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.

On helplessness, learned and taught

It is hard for me to write about this, because some of my frustrations are very, very specific, and this could easily become about venting rather than professional reflection. Not that I never vent about these frustrations (believe me, I do), but I prefer to vent a little less publicly.

I cringe (I try to keep it internal) every time I see a teacher model a learning behavior they would never accept from students. Saying, "I don't get technology," or "I can't figure this out, I'm not even going to try" or "Here, you do it, it never works for me." All things I've had teachers say to me in front of students.

It is really hard to keep that cringe internal, because when I hear teachers say these things in front of students it makes me angry. For a faculty that is very aware of the impact of learned helplessness, we don't always spend a lot of time reflecting on who taught that helplessness.

I can be guilty of teaching helplessness to my teachers, and I am working on recognizing and stopping that behavior. When someone asks me a question, I want to answer it; this is an instinct many teachers and librarians share, and I don't think it's always a bad one. But sometimes our drive to provide the answer can get in the way of teaching people how to find the answers themselves.

For example, a teacher recently e-mailed me to ask if a certain book was available via Bookshare. My first instinct was to look it up for her; but, I'd spent a lot of time this summer creating Bookshare logins for all my teachers so they could look up books and download them for students at the point and time of need (part of a larger effort to make assistive tech a little more seamless). It would have been much, much faster for me to just give her the answer. But I didn't. I replied with the URL to the site, reminded her how to login, and pointed her to page on the library website with details for how to download a book. Yes, that took much longer (especially since I looked the book up anyway just to be sure), but I'm hoping for a long-term payoff.

We are piloting a 1:1 iPad program with our freshmen and sophomores this year. Some teachers are struggling with being comfortable with the iPad and learning new apps. I struggled with a lot of it too, at first. But now teachers will seem amazed when I know how to do something, and ask how I learned it. To which I always reply, "I pressed something, and saw what happened. And then I pressed something else. There is no self-destruct app for the iPad." But still every once in a while a teacher will say, "I'll never figure this out." When they do (and as long as there are no students around), I've tried to get better at asking, "Would you allow a student in your class to say that?" It can make the conversation kind of uncomfortable. But that's kind of my goal.

One of the things we as teachers need to model is that it's okay to fail. It's okay to get something wrong. Getting something wrong is often an important part of the process. But that idea makes many teachers nervous.

It can be scary to admit you don't know something. To admit it in front of a room of teenagers who already think they know more than you do can be downright terrifying.

But we have to be willing to model not just that it's okay to not know something, but how to ask for help learning how to do something. To say, "the kids are better with technology, I'll never keep up," and use that as an excuse not to learn? Inexcusable. When you say that in front of a student, what's to prevent them from thinking, "everyone else is better at history/math/reading/writing, I'll never keep up"? Is that the attitude towards learning something new we want to model for our students? I hope not.

We need to model the right attitude towards learning--not, "I don't know how to do this, you do it for me," but, "I don't know how to do this, can you show me how?"

If what we're teaching by our model is helplessness, we can't be surprised when that's what our students have learned.

But if instead we model that it's okay not to know, but not okay to not want to know, we create an environment in which all kinds of learning are possible.

An open letter to academic librarians

Right around this time of year is when I start getting messages from last year's seniors. Each one is a little bit different, but in many many ways they all say the same thing: "I'm in college, and I'm doing research, and I need help." And the subtext is, always, "And I'm too scared to ask the librarians here, so can you help me?"


I'm not writing you to ask you to help my students; I know you will help my students. And that's what I tell them every time--that the best way I can help them is to direct them to all of you so you can show them all the resources (far beyond what I was able to show them) you have available.

But I have to admit, I am nervous, too. I am worried that you will judge my students for what I failed to teach them.

I did my best, I really did. But so many of my students come to me having been--for lack of a better term--abused by the educational system. They have been made to believe that they are stupid, that a failure is a reflection on them as people, not on the inherently messy process of learning. Many of them did not think college was in their future.

We did everything we could to teach them about who they are as learners, to give them the skills they need to engage with new material, to inquire, to understand both their strengths and their weaknesses, and to engage with the world while understanding that what matters is not the mistakes you make, but how you respond to them.

There is a lot they don't know about the nuts and bolts of research, but that is my fault, not theirs. Please do not hold them responsible for my shortcomings. I wanted them to see libraries as welcoming places, and librarians as welcoming people. I knew that I could never teach them everything they needed to know, so my hope was to foster the attitudes necessary to continue learning long after they left.

I know I am putting them in good hands. I know you will help them. And I thank you for teaching them the things I didn't.

Everyone Makes Mistakes (So Why Can't I?)

First, a trip down memory lane:

I made a terrible, awful, horrible mistake on Friday. I was working with a student, reviewing his paper for citations, and I overheard another student saying something awful. One of those things that takes me to a very angry place very quickly. I responded without thinking and I yelled at him. Loudly. I just. . . snapped. And when the student tried to explain, I was still too upset to let him finish what he was saying.

Thing is, I misheard him. He'd said nothing like what I thought he'd said. I yelled at a student, and made him feel awful, for doing exactly nothing wrong. And the guilt is eating me up.

As soon as I realized what a horrible, terrible mistake I made, I apologized. Profusely. And the student, very graciously, accepted my apology. I don't think any long-term damage was done to our relationship. But still, it's eating me up.

This is not, by any means, the first mistake I've made while teaching. Not the first mistake I've made this year. Probably not even the first mistake I made that day (and it probably also wasn't the last).

I've been thinking a lot this year about resiliency and reflection and how to make students more comfortable with mistakes. I've always believed that learning is a messy process in which failure is inherent; most days I take the Red Queen's approach to impossible things and apply it to mistakes. I try to think of myself as someone who can make a mistake, admit it, fix the problem, and move on. I admit that I've sometimes had difficulty empathizing with students who hit (what seems to me) a small roadblock and completely shut down.

And so, in light of this encounter, I've been thinking about how we think about mistakes--whether a mistake is something you DO, as opposed to a mistake being something you ARE. And whether there are some mistakes that hit a little harder at our core.

As long time readers of this blog (or people who know me personally--hi Mom!) know, I work at a school for students with learning disabilities. Sadly, many of my students come to our school having been badly abused by the educational system; they've been treated as if their difficulty with learning--and the mistakes they make as a result of that--says something about who they are as people. And it's not a nice thing.

I pride myself on my ability to build relationships with students, to talk to them about difficult subjects, to guide them through a subject (whether that's the Battle of Gettysburg or the use of respectful language), and to do some calmly and rationally. Which is, I think, why this mistake is hitting me so hard. It hits much closer to my self-perception than using the wrong keywords for searching.

I know, ultimately, that this mistake is not all that defines me as a teacher, but it's been a good reminder of how debilitating a mistake can seem. It is helping me get a better understanding of how my students feel when they make a mistake while learning. When a mistake seems to be about who you are as a person, it's hard to simply move on. I still don't know how to help students with this process, but I feel better equipped to empathize with them as they move through the process.

____________________

P.S. If you have found your way here from the Salem Library Blog awards, welcome! And thank you! I'm overwhelmed and flattered to even be on such a list.

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.