The Ort Report

Last week, our lower school (5th and 6th grades) went "camping" at Camp Jewell, close to the Massachusetts border. We had a fantastic time - we all had one heck of a time: Kids canoed and climbed rocks and swam in the lake and built a fire and went on a nature hike and performed campfire skits and made s'mores and...we learned about ort.

At every meal, our camp counselor would have us sing the "ort report" song and would reveal how many pounds of ort we had left uneaten at our last meal.

As you may be able to see from the bar graph, we steadily reduced the amount of ort left at every meal. That's good - it's generally a good thing to get kids to care about not leaving so much food and drink behind at meals. And all that really happened was this: We got excited to see the number (by doing a quick song and dance), our counselor gave the occasional tip* on how to reduce our ort, and we saw the number at every meal - represented neatly in a bar graph.

*My favorite tip was this: When using milk for cereal, keep in mind that one bowl of cereal takes about half a carton of milk. So you may want to find someone else who wants cereal and just get one carton of milk among the two of you.

I like the ort report for two reasons:

1. It helps kids care about a great cause, and one I suspect we don't talk about as much as we used to - not wasting food. But this isn't the nebulous "kids in China are starving" argument; it's more of a soft sell.
2. The ort report, whose stated purpose is to show how many scraps of food (and drink) were left uneaten (and...undrankened?), also helps foster other great habits: cooperation among table-mates, planning ahead for what you'll actually eat and drink, and erring on the side of taking less food than one may take otherwise. Economists call these other effects 'positive externalities.'

This all got me to thinking: What are the other 'ort report' -type activities that produce positive externalities in schools?

The one practice that comes to mind is the practice of asking students for evidence (usually text evidence) to support their answers. This gets kids to read more carefully, to evaluate each other's answers more carefully, check their own thoughts to make sure they're supported by evidence, and, ultimately, learn to pay closer attention to details in the first place.

Other than that, I'm struggling to find something as useful or elegant as the ort report. I'd love to hear more ideas in the comments...

In the meantime, one positive externality of the fact that this ritual is about ort is that, in reading this short post, you learned a new word exclusively through repeated exposure. Nobody defined ort for you, but, if pressed to define the word, you could probably get pretty close to the dictionary definition. This is the power of embedded, indirect vocabulary instruction. So thanks for reading, and congratulations on your new word - you ort to be very proud of yourself.

Sorry about that last one...

Should kids read less?

Instead of reading for four hours a day, I think our kids would be better off reading for two hours a day and consuming carefully selected media (movies, television programs, podcasts, plays, and the like) for the remaining two hours. Here I mean National Geographic specials, Mythbusters, historical speeches, and anything else that meets essentially the same level of criteria we would set for the books and texts our kids read.) Real Housewife fans, sorry for getting your hopes up.

When you're reading, assuming what you're reading meets some minimum bar of quality, you are doing a couple of things:

#1. practicing decoding, fluency, and comprehension skills (i.e. practicing reading), and

#2. learning something about the world that can someday apply to other texts you'll read, or, in a more broad sense, other situations you'll encounter. This means context, content knowledge, and vocabulary.

When you're watching TV, you're not doing #1. Well, you're not practicing decoding or fluency, but you are practicing some sort of comprehension skills. And, unless your decoding and fluency skills are incredibly advanced, you're doing #2 much, much faster. By "doing #2", I mean building context, content knowledge, and vocabulary - not pooping. Grow up.

Just like professional athletes build their football abilities on the field/court/pitch part of the time, and in the weight room the other part of the time, we need to start targeting the knowledge gaps in more efficient ways than waiting for a child to sound out and slog through text he doesn't yet understand. Of course, the underlying philosophy here is that content knowledge (specific "background knowledge" for a given text) is essential for reading comprehension, and matters much more than a more generalized list of reading strategies.

If you're not convinced, I invite you to read the first three paragraphs of Laura Ingalls Wilder's "The Long Winter", a 4th-grade-level book, and think about what circumstances (in terms of applying reading strategies and knowing something about the world) would lead to a middle-school student from New Haven to be able to answer the questions that follow. What would such a student from New Haven have to have experienced in his/her education (or in his/her life) in order to fully comprehend these three paragraphs and accurately answer the questions that follow?

