Evidence of Students Ownership of Learning

What's your evidence that students are taking ownership of their learning?

Are you looking for students who are reflective about the quality of their work and can articulate their areas of strength and next steps?

Do you want students to demonstrate curiosity about academic content?

Are you looking for students who show perseverance and utilize various strategies in solving problems?

I would agree with all of these and yet I recently found some less formal evidence of student ownership of learning that bears noting.  

The first student I came across, during Independent Reading time, was reading on Wattpad.  Of course, the 6th grader had to explain to this neophyte that Wattpad was an organic community of readers and writers who submit stories and read stories form other self publishers.  While the nature of this social literary community requires monitoring and guidance so students use discretion and engage safely, I was surprised to find that this student (I later found a few others) had discovered a literary community where they could read stories of interest and submit their own for the eyes of a wider audience.  This same student indicated that she had some writing she wanted to share but hadn't gotten the courage to publish quite yet.  Her classmate then chimed in and encouraged her to take the plunge.

My second discovery that same day was in another 6th grade class where I found a young man writing a narrative in Google Docs.  I figured he was working on an assigned piece from his teacher, but soon discovered that  he was writing a story of his own choosing collaboratively with a classmate (who waved at me from across the room). They had taken this collaborative tool and repurposed it for their own personal writing project.

I can think of no better evidence for students who have taken ownership of their learning then to see them choosing literacy activities, with enthusiasm, outside the school curriculum.   Of course, we will continue to look for formal evidence of student ownership of learning, but these anecdotal and personal examples are evidence just as surely, and should be encouraged and celebrated in your school, as they will be in ours.

Learning What Works Through Failure

Misconceptions are a natural phase in the learning process.  Here's  a great quote from Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning about the benefits of failure and problem solving.

It's not the failure, that's desirable, it's the dauntless effort despite the risks, the discovery of what works and what doesn't that sometimes only failure can reveal.  It's trusting that trying to solve a puzzle serves us better than being spoon-fed the solution, even if we fall short in our first attempts at an answer.

Research shows that effort is required for learning to be lasting and durable.  Sweat equity must be paid and the task for teachers is to design learning experiences that allow for productive struggle and determination without leading to frustration and burnout.

Learning That Feels Easy is Ineffective

It's Always About the Learning

Camarena Elementary is considered a technology school.  Some days I feel like that is unfortunate, because I don't want the perception to be that our focus is primarly on technology.  As the two posts below show, the focus needs to be first, last, and always about  learning.


Words Matter: Let’s Talk About Learning, Not Technology

This summary of phrasing sums up this point of view well.

Technology is a Tool, Not a Learning Outcome

Bill Ferriter's summary helps put learning and technology in their proper place.

2 Class Dojo Points for Bill!!!


At the end of the day, my hope is that our work with students moves the needle forward on learning and we will use any and every technology tool that helps us accomplish that goal.  

Maybe Weighing Pigs Does Make them Fatter?

Photo Credit: Ethan Block on Flickr

A good friend of mine likes to remind me that simply testing kids doesn't increase their learning, thus the title of this post derives from her catchy phrase that, "weighing pigs doesn't make them fatter".  The authors of Make it Stick (Peter Brown, Henry Roediger, and Mark McDaniel) might disagree with that statement.  The subtitle of the book is The Science of Successful Learning and their aim is to review the research on what practices help us learning.    You can get a summary of their work on the American RadioWorks podcast here and a related podcast here.

The first strategy that they discuss is the benefit of retrieval to aid memory, especially when compared to simply rereading content.  Retrieval is described as self testing, using flash cards to practice the content, summarizing after reading short chunks, writing key ideas after reading, and low stakes quizzing.  Study after study compares the benefits to learning that accrue when one retrieves the information periodically during a course of study instead of simply reading and rereading the material and notes.   Students who stop to recite what they are learning or are asked to answer short quizzes learn more both in the short term - and here's the big bonus - in the long term.  This is called The Testing Effect.  For those of you who are still bent on cramming, you will see some immediate benefit from that frenzied approach, but the gains quickly disappear in to the black hole of long term forgetting.  You will get more benefit from studying and testing yourself AND you will remember more of what you have learned a month later.

Their research about this topic also found that learners benefited from questions and testing that were spaced out to allow some forgetting to occur such that the act of retrieval was accompanied by cognitive effort.  The greater the effort (so long as there was ultimate success) the more that the learner remembered.   Other benefits of frequent quizzing (effortful retrieval) included students understanding the content that they knew and didn't know in order to study more effectively, lower test anxiety because frequent quizzes helped students gain confidence, and slight improvement in attendance in higher education courses.

I see several implications for schools.

1.  Teach students how to study.  Explain to students the benefits of summarizing what they are learning through taking notes about the content they are grasping.

2.  Embrace low stakes quizzing throughout all units of study.  While we are in an environment of high stakes testing and there are plenty of reasons to eschew more testing.  Research has shown that low stakes questioning will enhance learning of all content and allow students to perform higher order thinking because of the rich content that is solidifying into their long term memory.

