Guest Post: Nihilist Ned

From my friend Nihilist Ned:

 

Confidence

Superpowers

Imagine you're about to step in front of thirty adolescents you have never met before. You are stepping in as a substitute teacher, and you know nothing about them except that their teacher is out sick today. It's a Friday and the day before a vacation, so even that is up for debate. If you could have one of the following superpowers bestowed on you immediately before walking into the room, which would it be?

http://xkcd.com/1012/

a) The ability to answer to any question a child might ask about the content

b) Intuition regarding where every child should be sitting

c) Instant knowledge of the school's discipline system

d) Knowledge of one personal fact about every student in the class

e) A perfect, photographic recall of the teacher's lesson plan

f) The ability to project self-assuredness and confidence

Go ahead and make your choice. Read the title of this post if you need a hint.

Let's play my favorite teaching game: What will go wrong? Let's go through the choices one by one, seeing what might go wrong in each case:

a) The ability to answer to any question a child might ask

Once kids discover this fact, they will use it to try to sidetrack you. I've seen plenty of subs get taken down this rabbit hole, and I've seen kids' eyes light up when they realize they won't have to do any actual work today because this teacher will continue to answer whatever off-topic question they can come up with.

b) Intuition regarding where every child should be sitting

Yes, but what will you do when they're not sitting there?

c) Instant knowledge of the school's discipline system

This one is tempting. Maybe this will lead to some sort of action. But I imagine the interaction going something like this:

You: Look, guys, I know about your referrals, and I'll do it!

Them: No, you won't.

d) Knowledge of one personal fact about every student in the class

Even more tempting! It's a personal connection, right? But in the crucial first three minutes of class, what are you going to do, start spreading everybody's business? Make eye contact and allude to that time they were at the mall and peed their pants? Drop the name of their favorite basketball player? This has a high chance of coming across as inauthentic at best, and creepy at worst. 

e) A perfect, photographic recall of the teacher's lesson plan

1. The teacher probably didn't put as much thought into the plans as you hoped they would.

2. Are kids going to listen to you? Will they follow your directions?

f) The ability to project self-assuredness and confidence

Bingo. Plenty could still go wrong, but you won't be run over. This is a huge win.

But why? Why is confidence such a big deal?

1. Confidence tells kids, especially kids you don't know: I know something you don't. Otherwise, where is this confidence coming from? Are you really good at your job? Kids like teachers who are good at their jobs, because it means they learn more, they get more respect, and they generally have more fun enjoying learning when they're with these teachers.

2. Confidence means you don't take it personally, or doubt yourself, when kids push the limit of what is acceptable. Unflappable calm is a positive side effect (or, in this case, side affect) of confidence.

3. When you are confident, things will still go wrong, but they will not spiral out of control. Consider the opposite: If you publicly doubt your ability to keep the class together, and things start to go wrong (which they will), it will be nearly impossible to bring things back together.

I chose the substitute scenario because this is the most extreme case I can think of: How you present yourself in the moment can make the difference between kids walking out of the class and kids actually (maybe) learning something. But this applies to classroom teachers as well. I'll leave out the other connections to dating, dancing, and other stressful performance scenarios and focus on teaching here.

How to build confidence

This is not Orin.

1. Mindset. Orin G, director of the MATCH Teacher Residency, encourages rookie teachers to adopt the personality of a historical badass, chosen from Ben Thompson's Badass series. When stepping into an unpredictable arena, just feeling that you're in charge is a big deal. Some of you veteran teachers may be reading this and rolling your eyes, but remember what it's like to step into a classroom for the first time: You didn't know what you know now, and, even if you did, you weren't able to project it in the right way.

2. Teacher moves. There are some teacher moves that simply exude confidence, Strong Voice being at the top of the list. From there, Do It Again and clarity about What To Do can go a long way. Think Cesar Millan, the Dog Whisperer.

"OMG you're treating kids like dogs!?!" - Says somebody who has never told a 4-year-old to get down from the table.

3. Successful practice. You will become more confident the more you practice exactly what you're going to do. See Practice Perfect for more on this; basically, the more you do something right, the more you believe in your ability to do it right.

