Think Differently and Deeply Volume 2

The Transformational Classroom: How Research in Educational Neuroscience Enhances Teaching and Learning

VOLUME 2

Foreword DR. MARK MCDANIEL..............................................................................................................................................

Introduction GRANT LICHTMAN...................................................................................................................................................

I. Research-Informed Teaching at St. Andrew’s GLENN WHITMAN....................................................................................................................................................

II. Your Brain on Ukele

DR. AMY WOOLEY ...............................................................................................................................

III. How I Teach A.P. U.S. History (Now)

ALEX HAIGHT .................................................................................................................................

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Throughout this resource, the following icons will indicate important aspects of each teacher’s instructional practice:

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IV. Meta-Cognition: A Pathway to Intrinsic Motivation

.................................................................................................................................. 12 V. Making It Stick Better AMANDA FREEMAN AND PHYLLIS ROBINSON .................................................................................... 14 VI. In Spit We Trust DR. LUKE RINNE ............................................................................................................................. 16 VII. Making Better Public and Private School Teachers: The Teach for America/St. Andrew’s Partnership AMY HELMS ................................................................................................................................... 18 MARIA DIAZ

VIII. Lessons Learned in Cambridge: Two Research Fellows Reflect

BOBBY RADECKI ’16 AND CHRISTINE LEWIS ........................................................................................

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KNIHT YLTNEREFFID DNA YLPEED IX. Happiness and School Achievement

DR. CHRISTINA HINTON AND DR. IAN KELLEHER ..................................................................................

X. St. Andrew’s, Yale and My Prefrontal Cortex

AARON SIBARIUM ’14 .....................................................................................................................

XI. Mathway to the Brain

JUDY KEE AND GREGG PONITCH .......................................................................................................

XII. From Grant to Great Works

EVAN BROOKE AND SUSHEELA ROBINSON ..........................................................................................

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TECHNOLOGY

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XIII. The Differentiated Classroom

.............................................................................................................................. 30 XIV. Teach Me and I’ll Teach You RODNEY GLASGOW .......................................................................................................................... 32 XV. Let Them Play (Part II) NICOLE STARACE .......................................................................................................................... 34 XVI. We All Need Executive Functions DR . IAN KELLEHER ......................................................................................................................... 36 XVII. One For All and All For One SAMANTHA SPEIER ’95 AND KRISTIN CUDDIHY ................................................................................... 38 XVIII. An Epistemic Nudge SUNG HEE KIM

TROY DAHLKE......................................................................................................................................................

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Afterword: Research and Relationships:

The Science of Great Teaching and Learning

42 Endnotes.. ...................................................................................................................................................... 44 ROBERT KOSASKY................................................................................................................................................

www.thecttl.org ONLINE

Visit The Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning online at www.thecttl.org

Google, Shoes, and Inquiry: How a 21st Century Mind Researches – Sarah Stonesifer and Scott Corkran

A Snapshot or a Snapchat of English Teaching in the 21st Century – Christina Chalmers Assessment and the Learning Brain:What the Research Says – Dr. Mariale Hardiman and Glenn Whitman What Student Self-Advocacy Really Looks Like – William Feigert ’16 and Joy Reeves ’18

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The Transformational Classroom: How Research in Educational Neuroscience Enhances Teaching and Learning

VOLUME 2

Foreword MARK MCDANIEL, PH.D

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Professor of Psychology and Co-Director of CIRCLE

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the lead article of this second volume of Think Differently and Deeply, Glenn Whitman has the reader imagine a medical doctor indicating that he has great instinct and passion about how the body works but has never formally studied it. Whitman is making the point that most of us would likely be disinclined to seek treatment from this physician, yet many educators and school leaders proceed through their career with a similar approach to their educational practice. That is, educational practice too often has been rooted in lore, intuition, and tradition. But, from my perspective, the landscape is changing. Since the publication of our book, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, we daily hear from teachers across the country who are deeply interested in and committed to informing their educational practice with evidence from the learning-, cognitive-, and neuro- sciences.

These are certainly positive developments, but they must be paralleled with a sustained and committed effort in education research and new models for conducting such research.

To implement evidence-based educational practice, teachers and educational leaders must similarly be able to appeal to a rich foundation of solid, well-conducted educational research. Unfortunately, for a number of reasons, this scientific foundation has been slow to accumulate. One key reason is that conducting strong educational research is arguably more challenging than conducting medical research because of additional constraints in the educational context.

First, unlike medical research, the gold standard of randomized, double-blind experiments, in which teachers and students would be randomly assigned to different instructional conditions and in which the teachers and the students would be “blind” to the treatments is extremely difficult, though not impossible, to implement.

Second, some teachers have told me that the evidence that is most convincing to them comes from research conducted in authentic classroom contexts, more so than from laboratory experiments that do not capture the many complexities of the classroom. The difficulty is that classroom research cannot be conducted as in the laboratory, where the researcher has control over scheduling participants, implementing the manipulations and collecting the data. School administrators, teachers, and parents (often) must be fully cooperative partners in the research.

Nevertheless, the kind of research sketched above is beginning to gain steam. To succeed and flourish, researchers, administrators, teachers, and school systems need to accept that developing the evidence base necessitates a collaborative, community effort. Unlike their research in the laboratory, university researchers alone cannot conduct classroombased studies. Instructors and discipline experts who are implementing innovations in their classrooms and seek to know whether these innovations are working to increase learning cannot solely shoulder the burden of designing and conducting appropriate classroom-based studies.

A new model is needed that includes developing institutional entities to promote and sustain collaborative efforts among researchers, teachers and administrators. It is encouraging that this model is being realized at new university centers such as Washington University’s Center for Integrative Research in Cognition, Learning, and Education (CIRCLE).

It is being realized at forward looking schools like St. Andrew’s, which has armed their educational mission with their Center for Transformative Teaching & Learning. The fruits of St. Andrew’s efforts toward evidence-based education and contributing to the evidencebase itself can be seen in the articles that fill Volume 2 of Think Differently and Deeply.

These articles increase my optimism that these emerging collaborative efforts herald a century in which the evidence base for informing educational issues becomes robust and in which our educational practices are truly based on that evidence.

Mark A. McDaniel, Ph.D. Professor of Psychology and Co-Director of CIRCLE Co-Author, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning Washington University in St. Louis

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Introduction GRANT LICHTMAN

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Educators

and schools around the world are evolving to meet the needs of a rapidly changing world. That simple statement is driven by the mission of education to prepare our students as best we can for a future they will inhabit that is vastly less knowable, less predictable, and likely more ambiguous than anything humankind has seen in the past. In order to meet that core mission, can we possibly keep teaching the same things in substantially the same modalities that we have for decades, centuries, or millennia?

Over the past two years, I have visited more than 100 public and private schools across the United States to uncover what innovative teaching and learning looks like.

In October of 2013, I found myself at St. Andrew’s, where I observed a remarkable understanding and intentional use of research in Mind, Brain, and Education Science to inform their teaching practice and enhance student achievement.

Mind, Brain, and Education Science uses modern neuroscience and psychology to help us understand how to create and enhance student engagement and performance, design authentic assessment tools which students understand, and forge an environment where students see themselves as able agents of their own learning. While St. Andrew’s and its Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning is certainly enhancing the quality of teaching and learning at the school, what they offer the larger educational community is a replicable model for not only research-informed teaching but also of school/university partnerships. It is rare to see such collaboration amongst teachers, researchers, and a school community eager to learn more about what is working and what can be improved through original, school-based research. St. Andrew’s has forged a mutually beneficial collaboration with university researchers who are leaders in the field of Mind, Brain and Education Science, most notably researchers at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education who lead Research Schools International and at The Johns Hopkins Graduate School of Education.

The CTTL does not just read the latest research and wait to see what takes hold. They have created a constant-improvement cycle that keeps track of a neurodevelopmental analysis regarding the strengths and weakness of each student, so they know how each student learns best. Moreover, the Preschool through 12th grade faculty are challenged each year to enhance their teaching using research on how the brain works and learns, something they call the “10% challenge”.

But maybe the larger importance of the CTTL is its willingness to share its results with the broader educational community. In this second volume of Think Differently and Deeply, you will find an incredibly rich array of ideas and practical applications for how to apply the lessons of modern Mind, Brain, and Education Science to directly improve the learning experience of individual students across a wide array of ages and subject areas.

Will we, as John Dewey advocated more than 100 years ago, prepare our students for their future, not for our past? In this volume we find research-informed strategies that all educators can use in our constant push to best prepare our students for a future that is already here.

Grant Lichtman (@GrantLichtman) is the author of #EdJourney: A Roadmap to the Future of Education.

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Research-Informed Teaching at St. Andrew’s GLENN WHITMAN

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esearch shows that the single most important factor in developing each student’s potential is the quality of his or her teacher. A highly skilled teacher, whether in front of a class of 15 or 30, can have a profound impact on the academic achievement of his or her students.1 But two significant gaps currently exist in most teachers’ professional toolkits: (1) More than 75% of classroom teachers and school leaders lack any formal training, defined as at least a one-week class, in how the brain actually learns. 2(2) Most teachers and school leaders have little experience translating and using research to transform teacher quality and student achievement.

There is no question that teaching is a challenging profession made increasingly difficult because of the complexity of the brain and the growing number of tools available to teachers, school leaders and students. But the most important tool that each student brings to their learning is their brain. While a student can claim they forgot their homework or notebook, they can never say that they forgot the “organ of learning.” But even with their brain, there is no assurance that learning will happen. Deeper learning for students requires deeper learning for educators and that learning must be informed by research in the field of Mind, Brain, and Education (MBE) Science.

Imagine for a moment a medical doctor coming into a consultation for your upcoming surgery and saying, “I have

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great instinct, passion, and love for your heart, but I have never formally studied it.”

Would you choose this doctor to conduct the procedure? Probably not. However, it is with great instinct, passion, love, as well as idealism, that most teachers and school leaders arrive at and proceed through their careers as educators. What teachers and school leaders lack is an understanding of how the brain receives, filters, and uses old and new knowledge and experiences.

From the outset, the working hypothesis of the Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning has been that the more teachers know the research in the field of MBE Science, the better able they will be to design their classes and work with each student—an educational mindset that is now supported by research.3 Yes, teachers must know the content of the grade level or course they teach. But content pedagogy is equally important, making how you teach as critical as what you teach.

The CTTL recognizes that teaching is both an art and a science. The best teachers are artists in how they design their classes and how they engage, challenge, and inspire students. They have a high EQ (Emotional Quotient) and high IQ (Intelligent Quotient). But not enough attention has been given to the science of teaching as a necessary component to inform the art of teaching. Mind, Brain, and Education Science does three things for each preschool through 12th grade teacher at St. Andrew’s. First, it validates some existing pedagogical practices, and

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even what might be considered traditional (or “old school”) teaching practices. Second, it informs thinking about the need for curriculum and instructional change. Third, it transforms teaching. For the educator who claims, “I have been doing it for years and it works,” I often consider the adage, “In G-d we trust, everyone else bring data” or call upon my inner Ronald Reagan who once declared, “Trust, but verify”.

The use of research in schools comes in three different forms, but it must begin with teachers having the mindset that they are in fact researchers. First, there is what we call “ready-made” research. These are studies that already exist in scholarly journals but often do not get into the hands of teachers. The important thing to keep in mind is that research does not have to be new to be valuable to teaching and learning today. A great example of this is the primacy-recency effect (sometimes referred to as the Serial Position Effect).4 I first heard of this research 15 years into my teaching career and the research itself is 40 years old. But all teachers should use it to inform how they shape their use of class time around the research that says students will remember best what they learn first and they will remember second best what they learn last. Therefore, merely going over homework or taking attendance during the first moments of class is a waste of a prime learning opportunity.

The second type of research is

original research studies. This type of research is fertile ground for the growth of school/university partnerships.

Schools and universities need one another to conduct original research as well as to incubate new strategies within authentic learning environments with actual students. It is why St. Andrew’s sought out faculty like Dr. Mariale Hardiman at The Johns Hopkins University School of Education and Dr. Kurt Fischer5 at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education. It led St. Andrew’s to collect saliva samples from our students to study stress, peer relationships and academic performance, and to examine how happiness shapes student motivation and academic achievement. The results from these original studies inform curriculum evaluation and change at St. Andrew’s and are shared with the larger educational community through publications and CTTL workshops.

The third type of research is “action research” designed by an individual teacher (or small group) with a class. This is a great way to teach students genuine research methodology, to witness “the scientific method” in action. While such research will not be published in scholarly journals, it does provide teachers with additional data to make decisions about teaching and learning strategies. For example, the one-to-one laptop program at St. Andrew’s raises questions of what “traditional” methods for learning remain better than what technology can do. Some teachers have chosen to study whether note taking by hand is better or worse for memory consolidation than note taking with a laptop or iPad. They spilt their classes into a control and test group and have each take notes in a certain way and then assesses what they retained.

Currently, the research continues to point toward note taking by hand as more beneficial for retaining information. An

additional benefit for schools that have cultures of action research is the enhanced professionalization of the craft of teaching.

Being researchers changes the way teachers perceive themselves as professionals and it is a powerful form of professional development, particularly when it involves pairs or cohorts of teachers that may span across grade levels or disciplines. The research mindset it engenders is a key part of teacher training and practice in Finland, and is linked to being a key part of that country’s educational success.6 Why has research-informed teaching worked at St. Andrew’s? It begins with 100% of the faculty being expected to continually reflect and improve on their craft. As one colleague proclaimed, “it’s part of our culture, our professional DNA.” Second, having a common language and framework allows for more efficient observation of student work and communication of teaching and learning strategies informed by research.

Third, it is not enough for teachers to know the content of their courses or grade level. What is equally important is how to deliver that content in a brain-friendly way, in a manner that is engaging and intrinsically motivates students to take risks, experience success and setbacks, but use timely feedback to move their learning forward and deeper. For example, every teacher wants the content and skills they teach to stick. Research in the field of MBE Science, especially in the area of memory, provides important and underutilized strategies that often run counter to how parents, who are an integral part of each student’s learning support system, studied during their academic journeys.

Finally, it is the fundamental belief, supported by research, that the brain is changeable (often referred to as brain plasticity), and that teachers are brain changers. Imagine what is possible for deepened and sustained learning for today’s students if more teachers and parents had access to this research?

Research in MBE Science will verify some classic teaching practices but repudiate others—with evidence—and it will offer new strategies and frameworks.

It will change the professional practice and professional development of teachers.

It is the next frontier for teacher and school leadership training,7 and the true beneficiaries are the students. Just ask those at St. Andrew’s.

Glenn Whiteman (gwhitman@saes.org, @ gwhitmancttl) is the Director of Transformative Teaching and Learning (www.thecttl.org) and co-author of the forthcoming book Neuroteach.

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Your Brain on Ukulele AMY WOOLEY, PH.D

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n his 1973 book, How Musical is Man, the great British ethnomusicologist, John Blacking called music “Humanly Organized Sound,” with the concluding section of his book entitled “Soundly Organized Humanity.”1 We have long understood that music makes us more human. Recently, driven by lots of stunning research, the conversation has moved to how music makes us smarter humans in every way: emotionally, socially, physically and intellectually.2 This is especially true if we humans learn music at a young age, when the brain is at its most plastic. The research tells us that these advantages remain with us throughout our lives, whether we continue to study music or not. My favorite new metaphor for this phenomenon is that playing a musical instrument is like “a fullbody workout for the brain.”3 At St. Andrew’s, we began a ukulele project in 2010-11 which is now in its fifth year. The students love their ukuleles and are doing extraordinary work, from experiencing music from world music cultures to attaining musical literacy to composing and performing blues improvisations. I am grateful for the support at St. Andrew’s for this project and am excited to publish what we are doing.

Why Ukulele?

Your first question might be, “why the ukulele?” The answer is simple yet deep. Ukulele is a real instrument that is popular, inexpensive, accessible, and

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leads to other instruments. Learning it involves reading notation, tablature, chord symbols, and scale patterns. It plays both melody and chords, and coordinated activities like singing and playing, as well as ensemble playing are possible. It is a four-string plucked lute. The guitar is a sixstring plucked lute and 100% of ukulele knowledge transfers to guitar, as well as bass guitar. Violin is a four-string bowed lute so the transition is fairly natural from ukulele to violin, viola and even cello.