3. Implement this research today.  Too often educators have sneered at research that seems counter intuitive and the big losers are our students.  Check out the research yourself and you will see that this practice consistently allows students to learn material at a much higher rate than merely rereading.

Let's try this out!

Flow and Learning

I came across this quote from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his book Flow and it reminded me of the work we are doing around success criteria, feedback, and visible learning.

One reaches flow in activities where ... "a sense that one's skills are adequate to cope with the challenges at hand, in a goal-directed, rule-bound action system that provides clear clues as to how well one is performing."

This quote demonstrates several truths that are the hallmark of quality learning experiences.

First, the learner must believe that she has the skill to meet the challenge so a) there must be some challenge and b) the challenge cannot be so great that the learner doesn't believe that she can attain the goal.  

Second, sufficient structure must be provided so that the learner can navigate the activity with a certain degree of certainty.

Finally, feedback must be connected to the goal that one is pursuing and must be explicit in describing the current performance against the ideal state.

Does this square with your beliefs about what quality teaching and learning looks like?

Study Smarter

Here's a summary of research on effective study techniques alluded to by John Hattie at the Visible Learning Conference.  The big winners are:

Dunlosky and colleagues report that spreading out your studying over time and quizzing yourself on material before the big test are highly effective learning strategies. Both techniques have been shown to boost students’ performance across many different kinds of tests, and their effectiveness has been repeatedly demonstrated for students of all ages.

Teachers, parents, and students would be wise to focus on these strategies for learning instead of the less effective strategies like summarizing and highlighting.  Here's the full study:

Improving Students’ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions From Cognitive and Educational Psychology

Feedback is a Gift, so Spread it Around

A colleague recently gave me some unsolicited, direct feedback about my poor facilitation skills, and I'm not gonna lie - It hurt!  Actually, I'm very grateful as it helped me reflect on behavior that I had NO IDEA was going on - and I consider myself a reflective fellow (he said, humbly").  However, this reminded me of a quote that Russ Roberts of Econtalk is fond of quoting from Richard Feynman, "The most important thing is not to fool yourself, and  you are very easy to fool."

As a Principal, I give a lot of feedback and getting a taste of that feedback makes me want to give direct and clear feedback to others more and more.  True professionals want to improve their craft and get better and they will only benefit from honest feedback provided in an environment that is safe and supportive.   I will definitely press forward to give clear, specific, and actionable feedback to others and gladly solicit that feedback for myself.  

50 Success Tips minus 47

Photo Credit: PHOTO ♥ BOOTH

Just saw this post on twitter, 50 Success Tips for Principals, and got to thinking.  How do I remember 50 tips about anything?  I mean do I need 50 tips to be a good dad?  How about 50 tips for saving energy.  You're lucky if I remember one thing to do.  Since, I've written before about focus, here's my list of successful tips for principals and I'm going to distill them down  to three.

Here we go.

1.  Have a Positive Attitude - Now, if you went to the 50 tips link above you may have noted that this is also #1 on their list, but I promise I did think of it before these guys.  A Positive Attitude does a world of good.  One of the parents in my son's boy scout troop was reading a book on wilderness survival, and you'll never guess what the most important thing you can do to survive - that's right - Have a Positive Attitude.  A positive attitude has a profound effect on you and everyone you lead.  You will face many challenges in the Principal's seat and you only have control over one thing - your response.  A positive attitude will help you absorb the challenges of the work both small and great and encourage those around to pursue the most positive course for students.

2. Make the People Around you Better - A former Principal I worked with years ago once said, "The job of the Principal is to do nothing".   Now, that is not an incentive for lazy administrators, but an acknowledgment that the people who actually run the schools are the teachers, secretaries, custodians, parents, and students.  The Principal's job is to create the environment where all of these folks can do their job to the best of their ability.  You'll need to get resources in their hands, build collaborative structures so they can work in teams and highlight their accomplishments every step of the way.  It's also good to remember that when you finally leave that school, they will not remember the things you did, but how you made them feel.  Did you make them feel competent, supported, encouraged, challenged?

3.  Be a Student of Learning - Study your school.  Study your curriculum.  Study your teachers, students, and community.  Read research.  Read for pleasure.  Listen to complaints, criticisms, and compliments.   Learn, Learn Learn.  The Principal should be the CLO (Chief Learning Officer) of the school.  Model a willingness to change (isn't that learning?) and constantly look for new insights, ideas, and strategies to make your school better.   Having a vision for your school comes from thinking about what is working and what could be better.  It also involves looking outside your school for inspiration and ideas.  The Principal as a learner is a powerful force for adult and student learning.

The principal job is extremely complex and sophisticated and can hardly be reduced to any list of things you can do.  In fact, I was tempted to put as #3 Never make a list like this!  However, some things are more important than others, and here is a great place to start.  If I can learn something new every day, help one member of my staff get better today, and keep a positive attitude no matter what comes my way, success is sure to follow.  If not, go back to that list of 50 things and try another one of those.   They're actually pretty good.

Failure is tolerable and even desirable ... so long as you are learning. Failure that doesn't develop new learning is truly a FAIL, with no redeeming qualities. But failure, that produces lessons for the next try can truly make an organization, school, classroom, student, or teacher smarter and more successful. Liz Wiseman, in her book Multipliers introduces Lutz Ziob who was the general manager of the education business at Microsoft who was described as,

"He brings an intellectual curiosity for why things didn't work out."