4. The 20 Mile March. Jim Collins, in his latest book Great by Choice, talks about companies (the "10X" companies) that achieve more than their competitors in volatile business environments, and likens their fanatic discipline to Road Amundsen's strategy for reaching the south pole in 1911: On the best days and the worst days alike, march between 15 and 20 miles. Do not overextend yourself in good conditions, and do not allow yourself to fall behind in poor conditions. For businesses, this means putting both a floor and a ceiling on goals: Do not do more than you are able to sustain over the long haul.

For rookie teachers, this means rolling out exactly one new routine a week, and seeing success with it. It means mastering one small teacher move every time you meet with your coach. It means setting student achievement goals that are not too ambitious, that don't require you to sprint full speed ahead when you have the time, because soon you won't have the time and you won't know how to compensate.

From Collins:

Accomplishing a 20 Mile March, consistently, in good times and bad, builds confidence. Tangible achievement in the face of adversity reinforces the 10X perspective: we are ultimately responsible for improving performance. We never blame circumstance; we never blame the environment.

Confidence is not arrogance

Sure, confidence includes a measure of acknowledging when things have gone wrong, and the ability to tell kids that your first direction was not as clear as it had been. But most importantly, confidence comes from a systematic process of preparing for the worst. In the classroom, you've already thought of the ways that kids will try to get out of doing work. Instructionally, you've thought through the ways they will misunderstand the concept you're teaching. You have anticipated every question and every misconception and every diversionary tactic, so when they arise, you're not caught off guard. Roald Amundsen took four thermometers for a key altitude-measurement device on his trip to the south pole, in case one of them (or three of them) broke. He left himself four times the necessary provisions along the way, in case things went wrong. In the ultimate badass move, in his youth, he experimented with eating raw dolphin meat, because, if he were to ever find himself shipwrecked, he wanted to know if he could survive by eating dolphins. Amundsen was the first man to reach the south pole, but it was not because he blindly believed in his own abilities; he had prepared for the worst in every possible way.

Most great teachers I know, starting with our principal, Rebecca, are fanatical about preparing for the worst. Like a lot of great teachers, Rebecca balances the wholehearted belief in the good inherent in each child with the understanding that adolescents try to push the boundaries of what is acceptable. She likes to ask about all of the ways in which something could go wrong with any of my harebrained schemes I come up with for our school:

• What if kids don't have their homework?
• What if they don't turn it in?
• What if they're at the doctor's office?
• What if they were absent yesterday?
• What if they arrive late?
• What if a teacher forgets to check homework?
• What if a key person is absent? What is the backup plan?
• What about this plan will make parents most upset? How do we proactively communicate?
• How much time will this take away from teachers? How can we lighten the load?
• What are all the ways this could be misconstrued by kids and parents?
• How will this affect our existing systems? What are the negative effects we'll need to mitigate?

Note that none of this is hypothetical; it's all phrased as what will happen, because if we don't assume that these things will go wrong, we will likely fail to plan for them. 

Final thoughts

Finally, two examples from chess may help to clarify the duality of confidence and pessimism.

First, Magnus Carlsen, a 22-year-old Norwegian player who is the highest-rated chess player of all time, in an interview for the Financial Times:

“Self-confidence is very important. If you don’t think you can win, you will take cowardly decisions in the crucial moments, out of sheer respect for your opponent. You see the opportunity but also greater limitations than you should. I have always believed in what I do on the chessboard, even when I had no objective reason to. It is better to overestimate your prospects than underestimate them.”

Contrast this with Paul Tough's assertion that the best chess players are pessimists who assume that a given move won't work, and actively try to find all the ways this particular move will lead to their own defeat. 

So in the end, we're left with confidence about the big things, and a neurotic obsession with the details of the small things. I will win this game, but this move will probably keep me from meeting that goal if I'm not careful. I will reach the south pole, but I will probably hit dozens of freak storms along the way. I will teach this classroom full of kids, but not before several of them try to keep me from reaching this goal along the way, and not before half of them misunderstand the key idea behind what we're doing. Now think through all of those things that will go wrong, prepare for them the best you can, do one small thing well and feel good about it, and, in terms of confidence, fake it 'til you make it.