Now that we know the profound cognitive advantages of learning to play a musical instrument, and the ways in which this affects every aspect of student learning, it is more important than ever to find a way to deliver this cognitive bump to our students. The ukulele is a destination and a gateway, and provides beautiful, delicious fruit for the brain, while making music class dynamic and fun.

The ukulele project brings several factors together to create this new kind of music curriculum. As an ethnomusicologist with a Ph.D. from UCLA (where the field was founded) trained in several traditional world music cultures (folk and classical), I have found that many of the answers to teaching music to diverse learners can be found in world cultures, if you know where to look, and what you are seeking. Each lesson contains these elements:

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1. Cracking the code: hearing what you see 2. Groove: feeling the beat, internalizing, expressing 3. Hear: processing the language of music 4. Play: practicing and performing music 5. Understand: finding patterns and understanding structure, playing several ways 6. Earworm: accessing musical memory, creating new musical memories 7. Joyful, joyful!: choosing satisfying music, the fun of mastery 8. Social: identity, ensemble and coordinated performance 9. All that jazz: choice, variation, improvisation So why has the ukulele project been a success? I want to touch on a few key elements from the above list that are incorporated in it.

1. Crack the code: hearing what you see Musical literacy connects ears and eyes.

Learning to read music in tablature, with numbers, letter names and/or Western notation needs to be supported by aural feedback. The two easiest ways to do this are using an earworm, and providing aural support for practice a practice mp3 on a class website or through a Learning Management System (LMS).

6. Earworm: accessing musical memory, creating new musical memories When I was teaching at an independent elementary school in Los Angeles, I

overheard our science teacher explaining why fruit is delicious and beautiful. It is so that the animals that eat it covet it so dearly that they pick it up and carry it someplace special to eat it, dropping the seeds far from the source, thus scattering the seeds, ensuring the propagation and survival of the fruit species. I applied this theory to explain why some folk songs like “Simple Gifts” and “Au Clair de la Lune” survive for generations, pop songs like “Stand by Me” and “La Bamba” become standards, and some classical tunes such as Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” are perennially part of the popular lexicon. I will also add that these tunes are easy to carry. Use this delicious, beautiful fruit year after year, and students will be excited to learn “Sakura” on the ukulele, because it is an old friend from the recorder repertoire.

9. All that jazz: choice, variation, improvisation Music cuts a deep groove in memory and we can harness the ear worm in music education.4 A sophisticated example of the earworm in action is jazz improvisation. In order to play a nice jazz solo, the musician must “hear” the original tune in her head as she comments on it by improvising around it. This is why jazz has a standard repertoire—improvising on a familiar tune is what it’s all about. Of course, this kind of sophisticated brain activity helps develop executive function.5 The Ukulele Blues Lesson The 12-bar blues is a standardized chord

pattern that is a common language in blues, rock and jazz. Involving only three chords, it provides structure for musicians to play together, and a framework for improvisation. The vocabulary for blues improvisation is the blues scale. Scales are great on a ukulele and guitar, because they involve a memorized finger pattern on the fretboard. This finger pattern is moveable, so once learned, it can work in any key.

It is the Holy Grail of becoming a master lead player. Once students realize this, their excitement can barely be contained.

I teach the blues unit near the end of the school year because improvisation requires a level of musical mastery to be effective (and even affecting), and also because once they learn the Holy Grail finger pattern, it is difficult for many students to resist playing around with it all the time, but joyfully, so it is worth it.

The chaos gives way to a full, coordinated ensemble experience when the 12-bar blues is performed in the classroom.

The entire class has learned the meaning and structure of the blues. Students with good groove anchor the group by playing the three-chord pattern in a steady beat.

Some students take turns singing their original verses, and everyone gets a turn improvising with the blues scale.

Everything we hope to accomplish in a class lesson is there.

Amy Wooley (awooley@saes.org) teaches Music to students in Grades 3-12 and was a CTTL Teacher Research Fellow in 2014-2015.

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How I Teach AP United States History (Now) ALEX HAIGHT

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remember the panic I felt early in my first year of teaching Advanced Placement U.S. History in 2002 when I walked into my classroom one Monday morning to find the notes that I had arduously written on every available piece of chalkboard had been erased. Copying the notes took me an hour and a half on Friday afternoon, and I felt good that both of my Monday block period classes (80 minutes) were prepped. The lesson plan was simple; I would read the notes as students copied them, adding some pithy anecdotes along the way to pique their interest. After all, this is largely how I had learned history in both high school and college. But with notes gone, what was I going to do? Who was responsible for sabotaging my students’ learning in such an egregious way?

I have come to realize that the saboteur was me.

While the perpetrator was never found, I think back to that time with a good degree of embarrassment and guilt. The information dump pedagogy (sometimes code named “drill and kill” by teachers) that I employed early on in my AP teaching career was more about me than my students. I lectured to cover content.

It wasn’t as much about what the students learned as much as me being able to say “I covered that.” For the students with excellent focus, attention, and memory, it worked. But for many, if not most of my students, these extended lectures resulted

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in glazed looks, boredom, and little recall of historical content, and ran counter to the research in how students learn best.

In the last 12 years, thanks to maturity, professional development, and training in Mind, Brain, and Education Science, my philosophy and teaching has evolved. First, I lecture far less, and when I do, I follow the concentration rule, never lasting more than 20 minutes. Lecturing still has its place in the classroom, but must be used cautiously. If my job is in part to prepare students for a college history class, many of which are still lecture based, then I need to prepare my students for this methodology. When I do lecture, I give students a skeleton of the content on the Smartboard and make the notes available for them afterwards.

But I have largely moved away from notes and lectures in my class, opting instead for more active learning. Class discussions have supplanted lecture, and our reading of Howard Zinn or Paul Johnson never ceases to engender spirited debate. I try as best I can to provoke students by discussing perspectives they have not heard, and at times may not want to hear. I have found attaching emotion, including antagonism, to a discussion improves memory retention and engagement. I am lucky, however, that I average about 15 students per AP class.

This allows everyone to participate on a regular basis. For those students who are more reluctant, I will mix in a Fishbowl

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Working in a group allows students to pool their knowledge, and it’s been my observation that students are better learners when they report on their work. discussion or use “poker chips” (which they must spend before the end of class by participating in the discussion) to draw more reticent participants into the mix.

I have also used more group work. I will give groups (2 to 5 students) a primary document to analyze, an historian’s perspective (historiography) to summarize, or specific content to report on. Working in a group allows students to pool their knowledge, and it’s been my observation that students are better learners when they report on their work. I have also used more on the spot 1v1 debates—asking students to argue for a particular point of view, either as an historian or person (ie.

W.E.B. DuBois vs. Booker T. Washington).

I have also employed more strategies to improve memory retention. Like the breadth of all classes at St. Andrew’s, AP U.S. History demands a lot of each student’s memory. MBE Science suggests that active retrieval and self-testing aids memory consolidation. As pointed out in “The Critical Importance of Retrieval for Learning,”1 a growing body of research suggests that actively retrieving

information (self-testing) produces significant long-term benefits for learning compared with passive studying (merely reading one’s class notes or textbook). Too often, when we ask students to reflect on their study strategies, they say they simply reread class notes. Training students to build regular self-testing into their study strategies will help them embed material into their long-term memory.2 With the old adage “If you don’t use it, you lose it” in mind, (an adage now supported by research), I encourage students to study for tests and quizzes by breaking content into themes (the brain likes patterns) and repetitively trying to remember specific events, people, documents and perspectives associated with it. I will also often start class asking students to spend two or three minutes to write down everything they know about a certain content area (for example— Populism). I will then ask students to share what they remembered, allowing students to add content they did not readily recall to their list.

Synthesizing history by making

connections to other periods of time is another strategy I have used to aid memory and attention. I have found that linking history to current events not only expands students’ horizons but makes what they are studying relevant and applicable to their lives. I can recall a particularly lively discussion about Freedmen during Reconstruction and the events in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. Was the failure to follow through on “40 acres and a mule” responsible for the racial divide in America today? What would America, and Ferguson, look like today had the Compromise of 1877 not taken place and racial advancement had been allowed to progress rather than thwarted for 90 years? Links such as these have resulted in some of the most interesting and engaging conversations that I have had.

Finally, I now use a greater variety of assessments to check student knowledge.

Because it is an AP class, I obviously still use multiple-choice questions and essays.

It is crucial that students practice these types of questions in preparation for the exam. But I mix in the occasional partner quiz or class quiz on the Smartboard, or have students form a human timeline, because novelty enhances attention and motivation.

Every May, my students sit for the AP exam, which in the last year has been overhauled to reflect a move away from rote memory and towards thematic learning and historical thinking skills. As students approach the day of the exam their stress rises, and we know from research that negative stress will ultimately create a barrier for performance. However, using the first eight months of the class to devise strategies and to find opportunities to retrieve and use information is the goal of my teaching. In the short run, students define success in this class by their score on the AP exam, and fortunately students tend to score highly on the exam. But I would also like to think that the success of this class can be measured by their passion for the subject and performance in their college history courses. The bar in AP U.S. History is high, but I recognize that students will take many different pathways and strategies to learning the required content and skills. It is my job to make sure I offer as many researchinformed strategies and pathways as possible so that all students can best learn the history and perform on the exam.

Alex Haight (ahaight@saes.org) teaches History and is the Varsity Boys Soccer Coach at St Andrew’s.

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Metacognition: A Pathway to Motivation MARIA R. DIAZ

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etacognition has become a buzzword in the education community. Although this concept has been pondered upon extensively over the last few decades in colleges and universities, it has only recently started to find a tangible shape in our elementary and secondary schools.

Metacognition refers to the ability to think about your own thought process.

The belief is that through metacognitive activities, students become cognizant of the way their mind works, and are capable, as a result, to come up with strategies to deepen their learning.

Many studies document the impact that this kind of intentional reflection has on students’ progress.2 Furthermore, recent research has also contemplated differences in the physical make-up of the brains of individuals who regularly engage in metacognitive thinking. As reported in Science magazine, a group of researchers at University College London explored the neural basis of metacognitive behavior by devising an experiment that compared task performance and the accuracy of self-assessment.3 Through MRI studies, they discovered that those individuals who more accurately assessed their own performance had more grey matter in the prefrontal portion of the brain, linking for the first time physical brain differences to level of metacognition. These findings address the question: “What happens to our brains when we think about

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our thinking?” This study validates the relevance of metacognitive behavior from a neuroeducational perspective, yet it also reinforces the correlation, personally observed over years of teaching, between self-awareness, introspection, and motivation.

Learning is primarily a cognitive function, and it entails a deep and conscious involvement in the perception, processing, and organization of knowledge. The mind is a dynamic agent in the experience of learning, and the student is therefore engaged in his or her own education. Learning is a committed and purposeful act. The student can engage in this process (perception/process/ organization) thanks to the existence of prior knowledge.

From birth, the learner has been exposed to experiences and interactions that instruct their understanding of reality.

Learning is a process of ever changing structures: from “anchoring ideas,” the learner establishes connections and relations, as they build their cognitive structure. I believe that people interact with the environment in terms or categories for which they determine their own rules of selection. Therefore, people go beyond the information given; people construct knowledge. I also believe in the constructive nature of the learning process where learners create knowledge as they seek meaning and interpret their own experiences. In fact, the new knowledge

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is never a replication of some objective reality, but rather a personal, meaningful understanding.

The representation of the learner as a goal-oriented and intentional agent highlights the role of metacognition, inclusive of emotions, in the definition of learning. When speaking of metacognition, I refer to the awareness (a cognitive factor) and the sense of control (an affective factor) that we have over our abilities and ourselves. It is the affective component that constitutes the root of the motivation discussion and reveals the power of metacognition in promoting engagement, participation and persistence of the student in the task.1 Success in school comes from both cognitive abilities and the willingness to exercise them. The student’s decision to engage in meaningful and significant learning involves the integration of multiple sources of information concerning the value of the task, the school environment, and the self. What is most relevant for the student’s motivation is not just the objective chances of success, but the subjective and personal appraisal that she makes of her chances of success in relation to her abilities.

Psychologist Albert Bandura had already defined in the 1970’s the concept of self-efficacy as the belief in one’s ability to succeed in specific situations. In his theory of self-efficacy he distinguishes two related components: actual capacities of the individual, and personal estimates of competence. Judgments of self-efficacy are critical to the student involvement in the task because they determine the amount of effort likely to be expended So, what conditions make a student acknowledge her capacities and be willing to exercise them? This is a crucial question as cognition is mediated by emotions, and intellectual growth is dependent upon the subjective interpretation that the learner makes of herself. If a student has a low sense of personal efficacy, they are more inclined to put little effort into the task; expectation of failure becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Experiences of success are not sufficient to break the cycle of learnedhelplessness. To do this, they need to be tied to the learner’s actions.

Metacognitive abilities have the capacity to turn this equation around. When metacognition is introduced in the classroom, students are guided towards thinking about how they can best learn. Through these exercises of reflection and introspection students evaluate their own thinking process and develop

When metacognition is introduced in the classroom, students are guided towards thinking about how they can best learn. Through these exercises of reflection and introspection students evaluate their own thinking process and develop personalized strategies. The resulting academic success is now associated to personal effort, and attributed to the student’s ability. This in turn strengthens judgments of personal competence, and fosters self-esteem. personalized strategies. The resulting academic success is now associated to personal effort, and attributed to the student’s ability. This in turn strengthens judgments of personal competence, and fosters self-esteem. More importantly, these experiences of success produce a readjustment of expectations, so that students take reasonable risks in future learning experiences as they are more willing to engage. It is this new attribution of controllability over the task what will generate participation and commitment to the learning process.

Consequently, metacognition empowers the self, generates the impulse to act, and sustains effort. Ultimately, a habit of mind that encompasses metacognitive behaviors lights up the pathway to motivation and cultivates more independent, selfconfident, and self-aware learners.

Motivating one’s students to learn is a daily goal for each of our classrooms.

The good news is that motivation is responsive to explicit interventions from educators. Teachers can impact students’ perceptions by designing attainable challenges, provide informational feedback, and, most importantly, explicitly instruct on metacognitive behavior.

Furthermore, ability and intelligence switch from a fixed endowed quality to an expandable capacity, which is controllable through effort and appropriate learning strategies. The development of these selfregulatory skills leads to the ultimate goal: a self-directed learner.

Maria Diaz (mdiaz@saes.org) is the Head of the Foreign Language Department at St. Andrew’s and a CTTL workshop facilitator.

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Making it Stick Better AMANDA FREEMAN AND PHYLLIS ROBINSON

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iology and History. Two high school courses that seem very disparate from one another. One is all about microscopes and critters, while the other is all about dates and battles. Or at least that’s what conventional wisdom would have you believe. But when teachers at St. Andrew’s consider these courses, we find that we have more in common than you might think. While the subject matter is very different, a common thread between them is memory. How can we help students learn the facts and concepts that exist in each course both for and beyond the summative test or project?

We can think of memory as creating pegs in our students’ brains on which they hang the specific pieces of information that they read or discover. The real trick is for the students to retrieve what they have learned; in fact, the human brain can easily learn a lot of material very quickly –it’s the retrieval that’s so challenging.

So how do we help our students become more capable retrievers? For us it began by looking at the research, in particular, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. Memory, like all brain functions, is not isolated to one region of the brain—and without it, learning does not happen. What follows is how we have translated research on memory to our respective disciplines, both at the Advanced Placement and nonAP levels.

Illusion of Learning: For years we promised students that if they would just

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review their active reading highlights or notes, they would succeed and demonstrate mastery. But research shows how misguided that is, because familiarity with material tends to result in the illusion that you have learned it. Research shows that when students have to pull information out of their brains, they remember material better than if they re-read the information.

So now in biology, our students interact with the material in order to make it stick better. They build electronic flashcards using Quizlet for vocabulary recall, orally explain diagrams to their family members, quiz each other, rewrite their notes in a novel format, or use their notes packet to generate review sheets. Such strategies cross-over into history as well. Students in history class “self-test” by writing out essential names, dates, and ideas on a blank sheet of paper without any reference to their books or notes so that they can see how much they remember. Then they go back with their text open to fill in the gaps.

