And I get the opportunity, from time to time, to see these smart folks in action. This year, on the first day of school, MIchelle and Kyle and I took a lap around the district and happened to wander by Kevin’s classroom a few minutes into his year. #

And, boy, was he in the zone.  Already.  Inside a few minutes. #

He was  introducing reading notebooks to his students when we happened by.  We were approaching the classroom, no appointment, just saying hi, when we heard him say this: #

We are going to have thoughts as we read, and it’ll be good for us to write those down so we don’t forget them. #

Of course, the more I think about that one sentence, the more I think it sums up so much of what I think school should be – people exploring thoughtfulness. Thoughtfully. #

And I am grateful for folks like Kevin, who works with 4th graders, because I know that they are well served because he is there exploring their thinking with them. #

If your school year’s just getting going, I sure hope that you are reading something interesting, and asking your students to, and that you’re all pausing from time to time to write something that you’re thinking about down. #

And if you’re not – why aren’t you? #

#

What we needed as children was someone to show the way.  Someone who knew us and valued us.  Someone who would live with us and for us. #

What we needed as children, children still need. #

The teachers and I, conscious of the dangers that come to an active child from a random seeking to satisfy his desires, tried to make the people whose children were about us realize their responsibility while we ourselves did our share.  We knew the children needed the older folk. We knew that we had only limited means of gathering and holding these young people together.  All we had was the school and we were fast losing that except as a drill machine running eight hours a day during which time two schools¹ in turn tried to master the prescribed book facts. #

The school, after all, narrowing down to routine, was such a faraway place, far away from the actual lives of people.  How could we get close, so close to each other that we would be part of the people and they a part of us, and be “folksy” together?²
#

1. Patri’s school at the time shared its facility with another.
2. Both quotes from pages 80-81.

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I’ve been working with some folks to write about the centennial of English Journal, which is this year.  One hundred years of writing about teaching and learning language arts.  We’ve been focusing on the way that technology has been addressed in past issues of EJ, looking back at articles from the last one hundred years and exploring past brushes of technology and pedagogy.  It’s been a fascinating trip back in time. #

My hunch going into this work is that we would find many, many similarities between the issues of yesterday and today.  I expected that we would always see that the transformational technology was right around the corner, and that things would be better if only we would adopt it. ² #

What I also expected, but have been both inspired and disappointed by, is that so many wise teachers from our past saw what we really needed to focus on.  They saw that it wasn’t the technology, but the purposes that we put it to, that were what count and what matters in teaching and learning.  And their words were praised. #

And then forgotten. #

And now many of my contemporaries make the same great arguments.  Arguments that have been made before.  Here’s one: #

The tragic lack, as I see the present social order, is that of understanding and intelligent sympathy. Our ignorance makes us indifferent and cruel. We are preoccupied with ourselves. #

Further on in the same piece: #

If English instruction can help in the substitution of creative effort for scheming greed, if it can substitute social co-operation for selfish individualism, if it can help in the development of men and women sensitive to human suffering and bent on furthering human happiness – in a word, if it can make beauty a dominant factor in contemporary life – the aim not only of English instruction but of all education will have been accomplished.³ #

As I think about the challenges of today, and the arguments that are and aren’t occurring in schools and about schooling in these United States, I wonder why we forget these voices that have come before.  I worry that they may have figured out much of what we needed to know then and need to do now.  But we moved on⁴ without them. #

So why aren’t we doing it?  What’s holding us back?  Will we do things differently, or will someone stumble across our words a hundred years down the road and wonder similar things? #

It’s enough to make me mad.⁵ #

  #

1. Or kind of sad.
2. Be it microfiche, radio, television, word processors, computers, or even typewriters.  All are represented as the next great thing in the articles I’ve read.
3. Stella S. Center, Past-President, National Council of Teachers of English, from her Presidential Address, “The Responsibility of Teachers of English in Contemporary American Life.” November 24th, 1932.  Published in The English Journal, Volume 22, Number 2, February, 1933. (pp.97-108)
4. Perhaps not forward, but on.
5. But we know what to do with the mad that we feel, don’t we?

