Is compassion still necessary is akin to asking whether thinking is still necessary? While not everyone may practice thinking, thankfully most people believe it necessary. The same can be said of compassion. A world where most people are not compassionate would be a world without progress; for compassion is about holistically understanding the world around you so that you can find solutions to problems, thereby improving the quality of life. Compassion is necessary, especially if you want the world to progress. Even in a world full of compassion, it would still be necessary because compassion is like love; the more you use it, the more there is of it. In short, compassion will always be necessary just as thinking will be.
The host of Tipping Point Radio’s The Mastermind Show, Craig Meriwether, recently interviewed me for a specific program called “Is Compassion Still Necessary?” Craig and I discussed a wide range of issues as they relate to compassion such as politics, education, neuroscience, parenting, economics, religion and even video games. I hope that you’ll take a 45 minute ‘mindwalk’ about compassion with me and Craig: Click here to listen to the show.
Teachers are the artists who help us paint who we are and the astronauts who help us explore the people we become. Teaching is a profession that explores and experiences, in the words of The Outer Limits intro, “the awe and mystery that reaches from the deepest inner-mind … to the outer limits.” Teachers mold our minds and help us reach for the stars. The best educators know that there is an art to teaching and science, especially neuroscience, is just beginning to help us understand how great teaching creates inspired learning.
My talk for the Jesse Lewis Choose Love Foundation’s 2014 workshop for teachers titled “The Science of Artful Teaching” explains how and why great teachers are both artists and astronauts. The talk, which is part of my Inspiring Teachers Talks (The IT Talks), weaves together research in neuroscience, education and even cosmology to show educators that what and how they teach literally and figuratively paints and sculpts their students’ brains and futures.
If you are willing to explore the cosmos, the brain and be “blinded by science” all in an effort to understand the power and influence of a teacher, then “The Science of Artful Teaching” is for you.
Here’s my talk.
‘Work hard, play hard’ and ‘work hard or go home’ are bumper sticker slogans that may help achieve success on the field but not in the classroom. Recent research and books on learning suggest editing the first slogan to ‘work hard, play harder’ if we want to create academic environments that help students succeed. In America’s education system, however, we have focused exclusively on work to such an extent that play is being excluded from school. Most American school districts have either reduced or eliminated recess, phys-ed and other playtime to allocate more time for work focused on studying and taking standardized tests.
The importance of play in successful learning has been highlighted and demonstrated by ancient scholars (i.e., Plato), modern neuroscientists (i.e., William Klemm) and the top test scoring countries in the world (i.e., Finland). American education leaders have ignored the evidence for the play-learning nexus by placing their heads in the proverbial sand when they should be building more sandboxes for students at all academic levels. Learning sandboxes range from wooden sandboxes at recess time for elementary schoolchildren to Makerspaces for middle and high school students to virtual online sandboxes for college students. “Play,” according to Diane Ackerman (the public science writer of The Human Age and 23 other books), “is our brain’s favorite way of learning.”
Our brain’s favorite way of learning is being removed from American schools. “When I was in elementary school,” states Peter Gray (author of Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Live), “in the 1950s, we had six-hour school days: two hours of outdoors playing per day, half hour in the morning, half hour during lunch, and a full hour in the afternoon.” Today, the national average is twenty-six minutes of recess and Connecticut, my home state, only “recommends” 20 minutes (in addition, my three boys—ages 7, 9 & 11—are given less than 20 minutes for lunch each school day). There are less than a handful of states that even require daily recess. In contrast, Finland—always at the top or near the top of international test scores—provides a 15-minute break every 45 minutes for students during the school day.
The demise of play in American schools has been linked by Peter Gray and others to a decline in cognitive and social skills as well as an increase in mental disorders. William Klemm, professor of neuroscience at Texas A&M University, recently summarized several studies on the importance of play writing that “When members of a play-oriented species [such as humans] are denied access to juvenile play, they can become dysfunctional adults…Juvenile play sculpts the brain to be more adaptable later in life. In modern human society, juvenile play is often obstructed by such externals as over-scheduling, too much adult supervision, and too many restrictions…In this respect, the ‘good old days’ really were the good old days.” Elementary school students need their play for cognitive and social-emotional learning and we, as a society, need to provide them with the playtime necessary for their development into functional adults. Increasing time for recess is not only healthy for our children but our communities.
