Every year around this time, I publish a summer reading list of books I love and that have influenced my way of seeing teaching and leading. Here’s this year’s list:

Imagination First:  Unlocking the power of possibility.  By Eric Liu and Scott Noppe-Brandon.  In an age of round-the-clock testing, I was pleased to discover this book that encourages us to cultivate imagination in ourselves and in our students. This is not touchy-feely tome; the authors make a compelling case for why creativity and imagination are essential to higher order thinking and problem solving.  It helps us reframe our current challenges and uncover solutions that are unavailable as long as we stay stuck in formulaic thinking.  They also offer 28 practices that can be applied with students and with ourselves to help us develop imagination, creativity, and innovative thinking.

Why Don’t Students Like School:  A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How The Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom. By Daniel T. Willingham.  This practical and readable book really helped me understand why some students don’t like school and gave me tips for how I can organize my lessons and approach better to make them more engaging for students.  He offers practical advice and some surprising insights about how children learn and how we can help them learn better. I especially loved his ideas about how to support struggling learners.

Linchpin:  Are You Indispensable?  By Seth Godin.  I attended a Skype riff with Godin this spring before I’d read his latest book and was immediately impressed with his passion. That passion translates into his book. Here, Godin talks about how the work world is changing and how now, more than ever, we need “linchpins” who lead, invent, connect others, and create order out of chaos. Godin has some interesting insights about how schools can prepare students to be linchpins in the new economy and he also challenges us as members of huge bureaucracies to become linchpins within our sphere of influence.  He shows us how we can overcome resistance and significantly impact our students and our schools. 

Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns.  By Clayton M. Christensen.  Christensen makes the case that the way that schools are currently structured actually impedes authentic learning.  He and his co-authors apply theories of disruptive innovation to schools and imagine what schools would look like if they were re-designed to better meet students’ needs. I like the way that Christensen challenges us to think beyond the current school structures to ways that we can leverage technology to help students create customized pathways to mastery. It’s a little radical for traditionalists, but it’s a great book to shake us out of our complacency and imagine new ways of schooling that better meet the needs of 21st century learners.

What Video Games have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. By James Paul Gee.  I was a little skeptical when a friend suggested I read this book, but after the first chapter, I was hooked. Gee makes a really compelling case for how video games embody some of the best teaching and learning practices and how we can learn from them. Since reading this book, I have seen several ways I can incorporate his principals into my own work with teachers and leaders who are grappling with how to make learning compelling to 21st century learners.

Switch:  How to Change Things When Change is Hard. By Chip Heath and Dan Heath.  The Heath brothers are two of my favorite authors so I couldn’t wait for their next book. They didn’t disappoint. This is essential reading for any instructional leader trying to move a school in a new direction. They break down the change process into three parts, give practical and actionable advice for how to implement each part of the process, and provide research and compelling stories to support their claims. It’s an easy read but filled with strong data and support for their claims.  I find myself turning to again and again as I help schools and organizations navigate the change process.

What are you reading this summer???  Would love to hear your suggestions.  Please leave your comments!

When I built my company Mindsteps on the idea that any teacher can become a master teacher with the right kind of support and practice, I got a lot of push back. Immediately, people bristled at the idea. They pointed to teachers who threw chairs at students, or teachers who were mentally cruel to students, or teachers who were pedaphiles and then they ask “Are you really saying that those teachers can become master teachers?”

Uh, no.

But it’s really an unfair question to begin with. It equates bad teaching with being a bad person.  It’s funny, when a disaffected postal worker or tax accountant shoots his colleagues in a rage, we don’t call him a bad employee. Or when a doctor molests his patients, we don’t call that bad medicine. When an accountant steals her clients’ life savings, we don’t call that bad accounting.  When a chef throws a knife at a diner, we don’t call it bad cooking. It’s evil behavior to be sure, but we are able to attribute the behavior to the person, not the profession. Why is it that we are able to separate bad behavior from job performance in just about every other profession except teaching?

Wednesday on CNN, I saw some of the most disturbing video footage I have ever seen. In it, a teacher cornered and brutally beat a student while other students watched and laughed. The teacher’s behavior was evil, and disgusting, and a whole lot of other adjectives I could come up with, but it wasn’t bad teaching.