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– Meredith Stewart, “Double Vulnerable: The Paradox of Disability and Teaching,” English Journal 100.2 (2010): 27-30 #

#

She just mentioned a conversation that I wanted to get down before I forgot it. #

Donalyn was asked about her students’ reading. “Your students,” the inquirer asked, “read fifty books a year without any rewards or incentives?” #

Donalyn replied, “Isn’t reading its own reward?” #

Yes. It is. The reading of the book, the mastering of the text, the enjoyment of the story. #

That’s the reward. That’s the prize. That’s the incentive. That’s what gets folks to put down one book, and pick up the next one. #

We don’t need stickers, or points, or prizes. Just good books, thoughtful people who know their students to read and recommend to them, and students willing to explore the world through writing. #

So let’s spend less time with systems that add to the mess, and distract from the books. Okay? #

#

Direct Link to Audio #

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In particular, I found the frank discussion of youth risks, while not new, to be refreshingly written.  Here’s a taste: #

So, based on the research and the opinions of several experts, one of the biggest risks to children may be adults who try to shut down the informal learning involved in their use of Internet technologies at home or school. (p. 18) #

There’s lots to like here.  I hope someone in a position to do something about the working group’s recommendations is taking good notes as they review the report. Anne’s got a full wrap up of coverage on her site.  The report’s below. #

Online Safety and Technology Working Group Final Report #

#

Do you know of anyone pushing ePUB via RSS?  A good ol’ podcast of ereadable books?  Please share links in the comments. #

#

Let me show you: #

Example 1 – “Texting poetry inspires students to learn” #

From the article: #

Chester Middle School Principal Ernie Jackson, for instance, challenged reading and social studies teacher Mel Wesenberg to find ways to use text messaging to teach poetry. #

The results were surprising: Kids who used their cell phones to boil down the main points of the stanzas got 80 percent of the questions about a poem correct on a state test. #

Kids taught the same poem in the traditional way – reading, reciting and discussing – got only 40 percent of the questions right. #

“That’s a big jump,” Jackson said during a recent demonstration of the experiment with a sixth-grade class. #

From the article: #

She gave examples of an elementary child’s note about a character in the book she was reading: “If I were him, I’d say no way!” Such comments indicate a child is unknowingly focusing in on the author’s character development, something college students struggle with in their literature classes. Another child summarized the plot – a simple electronic form of the dreaded book report – which reinforces their understanding of the book. #

The Kindle isn’t the important bit.³ #

Turns out, in both of these cases, the technology that helps the students to read and to understand better was a very old and familiar technology: #

Writing.⁴ #

It’s exciting to bring new gadgets and gizmos into the classroom, to see what they can help us to do. But we can all too easily get caught up in the shiny object and forget that the basic toolset of teaching and learning, of reading, writing and thinking, is still the basic toolset. Reading and writing, meaningful reading and writing, are important⁵. #

Try to write and fiddle with words regularly, be it on a Kindle, a nook, an iPad, a cell phone, or any other device you might happen to have. Teachers should be active readers, writers and thinkers, no matter their subject area. We should be reading and writing with students regularly, whatever the medium. All that practice will help you read better, and then you, too, will be less likely to fall victim to a technology du jour switcharoo scam. #

Promise.⁶ #

1. Look! Aha! It’s true! Texting makes for smarter kids! Kindles change everything!
2. Not, I’d admit, the most useful headline. “Teaching literacy?” You mean “reading?”
3. That said, Will wrote an interesting post over the weekend on why you might use a Kindle as your annotation tool, but I’m thinking that his strategy isn’t practical for 2nd graders.
4. But we already knew that writing supports reading, didn’t we?
5. Ira’s post complicates this, but in a good way.
6. Yes, I know that “fatter” isn’t “really” a word. But it seemed like the right word. Please, no red pens here.

