Week of January 9

Bus Duty: Ben Higgs  and Lena Cooley

Monday 1/9/17 Venture Collaboration Day...8:00 CPR training in Library ($10 for card)  Agenda Here
Tuesday 1/10/17 7:30 -2:00 SAT summit
Wednesday 1/11/17
Thursday 1/12/17- 
Friday 1/13/17

Monday 1/16/17 Martin Luther King Jr. Day - No School
Tuesday 1/17/17 
Wednesday 1/18/17
Thursday 1/19/17- 
Friday 1/20/17

Senior Mentors:  Please talk to your students about the FAFSA deadline.  The actual deadline is Feb. 15

I read a really good book over Christmas break, Why Don't Students Like School?  We're at that time of year when reading time is at a premium (is there any other time of year???) So, I'm going to be pulling some key ideas out of each chapter and sharing them  here each week.  Don't tell the English teachers, but I'm not a good summarizer, so they are mostly sentences just pulled from the pages that seemed worthwhile to me.

My overview and thoughts about….

Why Don’t Students Like School?  A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How The Mind Works And What It Means For The Classroom

Chapter 1: Why don’t students like school?

The book opens with the observation that while people are curious, they are not naturally good thinkers and will avoid thinking unless cognitive conditions are right. 

BIG IDEA: People are naturally curious, but not naturally good thinkers; unless the cognitive conditions are right, we will avoid thinking.

·         The pleasure is in the solving of the problem.  Working on a problem with no sense that progress is being made is not pleasurable – it is frustrating.

·         There is not much pleasure in just knowing the answer – so being told the solution to a problem is not fun.

·         Even if there are too many hints given, the pleasure is lost.

·         Mental work is appeals to us because it offers the opportunity for the pleasant feeling when it succeeds. 

Curiosity is fragile.

Sometimes content can prompt interest, but it won’t maintain it.  The author shares a story of looking forward to the eighth grade sex talk and then quickly being bored by it.  He marvels at the ability of a teacher to bore hormonal adolescents with the subject of sex.  So, how can interest be maintained?  First, understand how thinking works:

Four factors are required for thinking:

·         Information from the environment

·         Facts stored in long-term memory

·         Procedures stored in long-term memory

·         Space available in working memory

Thinking is mostly about remembering and following a previous course of action.  So, people find successful thinking enjoyable and will selectively seek out challenges that seem solvable because those challenges/problems lead to feelings of pleasure and satisfaction.  So, for problem-solving to be successful and satisfying, the thinker needs enough information from the environment, enough information stored in long-term memory, the right procedures stored in long-term memory, and room in the working memory.

Implications for the classroom:

·      Make sure there are problems to solve.

• Problems = cognitive work that poses moderate challenge – things like understanding a poem or thinking or novel uses for recyclable materials. 
• Avoid long strings of teacher explanations with little opportunity for students to solve problems. 
•  With each lesson, consider the cognitive work the students will do. How often does this work occur in the lesson? Does it get intermixed with cognitive breaks at least every 15 to 20 minutes?  
• Will the problem or challenge be satisfyingly “solvable” or frustrating?

·      Respect students’ cognitive limits.

• Do they have the necessary background knowledge in memory to consider the question? If they lack the appropriate background knowledge, they will quickly judge the question as “boring”. If they lack the background knowledge to engage with a problem, save it for another time when they have that knowledge.
• Remember working memory limits. People can keep only so much information in mind at once. Multistep instructions, lists of unconnected facts, chains of logic more than two or three steps long, and applying a just-learned concept to new material (unless quite simple) overloads working memory. If students already struggle with reading or writing, the working memory is already under considerable stress. 
• The solution to working memory overload is to slow the pace, use memory aids like writing on the blackboard that save students from keeping too much information in working memory.

·      Clarify problems to solve.

• How can you make the problem interesting?  Curiosity gets provoked when we perceive a problem that we believe we can solve. So, what is the question that will engage students and help them want to know the answer?
• Sometimes we feel so anxious for our students to know the answers that we do not devote sufficient time to developing the questions. But the questions pique people’s interest. Someone’s telling you an answer doesn’t do anything for you.
• When planning a lesson, start with the information you want students to know at its end, then consider what might work best as the key questions that will have the right level of difficulty to engage your students while you respect their cognitive limits.

·      Reconsider when to puzzle students.

• Sometimes questions are used to draw a student into the lesson.  But consider whether you might use these after they have learned the basic concepts. If students don’t know the basic principles behind a demonstration it seems like a magic trick. They get a momentary thrill, but their curiosity to learn may not be long lasting.
• Another strategy might involve doing the demonstration after students know the principle involved. Every fact or demonstration that would puzzle students before they have the relevant background knowledge has the potential to become an experience that will puzzle students momentarily later, and then lead to the pleasure of problem solving.

·      Accept and act on variation in student preparation.

• You do not need to accept that “some students just are not very bright” and so we ought to track them into less demanding classes. But, its naive to pretend that all students come to your class equally prepared to excel. Students have different preparations, as well as different levels of support at home. They differ in their abilities. To the extent that you can, you will benefit your students and yourself to assign work to individuals or groups of students appropriate to their current level of competence. Naturally, you need to do this in a sensitive way, minimizing the extent to which some students will judge themselves as behind others and create helpless beliefs by attributing this to permanent, unchangeable personal characteristics.

·      Change the pace.

• We all lose the attention of our students, at times, and this happens more often when they feel confused. They mentally check out. Happily, we can fairly easily get them back. How?
• Change grabs attention. When you change topics, start a new activity, or in some other way show that you have shifted gears, virtually every student’s attention will come back to you and you will have a new chance to engage them. So plan shifts and monitor your class’s attention to see if you need to change things more often or less frequently – about 3 times per class.

·      Keep a diary or lesson notes. T

• The core idea in this chapter involves the fact that solving a problem gives people pleasure, but the the problem must be easy enough to solve yet difficult enough to take some mental effort. (Think Goldilocks - or better yet, think Zone of Proximal Development, or think Productive Struggle)
•  Your experience in the classroom serves as your best guide: whatever works, do again; whatever doesn’t, discard. But don’t expect that you will really remember how well a lesson plan worked a year later.
• Whether a lesson goes brilliantly well or down in flames, we tend to think at the time that we will never forget what happened; but the ravages of memory can surprise us, so write it down. Even if just a quick scratch on a sticky note, make a habit of recording your success in gauging the level of difficulty in the problem you pose for your students.