Bad teaching is not planning lessons that clearly move studnts toward mastery, or not using effective strategies to help students learn, or trying to cover too much in one class period, or giving students unclear feedback, or having a lesson so disorganized that students are all over the place. That’s bad teaching.

So when I express concern about the push to fire bad teachers, don’t mean the pedaphiles and the mental, emotional, and physical abusers, and others who present a danger to children. They aren’t bad teachers- they’re bad people and they have  no business being around children. 

But bad teachers — the ones who, by lack of will or skill, aren’t effective in the classroom — I still believe that with the right kind of support and practice, they can become great teachers and it’s worth the investment to help them.

More on that in my next post…

I am becoming more and more distressed by the conversations I am seeing in the national media that blame “bad” teachers for all the ills in society.  Take Newsweek’s March cover that claimed that the key to saving American education was to ”fire bad teachers.”  Not only do these messages misappropriate blame and over-simplify the very complex problems we face in schools, they unintentially kill good teaching.

Case in point. The other day I was helping a teacher rethink how she planned her lessons. We were working on creating more engaging, rigorous learning experiences for students. After I explained how to create spaces in the classroom to allow her students to learn how to deal with the messiness of learning, she said, “This is great Robyn, but what do I do when my principal walks in and sees all this messiness going on. I could lose my job!”  Unfortunately, I hear the same lament time and time again. I would love to teach this way, but …my principal, the state tests, the curriculum, my district mandate, the parents, etc.

To quote Seth Godin in his latest book Linchpin, “Great teachers are wonderful. They change lves. We need them. The problem is that most schools don’t like great teachers. They’re organized to stamp them out, bore them, bureaucratize them, and make them average.”

There are several reasons why schools don’t work, but firing the bad teachers won’t fix them, especially when the same systems that prevent really great teaching remain firmly in place.

So what do we do? For starters, we have to stop teaching scared. We have to stop letting fear keep us from doing what’s right and take the risk for the sake of our kids.  We have to do what master teachers have been doing for years — ignore the distracting noise outside, close your door, and teach extraordinarily.  We have to stop conforming and doing what is safe.  Instead, we must dare to be good, really good, not at our jobs, but at our calling to help students become great learners.   And most of all, we have to fight every day to get better at what we do, not because of some mandate or because we are afraid of being labeled a “bad teacher” and end up on the cover of Newsweek, but because it is the right and best thing to do. We owe it to our kids. We owe it to ourselves.

Spring is undeniably here and students (and probably a few teachers) have begun the countdown to summer.

Take a moment to think about your students who have made progress this year in terms of becoming more independent learners, beefing up their study habits, or learning to ask for help.

Chances are you’ve spent a lot of time providing the support, stability and strategies these students need in order to succeed.  Before the end of the year crunch is upon you, why not take a few minutes to make some notes about these students to share with the teachers they’ll have next year? That way students can continue moving in the right direction rather than reverting to their old ways at the beginning of the next school year. You might also enlist the teachers in the grades below you to do the same so that you have a head start with the incoming group.

Here are a few tips to get you going.

• Keep it brief. Come August, teachers will be busy preparing for the year. Create something they will actually read. If a teacher needs more information, she’ll know where to find you.
• Keep it objective. Every kid deserves a clean slate – just because you and a student didn’t gel doesn’t mean it will be the same story with next year’s teacher. Notes such as “Remind Tony to copy his homework assignments in the first few weeks,” can be helpful to the teacher and ensure that Tony gets off to a great start. Writing “Tony is such a space cadet he can’t remember to copy his homework assignments even though they’re right in front of his face!” may capture your feelings, but it isn’t as helpful to Tony or the next teacher.
• Keep it specific. Try to highlight the most important things you learned that will help the student start strong next year. Instead of “Maria needs lots of support,” try “Maria has a hard time breaking down complex directions. Get her to explain directions in her own words before starting complicated assignments.”
• Keep it academic. Chances are the other teachers in the school already know who has a standing reservation in the principal’s office. But only you know what students’ academic challenges are and how to address them.
• Just keep it. Let next year’s teachers know now that you have notes you’d like to share with them. If you meet in departments, sharing “student success notes” might be a great agenda item for a pre-service meeting. Team leaders, counselors or grade-level administrators might also be interested in collecting and distributing notes in the fall.

