Teaching is not magic

We are in a unique position to have a significant influence on the development of young people at a time in their life when conscious and unconscious growth is prevalent. This opportunity is brimming with responsibility. We are partners with parents, siblings, grandparents, coaches, and other influencers to help our students to grow. While educating our community’s children is not an easy task, an overwhelming concern we face is “what are we really trying to achieve?”. What are the goals we have for our students? What are the goals our students have for themselves? 

As educators we often think about the daily lessons and activities that our students will be expected to engage in. Curriculum units are often created around standards and understanding is measured by a test. Standards and tests are static, inanimate, unthinking, and unemotional. The craft of teaching brings life to learning, and needs to be deliberately designed to invoke learning. This craft is not witchcraft –  teaching is not magic. The simple act of ensuring your students know the learning intention for a lesson or activity and the success criteria associated with the experience may be enough to connect teaching with learning –  but not always.

Oftentimes we do need more to help direct our students from not knowing-to-knowing, or redirect them from misunderstanding-to-understanding. We have several tools we can employ when enhancing the learning experience for our students and the teaching experience for ourselves. As a point of clarification, enhancing the learning experience is grounded in design for deeper learning. We don’t want to just comply – cover the standards – get through the book – turn the page. 

These nine principles provide a framework for designing for deeper learning:

You are likely doing a lot of these things without realizing it or at least recognize some of these principles under a different set of vocabulary. How much of your planning deliberately includes each of these principles? How evident are these principles in your classroom? If you’re telling yourself you can probably do better in this work, consider us partners in elevating our collective attention and intention to grow our students in a deeper and more meaningful manner.

Over the next several posts, we’ll be digging into each of these principles and how they connect instruction to authentic performance tasks (and further) to the data that helps inform when and how we move forward in scaffolding the growth of our students..

If you can’t wait for our next post here are some resources to learn more about designing for deeper learning.

Deeper Learning Hub

New Pedagogies for Deep Learning

Design for Deeper Learning Kaleidoscope

What’s Deep about Deep Learning

Too many eggs in one basket

My daughter, Maddie, will be turning 22 on Sunday, April 10. She is the oldest of our four children. When she was just 9 years old we bought her a dog. Ruby, the dog (not my daughter … remember her name is Maddie), is blind in one eye (she thinks she’s look at the camera) and generally can’t hear, but she has three younger brothers (that’s true for both Maddie and Ruby) to keep her acting like a puppy (Ruby – not Maddie). My oldest son Christian has a dog, Jake. My two youngest sons, Sean and Finn, have twin dogs, Rider and Comet. Needless to say we are a dog family. So what happens when our children grow up and out of the house? How can we take four dogs and divide them among six people?

Most 3rd graders should be able to attempt this problem, but not solve it “correctly”. What about 4th graders? 5th graders? … High school?

Of course if we enact our skills of extracting critical information from the situation (does it matter what ailments Ruby has or how old my daughter was when she got her?), and then apply the algorithm of either “repeated” subtraction or the notion of fair-share, we realize each one of my family members (myself included) would be able to cuddle up with just 2/3 of a dog once properties of division are satisfied and we all agree fractions are numbers too. The math makes sense, but I really hope you see a problem with a fractional solution in this unrealistic situation. The real (non-mathematical) answer is that my wife and I keep all four dogs.

In 2001, the National Research Council published Adding it Up: Helping Children Learn Mathematics as a guide for educators to rethink how mathematics should be taught in grades pre-K through 8. The core of the text suggests there are five strands that are necessary for learning mathematical concepts.

Students spend a lot of time practicing procedural fluency, but under the auspices of standardized testing and time constraints we convince ourselves the other strands will either come naturally as students mature … or just aren’t as important as being able to do the math in order to get the right answer.

Graham Fletcher presented some of his learning progressions at the Montgomery County Intermediate Unit recently. This image of Graham shows a simplified form of the five strands where Application serves as a big bucket category for strategic competence, adaptive reasoning and productive disposition.

Graham Fletcher presenting at the MCIU on March 29, 2022.

Building authentic context around problems, and engaging students in modeling and conceptual understanding offers greater opportunity for students to participate in their learning. The introduction of design thinking, project based learning and interdisciplinary teaching and learning may be a bit of a stretch right now. Consider the dynamics of your classroom, and the balance of rational thinking versus algorithmic thinking that you expect from your students on a daily basis.

