Dillin, a seventh grade student at Newark Street School (NSS), had this to say about starting school with 30 minutes of daily movement:
“So my perspective is, I really like it. It gets you healthy. Your heart beats, and then you get ready for the day you have after you’re done doing it. Like you get to take all your energy out.”
Asked what would happen if he didn’t get his energy out, Dillin replies, “Oh, it’d be different. I’d be annoying. … With Power Hour, my brain is ready to learn – it, like, observes more.”
This 30 minutes of daily movement is called Power Hour (along with 15 minutes of breakfast and a 15 minute morning meeting). The school started it this year along with Exploratory Fridays, which devotes a half day each week to activities such as hiking, canoeing, or skiing.
These programs are having a positive impact already. Students seem to love it, especially students like Dillin who need to “get their energy out” or others who aren’t able to regularly access these activities because of cost or other barriers. The school has seen benefits in terms of student engagement, academic achievement, and behavior. Let’s take a look at how it works and why it is readily replicable.
Power Hour
The structure for Power Hour is simple: every day starts with 20-30 minutes of a movement-based activity. For K-2 students, it is similar to a recess. For students in grades 3-8, they get to choose among a number of activities. During warmer seasons, the choices could include biking, walking, running, or playground games. During the winter, there’s snow shoeing, cross country skiing, calisthenics, and sports in the gym.
Shared by Tim Mulligan, principal, and Ty Mulligan, grade 8 student, in a presentation at the 2023 Middle Grades Conference.
After exercising, students have breakfast and then circle up for morning meetings to get ready for the rest of the school day. In several interviews with students and adults, there was widespread agreement that Power Hour carries benefits throughout the school day in terms of focus and social connection. More on that later.
Exploratory Fridays
Once a week, students spend half of their school day engaging in experiential activities that often have a recreational or creative emphasis.
In some cases Exploratory Fridays are extensions of Power Hour. For example, students might bike each day around the school, and then head to the Kingdom Trail network on Fridays. I accompanied one of these trips and students conveyed that the daily biking was fun but that the Friday trips were the place where they got to see their skill and stamina gains pay off.
Shared by Tim Mulligan, principal, and Ty Mulligan, grade 8 student, in a presentation at the 2023 Middle Grades Conference.
In many cases, Exploratory Fridays involve community partners to provide more supervision and structure. Many of the activities plug students into established offerings that in past years may have been accessed more as one shot field trips.
Tatum, an 8th grade student, noted that while Power Hour is all about exercise, Exploratory Fridays was better described as “personalized learning.” It is less about getting the heart rate up as it is about leveling up.
Why does it work
There is solid scientific evidence behind the theory that daily movement prepares the brain for learning. Tim Mulligan, principal of NSS, had encountered this evidence in the book Spark, written by Dr. John J. Ratey. In a recent presentation at the Middle Grades Conference, Tim summarized Ratey’s evidence for the benefits of daily movement:
Opens neurological pathways that prepare the brain for learning
Cardiovascular activities actually create new neuro-pathways. The best way to take advantage of this is to engage in academics following sustained movement!
Provides therapeutic effects for everyone!
Especially for students with ADHD, anxiety, depression and other mental, emotional, and social health conditions.
Increases cardio-respiratory fitness
Develops a healthy habit that reduces risks of many chronic diseases.
Supports a healthy body composition
Promotes greater sense of self-worth and esteem
Creates positive social interactions and builds a stronger community
Tim has not been shy about sharing the research rationale for daily movement with teachers, students and community members. Mary Jane, a 7th grade student, had this response to a hypothetical skeptic that worried about a loss of “academic” time:
“Actually, studies show that biking or walking, or doing anything that exercises your body in the morning helps your brain learn better which will make our grades go up compared to having less movement in our day.”
Quite convincing!
As for Exploratory Fridays, the focus on doing is exactly what many students need, especially young adolescents. According to the Association for Experiential Education,
“Experiential education is a teaching philosophy that informs many methodologies in which educators purposefully engage with learners in direct experience and focused reflection in order to increase knowledge, develop skills, clarify values, and develop people’s capacity to contribute to their communities.”
The approaches used in Exploratory Fridays, such as outdoor learning and place-based education, are squarely in the experiential learning umbrella. Middle grades students at NSS reflect weekly in their personalized portfolios to make connections to their learning and lives.
Shared by Tim Mulligan, principal, and Ty Mulligan, grade 8 student, in a presentation at the 2023 Middle Grades Conference.
Early evidence of impact
So far, these programs appear to be living up to the promise of the research that is behind them. The principal cites several indicators heading in the right direction:
Attendance has improved
Test scores are up
Bullying incidents and misbehavior is down
There is a positive vibe about the programs. In interviews, students shared things like:
“I’ve noticed that when you are active, your brain works better” (Andrew, grade 6)
“I really enjoy it, and I do feel a difference in wanting to be at school earlier, and being more motivated to get up in the morning, get dressed, eat breakfast, and pack my bag” (Tatum, grade 8)
Yeah, it puts me in a better mood, because it’s waking me up. And I just like that moving in in the morning before I do school.: (Graham, grade 7)
“I would encourage other schools to do it, because it’s just so much fun to not just be in a classroom and just to be outside and doing all of these things.: (Ava, grade7)
These positive comments align with the survey feedback that NSS solicits from students and parents every few months. The vast majority of responses show that these programs are perceived as enjoyable and that students feel well supported. For those few who respond otherwise, the principal follows up to improve things for those students.
How do they do it
Tim Mulligan, principal at NSS, has worked with local community members to defray the costs of these programs. Through monetary and other types of donations (like letting students ride bikes on their land, or parent volunteerism), the cost of these programs to the school budget is kept to $15,000 per year.
Shared by Tim Mulligan, principal, and Ty Mulligan, grade 8 student, in a presentation at the 2023 Middle Grades Conference.
Morgan Moore, the Director of Experiential Learning for the district, supports Tim with some logistics and in making connections to community organizations. The district uses grant funds and deploys staff from their after school programs to support these types of experiences in other schools. Morgan brings in students from the Outdoor Education program at Northern Vermont University as well. At Concord School, Applied Academics teachers are the backbone of Exploratory Fridays.
Morgan notes: “Every school is different for how they can make this work. But it’s so important to make these opportunities available during the school day. Every student deserves to be exposed to these skills, the land, these local organizations, and of course Transferable Skills like teamwork.”
Making these opportunities a priority is perhaps the most important element in making them widespread and equitably available. Tim points to the challenges facing schools as the ultimate justification for innovation:
“How are we meeting the needs of all of our kids? ADHD, mental health, depression, the trauma so many have experienced. And all of us adults going through the same things? We have to try something different than what we’ve done in the past.”
So every school is different, and it is time to try something different. Getting students moving and exploring is a great place to start, however you do it.
How will you get students moving and exploring at your school?
This is a the first in a series of blogs with attention to education priorities in the not-so post pandemic world.
