#CyberPD Opening Minds Chapters 7-9

One of the things that I have especially appreciated with Opening Minds is that Johnston tackles the most important issue in education – namely, what is the purpose of education? Granted, this issue has been debated for thousands of years, so I don't expect is to be solved in my lifetime, but in just the last 100 years, the purpose of education has become increasingly narrowed. As he highlights in chapter 9, the political purposes of education is the nation's economic survival and global competitiveness. This view had been forced on school systems, parents and the media through the focus on high-stakes testing and global comparisons. However, as the quote illustrates, making a living doesn't necessarily guarantee making a life. This is the ribbon weaving through chapters 7-9 – support for the moral and ethical purposes of education.

Moral Development and Civic Engagement (Chapter 7)

Too often character education is just another class or add-on to the school day. I remember school assemblies introducing each of the 6 pillars of character education with cheesy posters covering the walls and “Catch 'Em Being Good” slips handed out as a reward for acting like a good citizen through being responsible, caring, respectful, trustworthy, and fair. As a kid, I never made the connection that these behaviors were suppose to guide classroom interaction (and ultimately used in real life), it just seemed like something to worry about during lunch and recess – and hope that the teacher caught me being good. Johnston contends that every classroom interaction is a model for moral development and civic engagement – for better or for worse. Students are engaged daily with making moral decisions in the way they treat each other and interrogate ideas. How does my classroom apprentice students into becoming a member of society? Am I fostering intense engagement with texts and ideas or passive acceptance of facts?

Fairness is a huge issues with students, I know. And Johnston highlights a classroom that normalizes the discussion of fairness. Somewhere I once read a teacher's philosophy statement that said something like, “I don't want to treat students equally, just fairly.” I've used that idea with students before, but without the constant conversation about exploration of fairness, it just came off like a bumper sticker platitude. But, I think one of the best illustrations of this ideal is the cartoon about standardized testing. "Everyone is a genius. But, if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid." -Albert Einstein

A huge part of moral development and civic engagement is the development of social imagination, as mentioned in chapter 6. Not only in taking perspectives, but in recognizing that there are differences in perspectives across cultures and time. In studying history, it is called historical perspective taking or empathy, which is recognizing the social, cultural, intellectual, and emotional differences of the time period and not applying 21^st Century mores to it. Much of multicultural education (and world religion curricula) have tried to bridge the similarities to create connections, but this diminishes the understanding of differences and how these differences may lead to diverse moral choices and actions. My classroom instruction needs to help students learn how to explore differences in a non-judgmental way which will lead to more empathy toward others, open mindedness, and a willingness to engage with difference.

Thinking and Working Together (Chapter 8)

“Thinking well together leads to thinking well alone.” (p. 96)

I have incorporated project based learning and cooperative groups in my teaching for years, but every year I have a parent or student who feel, as Johnston pointed out, that group work is unfair to the high-ability students or is in essence “cheating” because students are not working individually. However, in my experience, being involved in a group (like #CyberPD) forces me to individually clarify my thinking for an audience and revise my thinking as it is challenged by other perspectives. However, since most of schooling is based on individual achievement, many students do not know how to engage in thinking together. It is my goal this to help them develop the language and behaviors needed to work positively together and learn from each other. Listening is a major part of working together, as Johnston states, “Listening is the foundation of a conversation and it requires that we are open to the possibility of changing our thinking” (p. 102) Years ago I bought a book 125 Ways to be a Better Listener: A Program for Listening Success by Nan Stutzman Graser. At that time, I had my 8^th graders develop mini-lessons for each other bases on the lessons in the book. I might need to break that book out again.

Most years I have my middle schoolers design posters illustrating (in comic strip form) the ideal classroom and the worst nightmare to talk about general classroom behaviors. Johnston suggests having students create “Rules for Thinking Engagement” - to focus on what makes a conversation engaging and productive. This makes thinking together an object of study and allows for review and revision of the process.

Choice Worlds (Chapter 9)

Returning to the big questions – what kind of world am I creating in my classroom through my language and actions? Does my language reflect my beliefs and vice versa? How have my students imitated this? And the biggest question – what is the purpose of education?

Although is seems like the main purpose of education should be academic success, the “failure to attend to children's moral and social development will lead neither to happiness nor to economic security” (p. 114). Yes, I will be teaching English and history content, but I will also be teaching and modeling how to be a member of a community and the broader society. Fair and equitable education is so much more than exposing kids to the same content, or expecting everyone to be proficient on a narrow range of skills. “A better concept of a fair education would be to try to have every child develop as fully as possible. Of course we have no way of knowing what is possible for each child. All we can do is arrange for children to be fully engaged in ways that we know lead to expanded development. . . When children are fully engaged in an activity, they press into service all of their resources and stretch themselves as necessary. Children are more engaged when they have choice, a degree of autonomy, and when they see the activity as relevant.” (p.118). I think this is an outstanding philosophy for a school to embrace!

In some ways, I feel a bit paralyzed when recognizing the impact my comments can make on students. The hyper-awareness is a bit daunting – but then I have to remind myself about the lovely word “Yet”.

Johnston's final words, spoken and unspoken, “Well, now you know . . . “ What am I going to do about it? What an exciting challenge to take up as I enter the new school year!

If you would like to join the conversation about Peter Johnston's book Opening Minds: Using Language to Change Lives, check out #CyberPD on Twitter, or this week's host, Laura at Our Camp Read-A-Lot.

#CyberPD Opening Minds Chapters 4-6

Children collaborating on drawing a picture from
Early Learning Central

A teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary. - Thomas Carruthers

Although the titles of this week's chapters seem to indicate they are incredibly different topics, the theme that I found through each of them is shifting the responsibility for learning to the students rather than the teacher. The teacher is still responsible for the creation of a learning environment, and it is through the language that teacher uses (and associative practices) that he/she creates an environment where students learn from each other and individually become active agents in their own learning. This is done through thoughtful use of feedback, the creation of a culture of alternative thinking, and the development of social imagination.