1. What does "corked it tightly" mean?

2. When does this story take place (what time of year? what time of day?)

3. Show me the motions Laura likely used when she "drew up a pailful of water".

4. After Laura had drawn the pailful of water, why did she rinse the jug?

5. What caused the prairie to shimmer? What color is it likely shimmering?

You and your kids can strategize away - good luck with that. In the meantime, we'll be driving to Iowa (hey Trpkosh), following the position of the sun, and handling hot, dark objects while discussing how color affects heat absorption and how evaporation has a cooling effect. Or, at the very least, we'll be watching TV and movies about the prairie, and building our knowledge of the world. You may decode one percent faster from the extra reading practice, but we will have a leg up when it comes to forming a coherent mental model of what we're reading.

As a bonus, here is a video of a 'science walk' my daughter Barbara and I took last week. She undoubtedly grew as a reader during these 45 minutes - more, I'd say, than if we had taken 45 minutes to read about flowers and erosion. Enjoy!

Do Whales Eat Bears?

This is a post about messing around, but it's also about background knowledge, conceptual change, and inquiry. The genesis of this is described below, but the driving force behind the final YouTube video was a chance to entertain Joseph. This one's for you, compadre.

Sebastian (age 5) asked me today, "Daddy, do whales eat bears?" I thought it was an interesting question, and a good opportunity for me to practice building conceptual change. So I failed right out of the gate by not asking him why he thought whales might eat grizzly bears. But then I quickly redeemed myself with the following line of questioning:

Me: Where do grizzly bears live?
Sebastian: Grizzly bears live in caves.
Me: Right; where do whales live?
Sebastian: They live under the ocean.
Me: So can whales eat grizzly bears?
Sebastian: No.
Me: Why not?
Sebastian: Because they don't live in the same place.
...
Sebastian: Then what does eat bears?

This was fantastic. I asked what he thought, and he didn't know. It turns out I didn't really know, either (my guess was "some humans"), so I asked my good friend Google. Then Sebastian and I read this website together:

http://www.whateats.com/what-eats-bears

Here's a screenshot, so you can follow along:

Here was our line of questioning:

After the first paragraph:

Me: So what eats bears?
Sebastian: Bears eat other bears.
Me: Wow! That's messed up. What else might eat some bears?
Sebastian: [points to the newt from the unrelated picture to the right] This?
Me: Let's go back to the text to find out.
Sebastian: Oh, bears.
Me: Read the first sentence for me again. [He reads it.]
Sebastian: Oh, so tigers eat bears sometimes.
Me: You're right. Do they eat all kinds of bears?
Sebastian: No; they only eat little bears.

I actually think this was the right sequence. Going back to look for evidence is a good place to start, and I'm starting to see, as a teacher, that there is a huge connection between the practice of looking for text evidence to support an assertion and the idea of conceptual change: We're looking to confirm or refute what we believe, and the way to do it is to look at real evidence.

So Sebastian reads me the second paragraph, and we dig into which types of bears are most dangerous to other bears. We have a short conversation about grizzly bears, Sebastian assures me he is not afraid of grizzly bears because he knows Tae Kwon Do, and I remind him that he actually should be afraid of grizzly bears because they are dangerous and will eat you:

Me: If a grizzly bear and a black bear are in the same place, which one might eat the other?
Sebastian: The grizzly bear might eat the black bear.
Me: Why?
Sebastian: That's because grizzly bears are bigger and stronger.
Me: And if, instead of a black bear, a grizzly bear is standing next to you, what might happen?
Sebastian: The grizzly bear might eat me.

Bingo. I don't want my kid going all Tim Treadwell just because he is a yellow belt in Tae Kwon Do. Notice also that we've covered a bunch of topics in some surface-level depth that we will continue to build on in lots of future conversations: Asia, the fact that there are many types of bears, the vague idea that you can't be eaten by something that is far, far away from you, and some sort of a reciprocal relationship between A-eats-B and B-is-eaten-by-A.