The Crisis
I have been immersed in middle school education for decades. I have always been grateful to belong to such an amazing community of educators who share the same magnificent obsession. Because this community is passionate about the welfare and education of our young adolescents. And it’s committed to building a kinder and more just world. I am full of gratitude and admiration for my fellow educators who have managed to keep going, caring and persevering during this very challenging time. This has been tough. It still is.
To say that things are in good shape would be dishonest. Are any of us feeling like we are solid? Public education is facing a crisis unlike any I have seen in decades. This fall, when most schools resumed face to face, many educators began to realize that we and our students were in a rough place. I think we need to try to unpack what has happened and what most needs our attention as we move ahead.
Unpacking the pandemic’s impact
The pandemic has pressed our faces to the glass. We now see how fragile we were before COVID arrived. Over the past decades student needs have been mounting exponentially. Data on the mental health of our nation’s young adolescents has shown us that children are struggling in significant ways. Many teachers have shared with me their concerns about epidemic levels of self-centeredness accelerating in students. Likewise, many teachers and principals have been concerned about declining student engagement and investment in school learning. I hear from many that the true joys of teaching feel like a thing of the past. Teachers are buried under the mandates and prescriptive guidelines that were created to improve student engagement. Last, not least, the inequities in every system of our society have been on full display during this pandemic. Our America is not equally beautiful for everyone. Before COVID arrived, these were some of our unresolved challenges now magnified tenfold.
Educators by nature persevere. We don’t give up. But we all stand on shaky ground. Can we use the pandemic to help us see more clearly what we most need to honor in this not so post-pandemic world? As Arundhati Roy (2020) wrote:
Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smokey skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.
Adjusting the Lens
Recall that at the start of the pandemic, songs were written and sung, talks delivered, and articles poured forth. Art was created, and it all attempted to lift us up and help us manage the sadness, the loss, and the fear. Many of the efforts tried to cheer us up and give us hope. Some inspired us to think differently about how to live well. For a time, we lived life more slowly. Traffic came to a halt, animals came out of hiding, and we tried not to eat too much or snap at those we loved who we discovered were more challenging than we’d ever remembered. We felt united by our humanity. Everyone was searching for answers about the pandemic and the meaning of life. Beauty, nature, love, family and friends suddenly became more precious.
In schools, after some time in this quieter place, we were catapulted into craziness. Virtual teaching, hybrid teaching, masks, and we had to hold on as we rode the COVID protocol roller coaster. Exhaustion was commonplace, and burnout rampant. One gifted and always cheerful teacher I have admired could no longer smile at the start of year two. Another dedicated teacher told me she was thinking of quitting, but instead decided she just had to stop caring. It was all too much.
Today, as we find ourselves back in schools and the most dire COVID news lessening, can we begin to sort it all out? Can we rethink our priorities? Here is what I think matters most in our (almost) Post-Pandemic World.
Lesson One: Slow Down
One clear message from the early months of the pandemic was the realization that doing less and slowing down can bring us back in touch with many things that seem to matter a great deal. We were forced in our personal lives to be still as there was less doing and going —less going out to eat, less traffic, less driving kids to practice, less shopping in stores. People had more time: with those we love, time to play, time to really cook good food, time to listen well, time to care, time to revisit new and old hobbies, and time to think. Humans did as Thich Nhat Hanh once advised: “….unplug from the speed and complexity and noise of everyday life and … return to being in peace.” ( TNH)
That taste of slow was a good thing. Many of us noted an engendered calm. We noticed that less can be more, and that slow can be better: more productive, happier, and saner. Sure, at first we might have binge watched TV series, but soon most of us got busy and productive. Slow didn’t mean unproductive, but it meant we didn’t live at a crazed pace. How might we learn from that that calmer time and bring more slowness into our work?
Perhaps we finally reconsider our schedules and abandon the 45-minute period day, where we whiz students through 7 different subjects with 7 different teachers and move towards longer, more flexible blocks of learning time.
Maybe we have a daily Advisory time that is more responsive and less scripted, where students can talk more and we talk less.
Could be we have snack breaks in and outside.
Perhaps it means we make time for recess every day.
Maybe we don’t pursue multiple initiatives all at once.
Maybe it calls for us to have faculty meetings where teachers can really think and talk about what’s working and what’s not.
Could be we try to add a little mindfulness into our fast-paced school days.
Finally, perhaps we should try to declutter our curriculum – teaching less, not more.
I know principals and teachers would agree that school life would be significantly more satisfying for everyone if we could slow things down. Some teachers have decided they can no longer teach and are considering leaving the profession. Many are barely holding on trying to get through the days and recover what they once felt about this important work. We have a crisis in our schools that calls for bold thinking. As Roy said, we have a gateway.
Is there one way you might slow things down in your school? If you are a leader, can you find ways to shrink rather than expand the to-do lists for your schools and teachers? If you are a teacher, can you find steady ways to check the emotional pulse of your classroom? I urge you identify the places within our system and classrooms where we can slow down and focus on what matters.
This is the first education lesson from the pandemic.
What, when, and how are we asking them to show us?
In recent conversations with my colleagues, we’ve been considering shifts in assessment required of us in proficiency-based education. Now, let’s explore how to put those shifts into practice.
When we consider those shifts, a theme emerges. We begin to see students involved in the assessment process in meaningful ways. Leading me to wonder: how do both students *and* teachers know a concept or skill is learned or mastered?
The power of documentation
Let’s explore one of these shifts. How might teachers create conditions for the ongoing gathering of evidence of learning in a digital portfolio or personalized learning plan?
Angela Stockman, educator and professional development provider, asks, “ How do we truly know what our students know? Dissatisfied by the potential for quantitative data alone to address that question, many of the teachers that I support have begun embracing documentation for learning.”
Students and teachers have the opportunity to study why and how learning happens rather than merely evaluating the product of it.
It’s easier to weave feedback loops through the experience, increasing the likelihood that learners will reap the greatest rewards from the assessment process.
Capturing a wider vie]ew of learning invitees teachers and students to discover the unexpected and form hunches and theories that testing cannot inspire.
Note the active role students play here.
What might documentation look like in practice?
Special Education Functional Life Skills Teacher Kelli Ohms shares How I Use Seesaw to Create a Learning Journal in my Classroom. Documentation using Seesaw increased motivation. “Students can independently see their own progress. Now that they have several months of posts in Seesaw, they can look back and see how they are improving; they say, “look how I did today? It’s better!”.”
Ohms built student documentation of learning into classroom routines. She reports “At first, my biggest challenge was teaching my students to add items independently, but now they enjoy adding new items to their journals, and even request to post unprompted!”
Documentation as learning
Janet Hale argues the act of documenting learning is indeed a mechanism for learning. Documentation as learning focuses on the process of learning using metacognitive thinking. “Documenting learning is a shift from the traditional documentation of learning, which focuses on the end product, to documentation for learning and documentation as learning (Making Thinking Visible by Documenting Learning).
Shifting to documentation for learning
Over in her 5th grade class, Melissa Anders Thompson values documentation as a means for students to take more ownership. Because of this, when her school adopted a “bring your own device” policy, she added new weekly classroom jobs. You guessed it. One is the Documenter.
