Our students are not robots (except when they are)

I have just finished teaching an intensive two and a half week course on Lego Robotics. I met with the same 13 students all day every day during that time, and we built and programmed Lego robots, completing increasingly complex (both for them to program and me to build) challenges. It was an amazing time, but I’m not going to miss either the incessant whir of the motors or the incessant calls of “Ms. K-M, Ms. K-M, Ms. K-M!”

The other constant refrain of the course was, “My robot’s not doing what I want it to do.” To which I would reply, “Your robot is doing exactly what you told it to do; what did you tell it to do?” We talked a lot about programming and free will—specifically, your robot does not have free will, and it will only do what you tell it to do. If you’re robot is not doing what you want, it means you didn’t tell it what you wanted to do. (I managed to thoroughly undermine this line of argument by showing them Short Circuit.)

After the 342^nd (give or take) time I had this conversation, I started to relate it to other conversations I’d had with colleagues, usually as they bring me their students’ final products (sometimes these are projects they’ve worked on with me, sometimes not), and they tell me, “This is not what I was expecting students to produce.” And then we look at the assignment and/or rubric, and I often end up thinking (and saying), “Well, based on this, your students gave you exactly what you said you wanted.” Sometimes it’s teachers who are disappointed their students didn’t elaborate and build on ideas—but the assignment clearly asks for a report, and makes no expectation of applying ideas and facts to new situations. Sometimes it’s teachers who are frustrated that students spent more time on bells and whistles and fancy colors (whether the product be a poster, a PowerPoint, or something else) and not as much time on content—but the rubric gives as much weight to color and visual appeal as it does to content.

If we don’t ask our students to engage in inquiry, or use critical thinking, or apply prior knowledge to new information, they won’t. Some will, sure. But most students need to be prompted, guided, and taught to do so. And that’s our job.

I’m often able to revisit these conversations the next time I start planning a project with a teacher, and we’re often able to design something that, from the outset, asks students to use critical thinking skills and demonstrate the application of those skills.

However, our students—unlike most robots—do remember the programs they’ve been told to run before. Even the bad ones. So even though we’ve created something new and different, many students will fall back into old habits.

This is a challenge I know I’m not alone in facing; I’ve talked about it with colleagues both at my school and in other schools. It is so frustrating. We want to make the shift to inquiry-driven, student-centered work that builds critical thinking ability. But we can’t make that shift all at once. But in order to make the small shifts, it seems like we have to overhaul the entire culture. But we can’t. . . you get the idea.

I don’t know the answer for this, but I am starting to think about the spring research season and how we can help students reprogram their own learning behaviors.

I get knocked down, but I get up again

Apologies in advance to anyone who now has that Chumbawamba song stuck in your head; if it’s any consolation, you’re not alone.

Several weeks ago I was working with a student who had quite vocally declared that he was “done” with research. He’d hit a few roadblocks early in the process (he wasn’t connecting to his topic, as a result was having a hard time finding articles, was frustrated with citations, etc.) and had just decided to give up. As I kept trying to encourage him to stick with it, change topics, etc., he also made it quite clear that he felt like I was “picking on him.” I was coming at it from as many angles as I could think of, but nothing seemed to be working.

That encounter (along with many others) got me thinking again about resilience, a topic never far from my mind. I’m always trying to figure out ways to make my students more resilient in the research process. And as much as I know you can’t make somebody be something, I know that it’s possible to create environments in which it’s possible for students to develop these skills.

A crucial part of that process is, I believe, using formative assessments, which I do, but I don’t do enough. It’s hard when I’m not part of the day-to-day classes, and each teacher has different routine that they use, and levels of collaboration vary, but I know those are not particularly good excuses. So as I look ahead to spring research, I’m also looking at more ways to incorporate formative assessments into the research process.

This goes hand-in-hand, of course, with the issue of making students comfortable with failure that I’ve been struggling with. Many of my students see any roadblocks as a permanent state of fact, rather than as a temporary setback. In large part that's because this is what they have been taught to believe about themselves for years--that any failure is a reflection on them, not a reflection of the inherently messy and difficult process of learning.