Then, in an homage to the great Joseph Yrigollen and Kyle of realultimatepower.net fame, I wrap it all up with a meta-lesson on Key Points:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-_EZPTKieE

The Hard Sell

Imagine two schools:

School #1 has an air-tight system of accountability for students and spends an enormous amount of time and energy ensuring that kids, on the most basic level, follow all teacher directions, complete their homework, and re-do this work when it does not meet the standard.

School #2 invests the same amount of time as School #1, but instead uses this time to develop teachers' ability to plan stronger lessons, manage their classrooms using teacher 'moves', look at and respond to data, and infuse character education into their lessons.

To which school would you rather send your kids?
At which school would you rather teach?

And yes, I will go ahead and acknowledge that this is a bit of a false choice, and that the "so what?" argument applies to both schools - if you plan a great lesson and nobody pays attention, so what? And if everybody pays attention but nothing worthwhile is planned, so what? I encourage you to put these misgivings aside and indulge me a bit here...

For a long time, I thought I would want to send my kids to School #2, and I was certain that School #2 was a better place to work. I had seen a lot of School #1s make the transition to School #2s, and had even participated in a transition a lot like it at KIPP Fresno. I assumed this to be the enlightened path - it only natural to want to go beyond compliance and really dive head-first into better teaching. Besides, I attended some pretty great schools as a kid, and they were all like School #2.

There were a few defining moments that helped change my mind:

1. In 2010, we started KIPP Impact without a well-defined discipline system, and realized within the first week that this would inevitably lead to much less learning, less safety in the building, and, in the end, nothing but frustration and resignation as we watched kids make decisions that were not in their own best interests or in the best interests of those around them.

2. Also in 2010, I began working with a lot of Teach For America corps members who, despite their drive and passion, essentially had no learning going on in their classrooms because they were told to simply plan great lessons. They had not been taught to manage their classrooms, and their kids were suffering as a result.

3. In 2011, my daughter Barbara started kindergarten. I was largely absent from her life during this year and could not read to her and, at the end of her kindergarten year, she was far behind where she could have been in her reading. When I visited the school, many kids, including Barbara, were off task, and very little effort was made to get them back on task.

4. At this point, I've seen time and again the effect of basing a discipline system exclusively on teacher-student relationships, and it appears to be a key point of vulnerability in the design of many schools. One year of high teacher turnover and the school is set back significantly.

So here's where I stand right now:

School #2 can work when the school is staffed by veteran teachers who truly know their craft and have been teaching effectively for 10+ years. Let me add a condition here: This school should have no more than one less-experienced teacher joining the faculty in any given year.

However, any time there are less-experienced teachers involved, I am putting my money on School #1. Because here's the thing: School #3 has an airtight discipline system and puts time and energy into planning great lessons and teaching character and responding to student data. And the only path to School #3 is to start with School #1 (a strong accountability system) and then reap the rewards of time not spent dealing with discipline or making up for class time lost because of misbehavior or inattention.

But WHY?

Premise #1: Let's begin with the premise that kids, much like adults, don't always act in their own long-term self-interest. Then let's remind ourselves that it is our job to act in students' best long-term interest, even when they don't.

Premise #2: Kids learn more by doing than they do by staring out the window, messing with the other kids around them, sleeping, or pretending to work. Yes, they would probably almost always learn more from hands-on activities than worksheets, provided they are actually doing those hands-on activities, and not simply building towers using fraction strips. But worksheets with teacher feedback and opportunities to learn from mistakes are better than window-staring, right?

Premise #3: Though we don't always make rational decisions in the long run, we are remarkably consistent at making rational decisions in the short term (see Freakonomics.)

So the key, then, is to provide short-term rationale that help students lean towards what is actually in their best interest in the long run. If you don't do your homework, you will have to stay in from recess tomorrow. Though it may be more fun to mess around in class than to do your work, you really don't want the teacher to call home about your choices. The social capital you stand to gain from talking back to your teacher is not worth staying after school all week. And making the positive version of all of these choices, as it turns out, helps you and all the kids around you in the long run...even if that's not why you're making these choices.