“This summer I read, Who Owns the Learning by Alan November. In his book, he talks about the Digital Learning Farm, and how by giving student’s jobs within the classroom that are integral to the learning, they will take more ownership of their learning and become meaningful contributors to the class culture. The Documenter captures the learning happening in the room and in the school. They take pictures and videos of important learning. This is great practice for when we launch our Student Blogs.”
Documenting outside-of-school learning with digital badges and micro-credentials
Informal learning opportunities can be rich interest-driven experiences for students. Yet, that learning often goes undocumented outside of the context in which the learning occurs. In Digital badges in afterschool learning: Documenting the perspectives and experiences of students and educators authors Davis & Singh argue digital badges can increase the visibility of learning pathways in informal and out-of-school learning. This gives learners a sense of control and ownership. “As micro-credentials documenting specific skills and achievements, badges are well positioned to highlight the intermediate phases through which individuals pass as they deepen their expertise in a domain. By documenting where learners have been, badges can signal where they should go next.”
Vermont middle level educator Don Taylor uses micro-credentials to help students document progress through self-paced learning. When collaborative committee work ends, students can opt to work toward their Climate Change badge. Students earn certificates for completing levels. These certificates of progress get displayed on their PLP portfolios.
Portfolios fall short without documentation of progress
As educator Allison Zmuda says, “The simple act of having digital portfolios for your students doesn’t necessarily mean they are working. The learners need to own them and see benefits for #documenting4learning.”
Oh, and we’ll talk about the “soul-sucking force of reasonableness.”
On to the conversation!
Jeanie: I’m Jeanie Phillips and welcome to #vted Reads. We’re here to talk books for educators, by educators, and with educators. Today. I’m with Rachel Mark, and we’ll be talking about The Power of Moments by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. Thanks for joining me, Rachel. Tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do.
Rachel: I’m Rachel Mark. I live in the southern part of Vermont, and I am in my fourth year of working as a professional development coordinator for the Tarrant Institute for Innovative Education. Prior to that, I was a middle school teacher for 16 years in Manchester at Manchester Elementary Middle School, and I’m also a mom. I’ve got three kids, an 8-year old, a 12-year old and a 15-year old, and we all live in sometimes happiness with our dog and my husband in southern Vermont.
Jeanie: Excellent. Thanks for joining me.
I know you and I are very excited about this book, The Power of Moments by the Heath Brothers.
Jeanie: Let’s just talk a little bit about what it’s about. The Heath brothers talk about defining moments and they described them as meaningful experiences that stand out in memory. Why do you think they took the time to write about them?
Rachel: That’s a great question. I think one of the things thats so lovely about this book is that it’s psychology, but it’s also culture and sociology, and I love that the Heath brothers think about these parts of our behavior and our lives that are kind of overlooked and tried to look at them really carefully and examine what’s unique about them. This interested me when it first came out, because I have noticed some of the same sort of observations that they have about why or something is so special.
Why are some moments more impactful and meaningful than others?
So, part of me was darn it! They beat me to writing this book, but they’re far more accomplished writers, and I’m glad that they beat me to it.
Jeanie: Yeah. So, let’s give some examples. I’m going to give a non-education example of a defining moment that just delighted me early in this book, in the introduction. So, I’m going to turn to page 10. This defining moment takes place at a hotel. Actually, it’s called Magic Castle and it’s in Los Angeles, outside of Disneyland. So, here’s the description.
Let’s start with the cherry-red phone mounted to a wall near the pool. You pick it up and someone answers, “Hello, Popsicle hotline.” You place an order, and minutes later, a staffer wearing white gloves delivers your cherry, orange, or grape popsicle to you at poolside. On a silver tray. For free.
I love this idea that if I went to a hotel and there was a cherry red phone, and I got to pick it up in order my popsicle, and it came out like almost livery service. I would be so delighted and I would never forget that.
Rachel: It is unforgettable. At the same time, there was a piece of this that troubled me about this leading the book, because it does develop this idea about moments and memory, but it was also such a kind of trivial example, silly example that I wanted more from the book which comes.
Jeanie: So, this book is organized in such a way that it has two goals. One is to examine defining moments, and what makes them memorable, or meaningful, what helps them stick with us. Then the second goal is to help us create more defining moments so that we can improve our lives and the lives of other people around us. So, it’s not an education book, right? It’s a popular press book.
We can look at it through the lens of what makes a moment a defining moment, and then how can we create more defining moments in education.
Rachel: Right. When you said that it prompted me to look at the book and notice that it’s really suggested as a business and economics book. I would also call it a psychology book and sociology because I think so much at play psychologically and sociologically. But as I read this, I read this as both an educator and the mother of children. I have no frame as a business leader, but I could see so many applications of this book to education.
Jeanie: Yeah, I could too. My son has now left my nest, so I read it as an educator and also as somebody who just wants to have more memorable moments in her own life, as a human.
1. Elevation: building “peaks”
Jeanie: So, let’s look at what makes up a defining moment, and the first thing the Heath brothers go into is elevation. What do they mean by elevation?
Rachel: A few things stick out to me about their definition of elevation. They describe elevation as two things: building peaks and breaking the script.
To me, the piece about building peaks was resonant.
I do think that we have moments that stand out more than others in our lives, and that those moments must do something to us that’s transformative. They either provide for us a feeling in our hearts, or some kind of fizziness in our brain chemistry, but I do know as I’ve lived my life that something happens to me when I think about certain parts of my life. I’d be concerned if that didn’t happen for other people.
So, the piece about building peaks to me was really important. That’s probably why I really latched onto that senior signing day. One of the other stories that is important to me from the book is the story that comes from Hillsdale High, where teachers recognized that there were not enough kind of peaks for students in their high school experience. A couple of really creative teachers developed an experience called the trial of human nature.
It’s essentially a kind of interdisciplinary and experiential learning experience that I believe was introduced for juniors at this particular high school. It’s a public school in California. It became so popular that I think other teachers in this school started to feel perhaps a little let down, and so some other teachers develop then something called a senior exhibition.
This person who is now the principal of this school named Jeff Gilbert talks on page 51 in a way about school that made sense to me.
School needs to be so much more like sports.
“School needs to be much more like sports,” he added. “In sports, there’s a game, and it’s in front of an audience. We run school like it is nonstop practice. You never get a game. Nobody would go out for the basketball team if you never had a game. What is the game for the students?”
That was something that I felt in my own experience as a teacher. I felt like even for myself, for my own, I don’t want to say sanity, but I needed things to look forward to, and moments to build up to, and moments of performance that we’re both engaging and fulfilling for the student, and as a teacher, I found them fulfilling too.
Jeanie: I just want to throw in there that this really resonated for me as a student. What I don’t remember is ninth grade history, because it was textbook, worksheets, and a teacher with a really droning voice, and it was the opposite of peaks. It was the flattest course ever, which made me think I was a terrible history student. But then I had Mr. Richardson and I had him for Russian history which I loved, and I had him for AP world history.
