About Learning

Blog Week March 3, 2010

On March second,  President Obama said that it was right for all the teachers and the principal to be fired in a school when, in 2009, only 7% of their junior students passed state math tests. Only 3% of the juniors had passed in 2008 and test scores remained a problem throughout the school.  3% and 7% is totally unacceptable, all of us would quickly agree!  Yet, according to the media reports the union was outraged.

Well, I am outraged too.

The school's superintendent had compiled a list of proposals to remediate the problem. The proposals included: Increased workload without much extra pay for adding 25 minutes to the school day, providing tutoring on a rotating schedule before and after school, eating lunch with students once a week, submitting to more rigorous evaluations, attending weekly after-school planning sessions with other teachers and participating in two weeks of training in the summer.

It seems to me these were modest proposals. very modest...

Blog week December 21

Last week Ed Week published an article by Debra Viadero entitled
Cognitive Scientists Debunk Learning-Style Theories
Here is her first paragraph.

“At one time or another, we've all heard "experts" assert that children have different learning styles. Some children, for instance, may be visual learners, while others best absorb information by hearing it. Other theories categorize learners as "assimilators," "divergers," and who knows what else. A teacher's job, according to this line of thinking, is to find out what student's individual learning styles are and tailor instruction accordingly...

Several weeks ago, I watched the Soloist and it had a profound effect on me.
A newspaper columnist, Steve Lopez, discovers Nathaniel Ayers playing his old cello in an LA park and is struck by the beauty of his musical brilliance. He writes one column about Nathaniel and the response is overwhelming. Ayers is a schizophrenic music prodigy homeless on the streets of L.A. Lopez discovers that Nathaniel has attended Juilliard as a child musical prodigy before suffering a mental breakdown.  Music is the key to his sanity. Lopez, who never intended a prolonged involvement with Nathaniel, talks a music company into giving Nathaniel a cello to play in front of their store. In a scene, that for me was worth the price of the movie, Lopez gives the new cello to Nathaniel and sits on his haunches in an LA highway underpass and listens to Nathaniel try the beautiful instrument.
Lopez becomes a mentor and friend to Nathaniel, something he never intended. Now, he says, he can't imagine life without him. Through years of friendship and help, Lopez becomes an advocate for mental health and an expert on homelessness. ..

Blog Week of 10/22

A teacher is working on the following math standard for her third grade class.

Data analysis, Statistics and Probability: Represent and interpret data in real-world and mathematical problems: 1. Read and interpret data from circle graphs using hales thirds, and quarter. 2. Collect data using observations or surveys and represent the data with pictographs and line plots with appropriate title and key. 3. Explore the basic concept of probability.—Minnesota state standards for 3rd grade math.

As she thinks about how she will get her youngsters excited about learning this standard, she first asks herself, “Why do these children need to know this?”

She comes up with several answers. (1) these are important math concepts and they will be taught at higher and higher levels as students move up the grades, so they need a solid grounding. (2) children need to know how to measure things for themselves, irrespective of school requirements, and (3) it will definitely be on the test and I will be judged by their ability to do this...

Two weeks ago, I spent three days with 20 Chicago Public school principals. I learned a lot and I was honored to have been asked to work with them on instructional leadership. I came to a final realization of something I had suspected for some time; that success in the principalship is related to the ability to travel the 4MAT Cycle. I am using actual examples from two of the participants in that seminar. Both have given me permission to relate their survey results.

This 4MAT Instructional Leadership seminar has as its objectives to enhance the ability of principals and assistant principals to embrace diversity in their staffs and students, to leverage best practice and to transform their schools. I am not unaware that is a large order, but nevertheless that is how I have designed those three days.

The principals and assistant principals in my seminar took the Learning Type Measure (LTM) on the first morning and we went over their scores and their learner designations as either Type One, Two, Three or Four Learners. These indicate their preferences as to how they prefer to learn. All of them had a favored type. Several of them had a double style, meaning their had equal scores in two of the four styles...

Our sense-perceptions come from external sources, so we think they help us to understand the world. This is understandably so. But there is a deeper reason to think carefully about how to construct a Quadrant One experience. Our perceptions do indeed come from the external world, but there is a richer truth here. We are also drawn by these perceptions back into the outside world into something bigger that we all belong to. The teacher creating the mystery of the Why in the mind of the students is not just engaging them, but is causing them to flow outwards into an ever expanding world where all manner of connections exist. It is a crucial step to growth.