Can you infuse experiences that allow students to develop critical thinking (effect size = 0.49) and exercise creativity (effect size = 0.58)? Have you tried 3-Act math activities? They are built into the enVision program already, and if you’re looking for more check out Graham Fletcher, Andrew Stadel, Robert Kaplinsky (Open Middle is another activity worth exploring) and of course Dan Meyer. If 3-Act math is old news, let’s now consider design challenges and project based or problem based experiences. As unique as each of our individual students can be, the experiences we design for them can be just as unique. Let’s start scrambling the content, strategies, and experiences into authentic and holistic learning moments to get out of the eggs-in-one-basket approach to education.

Postscript: if you’re looking for resources on design thinking and project based learning for your classroom, I’ll be posting additional content to help (sorry to leave you hanging at the moment) … but we can always use your help in creating new experiences. If you’re interested in helping, please reach out.

The Green (Hat) Apple

In September 2017, I defended my dissertation on the perceived value of procedural fluency vs. conceptual understanding among secondary mathematics teachers. I know – BOOOORING (my oldest son actually fell asleep during my presentation).

Non-mathematicians (and I’m sure some mathematicians) will likely find it difficult to see the connection between mathematics and creativity. At some point, we’ve all sat in a math classroom and witnessed a teacher demonstrate basic algorithms like addition and subtraction. What most of us missed was the opportunity to explore the creativity associated with discovering how and why the algorithms worked … we just trusted that they did, and there was sufficient evidence to back the teacher’s claims.

At the conclusion of my defense, my professor, Dr. Fredricka Reisman, walked me to her office – exclaimed that I was her last doctoral student before retiring – and handed me the green glass apple picture above, something she has done for all of her graduates. Throughout my program, which focused on educational leadership and creativity, Dr. Reisman often referred to Dr. Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats framework. The Green Hat (or apple in this story) is “the creative hat, used to generate new ideas and possibilities and to explore alternate courses of action.” [taken from Reisman and Tanner’s “Creativity as a Bridge Between Education and Industry: Fostering New Innovations” – the second book from top in the photo].

Reflect for a moment …

How often do you exercise creativity in your teaching?

How often do you ask your students to be creative?

How close is creativity associated with successful teaching and learning?

The challenge is:

How can we make learning in the classroom more fun?

One of the best ways to get inspired is to look outside your context. When working on new design challenges, IDEO designers often use analogous inspiration to gain fresh perspective. For example, emergency room doctors can get insights about organizing their medical supplies by spending time with a Nascar pit crew and an airline employee might get ideas about check-in by observing a hotel front desk.

IDEO U Blog

IDEO is a design firm that has their fingerprints on every industry, including education. We have used their work as inspiration in bringing the concept of design thinking (remember “Launch” and “Empower” by AJ Juliani and John Spencer) to some of our classrooms. Using the suggestion above, we stepped outside the context of education to examine this challenge of making learning more fun and engaging while also invoking curiosity and celebrating creativity.

David Kelley (not the creator of Doogie Howser), founder of IDEO and the d.school at Stanford University, writes in his book Creative Confidence, “[a] creative mindset can be a powerful force for looking beyond the status quo. People who use the creative techniques we outline are better able to apply their imagination to painting a picture of the future (p.18)”.

When is the last time you thought about this question from George Couros’ The Innovator’s Mindset (p.39), “would I want to be a learner in my own classroom?”

David Kelley and IDEO have a lot of resources to help us think through the challenge of (re)designing a classroom that brings joy and confidence to both the teachers and the students.

We’re building a team!

Do you own a Green Hat?

If yes (your answers to the questions throughout this post were in the affirmative), then GREAT we’d like you to join us.

If you don’t own a Green Hat, would you like to? We’d like you to join us also!

Kevin (Murphy) and myself will be visiting your school soon to talk about a collaboration with the MCIU and FluxSpace (a makerspace “sandbox”). We’re hoping to include some interested teachers in exploring the creation of lessons embing computer science, makerspace, design thinking and/or project based learning experiences in core content teaching and learning. Our work will begin with grades K-4, but we will be expanding once we get things off the ground.

This is the first in a series of blog posts related to innovative teaching and learning , so stay tuned.