As a teacher, I know better. If I have a student who’s hiding from me and unwilling to answer a question, I have a problem. That’s not a kid who’s learning; that’s a kid who’s miserable for an hour each day.

The obvious reason that these kids aren’t jumping out of their seats and waving their hands to answer a question is that they don’t know the material. Not only are they lost, but they’re also struggling to save face in front of their peers. No one wants to answer a question incorrectly and risk looking foolish. I’m not looking for 100% perfection when I ask questions. I’m looking for thought and for students to learn the material. It’s not a test or a quiz. It’s not a gotcha game. It’s a learning opportunity.

Here’s what I do to increase class participation and decrease worry about wrong answers:

1. Think time. This one’s the most obvious and yet it’s hard to wait for a student response to a question when we think the answer is so clear. Be patient. Mentally sing the ABCs while watching students’ expressions. When it looks like most of the kids have caught on, call on a student.
2. Write it out. Ashley was a bright student in one of my classes. She did well on every test, but if I asked her a question in class, she’d get a stunned look on her face. I could almost watch the information leaking out of her head. Invite students to take a piece of scrap paper and write down their answers to the question. That way, they’ll still remember the answer after the shock of being called on wears off. This method is best used for questions designed for critical thinking, not fact-based review questions.
3. Think/pair/share. Again, this isn’t a new technique, but it’s effective and the students like it because they can chat with their neighbors and still be on task. The teacher asks a question, gives some think time, asks students to discuss their answers with their neighbors, sets the timer for a minute and lets ’em talk. When the time’s up, the teacher asks any student for a response. That student can choose to share her own answer, her partner’s answer, or an answer the two developed together. Think/pair/share takes the pressure off the individual to be right and focuses the attention on ideas instead.
4. No big deal. Good try. That’s cool. These are easy words to take the sting out of a wrong answer. Acknowledge that the answer was incorrect, but smile at the student and shrug it off. Hey, wrong answers happen to us all. No big deal.
5. How about an assist? Sometimes a student is right on the cusp of giving a correct answer. You can see the wheels clicking in his brain, but he hasn’t quite gotten there yet. I circulate around my classroom, so if a student is struggling with an answer, I might stage whisper a hint to her. Of course, the other students know I’m giving a hint, but they also know it’s O.K. to do so. The hint is a safety net for them and it communicates to students that I’m not going to put them on the spot and embarrass them. Phone a friend or poll the class are also effective options for the student to use and they use the class in a way that offers help, not criticism. This is an opportunity to learn and learning from others is just fine.
6. Can someone expand on that? Can anyone translate? Jake was a student who had trouble articulating his thoughts. I knew that he had the words in his mind, but maybe half of them surfaced in his response. That’s the time I asked for volunteers to expand on Jake’s answer. Jake wasn’t wrong; he just wasn’t complete enough. That’s when I’d ask for someone to expand on Jake’s answer. He gave us a good start; let’s have someone give us a good finish.Breanna was just the opposite of Jake. She had so many thoughts in her head that her answers were often a jumble. When she said an answer that might have been right, but I wasn’t sure, I asked my class for a volunteer to translate. Maybe a student understood what I had not. “Translating” teen into adult helps students who might not be eloquent still participate and receive recognition for their ideas.
7.  Use your resources. Question-and-answer time is not quiz or test time. It’s about learning. Looking up facts in the textbook and referring to class notes is a habit I’d like to encourage. If reading a sentence from the book takes the pressure off a student, I’m fine with that.
8. I’ll come back to you. Despite my best efforts to make the classroom a safe place to give an answer, a student might ask for a pass on a question. I say, “No big deal. I’ll come back to you.” Giving a student a little extra time might give her the confidence she needs to answer the question, feel successful, and learn.
9. Circulate, observe, and call out good work. Opportunities for participation aren’t limited to a question-and-answer activity. Participation can happen even during work time. I circulate among my students while they work to monitor their progress, to redirect off-task behavior, and to answer student questions. Often, I’ll stop by a student’s desk and ask permission to see her work. Maybe the class is writing essays and Shanna has a really good introduction. It’s so good that I hand her an overhead transparency and a marker and ask her to copy her intro onto the transparency to share with the class. Shanna’s a quiet girl who doesn’t like to be called on, but she writes well and glows when I hand her the marker and transparency. When the students are working on an assignment, I might read out a really interesting answer from a student’s work-in-progress and take suggestions from the crowd about whether they would add or subtract anything from the response.
10. Never use questions as a punishment. Never use sarcasm. Nothing shuts a student down quicker than punitive questioning and a smart remark. The point of class participation is to learn, not to discipline students for not paying attention or to show the class how clever your comebacks can be. You’ll see students stop raising their hands to answer questions, no matter how many participation points you offer. You can almost watch the learning curve take a nose dive for the worse.

What about you? Do you have any ways to encourage student participation in class? How do you create an environment in your classroom where students feel it’s safe to offer an answer or an opinion?

Despite the fact that Dr. Goldacre doesn’t believe in the amazing health benefits and antioxidant powers of chocolate, I think that his conclusions are sound, especially those about the mind’s incredible response to belief.

The post is called “Superstition,” and is about the results of a German study of good luck. Even if you’re a skeptic, you might want to look at this like Pascal’s Wager and keep a lucky penny in your pocket. Of all the things that might not raise test scores, this one is pretty harmless and has some science behind it, too. Here’s what the researchers found and how we can apply it in the classroom.

Experiment One

The researchers took 28 test subjects to a putting green. The researchers gave the subjects a golf ball and 10 chances to putt. For half of the subjects, the experimenter told them, “Here is your ball. So far it has turned out to be a lucky ball.” For the other half, the experimenter said, “This is the ball everyone has used so far.”

Test subjects who had the “lucky ball” did better than those who had the plain ol’ golf ball, and not just a little bit. Lucky ball average: 6.42, plain ol’ golf ball: 4.75.

What does this mean in the classroom? Well, with this knowledge, every pen I loaned out would be a lucky pen. Any test sheet would be a lucky test sheet. Sure, it can be overdone, but that’s part of the appeal for me. Best of all, insisting that this quiz is a lucky quiz because other classes did well on it is free. And, it just might improve scores.