Grace

Francis Su is a math professor at Harvey Mudd College* in Claremont, CA. Last week, upon receiving the Haimo Teaching Award of the Mathematics Association of America, he gave a speech to a community of educators that put into words something I have been thinking about for a while:

The Lesson of GRACE:

•      Your accomplishments are NOT what make you a worthy human being.
•      You learn this lesson when someone shows you GRACE: good things you didn't earn or deserve, but you're getting them anyway.

You can (and should!) read the entire text of his speech on his blog. Trust me; it is a much better use of the next five minutes than, say, reading this blog. This idea is really powerful and, though it is often relegated to the 'soft' side of teaching, is among the most important things to understand and apply in teaching and in life. Here are some ways in which this idea of grace manifests itself:

1. Dr. Steve Perry, principal of Capital Prep in Hartford, shows us on one of the TV One show Save My Son (check it out here, and keep in mind that I am somewhat obsessed with this show) that the most important step in talking with a young man who is currently on the wrong track is to establish trust by showing him that you value him as a person. For those of us who tend to dive into the issues ("I'm here to help you make better choices!"), it is great to have a model to follow in terms of simply asking what a kid is into. Do you like basketball? What's your favorite team? Do you love your mother? Where do you like to hang out? Why? Dr. Perry asks all of this without judgment, and makes it clear when he is asking kids to open up so that he can help them. Until this point, if a young man doesn't answer in a straightforward manner, Dr. Perry avoids the trap of pushing too hard too soon, and simply takes this as an indication that he has hit upon something that the young man doesn't want to discuss. In the meantime, the young man knows that he is sitting next to somebody who is giving him 100% of his attention. This means a lot especially in Dr. Perry's case: He is a principal (which I've heard can be a bit of a hard job), an author, a correspondent on CNN, a much-sought-after speaker (I heard him speak in Jacksonville) and a father of two. If you are a young person and know who Dr. Perry is, you know how important it is that he is giving you his undivided attention - but that's the catch: The young men on Save My Son don't seem to know who Dr. Perry is, and Dr. Perry himself doesn't make a big deal out of it. Just as his own accomplishments don't define him, he wants the young men he is trying to save that their actions to this point don't have to define them either.

Shawn Jackson, seen here speaking
with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan
and Congresswoman Corrine Brown

2. Shawn Jackson, the Dean of Students at KIPP Impact in Jacksonville (and one of my favorite people anywhere) is a genius when it comes to working with students and parents. Shawn can talk to a kid who is having the worst day of his life, and convince the kid that he is still a great kid with unlimited potential, in a way that gets the kid to reflect on some of the less productive choices he has recently made. Specifically, Shawn has a way of communicating to kids, even at their worst moments, that:

• your behavior does not define who you are,
• as a person, you matter to me, and
• even when you are not at your best, I am happy to spend time with you.

3. Jeffrey Duncan Andrade is a high school teacher in East Oakland (see some of the beautiful and powerful stories at Roses In Concrete) who talks a lot about the need to connect with your students in an authentic way. He advocates living in the neighborhood in which you teach, and finding other ways to express to your students that you do not see yourself as better than them, or above them, in any way. He tells the story of offering a student his Subway footlong sandwich so the student wouldn't have to eat the not-so-tasty school lunch. This is his way of saying, "One of us is going to be hungry, and I'd rather it's not you." This is a segue to showing the child that you are going to be a part of his life forever, and that, as such, you're never going to give up on him. As Professor Su noted above, this favor wasn't earned - it is simply an act of grace.

4. Teachers can also exhibit grace in very small ways: In a lesson our math and science departments watched recently, star math teacher Nicky Berman of Achievement First Bushwick Middle School went through a thorough explanation, involved the class in coming to a shared understanding, and finally ended with, "Did that answer your question, Brandon?" This small addition to what was already a very complete explanation sent a very clear message to Brandon (and, by extension, to the rest of the class): I care about you, as an individual, and I want to make sure that you (not the generalized "every one of the students in this class") understand.

Here are our challenges for this week:
1. If you are a teacher, notice when you show a student grace. If you don't notice yourself doing it, try something.
2. If you're not a teacher, pick somebody who you think is feeling down and show him/her grace. This doesn't have to be fancy.
3. After this week, let us all know how it went. Did you find this natural? Did you struggle with it? What worked? What was the outcome?