Which of course makes me think of this excellent TED video, which is about remaking math classes, but I think there’s a solid argument that we need to do away with the paint-by-numbers coursework Meyer talks about in ALL of our courses.


Learning is messy--the learning I’ve done since leaving formal schooling is far messier than anything I did in school, and I am sometimes frustrated that my formal education mostly focused on finding the answer rather than creating good questions (with some notable exceptions, of course).

Luckily, I am a fairly resilient person. “I don’t know” is a starting point rather than a stopping point for me. And that’s part of the challenge for me, and I think for many other teachers; we are drawn to teaching because we are “good at school”--we like learning, and even if things don’t come easily to use, we like working at it. How do you teach a skill--like resilience--when you’re not sure how you learned it yourself?

But I need to figure out something, because it’s crucial to success. A friend posted this article from Wired, and while the researchers identified grit as the quality that's key to success, I think a solid argument can be made that the Venn diagram of how resilience and grit overlap pretty much looks like a circle (if you, like me, would prefer it if more of your world was explained via Venn diagram, I highly recommend thisisindexed).

The paper (which I haven’t read yet) referred to in this article focused on competitors in the Scripps National Spelling Bee, and came to the conclusion that grittier competitors (as Lehrer defines it, “those with grit are more single-minded about their goals – they tend to get obsessed with certain activities – and also more likely to persist in the face of struggle and failure.”) fare better.

That “persistence in the face of struggle and failure” is the bit that really resonated with me. I can help students identify and connect with what they’re interested in and passionate about--but how do I help them stick with it through the ups and downs? After all, frustration and struggle are pretty integral parts of the learning process.

And then another friend posted this article: The Right Way to Respond to Failure. I’d need to quote the entire thing in order to do it justice, so you should just go read it.

The crucial role of empathy really resonated with me; when I’m frustrated (with a project, with a colleague, with a seemingly unsolvable problem) more often than not I don’t want someone offering up possible solutions--I want someone with a sympathetic ear who will let me vent and acknowledge my frustration as legitimate.

Which brings me back to the student I was talking about at the beginning (remember him?). The real breakthrough with him happened when I joked with him that as soon as I was done picking on him, I was going to go pick on all his friends about the work they needed to be doing. It was like a light bulb went off for him as he realized that EVERYONE was struggling and frustrated--and getting “picked on” by me. It suddenly became clear to him that the frustrations of research were not unique to him--they were a part of the process that everyone was experiencing.

This kid did a complete 180. He changed topics to something he was really passionate about, and needed no prodding from that point on. When I offered corrections to his citations, he made them without complaint. He was well ahead on note taking and synthesizing information--and cheerfully so.

Now, my interaction with this student is not indicative of how these things usually go, but I took a powerful lesson from it.

I believe that empathy is important--crucial, really--to helping students become resilient. We need to acknowledge that their frustrations are real and valid. But beyond that, we need to help them broaden their perspective--to look around and see that the roadblocks they’re running up against exist for everyone.

In doing that, maybe we can help them develop a little empathy for their peers, and a little resilience of their own.

Reflections on Research

We're nearing the end of the first go round with the collaborative research unit I talked about a while back. And as I mentioned in that post, we're on a modular schedule, which means we'll be starting the same project from the beginning. Which, of course, means revamping based on our experiences this first time around.

In talking with teachers about revamping things, they have sometimes lamented that it's unfortunate that this first group had to act as guinea pigs--but I point out that usually all students have to act as guinea pigs, and we have to wait an entire year in order to test our new ideas again. I'm excited about being able to re-do this unit so soon, and get more ideas for how to make it better.

And boy do I have ideas for how to make it better. I love this project, and I think many things worked well the first time, but there are definite areas for improvement. One big change will be where in the process we explicitly introduce the writing of the thesis statement (speaking of which, have I mentioned how very, very much I love Tom March's Online Thesis Generator? 'Cause I really, really do). We talked with students from the beginning about the need to form an argument and write a thesis, but we didn't do much direct instruction until late in the process of finding sources--and many students discovered that the sources they had were not helpful to their thesis, which was very frustrating for many students.