Experiment Two

The researchers asked a group of 51 test subjects to do one of those tilt board games where a player tilts a maze to roll balls into holes. Test subjects were in three different groups. Before a subject in the first group began the task, the researcher said, “I press the thumbs for you,” which is a German saying that means, “I’m keeping my fingers crossed.” The second group heard, “I press the watch for you,” which is a German expression that offers encouragement. The final group heard, “On you go.”

The test subjects who heard the fingers crossed suggestion finished the game faster than the other two groups.

What does this mean in the classroom? Before a test or a quiz, just say that you’re crossing your fingers for your students. It doesn’t cost anything to say it and your students might complete the task faster than you’d expected.

Experiment Three

The experimenters rounded up 41 test subjects who had a lucky charm and they asked the subject to bring the lucky object with them to the lab. Half of the subjects were allowed to keep their lucky charm with them in the testing room. The other lucky charms were taken away “to be photographed.” Researchers gave the test subjects a memory game and a post-game questionnaire about how confident they felt about their performance on the memory game.

Not only did the test subjects who had their good luck charm with them do better on the memory task, but also they reported higher levels of “self-efficacy,” which means they felt more confident about their work.

What does this mean for the classroom? It means that I’m going to talk about lucky charms from day one. I’m going to bring in a necklace or four-leaf clover and ask my students to do the same. I’m going to encourage them to bring their lucky charms (within reason) to class every day and refer to them often. “Does everyone have a lucky pencil?” If a little piece of luck makes my students perform better and feel more confident, I’ll start growing four-leaf clovers myself.

Experiment Four

The luck researchers invited 31 test subjects to bring their lucky charms to the lab. Again, only half of the subjects were able to take their good luck objects with them into the testing room. This time, the subjects had an anagram to play with: how many words can you create out of a certain word? Before the test, though, the researchers asked the test subjects to set a goal: what percentage of the words did the participant think she could find?

As you might expect now, the test subjects who were able to keep their lucky objects with them did better than their luck-deprived counterparts and they reported more “self-efficacy” or confidence. Even better, those with their good luck charms set higher goals and stuck with the task longer than the unlucky subjects.

What does this mean for the classroom? Again, I’m going to encourage good luck charms, but I’m also going to ask students to write a goal score in the bottom corner of the test or quiz page. Maybe if they give themselves a target to shoot for, they’ll try to hit it.

Bottom Line

Do I believe in luck? Well, I believe in the power of belief. I think that often what someone believes about herself becomes true. If she believes she’s lucky, she will be. If a student believes he’ll be successful, it becomes self-fulfilling. If I, as a teacher, express my belief in my students, that’s a powerful form of belief, too. Call it luck, I don’t care. It’s powerful and I’m going to use it in the name of good teaching and higher test scores.

How about you? Is this luck thing nonsense or will you, like me, exploit it to the point that every sheet of paper sparkles with fairy dust? Have you had experience with the power of luck or belief? Please share in the comments!

But what did you learn? Did you catch that spark? Did you have an ah-ha moment? I’m out of the classroom and able to talk education experts. Here are my ah-ha moments:

1. How to tame out-of-control parent volunteers. I had a parent volunteer who tried to take over the school newspaper I was advising. She was a well intentioned person, but being the wife of an editor didn’t make her an editor. An election made her a school board member, though. You can imagine how difficult it was to manage her.
   Inside the School presenter Suzanne Tingley taught me that it’s best to have an idea of what you’d like the volunteer to do in the classroom and spell it out in writing. Include guidelines about privacy and safety. Ask the volunteer to sign the expectations sheet and commit to showing up at the same time every week. (How Can I Use My Classroom Volunteer Effectively?)
2. Don’t sugar coat bad news. Gavin disrupted class again today, so you held him after class to make a parent phone call. Tingley said in an online seminar that you might think you’re helping parents by sandwiching the bad news about his behavior between two not-so-bad things. You’re not. Mom has answered the phone at work and wants to end the painful phone call as soon as possible. Explain what Gavin did to merit the phone call and keep your words objective. Come to a solution with Mom and tell her how glad you are that the two of you can work together to help Gavin. End the call on a positive note, but also review the actions you’ll both take so both you and Mom are clear about what the problem was and how you’re going to solve it. (How to Give Feedback No One Wants to Hear, Dealing with Difficult Students, 2-part series)
3. Most students have used a cell phone to cheat. About one-in-three kids with a cell phone have used it to cheat, according to a Common Sense Media report. Two-thirds of students say they know other students who have used a cell phone to cheat. Many teens don’t understand that storing class notes on a cell phone and using the notes on a test is cheating. They think texting friends for an answer isn’t a serious offence and 20 percent say that’s not cheating at all. We’re never going to get rid of cell phones, so it’s clear that we need to educate students about cheating and its consequences.
4. Blended learning is coming. What’s blended learning? It’s blending the physical classroom with the virtual classroom. According to Inside the School presenter Curt Bonk, Ph.D., blended classes will have online resources, an online learning space, and an online ideas exchange among students and the teacher. Maybe your school is on the cutting edge of this and you’ve been using Moodle or Blackboard for years. If you haven’t, you will soon. (Prepare for Natural Disasters and Outbreaks with Blended Learning)
5. A little zaniness is O.K. The brain loves novelty; a little bit of zaniness will create a learning hook that your students won’t soon forget, Stanley Pogrow, Ed.D said in an Inside the School online seminar about Outrageous Teaching. As long as the outrageous part of the lesson meets an objective and involves the students in learning, it’s just fine. You don’t need to teach in a zany way every day, but a little bit benefits students. The bonus is that off-task behavior goes way down during an Outrageous Lesson. (Teaching Content Outrageously)
6. Good teaching is universal. Sandra Rief, author of How to Reach and Teach Children with ADD/ADHD, visited our studio last fall to present three online seminars about teaching students with ADHD. Chunking up material, differentiated instruction, and providing opportunities for student interaction aren’t teaching strategies that just work with ADHD students; all students benefit from these strategies. It’s just good teaching. (ADHD and LD Training Series with Sandra Rief)
7. Front load. Prepare as much as you can in advance of everything. Make sure everyone is clear what the expectations are. Presenter Tingley said in her Dealing with Student Discipline online seminar that the best discipline plans are front loaded. The parents, students, teachers, and administration all understand the behavioral expectations up front, so there’s no question about what will happen if a student breaks a school rule. Front loading takes time to do, but saves time in the end. (Dealing with Student Discipline)
8. Teachers are important, too. Nathan Eklund, author of How Was Your Day at School? visited last winter to present online seminars about teacher morale. It’s common to hear teachers say they want to do What’s best for kids. Eklund says that we also need to consider the school as a workplace for teachers. How happy is the faculty? Are they burnt out? Teacher attitudes affect student performance. Ignoring the welfare of half of the learning equation isn’t smart policy. (Ways to Improve Staff Culture to Benefit Teaching and Learning)
9. Recognize accomplishments. In the latest Trends and Tudes newsletter from polling and research company Harris Interactive has information from the latest MetLife Survey of the American Teacher and the Scholastic/Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation study.  What really caught my eye was an essay from a high school intern who had worked on the project. Amanda Welch of Rochester, NY, has noticed that the same 24 students receive academic awards in her school. Other students receive nothing. A student might be hardworking, really improving, or struggling to overcome learning disabilities, but Welch wrote that school doesn’t recognize their achievements.
   “When you try really hard and believe you are doing a good job, it is natural to want to be rewarded or recognized,” she wrote. “If schools begin recognizing underdogs who put forth their best effort, I think that there will be more students excelling because they will feel supported and satisfied. We want to walk across that stage at graduation (or even award ceremonies) with confidence, knowing that the people around us believe in us
10. Connections mean so much. Dr. Ivory Toldson of Howard University presented two online seminars for Inside the School based on his research about helping black males achieve. A recurring theme from his presentations, as well as Eklund’s, was that the personal connection is powerful. One teacher’s belief in a student can give that student belief in himself, Toldson said. Just one personal connection between a student and a teacher can help prevent behavior problems, too. Personal connections among teachers are also important, Eklund said. Those connections among colleagues keep teachers from feeling isolated in the classroom. (Breaking Barriers: Reducing Gang Violence, Improving Security and Creating a Culture of Learning in Schools)