Regardless of whether this goes well for you, or it doesn't quite turn out, please know, I - and those who stand with me - will still love you. 

*Fun fact: Harvey Mudd was one of three colleges to which I applied, and the first to accept me. When I opened the acceptance letter, I remember telling my mom, "Well, looks like I'm going to college!" If I had gone to Harvey Mudd, I would have likely had Dr. Su as one of my professors, and I may have learned about grace a little sooner. Then again, I might ride a unicycle. I'm not sure how I feel about that.

A variety of opinions

What are the official Hawketalke-sanctioned opinions on contentious issues?

No, this is not a collection of my opinions. If you want those, I'm generally not very shy about sharing them - just ask. Or don't, and wait, and I'll probably share anyway.

[Spoiler alert: I share them below.]

This is a post about the value of seeking a variety of opinions, which could avoid a lot of shock and lead to better decision making in general.* However, we should be careful not to take the balancing of opinions too far, particularly in education, when we are responsible for helping young children come to a view of the world that will help them to have incredible lives. There has to come a point when you say, "look, I know there are a lot of opinions about this, but some of them are very dangerous."

Aunt Lila's Question

The other day, my aunt Lila posted on facebook:

Hello friends: I would like to hear from any of you a dispassionate, reasoned argument that will explain to me why a citizen of the United States either needs or should have an assault weapon, armor piercing bullets, or a magazine that holds more than 10 rounds. I am serious about this, and will appreciate no name calling, no sound bites, no sarcasm, but an attempt to help me understand what seems incomprehensible to me. "Because the second amendment says so" will not fulfill this request. Thank you.

This is a well-reasoned request that, absent the disclaimers at the end, could have well ended in a one-sided tirade against advocates of gun rights. Gun rights, along with abortion rights, gay rights, the role of government and, in education, the "reform" movement, are among the most contentious issues right now. When something is contentious, it tends to be extremely polarizing, putting people squarely on one side or another. There just aren't a lot of people who say, "I don't care one way or another whether Americans should be allowed to walk around with assault weapons; whatever the majority decides, I'm OK with it." And just to remove the sense that I am somehow above this and I have perfectly balanced opinions, I'll go ahead and name my opinions on the above: No, yes, hell yes and I'm embarrassed that this is still an issue in 2013, generally more, and in favor but worried about hubris and testing and politics. When I think about these issues, like most people, I don't think about them in terms of my side being equal to the other side; I think there is my side and the wrong side. Those on the wrong side must be some misunderstanding or misinformation, because how could a person reasonably disagree with me? Except the role of government; I get that one.

So we tend to dismiss people who disagree with our opinions, and tend to gravitate towards people who agree with us. We engage in dialogue about the issues primarily with people who share our viewpoints, which leads us to inadvertently (and unnecessarily) gathering confirming evidence for what we already thought (see here for my previous post on the dangers of confirming evidence in the classroom)

The Problems

The problem with this is two-fold: It affects us as individuals, and it affects society on the whole.

On the individual level, our opinions become more and more entrenched, and we are less understanding of others. We limit our circle of friends based on what would normally not be an important issue. In conversation with people we don't know well, we condition ourselves to stay away from certain topics, lest we disagree. This limits the scope of what we can discuss, the quality of our relationships, and, ultimately, our own understanding of the issues. We read news stories from outlets that share our views and bring this bias into their reporting, and we avoid the outlets that we disagree with.

For society, the effects are worse. Instead of individuals choosing to spend time with other individuals, now we have groups choosing whether to engage in dialogue with other groups. We accuse politicians of this, but politicians are just a highly visible subset of the population as a whole. We're just not talking to each other and, when we are, we're not really listening to each other.

The solutions:

If you're aiming to balance your thoughts on any particular issue, here's how you can start:

1. Acknowledge that there are other valid opinions out there. You may change your mind at some point, and that's OK. If you don't take this first step, you'll have trouble truly listening to the other side.

2. Ask questions like my aunt Lila's. Actively seek out people who will disagree with you and help you understand their viewpoint. One way I have found to get people's opinions and hear their evidence is to simply tell them that you disagree with them. Most people are happy to oblige with their explanations and evidence, to convince you that they are right, which has the benefit of giving you a window into their way of seeing the world.