–Claire Lambert

If you’re reading this post after Robyn’s most recent newsletter piece and tip sheet on Keeping Promises, you may be thinking about the promises to students that you have made, mangled, and managed to keep. As I read her tip sheet, one of the “promises worth keeping to our students” stood out to me:

7. I promise to help you learn from your mistakes and show you how to get better at learning.

This one took me a long time to figure out in my own classroom, and I continue to practice it as I work with both teachers and students. In my first several years as an English teacher, I thought I was helping students learn from their mistakes when I spent hours writing comments on their papers and grading the work that I handed back. And when I deducted points for late or incomplete work, surely they must have been learning from their mistakes. But it seemed like those same kids kept making those same mistakes over and over.

What I found out through trial and error is that I was taking only the first step in that process. I was showing students that they had made a mistake. Sometimes I could get them to remember that they always made a certain mistake. A few of those kids even felt bad or stupid when they saw the mistake pointed out again and again.

Unfortunately I wasn’t doing a very effective job at helping my students learn from their mistakes or at showing them how to get better at learning. One day I had a very upset 7^th grade student, we’ll call her Shana, come to me with her paper in one hand, a low C full of comments, and her friend’s paper, an A, in the other. “How come her paper is good and mine is bad?” she asked, “Mine is just as long.”

I realized that, unlike me, Shana hadn’t spent an entire Saturday reading 100 versions of this paper and seeing how they stacked up. She had only seen her own work and, despite my comments, she really didn’t get how to make it better.

After checking to make sure her friend was okay with us using her work, Shana came in at lunch and we spent 15 minutes looking back at the assignment sheet and rubric, reading her paper and comparing it to her friend’s. I was able to put my comments in context and explain how they connected to what the assignment asked for versus what she had written. At the end of our conversation, she seemed satisfied. Shana really understood why her paper earned a C while her friend’s earned an A. She was able to talk about the work more objectively rather than just feeling angry and criticized. We had another similar assignment shortly thereafter and she did much better.

After this assignment, I shared with Shana’s entire class some anonymous examples from another class and we talked about what made them high quality work. Students reviewed the comments on their own papers with a partner and compared their work to the exemplars. I saved a few copies of C and D papers and used them anonymously a couple of years later (once their authors were safely in high school) so that students could practice explaining why these examples didn’t meet the standard. I even saved a few with the most commonplace mistakes and had students analyze them before the assignment was due, giving them the chance to check their own work and fix up any similar problems.

Looking back, I’m thankful that my frustrated student marched up to my desk with her friend’s paper in hand and demanded to know why they weren’t the same. She taught me how to help her learn from her mistakes – and how to transform criticism into progress. In the process I think I kept promise #10: “I promise to learn alongside you.”

–Claire Lambert

1.    I promise to pay attention to who you are and respect the currencies you bring with you to the classroom.

2.    I promise to keep out of your way so that you can take on the work of learning and enjoy the fruits of learning for yourself.

3.    I promise to provide you with a physically and psychologically safe learning environment.

4.    I promise to listen to the feedback you give me verbally, non-verbally, and in your work, and use this feedback to do a better job of meeting your needs.

5.    I promise to keep trying until together, we figure out the best way to help you learn.

6.    I promise to do all that I can to set you up to succeed.

7.    I promise to help you learn from your mistakes and show you how to get better at learning.

8.    I promise carefully choose the work I give you so that it clearly increases your understanding and proficiency and doesn’t encumber you with meaningless rote exercises that do little to help you learn.

9.    I promise to provide you with challenging and engaging instruction that stretches you to within but at the outer limits of your ability.  In this way, I will help you grow as a learner.

10.    I promise to learn alongside you.

What other promises should we be making — and keeping– to our students? Leave your suggestions in the comments section.

For years, I have unquestioningly accepted the prevailing wisdom that the holy grail in education is to have intrinsically motivated students who learn for learning’s sake.

And yet, most of us don’t do everything we do for purely intrinsic reasons.  We work at least partially for a paycheck. We drive the speed limit not because we enjoy driving 25 mph when we are in a hurry but because we don’t want to get a ticket and imperil the lives of the other drivers around us. We work weekends in order to meet deadlines and complete paperwork because its our job.  We clean behind the fridge because company is coming over and we endure family dinners with Aunt Midge so we don’t upset our mothers. In fact, very little of what we do is purely intrinsically motivated.