Did you learn any teaching lessons this year? Maybe what you’ve learned is as simple as: keep track of the restroom pass. Whatever bits of wisdom you’ve garnered, share it in the comments!

This article views the failure of policy to reduce the learning gap over the past decade as a function of the reforms to solve the most pervasive and fundamental learning blockage faced by disadvantaged students and their teachers. This most fundamental problem is viewed as the tendency of the students to stare when asked an open-ended, analytical question. The basis thesis is that the learning gap cannot be reduced substantially, and that disadvantaged students cannot achieve at their full considerable intellectual potential, until this fundamental problem is solved. This article draws on the author’s experience both as a teacher in inner city schools and as a researcher to explain the cause of the stare, and the keys to eliminating the problem.

Many, many years ago (more ‘manys’ than I want to admit) I was a public school teacher in New York City teaching disadvantaged middle and high school students from Harlem and Hells Kitchen. I and my peers were using the latest reform; a discovery approach to teaching. Please keep in mind that I was a highly motivated teacher who loved his students. I think I was a hip (that is how we spoke back then) teacher who was liked by his students. I was committed to the ideal of using progressive approaches to education with disadvantaged students and was as knowledgeable about the research of the times as a teacher could be. All the advocacy and theory would therefore predict that I and my students would experience great success. However, amidst the successes that I had with individual students and with different topics it was not an overall success. There was one stumbling block that I never was able to overcome. Whenever I asked an open-ended question, or any question that required real generalization or abstraction, the students would stare at me. My eager hyperactive students suddenly became silent and stared blankly at me. The more I urged them to “think,” the harder they stared and the more puzzled they seemed to be. Then the silence would become unbearable, and they would avert their gaze. I then faced the dilemma of: “What do I do now?” The only available choices appeared to be to either simplify the questions or give obvious hints, which would defeat the goal of bringing higher forms of learning to the students, or be satisfied with the same two or three students answering the more open-ended questions. My peers had the same dilemma.

I sensed then that the blank stare would always limit both my effectiveness as a teacher and the academic success of my students. As a result, I set off on a quest to understand why they stared when we tried to get them to reach into the world of reflection and abstraction. The following is what I have learnt in the intervening years based on large-scale research and experience.

My initial instinct was correct. The blank stare is ground zero of school reform, i.e. the real litmus test of whether any given reform is reducing the gap. Regardless of the reform flavor at a given moment, if when teachers close their door and ask a complex question most of the disadvantaged students stare, then the reform is not reducing the gap. The blank stare is education’s equivalent of the miner’s canary. It is an indicator of whether things are okay in the trenches.

Unfortunately, the reforms of the past decade have had little impact on the stare. Today when I visit “reform” schools teachers are still either asking primarily simple questions or only a few students are answering the complex questions with the rest staring. Most of these are very good teachers who are as frustrated now as I was then. I watch my well trained and enthusiastic student teachers get so frustrated that they virtually stop asking complex questions after several weeks in the classroom. Despite all the new theories and techniques, things are not well in the trenches, and the problem at ground zero remains the same. Indeed, gaps re-widened in the 90’s, despite major reform efforts.

In order to deal substantively with the “stare” two misconceptions have to be put to rest. The first is the belief that disadvantaged students are not capable of abstract thinking, and it is not fair to expect that. In the 70’s they were even categorized as “concrete” thinkers. In the 80’s the self-concept movement preached asking simple questions so that students could gain self-concept by getting correct answers. Nonsense! Disadvantaged students are as capable of abstract thought as anyone.

The second misconception is that the dumbing down of questions is primarily a result of teachers not being sufficiently trained or motivated, and that this can be solved with advocacy and yet more staff development. Nonsense! I and my peers were well trained and motivated—and we still could not produce the desired reflectiveness in our students.

The core of the problem is that these wonderful students are not prepared to answer reflective questions. Staff development to train teachers to ask reflective questions is of little value if students are not prepared to respond. The lack of student responsiveness is not because of ability. Rather, it results from the gap in disadvantaged students’ access to the types of cultural interactions that do prepare an individual to engage in reflective and abstract thought. The key needed interactions are discussions with adults about ideas, a process that traditionally took place around the greatest educational institution of all—the dinner table.

Unfortunately, disadvantaged students generally come to school without having had the opportunity to talk with adults about ideas. In addition, such a lack is not racial but economic. As you move down the economic ladder talk in the home diminishes dramatically. Betty Hart and Todd Risley found in their landmark study, Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children, that students from low-income households arrive in school with tens of millions fewer language interaction opportunities in the home. The interactions they do have largely involve listening to literal commands, i.e., “do this” and “do that”. In addition, most of the adult talk is negative in nature, admonishing and criticizing.