“Do not,” Plato said, “keep children to their studies by compulsion but by play.” Yes, even Plato knew about the importance of play in education. One of the most creative ways to “keep children to their studies by play” is to build time into middle and high school curricula for using a Makerspace (a.k.a. Hackerspace). A Makerspace is an area where students learn through experimental play with technology and ideas under the guidance of teachers and other experts in the community. It is a space where students play with concepts learned in the classroom for the purpose of bringing their ideas to life via a 3D printer, software code, plasma cutter and other tools. In the words of the Makerspace Playbook: “Making is innovative and resourceful. Makers build off the idea of others and choose the best tools for the job…They identify their own challenges and solve new problems. Making provides ample opportunities to deeply understand difficult concepts. Makers seek out STEM content to improve their projects, and they cross disciplines to achieve their goals, rather than staying within one specialty.” A Makerspace is where Einstein’s idea of combinatory play is figuratively and literally brought to life.
If a community or school district does not have the resources to immediately setup a Makerspace, a relatively inexpensive way of incorporating play into the curriculum is by gamifying parts of classes. Game-based learning occurs through low-tech ways such as the collaborative geography game called Galactic Mappers (seen in the video via Edutopia noted below) to high-tech options such as Statecraft.sim, which I used in my International Relations course this past semester. Assessing student learning is not only more enjoyable for the students as compared to standardized tests but my experience shows that their learning is deeper and more enduring.
The U.S. education system is using sand exclusively for building sand timers (for tests) rather than using it to build imaginations and engage students in learning. The system is focused on turning over sand timers rather than turning on students to learning. Since I’m at the tail end of the argument, let’s go back to one of the bumper sticker slogans I started with to sum it all up: ‘go hard or go home.’ School leaders will have to ‘go’ a little harder to work play into their curricula or send their students ‘home’ knowing that they are less cognitively, emotionally and socially prepared for the real world than they could and should be.
Cordell, Sigrid Anderson, “Nixing Recess: The Silly, Alarmingly Popular Way to Punish Kids,” The Atlantic (October, 2013).
Edutopia, “Building Formative Assessment into Game-Based Learning,” YouTube (May 13, 2014).
Klemm, William, “The Neuroscience of Why Children Play,” Psychology Today blog, Memory Medic (December 12, 2014).
Klemm, W.R., Mental Biology: The New Science of How the Brain and Mind Relate (New York: Prometheus Books, 2014).
Korbey, Holly, “Despite Benefits, Recess fro Many Students is Restricted,” MindShift, KQED blog (July 26, 2013).
Makerspace Playbook: School Edition (Spring 2013).
Solomon, Andrew, “Go Play Outside,” New York Times Book Review of A Country Called Childhood by Jay Griffiths (December 14, 2014): p 26-27.
Cartoon © Phil Watson. Used with permission.
An all-or-nothing person; you know the type. Everything is black-or-white and it’s their way or the highway. As coaches, they may rack up a few W’s in the win column but as educators and leaders, they lose sight of how effective learning happens. The all-or-nothing believers and debaters in education are blind to what works in learning because they refuse to see the different shades of gray between their black-or-white ways of thinking. Education is all about the gray matter. The science of learning is in their blind spot. Two of the biggest blind spots in education are testing and memorization.
The two all-or-nothing education camps on testing that garner the most attention in social and traditional media are those who believe standardized tests are important for academic achievement as well as accountability and should be administered every year (i.e., the No Child Left Behind advocates) and those who believe there should be no tests (i.e., the Free School movement). Recent studies on testing, however, demonstrate that frequent low-stakes testing (a.k.a. quizzing) timely spaced so that students begin to forget is the most effective way of making information “stick” in their minds (it is called spaced learning). It is not one big test to prepare for every year and it is not zero testing that help students learn but the counterintuitive idea of “forgetting to learn” with frequently spaced quizzing that advances academic achievement. It is the blind spot in our educational policy debates that can help us paradoxically see the most effective learning strategies for our children, if we would only turn around or turn a few research pages to see them.
When it comes to memorization or knowing facts, the blind spot of the all-or-nothing schools of thought should be called the Goldilocks Effect: it is not all memorizing and it is not zero memorizing but ‘just’ the right mixture of memorizing and recitation that helps a student learn. Several new books on the science of learning recommend splitting a student’s time for acquiring new facts into thirds where one-third of the time should be devoted to memorizing and two-thirds to reciting the knowledge. A common theme in many of the books echo neuroscientist W.R. Klemm’s Mental Biology mantra: “the more you know, the more you can know.” As Ian Leslie points out in Curious:
“Learning skills grow organically out of specific knowledge of specific domains—that is to say, facts…The wider your knowledge, the more widely your intelligence can range and the more purchase it gets on new information. This is why the argument that schools ought to prioritize learning skills over knowledge makes no sense; the very foundation for such skills is memorized knowledge. The more we know, the better we are at thinking.”
