may or may not have happened between M. and A., the chaotic placement of wood in those shelves, the makeup room. … It hit me as I sat on the edge of the stage, with my feet dangling over, looking out to the orange seats and thinking about the crew meetings in which the honchos would be sitting on the stage and the crew would be sitting in the first couple rows of seats.

Later, I would walk around the mostly-unchanged high school, struck by how emotionless it was for me. (The only thing that moved me was how the student artwork in that first floor hallway was unchanged from when we were there.) But of course most of the high school was just a place where we took classes. That theatre was . . . not to be too cheesy, but that theatre was where I became the man I am today. That was where we channeled our passion, our energy and learned how to cope, how to negotiate, how to motivate, how to make something happen. That theatre was home, in some ways as much as [our family home] was for me.

Reading this, I thought about what kids like this are actually rehearsing in all those hours of absorbing “non-academic” activities—whether in the arts, sports, or other areas. What they learned, Ted Sizer used to say, constituted the “residue” of a high school education: what remains long after we have forgotten everything we studied for the tests.

How much higher could the stakes rise, than to show that kids know “how to cope, how to negotiate, how to motivate, how to make something happen”?

What did you learn in your high school years that made you who you are today? Please share your answer in the comment box below! I’ll send a complimentary copy of Fires in the Mind to the best comment we receive.

Kathleen Cushman June 20, 2010 Featured Posts , , , 3 Comments

What are you practicing?

Starting this Fires in the Mind blog has made me think again about how hard it is to form new habits. Even though I’ve been writing and publishing for decades, it’s a big stretch for me to take that skill into new digital territory. With every new step I am painfully aware how clumsy and awkward it feels, how much I don’t quite “get” yet.

Tysheena, 13, described this when she told us about learning ballroom dance. But as she kept practicing with her partner, she noticed, the steps gradually came more naturally to her.

The secret, brain research tells us, lies not in big leaps but in tiny, continuous steps. If we practice every day doing something just a little bit differently, new synaptic pathways are actually forming in the brain— bypassing old habits and creating new ones. Taking giant steps, in contrast, creates so much stress that we are likely to stop trying altogether.

Knowing how we learn best can make that process much less painful. For example, I learn most easily as an apprentice, so I went to a young person who grew up with digital networking at his fingertips. One small step at a time, he’s coaching me to shift my writing routines into the unfamiliar patterns of WordPress, Twitter, and Facebook. Now when I have an idea to share, I’m doing something different with it every day.

Teachers and parents, too, often get better at what they do by making a new approach part of their daily routine. What new habit are you practicing right now? How have you managed the awkward, clumsy stage I’m in right now? What strategies do you use in order to keep yourself going?  I’ll send a free copy of Fires in the Mind if yours is among the best replies this week!

Kathleen Cushman May 22, 2010 Featured Posts , , 5 Comments

What we can learn from that ollie

Most days in my New York City neighborhood, as I walk down the sidewalk under the ramparts of the George Washington Bridge, I stop for a while to watch the skateboarders practice their ollies. A group of kids from about 11 to 15, they hang out on a little-used strip of asphalt across from the bus station, working on their moves in a way that seems at once fluid, social, and intensely focused.

Even when they seem to be taking a break, not doing anything much, they’re actually watching each other closely. Sometimes they exchange a few words of critique or advice. Then they’ll go back and try something new, again and again.

Like Dan Coyle in The Talent Code and many others, for the last couple of years we at What Kids Can Do have been digging into the cognitive research on what’s really going on beneath that bridge—and in other places where kids are getting really good at what they do.

The kind of practice that really moves us ahead – “deliberate practice” – requires explicit elements, I’ve learned — and those elements look a lot like what those young skateboarders are doing as they work at their ollies under the bridge:

• They see something excellent that they want to know and be able to do.

• They go after that thing at a challenge level that’s just right for them.

• They break the challenge into parts and rehearse each move in a focused, attentive way, at intervals, until it comes easily each time.