3. Expose yourself to multiple sources of news, and understand that what you are seeing is someone's reality. I like to read what the Schoolsmatter blog, the most extreme and scathing critic of education reform, has to say (despite the fact that I disagree with most of it and sometimes have trouble trusting that they are truly interested in what's best for kids). Nonetheless, there are some valid concerns about education reform, and they offer some evidence to refute what I sometimes take to be an absolute truth.

4. On twitter, follow people who disagree with you. Most of the people I follow on twitter are great math teachers, many of whom are very forthcoming about their objections to the education reform movement. I also follow Alfie Kohn, who is about as opposed to standards as you can get, because some of his ideas make a lot of sense any push my thinking about teaching.

The limits of balance

As teachers, we want to present a balanced view of the world, but there are also times when overthinking this step can have a negative impact on students. Many rookie teachers, for example, tend to over-balance their viewpoints when talking to kids, leading to less authority in the classroom and a sense among kids that everything is negotiable. Beyond this, we risk teaching kids that maybe treating others with kindness matters but, hey, that's just my opinion; maybe it doesn't. This moral relativism can spark a lot of deep thought in college philosophy majors, but can easily lead a middle schooler to validate his own self-centered view of the world (says someone who named his blog after himself.) The consequences of this can be disastrous for a classroom full of kids who need to put up with this student, and for the student himself, who can spend several years not necessarily becoming a better person. At some point, you'll encourage them to look for opposing views - just not right now, when you are telling them to stop punching people in the face.


*In a future post, we'll look at how expanding your sources of information and opinions, in addition to encouraging better decision making, can actually lead to more original and creative thought.

Vignette

Yesterday, while watching my wife earn her white belt at Tae Kwon Do (a precursor to the more modern Rex Kwon Do), my phone buzzed. I had a notification on facebook, from Addie Coulter, so I had to stop to think a bit.

Addie Coulter is my grandmother. She was born in 1919, the year the 19th amendment to the US Constitution gave women the right to vote. When we spoke on the phone last year, she said, "I'm 93 years old, and I wake up every day without any pain." Grammie's mother - my great-grandmother - who I only ever knew as Mom McCrumb, lived to be 102 years old, and went bowling for her hundredth birthday. Our family seems to benefit from some form of the Lake Wobegon effect, where "all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average." At least the first part.

This post could go a lot of different directions:

a) the advances of technology and what they actually mean in terms of our day-to-day experiences
b) lessons from my grandmother (picking up pennies, opening doors, and authenticity)
c) how not to convince a Coulter woman to do something
d) an homage to my grandparents

...but it will go in none of those directions. My grandmother is using her iPad to connect to me on facebook while my wife breaks a wooden board in half with her bare hands and our kids play with other kids, switching effortlessly between hide-and-seek, make-me-laugh, and Angry Birds.

We live in an incredible, amazing, wonderful, confusing world.

Falling Down 2: Teachers Falling Down

Loyal reader "Unknown" posted a great question in response to yesterday's post about pushing our limits in a constant search for improvement:

I can understand how this applies to students - it ties in with the idea of conceptual change, as well as giving children enough "at bats" to fail in order to eventually succeed. However, does the same apply to educators? Are we allowed to employ trial and error techniques to find what works best, even if it comes at the expense of our students' educations?  

Then again, everything I do is trial and error, so this comment is almost irrelevant.

First of all, let me say that this is not at all a trivial question. It gets at the heart of what we do as educators, and at the existential crisis that many of us experience in our first few years of teaching: Am I hurting children? Am I selfishly doing a job that I enjoy (sometimes) to the detriment of the people I aim to serve?