Knowing facts and learning go hand-in-hand and are mutually supportive. The all-or-nothing types are fostering a false dichotomy between knowledge and learning.
The science of learning is showing education leaders and policymakers where to look but they are implementing education policies as though they are, in the words of a Thomas Dolby’s 1980s song, blinded by science. If education is about learning (as it should be), then the science of learning should be informing policy. The fields of neuroscience and education have combined to form the emerging field (26 years old) of neuroeducation (a.k.a. educational neuroscience) that is not only revealing the blind spots of our educational system but is also providing ideas of how we should address them. The all-or-nothing schools of thought can only overcome the science of learning by ignoring it. The all-or-nothing crowd might want to try all-for-one and one-for-all.
BOOKS & ARTICLES:
Amy Adams, “Stanford Researchers Bridge Education and Neuroscience to Strengthen the Growing Field of Educational Neuroscience,” Stanford Report (November 21, 2014).
Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III and Mark A. McDaniel, Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014).
Benedict Carey, How We Learn: The Surprising Truth about When, Where, and Why it Happens (New York: Random House, 2014).
Benedict Carey, “Studying for the Test by Taking It,” The New York Times (November 22, 2014).
Paul A. Howard-Jones, “Neuroscience and Education: Myths and Messages,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience (October 15, 2014).
W. R. Klemm, Mental Biology: The New Science of How the Brain and Mind Relate (New York: Prometheus Books, 2014).
Ian Leslie, Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It (New York: Basic Books, 2014).
To stir a crowd is to get them excited about something and to stir a drink, such as the perfect glass of chocolate milk, is to blend seamlessly (where there is no chocolate at the bottom of the glass but the taste of chocolate in every sip). Two recent books on learning stir in both ways; they get the reader excited about learning and they clearly show that the basis of learning is blending knowledge with understanding. While one book is more scientifically centered (Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning) and the other is more story-based (How We Learn: The Surprising Truth about When, Where, and Why it Happens), they reinforce each other’s messages in complementary styles. The trouble with both books is that while their ideas are scientifically sound, clearly explained and need to be implemented in schoolrooms as well as boardrooms, the books are not assigned reading for policymakers, teachers and leaders: anyone who cares about and/or whose job is centered around learning needs to read these books. Each book STIRS the reader to actions that are sometimes counterintuitive but always effective for successful learning. (STIRS is an acronym I created to highlight the important factors that both books focus on for building an education that generates successful learning: Spaced, Transfer, Interleaving, Recitation & Sleep.)
Spaced—Spaced learning or the “Forget to Learn Theory” is one of the most effective ways to educate. It is based on the counterintuitive idea that if you want to know something so well that you can easily retrieve the knowledge whenever you want (i.e., your brain as Google), you should separate the learning of that knowledge by gaps of time where you begin to forget the knowledge. This spaced practice of building knowledge embeds learning in long-term memory because when you try to remember something you think you forgot, you activate complex networks in the brain that makes learning more robust and durable. “Forgetting enables and deepens learning,” according to Benedict Carey in How We Learn, “by filtering out distracting information and by allowing some breakdown that, after reuse, drives retrieval and storage strength higher than they were originally. Those are the basic principles that emerge from brain biology and cognitive science (p. 41).” A method to avoid any robust learning is to do what too many traditional teachers recommend (and what Rudy Giuliani famously called for in the 2012 presidential election): “drill baby drill” or what is known in the science of learning lingo as massed practice. Constant drilling and cramming may work for short-term memory goals but it simply does not work for embedding knowledge in long-term memory or, in other words, for any durable learning purpose.
Transfer—The more difficult and effortful we find learning something, the more durable and transferable the learning is to different settings. Both books use Robert and Elizabeth Bjork’s research on “desirable difficulties” as a foundational concept for outlining how learning can be robust and applicable in other contexts. In the words of Brown, Roediger and McDaniel, “the more effort required to retrieve (or, in effect, relearn) something, the better you learn it…The retrieval difficulties posed by spacing [and other practices] are overcome by invoking the same mental processes that will be needed later in applying the learning in everyday settings” (p. 82 & 85). We learn deeper and with wider applicability when learning is effortful.
Interleaving—An effortful and desirably difficult method for learning is interleaving (spacing is another kind of desirable difficulty). Interleaving is the practice of mixing two or more subjects or skills in one learning session. It usually involves weaving new ideas with older material. Make it Stick points-out that “learning from interleaved practice feels slower than learning from massed practice. Teachers and students sense the difference…As a result, interleaving is unpopular and seldom used. Teachers dislike it because it feels sluggish. Students find it confusing…But the research shows unequivocally that mastery and long-term retention are much better if you interleave practice than if you mass it” (p. 50). The mixed practice of interleaving, in short, makes the brain work harder, which makes learning stronger.