• Someone notices their mistakes and helps them adjust what they’re doing.

• They savor the small successes that come along — and then they look for the next challenge.

It’s what every good teacher wishes were happening in the classroom. But it takes time and persistence — the famous 10,000 hours we’ve read about in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers and other books drawing on that same research about achieving high performance.

And as our WKCD team documents the lives and learning of adolescents, it fascinates me how many of those 10,000 hours for kids happen “outside the lines.”

Kids spend about 5,000 hours in high school alone: six to seven hours a day, 185 days a year, for four years. Homework adds to that time, at least in theory. But when I ask kids where they experience “deliberate practice”—using the criteria we’ve spelled out above—they’re more often talking about skateboarding than about science class.

We’re going to use this space to explore with all of you who care about kids — teachers, parents, coaches, caregivers — what can bring that kind of practice into all the places where we interact with youth.

The kids under that bridge are showing us that it’s a way of being, not a curriculum. It’s at once playful and purposeful, and its result is high performance.

In this space, we’ll focus our discussions by watching and listening to kids themselves. We hope you’ll tell us what you’re seeing and hearing as you work with youth—and also share what you’re wondering and trying.

I’ll mail a free copy of Fires in the Mind to the best post I receive on this in the next week. So let’s go—it’s time to practice!

For reference and discussion, download What_Is_Deliberate_Practice? (PDF)

Kathleen Cushman May 6, 2010 Featured Posts , , , , 2 Comments

For starters: Ask kids how they ‘got good’

For the Practice Project that What Kids Can Do undertook last year, we asked close to 200 students to join us in a nationwide dialogue with teachers and parents about “what it takes to get good at something.”

They started by describing what they were already good at–often outside school!–telling how they got started and what kept them going when it got hard. Together, we figured out the “habits of experts” as they interviewed accomplished adults about their process and compared it to their own.

That led us to exciting insights about the very practical help they needed in order to move from novice level to mastery at school.It was a great conversation! In our new book Fires in the Mind, you can listen in on what they said in chapters like “Asking the Experts” and “Is Homework Deliberate Practice?”

In this video, I introduce the Practice Project and some of the students whose voices appear in the Fires in the Mind. Look inside the book and tell me what you think!

Kathleen Cushman May 3, 2010 Featured Posts , 4 Comments

Why all the fuss about practice?

Every day as I walk past the George Washington Bridge bus station in my New York City neighborhood, I stop to watch the skateboarders for a while. They hang out under the bridge ramparts on a little-used strip of asphalt, mostly kids from about 11 to 15, and they work on their moves in a way that seems at once fluid, social, and intensely focused. At times, they slouch into a break, but they’re actually watching each other closely. Then they go back and try something new, again and again.

Like Dan Coyle in The Talent Code and many others, for the last couple of years we at What Kids Can Do have been digging into the cognitive research on what it takes to get really good at something.

The kind of practice that really moves us ahead – “deliberate practice” – involves some key elements, we learned — and they look a lot like what those young skateboarders are doing under the bridge:

They see something excellent that they want to know and be able to do.
They go after something at a challenge level that’s just right for them.
They repeat the task in a focused, attentive way, at intervals that help them recall its key elements.
All along, they receive and adjust to feedback, correcting their mistakes.
They really savor the small successes that come along — and then they look for the next challenge.

It’s what every good teacher wishes were happening in the classroom. But it fascinates us, as we document the lives and learning of adolescents, how much of their learning takes place “outside the lines.”

We’re going to use this space to explore with all of you who care about kids — teachers, parents, coaches, caregivers — what can bring that kind of practice into all the places where we interact with youth.

The kids under that bridge are showing us that it’s a way of being, not a curriculum. It’s at once playful and purposeful, and its result is high performance.

In this space, we’ll focus our discussions by watching and listening to kids themselves. We hope you’ll tell us what you’re seeing and hearing, and tell us what you’re wondering and trying.

Welcome to practice!

Kathleen Cushman April 20, 2010 Featured Posts , No Comments
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