My most memorable high school experience or performance comes from his class where we had a debate.
We were put on teams, and I was on team Germany, and we had to debate who started the Second World War. Germany’s a tough person to be in that position, but I took that challenge. We had a panel of experts, and we got points, and I don’t want to brag or anything but I kind of won. The Germany kind of won that year, and I still think of that as so memorable, because it was a peak. We worked really hard towards it. We knew that there were these expert historians coming in, and I still remember it. I still know more about the start of World War II than I do about any other point in history.
Rachel: That’s a great example of building peaks in the experience of school. I tried, but I could not think of many moments like that in my own experience in school, which may be why I’m so motivated to cultivate those moments for students now. I thought a lot about how some of the work that you and I do with schools that involves using strategies and approaches around project-based learning, complements this idea of building peaks.
The nature of project-based learning is that there’s some authenticity to the work, and hopefully some public performance and public product.
I have always felt like that’s a really important element of project-based learning. It helped me to think about those aspects of PBL within the context of this book and how it is about building a powerful moment.
Jeanie: Exhibitions are often our powerful moments.
This morning I was at Leland and Gray with an engineer and somebody who worked in an architect firm, and we were giving feedback to seventh and eighth-grade students on their designs for projectile launchers for battle physics.
This was one sort of peak moment on the way to a larger peak, which is when they compete with students from Dorset School and Green Mountain Middle and High School. Their launchers go head to head to see you can hit the targets.
So, we have many other examples of schools doing really fabulous exhibitions where they build these peaks for students to show off. Do you have others you want to share?
Rachel: I don’t have a specific one I want to share, but what you’re talking about makes me wonder what are the sort of conditions that are at play when we’re building those peaks. It makes me think about a few things. As you and I have worked with some schools in the last year or two, I do think that there is an element of fun with this event and that the peak event.
We may be in danger of underestimating the importance of fun.
Because I think that though we don’t want to put that at the forefront of our educational experiences and our assessments, that is probably what makes some of these things so memorable.
Jeanie: Right, and the Heath brothers talk about two different aspects of peaks.
One is that they have sensory appeal that makes me think about what you’re saying with fun. They appeal to our senses. The other is that they raise the stakes.
Rachel: Right. That was the piece that I was just thinking about with your example of the battle physics and students consulting with experts in the field is that there’s accountability and an authenticity to that experience. And so it does, they step up their game, because they raise the stakes.
So, I definitely think there’s something I almost wonder if we could rewrite the description about exhibitions, and the meaning and purpose for them to acknowledge some of the ingredients from this book about that being a peak moment with sensory experience and raising the stakes. We have, you know, reminds me of the example that came out of the school we both work with at MEMS. Students presented to the select board about their findings for some research.
In your videos and your footage from that, I can remember them being dressed up and poised. And students talking about how nervous they were, and I thought about that and thought they are going to remember that.
Jeanie: It reminds me that so many of the things that are memorable or important to our students’ lives are extra-curriculars. You mentioned sports earlier. I think in a lot of communities is drama, the school play is a huge deal and the kids who do it year after year. Or musical performance, right.
You have to perform. You have an audience. The stakes are high.
You’re all in. And kids really passionately commit to that, and to all the learning. Whether it’s learning lines or choreography or learning whole musical pieces, right? There’s a lot of learning that they have to do in order to show up on performance day.
Rachel: It’s reminding me about a blog post that I wrote about exhibitions, where I wrote about my own experience about exhibitions. It wasn’t until I participated in an exhibition that I had some new insights into what is happening when we ask students to publicly exhibit work.
Great piece that reinforces the value of exhibition! When students share their work, it deepens the learning – Innovation: Education https://t.co/iI8nnIdq8t via @innovativeEd
I learned two things. When I had to do a public exhibition at the deeper learning conference at High Tech High in California. I can remember being nervous and worried and I felt a little insecure because I was standing there sort of waiting for people to come up to me.
The emotional responses that I was having are doing something to solidify that experience in my brain.
Then the second thing, I realized was when I was explaining that work multiple times to different people, I got better at describing my learning. I actually was learning as I was talking. So, what I started out describing was something that I made with a group of people some of whom were complete strangers in about 40 minutes.
At the beginning of my presentation and exhibition sharing, I was a little embarrassed about the quality of our work and pretty unclear about how we got to this particular visual. By the end of that hour, I actually made sense of it in my own head and got a lot more clear about the different steps we went through in the process of this activity. So, it was interesting for me as an adult to go through that, and we think that’s all practice up for that event, but it was actually during that event that I had some pretty significant learning too.
Performance *is* learning
Jeanie: I really love that. It reminds me of how we often think of performance of learning, but performance is often learning, right? You work with Flood Brook, and their middle school students presenting their passion projects. It makes me think how many of those kids maybe don’t get it the first time they do passion projects. They may not do it very well. They might not spend their time wisely. Some of them absolutely do, but then through that performance, standing there for an hour and a half explaining their project to so many different people, they might have new learning, new insights that might lead to new skills and habits.
Rachel: Yeah. I definitely agree with you. That’s another example of creating a moment that has that memory and impact for kids. It does consider building a peak and raising the stakes, because there’s people there. When I’ve talked to students there they say,
“Yeah, this made me work harder, because I knew there were people looking at people watching.”
Jeanie: So there’s a quote from this section that I just think is so apt for schools. I know even in the book it described schools, with our schedules, our regular routines and schedules as rather flat, and the quote I love is:
“Beware the soul-sucking force of reasonableness.”
It’s just a reminder that what’s reasonable it does not always lead to the most impactful or memorable learning, right? Sometimes we have to be unreasonable and go out of our way to create peak moments. Not all the time, not every day, but sometimes we have to do the extra work, or do the unreasonable thing to invite engineers and architects into our schools to give kids feedback, or to take our kids out into the world to have a peak experience.
Rachel: Right. I’m finding this part on page 53 where the author says, most of our school experience and life experiences are:
“Mostly forgettable and occasionally remarkable…” The “occasionally remarkable” moments shouldn’t be left to chance! They should be planned for, invested in. They are peaks that should be built. And if we fail to do that, look at what we’re left with: mostly forgettable.
So, that’s inspiring to me to think that we should plan for peaks.
Jeanie: Yeah. When we work with teachers on project-based learning, we ask them to think about those peaks early on. How well kids exhibit? Who will the audience be beyond you? How will we make this meaningful work for them to do, real relevant meaningful work for them to do?
Rachel: When you launch in project-based learning, you’re even building a peak to build investment and generate excitement.
Jeanie: Or you could be utilizing the second thing they talk about in The Power of Moments, which is insight. So a launch could be a peak. It could also be a moment of insight, and I really love this section even though I think it’s trickier. It’s harder for us to imagine where the Heath brothers talk about how when you as a human trip over truth they call it, that it packs an emotional wallop. They give these examples like these moments of discovery, these Aha moments. Do you remember any particular moments from the book?
The power of insight
Rachel: This was a hard section for me.