The absence of prior conversation with adults about ideas leads to disadvantaged students having so little cultural sense of how to engage in systematic or generalized thought that I refer to them as students who do not understand “understanding.” They have no idea of how to engage in fundamental aspects of understanding and working with ideas that we take for granted and that underlie all learning. The stare means: “I do not know what you mean when you ask me to think, or what you want me to do. Please tell me what to do so I can answer your question.” Thinking is a cultural way of representing things, just like language. Every culture does it differently. Therefore, when a teacher asks a complex question that requires thought it is equivalent to speaking to them in a strange foreign language. No wonder the students stare blankly. Nor is it surprising that after years of this cultural dissonance the students become resentful and frustrated. Nor is it surprising that teachers become equally frustrated by their inability to break through the blank stare. How can teachers even begin to develop a fundamental cultural sense of understanding in their students and still teach?

Indeed the absence of a sense of understanding and the resultant blank stare is the single biggest problem facing American education. It limits the achievement potential of disadvantaged students after the earliest grades when the curriculum becomes more integrative and abstract—regardless of how much progress students have made earlier. In addition, the understanding gap is so great that the problem of the blank stare has been immune from the effects of the myriad reforms of the past 38 years.

Are the schools helpless to develop a sense of understanding in disadvantaged students and thereby get them to become reflective learners who respond to open-ended questions given the enormity of the conversation gap? Are we doomed to be tortured forever by the blank stare and its consequences because of environmental issues that are beyond the control of the school? No!

However, the key to solving the problem of the “blank stare” is to be realistic and recognize that: a) the gap in opportunities to discuss ideas with adults is so huge that it is impossible for any one teacher in the context of regular classroom instruction to overcome this huge deficit—no matter how well trained or motivated, and b) no reform will solve the learning gap unless it addresses the conversation gap directly. The easy gains in gap reduction have been made and a new approach is needed.

One potential way to deal with the conversation deficit is for all teachers in a school to agree to ask the same type of key thinking questions on a day in and day out basis and push for student responses. Over time, repeated exposure to a similar set of thinking questions across all content should theoretically help to produce the familiarity and confidence that enables increasing numbers of disadvantaged students to start responding. This is the proverbial “village” approach.

While valuable, the village approach has some problems. First, it is hard to get all teachers in a school to buy into anything. Second, while I have helped schools implement the village approach, I have no data to this point on its effectiveness. I am sure that it would take many years for this approach to have an effect given the huge initial conversation gap. This is problematic for mobile students.

As a result, while the village approach can help, it is not likely a solution. This is why I developed the Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) program 24 years ago to explore the effects of providing an intensive conversation environment for a period of time as a substitute for supplemental drill and test prep. The program generates a very creative and intensive Socratic conversation environment in a specialized setting-either during or after school. It combines the use of technology and Socratic teaching techniques, i.e., teaching by asking. Socratic teaching is made possible by a combination of a sophisticated and creative curriculum designed in accordance with brain theory, and intensive teacher training that develops new reflexes for interacting with students.

After working with 2600 schools and half a million disadvantaged students all over the U.S., and experimenting with a variety of implementation processes, some key findings emerged from this experience over time. This large-scale research has shown that the right type of engaging and consistent conversation for 40 minutes a day can produce a sense of understanding in 1.5-2 years. The conversation needs to be provided in groups of 10-12 students by a good teacher trained in Socratic conversation techniques, using a curriculum designed from the ground up to intrigue students and stimulate Socratic conversation. (It is important that teachers conduct Socratic conversations, i.e., teach by asking, in order to provide students with the opportunity to create their own understandings.) The critical need is for students to create and articulate ideas, and then articulate rationales, justifications, and strategies, over and over and over, and over again— with virtually no overt direction or hints from teachers. The best time to provide such an intensive small group conversation experience appears to start around the middle of the third grade. While you can start as late as the eighth grade, the earlier you start the better. The blank stares disappear.

As the stares start to disappear both basic and advanced skills accelerate. In comparisons HOTS students have developed three times the gains in reading comprehension tests as additional content/test prep activities. Our latest research is showing that HOTS is able to produce substantial gains simultaneously on 16 different measures of academic and cognitive (thinking) development, including GPA, metacognition, writing, and novel problem solving, while comparison students who received extra help in content declined. Other research has shown that close to 15% of the HOTS Title I students make honor role in the first year. There are reports of HOTS Title I students being reclassified as Gifted, and teams of HOTS students beating Gifted students in competitions. In addition, there is tremendous growth in social confidence and verbalization skills. In other words, it appears that developing a sense of understanding transfers to a wide variety of substantial gains.

At the same time, developing a sense of understanding does not insure student success. In the limited follow-up research we have conducted it appears to function as an “enabler.” Those students who develop a sense of understanding and want to succeed perform well academically at the next level of school. On the other hand, few of the over-remediated comparison students do well later on. In other words, those students who do not develop a sense of understanding appear to hit a “cognitive wall” that limits their ability to perform academically as they progress through school. Conversely, the benefits of developing a sense of understanding are so dramatic that it should be part of any legal construct related to equity and opportunity to learn.

It is hard to convey in print how dramatically the student-teacher interaction dynamic is changed once disadvantaged students develop a sense of understanding. It is also difficult to convince people of the importance of developing a sense of understanding and the specific conditions needed to bring it about because so few have successfully produced or observed such effects. Much like a biologist who sees certain things for the first time because of having access to a more powerful microscope, I and thousands of HOTS teachers had a more powerful tool to produce, observe, and research the phenomenon of a sense of understanding—and witness its effects on academic and social growth.

That is not to say that HOTS is the only way to provide the needed intensive conversation. The most important contribution of the HOTS research is the principles of the conditions needed to produce a sense of understanding in ways that transfer to improved academic outcomes and social development. The most important findings were that: a) It takes 35-40 minutes a day of intensive sophisticated conversation for 1.5 to 2 years to develop a sense of understanding, b) such a self-contained environment is needed before the disadvantaged will be successful in thinking-in-content problem solving curricula, and c) providing such a self-contained environment produces greater test score gains than supplemental drill and test-prep work. (A more detailed summary of findings can be obtained from this author via e mail.)