These active retrieval strategies that are designed to be “deliberately difficult” are so much more than simply, and passively, “looking over their notes.”

Priming the Brain for Learning: Research shows that when students try to pull information from their brain before they learn it, they will remember it better when they have learned it. For example, students were asked “What made the French Revolution revolutionary?” before they had read the chapter. They had to generate informa-

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tion about the movements leading up to the French Revolution, based on their prior knowledge, and predict why it was such a game changer. Even if they got the wrong answers, which they probably should, having not studied the French Revolution very much, they were priming their brains to be aware of incoming information. In biology class, students are asked to predict what will happen next, be it in a metabolic pathway diagram or by predicting the effect of doubling the volume of yeast in a fermentation experiment. All of these in-class strategies keep students engaged in the learning process and have been shown to help our students retain what we want them to remember better.

Assessment: Research shows that frequent low-stakes or no stakes formative assessments help students recall information more effectively than almost any other study technique. After learning about DNA replication, for example, students close their notes and take a 3-question mini-quiz on what they just learned. Or on Fridays we might have a quiz that could be on any material we have studied so far this year.

Since the stakes are low, wrong answers simply alert a student that she or he needs to focus more on that area, but the grade does not torpedo a student’s average. It also alerts us to where we might need to focus additional teaching. Research shows that better learning happens when students frequently engage in low-stakes quizzing because they have a better sense of what they know and don’t know due to the retrieval practice. Also the act of retrieval helps students memorize the material for future use, with multiple “spaced” attempts at this helping even more.

Success Stories: In biology, students spend considerable time learning about various phyla (groups) of animals in the

Animal Kingdom. A lot of vocabulary and a lack of familiarity with the huge variety of living creatures in the world makes this a difficult topic for ninth graders. To help students keep the their memory pegs clean and connected, they are encouraged to make concept maps for review. They are provided with vocabulary words in large type. Students cut these out and arrange them to reflect terms and concepts that are unique to each animal group, and then tape them onto large sheets of construction paper in a way that makes sense to them.

Finally, they write in definitions, additional terms or ideas, and helpful memory tips.

The whole process IS their review, and what they create is essentially a review sheet. In fact, a student really won’t learn well from just looking at another student’s concept map—it’s the making of the map that helps a student figure out what they know and what they still need to learn. The first student who did this many years ago went from earning a C on tests to earning As. In history, research recommends manipulating course content out of sequence in some way in order to “make it stick.” My first action was to try to attack the summer reading in that way; students had read the first volume of the Norton History of Modern Europe on the Renaissance and Reformation. Students were assigned a country and had to follow that country throughout the book and tell the story of that country in the period of the Renaissance and Reformation.

The next step was to have students create an actual timeline that runs around the walls of our classroom. The country that the students had been assigned for their presentation on the summer reading was the country they would have to represent on the timeline. They came up with the idea of each country being a separate

color. The timeline serves a multitude of purposes. Ideally, when they are taking the AP exam they will be able to shut their eyes and imagine where events are on the timeline. Having each country be a different color allows for students to see patterns on the timeline and, again, see and speak the narrative of that country. Finally, the action of deciding what goes on the timeline gives rise to great conversation and thinking. By associating a memory with a specific place in the room, students were creating memory palaces they could use to store this information. The novelty, choice and personal buy-in of this activity also deepened student engagement, which aided their learning.

The Teacher Researcher: Student’s get the novel experience of watching us be happily immersed doing something we routinely ask them to do—research. This is a topic fundamental to both our subjects. In our work on memory, as good researchers do, we try something, observe, reflect on what worked and what didn’t, tweak things, and try again. We model good research practice with, in front of, and for our students.

Conclusion: What’s our take-away message? We intentionally apply research about memory in our classroom teaching.

In addition, we share it with the students so that they can use those strategies to retrieve information and be more successful. Students in A.P. European History or Biology may never take another Western Civilization or Life Science course in their lives, but it’s our goal that they remember these classes and what they learned about the world around them. Applying this research is a winning strategy for teachers on a more personal level as well. Why did we get into this profession? We love working with young people, but we also love our content and crave the opportunity to share the big ideas and the details. Translating educational neuroscience into the classroom gives us more opportunities to share our passions in a real and lasting way with our students.

We all win.

Phyllis Robinson (probinson@saes.org) teaches Biology and was a CTTL Teacher Research Fellow in 2013-2014.

Amanda Freeman (afreeman@saes.org) is the Head of the History Department at St. Andrew’s and was a CTTL Teacher Research Fellow in 2014-2015.

Much of the memory research in this piece is taken from Peter Brown, Mark McDaniel and Henry Roediger III’s Making It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning.

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In Spit We Trust DR. LUKE RINNE

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n 2012, the St. Andrew’s faculty invited researchers from the Johns Hopkins University Schools of Education and Medicine to collaborate on a groundbreaking study with the following question: What happens when students spit in class? Duh, they go to the principal’s office, right? Why do we need a scientific study to tell us that? Okay, so there are a few caveats.

First, students didn’t spit just anywhere—rather, they “drooled” into small plastic vials, which we then took to a laboratory at Johns Hopkins. Why on earth would we do this? It turns out that scientists can actually learn a lot from spit. Substances in saliva provide valuable information about stress levels, and we wanted to study how students’ stress levels in school relate to characteristics of their peer social networks, their academic engagement, and their peer reputations for academic success. We measured these latter variables using surveys of engagement and questionnaires in which students named their closest friends and also “nominated” peers as exemplars of strong performance in math and English/language arts.

The substance in saliva we were most interested in is called cortisol—it’s a hormone that plays an important role in the regulation of a number of biological systems. For instance, cortisol relates to awakening responses in the morning. Of particular interest to us, however, is the relationship between cortisol and stress.

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In stressful situations—particularly those that are uncontrollable or involve social-evaluative threats—the secretion of cortisol increases blood sugar, generating energy to respond to the threat at hand.

While this is adaptive in the short term, the extra energy comes at a cost—cortisol suppresses the immune system to make more energy available, and chronic stress can produce long-term problems for both mental and physical health.

So what does this have to do with school? Well, we think stress levels might be tied to social relationships, school engagement, and academic achievement in a variety of complex ways. Certain kinds of social relationships (those surrounding “popularity contests”) could exacerbate stress, while other types of relationships (stable, supportive friendships) could mitigate the negative effects of stress. Active engagement in school (participating in class, exerting effort on academic tasks) often improves performance, but it also opens students up to evaluation by peers or teachers. This could feed back into stress levels, for better or worse. Further, if peer relationships affect responses to stress, this could contribute to the perpetuation of “cycles” of positive or negative social and academic outcomes.

We knew from the outset that our study wouldn’t allow us to piece together the whole puzzle; but we thought we might find some clues that would make our efforts (and the contributions of St. Andrew’s

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students and faculty) worthwhile.

Research has to start somewhere. We analyzed students’ peer relationships using a computational method called “social network analysis,” which derives measures roughly corresponding to “popularity” and “social support” from patterns of friendship ties among students. Popularity has to do with “incoming” friendship nominations—this includes not only how many peers list a given student as a close friend, but also how many other students list those peers as friends, and so on. In other words, popularity “trickles” up—having friends who are popular makes one more popular.

We measure “social support,” on the other hand, in terms of “outgoing” nominations.

Networks of social support are more “flat,” so to speak. Social support derives from the belief that one has many direct friendship ties to all kinds of peers, without regard for what those peers’ social status is.

Interestingly, we found that being “popular” was linked to higher cortisol levels (i.e., greater stress). Although this may seem counterintuitive, it’s important to consider what’s involved in being “popular.”

Management of complex social relationships with a large number of people is stressful business. Further, being “highly visible” may increase opportunities for others to make social evaluations, adding to stress levels. On the other hand, we found that social support—as one might expect— was linked to lower cortisol levels. Strong networks of social support can buffer the negative effects of stressful situations.

Together, these results suggest that limiting “popularity contests” and working to increase connectedness among all students may help reduce the stress of navigating a

It turns out that scientists can actually learn a lot from spit.

Substances in saliva provide valuable information about stress levels, and we wanted to study how students’ stress levels in school relate to characteristics of their peer social networks, their academic engagement, and their peer reputations for academic success. school’s social fishbowl.

Although we did not find links between social relationships and academic outcomes, we did find interesting ties between cortisol (i.e., stress), school engagement, and students’ reputations among their peers for strong performance in math and language. The effect of student engagement (i.e., participation, effort, etc.) on academic success appears to depend on levels of stress—but only in mathematics.

Lower stress levels were consistently linked to better academic reputations in English/ Language Arts, as were higher levels of engagement, regardless of students’ stress

levels. However, in math, the relationship is more complex. High levels of stress appear to prevent greater engagement from “paying off.” We believe this may be due to the unique demands math places on working memory (the ability to hold information “in one’s head” and manipulate it). Previous research has shown that math anxiety affects performance by sapping capacity from working memory.1 A similar effect may be at play here, even among students who do not suffer from math anxiety per se. When a student is stressed (for whatever reason), greater effort or participation may not do any good, because the necessary cognitive resources simply aren’t available. In addition, if greater engagement is accompanied by increased evaluation by teachers and peers, efforts to increase engagement could themselves increase stress for some students, making them self-defeating.

In terms of teaching, our work suggests that math teachers and English language teachers may often need to take different approaches—for language teachers, efforts to increase participation and effort may always be a good idea, even for students with relatively high stress levels. However, in math class, lowering stress levels may, for some students, be a higher priority.

When a student is performing poorly, math teachers should perhaps try (at least informally) to assess the student’s level of stress (from all sources). It may be necessary to decrease stress before pushing a student to increase effort and/or participation will do any good. Further, if it seems as though engagement itself is a source of stress for a given student, it may be helpful to limit exposure to social evaluations (e.g., prompts for answers in front of the class).

By no means does this imply that “ramping up the pressure” is never appropriate. In our study, students with both low levels of stress and low levels of engagement had the poorest academic reputations in math.

Sometimes poor performance really does derive from a lack of effort with little concern for the consequences. The test for the teacher is to figure out what’s really “going on” when a student is struggling, particularly in math.

No research study can decipher the complex relationships between stress, engagement, and academic success for any individual student. But a good teacher can.

The contribution of our research is simply to highlight just how important teachers’ efforts toward this end can be.

Dr. Luke Rinne is a Faculty Associate at The Johns Hopkins University School of Education

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Making Better Public and Private School Teachers: The Teach For America/St. Andrew’s Partnership AMY HELMS ’03

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ton, D.C., public schools? This generative question led a philanthropist, with a deep commitment to educational excellence for all students, to approach leaders of The Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning at St. Andrew’s Episcopal School (SAES) and Teach For America’s D.C. Region about a possible collaboration.

What she was interested in seeing, MARY-MASON BOAZ, DIRECTOR, was how the educaTEACHER LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT, tional neuroscience TEACH FOR AMERICA (DC) lens which informs how St. Andrew’s THE PARTNERSHIP BETWEEN THE teachers design their TEACH FOR AMERICA—D.C. REGION classes and work and the Center for Transformative with each student Teaching and Learning at St. Andrew’s would translate to has been invaluable to our corps public school learnmembers. The opportunity to have access to experienced teachers through ing environments. classroom observations, communities of practice, and resource sharing has been In particular, could a dream come true for our new teachers. Whether it be around science labs, training of Teach creative assessment in the foreign language classroom, or exciting ways to do For America (TFA) test prep, our teachers have learned concrete skills to apply to their own practice. teachers in educaAdditionally, St. Andrew’s teachers stay in touch with our corps members as tional neuroscience, informal mentors throughout the year. As a new teacher, having access to that and connecting type of resource is an incredible professional development opportunity. In fact, them with veteran 100% of our CMs strongly agreed or agreed that the Excellent School Visit was a teachers, enhance valuable use of their time and 100% of them would recommend it to a friend. We their ability to work are so grateful for this wonderful partnership. with every student, an the success St. Andrew’s teachers have enjoyed with applying the principles and strategies of Mind, Brain, and Education (MBE) Science to their instructional practice be equally beneficial to teachers within Washing-

Teach for America

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their sense of professional satisfaction, and their greater commitment to students and careers in schools? Since the CTTL has a strong public purpose it welcomed the opportunity to work with TFA corps members who were equally driven to enhance student achievement for all.

In the years since the program’s launch in 2008, TFA and the CTTL leaders have learned valuable lessons about the challenges and rewards of public-private school partnerships. Our hope is that other educational leaders and schools can learn from our story and develop their own partnerships.

And here is why. Teach For America is a national organization located in every region of the United States. It recruits and trains top college graduates in low-income schools and with an acceptance rate less than 15%, it’s one of the toughest jobs to secure in America. St. Andrew’s therefore hopes that other independent schools across the country will recognize the value of fostering a similar collaboration with TFA and to use SAES’s experience as a model.

Such partnerships are not extra work for teachers, they are opportunities to reflect, grow, and share best practices. It is also a way to disseminate ideas and techniques informed by MBE Science that enhance teaching and learning to a wider audience.

In addition, they create important alliances across disparate school environments that actually have much more in common than most people think. Here is what we learned.

1. Identify your areas of expertise In the early stages, both TFA and SAES sat down to share their goals and challenges.

There was a lot of mutual admiration for each other’s work, but we were still wondering how we collaborate. What could we offer one another? Initially, SAES began by inviting TFA corps members and staff to events and teaching workshops. Attendance was low. Those that came saw value in what St. Andrew’s was offering, but we could never draw a critical mass of TFA teachers to SAES/CTTL events. TFA invited St. Andrew’s faculty members to spend a day visiting corps member’s classrooms.

The SAES teachers were startled by the challenges these young corps members— all first and second year teachers—faced in underperforming schools.

It soon became apparent that St. Andrew’s had relatively little to offer a new TFA recruit struggling with the basics of lesson planning and classroom management. But there was a strong cohort of second year teachers and TFA alumni who were craving the next level of professional development who had “solved” the classroom management challenges.

St. Andrew’s, with practices informed by MBE Science and an ongoing commitment to translate research into practice, offered unique experiences and an insight into the cutting edge of this dynamic field.

In this conversation, TFA explained that when their corps members went to St. Andrew’s, they could see what teaching and learning could and should be, what academic rigor and support looks like. It is valuable for TFA teachers to see what highperforming students are doing and strive for that in their own classes. Classroom observations drew larger numbers of TFA teachers. And during these visits, unique relationships were forming. After viewing classes, TFA corps members approached SAES teachers for advice and resources.

Some developed more long-term collaborations, which brings us to our next lesson.

2. Provide time for collaboration Sometimes formal programming isn’t necessary. The most meaningful professional development can be a conversation over a bagel and a cup of coffee with someone who teaches at the same grade level or content area. Rather than schedule more sessions or guest lecturers, why not just let these teachers talk, either in person or virtually?

We began adding more reflection and work time to our “Excellent School Visit Program,” in which academic departments welcome TFA teachers to their classes where they shared ideas about curriculum design, assessment, and best practices. The interesting conversations and exchanges that take place during these visits became meaningful professional relationships.

3. Mentorship is key Every talented educator can point to a mentor who pushed them to the next level of their practice. In order to formalize the relationships cropping up after “Excellent School Visits,” we assigned formal mentors, pairing up TFA novice teachers with veteran SAES faculty who taught the same grade level or content area. Teachers were expected to visit one another’s classes, share resources, and provide feedback to one another. The results were startling.

The veteran St. Andrew’s teachers were getting just as much out of these mentoring relationships as the TFA mentees. Working with a young mentee gave seasoned educators a chance to reflect on their own practice and they liked sharing what they have learned with the next generation of teachers and school leaders.

4. Establish systematic communication Educators are busy. Both TFA and SAES

have their own priorities and day-to-day responsibilities, so it is easy for partnership work to fall to the bottom of the to-do list.