Jeanie: One example that I remember is that they bring together all of these professors with their syllabus, and they realize that by looking at their syllabi together, by examining them together, they realize how uninteresting and boring they are. Like they have this moment of insight where they’re like, “Oh, right, this appeals to no one,” so, then they go back and revise. Instead of saying your syllabus stinks, they give them this opportunity to discover it on their own.
Tripping over truth
They talk about the one page, 105. They say there’s a three-part recipe for tripping over the truth: one is that you have this clear insight, it’s compressed in time, and the audience discovers it by itself. So, when I think about that, it reminded me of simulations.
I think a carefully crafted simulation can be that kind of opportunity.
Rachel: As you were talking, I was thinking about those three ingredients, the three-part recipe. It made me think that perhaps when we work with adults, when we work with a group of educators or a group of leaders, and we facilitate a protocol, which you’re famous for, we are conducting one of those three part recipes to trip over the truth.
"To trip is to catch one's foot on something & stumble. To trip over truth is to catch one's brain on something & struggle." #PowerofMoments
I’m sure it doesn’t happen in every protocol, but in the best ones we are compressing, it’s compressed in time, and it’s revealed through the process that there are a few really critical insights about some experience or some conflict or some system.
Jeanie: One of my favorite protocols to do whenever I’m working with adults, but also with kids. I’ve done this with high school kids and with middle school kids around equity and the way we treat people differently and status. Its called Liar’s Poker. It asks you to get a card that you can’t see and put it on your head two to ace.
The higher your card, if you’re an ace or king or queen, the higher your status. So, you pretend you’re at a party and you’re trying to talk to the highest status people. Really quickly you end up with clumps. So, we do that for about 15 minutes.
Then I ask people to put themselves in order, still not looking at their card, and figure out where do you think you are. Almost always people get in pretty close order from two up to ace. Then we have a discussion. How did it feel to be a two? How did it feel to be an ace? And how did it feel to be an eight? What do you think happened there? How does this relate to what you see happening in school or with students? It really fosters a really rich discussion that allows people to trip over the truth of how inequity shows up in their setting.
Rachel: That’s a simulation, right?
I mean, you’re simulating some sort of social strata and social experience that really happens.
Jeanie: Like the brown eyes and blue eyes experiment, where a teacher sort of said that blue eyes kids were smarter and more capable than brown eyes kids. Over the course of several days, this sort of eye racism, this eye bias played out in the classroom. It’s really interesting film to watch. I think it’s from the seventies, you can still find it on YouTube.
Stretching for insight
Jeanie: The other thing in the insight chapter that I think is more relevant, especially as we engage in proficiency based education is this idea of stretching for insight. On page 122 and 123, the Heath brothers cite a study on how students respond to feedback. I found that really interesting because so often we think we know the research shows that if a kid just gets a grade, they don’t even read the comments.
High standards + assurance
Rachel: Yeah. I’m so glad you brought up this part, and so I just turned to page 122 and 123, where the Heath brothers describe the work of a psychologist and a study that they conducted in a, I’m going to call it a middle school, they call it a suburban junior high school. In this particular paper by David Scott Yeager, he says there’s a two-part formula for… sorry, I don’t know what to call this. Anyway, David Yeager identifies a two-part formula in his research and he says “It’s high standards plus assurance.” I think that’s really interesting because I definitely hear schools and teachers talk about having high standards and how important high standards are. I have yet to hear the word assurance.
Made use of lessons learned from The Power Of Moments tonight: – High standard of expectation from players – Gave assurance – I know you can do it! – gave clear directions on how too succeed – gave them support; reminded, encouraged, praised and/ or breakdown conversations. pic.twitter.com/Q5z9Eoph8p
Jeanie: This reminds me so much of my podcast with Bill Rich, talking about the culture code and sending this message of, “We have high standards here. You’re a member of this community. I believe you can meet those standards.” Essentially that assurance is like, we’ve got high standards here and I’m certain that you can put in the work to meet them.
Rachel: Yeah, and that’s what this psychologist found in his research. The teachers really gave deliberately different feedback in this test group. Rhe comments that the teacher gave to the test group were that high standards and assurance. One particular comment says, “I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know you can reach them.” So, that was what the researcher called wise criticism, and almost 80 percent of the wise criticism students revise their papers. In editing their papers they made more than twice as many corrections as the other students.
So, for the other students that received a generic note in the teacher’s handwriting, the note said, “I’m have given you these comments so that you’ll have feedback on your paper,” which is hilarious. In that case, about 40 percent of the students chose to revise their papers. So, the finding is, that second note with the assurance is powerful, because it really changes the behavior of the students.
Jeanie: We know that in order for students to take feedback and use it well, it has to be clear, it has to be actionable, it has to be timely. They need to be able to use it right away, and that’s the whole crux of proficiency based education is that you get the feedback you need to have to gain that insight, to do the work you need to grow.
Feedback that matters
It reminds me of a story from something I was reading recently about proficiency based education, which is a student goes to their teacher and says, “You know, all year you’ve been writing this word on my essays and I just don’t know what you want me to do.” The teacher says, “Well, what?” He says, “Vaguu”, the word was vague of course.
It has to be meaningful to the students, it can’t just be meaningful to us. The feedback isn’t for us. It isn’t like, we’ve done our job, we wrote on the paper the feedback is for the student, and how do we make it actionable, unintelligible to them.
Rachel: As we’re talking about this, the section is making more sense. Like, I don’t know why. Some part of me thinks that I got tired at this point in the book as I was reading, which does make me remember that as I read this book, I had wished it was shorter, and I felt like it could have been accomplished in fewer pages. So, this second part about insight was where I got tired in the book. Can we talk about the next section?
Jeanie: We certainly can.
Not all moments have all of these elements.
Tripping over insight is a particularly difficult thing to accomplish in schools. We can’t all be Mrs. Frizzle in the Magic School bus. We don’t have those powers and that can feel like what it is, is like you have to orchestrate at that level. But a good field trip can help kids trip over insight.
I think about a project that I’m working on at MEMS. We are just starting to plan, which is that we hope kids will be able to discover germs. Not just hear that when you don’t wash your hands that you end up with germs on your hands and you could get sick. But to actually swab for germs and do the tests of what’s it take. How many germs does hand sanitizer get rid of, versus washing your hands with just water, versus washing your hands with soap and singing the happy birthday song? So, that’s the kind of tripping over truth that we’re hoping that they’ll do there.
Let’s move on to pride.
@RWScholars Crossett Brook students showcased their Cougar Co-Op #EdCorp at the LEAP Energy Fair. Authentic learning & pride…and recognition from VT Governor Phil Scott and VT Senator Bernie Sanders! #vted#SDGspic.twitter.com/YwtXCSMCmv
Rachel: This part was really meaningful to me. There were a couple of particular pieces.
Jeanie: Could you, before you begin giving particular pieces, just describe what, when we say pride, what they mean?
Rachel: Gosh, I hardly remember, but I think we all know what pride is. For me, it was their way of describing that within a moment of elevation, there’s a piece that made you feel good. So, it was not just important, but it gave you that validation.