Unfortunately, the notion of establishing a separate intervention to provide a small group Socratic learning environment for 1.5-2 years goes against the grain of the deeply held positions of both progressives and traditionalists. While progressives are ardent advocates of thinking development for the disadvantaged, historically they have implemented it in unsystematic and ineffective ways that unintentionally widen gaps. Progressives generally advocate that disadvantaged students be immediately placed in problem solving content curricula, and that all teaching and learning should be problem solving based. In particular, my experience is that they react viscerally against finding “b” above and characterize the process of taking disadvantaged students aside to first develop a sense of understanding as a form of tracking, labeling, and/or stigmatizing students. Such well intentioned criticism confuses means and progressive ends, and ultimately relegates most disadvantaged students to be “starers.”

In reality, both the teachers and students back in my school in New York City were victims of these good intentions. The students should not have been placed into thinking-in-content, in that case a discovery approach to learning in math and science, until they had first been put into an intervention to develop their sense of understanding. Had our students had such a systematic intervention, their eyes would have shined with energy and thoughtfulness when we asked the types of questions that we did. The students then would have benefited from, and succeeded in, discovery approaches to teaching and learning as well as anyone.

Traditionalists, on the other hand, keep the focus on just basic skills and accountability. They believe that the more time spent on basic skills the greater the rise of test scores. However, while skill development is important, if all you do is remedial/test prep work, you not only stunt the intellectual and emotional development of students, you also inhibit test score improvement. This is why traditionalist periods do generally produce test score gains but these gains plateau quickly and disillusionment sets in. For example, the results from the Chancellor’s district in New York City showed that massive doses of reading instruction, three hours a day, did raise reading scores. But, math scores did not go up, and they did not have time to teach science and social studies so those scores will go down. In other words, there was no transfer. Nor is it likely that today’s accountability press will eliminate the stare anymore today than it did in the past.

While the advisability of the current accountability pressures is debatable, it is clear that educator’s response to No Child Left Behind is repeating the mistakes of past accountability eras. HOTS was heretical when it started in the last accountability movement in the early 80’s. Its lessons are just as counter-intuitive in today’s response to No Child Left Behind. It is frustrating to see administrators once again reflexively responding to accountability pressures by focusing solely on test prep skill development. That is a mistake that ironically minimizes test score gains and limits the overall educational value of the gains that are made. Instead of increasing skill development test prep time, schools should: a) improve the quality of skill development activities during regular instruction time, and b) use supplemental time to provide creative approaches to develop a sense of understanding, and thereafter nurture that sense with creative content curricula.

In other words, the stare and learning gap results largely from professional mistakes we have made for more than a century—regardless of our philosophical predilection. Alternatively, we can make some key changes as a profession and empower disadvantaged students to tap into their vast intellectual potential. High poverty schools are filled with bright students who do not understand how to channel their potential. All they need is sufficient experience in conversing with adults about ideas in a systematic way. The most powerful technology of all is sophisticated conversation. This will do more to raise test scores and reduce the gap, with or without accountability pressures, than all the reforms of the past two decades.

At the same time, the conversation has to be done in a sophisticated, specialized, consistent, and targeted manner. The HOTS research indicates that there are clear parameters about how much conversation is needed, what type, when it is most effective, how to sequence it, and it documents major traditional and progressive effects. It also indicates that it is feasible to provide the needed amount of conversation in conjunction with schools’ existing initiatives and resources. At this point we are hoping to extend research on the benefits of developing a sense of understanding by combining the use of this program with other progressive and traditional approaches in the overall curricular design of schools and district reform plans.

The bottom line is that it is possible, practical, and essential to eliminate the blank stare. Doing so will open up a new era of real progress for disadvantaged students, create exciting opportunities for teachers to succeed with them at more advanced levels, and reduce the learning gap. Had my students had a transitional process available to them to become “understanders” I would probably still be a New York City public school teacher. Why would anyone ever leave a rewarding opportunity to teach low-income students with a sense of understanding who, instead of staring, instinctively think, respond, and learn at high levels?

References

Hart, B. and Risley, T.R. (1995). Meaningful differences in the everyday experience of young American children. Baltimore, MD: Brookes Publishing Company.

Stanley Pogrow is a professor of educational leadership at San Francisco State University, where he specializes in reducing the learning gap. His new book is Teaching Content Outrageously: How to Captivate All Students and Accelerate Learning, Grades 4-12, published by Jossey-Bass. He can be reached at stanpogrow@att.net.

Used with permission of the author.

We will not make much progress in achieving educational equity until we develop better approaches for dealing with student boredom and resistance. But student access to on-demand entertainment has made it harder than ever for teachers to interest their classes—members of the YouTube generation—in what they are being mandated to cover. The old standbys of telling students they have to know it because it will be on the test, or making it “authentic,” that is, trying to convince students they will need to know it as adults, have little effect on many students. They are not adults and may be rebelling against adult ideas.

I decided to tackle the problems of student boredom and resistance when I supervised student-teachers at the University of Arizona. Most of my student-teachers were placed in low-achieving, high-poverty urban middle and high schools.

Even as my student-teachers grew more skillful in managing classrooms, presenting content, and maintaining discipline, their students remained listless in class. Lots of time continued to be lost to the typical student whining. And, to be honest, I was bored by the lessons myself. The student teachers, too, were disappointed that their students were not hanging on their every word or exhibiting a thirst for knowledge. They quickly scaled down their expectations of what teaching could and should be. Student apathy and resistance had won out yet again.

Could my student-teachers develop fascinating lessons that would rivet the students of the YouTube generation? I felt the need to intervene—even if only to maintain my sanity over the course of observing 64 lessons a semester. I wanted to see some excitement in teaching and learning for everyone’s sake. So I asked my student-teachers to design one “dramatic” lesson. I provided them with just a two-hour overview of the components of drama and turned them loose to develop dramatic lessons that (1) covered the same content they were scheduled to teach conventionally that period, (2) had new content and was not a review lesson, and (3) maintained the dramatic context throughout, and was used as the basis for teaching the content, not just to intrigue students at the start of the period.

I had no idea what would happen, nor did my student-teachers. They approached this lesson, which was toward the end of the semester, with the same trepidation they had approached the first day of taking over a classroom. Would they lose control of the class? Would their students respond, or taking over a classroom.