Keep in mind that this is a profession where, every day when you leave, you know you could have done better, and that if you had done better, a child would be better off. You did not achieve what was theoretically possible to achieve with this child today. So, in a sense, you will hurt children every day you're a teacher. This sounds harsh, but if you don't accept it, you'll get upset with yourself every day for not being perfect. In fact, you can extend this same logic to every other part of your life: Unless you're eating the perfect balance of food, you're hurting your health. Unless you exercise just the right amount in just the right way, you're hurting yourself. Unless you spend all of your free time helping society in the most optimal way, you're hurting society. This assumes, of course, that the world would be better off with a perfect person in your place. This is logically true, but I don't think it's a reasonable way to live your life. Instead, I recommend measuring the good you doing versus the good that you are capable of doing in the moment. Nobody can fault you for being in your, say, first full year of teaching, but they can fault you if you're not trying as hard as you can. In other words, for your part of the relay, you don't have to be the fastest person on the team; you're just giving it your all and going for a personal best every day.

But what does 'trying as hard as you can' look like? Does this mean pushing yourself to grow, or does it mean serving kids? What is the balance?

Here I will explain why I believe this question addresses the inevitable, give a few suggestions for how to minimize the negative impact of your own learning process, then re-frame the question as a matter of how to maximize student learning over the course of a year.

First of all, let's recognize that, even if we wanted to, we couldn't escape the trial-and-error nature of our jobs. Circumventing the trial-and-error process would require the following elements to be present:
#1 there exists a strong body of knowledge about what good teaching is,
#2 this body of knowledge applies predictably to the group of students you teach, and
#3 acting on this body of knowledge will require no trial and (more importantly) error.

I believe #1 is more true than we generally recognize, and more differentiated by subject matter than we usually discuss. #2 is tricky; every class is unique, and every day is different from the previous day, but I've generally found that good teachers can apply what they know to new classes on new days. #3 is largely a figment of our imaginations. I just don't think there's a way for us to learn that doesn't involve a lot of pushing ourselves what we're comfortably able to do. Isn't that what learning is?

Minimizing the negative impact of your own learning process

But what are some ways to minimize the negative effects of our own inexperience on children? This is a question we already have some helpful answers to:

1. Practice your lessons prior to teaching them. In doing so, you're making mistakes and learning from them without actually affecting students.

2. Perform a controlled experiment: Mitigate the negative effects of something you're working on in a lesson by changing only the one thing you're working on, and keeping everything else about your teaching the same. This helps you to see the effects of what you're working on, and has the added bonus of not allowing the one thing you're working on to ruin the entire class because you kept everything else the same.

3. Hedge your bets: Assign high-quality homework, allow students to read high-quality literature (fiction and nonfiction alike), and keep in mind that your class is likely 45 minutes out of a much longer day. Contrast this with a self-contained classroom teacher just starting out, whose learning process could potentially have a negative impact on students for an entire day at a time. Think of trying out a new recipe; The mahi mahi may turn out incredible, or it may fall flat, but either way you've made your trusty mashed potatoes and corn on the cob, so something positive will come of the experience regardless. As a teacher, you're going to try new things, but you should also keep doing the regular things that are working for you.

Year-long impacts of teachers taking instructional risks

While this began as a discussion of a very practical question, I want to address a more theoretical question: What is the impact of instructional risk-taking on student learning, over the course of a year?

First, let's make the following assumptions:

• 70% of new ideas are simply not going to work. These are dropped. The other 30% become "strong" instruction add significantly to student learning and are adopted, replacing "safe" instruction.
• It will take a week of developing a new idea to determine if it is going to work. It takes a month for this idea to become an exemplary practice.
• Class time will be allocated, in percents, to the following categories, with the assigned number of learning units:
• Safe: 5 learning units at the beginning of the year
• Stretch (trial and error): 2 learning units
• Strong: 10 learning units

Next, I'll introduce you to three teachers:

Teacher A is a rookie teacher who is very risk-averse. She puts herself in situations where she aims to make as few mistakes as possible over the long run. She will still make mistakes, but those mistakes will be spaced out and not catastrophic. Her learning will reflect this; she will not learn very quickly. You have likely met a teacher like this. In this teacher's class, there is no group work because kids might get off task; there is no call and response because kids might be silly. There is plenty of independent reading and responding to questions in writing, because the risk inherent in these activities is relatively low. She stays steady at 95% safe instruction, 5% stretch instruction, throughout the year.