Jeanie: On page 139, they say,
How do you make moments of pride? The recipe seems clear. You work hard, you put in the time, and as a result, you get more talented and accomplish more and those achievements, spark pride.
Rachel: You work hard. You put in the time and as a result you get more talented and accomplish more in those achievements, spark pride.
Jeanie: Simple as that.
Rachel: That’s doesn’t sound simple.
Jeanie: No, it doesn’t. They start though by not talking about moments of pride because on page 142, they talk about a moment of, what’s the opposite of pride, of embarrassment that I’ve actually experienced. They talk about the kid who is told like, just don’t sing, your voice doesn’t work. I remember being in fourth grade and getting asked to leave chorus. Suddenly I didn’t belong. I don’t think I sang again until I had an infant.
Rachel: I’m sorry, Jeanie.
Jeanie: I know it still pains me, but so they start with the opposite of pride. Those moments of exclusion where you’re like sort of not told the opposite, not that you can get better at something. Not like, here’s how we can help you… I mean, because let’s just be honest, I don’t have a fabulous singing voice. But the way that shuts you down for new learning.
Recognition
Rachel: They turned that kind of switch from that exclusionary, kind of punishing selection to recognition and appreciation. So, this part was fairly, in terms of the context of the book, business oriented. It talks about recognizing employees, and perhaps that there are recognition programs within certain businesses and systems and that’s not typical in our education systems.
Jeanie: However, when I think about the MEMS caring day celebration and the opportunity students had to recognize and celebrate the empathy and kindness of members of our community, it felt exactly like, how do we recognize others?
Rachel: Exactly.
This piece made me remember how important recognition is for teachers.
I was thinking about how I feel about that it’s hard as a teacher to maintain a positive outlook all the time. It’s a hard profession and certainly, you face a lot of challenges and keeping your morale high requires a resiliency that is hard to find.
I could really think so much about how much personal recognition and personal, what I started to think of as gratitude, made a difference for me. They talked in somewhere about this, about that there is a difference in sort of recognition in a program. I want to find this part. Okay. So, there’s going to be some turning pages.
So, they begin to talk in the book about, how we can recognize people’s contributions on page 147. It says, “Recognition experts recommend…,” I’m going to stop saying that. On page 147, the authors say,
In our own research, when we asked people about the defining moments in their careers, we were struck by how often they cited simple, personal events.
Here are some examples of people who are just describing some really simple praise, I would say, by a boss or a supervisor. So, what the authors of this book notice is that in these cases their recognition is spontaneous. It’s not part of your annual review, and it’s targeted at particular behaviors. What this then reflects on is a paper by some people that talks about how effective recognition makes the employees feel noticed for what they’ve done.
I really thought a lot about that noticing, and to me, that is such an important part of behavior and motivation.
I think about that in terms of education from both an employee within the school level and a student level in the classroom. And I remembered that I have kept some of my recognition over the year. I’ve never won any big awards or anything like that. I have a file in my bookshelf that’s a few inches thick that is basically everything I kept from my 16 years teaching. It’s pretty astounding to me that it could fit in one small shelf.
In there is a lot of forms. I went back through it this morning and remembered that I have kept written thank you notes from people and handwritten notes. As I went back through them today, I remembered why I kept them. Those people said things like, thank you for… This person said, I want to take a moment to thank you for being a wonderful addition to our staff. I admire how you jump in, take risks, and have experienced success.
Every day feels like a good day to say it but I'm feeling it today especially: Thank you #vted. Thank you students, educators, support staff, administrators, school safety officers, volunteers, and everyone else. You all are amazing.
Jeanie: I also have a file like that, and my favorite things in it are the handwritten notes from students. I used to keep that file right on my desk when I worked as a school librarian, sort of in a place where if I needed a boost during the day, if I needed a moment of pride or recognition, I could remember why I did what I did even in the tough moments.
I think as teachers we know that implicitly, that if we can give kids some positive feedback, they’re also more likely to hear our constructive feedback or feedback for change.
Rachel: I hadn’t thought about that, but that’s definitely interesting. This piece about recognition made me automatically think about a little bit of a buzzword in culture right now about gratitude. Coincidentally, this morning I skimmed an article that came through my inbox about using gratitude with students. About both physical and emotional benefits of asking students in school to express gratitude. I thought this was an interesting idea, because I don’t see that fitting into any curriculum, right? Is that part of science?
And yet we know that there is a two-sided effect to gratitude.
The person who receives the gratitude has that moment of pride or that moment of feeling good, but the even more interesting outcomes are that research shows that you benefit when you give the gratitude. There’s so many good endorphins and serotonin that go on in your body when you express gratitude.
That just made me think about and tunnel into a little mini research about schools that are practicing this. Schools that are asking kids to do gratitude journals.
So, I thought about how could we embed that into some of our routines.
Some of our practices so that we’re just being more intentional about recognition. We could do that at faculty meetings when we recognize or give gratitude to our peers and our colleagues. We could do that at team meetings or advisory when we have students and ask students to express gratitude to their peers or their teachers. And we could do it at all school meetings in a more public setting when we have the whole school together.
We can recognize a student, have asked students to recognize one another, bring a special staff member down, things like that. I thought those are structures that we already have in place that we could possibly maximize to build in that sense of pride.
Jeanie: Yeah.
I think it’s really important to practice gratitude.
I mean, it’s been really important in my life, but I also think not all of our students come to us with families that practice gratitude. If we want them to be grateful and thankful and experience the win-win of gratitude, the win that other people feel good, and the win that I get to feel good, then we need to build opportunities to practice it.
I want to move on though, because I feel like there are other ways that we in schools think about pride. One is building in opportunities to experience milestones. I think that’s especially important when we’re doing project-based learning or something bigger that can feel endless.
We build in these opportunities for checkpoints or milestones where kids feel like they’re having progress.
It reminded me of something that I know we all think about kids being really into which is, video games. One of the appeals of video games is they have these levels and milestones where you get to feel good because you accomplish something. So, how can we replicate that good feeling you get by reaching the next level in education? Any thoughts about that?
Rachel: I can think of a few things. Your video game reference reminds me of some of the work that’s happening in the state, in our organization, and in the country around badging and sort of digital badging.
Thank you @hennesss for this post about how PAML students are using badges them to engage their peers.
Badging has the potential to decentralize the locus of power in credentialing. Awesome to see #vted students at the forefront!https://t.co/C3DjGmgsiF
— Life happens offline (@lifelegeros) May 22, 2018
It doesn’t necessarily have to gamify education, but that it does try to replicate that experience of identifying a set of skills or activities that once you attain that there’s a gold star.
So, it reminds me of that, but it also reminds me something that’s not really school-based, but something that really interests me, which is about cultural rites of passage. The sort of I don’t know how to say this.
I feel like we maybe don’t have enough cultural rites of passage in our society that are non-religious.
Jeanie: It reminds me of like goal-setting, and so right now I’m on Goodreads. I love Goodreads and one of the things I love about is I get to set a goal that’s meaningful for me and keep track of how I’m doing, how many books I’m going to read that year.
