Behavioural struggles

Again and again as I talk to other teachers about students' (problem) behaviours, one idea is never too far from the surface.  Give any conversation 5 to 10 minutes and you'll hear "There are no consequences any more.  No wonder the students don't behave."  And this sounds pretty reasonable.  After all, of of the reasons most of us usually behave in the way that society expects is because we do not like the consequences of behaving outside society's expectations.

But the problem with this idea is that it assumes that all students are capable, right now, right this instant, no matter what is going on in their lives, of behaving the way we expect them to.  We are assuming that the reason they are not behaving in the expected fashion is because they can behave properly but they are not making the effort, presumably because they lack the motivation of consequences.  Apply consequences, the thinking goes, and those behaviours will clear up like that.

But what if they cannot, actually mentally, emotionally cannot, behave the way we want them to?  I would like to get you thinking about the fact that behaviours can be hard to control, no matter how old and/or experienced you may be, let alone if you are a teenager.

My tough behaviour is eating.  I love eating.  I love the taste of food.  When I am tired, or stressed, or unhappy eating good food makes me feel better.  And there are consequences to this.  I am six foot 2 (around 187 cm) and at one point I weighed 280 pounds.  Now, I wasn't a candidate for the Biggest Loser but at age 37 my doctor started me on large doses of Niacin, a B vitamin that helps reduce cholesterol.  I understand the consequences of love of eating.  Extra weight damages joints, my cholesterol level, combined with my family history, puts me at greater risk of a heart attack, of dying young.  Extra weight saps my endurance, making it harder to do physical activity with my family.  I know all this.  I am motivated.  What could be more motivating that the risk of death?

Yet motivation is not enough to help me control my eating.  My eating behaviours have been put in place over 42 years of my life.  I cannot motivate them away.  I have to try and be smart about them, figure out when and why and what I eat and figure out ways to reduce my calorie intake while still being happy.  I have to find ways to get more physical activity into my life.  Making these changes requires "skillpower, not willpower", as an anti-smoking expert once told me.

Do you have any behaviours that are negative but you have trouble controlling?  If not, then you are one lucky SOB.  But if you do, then please take a minute to think that at least some of the student behaviours that bother you come from a lack of "skillpower" rather than a lack of motivation.  Please take the time and energy to work with them on their behaviour management skills so that they can behave the way that we want them to.

If you are looking for tools to help students improve their "skillpower", have a look at the Collaborative Problem Solving ideas of Dr. Ross Greene.  I have found those tools to be tremendously helpful in dealing with all kinds of students.  You can get more information at the Lives in the Balance web site.

Should learning be fun?

Note:  I started this post about a year ago.  Here I am finally getting around to finishing it.  I hope the links still work.

A few days ago I saw an email from a Math teacher with whom I have previously worked. She was pointing her colleagues to an article about the riots in Vancouver after Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals. The article, by Naomi Lakritz (one of my least favourite newspaper columnists), is critical of how teachers and society deal with children and teenagers. The author of the article is critical of, among other things, the idea that learning should be fun. She makes fun of an article by Larry Williams where he puts forward some good ideas about the value of fun in creating motivation and the value of motivation to help people learn.

A quote from Lakritz: "But learning cannot always be fun; it often requires long hours of mental effort, perseverance and hard slogging. Insisting that learning must be fun teaches children to expect that everything in life must be fun, that they are always entitled to fun, and that if something isn’t fun, they don’t need to bother with it."

I think Lakritz is missing the point about learning. For example, she is a writer and learning to be a good writer (I dislike Ms. Lakritz's opinions, but I can find no fault with the technical aspects of her writing) can certainly involve "long hours of mental effort, perserverance and hard slogging". But I would be willing to bet any amount of money that writing for Lakritz involves elements of joy and/or satisfaction. I am sure that she felt happy and satisfied that her column about the Vancouver riots was picked up as a guest column for the Sports section of canada.com. It would have been positive feelings like those that sustained her though all the "hard slogging" of many years of learning the technical skills of a good writer.