Feedforward Rather Than Feedback (Chapter 4)

If the purpose of feedback is to improve further understanding and build skills while deepening perseverance in learning, than the more appropriate term might be feedforward (creating the worldview of progressing forward, rather than regressing back). Too often schools have focused on assessment (or using assessment as data) as the final hurdle to be jumped in a unit (or year) rather than a part of the learning process. Or, with Generation Me, students are praised with the mistaken belief that praise will increase self-esteem and motivation.

Johnston transforms the purpose of feedback to one that creates student narratives of agency and a dynamic mind-set of learning. He states, “The heart of formative assessment is finding the edges of students' learning and helping them to take up possibilities of growth” (p. 40). This means that feedback needs to focus on process and be non-judgmental, as judgement creates a fix-attribute mind-set. A focus on process helps students imagine and believe in the possibility of change and progress. The alternatives to straight-up praise or criticism is:

• Talk about cause and effect - “When you did __________ , I noticed ______
• Be positive (which doesn't mean praise) and notice strategies used
• Provide alternative ways of looking at the work
• Notice what is partially correct and work from what the students have shown they know

As teachers, we need to model these ways of providing feedback and encourage students to take up these models in their interaction with each other as peer interaction is the majority of a student's day.

Flexible and Collaborative Thinking (Chapter 5)

In a dynamic-learning frame knowledge is also dynamic. I know this is a radical idea for many people who grew up in a world of fixed-knowledge (Just the facts, Ma'am). When knowledge is dynamic, the construction of understanding is influenced by the perspectives and contexts of the individuals involved. Dialogue is the foundation of building flexible and collaborative thinking and the perception of uncertainty enables this dialogue. This means that we as teachers need to model comfort with uncertainty and expect disagreements but also explanation of personal positions. I have seen the teachers I work with do some amazing things to build knowledge together with their students. When a question comes up that doesn't have an immediate answer, the teacher says, “How can we find out the answer to that?” The teachers I've worked with use their whiteboard and chart papers to record their students' thinking and help them see the connections between ideas.

Social Imagination (Chapter 6)

Learning is fundamentally a social activity. Part of existing as a social being is learning how to read cues from others, imagine the perspectives of others and possible outcomes of actions. Johnston calls the first part “mind reading” - being able to read and interpret body language and cues accurately. Social reasoning is the ability to take perspectives and imagine possible outcomes. By helping students develop their social imaginations, they are also more likely to be able to self-regulate themselves and understand the consequences of their behaviors. Although these skills are not often listed in standards and benchmarks, nor tested, they are essential in building relationships with others – which provides the opportune environment for learning. Teachers can support the development of social imagination by asking students to imagine the motivations of book characters or classmates, posit multiple reasons for incidents, role play how to manage events, and guiding students to problem solve together.


If you would like to join the conversation about Peter Johnston's book Opening Minds: Using Language to Change Lives, check out #CyberPD on Twitter, or this week's host, Jill Fisch at My Primary Passion.

Knowledge Building

A major aspect of affinity spaces is the sharing of knowledge – but not in the traditional consumption model in which the learner is presented with a body of knowledge to commit to memory or master a set of skills. Scardamalia and Bereiter propose (2003) that knowledge building is “the production and continual improvements of ideas of value to a community, through means that increase the likelihood that what the community accomplishes will be greater than the sum of individual contributions and part of the broader cultural efforts” (p. 1370). To have environments that build knowledge, ideas need to be addresses as “objects of inquiry and improvement” (p. 1371) and be made available to the community to dissected, connected and discussed. Therefore a shared work space is needed along with an organized method of interactions with the ideas. It is through this interaction that the ideas themselves are improved, but also the participants are able to engage in the discussion as their own level and make individual connections to the ideas. Knowledge building is a form of constructivist learning, in which the learner constructs his or her own meaning of the ideas through connecting the new experiences to previous experiences. However, deep constructivism requires that “people are advancing the frontiers of knowledge in their community” (p. 1372). To do so, the learners must identify their own problems and goals, gather and report information, make conclusions and theories, and refine the ideas, which Scardamalia (2002) calls collective cognitive responsibility. In other words, all members of a group have an individual responsibility to contribute to the joint creation of knowledge, which is distributed across the group, not concentrated in a leader.

In a 2002 article, Scardamalia delineated the principles of knowledge building:

• Real ideas and authentic problems
• Improvable ideas
• Idea diversity
• Rise above (forming theories or principles)
• Epistemic agency
• Community knowledge, collective responsibility
• Democratizing knowledge
• Symmetric knowledge advancement
• Pervasive knowledge building
• Constructive uses of authoritative sources
• Knowledge building discourse
• Concurrent, embedded, and trans-formative assessment

Affinity spaces seem to be good places to see knowledge building in action. Since affinity spaces are created based on the shared interest in content, or ideas, the building of knowledge within this space is a primary goal, plus the goals or problems are defined by the people inhabiting the space. In addition, according to the characteristics of an affinity space, as defined by Gee, status and leadership is porous or constantly changing – novices and experts work side-by-side.

References

Scardamalia, M. (2002) Collective cognitive responsibility for the advancement of knowledge. In B. Smith (Ed.), Liberal education in a knowledge society (pp.67-98). Chicago: Open Court.

Scardamalia, M., & Bereiter, C. (2003). Knowledge Building. In Encyclopedia of Education, (2^nd ed. pp. 1370-1373). New York: Macmillan Reference, USA.