To my delight and amazement, and to theirs, the student-teachers delivered some of the most masterful teaching I have ever witnessed. They broke all the rules. In some cases, the dramatic contexts or storylines they invented called for them to run in and out of the classroom, or teach while hiding under the desk, or teach with their heads on the desk most of the period, or pretend to be crazy. These contexts and storylines were orchestrated, such that students needed to learn the content to help the teacher or themselves resolve some issue of concern, or to help/rescue someone or something.

In most cases, the actual content of these lessons was prosaic, arcane, or complex, and engaging students using conventional instruction would have been problematic. By surprising them with these unorthodox approaches, the teachers made their lessons magical moments in which students had no idea what was going to happen next. And, frankly, neither did I.

We were transfixed, trying to figure out what was going on. My student-teachers never lost control of their classes, because their students were so fascinated and puzzled. For these lessons at least, the student-teachers’ idealized visions of what teaching would be came true. Their students hung on their every word and gesture. When they were asked to do something, they quickly and quietly followed directions. No one asked to go to the bathroom, or complained that they did not know what to do, or said they were missing a pencil. Former passive-resistant learners became initiatory leaders. These lessons were meaningful to students in terms of how they thought (“creative authenticity”), and learning was now driven by passion and emotion.

I call this process of using dramatic technique as the primary method for teaching existing content objectives efficiently “outrageous content instruction” (as opposed to other uses of dramatic technique that generally reinforce or review content already taught, or that develop non-content objectives such as self-expression). The techniques of “outrageous instruction” were refined over time into a series of easily learned principles that were applicable across the content areas, and that transformed the teaching-learning process for even the oldest and most resistant learners. I discuss these principles and lesson planning techniques, with samples of outrageous lessons across the content areas in grades 4-12, in the book Teaching Content Outrageously.

I can share here the following insights drawn from our research: (1) When teachers harness their imaginations to teaching in an “outrageous” fashion, students likewise use imagination to learn—and the most underperforming, jaded students do the best. (2) The learning that occurred was deep and sustained. Classes taught Outrageously did better on the end-of-unit test—even if only their first lesson had been taught dramatically. (3) Even a single Outrageous lesson had major impact in changing how students viewed their teacher, and on their appreciation of the importance of learning content. (4) The rules that work for teaching Outrageous lessons are almost the total opposite of the ones for conventional instruction.

The bottom line is that when teachers taught “outrageously,” there was no boredom or resistance, and the amount and depth of learning increased—for everyone. Teachers were re-energized about the possibilities of their craft and what they could achieve with their students. This was real and powerful reform.

Yet, this reform did not cost any extra money or require elaborate in-service training. This creative approach was as applicable to the current standards-based accountability era as it would be to a progressive era. All this transformation required was that teachers be given the encouragement to tap in to their imagination. If providing students with a single Outrageous lesson from a single teacher had such effects, what would happen if every teacher in a school taught two such lessons a year? We do not know. But this seems to be a reasonable goal that might revitalize teaching and increase student learning. It could be achieved by simply establishing a school wide book club and having leaders encourage teachers to develop and share their periodic Outrageous lessons and experiences. (There is also a blog where teachers can post their successful lessons and share them: outrageousteaching.blogspot.com.)

The use of imagination is the most powerful teaching and learning technology available to us to overcome student boredom and resistance. The images of the mind are far more high-def than the most advanced computers or TVs. By reaching inward into our magnificent minds, we can create new dynamics of practice that are enriching for everyone—while also measurably increasing learning. We do not need to continue to offer students with the most imagination and creativity the least imaginative approaches to teaching them.

In short, we should no longer think of reform only in terms of reaching outward to try to obtain more resources to provide more services (though that is certainly important). We also must begin to think of reform as reaching inward as individuals to use the most powerful technology available to us, one that is ubiquitous and free: the power of the human imagination. We all can, and must, be outrageous some of the time.

Have you tried teaching outrageously? Do you think it might work with your students? Do you think it’s practical for your teaching situation? What do you think your principal would say if she observed you while you were dressed as Edgar Allan Poe or Richard Feynman?

Stanley Pogrow is a professor of educational leadership at San Francisco State University, where he specializes in reducing the learning gap. His new book is Teaching Content Outrageously: How to Captivate All Students and Accelerate Learning, Grades 4-12, published by Jossey-Bass. He can be reached at stanpogrow@att.net.

As a teacher trainer and former long-term high school teacher I am always concerned about how to balance the curricular needs of my students with the need to demonstrate that they can read and write in the content. But, honestly, I am a biology and art teacher, not an English one. I started by making my science students keep journals; a great, but ultimately time-consuming practice whose benefits were hard to measure in instructional change or curricular practice.

Now, my 3000 level Adolescent Curriculum and Instruction course is paired with a colleague’s literacy course and this year I introduced a new writing practice: A Literacy Notebook. Entitled Writings and Musings, (recently, a student added Mutterings to the title), this notebook is passed around once a week at the start of class and contains prompts to which the students respond. The queries range from the student generated, “What do you love about your content area?” to the schema access, “What roadblocks have you surmounted this year?” to the slightly silly but important, “How do you shimmer, sparkle and shine?” This question is the start of a conversation about professional skills and aptitudes.

The literacy notebook encourages students’ reading and writing in a community on several fronts:

• Students have an opportunity to write as individuals in a literate community of peers, students have brief moments of internal review;
• All students are encouraged to generate questions;
• The pre-service teachers participate in an active model of reading and writing that illustrates how moments of literacy are incorporated into a secondary classroom space regardless of curricula.

Further, and most importantly, I have a quick assessment that allows me to conduct a scaffolding check to see what impediments my students are encountering. I can read the book after class during break and make immediate, next-day instructional change. Unlike the journals which can be a great format for extended internal review, this notebook is a more holistic and less high-stakes assessment.

Moreover, the prompts are easily modified to fit any curricular or instructional concerns from, “What about Global Warming is confusing?” to “What was your greatest success in the last vocabulary unit and why?” The notebooks can fill lulls between early arrivals and the start of class, can be given to students who finish early as a modification, and really help frame for me where students place themselves within my content curriculum and instructional methods. I have found the literacy journal to be a gender neutral experience as boys and girls respond with equal frequency (Smith & Wilhelm, 2002).

These ungraded, but heavily assessed documents are brief, but enlightening moments in time.