Moreover, when staff moves on and new people step in, it can take time to reestablish relationships and get new people up to speed on partnership objectives. For these reasons, it is important to establish a regular communication schedule to check in on projects and goals. Scheduling time to talk in advance ensures that partnership work does not get ignored, and it is critical that each organization has a staff member tasked with managing the partnership.

5. It has to be mutually beneficial The partnership has been rewarding and enjoyable for TFA and St. Andrew’s. Many TFA corps members comment that working with a SAES mentor or visiting SAES classes is some of the best professional development they receive. St. Andrew’s teachers value sharing their knowledge with the wider educational community, and the opportunity to reflect on and put into words their own craft is, they say, some of the best professional development they have had. But St. Andrew’s teachers also value what teachers new to the profession, with fresh ideas, idealism, and innovative thinking, can teach them.

Right now, the partnership consists mostly of St. Andrew’s teachers sharing what they know through its “Excellent School Visit” program and Brain Science and Content Development Collaborative.

But we know that TFA is using cutting-edge approaches around personalized learning that SAES teachers can learn from. In fact, St. Andrew’s teachers have found very useful one book in particular that informs TFA teacher training, Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion. In the coming years, we would like to see more opportunities for corps members to share their great work with SAES teachers.

Finally, as every educator knows, it is often through the relationships teachers forge with each of their students that they can get them to take on new challenges, and embrace new learning. Such relationships are equally important for adults—education professionals—who are equally committed to enhance the academic achievement of all students and who recognize that teaching and learning happen best in partnership.

Amy Helms ’03 is a former St. Andrew’s teacher as well as an alum. In 2013-2014, she was a CTTL Teacher Research Fellow and is currently an Assistant Principal for Academics at D.C. Prep’s Edgewood Elementary Campus.

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Lessons Learned in Cambridge: Two Research Fellows Reflect BOBBY RADECKI ’16 AND CHRISTINE LEWIS

On Monday May 12, 2014, the inaugural group of CTTL Teacher and Student Research Fellows boarded a plane for Boston and Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education.

They were heading to Cambridge to participate in the Research Schools International Symposium, to share their experience helping to design a research study for St. Andrew’s whose results will have implications for the larger educational community. They had the opportunity to connect and learn from leaders in the Mind, Brain, and Education Science field, such as Dr. Kurt Fischer, Dr. Christina Hinton, Dr. Todd Rose, and Dr. Bruno della Chiesa, as well as to share their experience of doing school-based research.

ON BEING A CTTL STUDENT FELLOW—BOBBY RADECKI ur world thrives on innovation.

Especially in this day and age, technology giants like Apple, Microsoft, and Google are dominating the consumer market, with their awe-inspiring, seemingly never-ending products and new ideas. It has always been my dream to be a great innovator. It’s not only because of my dad’s talks about business that I yearn to innovate, but ever since I was little I have been drawn to new ideas. Although I still have a huge imagination, I’m not pretending I’m a superhero or fighter pilot anymore. I’m dreaming up big-kid, worldly innovations that can help others and that will change the present and the future. And it all starts with research.

The research with the CTTL started quite abruptly upon my return from Winter Break in January of 2014. Within a week I was eating lunch with the “father of educational neuroscience,” Dr. Kurt Fischer.

At this initial meeting, I received the opportunity to dream big and share our academic perspective with the other CTTL Student Research Fellows.

While the remainder of the fellowship

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Ultimately, the study proved that our school has happy students, and that this joy is correlated with high academic achievement. experience could only be described as truly incredible and thought-provoking—discussing how to format the research study’s questions, acting as pilot subjects for the rest of the student body, and traveling to Harvard itself—this first experience set the tone for the rest of the study: student fellows on a level playing field with that of the faculty from St. Andrew’s and Dr. Kurt Fischer and Dr. Christina Hinton from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.

As we entered into the classroom with little knowledge of educational neuroscience and contemporary teaching and learning constructs, the faculty all heeded our comments without interruption, even though our ideas might have run counter to some of what they knew from studies they had read. This equality frankly

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astounded me—teachers and PhDs alike were willing to challenge the age-old assumptions about education by listening to students.

It was clear when the meeting ended how important teaching and learning are to the faculty and administration at St. Andrew’s. For starters, I felt thoroughly satisfied that our faculty strove to close the distance between themselves and the students. This relationship lies at the center of any great school. However, even more than this, I marvel at how central the teachers viewed learning to the school experience, so much so that they were willing to put the integrity of the school to the test by discovering the actual feelings of the student body.

Educational researcher Barbara McCombs once explained, “...with the emphasis on knowledge and skill standards, our current educational paradigm defines the goal of learning as knowledge conservation rather than knowledge production...From a learnercentered view based on research-validated principles of learning and change in complex human living systems, this focus must be transformed.”3 This shift is clearly being implemented at St. Andrew’s.

Ultimately, the study proved that our school has happy students, and that this joy is correlated with high academic achievement. Had I gone into the study guessing this was already true? Of course.

But the fact that we could, and did, measure the reality of student happiness really distinguished St. Andrew’s from the bulk of “innovative” schools. It made it a place where going against conformity is widely accepted and encouraged. And that is something truly special.

ON BEING A CTTL TEACHER FELLOW —CHRISTINE LEWIS he profession of teaching demands that educators develop the ability to synthesize a multitude of information streams into one gestalt practice. This includes longestablished knowledge from widely divergent fields such as specialized content, emotional development, cognitive maturation, social context, and the varied historical philosophies on education with their associated pedagogical frameworks.

In itself, this is a highly-skilled task. When incorporating the diverse and unique signature of each class (and each student), the quickening evolution of global technologies, rapidly emerging facts from the field of educational neuroscience, and the widening economic divide, teachers everywhere are presented with ongoing

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Collaboration with a higher education research institute allows teachers to access knowledge, resources, and archives not available any other way. shifts in need, policy, and even in the basic functional nature of the students we serve in the 21st century.

Working as a teacher at St. Andrew’s, I have the distinct privilege of enjoying a high number of collaborative, innovative colleagues eager to deepen their practice and realize the aspirations of their students. In her article, “Teacher Research Could Change Your Practice,” Dianne DeMott Painter observes, “Teachers who practice teacher research find that it expands and enriches their teaching skills and puts them in collaborative contact with peers that have a like interest in classroom research.”1 Several of my colleagues shared information freely, discussed views on pedagogy, and openly acknowledged strategies that proved less than productive.

This dialogue positively impacted our own classroom practice. The challenge in making this a “whole-school” commitment was to bring research methodology into our classrooms in a way that provides reliable evidence upon which all teachers can base pedagogical decisions. “Research is the process of creating new knowledge. Making progress in creating knowledge requires a significant amount of background knowledge, before one can reach the ‘frontier’ of a topic, where the interesting questions are.”2 Collaboration with a higher educa-

tion research institute allows teachers to access knowledge, resources, and archives not available any other way.

As a revolutionary experimentalist by nature, I jumped at the opportunity to collaborate with the CTTL and researchers at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education that lead Research Schools International as they engaged in the ambitious task of quantitatively analyzing factors influencing student happiness and achievement.

Supporting the process of gathering data revealed educational norms and peerreviewed tools that allow results to be legitimized by a wider academic audience. And having access to the raw data analysis following the experiment gave insight into research practices within the social sciences designed to “hone in” on specific research questions. As my CTTL Fellow colleague, Kristen Cuddihy recently shared, “teaching is an incredibly dynamic profession; doing research enables us, like our students, to deepen knowledge and formulate better questions.”

I believe all of the CTTL teacher fellows are now better consumers of educational research having gained first-hand insight into the specific accepted practices, tools, and processes used by highly regarded researchers in the field today. As I continue the path of a research-informed teacher, I am more aware of the need to document and share my findings in a way that can benefit other teachers facing similar challenges; cultivating my own personal pedagogical art is no longer enough.

Bobby Radecki ’16 is a senior at St. Andrew’s (Class of 2016) and was a CTTL Student Research Fellow in 2013-2014.

Christine Lewis (clewis@saes.org) teaches third grade at St. Andrew’s and was a CTTL Teacher Research Fellow in 2013-2014.

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The Happy Factor: Happiness and School Achievement DR. CHRISTINA HINTON AND DR. IAN KELLEHER

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hat leads to success in school? Cutting-edge research reveals that it is significantly driven by character skills. Angela Duckworth has shown that “grit,” or perseverance and passion for long-term goals, is a better predictor of success in school and beyond than IQ. Likewise, Carol Dweck demonstrated that having a “growth mindset,” which recognizes that abilities are malleable and developed through practice, is associated with academic success. What other character skills contribute to success? More research is needed to explore this question. In this study, Harvard Graduate School of Education researchers partnered with St. Andrew’s to explore one possible factor—happiness.

Positive psychology The field of positive psychology has defined happiness and studied it quite extensively. Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert defines happiness as frequent positive feelings accompanied by an overall sense that one’s life has meaning.

Psychology research has shown a strong link between happiness and success in the workplace. For example, Daniel Gilbert and colleagues showed that happier employees tend to perform better, earn more money, and be more helpful to their coworkers. What about happier students?

Researchers are only beginning to explore the relationship between happiness and school achievement.

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Research on happiness and academic achievement at St. Andrew’s Episcopal School As part of the Research Schools International initiative, researchers from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education partnered with administrators, teachers, and students at St. Andrew’s to investigate the relationship between happiness and academic achievement. We collected data on happiness and grades from 94% of the student body at St. Andrew’s including Lower, Intermediate, Middle and Upper school students. A team of researchers collaborated with teachers and students at the school to develop surveys that would measure students’ happiness in a developmentally appropriate manner.

These surveys included validated scales based on Daniel Gilbert’s definition of happiness as well as additional short answer and multiple-choice questions.

We then worked with administrators and teachers at the school to collect data on students’ grade-point averages (GPA). Once this data was collected, the research team analyzed the survey data using quantitative and qualitative methods to glean an in-depth understanding of students’ happiness. Following this, we statistically analyzed the relationship between students’ happiness and their GPA. Happiness predicts academic achievement at St. Andrew’s Results reveal that students who report being happier tend to have higher grades at St. Andrew’s. From 4th grade to 12th

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grade, there was a statistically significant correlation between happiness and GPA. Qualitative analyses of students’ short answer responses complement this finding. Students often report that happiness, or positive feelings like enjoyment or fun, support their schoolwork. As one student sums it up, “I only do good work when I think happy thoughts.” Another shares, “In school I feel happy and accepted, which allows for a fun and free learning experience.” Yet another explains, “I always feel pushed to do my best when I have a project that I find to be really interesting and fun.”

These results suggest that there is an interesting relationship between happiness and academic achievement, but more research is needed to further understand this relationship. In the future, we plan to conduct an experimental study to investigate whether happiness actually fosters better grades.

Relationships are fundamental to happiness What supports students to be happy? In this study, we found that a network of supportive relationships is at the heart of happiness. Statistical analyses indicate that satisfaction with the school community significantly predicts happiness in students of all ages at St. Andrew’s.

Moreover, qualitative data shows that students’ happiness is greatly supported by

Students often report that happiness, or positive feelings like enjoyment or fun, support their schoolwork. As one student sums it up, “I only do good work when I think happy thoughts.” relationships with both teachers and peers.

For example, one student shares, “In school I feel happy. I think I feel this way because I’m surrounded by my friends, and around teachers that are very nice and caring.”

Another student echoes this sentiment, “I feel happy because I feel like I am surrounded by a great group of friends and teachers.” Yet another expresses, “I feel happy while I am in school. I feel this way because I have my friends.” Another explains, “I am only happy in school when I feel that I have a group of good friends.

Friends are what makes me very happy, energetic, and enjoy school.” Although voiced in different ways, time and time again students of all ages emphasize that their relationships are fundamental to their happiness. More research is needed to explore the relationships among happiness, social networks, and achievement in a school setting. The findings of this study at St. Andrew’s Episcopal School are consistent with those in positive psychology. As positive psychologists Daniel Gilbert and Matthew Killingsworth explain: “If I wanted to

predict your happiness, and I could know only one thing about you, I wouldn’t want to know your gender, religion, health, or income. I’d want to know about your social network—about your friends and family and the strength of the bonds with them.”1 Dr. Christina Hinton is a researcher and faculty member at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and co-founder of Research Schools International.

Dr. Ian Kelleher (ikelleher@saes.org, @ ijkelleher) teaches Science at St. Andrew’s, is Head of Research for The Center of Transformative Teaching and Learning and coauthor of the forthcoming book Neuroteach.

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St. Andrew’s, Yale, and My Prefrontal Cortex AARON SIBARIUM ’14

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s. Racquel Yerbury, my former Latin teacher and eternal friend, was quite fond of the Socratic method. As our five-person AP Latin class took turns deciphering The Aeneid, she would periodically interrupt with a guiding question: “What noun must this adjective agree with?” “Where’s the verb?”

“What is the context of this sentence?” I found such inquiries immensely helpful in a course that frequently tests (and frustrates) the most dedicated classicists.

And then there is my English teacher, Mr. Morgan Evans, with whom I spent countless hours discussing my senior thesis. When I say ‘discuss,’ I mean debating, analyzing, and philosophizing about the confluence of economic and intellectual history in Western Europe, not scanning for punctuation errors or sentence fragments. We spoke almost as colleagues, and our conversations invariably devolved into the most profound and tangential of meditations.

Neither of the above techniques is particularly new. Antiquity adopted Ms. Yerbury’s strategy well before St. Andrew, our patron Saint, set foot on earth, and tutorials have existed at Oxford since the 15th century. What is new—and, I think, quite exciting—is how St. Andrew’s has incorporated these teaching methods into its academic milieu.

Regardless of what school you attend, lectures and in-class activities can only go so far towards refining your writing and analytical abilities. Rigorous, personalized feedback is essential for growth irrespective of gradepoint average, and St. Andrew’s is unparalleled in this respect. Teachers consistently display an astonishing eagerness to engage with and befriend students. For what we

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might call more gifted students, these types of interactions are especially valuable. A constant stream of difficult questions in class or a provocative observation about a paper will always force smart, motivated scholars to go one step further, to think, in the highest sense of the words, differently and deeply.

Metacognition is the process by which one reflects on his or her own mind in order to develop one’s optimal learning strategies.

For me, metacognition meant engaging with my teachers both in and outside of the classroom, thinking about a challenging question until I could reply with an even tougher one.

My teachers never discouraged me from pursuing dialectical inquiry, nor did they recoil when I posed a question to which they did not know the answer. On the contrary, they redoubled their efforts to baffle and delight me with new investigations.

I write this article on the eve of my matriculation at Yale, where I will be enrolling in a selective program devoted to an intensive study of Western literature, political thought, and philosophy. I can’t tell you what grade I will get on my first paper, or how long it will take for me to complete my first problem set in calculus. But I can tell you that I feel very prepared (and excited) to spar with my future classmates, accomplished though they will be. I discovered at St. Andrew’s a singular passion for ideas, for disagreement, for dialogue. That is true critical thinking, and few schools could have possibly taught it as successfully as this one has.

For that, St. Andrew’s, I cannot possibly thank you enough.

Aaron Sibarium ’14 is currently a sophomore at Yale University (Class of 2018).

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The Mathway to the Brain JUDY KEE AND GREGG PONITCH

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t the beginning of the 21st century, there was a tremendous push in American schools, and by American parents, to get as many students started in Algebra as early as possible. Maybe it was because of the results of the international PISA exam in which the United States recently finished 13 out of 39 countries in math, or because fewer college students are majoring in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) fields.

The St. Andrew’s Math Department strives to have as many of our graduates take the most complex math courses that we offer. But we also recognize that not all students are ready to jump into an algebra course in seventh grade. How do we find the balance to both challenge and support? All brains develop differently and

have differences in learning strengths and weaknesses. However, all brains have neuroplasticity—they will develop differently based on the experiences the student has and how they unpack them. How do we best harness this neuroplasticity to grow students’ ability in math?

Mind, Brain and Education (MBE) Science has helped the St. Andrew’s Math Department develop research-informed answers to the questions from teachers, school leaders and parents conscious of this national desire for growth in math.

“Math is boring”, “It doesn’t make sense”, “When will I ever use this in my life?”

These statements can sometimes be heard when students talk about math in schools.