Underlying all of this is Mike Goldstein's idea of the "misbehavior tax" (which he refers to here), which undercuts learning more than just about anything else in the classroom. This is not behavior for behavior's sake; it's behavior for the sake of work for the sake of learning.

Added benefits of the hard sell

I've met a lot of teachers who want their classroom to be an egalitarian haven, where kids and teachers make every decision together, nobody has power over another, and positivity and kindness are the teacher's only tools to combat the negative effects of society. Ironically, these teachers' classrooms tend to be the places where kids are most cruel to each other, and where the teacher's own misgivings about being an authority figure have actually led to significantly less learning (and thus far less empowerment of students down the road.)

But the real world doesn't work like this. Even the children in your classroom who grow to become entrepreneurs will likely work for somebody else along the way and, even when they're independent, they'll still have to follow laws and pay taxes and, ideally, treat others with respect. Instead of teaching our kids to navigate a fantasy world in which nobody is in charge, let's teach them to deal with rules - even rules they may not like - and to work within those rules. (Note: This is not the same as 'the world is unfair, so let's be unfair', nor is it the same as 'you'll have homework in high school, so you need homework now'. This is more along the lines of, 'Show me a successful person, and I'll show you someone who grew up with rules.')

Where can this go wrong?

If the school has a poorly defined curriculum, then a strong accountability system is only as good as individual teachers' ability to create, find, or modify great lessons. To all you new school leaders out there: Pick a curriculum from the beginning and go with it - I recommend something well-defined that makes sense to you.

If individual teachers are in charge of every part of this, i.e. if there is no administrative support structure, teachers will have no time to plan lessons, grade papers and give feedback, or sleep. The leadership of the school needs to take on the majority of the burden here.

If the school focuses on an air-tight accountability system but does not have a strong structure for supporting teachers with lesson planning and teaching, this could easily turn into the "everybody's working, but on nothing" scenario. Nine hours a day of intensely focused handwriting practice is probably not going to help kids get ahead in the world.

If the school never helps kids evaluate the choices they're making, so that they can make connections on their own between short-term desires and long-term rewards, the kids could have an adverse reaction to a lack of structure down the road, much like kids whose parents forbid drinking alcohol then go to college and indulge in binge drinking. Note what happens when we extend this metaphor: In many classrooms, teachers are trying to fight binge drinking in college by letting ten-year-olds drink as much as they want.

Text Selection Matters, or STOP WASTING TIME

Let me start by saying that I believe very few things more strongly than I believe what I am about to write. I've been wrong in the past - A LOT - but I would be shocked to find I am wrong about this one.

In my last post, I posed the following choice:

a) You could ride bikes together, encounter something interesting, and have lasting memories of the day.
b) You could ride bikes together, encounter something interesting, and instantly forget the experience.

Option b) describes much of our current reading instruction, and we absolutely must change this. In this metaphor, the skill of riding bicycles symbolizes the skills of decoding and making meaning of printed text, commonly grouped together and referred to simply as reading. The experience itself, and the knowledge to be gained by riding the bicycle, refers to the content of what is read. Let me start by describing a practice that we see in many reading classes:

1. The teacher talks about a reading skill that students should practice, such as finding the main idea or making inferences or identifying and interpreting examples of figurative language. In the best of cases, this takes less than 10 minutes.
2. The teacher then puts a text in front of students so that they can practice this skill. This text is not connected to anything the students have learned previously, so that the teacher can be sure the students are using today's strategy and not simply making connections to what has been previously learned.
3. The students answer several comprehension questions about what they have read, and answer questions directly related to the day's aim, to ensure they are practicing applying the correct metacognitive strategies they are supposed to be applying.
4. At the conclusion of the lesson, the teacher never speaks of the passage, or its contents, ever again. Students are not expected to remember what they have learned and, due to the desired novelty of each subsequent practice passage, they are passively encouraged to forget what they have read. the debrief inevitably focuses on the strategies students used, and make it clear to students that they are not expected to take any knowledge away from the passage. The words students have read are simply a vehicle for practicing today's skill.