Teacher B is a rookie teacher who likes to break out of her comfort zone a bit. She likes trying new things and is not afraid to make mistakes. She tries out group work, and sometimes it doesn't work. She has kids explore things she has placed around the room, and it doesn't work. She tries a new game and it works. She expects that the probability of the things she tries working is less than 100%, and is not discouraged when something doesn't work out. This teacher begins the year at 80% safe instruction, 20% stretch instruction.

Teacher C* is a total loose cannon. She tries something new every day. She alternates between excited and disappointed. She wants to sing a song to teach today's lesson, but tomorrow she wants students to generate their own knowledge by grappling with difficult concepts and humming to themselves. She starts a blog and wants kids to spend all class writing in the blog once a week. She wants to try full-on science labs tomorrow, despite not having ever taught this way. She tries Total Physical Response the day after she hears about it. She has kids act out plays that they have written about the life cycles of plants. She has kids respond as if they were members of various plant species. Pen pals! Plant pals! Dress up like a dinosaur and roar your answers! In short, she has a lot of ideas and wants to try them all, also realizing that some will work and others will not. Like Teacher B, she is not discouraged by failure. This teacher begins at 100% stretch instruction.

Which teacher's students are going to learn more?

Let's see what happens in the first four months of school:

According to this model, Teacher A's teaching led to 19.85 units of learning (the most), Teacher B's teaching led to 19.4 units of learning, and Teacher C's teaching led to 8 units of learning (the least, by far.)

First, some clarification: Why didn't Teacher C develop any strong practices? Wasn't all that trial and error helpful?

As it turns out, Teacher C has a fatal character flaw which does not allow her to learn from her mistakes. She does not test her variables in isolation, so she doesn't know what is working and what is not. She also lacks the discipline to stay with the same idea for long enough to develop it into a strong practice. So instead of embracing her failures, she quickly moves onto the next new thing. This is very bad. Learn from the cautionary tale of Teacher C. Be the skier who points her shoulders downhill and gives herself permission to fall; do not be the skier who jumps from the ski-lift.

Next, you'll see that Teacher A, the teacher who played it safe, had more net learning in the first four months of the school year than Teachers B and C (though the difference is almost negligible.)

Interestingly, the data from Month 1 tells you which approach is better for students in summer school, for example: Under these assumptions, if you want to serve kids on a one-month basis, don't get too creative with your teaching. Stick with what you know and kids will learn more than if you tinker.

However, most teachers don't have one-month or four-month contracts.They teach for about 9 months:

As we suspected in this highly contrived example, Teacher B's students will learn more. Take a healthy amount of risk, but be thoughtful about the amount of risk you take on at any given time. Your kids will end up learning more as a result.

Plus, I can see two more benefits to teaching in a slightly riskier way:

1. You are modeling for kids that taking risks is OK. This will help them learn the all-important habit of pushing themselves, even when this is not leading to immediate academic learning.
2. You are developing yourself as a teacher, which means that you will have a greater effect on the learning of future children. 

...and that can't be all bad, can it? I can't imagine anything better than knowing you will add even more value in the future, and helping kids to internalize one of the most important habits that will serve them for the rest of their lives: how to learn by making mistakes.


*None of these teachers are actual people, of course; any resemblance to actual teachers is pure coincidence.

Falling down

1. A Day at the Ice Rink

Yesterday, we went ice skating, because apparently that's what people do here in the wint'ry North. Sebastian was essentially carried by an adult while he did a high-speed version of a Chandler wobble (which is a real thing.) Barbara fell a little. Maria and I did not fall. A good time was had by all, and this picture serves as a pretty accurate look at how most of the day went:

Let's focus on Barbara's skating experience. She skated for about an hour total.

For the first thirty minutes, Barbara did not fall once. She stayed on the wall, inching her way along, occasionally venturing out a few feet from the wall for a few seconds.

Once she gained enough confidence, she started to spend more and more time away from the wall. She started skating a little faster. And she started falling.

I will argue here that this is exactly the right way to go about learning to skate. And it's precisely why the learning curve is so steep at the beginning of learning to do anything. How can we apply this same principle in the later stages of our development? Simply put, we can accept the first rule of bicycle riding: Riders fall. If you're not falling, you're not really getting better, at least not as quickly as you could be.