So, how does St. Andrew’s get students more excited and interested in math? We know from research that when students find relevance in their academic work, as well as make a personal connection to the material, their intrinsic motivation increases. When students find the work rewarding, they are more likely to be engaged, curious, and creative. Classrooms need to connect the seemingly abstract concepts of number relationships to real life scenarios. Teaching math concepts in isolation from its real world application or potential career impact misses the opportunity for students to see the relevancy of their work.

Try exploring interesting math questions at the start of math class. Instead of defining prime numbers, explore the “Locker Dilemma” and have students discover number patterns in a fun way

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Classrooms need to connect the seemingly abstract concepts of number relationships to real life scenarios. Teaching math concepts in isolation from its real world application or potential career impact misses the opportunity for students to see the relevancy of their work. or introduce a real-life example at the beginning of each class that connects to the math concept of the day. Boredom is actually a stressor for young brains. One way to boost engagement and cut down on boredom is to include inquiry-driven projects that connect to students’ interests.

tions. Arts integration has great potential to help increase student engagement and achievement. Sometimes novelty simply comes from providing students a truly awesome problem to solve. What are the novel moments in your instructional practice?

How do math teachers at St. Andrew’s keep students engaged? Novelty, novelty, novelty. Student engagement is a student’s willingness and desire to be involved in the learning and understanding of a day’s lesson. It helps motivate the students, captures their attention, and helps improve long and short-term memory. Lessons that are stimulating, challenging or include novelty in some way are more likely to pass through the amygdala, and the rest of the limbic system, the brain’s emotional switching station, and be worked on by the pre-frontal cortex and other higher order thinking parts of the brain. Activities involving movement, humor, art, music, and competition are always welcome and often times new to our students’ daily class expecta-

How do teachers at St. Andrew’s best structure their class period? How do they begin and end class? Timing is everything according to the Primacy-Recency Effect.

The prime time to introduce new ideas or reinforce the most important information is during the first 10-12 minutes of class (assuming a 40-45 minute class period).

During a learning episode, we tend to remember best that which comes first, and remember second best that which comes last. We tend to remember least that which comes just past the middle of the episode.

Beginning class by just going over last night’s homework might therefore be a waste of the prime time for the brain to learn new ideas. “Prime time 2” (the last 10 minutes of class) is the ideal time to summarize and reflect on the most important

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concepts of that day’s lesson. The middle portion would be the perfect time to practice problems using the new concepts taught that day. As we all know, this structure would be difficult to maintain everyday. Often times, we do engaging activities that last an entire class period. Just being aware of this research-based class design makes lesson planning more productive.

Do students at St. Andrew’s still need to memorize basic math facts? Yes, memorizing basic math facts is a crucial avenue that frees up a student’s active working memory (sometimes referred to as immediate memory) so new learning can occur. Research shows that an individual can only hold 3-5 things in their active working memory.1 By knowing, without thought, the times tables, students create more space in their active working memory to conduct higher order math. fMRI brain imaging studies show that when a student “gets” a math fact, their brain processes it in a different, more efficient way.2 Students who have memorized math facts can focus on the complexity of higher math instead of using brain space to calculate simple equations.

How does St. Andrew’s add to math’s traditional trio of test, homework and quiz to given students more feedback? Research shows that getting quality and timely feedback is crucial for learning. The main purpose of evaluation at St. Andrew’s is not to assign a grade, but rather to provide students and teachers with relevant and

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immediate feedback about skill and knowledge acquisition so that the student can adjust learning habits and the teacher can fine-tune lesson construction. The “evaluation = chance for feedback” equation provides a fundamental shift in how the teacher perceives and constructs the class.

One quick and easy method a teacher can use is exit tickets. Before students leave class, the teacher hands out a “ticket” in which students answer a math question, define a math vocabulary word, or ask questions. Exit tickets allow teachers to check for understanding that will inform the teacher on how to construct the next day’s lesson. Other forms of feedback that we recommend include practice assessments, written reflections, student-made assessments, ungraded (formative) pop quizzes, warm-ups and “Do Nows”. Switching the traditional pop quiz to frequent no-stakes or low-stakes formative assessments is a particularly good change, as it allows students to assess where they are with their understanding, and teachers to assess what further work they need to do to prepare students.

We have recently adopted the idea of “deliberate difficulty” into our teaching.

Studies suggest that if learning is difficult, although retrieval strength may be weaker in the short term, in the long term it will be stronger. When we create practice assessments, which the students request all the time, we purposely make them more difficult and challenging than the actual test, quiz, or assignment. “A teacher’s job is not to make work easy. It is to make it

difficult. If you are not challenged, you do not make mistakes. If you do not make mistakes, feedback is useless.” Finally, no matter how challenging it seems, providing immediate feedback is crucial and particularly important in math. The mere anticipation of rapid feedback even helps - studies suggest that students who know they will receive feedback sooner tend to perform better than those who know they will receive grades after a greater delay.

The flipped classroom seems to be the talk in educational practices. What are St. Andrew’s thoughts? The flipped classroom has generated a lot of interest and conversation in education recently especially because of the work of Khan Academy and LearnZillon. The idea is for students to watch video lectures at home, and then do the “homework” in class with the teacher and their classmates discussing the assignments. Watching videos on their own allows students to pause and re-watch the lesson if they need to study a problem or need something repeated. We have used the flipped classroom with a few select units in a Precalculus course. Some students found this method very helpful, while others had a hard time adjusting to this new way of teaching.

Research tells us that all students have learning differences—things they are currently good at, things they currently are not so good at. It is no surprise, therefore, that the flipped classroom might help some students but not others. Research on multiple intelligences and learning

differences tells us that the teacher should select methods to teach and assess based on the content they want to teach.3 Trying to teach to individuals student’s preferred learning style is a neuromyth proven false by research. It is one of the most common neuromyths that incorrectly inform instructional decisions.4 Thus, some topics will be best taught by the flipped classroom method, others in a more traditional, teacher-directed, setting.

The expert teacher, by deeply knowing the essential representations and questions of their subject, figures out which, and does so taking feedback from their class and the variety of experiences they have recently had into consideration.

The most important change, however, is the professional development mindset of the math department. Collaborative, research– informed reflective practice is key. Based on research, your own experience and expertise, and discussions with colleagues, try something out. Evaluate how it works, tweak it, and try again. With this iterative mindset, we are better than we were last year, and next year we will be better still.

Judy Kee (jkee@saes.org) teaches Math and Science and is the Head of the Intermediate School at St. Andrew’s.

Gregg Ponitch (gponitch@saes.org) teaches Math and is the assistant Boys Varsity Soccer Coach.

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From Grant to Great Work EVAN BROOKE AND SUSHEELA ROBINSON

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lexander was called it. And that winding wall in China is known for it. Tony, the Tiger, yelled it on every box of those sugarcrusted flakes. But what exactly did Tony mean when he declared, “They’re Gr-rreat!”? What do we mean when we tell our students, athletes, fellow colleagues or administrators that something or someone is great? Perhaps its vagueness saves us from the roll-up-your-sleeves consideration our discussions need. Perhaps the linguistic ambiguity of the word simply saves us a lot of time. But if we don’t know exactly what we mean when we call a book or a poem great, then how will our students?

These questions impelled us to apply to The Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning for a Research-Informed Teaching Grant. We sought to make our 10th grade English classrooms more student-centered and more relevant.

After years of the inflexible structure of a traditional British Literature course, we witnessed students falling out of love with the very subject we hoped might inspire them, so we began to research the role of choice and independence in learning. Of course, this research led to more questions, such as, what happens when students are allowed to develop a passion or select a book or investigate a concept of their choice? How does fostering a coaching relationship with students, where they can develop their own voices with guidance from a teacher who knows them, impact lasting learning and intellectual curiosity?

In his 2013 book, The Social Neurosci-

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ence of Education: Optimizing Attachment and Learning in the Classroom, Louis Cozolino says, “We can increase classroom autonomy by offering choices, encouraging independent problem solving, and involving students in decision making. All of these actions promote intrinsic motivation, self-determination, and the students’ ability to discern the causes of their successes and failures.” St. Andrew’s strives to foster an environment where students develop their intrinsic motivation and self-determination. From this, the Great Works project was born. In the Great Works project, we explored, along with our students, how teaching and learning changed when students could make choices and have opportunities to participate in authentic learning with high stakes outcomes.

The Process As collaborators, we were keenly aware that we had to step out of the way more than usual in order to allow students to mature as independent thinkers and critics. In short, we had to share authority for teaching and learning with our students.

At the same time, we were strangely excited about the possibilities that emerged as we designed the process for the yearlong project. Starting with the seed idea of providing an environment where students had an opportunity, in front of peers, teachers, and outside judges, to defend a work as great, we understood that the outcome had to truly matter to the students.

That meant we needed to fully embrace being a guide, so that it was not our voice

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We walked our students’ walk. By taking a back seat, we moved students’ critical thinking to the foreground and were rewarded. alone steering the force of the classroom.

Instead we had to trust in the students’ curiosity, encourage them to poke at canonical texts (novels and stories and poems deemed sacred by critics and scholars), allow them to change their minds, and let go of “getting through the curriculum.” And there was a lot we had to let go of. From controlling the texts students chose (what if a sophomore chose Harry Potter?), to being sure that students were really reading (as if we ever know that anyway), to designing a common assessment that demonstrated that all students had learned the same concepts (even though we philosophically believe in knowing and inspiring the uniqueness of each child). So we began with the end in mind. Students would, before a panel of judges, defend a work of literature as great, and, as our pièce de résistance, the winning book would be added to our curriculum the next year...even if it were Harry Potter.

Given the stakes of the outcome and the skill sets expected of our students, we dedicated three-quarters of the year to instruction, practice, and research. This process went as follows: l Discuss and debate the concept of greatness (not limited to literature) l Apply refined definitions of greatness to each text we read ranging from a contemporary graphic memoir to a canonical Shakespeare play (thus practicing the art of argumentation and public speaking)

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Review teacher criteria for the project (each personal text had to meet a minimum of two prerequisites to be eligible) Submit choices to teacher for approval Begin independent reading and research while simultaneously reading and critiquing texts in the curriculum

The last four weeks of the year were then devoted to preparing the defense, which was comprised of three parts: l two- to three-page paper arguing book’s greatness in three categories l tri-fold poster detailing the author’s context, the reader’s response, and critics’ reception l two- to three-minute persuasive speech delivered to each student’s class (and a panel of English faculty) Each English class (and selected English faculty judges) voted on the most persuasive speech (in content and delivery), and the winner of each section moved on to the final round, delivered in front of a panel of faculty and administrators.

The Outcome Because we gave them agency, students bought in to the process, which was a critical component to this project’s success. And while some students chose their authors safely (John Green), others went big (Anthony Burgess). All, however, faced the same stakes.

By upping the ante as educators (profes-

sionally, philosophically, intellectually), we modeled the value of risk-taking. We walked our students’ walk. By taking a back seat, we moved students’ critical thinking to the foreground and were rewarded.

Ultimately, two different approaches to greatness stole the show, each argued eloquently, intelligently, and convincingly.

Marveling at the text he had chosen, one of our winners reflected, “Like other great literature, The Kite Runner is a stunning work of art. Hosseini writes with such precision that words seem to fly off the pages.”

Another curriculum changer spoke of the philosophical challenges his book posed, “Aldous Huxley makes us question our very own happiness in life and whether it is stimulated by cheap and easy means.”

By year’s end, each student made deliberate choices about literature and learned to evaluate and deliberate with maturity.

And, after a lot of hard work, they debuted their critical thinking and orating skills on a public stage, and took a gratifying bow as defenders of greatness, but also as defenders of choice and autonomy in a dynamic classroom they helped to build.

Evan Brooke (evan.m.brooke@gmail.com) is a former St. Andrew’s teacher who currently teaches English at Abington Friends School.

Susheela Robinson (srobinson@saes.org) is the Head of the English Department at St. Andrew’s and a CTTL workshop facilitator.

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The Differentiated Classroom: An Elementary School Perspective SUNG HEE KIM

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ome years ago, a student new to St. Andrew’s told me he did not like math, and was not interested in learning any that year. Over the next few weeks I taught and observed this student in the classroom and on the playground. He was a bright child, quick to understand new concepts, but had little background knowledge. He was missing essential knowledge and skills in many areas, including math, which dampened his enthusiasm for learning. To help him find success in the classroom, I spent a large part of the year identifying these gaps of knowledge and filling them in so he could gain confidence, and have a solid foundational knowledge base that would allow him to progress successfully with his class.

A differentiated classroom is one in which teachers place great focus on who they are teaching, in addition to the subject matter that is being taught.

It is an idea supported by research that shows that students’ learning is enhanced

when lessons are planned taking into account their differences. At St. Andrew’s, a differentiated classroom means that teachers understand that students will come to them with varying levels of knowledge and skills, and accept it as their professional responsibility to meet students where they are, engaging and appropriately challenging them to maximize their learning. We do this with the understanding that differences can stem from a myriad of origins. They can be due to socio-economic, cultural, racial, or gender factors, as well as a result of individual learning differences, readiness or personal affinities. All these elements can cause a group of students to enter our classrooms at the beginning of each school year with a collection of knowledge and skills that spans far beyond a developmental year.

To teach our students while being mindful of their differences, we need to know how these factors have shaped who they are. In this way, differentiating begins

At St. Andrew’s, a differentiated classroom means that teachers understand that students will come to them with varying levels of knowledge and skills, and accept it as their professional responsibility to meet students where they are, engaging and appropriately challenging them to maximize their learning.

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with knowing the student. St. Andrew’s mission statement, “to know and inspire each child in an inclusive community dedicated to exceptional teaching, learning and service” reflects our dedication to differentiation.

Differentiation is predicated on knowing the child, knowing what their interests are, what values are taught at home, customs that they are familiar and not so familiar with, their current neurodevelopmental strengths and weaknesses, emotional, and social maturity, as well as prior knowledge upon which curricular content will be built upon. Differences in the classroom can be vast. I remember a six year-old student whose knowledge of the world was limited, and who could not even tell me her last name, while another could tell me accurate historical details about the city of Pompeii. Some students struggle with adding single-digit numbers, while others are successfully adding two-digit numbers up to one hundred. A student who is academically capable may find it challenging to work with a partner, while another student seems to have the capacity to make every partnership a success.

From the moment a student first walks into our classroom, teachers seek to understand these differences that make each child unique. We interact with and observe the child during academic and non-academic settings, noting how she or he accomplishes specific tasks, problem solves, deals with frustration, and interacts with peers and adults. We also use formative assessments that tell us where the student is in terms of specific academic skills. Over time, the data we collect will allow a pattern to emerge highlighting the student’s current neurodevelopmental strengths and challenges that have to do with learning.

We consider this information together with what we know about the student’s emotional profile, and readiness, to get the truest picture of a child. Emotional factors, sometimes called non-cognitive factors, such as self-confidence or stress, must also be taken together with a child’s neurodevelopmental profile. I once had a student who seemed to struggle with recalling information, making it appear as if he had challenges with short-term memory. I discovered only after speaking with his mother that he had such anxiety about being wrong in front of his peers.

When he needed to recall something, he would often just say that he could not remember. Anxiety can be hard to identify because sometimes there are no observable behaviors, as it was the case with this child.

With this new information, I was able to try different ways of reaching him, which revealed that confidence, or lack thereof, did in fact affect his ability and willingness to recall. His challenge with recall was based more on emotional factors than a lack of encoding or consolidating of memory. Differentiating for him entailed encouraging him to recall only when the chances were high for him to have success.

Allowing him to take increasingly larger chances as his confidence was gradually built up, while protecting him from negative peer responses should he make a mistake, was a way to differentiate for the part of him that was too afraid of showing his peers that he could be wrong.

Aside from demonstrating the importance of using a child’s emotional state and readiness to interpret a neurodevelopmental profile, this example also helps illustrates the importance of communicating with parents for effective differentiation for young children.

St. Andrew’s teachers are committed to Responsive Classroom™ practices, which value working in partnership with parents to help the child most effectively, because we understand that both teachers and parents hold vital pieces of information about a child. Sometimes, when we consult with parents and share what we see at school, parents will often share that they see similar types of behaviors at home.