Reference:
Smith, M. & Wilhelm, J. (2002). “Reading don’t fix no Chevys” Literacy in the lives of young men. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Additional sources:
Hermsen, T. (2009) Poetry of place: Helping students write their worlds. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.
McKenna, M. & Robinson, R. (2009). Teaching through text: Reading and writing in the content areas (1st ed.). NY: Allyn & Bacon.

It’s an interesting discussion and probably something you and your teaching colleagues have discussed before: do rubrics guide both teacher and student or do they limit student creativity and independent thinking?

I love rubrics. My first year teaching English taught me more than I taught my students. I learned very early that if I didn’t provide students with a rubric, the essays I would receive would be so diverse as to make grading impossible. Without a rubric, it’s tough to justify to students and parents why Justin’s three-page tongue-in-cheek career profile of a U.F.O. tracker received an A (incredible voice) and Aaron’s poorly proofread and generic career profile on the same subject received a C .

Assigning without a rubric means that as a teacher, you really don’t have a clear vision of the product you want and how you will assess it. In the real world, if I asked a designer to craft a logo for me, I would choose options like color, size, and digital reproducibility. It’s a rare thing in the world of work for a boss to give a project to a worker and say, “Do what feels right. Be creative.” In that sense, I think that rubrics mirror real-world expectations.

Those expectations are important to students who are struggling to finish the project at 8 p.m. the night before it’s due. The expectations are even more important to the parent who is trying to assist the student. Furthermore, when it’s 8 p.m. on a Sunday night and I’m wading through my stack of papers, I don’t have to spend time wondering what to do with Matt’s essay on crop circles, which contains more illustrations than words.

The rubric helps me at 9 p.m. Sunday night when I’m drafting my week’s lesson plans, too. The state standards drive my lesson’s objectives and my assessments had better measure students’ understanding of those objectives. If students don’t know what product they should turn in and I don’t know how to grade the random essays I receive, how can I assess whether or not a student understood the material?

Rubrics have their limitations. It’s true, though, that a song about a songwriter would be a fitting way to meet the project’s objectives. However, the song doesn’t fit into my rubric. It’s not an essay, it’s a song. Now what do I do?

Maybe I have the wrong rubric. The kid who writes the song meets the research expectation, but the content’s not in the format I expected. The mistake teachers sometimes make in using rubrics is that they don’t include the class on the conversation.

The compromise between conformity and creativity. To make sure everyone understands the project’s expectations, it’s a great idea to have a two-pronged approach to the rubric. Make your own rubric while you’re planning the unit. Figure out what students need to demonstrate to master the objectives.
In class, explain the project. Place students in think-pair-share groups to discuss what criteria they would use to judge the project. Ask for a volunteer to take notes for the class on the whiteboard and take criteria suggestions from the crowd. Circle those items that have more than one vote. Underline those that you have in your own rubric. Talk about the products and how each criterion will be evaluated. Show the class your rubric and add suggestions from the class’s discussion.

By having this pre-work discussion, students can show their creativity on the front end of the project. They have a say in what distinguishes a successful project from one that doesn’t meet expectations. The students have ownership and have begun the thought process that will lead to the project development. This isn’t a waste of class time; it’s think time.

Best of all, when you receive the students’ projects, you’ll have a rubric to guide you. You won’t be surprised with a clay sculpture when you expected a lab write up. And you’ll be assured that your lesson’s objectives, the students’ work, and everyone’s expectations all line up.

My husband asks me why I don’t just throw it all away.

Well, some catalogs I might be able to cut up to use as conversation starters or metaphors in class. Some flyers I might be able to use in my mass media class to teach a persuasive print advertising technique.

And let’s face it: I like the pieces that call me by name.

I know it’s a trap before I open the envelope, but I respond better to the junk mail with my name on it rather than resident or valued customer.

Students are the same way.

When I taught, I tried hard not to lecture for most of the class period. But, we all know that the lecture, even a short lecture, is inevitable. Here’s how I ran mine:

Guided note taking. I gave students an outline for their notes so they could anticipate what was important and what topics we’d cover.

Student involvement. I had a designated note taker at the board or overhead projector who wrote the notes for the class. That freed me up to circulate among the students and make sure they were on task and that I was available for questions. I also had the designated name picker choose volunteers to answer questions from a deck of name cards.

Name dropping. This is the smartest thing I’ve done to help kids pay attention during a lecture. As I mentioned, it’s inspired from my junk mail. As often as possible, I tried to incorporate a student’s name into an example during my lecture. I didn’t choose someone who was nodding off or doodling instead of listening. I spread the joy around and tried to name each kid in the class during the lecture at least once.

If the student name didn’t work well in an example, I worked it in like I was having a one-on-one conversation with individual students. It went like this:

“So, Jonah, we’re not really sure if it was Shakespeare who wrote these plays or if someone else did it. But that’s not really important, right Jenny? The words by any pen would still be terrific, don’t you think, Lisa?”

That example might be overdoing it, but just saying those student names at random during the lecture and making eye contact with each kid really helped them pay attention. We all love it when someone calls us by name.

It’s just like how those colorful mailers get my attention when they print my name on the envelope: Diane Trim, you could be our next winner!

Name dropping like that is hard to ignore.

Most college students struggle with the vocabulary of our disciplines. In their various electronic exchanges, they do not use a lot of multisyllabic, difficult-to-pronounce words. And virtually all college courses are vocabulary rich – unfamiliar words abound. Most students know that the new vocabulary in a course is important. They use flash cards and other methods to help them memorize the words and their meanings for their exams. Two days later, the words and their meanings are gone.

Word sort is a strategy that helps students learn and better remember new vocabulary. Students work in small groups, with each group given an envelope containing key terms on separate slips of paper. Students are instructed to discuss what they think the relationships among the words might be. The strategy was developed for use in science courses, where terms have more precise meanings and fit more readily into categories. Students do this initial sort before reading about the terms or hearing them defined and discussed in lecture. After exposure to the words in the text or lecture, students get back into their groups and re-sort the words, comparing their new arrangements with the ones they first constructed.

Lots of iterations of the basic strategy can be used. For example, individual students can be given the collection of terms and told to define and relate them after having done the reading as a homework assignment. Before turning their work in for some modest number of points, students might share with other students in a small group what they’ve done. Or the instructor might use a particularly good categorization in a final review of the material or position that chunk of content with what’s to be learned next.