A year is a long time for young adolescents, but I used to use Goodreads with seventh graders, and they would keep track of how much they read and set a goal for themselves, and that was really meaningful for them. I’m sorry, maybe it was eighth graders, but it is like that.
How do you track progress towards your own goals?
It also reminded me of before and after photos and thinking about looking through Eli my son’s portfolio with him as he was graduating, moving towards graduating high school, and looking back over his work that we had collected over the years. He was able to laugh and be like,
“Oh, I remember when that was hard.”
There’s something about looking back and sort of noticing like, “Oh, I used to.” I remember him having this long discourse about, “I remember when Algebra was hard and now it’s not hard anymore.”
So, it made me wonder about writing from the beginning of the school year versus writing at the end of the school year or art or anything that we do in school. Really, you can compare an early draft, to work that you do on down the road.
Rachel: Well, my thinking immediately jumps to what would be some of the ideal functions of a PLP, which would be that growth charting. One of the outcomes of doing that, of collecting that work and reflecting on it would be to feel that sense of pride in the end.
Practicing courage
Jeanie: Another thing they talk about in this chapter that really struck me was this idea of practicing courage. They cite DARE and DARE’s failure to prevent kids from using substances. They say one of the reasons is that kids never get the chance to practice saying no to substances. Like there’s all this education, but they never actually practiced. They never go through the script.
That reminded me of one of my former students who did some research on hate speech and found that hate speech leads to hate crimes and she wanted to interrupt hate speech. She created this hate speech photo booth where you could practice what you would say if you heard somebody use a racial slur or say something homophobic.
So, you might write on your speech bubble, “Hey, that’s not okay,” because in the moment when you hear hate speech it can be hard to know what to say. In a way, you were practicing courage by writing your script. Does that makes sense?
So, it made me wonder, how do we give students an opportunity to practice courage to stand up?
It made me think of Anna Nicholson, students going before the select board to advocate for a plastic bag ban, which is something they believed in strongly and they’ve collected petitions. They’ve done all this research about plastic bags and they had to practice courage to stand up to a bunch of adults and say, “We think the town should ban plastic bags.” The town did not play banned plastic bags, but they were really impressed with what the students had to say.
So, how do we help kids practice moral courage, intellectual courage? I don’t have a good answer to that either, but it’s a question that really intrigues me.
Rachel: It interests me too. My fear is that we don’t do enough of it, because of possible controversy. I think that we’re afraid to do things that will make people uncomfortable and kids uncomfortable.
It reminds me of a professional experience that I had this year listening to a woman who’s an expert in childhood anxiety disorders and talking about how do we help anxious children in school. There are skyrocketing numbers of anxious children in school.
She talked about what essentially the Heath brothers identify on page 185, which is exposure therapy. We don’t reduce the anxiety by removing the anxiety-producing experience.
We reduce the anxiety by sort of slowly encountering and learning how to manage that experience.
I’m afraid we don’t do that enough.
Jeanie: It reminds me of Christie Nold students and how they did that work with adults of helping them explore their identities. I can’t help but think that had to have been a moment of pride for her students. They got to get up and teach the adults in their building about different identity groups and how they could think more deeply about their own identities and what that means for how they are in the school.
Rachel: Yeah. If I’m looking back at this page about courage, and it says on page 185,
Managing fear, the goal of exposure therapy is a critical part of courage.
It goes on to say,
But courage isn’t just suppressed fear. It’s also the knowledge of how to act in that moment.
That’s an area of growth for us.
How to expose students to moments that require courage and develop the knowledge of how to act in that moment.
Jeanie: Listeners, you can’t see us, but Rachel and I are both smiling at this opportunity for new growth and I hope you are too. The last way that the Heath brothers define powerful moments is talking about connection. This just made a lot of sense to me. Do you want to talk a little bit about what they mean by connection?
Connection
Rachel: Yeah. I think connection is possibly easier for our readers to understand. So, they say as you know, there are moments of elevation, insight and pride, but they’re also social moments. They’re most memorable, because others are present, and that moments of connection deepen our relationship with others. So, not only are these defining moments, but these are social moments that provide a peak moment of connection.
I wanted to push back a little bit on this and start to wonder if it had to be, and we do know that the authors of the book say the powerful moments don’t have to have all these ingredients. So I thought, let’s just be clear that there is the possibility that a moment could be a powerful, impactful moment and not a social moment.
The type of moments they’re describing in these are, when these moments create shared meaning and connect us together.
So, personally I’m really cognizant of how important social connection is in my own life, and how meaningful that is to my own learning. So, this wasn’t surprising to me. It was affirming. But something that did surprise me was some research that they describe about creating moments of connection.
It’s from the research of this person, Morten Hansen from UC Berkeley. It’s work-related, it’s kind of business related. He has a book coming out called Great at Work: How Top Performers Work Less and Achieve More. They described his research on pages 216 to 219, but essentially, he explores the distinction between purpose and passion.
Purpose is the sense you’re contributing to others, that your work has brought or meeting. Passion is the feeling of excitement or enthusiasm you have about your work. This researcher was curious, which would have a greater effect on job performance.
Essentially, his research finds that purpose trumps passion.
So, it goes against some of what we’ve heard is as a cultural message. The authors say essentially we should not be saying pursue your passion but pursue your purpose. Of course, it’s great to combine both, but when you can find meaning for your work, you cultivate that purpose.
Jeanie: It makes me think about relevance, about making learning more relevant either to the real world or to kids’ lives. That it feels more purposeful or if you’re doing something like on the engagement hierarchy, if you’re doing something for the good of others, that’s like the highest level of engagement.
That makes me think about that purpose, that sense of purpose and connection to others and the good of our culture, or the good of your community.
I’m also thinking back to when you talked about how school is really flat, and I’m thinking about my own son who could occasionally be a class clown. I think when school got too flat, and he didn’t feel connected, he used humor to create his own peaks and to connect with his peers, because he was like, if nothing’s happening in here and I don’t want to feel connected, I’m going to make my own fun.
So, it just made me think about, it might cost him greatly. He might get in trouble, his grade might go down, but it was worth the payoff to him to have that connection with a classmate.
Rachel: That’s interesting. Certainly, we can when we talk about kids who are demonstrating a behavior like that, we often think that it’s about seeking attention. I had never thought about being a moment of connection. I have a tendency to be that kid sometimes. And I think for me it is about connection. That, I’m breaking the protocol or breaking the rules to seek connection with other people.
Jeanie: That ties us back to the last section about like we want to be seen and heard. We want to be noticed, right?
Rachel: Yeah.
Students should feel like if they don’t show up at school, the place can’t run without them
Jeanie: All of us. I have been thinking about Cabot Leads and service learning and thinking about, I’m not sure who said the quote, but this idea that students should feel like if they don’t show up at school, the place can’t run without them. Wouldn’t that be awesome?
At Cabot Leads where students get jobs, they create these connections, whether it’s with other people that work in the cafeteria or with a specific teacher or with the student, the younger student that they’re mentoring or a reading buddy, right? They create these really meaningful connections that increase their motivation and makes the school day more memorable for them.