For our next go round, we'll be asking students to find a certain number of sources on their topic in order to establish their background knowledge and get an overview of their topic. Then write the thesis, then find additional sources in order to specifically address the subtopics of their thesis. This is one of those ideas I have that makes me feel kind of foolish for not having thought of it the first time around.

As frustrating as citation has been, I'm nerdily excited about deploying my citation map to its full effect. And I have to remind myself that I no longer see Works Cited pages that simply list "www.google.com", so progress is being made. There have been some interesting mistakes, and I think understanding those will help me help students avoid them in the future (for example, one student entered a magazine article from a database as a radio broadcast, because he'd used the database's built-in text-to-speech feature (which, by the way, much UDL love there) to listen to the article). (Did I just do a parenthetical aside within a parenthetical aside? I think I have a problem. . .) And inspired by Buffy Hamilton (a statement which could be true of about half the things I do), I'm going to work on some citation guidesheets to help my students move through the process from finding a source to creating an accurate citation. While I love NoodleTools (and eventually many of my students come around), many of my students struggle with identifying what type of source they have and how to answer the questions in NoodleTools. I want to help them get things right at the beginning, in order to limit future frustrations.

And after reading Kristin Fontichiaro's recent post about reflection it occurred to me in that "why didn't this occur to me before?" kind of way that while I regularly checked in with students on their progress and got a good sense of what they were struggling with and what was going well, it would be good to ask students to reflect in a more formal way on their own process. So I created a form asking students to reflect on each part of the research process--from topic selection to citations, and which parts were easiest and most difficult for them. This will help in adjustments for the next go round with this project, but I'm hoping that it will also help students realize how much they've managed to accomplish.

There are also lots of little tweaks, and I'm sure after the next time I'll have even more ideas for how to adjust. I don't know if I've ever taught the same unit the same way twice, and I think it will be a long time before I do. If I ever do. Which is just the way I want it to be.

On the Internet, no one knows you're a Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus

A colleague recently posted a story titled 'Tree octopus' is latest evidence the Internet is making kids dumb, says group on the CASL listserv. You should go read it, too, particularly because it's much more reasonable and balanced than the title would lead you to believe.

The researchers concluded that the fact that students fell for the tree octopus site meant that students weren't prepared to critically evaluate information they found online. Which is likely true, but that, I don't think, is the real takeaway lesson from this. What struck me is that the students' biggest mistake was not in trusting the information they found on the tree octopus site--it was in trusting that the researchers had steered them in the right direction.

Around the same time I read that article, I saw this one from the New York Times, about the proliferation of Q&A sites on the Internet. As more and more information is available, the harder it is to sift through it all on our own; we rely on other people to either help us sift through it or to answer our actual questions, not the ones that the SEO spam that is creeping more and more into Google search results thinks we're asking.

Wanting to know and trust that there is a person behind the answer--no matter how qualified or unqualified that person might be--is, I believe, part of why sites like Yahoo! Answers and WikiAnswesrs (and Wikipedia itself) are so popular. As much as we love having so much information at our fingertips, we don't trust information. We trust people. When people get starry-eyed talking about how the Internet has changed things, they seem much more likely to be talking about how it makes it possible to connect to people, not to connect to more information.

The students in this study fell prey to the most natural instincts of all learners--when you're learning something new, you turn to an expert. When I'm trying to learn something new, I don't start from scratch--I see if any of my colleagues have experience or expertise to offer. I search for what other librarians have done. I consult professional journals and listservs. As a very last resort I'll try random Googling, but if it comes to that I know I'm in for a long road ahead.

This, too, is what I try to teach my students about searching. If you want to make life easier on yourself, use the pathfinder I've created for your class, use the library catalog to find websites, and above all, ask for help. While I hope my students develop a bag of tricks for doing research in high school and beyond, more than anything I hope they develop the ability and the confidence to know when to ask for help--and who to trust when they ask for that help.