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Ani goes to Kindergarten in the fall, so we spent the winter investigating schools around our town. We were looking for places that felt right for us – evidence of care and thoughtfulness, ties to particular district programs that we think are valuable or hope that Ani will have an interest in in the future, that sort of thing. #

We settled on a short list of three elementary schools in our school district, the district where my wife is also a teacher. One of the schools, our first choice, was full up and we didn’t get selected into it. Of the two that remained, it was a draw. Until I attended parent nights. I could tell that both schools cared about kids, but I had a real concern about one of the two schools: the use of Accelerated Reader (AR). #

While I was at the parent night where I learned about the school’s use of AR, I tweeted some of my questions and concerns, and began to hear back from many people about the pros and cons of AR.¹ Actually, that’s not true. There were a few lukewarm responses. But most of the replies, many of them private, were about bad² experiences that folks and their children had with the program. Phrases like “it sucked the joy out of reading” were sent to me by friends, colleagues, and near strangers from all over my Twittersphere. #

And I swore to myself, as I listened and thought and considered, that I wouldn’t expose my daughter to such a program. #

And yet, Ani will begin next year in that school, where AR is a large piece, according to the principal, of the formative assessment used by the Kindergarten teachers.³ #

That said, I’ve got some baggage around Accelerated Reader and programs like it. And I worry that my baggage is unfounded, particularly when people I know and respect choose to use the program. I don’t get it. And that bugs me.⁴ #

I know that motivation that springs from external sources isn’t terribly motivating when the external motivator is gone. In fact, I know that such external motivation can decrease one’s intrinsic motivation for the thing that being fiddled with. I was reminded of the tension between what I know about motivation and what I see thoughtful people doing when they use AR when I stumbled across this article in Time on Saturday. #

The piece is a profile of some work being done by Roland Fryer, Jr., an economist at Harvard, to see what effect money can have on student performance. The angle that’s interesting is that he’s not looking at how to incentivize teaching – he’s looking to see if financial incentives can impact learning. Specifically, he’s paying kids to do certain things. And it’s fascinating work, for several reasons. #

For starters, he ran into considerable trouble from grown ups when he proposed doing such studies, in part because folks (like me) get hinky whenever you talk about paying kids to do well in school.⁵ More on that in a moment. #

I’m also curious because of the way he set his tests up – there are several different models in his study, ranging from paying 2nd graders $2/book to do some reading up to paying high school students a certain amount for every good grade they earn. #

The author of the article, Amanda Ripley, does a good job summing up some of Edward Deci‘s work on motivation, which I’ve relied on in the past: #

The most damning criticism of Fryer came from psychologists like the University of Rochester’s Edward Deci, who has spent his career studying motivation. Deci has found that money — like other tangible rewards — does not work very well to motivate people over the long term, particularly for tasks that involve creativity. In fact, there is a lot of evidence that rewards can have the perverse effect of making people perform worse. #

A classic experiment in support of this hypothesis took place at a nursery school at Stanford University in the early 1970s. There, researchers divided 51 toddlers into groups. All the kids were asked to draw a picture with markers. But one group was told in advance that they would get a special reward — a certificate with a gold star and a red ribbon — in exchange for their work. The kids did the drawings, and the ones in the treatment group got their certificates. #

A few weeks later, the researchers observed the children through a one-way mirror on a normal school day. They found that the kids who had received the award spent half as much time drawing for fun as those who had not been rewarded. The reward, it seemed, diminished the act of drawing. So instead of giving kids gold stars, Deci says, we should teach them to derive intrinsic pleasure from the task itself. “What we really want is for people to value the activity of learning,” he says. People of all ages perform better and work harder if they are actually enjoying the work — not just the reward that comes later. #

In principle, Fryer agrees. “Kids should learn for the love of learning,” he says. “But they’re not. So what shall we do?” Most teenagers do not look at their math homework the way toddlers look at a blank piece of paper. It would be wonderful if they did. Maybe one day we will all approach our jobs that way. But until then, most adults work primarily for money, and in a curious way, we seem to be holding kids to a higher standard than we hold ourselves. #

1. I also recorded a podcast about the experience. Give it a listen if you want to learn more.
2. terribly, horribly, awfully, no good, very bad
3. This post isn’t about the school, or their methodology. I’m excited to have Ani go there, although I am nervous about the experience. We’ll stay on top of it. I hope.
4. It fills me with terror and anxiety, actually. If I’m wrong about AR, what else am I wrong about? And AM I wrong about AR?
5. And we might be right to get hinky about such things.
6. I’m butchering the conclusions – you should really read the study for yourself. I’m planning on it.
7. Or a pizza, or a toy, or a whatever
8. Big suppositions, but I’m thinking out loud here. And about to ask you to help me think out loud better.

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