The Academic vs. "Real Life" Dichotomy

Is going to college worth it? (Especially considering today's economy, not to mention the enormous price tag that leaves many graduates starting out their independent lives tens of thousands of dollars in debt.) This is the subject of this NY Times article, which questions the value of a college education in the changing economic landscape and seems to pit academic skills in opposition to workplace skills.

Professor Lerman, the American University economist, said some high school graduates would be better served by being taught how to behave and communicate in the workplace.

Such skills are ranked among the most desired — even ahead of educational attainment — in many surveys of employers. In one 2008 survey of more than 2,000 businesses in Washington State, employers said entry-level workers appeared to be most deficient in being able to “solve problems and make decisions,” “resolve conflict and negotiate,” “cooperate with others” and “listen actively.”

Yet despite the need, vocational programs, which might teach such skills, have been one casualty in the push for national education standards, which has been focused on preparing students for college.

The author acknowledges that the debate between academic versus vocational education is not new, but it makes me wonder why this polarization continues to be played out in the conversation about education. I contend that if we were to think more holistically about learning, some of these "non-academic" skills are actually embedded in (or at least highly relevant to) teaching for dispositions. The ability to problem-solve and be strategic in one's thinking cannot be divorced from understanding, say, mathematical formulas and how to apply them; conflict resolution requires the same disposition for understanding different perspectives that you would find in a social studies class; cooperation and active listening is fundamental to true collaborative inquiry.

Consider how much the education of young people would be transformed if we stopped compartmentalizing kids and saw them genuinely as developing thinkers whose academic, emotional, social, and personal experiences are actually integrated into a whole person!

Ongoing Reflection and Practice

As I consider this process of teaching for intellectual character, I realize that it is a personal reflective journey, and that the transformation of my students as thinkers only comes as I learn how to transform the experience and culture of my class, and that THAT comes best when it arises organically through deep personal reflection and self-examination. So, I recommend that you finish the last 3 chapters of Ritchhart's book, and here are some final thoughts to continue this professional journey:

1. Engage with yourself as a teacher:
   What are MY values? What do I believe about learning and the goal of teaching? What kind of thinker am I?
2. Attend to the defining aspects of dispositions:
   Creating a more thinking-rich classroom itself requires a dispositional stance:
   o Inclination
   o Ability
   o Awareness
3. Engage with colleagues
   -Why does this concept/skill/topic matter to our discipline? How would engaging in this help our students become better thinkers?
   -What thinking dispositions should we be actively cultivating? How do you scaffold activities or tweak assignments to place greater emphasis and value on the demonstration of those dispositions?
   -Observe one another teach.

Let me just say how much I've appreciated everyone's thoughtful and earnest participation, most of all your willingness to examine yourselves and allow us to enter into your own reflective journey!

What kind of thinker does the world need now?

Globalization guru Thomas Friedman gives some interesting insight into the kind of human capital we need in today's world in his article, "America's Real Dream Team":

In today’s wired world, the most important economic competition is no longer between countries or companies. The most important economic competition is actually between you and your own imagination. Because what your kids imagine, they can now act on farther, faster, cheaper than ever before — as individuals. Today, just about everything is becoming a commodity, except imagination, except the ability to spark new ideas.

I'm noticing a growing chorus of voices, from within the education world and without, that are waking up to the realization that the old currencies of knowledge are quickly becoming obsolete in a world that has undergone an information revolution. And yet, schools are notoriously slow at adapting to these changing realities. To what extent is sparking imagination, cultivating innovative and flexible thinking, or empowering students to create, a top priority in our schools? Shifting our focus to educating for dispositions reflects what our students need most in order to be prepared for a world that is changing so rapidly, we may not even know the body of content expertise they might need in the future.

Another "Great Moment" in Teaching

In this New York Times Magazine article, "Building a Better Teacher," there's a wonderful little vignette about a math class in which a boy, Sean, starts to assert that 6 is both an odd and even number. As he provides his rationale, the teacher (Deborah Ball), does not correct him, but rather invites the class to offer their ideas.

The Sean video is a case in point. Ball had a goal for that day’s lesson, and it was not to investigate the special properties of the number six. Yet by entertaining Sean’s odd idea, Ball was able to teach the class far more than if she had stuck to her lesson plan. By the end of the day, a girl from Nigeria had led the class in deriving precise definitions of even and odd; everyone — even Sean — had agreed that a number could not be both odd and even; and the class had coined a new, special type of number, one that happens to be the product of an odd number and two. They called them Sean numbers. Other memorable moments from the year include a day when they derived the concept of infinity (“You would die before you counted all the numbers!” one girl said) and another when an 8-year-old girl proved that an odd number plus an odd number will always equal an even number.

What I love about this vignette is not simply that the teacher allowed the students to "play with" the math--come up with their own theories and challenge and test them until they arrived at a group consensus that underscores a much deeper understanding of math--but also the sense of learning community that must be evident here for this process to have unfolded the way it did. This speaks to the power of the teacher setting the tone for individual and collective inquiry in her class, rather than a focus on work and correct answers.

Professsional Practice: Making the Shift towards Dispositions

What is a particular disposition that resonated with your values and ideals? Before our next meeting in April, think about ways you can make this more explicit for your students. Here are some ideas:

• Re-tool an assessment or assignment to emphasize that disposition.
• Create a new activity or assignment that asks them to demonstrate that disposition.
• Think of how you can purposefully model that disposition in class and check students' understanding or responses.
• Think of ways you can highlight and reward the demonstration of that disposition in class.

It would be great if you could save an artifact or write a brief reflection on your experiment so that we can share and process our experiences together at our next meeting.

Also, I'd like for us to read Chapter 4 in Intellectual Character. Ritchhart provides several vignettes of teachers on their first day of class, trying to set a tone for thinking. It might be helpful to think about our discussion of windows and mirrors as you read.

I think Chapters 5 and 6 are helpful, but it depends on where you are in this process and where you'd like to go. Chapter 5 explains specific practices called thinking routines that you can start to implement in class. Chapter 6 really starts to get more at this idea of our implicit curriculum and how the very language we use in class communicates powerful messages about what it means to learn.

Great Moments in Teaching!

From Day 1 (2/10/10):
As we shared our individual "great moments" in teaching, here is our collectively generated list of the implicit messages our students were getting about what it means to learn.

• It involves active participation.
• It takes time.
• De-emphasize coverage.
• Address complex questions.
• Don't shy away from complexity and controversy.
• Questions lead to more questions.
• Value students’ questions—their questions set the agenda for learning.
• Learning is personal.
• It’s ok to not know the answers.
• It's about trial and error.
• It involves risk-taking.
• Focus on the process of how to solve problems.
• It's a community effort.
• Knowledge is not top-down (it's text/source-driven rather than teacher-driven).
• Be transparent--students can and should identify the skills themselves.
• Provide immediate feedback.
• Learning is not for an audience of 1 (the teacher).
• It’s important to stop and process/reflect periodically.
• Listen before responding.
• Take into account other perspectives.
• Others can be resources in constructing your understanding.
• Understanding evolves, changes, adjusts based on new information, insights, perspectives.
• Experiment, “play with" ideas.
• Be curious.

Pretty impressive and inspiring list! If these represent our ideals when it comes to learning, how consistently are we communicating these messages to our students?