A Whole New Research Project

Every year the sophomores do a major research paper in their history class. And every year it is a disaster.

Okay, okay, disaster is too strong a word. Let’s just say that my vision of how the process will go and the way the process actually goes have less in common than I would like them to.

But every year it is a disaster in a slightly different way, and every year we tweak it and change it and try to make it better. Having done this several times, we’ve been able to really hone in on the areas our students really struggle with:

• Most of the time students are learning the PROCESS of research at the same time they’re learning new CONTENT for their class. Trying to master (or even manage) both is overwhelming. Trying to synthesize everything into an essay? Oy.
• Students are often so focused (and stressed) about the end product, that they want to rush past the process and right into writing the paper (they do a lot of the things I mentioned in my post about why I want to teach a stand alone class).
• We usually require students to find and evaluate X number of sources; students then find X (or sometimes less than X) number of sources, enter them all in NoodleTools, read 1 source, and get all their information from that one source
• Thesis statements? *sigh* Well-integrated evidence from their research to support that thesis complete with appropriate citation? *sigh times a million*

I realize, of course, that none of these issues are unique to me or my situation, which is some comfort.

However, this year we have a whole new schedule which is going to allow us to do something entirely different, and I’m really, really excited about it.

We’re on a modular schedule this year. Our year is divided into 8 mods; students take classes A-D during mods 1, 3, 5, 7 and classes E-H during mods 2, 4, 6, 8. Classes are 75 minutes long, as well, which I love (in years past students took 7 classes--all of which met all year long--and classes were only 40 minutes long; with that schedule it was hard to both introduce a skill and have students get meaningful practice with it). Also, this year all sophomore are taking Thinking & Writing, a class which I think pairs very naturally with teaching the research process.

Today, I met with the chairs of both the Thinking & Writing and History departments, as well as the other teacher of sophomore Thinking & Writing, about collaborating across all three departments on the research project. We wanted to make sure students we’re able to grapple with the whole process of research from topic selection to finished project, while also hitting all the steps in between.

So. In the 5th/6th mod (depending on individual schedules) students will, in their Thinking & Writing class select a topic for their History research paper, develop research questions, find and evaluate sources and then create an annotated bibliography of all their sources (this bibliography will also include a sentence about how they found and selected each source). We’re doing this to emphasize to students that gathering information from multiple sources and viewpoints is a crucial part of the research process. By the end of the mod, having done this initial research, they will develop a working thesis for their paper.

Then, in the 7th/8th mod in their History class, students will, building upon the research and thesis from their Thinking & Writing class, refine their thesis, find additional sources as needed, outline, and write their paper. Students will be able to focus on taking the information from sources and integrating it into their paper in order to support their thesis, using information to build a well-supported argument. Students will also create a presentation about their research findings (we talked briefly about doing some work on avoiding death by PowerPoint).

Time devoted to process, and time to devoted to content, honoring all parts of the research paper writing experience. I think this will help, too, students better understand that the habits of mind involved in the research process are not isolated to one project or one class; they really exist and are applicable across disciplines.

We’d been playing with and talking about this idea from the start of the year, but things really crystallized today and we were EXCITED. I came to the meeting prepared to try and coerce these teachers in to doing things the way I wanted, but they brought even better ideas to the table. I’ve been working with the History chair on this project all four years I’ve been here and I feel like I am reaping the benefits of having really invested time in building that collaborative relationship; I honestly believe that I could not have made this project happen two years ago.

Also out of this discussion came the idea (also from the teacher) that we should develop a research paper rubric to be used across all classes in the History/Social Studies department, with increasing levels of complexity in grades 10-12, and with separate areas for the content area teachers to assess and for me to assess. This is something I’ve been wanting to move to for a while, and to have the idea come out of someone’s mouth besides my own feels like a major victory.

I’m either starting from scratch or totally revamping everything for this project, but I think it will provide a great way to try out some of my ideas for the class I’m teaching next year. It’s going to be a lot of work, but after years of trying to shape the research process to look more like this, it’s exciting to see it really take that shape.