Other times, they may tell us that that they are able to do tasks with ease that we see them struggle with at school. Either way, the information parents bring to the table is essential in helping teachers refine our thinking about the child’s learning profile, which in turn helps us differentiate in class.

As we form an understanding of individual students in the first weeks of school, we also see the learning profile of the class as a whole emerge. We

differentiate according to the needs of individual students, but also the personality of the class, and we recognize that brain plasticity is a key mindset for both the teacher and the students. Strong lesson plans are never created in a vacuum, but with real students in mind. Social Studies lessons are particularly well-suited for modifying curricular content that appeals to students’ interests, thereby increasing engagement. We also teach using multiple modalities, which makes learning fun, while allowing a wide range of learners to receive information in ways that sometimes challenge their current learning strengths and at other times challenge their current learning weaknesses.

Differentiation is not a supplement to the curriculum, but a mindset that infuses all that we do to help our children meet their potential. This way of thinking entails that we work to establish, from the onset, an inclusive, culturally responsive, classroom environment, where students can feel safe and take risks, knowing that the differences that make them who they are will be respected by their peers.

Finally, differentiation in the classroom does not take a break. As brains change and as individual and group needs change over time, so should how we differentiate. To do this, teachers must be attentive, open-minded and purposeful in continuously collecting new data, and recalculating our approach to help a child succeed. Listen. Observe. Ask students to self-reflect. Children are incredibly resourceful beings, and sometimes they will find their own way of differentiation, if you empower them.

Sung Hee Kim (skim@saes.org) teaches first grade at St. Andrew’s.

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Teach Me and I’ll Teach You: Learning as an Equitable Exchange RODNEY GLASGOW

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have begun my middle school Religion class the same way for all of the three years that I have been the teacher.

Students pair up, and they discuss a given question with their partner. Tell your partner about your religion. What is your religion? How do you practice it? Then, they find another student, and they prepare to discuss a new question. How do you believe the world began? Three minutes later, they find a different student. Talk about a time when you experienced something that you could not explain. They switch partners again to discuss, What do you think God looks like? This continues for a few more rounds of questions, and ends with: How have you seen people using or practicing religion around you?

Although I start my class the same way every time, each time is a different experience. This exchange of stories and ideas between students is a novelty for each Religion section. Students present their answers to these questions to the whole class aided by a creative slideshow, and after each presentation the class must ask two questions of the student about something that interests them from what they heard.

That begins our exploration of Genesis and the founding of Judeo-Christian beliefs.

When I created this opening unit, I surely had James Banks whispering in my ear.

The transformation approach to curriculum development that he describes in his “Four Approaches to Multicultural Education” is evident here. The transformation approach restructures curriculum to include multiple

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perspectives.1 It often involves doing what I did—throwing out the existing curriculum and reimagining the course altogether. The other three approaches all speak to some aspect of the foundations of multicultural education: the contributions approach (heroes and holidays), the additive approach (stand alone units and cultural days, week, or months), and the social action approach (using what is learned to actively address a current real world issue). As Sonia Nieto tells us: “Multicultural education is a process of comprehensive school reform and basic education for all students. It challenges and rejects racism and other forms of discrimination in schools and society and accepts and affirms the pluralism (ethnic, racial, linguistic, religious, economic, and gender, among others) that students, their communities, and teachers represent. Multicultural education permeates the curriculum and instructional strategies used in schools, as well as the interactions among teachers, students, and parents, and the very way that schools conceptualize the nature of teaching and learning. Because it uses critical pedagogy as its underlying philosophy and focuses on knowledge, reflection, and action (praxis) as the basis for social change, multicultural education promotes the democratic principles of social justice.”2 Multicultural education is an idea born of the ’70s that gained popularity in the ’90s. More recently, the nomenclature has shifted as the philosophy has deepened.

Instead of talking about multicultural

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education, which most confuse with simply addressing race in the classroom, educational leaders are now focusing on inclusive pedagogy.

Inclusive pedagogy or inclusive teaching describes instructional strategies used to create engaging learning environments.

Inclusive teaching equips students to learn from differences in perspectives, learning differences, cultural and social backgrounds, and exceptionalities in the classroom. Practitioners of inclusive pedagogy vary course design and assessments to give students a number of ways to demonstrate their mastery of the course content and skills. Inclusive teaching brings students’ experiences into the classroom. The instructor not only delivers the content but also develops the students.3 Multicultural education’s main focus can be said to be on what we teach, where inclusive pedagogy’s main focus is on how we teach. Where multicultural education has been mainly applied to race and, in its more broad moments, gender, inclusive pedagogy encompasses the totality of an individual’s identity, including learning preferences and lived experience. Quite simply, inclusive pedagogy asks us to know the stories in the room and to use those stories to engage the learner thus deepening the learning.

Inclusive pedagogy is brain-based and research informed. It relies on the importance of relevance4 and novelty5 in creating learning and aiding memory storage and retrieval. Our brains fire up when we can say, “Here is how this relates to me,” or “Here is why I need to know this,” or “Here is where I can connect my story with this information.” Our brains become more alert in

those moments when we are encountering information that we have not previously considered. In the faculty lounge, we call it the power of “whoa!” and “a-ha!”

I have experienced “whoa” moments and “a-ha” moments often in my classroom.

In that first week of Religion class, there are always a few. I am thinking of the student who, in describing her own spiritual beliefs to the class, disclosed that she was a medium. You could feel the interest build in the room. Some students were thinking, “Whoa! A medium! I wonder if there are spirits in this room. Does she see them?”

Other students were thinking, “Whoa!

What is a medium?” Novelty walked right in the room and excited their brains, and the learning happened. One student raised his hand to ask her, “What is a medium?”

She answered confidently. Another wanted to know when she discovered her abilities, and another wanted to know if she was frightened by it. A fourth student asked, “Why is it called a medium?” And here is where, as a teacher, relevance and shared experience comes in.

I sneakily asked, “Where else have we heard the word medium?” Students responded that items are often sized small, medium, or large. They then recalled that medium is another term for being in the middle, and they decided that a medium is someone who is in the middle of this world and the spirit world, able to communicate with both. They will forget many things about Religion 6. That will not be one of them! Now, when this class discusses what it means to be spiritual, or if miracles exist, or what happens after life, they will have a different perspective than

their own to consider.

Inclusive pedagogy’s call for multiple perspectives as a learning tool is nothing new. Dewey, the great educational philosopher of the early 20th century, already told us that “…it is the office of the school environment to balance the various elements in the social environment, and to see to it that each individual gets an opportunity to escape from the limitations of the social group in which he was born, and to come into living contact with a broader environment.” 6 Indeed, Horace Mann, the Father of American Education, began this dialogue in the 19th century when he urged us to see education as the great equalizer of diverse experiences. Inclusive pedagogy is applicable to each classroom and every discipline. There is always space to broaden the perspective and widen the lens.

My middle school Religion class always ends the same way. Students write an essay or produce a work of art that explains how their thoughts about God have either changed or been solidified since the start of the course. And in that way, the class ends in a different place for each student that I, as their teacher, must recognize and honor. By releasing myself from being a “sage on the stage” to become a co-creator of educational opportunities with my students, everyone in my classroom is a better teacher and stronger learner.

Rodney Glasgow (rglasgow@saes.org) teaches Religion and is Head of Middle School and Chief Diversity Officer at St. Andrew’s. He is the founder of the National Diversity Directors Institute (http://www.nationaldiversitydirectorsinstitute.org/).

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Let Them Play (Part II) NICOLE STARRACI

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hysical Education, what many readers might fondly remember as gym, has changed. It’s no longer about elimination games like dodgeball or conditioning exercises such as sit-ups, pushups, and pull-ups. P.E. is about developing competency in a variety of movement experiences. For instance, each year I strive to take my students on a P.E. field trip to the bowling alley. Before that, we were learning the volleyball bump using balloons, perfecting our downward dog position in yoga, playing Bocce in our underhand throwing unit, and learning the art of chasing, fleeing, and dodging through tagging games. We all know what happens when kids find something they love and that makes them feel good. Play and movement are dopamine producing activities, and when children find something they love, nothing else matters in their world. P.E. can help children discover a love of movement.

Unfortunately, not too many schools have chosen to let students play. The thinking is that to raise reading and math scores, students should be spending more time in those classes. Time is the prize in schools and too often what gets cut is physical education and the arts. This choice runs counter to research in Mind, Brain and Education Science.

From the perspective of learning, the research is clear that physical activity, as well as social support, are the two most important factors in reducing stress.1 When you exercise, you turn on the front part of the brain where the prefrontal cortex,

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which plays a major role in executive function, resides. We know stress will manifest itself in the lives of every student, whether it is self-imposed or it comes from parents, teachers, or one’s peers. But providing students strategies to deal with stress throughout their lives is critical to their emotional well-being. As Plato’s said so clearly to Hippocrates: “If you are in a bad mood, go for a walk. If you are still in a bad mood, go for another walk.”

If you’ve read John Rateys’ Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, then you already know and understand the benefits of movement and exercise on the brain. If you read the last issue of Think Differently and Deeply, then you know the benefits of play, especially unstructured play, in learning. We also know that unless kids start moving more, putting down their PlayStation and Xbox, this country will have an obesity epidemic.

We hear it every time the argument for and against P.E. in schools gets started.

Americans, both adults and children, are reaching epidemic levels of obesity and schools play a critical role in developing a mindset of motion.2 Physical education and play also correlate to better academic outcomes and a drop in discipline problems. We have known for years that the fitter you are the better student you are.3 If you want proof, look to Sweden where better aerobic capacity was shown to lead to an increased IQ.4 Finally, it has been shown that movement and P.E. lower the internal state of noise and chaos for struggling students.5

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But the argument to keep P.E. in schools isn’t based solely on the benefits to the brain. It’s because the research tells us that children who receive limited exposure to movement activities have fewer options later in life. Just as we teach Math, Language Arts and Science to prepare students to be competent and capable adults, we also want our children to grow up to be happy and healthy adults. Therefore, we also need to give them the tools to manage both their stress and their overall health.

The long-term goals of physical education teachers are not too distinct from teachers of other disciplines. For example, one of the hopes of a Language Arts teacher is to make each student a confident, independent, life-long reader. For P.E. teachers, we want each student to become confident, independent life-long movers.

So the question should not be why we need to keep Physical Education in schools, but rather why is it not as much a priority in schools as every other academic discipline.

From my observations, I can tell you this: the disparity between children who have been engaged in and regularly receive developmentally appropriate, regular, and enriching movement experiences and those who do not is evident before they even get to kindergarten.

For those parents trying to turn their budding youth into a collegiate athlete

by specializing in one sport, P.E. is about exposure to many options. Children who have only experienced a youth soccer league will lag behind their peers in throwing, catching and striking skills, skills that are not explored on the soccer field. And when soccer is not an option for those children, they do not feel confident in joining in on the baseball game, or the gymnastics routines, or the yoga class that their peers are confidently enjoying.

In order for children to feel confident in any activity, they need exposure, education and practice with the skills essential to successful participation. The best place to receive this instruction is in a P.E. class taught by an educator who understands how children learn and can patiently address each student’s current neuromotor strengths and areas of challenge.

This is where it is important to understand the brain’s wiring and the process of myelination. When my preschool through second-grade students are learning a new skill, whether it is to throw or kick a ball, catch, or run, learning the proper technique from the beginning is critical. As we know from brain plasticity, it is possible to rewire the brain. But when we initially learn a technique wrong, it will require building a new neural pathway to correct the flaw.

Children at St. Andrews receive an average of 1.5 hours of instruction per

week in movement education or physical education in grades preschool through second grade and 3 hours per week in grades 3-5. This is on top of their daily recess that they receive for an average of 45 minutes a day. By instilling this competency and a love of movement in children at a young age, they will seek out physical activity outside of school, at recess, on the playground, and as adults. It is no different than research on adult vocabulary and how it correlates to the amount of words a child was exposed to early in life. Children that feel capable and confident in a variety of movement experiences turn into adults that incorporate exercise into their daily lives because they enjoy it and have a variety of physical activities they feel competent in doing.

The role of the P.E. teacher is to develop a joy of movement, and that comes when students develop competency in a variety of movement activities. This alone is why P.E. should be considered a central part of a school’s program, and the fact that P.E. correlates to enhanced academic success, is merely, dare I say, game changing.

Nicole Starace (nstarace@saes.org) teaches Lower School Physical Education, is Head of the Physical Education Department and is an Assistant Preschool Teacher.

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We All Need Executive Functions DR. IAN KELLEHER

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ne thing became very clear when The Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning started facilitating workshops for teachers and parents: if you begin talking about the brain and its role in learning, large swathes of the audience jump to the conclusion, and stay mired in the erroneous assumption, that you are talking solely about students with significant learning challenges or special needs students. It is one of the most pervasive myths about Mind, Brain and Education (MBE) Science. So a part of the mission of the CTTL is to bust this myth.

This is not just our opinion. There is a growing base of research showing that strategies for teaching and learning informed by MBE - actionable things that teachers and students should do and should not do - lead to better learning outcomes for all students.

This includes those with learning challenges, but also for the highest achieving (the Advanced Placement level student), as well as the “just fine” kids who are often overlooked when we think of ways to improve learning. Mind, Brain and Education Science informed strategies work for all students. informed strategies work for all students.

There are two words you can add to a sentence containing “learning” and “brain” to make the audience even more convinced that you are only talking about students with learning challenges, and they are “executive functioning.” In truth, who were you thinking of when you saw that that this article was on executive functioning?

“Executive functioning” is a term that

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rarely seems to be used in a positive sense, and is often followed by the word “disorder.” It is also a term that is often used without being defined, as though there is some unspoken agreement that, to save everyone’s collective embarrassment, no one in the room is allowed to ask, “what exactly does that mean?” When we understand more about executive functioning and the brain, we will see that it is an area of huge potential to improve learning outcomes for all students.

So what is executive functioning? It is the ability to plan, organize and execute.

Take a moment to think of a project you are currently working on, and then think of all the steps you are taking to accomplish it. This is executive functioning: forming objectives, devising plans to meet these objectives, selecting the necessary cognitive skills, coordinating these skills, applying them in the correct order, monitoring and evaluating progress towards the objective’s goals, making adjustments as necessary, and assessing when you have reached a satisfactory endpoint. These things are critical for every person. Things critical to be a good student, but also, as we get older, to be an effective employee and a functioning member of society.

The frontal lobes of the brain play an important role in executive functioning.

This region is one of the last in the brain to fully develop, still undergoing significant development until the mid twenties at least, with rewiring of neural connections continuing through adult life. This means that all the way through school-

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ing—through elementary school, through secondary school, through college, through a masters degree and into a Ph.D. even— the pre-frontal cortex is still significantly developing. And whilst there is a large genetic component, this development, all the way through, will be affected by the environment, by experiences the student has, by how they reflect upon and unpack those experiences. This is the concept of neuroplasticity, and it is something that schools, for better or for worse, whether they sign up to it or not, play a role in.

The decisions that teachers make help shape, amongst other things, each student’s executive functioning skills, regardless of whether an individual teacher believes this or not. We need teachers who both believe this, and teach in ways that help students’ executive functioning skills grow stronger.

Schools and teachers are brain changers.

Let’s look more closely at the executive functioning skills schools can influence the development of: problem-solving, prioritizing, thinking ahead, self-evaluation, long-term planning, calibration of risk and reward, and regulation of emotion. These are skills that all students, the most advanced student, the “just fine student,” and the struggling student, can benefit from being as good at as they possibly can be.

But instead of embracing this opportunity to teach a raft of valuable school, job and life skills, executive functioning is relegated to something that schools dare not talk about for fear of, at best, the discussion being labeled as all about learning disabled students, or at worst, the school itself being labeled as an institution for learning disabled students.

Schools have a prime window of time where they can influence the rewiring of students’ brains. The sad thing is that most schools either ignore or are ignorant of the research, and just leave this neuroplastic brain development to chance. Elementary schools do a better job teaching executive functioning—elementary teachers tend to recognize that these skills are a vital part of learning. What we need is for teachers to find age appropriate ways to develop these skills at all grade levels.