As might be expected, some students (in this article it was a small group) object to the approach. These are the students who think that the instructor should just tell them the definitions and their relationships. Having to figure it out for themselves means that the students are doing the work the teacher should be doing. What these students fail to understand is that the process of discussing – saying the words aloud and using them in sentences – makes the words more familiar and therefore easier to remember. Exploring how the words relate to each other means that the students are building a framework that puts the words in context, also making the words easier to remember in both the short and long terms.

If students work with the terms and their relationships before being given their definitions and relationships, they are forced to draw on their prior knowledge and experience. Students discover that they often do know something about the terms and their relationships, and teachers need to include more activities in courses that challenge students to draw on their prior knowledge. Students do not arrive in college courses as blank slates – they have taken (in this case) science courses previously. That tasks like these challenge students is a good thing. Students benefit when they are put in situations where figuring out answers is up to them.

Reference:

Nixon, S. and Fishback, J. (2009). Enhancing comprehension and retention of vocabulary concepts through small-group discussion: Probing for connections among key terms. Journal of College Science Teaching, May/June, 18-21.

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Listed below are 10 such ideas.

1. Incremental Change: Change is always complex and difficult. Shifts to online teaching and learning are no different. We recommend that those who might be nervous or more hesitant start with small steps or minor course adaptations. Perhaps a training program might begin by having these individuals find online resources that they can later use. During training, they might also select from an assortment of low cost, low risk, low time strategies. At the end of such a training or orientation program, participants might indicate where they presently are on a risk continuum or meter as well as where they would like to be in a few years.
2. Shared Success Stories and Best Practices: Another option is to show teachers examples of what actually works. These examples and models might be found in books, newsletters, email messages, CDs, Web portals, testimonials, or some other media delivery format. Consider having these stories developed by peers and colleagues whom they trust instead of by vendors or external consultants.
3. Training and Development: I have found that starting with a simple technology tool or resource that can be mastered and applied is more important than explaining the underlying instructional approach, philosophy, or pedagogy. Providing incentives for the completion of the training is also important (e.g., a stipend, certificate, iPod, laptop, tablet PC, etc.).
4. Just-in-Time Support: Support staff might be on call when needed for 1:1 help and advice. Technical support personnel and trainers should not dictate a single approach or instructional philosophy but rather they should listen to teacher needs and respond accordingly. Allow teachers to select the training topics that they are interested in, rather than preselecting the topic(s) for them. I have found that when working with practicing teachers in schools that training them in the technologies that they had on their machines or had access to was far superior to training them in software that I just happened to like or use myself.
5. An Atmosphere of Sharing: Fostering change in terms of technology integration and use will only come when there is an atmosphere of change. Such an atmosphere can definitely build up over time. For instance, the final 5-10 minutes of a department, program, or unit meeting might be saved for a live presentation of an emerging technology or discussion of ideas related to how one is using technology or the Web in instruction. I often see this sharing occurring at the school and university level with annual technology in teaching events or awards for technology integration and innovation. Many schools also sponsor such events as brown bag luncheons wherein a teacher or visitor will present some interesting technology or online activity. Colloquiums, institutes, videoconferences, Webinars, and other events can also be employed to cultivate this change in atmosphere.
6. Awards and Incentives: As indicated above, training programs might include incentives such as stipends, travel monies, awards, and technology. For example, those who are innovative might be the first in line for hardware or software upgrades and replacements. The School of Education at Indiana University, for instance, has been innovative in sponsoring laptop programs wherein enlisted faculty members receive a laptop for their instructional uses after completing a set number of hours – here 16 – of technology-related training. Other incentives might include assistance in writing grants for technology and money for conference travel. There might be competitions for interactivity in online course development, outstanding course awards, and annual events for innovation in online instruction. Such efforts are vital since part of creating a community of online educators is to support success and then to celebrate such success when it occurs.
7. Modeling: I have found that modeling the use of online technologies and courses by one’s colleagues and superiors is highly valuable. In effect, when one’s leaders or supervisors are doing it (e.g., the school principal or technology coordinator), so can you. And when the high school superintendent generates a podcast or receives her training from one, people throughout the school district tend to take notice. Modeling also creates opportunities for discussion and interaction to occur around the topic or content area being shown, resulting in a sense of community among those who are interested in the new ideas.
8. Mentoring and Coaching: While technology-oriented training increasingly relies on technology-based tutorials, opportunities for 1:1 advice and consultation are bound to have a lasting impact. When new teachers or staff members enter into an online environment or situation, it is vital to provide some form of cognitive apprenticeship. For instance, someone savvy with technology or knowledgeable about online teaching and learning might be asked to support one or more novice teachers or assistants. And such individuals might receive modest stipends for such efforts.
9. External Supports: Most of the above ideas relate to internal forms of support within an organization or institution. Naturally, given the expansiveness of the Web, some external supports might be provided such as access to online teaching examples, online instruction certificate programs, and even master’s degrees. In addition, an organization or institution might subscribe to an online newsletter or enter into online discussions on a community using Ning or some other collaborative technology. For those in the K-12 world, the George Lucas Educational Foundation (GLEF) provides many examples of innovative teaching approaches with and without technology.
10. Frameworks and Models: One of the more significant ways to learn to teach online and become less hesitant, reluctant, and resistant, is to use models, overviews, and other frameworks. Frameworks offer a means to reflect on what works and what is not working. They lend a macro lens to any online teaching and learning situation. And they can help one to categorize or make sense of the never-ending mounds of information or data each of us deals with each day. In effect, they reduce the apprehensions and angst professional educators might have related to teaching as well as learning in online environments. The R2D2 (i.e., Read, Reflect, Display, and Do) and TEC-VARIETY models that I have designed are pedagogically-focused examples of such frameworks. With tools such as R2D2 at one’s side, normally hesitant or resistant instructors often become models and advocates of online education.

Anyone involved in organizational change will readily admit that change is typically systemic in nature. Consequently, I recommend you consider how most or all of the above ten categories of ideas can support teacher and staff development or perhaps even transformation within your school or school district. With such support, they can feel more secure in their online decision making and related adventures. Good luck.

Curtis J. Bonk is Professor of Instructional Systems Technology at Indiana University. He has a popular blog called TravelinEdMan and is the author of The World Is Open: How Web Technology Is Revolutionizing Education as well as Empowering Online Learning: 100+ Ideas, for Reading, Reflecting, Displaying, and Doing.