To see an extreme version of this, pay attention to the "test prep" that is done in reading classes. Students across the country read disjointed passages and answer comprehension questions about them. At its peak, this practice takes hours away from other potential activities every week.

First, to the idea that kids need to be ready to read things they have never heard of, let me ask you how often you really read doctorate papers in physics (no cheating, cousin Sarah!) or how often you read just one academic paper on a totally unfamiliar topic. You don't, right? If you really care, you try to build a base of knowledge before diving into something so technical. And you can understand newspaper articles about things you don't know because the authors can assume some level of general knowledge, and fill in the rest of the gaps for you.

I'm not going to spend the next three hours ranting about the relative merits of skills-based reading instruction. Instead, I want to make a couple of simple propositions:

1. Increased knowledge of the world will allow you to understand more of what you read.
2. Reading skills aside, education should be biased towards knowing more things, rather than less things.

#1 is really the point here, but even if you don't believe it, #2 is a nice backup.

Back to the original bike-riding choice, this time framed in terms of reading:

a) You could read something, learn a few interesting facts, and have lasting memories of the material (which would positively affect your ability to read future texts about a similar topic), or 

b) You could read something interesting, encounter a few interesting facts, and instantly forget what you have read.

Absurd as it sounds, we often make choice b. We put material in front of our kids and all but instruct them to forget what they have learned, all because of our notion that what students read doesn't matter - based on our actions, only how they read seems to matter. I don't buy it.

Text selection matters. And it matters even more when taken cumulatively. Even if we still focus on skills (which, I'll admit, I think is largely a waste of time, compared to the opportunity cost of learning material that will allow students to acquire new vocabulary much faster, and recognize all of the information that writers assume they already know), we at least owe it to our kids to use the time they spend reading to also build a coherent body of knowledge.

Let's be much more intentional about the things our kids read. Eventually, we'll become much more aware of what core knowledge we're helping our kids develop, and we'll align this with the most frequent assumptions authors make, using, oh, I don't know, the Core Knowledge sequence, or something similar. But a necessary first step is a recognition that time spent reading material we don't actually want our kids to learn anything from is a terrible use of time. Even in fictional works, there is always something to be learned. Meaningless, disjointed texts are not only taking all of the joy out of reading; they are also taking away most of the learning.

As I read this, my 5-year-old son is sitting next to me reading about sharks and keeps shouting things like "Daddy! Sharks don't have bones!" and "their skin is like SANDPAPER! We used sandpaper before in my class!" Looking backwards, it's a good thing his teacher thought it was important that he use sandpaper;

otherwise the reference to a shark's "skin like sandpaper" would have been lost on him. Looking forward, he will be in better shape next time he reads about marine life, not because we have practiced making inferences about sharks, but because he is beginning to grasp predator/prey relationships, variety within a species, and the vastness of the ocean. We'll build on this the next time we read about the ocean, or about other predators, or the next time an author compares a character's motions to those of a shark, or the next time someone is called a remora, and so on...

Getting Less out of Bicycle Riding

On this beautiful spring weekend, you could choose one of the following ways to spend a morning with your child:

a) You could ride bikes together, encounter something interesting, and have lasting memories of the day.

b) You could ride bikes together, encounter something interesting, and instantly forget the experience.

Now suppose you have this forced choice every weekend. Or every day. Would you choose for your child and learn something new from every experience, or simply to practice riding her bike? Without a doubt, riding a bike is a good thing to spend time doing. Practicing this skill will make your daughter more proficient at a skill that is useful for fitness, transportation, and both personal and fossil-fuel based independence. But wouldn't it be nice if you were actually riding somewhere, or at least noticing new things along the way, or, I don't know, learning something about the world?
to practice riding her bike

What current, near-ubiquitous educational practice am I describing here? 

There are certainly many right answers; I'll share my take on this soon.

The First Rule of Songfest

At KIPP Fresno in 2004, we wanted to start a Friday tradition that had enjoyed some success at other similar schools, so we started Songfest. We copied the lyrics to songs that had meaning, and prepared to sing them together. Our first song was Lean On Me, followed by We Are Family, then Patience (by Guns 'n Roses.) After that, I'm less sure. There was "It's the End of the World as we Know it", likely with more consistent capitalization, but it all became a blur pretty fast.