What does the deliberate teaching of problem-solving, prioritizing, thinking ahead, self-evaluation, long-term planning, calibration of risk and reward, and regulation of emotion look like in middle school and high school? What does it look like in History? In Science? In Math, Language or English? The articles Google, Shoes and Inquiry” (available at www.thecttl.org) and “From Grant to Great Works” (in this volume of Think Differently and Deeply) give good examples give good examples of

how this is done at St. Andrew’s. Think of somewhere in your own class where there is an opportunity to include some deliberate scaffolding to aid the development of these skills. Context is vital—it needs to fit authentically into your class and be linked to a topic of study, don’t just announce, “this week we are working on an executive functioning project…” The scaffolding, of course, can be removed over time, and on an individual basis—too much scaffolding creates boredom, too little creates frustration. Each student has different needs, and these needs vary over time.

The good news is that the kind of assignments we need to purposefully develop these skills, and the way we need to structure and scaffold them, are, when we look at a broader range of MBE research, great teaching strategies. They are the kind of things we should be doing anyway, regardless of the executive functioning benefit.

For example, teaching and assessing in multiple modalities, varying the neurodevelpomental demands we are placing on students over time guided by the content we are trying to teach, using arts integration to aid knowledge transfer and memory consolidation, teaching memorization strategies alongside material that needs to be memorized, giving prompt and scaffolded feedback, the opportunity to redo work, and providing chances for reflection. And, as we provide students with opportunities to plan, organize and execute, the process skills that lead students to their final goal

need to be put on a higher pedestal — taught more explicitly and rewarded more.

Remember, if teachers choose not to do this, their students’ prefrontal cortexes, every one of them, will be developing away in reaction to their environment and experiences. Their executive functioning skills will be necessarily changing, but we will be leaving the building of these critical student and life skills more to chance than we need to. So the real nugget of gold that is “executive functioning for all” is that we can help all young people, at all ages of schooling - the most advanced student, the “just fine student” and the struggling student - to rewire their brains to become better learners and higher achieving students. Or we can make the deliberate choice not to.

Executive functioning isn’t a disorder, it is something for all.

Dr. Ian Kelleher (ikelleher@saes.org, @ ijkelleher) teaches Science at St. Andrew’s, is Head of Research for The Center of Transformative Teaching and Learning and coauthor of the forthcoming book Neuroteach.

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“One For All and All For One”: Learning Happens Best in Partnership KRISTIN CUDDIHY AND SAMANTHA SPEIER

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ne of the questions we are most frequently asked by parents in our roles as Dean of Students and Director of the Education Center is: “How can my child be more successful in school?”

We believe that the strongest chances for student success exist when there is a three-way working relationship involving the school, the student, and the family.

Think “Three Musketeers”—but instead of brightly dressed cavaliers, this brave and loyal trio is comprised of the student, the student’s family, and the student’s teachers.

While it is true that most of a student’s day is spent at school, the time a student spends at home working on academics is equally as important. This is where strong parental involvement is key.

The dilemma for many parents is that moment when they recognize that their child is struggling and they feel the need to step in and help, but are unsure how. It can oftentimes feel very stressful for both the parent and the student, particularly during that critical “homework time” in the evenings. Take this scenario, for example: Paul’s recent performance in English class has not reflected his potential. He is not turning in homework, even though he completed it; and he has performed poorly on the last three vocabulary quizzes, even though he says he’s been studying.

The best way to support Paul in this situation is for the “Musketeers” to band

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Just like marathon training, students and their parents have to be committed to the long-term goal of academic success and remain patient as new study strategies create new neural pathways. together with their cry of “one for all and all for one.” What does this call to action look like at St. Andrew’s?

The first thing to remember is that like the Musketeers, all three groups are on the same team with the common goal of Paul’s success. Paul, his parents, and his teacher would meet together to create a plan all three parties can support. What we have found in our practice is that all three members of the team must buy-in to any given strategy. In Paul’s case, we could suggest that he print out all of his homework at the end of the evening, show it to his parents, and put it all in one red folder that each of his teachers can check each day. However, if Paul isn’t comfortable with that strategy, or if the parents aren’t available to check the homework each evening, then a new strategy needs to be developed. Action steps need to be specific and achievable in order to be successful.

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The second important element is finding the right balance of “help” at home. Research supports an idea that many parents already know: the transition between dependence and independence that adolescents are making is highly changeable and frequently confusing, with desire for each coming in different spheres of each child’s life at different times. 1, 2 There is no set time when a parent should consider pulling back entirely. Similarly, throughout their academic career, students need differing and shifting levels of support, reinforcement and opportunities to include their own voice. Perhaps the most important element of parent support involves setting clear expectations at home for the following: homework, technology use, and workspace. Perhaps the hardest element of parent support involves finding the right level and means to let their child have a say in the discussion so they can feel the decision is partly theirs, honoring the emerging developmental desire for independence.

In the case of our student, Paul, the folder idea didn’t work. Another strategy that has proven to be successful is the use of a checklist. Checklists can be as simple as a piece of paper with homework tasks and materials they need for school the next day, or more elaborate ones, such as phone and computer apps and programs that keep lists for you.

Paul has also insisted that he “studies”

for his quizzes, but what does that really look like?

Even if he’s using his laptop to study, technology can become a doubleedged sword. Cell phones, laptops and their myriad applications are an overwhelming distraction.

Students need to be monitored— no headphones, ringer switched off, laptop not showing multiple screens. While in “homework mode,” there should be a no-texting, nochatting rule in effect as there is a transaction cost when students task switch between academic work and social media. Despite what students might think, brain research tells us that there is no such thing as multitasking - the brain actually switches back and forth between tasks and there is a penalty to pay for doing so. A strategy to help Paul is to put him in a space where all screens are visible to his parents. Research also suggests that while listening to music has many positive effects, like helping with anxiety, doing so during tasks involving memory recall impairs performance, 3 hence the no headphones rule.

And what about Paul’s usual workspace—on his bed with his headphones plugged in? Homework should be done in a visible, well-lit, and comfortable space. Bedrooms are not the ideal location for students. Ideal workspaces are kitchen tables or islands or alcove offices/desks. Dining rooms are sometimes a good choice, especially if your kitchen is busy and noisy. If these are traditionally noisy spaces in your home, a strategy that we have found successful for many families is to impose a “quiet zone” in these areas.

And finally, set up a study calendar for as many days as possible prior to a test and study in small chunks each day, rather than studying all of the material the night before. Research strongly suggests that space practice is much more effective at storing information in long-term memory than massed studying.4 To help

Paul prepare for his next vocabulary quiz, his team might suggest the following schedule. Monday: Paul recalls and writes down all the vocab words he knows (research has shown that having students recall as much information as they can about a subject BEFORE they start studying is the best way to start).

Tuesday: he creates an online study guide (www.quizlet.com is preferred by many St. Andrew’s students) or a PowerPoint “memory” game and review. Wednesday” he reviews his independently designed study guide. Research suggests that active retrieval methods work better for this than rereading notes—so maybe he tries to write down what he knows about a topic before consulting his study guide.

Rereading notes or a textbook tends to be a comfortable but ineffective way of studying, leading to “an illusion of fluency” where growing familiarity with words and phrases leads students to feel they have memorized things better than they actually have.5 Thursday: he meets with his teacher to ask questions. Friday, Saturday, Sunday: he reviews all work from the last week in small time segments, and by Monday, paul is ready for the quiz. In addition, school is stressful for both students and their parents. Research shows that exercise and positive relationships with both adults and peers help relieve stress, and making time for these should be part of any student’s study schedule. Finally, research shows that sleep is crucial for learning, especially memory consolidation, and as Paul tries to fit all the pieces of his busy week together, he needs help from all those around him so that he gets sufficient amounts of sleep into his schedule.6, 7 Is this all as easy as it sounds? No, but just as you would never train for a marathon by running the whole course on the first day—you can’t expect these new habits to be formed overnight. Just like marathon training, students and their parents have to be committed to the longterm goal of academic success and remain patient as new study strategies create new neural pathways.

Just as the Three Musketeers joined forces to protect the kingdom from evil, the alliance of the parent, student and teacher needs to remain connected through ongoing communication to set the best possible course for a student’s success.

Kristin Cuddihy (kcuddihy@saes.org) teaches English and is Middle School Dean of Students.

Samantha Speier (sspeier@saes.org) is Director of the Education Center.

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An Epistemic Nudge: Creating Buy In TROY DAHLKE

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ow do you get students to buy in to a class that seems irrelevant for their lives? I teach in the areas of philosophy and religion, face degrees of oppositional attitudes, and so it’s a question I have to address at the start of every trimester.1 Yet it seems, so I’m told by students and by word-of-mouth from colleagues, that the classes I teach actually succeed in creating buy in and, as a result, raise the bar of higher order cognition and critical thinking.2 To do this, of course, you cannot simply deliver complicated stuff, you need to lure students into the conversation about complicated stuff.

Of all the classes I teach, it probably comes as no surprise—at least to readers who read these-types of publications—that the 11th grade course I teach in Biblical Theology is one in which I face the most opposition from students. Exciting as this topic is (really!), it’s hard draw them in using tradition theological loci such as “God,” “sin,” and “Incarnation.” Should one then capitulate to the dominant Zeitgeist by saying that the truth of biblical claims are limited to the choice of the individual or to sundry relativistic expressions of our collective longings for meaning, or something like? I think not. To do so only instantiates the logic of indifference in which students are already inculturated.

A better approach is to give students an epistemic nudge that allows them to see that, for example, the native claims of a course like Biblical Theology are analogous to the ways that they already understand life. In other words, the seemingly arcane

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and irrelevant notions of traditional theology are actually intelligible in light of what they already know—but don’t necessarily know that they actually know it.

What does it mean to epistemically nudge students? Epistemology is the study of knowing, or better, what counts as knowing. When a person claims to know something, what qualifies that claim as “knowledge,” rather than, say, wishful thinking, hunch, or mere opinion?

It’s a big question and it has occupied theological and philosophical types for centuries. For a teacher to nudge students, the first thing is to offer, directly or indirectly, a reasonably accurate account of their current epistemic assumptions.3 If I had to describe the dominant epistemology of my students, I would say that they are, on the one hand, positivistic and, on the other, voluntaristic.

By positivistic, I mean that only those things that can be measured, like in science or math, are positively and properly objects of “knowledge.” Most students, obvious enough, do not think that the stuff of the Bible is positive knowledge. By voluntaristic, I mean that everything that either hasn’t yet been or can’t be measured is more or less a matter of personal volition. Most students firmly believe that, for example, “reality,” broadly conceived, is something that is up to each individual to decide. For many, after years of being taught that we only speak truthfully about non-measurable reality from our own “I”, and that nearly everything but the positive is a matter of

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personal preference, the idea that we all have our own reality is almost axiomatic.

The import of the Bible is definitely, most students would say, a matter of choice. If students assume that the relevance and intelligibility of a discipline do not fit neatly into a positivistic frame, then at best that discipline is voluntaristic. And if it’s non-academic and irrelevant for college admissions, why should students care?4 Understanding the assumptions of students is vital for creating buy in because it helps you identify what needs nudging and how to nudge it.

With a reasonably accurate description of their epistemology in play, the next move is not to fundamentally alter their epistemology—desirable as that may be— but to show that they actually and already know things about life and reality that do not fit positivistic and voluntaristic claims.

Knowing is much more than “knowing.’5 Knowing, in this sense, is something like what Martha Nussbaum has termed, in an essay of the same name, Love’s

that’s exactly the point: there is genuine knowledge that is already recognized as knowledge and is, for most 11th grade students, already relevant. Arguably, it is the variety of relationships that a person enjoys, or absence or failure thereof, which intones a full or diminished life. However confident the positivist may seem, more times than not, the unexpected joy that comes from such news as “she likes you” or the equally unexpected sadness of “she has gone” hardly seem to be entirely, if at all, a product of measurement. Equally so, this type of joy or sadness seem beyond volition. Who, among 11th graders, really think—when pushed at all—that they ‘choose’ to be happy or sad in such moments, as if mere willing can do justice to their knowledge in that moment?

Marcel certainly wouldn’t, because love’s knowledge is knowledge!

By showing students that there is more to knowing than what a positivist claims or what a volunteerist denies, you can move them beyond their assumptions—perhaps

Understanding the assumptions of students is vital for creating buy in because it helps you identify what needs nudging and how to nudge it.

Knowledge. Her work suggests a viable pedagogical approach that often results in an epistemic nudge. Put another way, the immediate goal of a course like Biblical Theology is to introduce students to a mode of thinking that is already relevant in and for their lives.

Appropriating the work of Marcel Proust, Nussbaum writes: “Francoise brings him the news: ‘Mademoiselle Albertine has gone.’ Only a moment before, he believed with confidence that he did not love her any longer. Now the news of her departure brings a reaction so powerful, an anguish so overwhelming, that this view of his condition simply vanishes. Marcel knows, and knows with certainty, without the least room for doubt, that he loves Albertine.”6 The moment before, Marcel was sure he understood, based on a supposedly rigorous and analytic scrutiny, where he stood in relation to Albertine. But of course, Nussbaum via Proust argues that analysis, scrutiny, and for that matter voluntary and positive reason are not able to know fully what a person knows.

It is cliché that you don’t know what you have until it’s gone. Paraphrasing the editor of the this volume, “Of course, every high school boy knows that.” To a degree,

even beyond the extravagant claims of the college admissions process—and create the possibility of buy in.7 If love’s knowledge does this, then you can nudge them into an epistemology where even a course like Bible Theology is intelligible.

This is because, from first to last— whether we agree with it, believe it, or even like it—the Bible is a love story, replete with the epistemic certainty of love’s knowledge, including joy and sadness. At the center of this love story, for the Christian tradition, is the heretofore uninteresting and unintelligible high theological notion of the “Incarnation,” that God so loved the world that he became a human in Jesus Christ In his own day, Soren Kierkegaard addressed the challenge and scandal of the Incarnation by employing a fairy-tale, of sorts. I use Keirkegaard’s poetic account to have students enact—literally, I have them put on a skit—the logic of the Incarnation as an instance of love’s knowledge. His fairy tale is nuanced, complicated, and polyvalent, so for our purposes, a quick paraphrase must suffice…

Once upon a time, there was a King who fell in love with a lowly maiden.

This King was rich and powerful beyond measure and could, by the utterance of a

single command, have the maiden. But the King, being both kingly and a connoisseur of human nature, sees a problem. Lest love become one of manipulation or misdirection, he must overcome the great distance between himself and the maiden.

With a poet’s help (Who else would you call upon—your physics teacher?), he realizes that the Cinderella option isn’t viable. He cannot appear to the maiden as King Charming and dazzle her with the brilliance of his wealth, power, and good looks. Why? Because as a connoisseur of human nature, he knows that humans are so inclined towards beauty and power that they often confuse their love of them with love for the one who possesses them. She may think that she loves him, but in reality she may only love him because she gets to live in the castle and live happily ever after. The King knows that if they are to share a happy love she must have the “bold confidence” to know that she loves him, with or without the royal accouterments.

Although the Cinderella option isn’t available, all is not lost. The King and poet recognize that a type of the Princess Bride option remains. He could become like the servant boy Wesley. He could renounce— and this would have to be absolute and final, a till-death-do-us-part renunciation— his kingship for servitude and try to win the maiden’s heart as a less-than-equal. It’s risky! He could renounce everything, live as a peasant, risk his affection for her and still get rejected.

But if it’s for love, it’s worth it. And so…the King is born of a virgin and laid in a manger…and is later rejected and is crucified…8 When students come to grips with Kierkegaard’s poetic—yet highly theological—tale and realize that they know the logic of love therein, they’ve been nudged. They recognize that there’s something knowable beyond their positivistic and volunteerist assumptions.

Still, it is unlikely that students will change the way they believe when they recognize that their experience of love’s knowledge is anticipated and displayed in the Bible.

Provisionally, that’s beside the point. The point is that, perhaps, this nudge will be enough for them to buy in to a course that they otherwise would have thought as unintelligible and irrelevant. And when that happens, when students are surprised to find something like the Bible meaningful and interesting, well, that’s why teachers teach.