For years I thought the key to student engagement was to make work more interesting and yet studies have found no evidence that the interest value of material is a determinant — as opposed to a consequence — of learning. In fact, the more I read the literature on motivation, the more I am struck by one startling idea: Intrinsic motivation may be over-rated.  Two concepts have changed my mind.

The first is the idea of integrated extrinsic motivation.  The research shows that external motivators, when used correctly, can actually help people develop intrinsic motivation over time.  When students recognize the underlying value of a behavior, identify with it, and integrate it with other aspects of themselves, they will carry out the behavior independently and outside of your control — even if they are not intrinsically motivated to do so.  Although externally motivated, they are more likely to transfer to internal motivation.

In order to achieve integrated extrinsic motivation, three factors must exist. Students must feel a sense of autonomy – that they are not being forced to do the activity; they must feel that they can be successful at the activity (competence); and they must see how the activity helps them function within the classroom and outside culture (relatedness).

The second concept is emergent motivation. This theory asserts that although students may initially find an activity boring, it doesn’t mean that they will always find it so.  When they begin to see relevance in the activity or their skill set with the activity improves, and if they can find in the activity opportunities to be successful, the activity becomes more interesting and finally, enjoyable. In other words, our motivation to do something may be initially low, but we can actually grow our motivation over time.

For too long, we have been trying to get students to care about what we teach and lamenting their lack of intrinsic motivation. Turns out, the problem isn’t that our students are not intrinsically motivated.  They may never love literature the way that we do. They may never get their kicks from solving impossible math problems and spelling may never be as important to them as it is to us.  The real problem is that the way we try to motivate them externally fails and puts the work on us. We have to keep pushing them to get any work out of them at all and we are exhausted.  But what if our external motivators could be, well, more motivating?  Do we really need students to love everything we do in the classroom or is it enough that they engage for externally motivated reasons, and in doing so, learn to build their own motivation over time?

Don’t forget to leave your ideas and comments here

For more information, check out the Handbook of Competence and Motivation. (2005, Elliot, A., and Dweck, C., Eds.)

~Robyn R. Jackson

Does your school or system require that objectives be posted in the classroom? Are they part of your lesson plans? Something that shows up in your curriculum? At some point in your teaching career you’ve probably encountered SWBAT – Students will be able to…  But can you put SWBAT in front of just anything and call it an objective?

Often when teachers plan, whether it’s for a single lesson or the next unit, they focus on the activities students need to complete. With curricula that are packed with must-do projects, tests or worksheets, it’s easy to concentrate only on what work students have to get done and not what they should get out of doing that work.

The good news is that with a little reflection, it’s easy to upgrade an objective from the activity level to the mastery level. “SWBAT create a poster about the prairie” may become “SWBAT identify four species of prairie plants and animals and explain how they interact in their environment.” It’s still important for students to know what you want them to do – complete those worksheets or make a poster – but sometimes we forget to explain what it is we really want them to know. When we write objectives at the mastery level we not only clarify for students why they’re doing this work, but we also uncover the key elements for ourselves which makes classroom differentiation much easier.

For example, if a student has difficulty writing or breaking down a complex task, making the prairie poster could take more time than is available leaving her struggling to catch up. For some younger students who are still developing the motor skills for cutting and pasting or who could get lost for an hour looking for prairie pictures in a magazine, it’s difficult for them to meet the objective written at the activity level. This objective says the student must create a poster, implying that the most important skill is poster creation.

But when the teacher rewrites the objective at a mastery level, she opens up the possibilities for expressing the essential knowledge in other ways. Maybe now the student could walk the teacher through a textbook chapter using the illustrations to show what he knows about the prairie environment or select prairie pictures from a variety of choices, group them, and tell a partner how they interact.

Take a moment to look at the objectives posted on your board today or in a lesson plan for next week and reflect on what the objective really asks students to know and be able to do.  Give yourself a pat on the back for your mastery level objectives and be on the look out for those that could use an upgrade!