Blog week 11/23

“The purpose of schooling is not in keeping in school but in pushing out into the world young citizens who are soaked in habits of thoughtfulness and reflectiveness, joy and commitment.”

—Ted Sizer in Horace’s School

Is the Rigor in the Standards?

Standards are the structural content components, the base all students need. They are a part of rigor, but only a part. In 4MAT language, they are the Quadrant Two ideas and understandings that make up the content fields. They also list the skills, the Quadrant Three practices necessary for students to do the work of manipulating, testing and critiquing the ideas and procedures for themselves. Teachers need both the ideas and the lists of skills as their instructional base. They are the What and the How of learning.

But they are only a part of the learning cycle, the bottom half of 4MAT. They must not be taught by themselves. When students receive only knowledge and skills, they miss the reasons and the possibilities of learning, the Why and the If, 4MAT’s Quadrants One and Four. In the absence of Quadrant One (meaning) and Quadrant Four (creativity, possibilities), our students are bored or lost...

Teachers and Their Ability/Inability to Conceptualize Content

In the teacher training we do in our About Learning organization, we find teachers often have difficulty creating significant content concepts, so their students get the big picture.  Teaching success is based on the ability to conceptualize content, to cut through the mounds of details to find and use the concept that captures the content essence that best connecta to the students personally.

Students continually proceed through math courses for instance, without understanding the meaning of the mechanics of what they are doing and why they need to do it and why on earth they even need to know it. They work at it because they have to pass the test and the test after that test. It is a pointless ritual detrimental to learning.
Einstein had the same problem...

How is the use of 4MAT aligned with a common set of standards?  Simply because now we can stop arguing and obsessing over WHAT will be taught and get the important business of HOW it will be taught and how it will be CONNECTED to learners. Once we know the entire WHAT, we can get to work creating the concept maps and learner connections that will bring this material to life for kids.

Most States Coming on Board

What should students know when they finish high school? Who should decide? Should we all agree on this? Yes, of course we should. All our students need to know what successful, educated 21st century citizens need to know. So far forty-six states have agreed to tackle this complex task. Missouri, Texas, South Carolina and Alaska may come on board when the common sense aspect of this becomes clearer to them...

Karen Aka is working with the Hawaiian Educational Council Change Leadership Group of Harvard University. She works  creating leadership seminars and is well know in Hawaii as a consummate professional educator.

Karen sent us an example of insight on the Learning cycle that is important for all users of 4MAT to understand. The 4MAT Cycle is one complete flow always starting with learner connections and moving to the new knowledge and skills and then back to the learner for personal usefulness. This flow is learning made real. Here is her 4MAT insight recently sent to me...

I am involved in Martin Seligman’s work, first by seeing him on TED and now reading his book Authentic Happiness. ISBN 908-0-7432-2297-6. He works to understand and study happy people in order to improve normal lives. His mission is to enhance and strengthen wellness and the best things in life in ordinary folks.

He has discovered three kinds of happiness:

1. Pleasure, the attention and savoring of something, enjoyable and exciting, but the drawback is it tends not to last
2. Engagement, being seriously involved in what you are doing: be it parenting, working studying an so on. Real engagement puts people into flow, they go into the zone, mindless of time, doing and astonished at their own doing, like someone else is there with and in them. “So engaged, his body identity disappears from his consciousness.” (Seligman speaking of Mozart)
3. Meaning, to be in service to something larger than yourself. The strongest combination being of course, engagement plus meaning. He goes on to say health and productivity follow the same path. Wonderful insights.

We are now creating Readers Theatres for all the literature units we write. We choose the books to create these complete 4MAT units from lists in our client districts, We are currently  completing the final book for our new Middle School set of eight books.

We found Readers Theatre when Ben Brady, a close friend and founder of Rigby of America and the Children's Literacy Foundation, a video-disc literacy inservice enterprise. Ben handed me a book called The Fluent Reader by Timothy Rasinski, chronically the power of oral reading and suggesting it could make the performance element we have in all our 4MAT units. And indeed he was right...