Troy Dahlke (tdahlke@saes.org) teaches Religon and Philosophy at St. Andrew’s.

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Research and Relationships: The Science of Great Teaching and Learning ROBERT KOSASKY

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here’s nothing more essential or elusive than great teaching.

Every parent wants it, and every student deserves it. Yet few schools successfully deliver great teaching consistently, day after day, at every grade level and in every content area. Why? Because today great teaching requires a faculty, and a faculty culture, that embraces relationships and research with equal passion.

This publication was written for a clear and simple purpose: to make the benefits and methods of researched-informed teaching tangible. The articles in this volume of Think Differently and Deeply flow from our faculty’s belief in the power of applying the science of learning and the power of positive relationships to each aspect of school life. A school’s culture is a prime determinant of students’ learning and character; therefore a school’s spirit and “feel” should be shaped as carefully and intentionally as its math or reading curriculum. The time that teachers have with students and with each other is precious. Each class and practice and conversation should matter.

Student Happiness, Motivation, and Achievement Happy students learn more. Too often schools suggest that families must choose between rigor and a happy learning environment. According to this view, being miserable and anxious is the cost of achievement, and some schools even

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This publication was written for a clear and simple purpose: to make the benefits and methods of researchedinformed teaching tangible. imply that those emotions fuel learning.

Research flatly disproves this outdated belief, and actually shows that they have the reverse effect. Students’ effort level, intrinsic motivation, and academic achievement all correlate with their happiness in school, and now we have the research to prove it after a study the CTTL conducted with researchers Harvard’s Graduate School of Education that lead Research Schools International.

Students work hard and perform better when course material (or sport or activity) is engaging and teachers truly know and enjoy them as people and learners. In that kind of supportive and stimulating environment, students will work harder, think more creatively, and more readily take on new or challenging material.

Schools must concretely recognize and reward effort, because over time persistence—perhaps the most crucial habit of mind for adult success—increases intelligence as well as performance.

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Great Teaching and the Science of Learning No one would go to a doctor who proudly practices medicine the same way they did 30 years ago. So why would any school or family accept a teacher who doesn’t improve his or her teaching every year? To guarantee student achievement, educators need to engage with current research on teaching and learning, and improve their pedagogy based on research as well as experience. Many traditional teaching styles have merit, but a teacher who doesn’t understand the basics of Mind, Brain and Education Science can’t consistently help his or her students—from the strongest to the struggling—flourish academically.

Traditions are important for schools and students, and it’s right that some things don’t change year after year.

But in the classroom, complacency is bad for students and teachers. Great schools construct and fund professional development programs that include every teacher and focus on a simple question: “How can we challenge and support every student even better?” The best teachers are the hungriest for growth, and their drive in turn motivates and inspires their students.

Great schools recognize and applaud their

Great schools construct and fund professional development programs that include every teacher and focus on a simple question: “How can we challenge and support every student even better?” teachers’ excellence, and then support those teachers’ desire to get even better.

A Final Word One of our former chaplains liked to say about St. Andrew’s: “There is a spirit in this place.” Over the last decade, that spirit—so evident in the joy of helping others and the determination to keep improving—has been validated and strengthened by a deepening commitment to research-informed teaching. I am blessed to work with teachers and staff members who exemplify educational excellence. I hope that you find their thoughts as illuminating and their passion as inspiring as I do each day.

Robert Kosasky (rkosasky@saes.org) has been the Head of School at St. Andrew’s sine 2002.

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Endnotes Pages 6-7 Research-Informed Teaching at St. Andrew’s 1 See Linda Darling-Hammond, “Teacher Quality and Student Achievement: A Review of State Policy Evidence,” Education Policy Analysis Archives 8 (2000) and Jesse Levin, “For Whom the Reductions Count: A Quantile Regression Analysis of Class Size and Peer Effects on Scholastic Achievement,” Empirical Economics 26 (2001): 221.S 2 This data reflects surveys done with over 1500 public and private school teachers who have participated in CTTL programs.

3 Mariale Hardiman, Luke Rinne, and Ranjini Mahinda John Bull, “Professional Development Effects on Teacher Efficacy: Exploring How Knowledge of Neuro- and Cognitve Sciences Changes Beliefs and Practices,” Paper Presented at Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association (April 2013).

4 Castel, Alaln D. (2008) “Metacognition and learning about primacy and recency effects in free recall: The utilization of intrinsic and extrinsic cues when making judgments of learning.” Memory & Cognition, 36 (2), 429-437 5 Dr. Mariale Hardiman is the author of The Brain Targeted Teaching Model for 21st Century Schools (Corwin 2012) and founder of the Neuro-Education Initiative at Johns Hopkins Graduate School of Education. Dr. Kurt Fischer is the founding president of the International Mind, Brain, and Education Society and founding editor of the journal of Mind, Brain, and Education Science.

6 Back, Shlomo. Ways of Learning To Teach: A Philosophically Inspired Analysis of Teacher Education Programs. Rotterdam; Boston: Sense Publishers, 2012.

7 “Leadership is second only to classroom instruction among all school-related factors that contribute to what students learn at school.”

Kenneth Leithwood et. al., Review of Research: How Leadership Influences Student Learning.

Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement (2004).

Pages 8-9 II. Your Brain on Ukele 1 John Blacking. How Musical is Man? (1974).

2 E. Glenn Schellenberg. “Long-Term Positive Associations Between Music Lessons and IQ.” Journal of Educational Psychology 98 (2006): 457-468 and Sylvain Moreno, Ellen Bialystok, Raluca Barac, E. Glenn Schellenberg, Nicholas J. Cepeda and Tom Chau. “Short-Term Music Training Enhances Verbal Intelligence and Executive Function,” Psychological Science 22 (2011) 1425.

3 Anita Collins. “How Playing a Musical Instrument Benefits Your Brain,” Ted-Ed Lessons Worth Sharing. (Accessed 2015) http://ed.ted.com/ lessons/how-playing-an-instrument-benefits-yourbrain-anita-collins 4 Wallace, Wanda T. “Memory for Music: Effect of Melody on Recall of Text.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 20, no. 6 (1994): 1471–85. doi:10.1037/02787393.20.6.1471.

5 Zuk, Jennifer, Christopher Benjamin, Arnold Kenyon, and Nadine Gaab. “Behavioral and Neural Correlates of Executive Functioning in Musicians and Non-Musicians.” PLoS ONE 9, no. 6 (June 17, 2014): e99868. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0099868.

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Pages 10-11 III. How I Teach AP United States History (Now) 1 Karpicke, Jeffrey D. “The Critical Importance of Retrieval for Learning.” Science 319, (February 2008): 966-968 2 See Karpicke, J.D. & Roediger, H.L., (2008).

“The critical importance of retrieval for learning.” Science, 319(5865), 966-968 and Karpicke, J.D. & Blunt, J.R. (2011). “Retrieval practice produces more learning than elaborative studying with concept mapping.” Science, doi:10.1126/ science.1199327.

3 S. Radford-Hill. “Practicing Inclusive Pedagogy.

(2014). https://www.luther.edu/ideas-creationsblog/?story_id=548097

Pages 12-13 IV. Metacognition: A Pathway to Intrinsic Motivation 1 C.S. Dweck. “Self Theories: Their Role in Motivation.” Personality, and Development. (1999).

J. Tardif. Pour un Enseignement Stratégique, l’apport de la la Psychologie Cognitive (Montréal 1992). M. Bigge and S. Shermis. Learning Theories for Teachers, Massachusetts: (1992).

6 J. Dewey (1916). Democracy and Education. New York: Simon & Brown (1997).

2 Benassi, V. A., Overson, C. E., & Hakala, C. M. (2014). Applying science of learning in education: Infusing psychological science into the curriculum.

Retrieved from the Society for the Teaching of Psychology web site: http://teachpsych.org/ebooks/ asle2014/index.php 3 Fleming, S. “Relating Introspective Accuracy to Individual Differences in Brain Structure. Science 329 (2010): 1541-3.

Pages 16-17 VI. In Spit We Trust 1 Mark H. Ashcraft and Elizabeth P. Kirk. “The Relationship Between Working Memory, Math Anxiety, and Performance,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 130 (2001).

Pages 20-21 VIII. Lessons Learned in Cambridge: Two Research Fellows Reflect 1 Dianne DeMott Painter. “Teacher Research Could Change Your Practice.” National Education Association (Accessed June 2015). http://www.nea. org/tools/17289.htm 2 “Research | How to Do Great Research.”

Accessed June 2, 2015. http://greatresearch.org/ category/research/.

3 Barbara McCombs. “What Do We Know About Learners and Learning? The Learner-Centered Framework: Bringing the Educational System into Balance.” Educational Horizons (Spring 2001): 182.

Pages 22-23 IX. Happiness and School Achievement: What the Research Says 1 M.A. Killingsworth and D.T. Gilbert. “A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind.” Science 330 (2010): 932.

Pages 25-27 XI. Mathway to the Brain 1 Cowan, Nelson. “What Are the Differences between Long-Term, Short-Term, and Working Memory?” Progress in Brain Research 169 (2008): 323–38. doi:10.1016/S0079-6123(07)00020-9.

2 Dr. Jay Giedd. 2010, pers. comm.

3 See Dr. Mariale Hardiman and Glenn Whitman’s “Assessment and the Learning Brain” Independent School (winter 2014) available at www.thecttl.org.

4 University College London. “Novelty Aids Learning.” ScienceDaily (4 August 2006). www. sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/08/060804084518. htm 5 Bernard, S. (2010) http://www.edutopia.org/ neuroscience-brain-based-learning-relevanceimproves-engagement

Pages 34-35 XV. Let Them Play (Part II) 1 Sheldon Cohen and Thomas Ashby Wills.

“Stress, Social Support and the Buffering Hypothesis.” Psychological Bulletin 98 (1985) and Ulrike Rimmele et. al. “The Level of Physical Activity Affects Adrenal and Cardiovascular Reactivity to Psychosocial Stress.” Psychoneuroendocrinology 34 (2009): 190—198.

2 See The Aspen Institute’s Project Play report “Physical Literacy in the United States” http:// plreport.projectplay.us/ 3 Ratey, John J., and Eric Hagerman. Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain. 1st edition. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2008.

4 Åberg, Maria A. I., Nancy L. Pedersen, Kjell Torén, Magnus Svartengren, Björn Bäckstrand, Tommy Johnsson, Christiana M. Cooper-Kuhn, N. David Åberg, Michael Nilsson, and H. Georg Kuhn. “Cardiovascular Fitness Is Associated with Cognition in Young Adulthood.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106, no.

49 (December 8, 2009): 20906–11. doi:10.1073/ pnas.0905307106.

5 Pontifex, Matthew B., Brian J. Saliba, Lauren B. Raine, Daniel L. Picchietti, and Charles H. Hillman.

“Exercise Improves Behavioral, Neurocognitive, and Scholastic Performance in Children with Attention-Deficit/hyperactivity Disorder.” The Journal of Pediatrics 162, no. 3 (March 2013): 543–51. doi:10.1016/j.jpeds.2012.08.036.

Pages 38-39 XVII. All For One and One For All 1 Yardsticks: Children in the Classroom Ages. 3rd edition. (Turners Falls, MA: Center for Responsive Schools, Inc., 2007): 4-14.

2 “Adolescence and the Final Battle for Independence.” Psychology Today. http://www. psychologytoday.com/blog/surviving-your-childsadolescence/201101/adolescence-and-the-finalbattle-independence.

3 Perham, Nick, and Joanne Vizard. “Can Preference for Background Music Mediate the Irrelevant Sound Effect?” Applied Cognitive Psychology 25, no. 4 (July 2011): 625–31. doi:10.1002/acp.1731.

4 Benassi, V. A., Overson, C. E., & Hakala, C. M. (2014). Applying science of learning in education: Infusing psychological science into the curriculum.

Retrieved from the Society for the Teaching of Psychology website: http://teachpsych.org/ebooks/ asle2014/index.php

4 Howard Garnder, and Charles M. Reigeluth (Editor). Instructional-Design Theories and Models: A New Paradigm of Instructional Theory. 1st edition.

Vol. II. Hillsdale, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1999.

5 Brown, Peter C., Henry L. Roediger III, and Mark A. McDaniel. Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 2014.

Pages 32-33 XIV. Teach Me and I’ll Teach You 1 J.A. Banks. An Introduction to Multicultural Education 2nd ed. (Boston 1999).

6 Dr. Robert Stickgold. “Sleep Memory and Dreams: Fitting the Pieces Together” TEDxRiverCity (June 8, 2010) Retrieved from: http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=WmRGNunPj3c

2 S. Nieto. Affirming Diversity: The Sociopolitical Context of Multicultural Education (2nd ed.). (New York 1996).

7 Carskadon, Mary A. (2011) “Sleep’s Effects on Cognition and Learning in Adolescence.” Progress in brain research 190: 137–143. NCBI PubMed. Web.

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Pages 40-41 XVIII. An Epistemic Nudge 1 Who could blame students for this attitude, given the prejudices of their culture and trained as they are to think of education in utilitarian terms— What means will get me to the ends of admission to a good college? College admission committees (and we all know they know what’s best), the unestimable CollegeBoard (ditto!), and even my own school—with its stubborn designation of classes as ‘non-academic’ or ‘non-major’ classes—support this negative animus.

2 If any of the positive feedback is true, the credit really lies with the content of the disciplines I teach, not me as teacher.

3 When engaging in description, it is essential to avoid making claims about a given student’s assumptions as it leads to confusion and defensiveness. Rather, it is best to speak at the level of, say, “society” or “our culture” and on the basis of “evidence” and philosophical genetics.

4 Adding to the indifference is the steadily rising tide of animosity toward religion in general and Christianity in particular. Not long ago, for example, traditional Christianity was held with suspicion because it supposedly made erroneous truth claims, but it was still viewed as playing a positive role in society for its role in moral education. More recently, however, traditional Christianity is viewed negatively, not only because it’s truth claims are apparently erroneous, but because its moral claims are dangerous in as much as it supposedly leads to repression of the inner desires of the self and the oppression of others.

However dubious and misunderstood these claims are, their influence on contemporary culture is hard to deny.

5 Knowing isn’t always ‘knowing’. Or, as Martin Heidegger once put it, “Thinking only begins at the point where we have come to know that Reason . . . is the most obstinate adversary of thinking” (quoted in William Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosphy (Double Day, Anchor Books: Garden City, NY, 1962): 206. Heidegger’s point isn’t that we shouldn’t use reason to think; rather, it’s that our culture too often equates only a positivism with knowing. However, since this kind of reason only attends to a narrow slice of our experience of reality, and does so without serious reflexive critique, Heidegger argues that positivism often gets in the way of thinking about what matters most.

6 Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford University Press, 1990), pg. 261.

7 One approach of showing love’s knowledge to students is to engage them in, what I call, a ‘quotidian phenomenology.’ At its most basic level, the goal of phenomenology is to show what life looks like as from the perspective of one experiencing it, and in the hands of people like Heidegger, it’s often seems obtuse. But Jerry Seinfeld was, in his own way, a phenomenologist.

His famous question—Have you ever noticed that…?—is funny because he points out things that we experience everyday but haven’t actually described. Similarly, I aim to give students both the opportunity and the conceptual means to examine the stuff of their everyday lives, especially as they experience love’s knowledge.

CREDITS

Director: Glenn Whitman Head of Research: Dr. Ian Kelleher Program Coordinator: Molly Magner Financial Manager: Monique McMillan-Jackson Editors: Richard Coco, Danielle Collins, Dr. Ian Kelleher, Glenn Whitman Graphic Designer: Hillary Reilly Photography: Richard Coco, Danielle Collins, Stacie Crawford, Molly Magner, John Troha, Glenn Whitman Published October 2015 The mission of The Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning is to create and innovate in the field of Mind, Brain and Education Science to allow teachers to maximize their effectiveness and students to achieve their highest potential. @thecttl

St. Andrews Episcopal School 8804 Postoak Road Potomac, MD. 20854 301-983-5200 | www.saes.org