The first rule of songfest may very well have killed the whole thing: Everybody must sing.

At the time, this seemed reasonable enough. If the goal is for everybody to feel the power of this positive music, everybody should participate. We couldn't, in good conscience, let a kid opt out of something that was going to help her. We wouldn't let a kid opt out of learning to read, or learning multiplication facts, so it seemed natural that a child should not have the choice to avoid all of the positive benefits of singing your heart out as part of a wonderful group of enthusiastic young people.

The results were mixed, at best. A lot of kids sang and had a good time, and there was some level of joy in the room. There were also a lot of kids choosing to opt out, leading to a lot of frustration from us - the adults in the room - who were trying to make sure that everybody sang.

In 2012, human genius Joseph Yrigollen, this time at KIPP Jacksonville, came up with something much better: A class vs. class game of "don't forget the lyrics." You have likely never seen a group of young people more enthusiastic than the 5th and 6th graders of KIPP Jacksonville singing their hearts out to "We are Young" and "Someone Like You" (by Adele, not Rod Stewart.) I recently brought Joseph's innovation to our school in New Haven, Elm City College Prep, and our kids' rendition of Taylor Swift's "We are Never Getting Back Together" (like, ever) still ranks as one of the highlights of my (our?) year. 

Let's say there are three goals of songfest:
1. Foster a sense of team and family
2. Have fun
3. Share the positive messages of the songs

Our original forced-singing approach may have had an edge in #3, but even that was too often obscured by the First Rule of Songfest. For goals #1 and #2, the Yrigollen method was a clear winner. And, though you may laugh, I think there is something to learn from Taylor Swift's steadfast resolve to not make the same mistake again, Adele's soulful decision to find her happiness elsewhere, and Fun.'s, well, Fun.

Song selection might have something to do with the relative success of Don't-Forget-The-Lyrics: We have recently chosen songs that many of our kids already know, and these are songs that many of our kids are choosing to listen to outside of school. There is also less teaching involved here, as we're not intending to teach the lyrics or the message explicitly. Still, I think the biggest difference is in the setup. I try to imagine applying the First Rule of Songfest to our game of "don't forget the lyrics", and I see it falling flat. The biggest difference is what Rafe Esquith calls the "soft sell."

The soft sell is pretty straightforward: Don't spend so much time and effort making people do something they don't want to do. Instead, spend time and effort getting them to want to do it. Rafe doesn't make his kids come to school at 6:30 for math club, but within the first month of school he usually has 100% of his class coming to math club daily. He doesn't force his kids to take guitar lessons with him during recess, but most of his kids take him up on the offer. Rafe is a master of convincing kids that they want to do what is good for them. How does he do it?

1. For anything that he is going to soft sell (which, for Rafe, is most things), he makes sure it is clear that this is not mandated. As soon as the First Rule of Songfest is put into place, it automatically becomes something that kids want to do less. Being told you don't have a choice is often the best way to turn people off to an idea. Though it is essentially the opposite of our approach to homework, Rafe's soft sell is extraordinarily effective - you don't have to read tonight, but if you do, a lot of good things will happen. Looking back at how painfully we learned this lesson, the new First Rule of Songfest should probably become "Don't talk about Songfest."

2. Rafe builds a strong in-group bond between the kids in his class. The implicit message is that those of us in this room are special: We love to learn, we are nice to others, we are going to college, and we will become extraordinary. This develops the kind of positive peer pressure that allows wonderful things to happen.

3. Drawing on Kohlberg's six levels of moral development, Rafe consistently talks up his kids' small choices and makes them feel like heroes for choosing to do hard things on their own. This is tough to celebrate when your only real choice is "do this thing" or "detention."

In my next post, I'll explore the opposite of the soft sell, and explain how an airtight homework system and certain heavily influenced decisions have helped to build strong habits and solid academic skills. In the meantime, what are some examples you have seen of the soft sell, or places where you have seen it fall apart? Let us know in the comments!