And the fun/excitement/joy satisfaction of doing something well is what motivates anyone to keep working and learning at a skill. As an example, every year, thousands of amateur athletes make massive sacrifices of time, money and energy to compete in sports that our nation pays attention to only at Olympic time. Do those athletes do it to get rich, to be famous? No, they do it because they love their sports and they love doing those sports and they love the challenge of trying to be the best in the world. In other words, they have fun and they enjoy what they are doing. I doubt they enjoy every minute of what they are doing. Working at being a world-class athlete demands a level of "hard slogging" that most of us cannot even contemplate, let alone do.

But the fun, the joy is there.  Clara Hughes has been one of Canada's most successful Olympic athletes ever. I remember her winning medals at the Atlanta Summer games in cycling.  Then she won multiples medals in long distance speed skating.  She has been through more hard slogging so far than the vast majority of humans.  But here are some of Clara's comments about it all.   From August 21, 2007 "With all of this fun, it’s easy to forget the pain and work that this job entails." From March 2005 "...it was so beautiful to go and skate ‘just for the fun of it’."  How about this one from June 21, 2011? "...why the heck I am still doing this sport thing. I realized the reason is exactly that. Joy. The potential as a human being to experience the sensation of joy has been possible for me because of sport. Because of competing. It is my form of self-expression and beyond any satisfaction, any success, well beyond those moments of winning or perfecting performance…the emotion that has lifted me up and urged me time and again to return to the arena of competition is joy."

So, maybe if students found learning as fun as Clara Hughes finds distance cycling and skating, then maybe learning wouldn't be such hard slogging after all.

The wood stove model of teaching

About a week ago I read an article by Margaret Wente in the Globe and Mail talking about how liberals and conservatives operate on two different moral systems.  The article is based on ideas from Jonathan Haidt's book The Righteous Mind (Globe and Mail review), where Mr. Haidt says that liberal thinkers are concerned with care, harm, and fairness but conservative thinkers are concerned with loyalty, authority, and sanctity. 

This struck a chord with me recently.  On Friday I was at a Professional Development day activity looking at restorative practices.  One part of the presentation was comparing restorative practices to traditional school discipline.  The traditional discipline practices were really about authority, and sanctity, with maybe a bit around loyalty.  Roughly speaking, in traditional discipline, if a student does not show respect for authority and those things authority sanctifies, then the student is punished.  A classic example: student swears at a teacher.  The student has shown a lack of respect for authority and the teacher's role, so we suspend the student.  After the suspension the student comes back to class, usually angry about the suspension, while the teacher is still angry at the student for the disrespect shown that has not been addressed.  There is a good chance another incident will occur.

The restorative practices are focused around care, harm, and fairness.  The main thrust is that if a problem occurs then at least one person has been harmed and the fair response is to try to fix the harm as much as possible and restore a working community.  In restorative practices, if a student swears at a teacher then there is recognition that the teacher has been hurt by that.  However, if the student can be helped to understand that he/she has hurt another person and then the student can make honest amends through an apology and/or other actions, then the student can be accepted back into the classroom with no hard feelings and possibly with both student and teacher having a better sense of how to work together in the future.

I feel that I can say fairly that in my experience, discipline that is more restorative around fixing a problem works better than traditional discipline.  If you are treated fairly, cared for, and protected from harm it is quite easy to develop loyalty and respect for authority and sanctity.  But if you are harmed, not cared for, and not treated fairly, it is almost impossible to develop the traits valued by conservatives.

I think an analogy that I heard many years ago fits this situation.  The analogy was the idea of a person telling his/her wood stove "I will give you some wood as soon as you give me some heat".  We all know that a wood stove will not give any heat until we put some wood in.  In the same way, young students will not show respect and loyalty until they have been cared for, treated fairly and protected from harm.

So teachers, the next time you are looking for "heat" from a student think about whether your best choice might be to stoke the stove by offering some caring and fairness first.

Two years ago I created this piece about my connections to Remembrance Day. As we approach November 11 next week, I thought it was worth posting.

Teaching Works of Art

Many years ago when I was a student at Queen's University, I was fortunate to take four courses with Peter Taylor, a terrific Math professor. Dr. Taylor is a terrific mathematician but he also has side interests in Biology (I did not know theoretical biology existed until I heard him talk about it) and education.

Earlier this year, I was able to attend his "Last Lecture" entitled "God is a Mathematician", and speaking to him briefly afterward I heard about his web site. When I find time, I look through his web site to see what gems I can find, because he has so many fantastic ideas and makes so many neat connections. Yesterday, I found this Dialogue (it deserves the capital D) which sparked fireworks in my brain about some of the difficulties I have seen while teaching.