Shout out to Cabot→ way to go expanding iLead into Cabot Leads, a 5-8 service learning and leadership program! Growing community, leadership, voice, purpose. https://t.co/ZR3k5wthkK#vted
Rachel: Well, and there’s such an inherent purpose in that. When they have those jobs, they feel like they have a meaning. They have a contribution that they need to make.
Jeanie: This makes me think of personalized learning plans too, and when those feel like they don’t have purpose, they can fall flat for students.
How could we help kids build purpose into them for what they’re learning?
I feel like there’s a lot of opportunity there if we can let go the soul-sucking reasonableness of the daily school day to make them really powerful, motivating tools for learning.
Rachel: Well, this book inspired me a great deal to push for these moments. One of the things I’m working on right now is designing an experience for the eighth graders in three of our schools where they have this kind of elevated experience. I’m not going to be the person following this through all the way, but I’m pretty invested in seeing this happen because I want this experience for our young people. In this case, it’s eighth graders. I think there is that sense of connection built in there that this is, I will find something that matters to me through this experience.
I hope I can only hope.
Jeanie: Listeners, we strongly recommend you take a gander at this book, The Power of Moments.There’s so much in here that is relevant to education and that can be used to build really meaningful moments for your students. Rachel, thanks so much for talking to me about this book.
Jeanie: I’m Jeanie Phillips, and this has been an episode of #vted Reads, talking about what Vermont’s educators and students are reading. Thank you to Rachel Mark for appearing on the show and talking with me about The Power of Moments. If you’re looking for a copy of The Power of Moments, check your local library. That’s where I got mine. To find out more about #vted Reads, including past episodes, upcoming guests and reads, and a whole lot more you can visit vtedreads.tarrantinstitute.org. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram @vtedreads. This podcast is a project of the Tarrant Institute for Innovative Education at the University of Vermont. Special thanks to the Manchester Public Library for hosting us today.
This past spring, a small group of Stowe Middle School students gathered to help their teachers and peers solve a problem. As students worked on independent interest projects, they periodically reflected on their learning. All were interested in finding ways to make this reflection meaningful, for both students and teachers.
But what does meaningful reflection look like? And how can we scaffold exercises that create meaningful reflection?
There are all those transition meetings, already getting ready for the next year. Then there are placement meetings, figuring out who will be in what class, core or group. And of course, all those ceremonies, exhibitions, and spring events.
It’s easy to forget all of the progress you have made with your students and as a school during these times. And it’s easy to get frustrated and to focus only on what you have to do next.
Your class, your community and the progress your school has made matters. And they should be celebrated.
It is easy to not plan time for reflection in project-based learning (PBL) because there is just so much DOING! The students are engaged, and it’s fun and hands-on, and everything moves pretty quickly. But for PBL to connect to learning targets and goals and transferable skills, frequent reflection needs to happen, and as we all know, this has to be deliberately built into the schedule.
So, what can this look like? Here are 8 methods for reflection in project-based learning.
There are many thinks to look forward to as summer approaches. As an educator, I appreciate the calm I feel when school is out. You know that tense feeling thinking about what tomorrow’s class will be like. There is nothing like the first Sunday night when you realize you don’t have to be a teacher in the morning!!!!
I also look forward to a slower pace of life where I can stop adding items to my TO-DO LIST and finally start checking a few off. One of those things for me is my summer reading list.
As the end of June nears and students take their final exams, clear out their lockers, and begin sleeping in until noon, teachers are gathering their remaining energy, and administrators are giving them space, to take stock of the year, celebrate the successes and challenges, and together learn from them.
But what’s the best way to assess technology-rich instruction and the 1:1 environment?
At The Compass School in Westminster, Vermont, students advance through grades by producing evidence of their accomplishments from the year, using the previous year’s reflection to inform the current one. We had the chance to sit down with a student just finishing 11th grade at Compass, and hear not just about his Y.E.A.R. (year-end academic reflection) but how it’s going to prepare him for the all-important graduating Roundtable.
My colleague, Meredith Swallow, recently shared a post about the importance of reflection in her professional growth, which got me thinking. She points her readers to Reflect or Refract: Top 3 Tips for the Reflective Educatorwhere the authors suggest “reading a wide variety of education blogs regularly exposes educators to new ideas and concepts. Transformational thinking occurs when conversations about these posts develop. New ideas that stem from blog posts provide alternate thoughts to consider.”
I couldn’t agree more. Here are a few tech-savvy math bloggers who you might want to engage with to inspire ongoing reflection.
This has been a very interesting week for me, trying to write a post for today. The task actually seemed pretty straight-forward. Audrey had passed along an app for me to take a look at: Monster Physics. A number of folks seem to be thinking about it from an education standpoint. At first blush I was put off by it, and wrote half of a pretty critical post. But every day that has gone by, I have found my position changing. It was a very interesting process, and a good reminder that when we try to think more laterally (a skill the game encourages) our understandings change. So today’s post is about Monster Physics, but its also about the importance of reflection in education, especially in a technology-rich environment where new apps, opinions, devices, and ideas come so fast it can be difficult to give them the time they deserve. Let’s take a look at the app. Continue reading “Monster Physics and the importance of careful consideration”
In September of 2009, Sarah, the 9 year-old daughter of our keynote speaker posted a 90-second YouTube response to President Obama’s speech to US students. This video “went viral” and currently has over 190,000 views. In May 2010, a 6th grader in our keynote presenter’s hometown attracted the attention of Ellen Degeneres with his YouTube remix of a Lady Gaga song. Greyson Chance is now a household name and national star with a record contract and his own manager. Join this session to discuss the issues raised by these two situations and lessons learned including Internet safety and digital citizenship responsibilities.
Very powerful reflections from 9-year-old Sarah Fryer and her father, educator and technologist Wes Fryer, on digital citizenship for students on video-sharing sites such as YouTube. This podcast captured their presentation, When Student Videos Go Viral, at the Mid-America Association for Computers in Education (MACE) 2011.
“It’s not that I feel smarter in learning, I feel smarter in everything.”
Tarrant professional development coordinator Meredith Swallow learning about batch processing files from a 6th grader at Essex Middle School.
Essex Middle School’s Edge team opened their doors to the community May 16th as one of three Innovation schools in Vermont. Students and facilitators discussed some of the projects they’ve accomplished and some of the things they’ve learned as part of this unique environment.
“I’ve learned things high schools seniors don’t know,” commented 7th grader Isaac.
It is easy to not plan time for reflection in project-based learning (PBL) because there is just so much DOING! The students are engaged, and it’s fun and hands-on, and everything moves pretty quickly. But for PBL to connect to learning targets and goals and transferable skills, frequent reflection needs to happen, and as we all know, this has to be deliberately built into the schedule.
As the end of June nears and students take their final exams, clear out their lockers, and begin sleeping in until noon, teachers are gathering their remaining energy, and administrators are giving them space, to take stock of the year, celebrate the successes and challenges, and together learn from them.