We must ask lots of questions about our failures to determine why they didn't work and what we might do differently to reach our goals.

Hidden Agenda Unveiled

On every staff for which I have worked, there are always a few who get the feeling that I have a hidden agenda. Well, today I confess that they are correct. I have always had a hidden agenda and it's about time I revealed what I'm REALLY trying to accomplish. For example, ...

1. When I share teacher data from every classroom on school wide assessments my goal is that teachers learn from each other.
2. When I observe a class and head straight to the student least likely to know what's going on, I just want to make sure that student is learning just like the others.
3. When I ask reflective questions about a lesson I've seen, I want to understand what the teacher was intending to accomplish and how she was going about doing that.
4. When I insist on using nearly every staff meeting opportunity, it's because I believe that the more time our staff spends together thinking and discussing about teaching and learning, the better we will become.
5. When I ask teachers to allow me to videotape and view their lessons it's because I want them to learn about their own best practices and how they can get better.

With these examples and many more, my hidden agenda is that it's all about the learning. I hope this provides some relief to anyone who was thinking I had some sinister or evil plot in mind for my methods and madness. Please excuse me for keeping up the game because I've still got a lot to learn.

Quality Teaching

Today I had the great fortune of discussing quality teaching with several of my colleagues from the Chula Vista Elementary School District. These Principals came to our school to observe proficient teachers and discuss the indicators of successful teaching. The conversation was a true discussion around the areas of communication, engagement, questioning, assessment, and more. We had a rich debate on the indicators of true engagement, reflecting that most teachers don't get past compliance or mental assent to the topics at hand. The ideal is that students become cognitively engaged in the work, in short, that they THINK. However, some suggested that the more elementary learning of mastering facts and skills is a necessary and prerequisite step that will enable students to eventually have those cognitively demanding and robust conversations. You can't start off with cognitively demanding tasks until you've laid the foundation of background knowledge and skills that support those deeper level conversations and learnings.

My big take away today was that we need to provide opportunities for our whole staff to engage in similar conversations around quality teaching in order to arrive at a common definition of what quality teaching looks like. Their participation in the dialogue would hasten the improvement of teacher practice, which is our ultimate goal.

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/22326055@N06/3611501075

Social Learning Starts Early

A recent study in Pediatrics journal gives strong support for parents to converse with their children early and often.

Parents should be encouraged not merely to provide language input to their children through reading or storytelling, but also to engage their children in two-sided conversations.

This is a great encouragement that underscores the value of language. This is a current trend in our instruction and, it only make sense, that children would benefit from having large doses of conversation at early stages of development as well. I mean, just look at this little guy. He is on his way to a degree at Harvard.


Super Baby, Intersting, Little Girl Telling What - Click here for more home videos

Student ownership of learning

In this excellent article by Joe Paterno (yes, the football coach) he expresses the joy of learning to read Virgil in Latin during his high school days and has this insight from his instructor that describes the gradual release of responsibility of learning to the student:

Starting from his first day as a teacher, Father Bermingham always kept an eye out for kids who had begun what he calls the most important task in education: their “self-education.” He meant kids who showed signs of taking responsibility for their own expansion instead of waiting for teachers to do it for them. Even the most talented teacher can try what he or she thinks is “teaching,” but it won’t really take unless the student takes charge of the more important job: learning.

What an excellent goal for every teacher to focus on as the new year gets underway.

(HT to kitchen table math, the sequel)

Isolation should be a thing of the past

Reading David Mccullough's fine book The Great Bridge I've come to learn about some amazing feats of engineering of the late 19th century. Washington Roebling, the chief engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge needed to bury two mammoth towers on each side of the East River and to do this, he used pneumatic caissons. This technology was in its infancy at that time, but there was another engineer, James Eads who was using the same strategy while building a bridge over the Mississippi at St. Louis. The caissons, pictured above were a hollow structure that was lowered to the bottom of the river, then filled with compressed air to drive the water out and allow the laborers to dig deeper into the waterway's floor. The problem that was soon found out on Eads' project is that workers began to get sick from their exposure to the compressed air. Some even died. They were suffering from what later would be termed "The Bends". What's interesting is that Roebling visited Eads' site before starting on his project and was aware of the problems he was facing, but because of fierce competition, pride, and distances not easily overcome, the men did not share notes and details about their experiences. This isolation exacerbated the problem and led to far more suffering than necessary. When I picture these workers far below the surface, working in isolation in these stuffy enclosures, I think about teachers and schools. Traditionally, teachers and schools have been just as isolated as these laborers, but in today's environment, that isolation is no longer necessary. Because of modern tools (video tape, Internet to name just two) we can learn about each others' successes and failures and all improve because of it. The problem is that too many of us are satisfied to wallow in our lonely state for a host of reasons. When we struggle with students who aren't learning, we should eagerly seek out teachers and schools who have had breakthroughs with similar students. Or, we can learn the hard way and the slow way and lose a few more kids in the process.