Dr. Taylor's point in the Dialogue is that if you look at the content of an English course, it is normally full of works of art. There are poems, novels, plays, short stories and more that all have been found to have value, a connection to life, by many people. So, an English course by nature contains subject matter that is intrinsically interesting. I think that we all understand that not every student is going to be impressed by these works of art, but it gives the course a starting point rooted in reality, the reality that there is merit to these pieces.

In Mathematics, we typically focus on the building of technical skills, mostly revolving around addition, subtraction, multiplication, division of different mathematical elements. First, we work with natural numbers, then we work with fractions, then we work with variables, then we work with algebraic expressions. In a sense it is the same stuff over and over again, and so there is little wonder that students get bored. The questions/problems/challenges that have an interesting connection to the students' curiousities and lives are often put in the "extra", "challenge", or "extension" portion of the textbook and are rarely assigned by the teacher, usually because they seem too hard. Dr. Taylor's point is that these problems are hard, the same way that writing or reading a good poem is hard, but we still find the time to do that in our English courses, so why not do it in Math?

As I said above, these ideas ignited some fireworks in my brain. I have made a first attempt to put together a mathematical challenge to students that is, in its small way, a work of art. If you are interested in having a look, it is called the "One Shot Challenge". It is intended for Grade 10 Applied Math (Quadratics strand) and you can find it here on my wiki.

I welcome any thoughts and comments on my "work of art" as well as other ideas from this post, or any other.

New Ways of Paying Teachers

The edReformer blog today had an interesting article entitled How to Pay Teachers. The article describes how teachers are evaluated and paid at Summit Prep school in California. The upshot is that teachers gather evidence to demonstrate their competence in seven teaching areas. The seven areas are Assessment, Content, Curriculum, Instruction, Knowing Learners and Learning, Leadership, and Mentoring.

What I found so interesting about the article is how much control and influence teachers have over the information that is determining their evaluations as teachers. If a teacher thinks she is terrific in Mentoring, then she would be responsible for gathering documentation to show the value of mentoring, perhaps a series of lesson plans from a "mentee" showing progress over the year.

First off, I think that giving teachers control and influence over their evaluations just makes sense from a perspective of fairness. It also makes sense from the perspective of motivation. Workers who feel that they have control over important aspects of their work tend to feel more motivated. Finally, the Summit Prep system gets teachers thinking about what is being expected of them and how to show that they are doing it well. In my opinion, it is the last benefit that is going to pay the biggest dividends. One major aspect of teaching that I feel is weak for most teachers is reflection about the quality and nature of the teaching they do. Teachers at Summit Prep who do not reflect on their teaching will find themselves at the bottom of the pay scale for years at which time an administrator is likely to notice the teacher's lack of progress and fire him or her.

My only question, which does not seem to be addressed in the post, is whether spending time to gather all the information teachers need to be evaluated gets in the way of teaching. Other than that, this seems like a great system for evaluating teacher performance.

The power of new teaching methods

I just found an article entitled Lectures obsolete, says Nobel winner in the Ottawa Citizen newspaper. The article talks about how new, interactive teaching methods were able to teach more physics to a group of students than an experienced, charismatic professor at UBC. This feels like a personal victory to me since back in January 2009 the Citizen ran an editorial ridiculing the types of methods that proved to be so effective in the current article. The Citizen's January 23, 2009 editorial, entitled "Learning Difficulties", concluded "A lecture from a charismatic professor, given to a group of students who want to be there, will always be worth more than clickers in the hands of a colourless professor and disengaged students."

I wrote two letters to the editor on the topic of lectures versus new teaching methods, defending the value of new teaching methods. Portions of the two letters were combined and printed in the Letters page on February 5, 2009, along with my picture. That was a small victory, although the Citizen highlighted my recognition of the fact that lectures work for some students over my defense of new teaching methods.

Now, however, comes today's article showing that good teaching methods, including the much-maligned clickers, actually blow away a charismatic professor. Students learning from the professor scored 18% better than random guessing while students learning from the new methods scored 51 percent higher than random guessing.

I am curious to see whether the UBC results will merit an editorial comment. If it does, I will be sure to respond. :)