Recitation—If you want to remember a written passage or anything else you should spend more time rehearsing or restating it rather than studying or memorizing it. Amazingly, reciting a passage increases your memorization of it better than memorizing it by itself. As Carey writes in How We Learn, you should “spend the first third of your time memorizing it, and the remaining two thirds reciting from memory” (p. 85). In another section of the book, Carey explains how the best way to learn something is to teach it and he calls that “the high-octane kind” of studying (p. 102-103); a recitation with an exclamation.
Sleep—While How We Learn devotes an entire chapter to the importance of sleep to learning (chapter ten), Make it Stick weaves sleep into sections of the book highlighting its importance for consolidating learning. The books, for me, reinforced the ideas and arguments made in the American Academy of Pediatrics policy statement this past August for delaying the time schools start each day all for the purpose of improving health and academic success. Another study on delaying school start times by the University of Minnesota in St. Paul (February 2014) “found improved grades and standardized test scores, and a 65 to 70 percent reduction in teen car accidents.” Scores up and accidents down sounds like a type of balanced learning that is good for the students and their communities.
“How we learn” is really about “making it stick” in our brain and the combination of the two books provides scientific and pedagogical clarity for how robust and durable learning can and should occur. Reading the books together was like stirring the perfect glass of chocolate milk made to toast learning. I enjoyed every sip … I learned from every chapter.
American Academy of Pediatrics, “School Start Times for Adolescents: Policy Statement” (Pediatrics: August 25, 2014)
Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III and Mark A. McDaniel, Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning (Harvard University Press/Belknap Press: April, 2014)
Benedict Carey, How We Learn: The Surprising Truth about When, Where, and Why it Happens (Random House: September, 2014).
Andy Coghlan, “Open Schools Later so Teens can Lie In, Say US Doctors” (New Scientist: August 25, 2014)
After four decades of eating apples, I learned how to eat my “red delicious” correctly; that is from the bottom-up. Eating an apple from the bottom-up eliminates waste because you eat the core (click here to see video) and, according to one of my students, the apple tastes better. The Common Core in education is similar: it comes from the bottom-up, it tries to eliminate the waste of ignorance and it is adaptable to each school district’s academic ‘tastes.’
From the highly publicized February 4th debate between a scientist and a creationist (Bill Nye and Ken Ham) to the newly released biennial National Science Foundation (NSF) report on the state of science in the United States and world, we are presented with weekly reminders of why we need the Common Core State Standards (CCSS): too many basic concepts and facts are not commonly known. “Many Americans,” according to the NSF report, “provide multiple incorrect answers to basic questions about scientific facts.” For example, when asked to provide a “true” or “false” answer to “Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals” only 48 percent of Americans responded “true.” When asked whether “The universe began with a huge explosion” less than 40 percent of Americans correctly answered “true” while nearly 70 percent of South Koreans did. The Common Core tries to address the ignorance of facts that appears to be spreading throughout society.
The origin of the Common Core is more aptly described as bottom-up rather than top-down. The nickname of Obamacore for the Common Core by its critics misrepresents it as a federal program. The reality regarding its origin is that researchers, educators and state representatives from throughout the country, including the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief of State School Officials, constructed CCSS. The Common Core is not a federal program either in its origin or in its practice.
The CCSS is made so that each school district can assign texts it deems appropriate for its students in their quest to achieve the standards. One of the best examples of local ‘tastes’ being used to achieve the CCSS has occurred in the Pueblo of Jemez school district in New Mexico. The Pueblo of Jemez is a Native community in north-central New Mexico that has created and instituted a curriculum “rooted” in the Jemez culture “and aligned to the common core.” CCSS mandates a set of skills and knowledge that students are expected to master each year but does not mandate what is taught in any school. For instance, while all third graders are required to “Refer to parts of stories, dramas, and poems when writing or speaking about a text…[and] describe how each successive part builds on earlier sections,” CCSS leaves the decision about any texts to be used to the local school districts. An explicit purpose of the Common Core is to develop student skills that help them with “college and career readiness” and not to indoctrinate.
I started out as a skeptic of the Common Core and have, through research and practice, become an advocate of CCSS. I began as a skeptic because I did not want my three young boys to suffer through another No Child Left Behind program. I became an advocate because CCSS requires that all American students learn important educational skills while providing the freedom to localities to choose the books they want to use for achieving the Common Core objectives. High standards applied to all and the freedom to choose how to reach those standards; that is as American as apple pie.
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