–Claire Lambert

As you know by now, I am looking for ways to make the professional development I provide more valuable to teachers. Last week I tried something new in a workshop I was conducting for a group of teachers. Rather than create a tightly structured agenda where I filled every moment with activities and talk, I did what I often encourage teachers to do — I created spaces in the agenda for the learners to become co-creators of their own learning experience.

I started each day with a section called “Feedback on Feedback” where I took time to address any feedback I’d received about the workshop and make adjustments to the agenda based on the needs of the participants.  If something wasn’t working, we nixed it right there and tried something else instead. If participants didn’t feel that an activity would help them reach the objectives for the day, we came up with an alternative.

I also included time for teachers to share their own strategies. Sometimes I invited certain teachers to share, other times I announced that we would have time to share and let teachers volunteer. Each teacher had five minutes to share a strategy or resource that was relevant to the instructional principles we were discussing and take questions from the other participants. They could share a strategy they were already using successfully with their own students or one they had developed as a result of the workshop.  I learned as much as the other workshop participants during these sessions.  In fact, these sessions were amazing for how they fostered a learning community where we were all co-creators of the learning experience.

I also included time for teachers to work together in subject-alike groups to apply what they were learning and create resources they could use immediately with their students. This was a chance for participants to find practical applications for the theorhetical principles they were learning.

Finally, for each learning activity, I included a “rouge” option. Partipants had the choice of completing the activity I planned, or they could negotiate an alternative activity they would complete instead. As long as they could demonstrate how their choice would help them achieve the objectives of the workshop, they were free to pursue it. Some of the best insights of the day came from people who chose to “go rouge.”

It was a huge risk but it paid off. The participants told me that it was a much more rewarding workshop for them and I can see from the activity on our follow-up electronic community that the participants are using what they learned in their classrooms and sharing it with their colleagues. They have an enthusiasm for the project that wasn’t present before and I believe that these teachers now own what they have learned and are adapting — not adopting– these strategies into their own instructional practice.

Here’s what I learned. While I am a firm advocate of creating spaces in lesson for students to take ownership over their own learning, I have always been afraid to do the same for adults. I thought that if I did, I would seem unprepared. I felt like I needed to have highly structured activities or people would feel that my workshops were a waste of time. What I am learning is that when I let go of the false notions that I have to be the expert and allow room for co-creating, the learning experiences in my workshops can model the types of learning experiences I believe should be happening in the classroom.  I cannot forget that the same principles that work for helping children learn also work for helping adults learn. I plan to spend more time practicing what I preach.

And the quest continues…

~Robyn R. Jackson

For those of you who haven’t heard, I am on a quest to improve the way that we deliver professional learning experiences for teachers. My goal is to build a new model that has a greater impact in the classroom. I started this journey with the pledge that if I cannot deliver PD that is more useful to teachers than if they had spent the same amount of time grading papers, I will not deliver it.

This week was the first time I had to put that pledge to the test. I worked hard to provide an interactive, hands-on, practical workshop but I also wanted to avoid a laundry list of strategies. I wanted teachers to understand the principles behind the strategies so that they could adapt them to meet the needs of their students in the context of their classrooms.

Because PD can often feel like jail, I decided to give each teacher a “Get out of jail free” card. They could use that card at any time to anonymously raise a question, voice a concern, or let me know that the workshop was not meeting their needs. I thought it would be a great way to let the teachers exercise some control over the agenda and hold me accountable for keeping my pledge.

The entire day, only one person used his card. Now that could mean that I was delivering utterly compelling and useful PD, but I think that the more likely reason is that using the cards is an imperfect solution to a much greater problem. For one, only people who care about their learning will even use such a card. Those who are just there putting in time won’t bother.  Two, although I immediately addressed the card, the writer’s concern — he wanted more help with motivating reluctant learners — I could not address his concern to the level and degree he needed within the confines of the time we had. The best I could do is promise to deal with his concern in more detail the next time I came and to bring additional resources with me. The others in the room liked that idea and we changed the agenda for next time, but I worry that the teacher who raised that concern didn’t get his needs met immediately.

So, do “Get out of jail free” cards work?  Not sure. I’ll need to try them a few more times to see if they really make a difference.  But I do know this. These cards are minor tweaks.  They are never going to accomplish the goals I have set for how we deliver professional learning. 

So, the quest continues…