2. Put Your Shoulders Down

In Practice Perfect, Doug Lemov, Erica Woolway, and Kate Yezzi describe a skier who realized that she had hit a plateau by not pushing herself to fall. This excerpt from their article says it all:

We know a woman who is a breathtaking skier. She tells an interesting story about her breakthrough moment--and it was just that, a moment--when she started down the road of becoming an expert. It happened on the day she decided to fall. She was getting on the lift at the base of a steep, sunlit ski bowl. She had just come down a twisted, mogul-ridden trail in top form, earning the admiration of a teenager who'd been trailing behind her. At the bottom, amidst words like "stoked" and "killer," the teenager asked, "Do you ever fall?" 

Getting on the lift, she realized that (1) the answer was no, and that (2) if the teenager had been a nephew or a cousin whom she felt invested in developing as a skier, she wouldn't have wanted to admit that to him. Instead she would have pointed out that if you never fall, you aren't pushing yourself and you aren't improving as fast as you could be. Midway up the mountain she realized that she hardly ever fell, perhaps once every eight or ten days on skis, and even then it was usually at tangled moments when she wasn't actually skiing that hard. She realized that if she wasn't falling she probably wasn't pushing herself to learn as hard as she could be. She had gotten lazy because she was so good. 

When she got to the top of the mountain and skied off the chairlift, she knew what she needed to do. She set out to ski hard enough to fall, but she was intentional about how. She knew that there was one thing that she had been working on: pointing her shoulders face down the mountain, no matter how steep. She then set out to execute this skill even if that meant falling. She fell three times that first day. "I could feel myself trying to do exactly the things I was afraid of. I knew if I stuck with it I would conquer my fears." She began skiing without fearing falling. Within a few weeks she was a different skier entirely.

This is powerful for any of us who want to get better at something, and is a great reminder that failure is the only way to know we're pushing ourselves hard enough.

3. Thin Value Bets

There was a time when I played a lot of poker. It's OK, Mom: Nate Silver played a lot, too. In poker, let's say you have a good, but not a great hand, and all of the cards have been dealt. Conventional poker wisdom says that, if you are the last to make a decision, and it has been checked to you, you check behind, because your opponent will always call your bet with a better hand (meaning you threw away money unnecessarily), will sometimes call your bet with a worse hand, and will sometimes fold to your bet with a worse hand. The latter case has no effect, so we'll remove it from the equation. The mathematics of this situation basically ask you to calculate how much money you will make with this bet (referred to as a thin value bet) vs. how much money you will lose when you are called by a better hand.

Most poker players do not make these thin value bets, just like most decent poker players do not try to bluff their opponents excessively. both of these plays are very risky and can potentially cause one to lose a lot of money. But the best players play the game very differently. They are notorious for making more value bets than anybody else, for bluffing in a wider variety of situations, and for being less predictable in general.

All of this comes about because they are not afraid to fail. They are more afraid of leaving value on the table, missing out on what could potentially be an increase in profit over the long run. In short, these world-class players become world-class precisely by preferring to find the limits of their abilities, rather than accepting them.

4. Testing the Ice
(in which this post comes full circle, right back to ice.)

My favorite story to tell students has the same message, but is phrased as a cautionary tale: The only way to know how far you can take something is by taking it too far. In other words, you only know where the line is once you've crossed it.

I was about 10 years old, and my job was to pick up dog poop in our back yard, put it into a plastic bag, and throw it away. We had a pool in the yard, and it had developed thicker ice than I'd ever seen, so naturally I was curious as to how much weight it could hold. I threw a ball onto the ice, and it bounced. I put a little of my own weight, and it still held. Little by little, I put more and more of my weight on it, with the idea that maybe - just maybe - I could walk on the ice. I continued to put weight onto the ice until, in an instant, I fell through, bounced off of the bottom of the pool, and somehow found myself inside. Our cousins were visiting, and everybody else had just taken hot showers, so there was not hot water. I remember my mom heating water over the stove and taking it to the bath so I could warm up. Thank you, Mom :)

I still wonder what happened to that dog poop...

So I learned this important lesson, but it wasn't until recently that I could make sense of the positive corollary, described above. We have to push our limits not only to see what we're capable of, but to ensure that we are pushing ourselves to expand these limits.

Happy falling, everybody.