“Success is no accident. It is hard work, perseverance, learning, studying, sacrifice, and MOST of all, love of what you are doing.”

            Pelé (the soccer great who died last month)

“Exposure is key. Too many students are growing up having never used a tool. They are completely removed from the world of the practical.”

            Temple Grandin (see item #1)

“If you’ve ever attended a meeting where nothing gets solved, it may be because there are too many people who think alike.”

            Temple Grandin (ibid.)

“Coaching can be isolating and confusing. Self-doubt runs rampant. And just like teaching, coaching requires a specific set of skills that take a lot of practice and feedback.”

            Jo Lein (see item #4)

“It’s easy to understand why educators feel threatened. ChatGPT is a freakishly capable tool that landed in their midst with no warning, and it performs reasonably well across a wide variety of tasks and academic subjects.”

            Kevin Roose (see item #6)

“Editing is intelligent and sympathetic reaction to the text and to what the author is trying to accomplish. When you try to change something into something that it isn’t rather than make it better at what it is, tragedy lurks. It’s not yourbook.” 

            Robert Gottlieb quoted in “Robert Caro, Robert Gottlieb, and the Art of the Edit”

            by Pamela Paul in The New York Times, January 5, 2023

“Adults need to show K-12 students that it’s OK not to know something yet. School isn’t a quiz show; the first person to say the right answer doesn’t deserve the greatest reward. Rather, school should cultivate students’ curiosity and let them feel the thrill of finding something out.”

            Jonathan Malesic in “The Key to Success in College Is So Simple, It’s Almost Never

Mentioned” in The New York Times, January 3, 2023

In this New York Times article, Temple Grandin (Colorado State University) says she didn’t have language until she was four years old. She was diagnosed as brain damaged, then on the autism spectrum. She gradually blossomed, in different ways – for example, at age 7 or 8 she was experimenting with parachutes made of old scarves, single-mindedly, almost obsessively, trying to figure out how to get them to open more quickly. 

Over time, Grandin realized that she was a visual thinker, seeing the world in “photo-realistic pictures… with images clicking through my mind a little bit like PowerPoint slides or TikTok videos.” Reading about inventors like Edison and the Wright brothers, Grandin realized that many of them shared her powers of observation, single-mindedness, and persistence and wondered if some were also on the autism spectrum.

Most other people, Grandin saw, are “word-centric,” mostly seeing the world and communicating verbally. A term was coined for them – neurotypical – along with a descriptor for people like Grandin – neurodivergent. The popularization of this term, she says, and “society’s growing understanding about the different ways that brains work, are unquestionably positive developments for many individuals like me.” 

For all the gifts visual thinkers possess, says Grandin, life is still challenging for them. That’s true in schools that “force students into a one-size-fits-all curriculum” and in jobs that rely heavily on verbal skills. “This must change,” she says, “not only because neurodivergent people, and all visual thinkers, deserve better, but also because without a major shift in how we think about how we learn, American innovation will be stifled.” To fix American infrastructure, she believes, we need people with visual skills and hyper-focused attention. 

Grandin’s number one suggestion for improving K-12 schools: “Put more of an emphasis on hands-on classes such as art, music, sewing, woodworking, cooking, theater, auto mechanics, and welding… These classes also expose students – especially neurodivergent students – to skills that could become a career. Exposure is key. Too many students are growing up having never used a tool. They are completely removed from the world of the practical.” Grandin says she would have hated school if it hadn’t been for teachers who allowed her to think visually and have direct tactile experiences. 

Algebra was too abstract, she says, because it’s usually taught with no visual correlations. With today’s curriculum requirements, Grandin believes she would have difficulty graduating from high school. Better to provide alternative routes with courses like statistics incorporating real-world applications, making it possible for students who are “bad at math” to graduate and move into careers that put their skills to work. Grandin did poorly on the math SAT, which prevented her from getting into veterinary school – yet today she is a professor of animal sciences and is asked to speak to academics, corporate executives, and government officials around the world. “The true measure of education,” she says, “isn’t what grades students get today but where they are 10 years later.”

She believes about 20 percent of the drafting technicians and skilled welders she’s worked with over the last 25 years designing and constructing equipment to manage livestock are on the spectrum. It’s not just the unique contributions that neurodiverse people make, says Grandin; it’s also the synergy that takes place in diverse teams: “If you’ve ever attended a meeting where nothing gets solved, it may be because there are too many people who think alike.” 

In her travels, Grandin has noticed a number of high-quality products in the U.S. that are made in other countries – for example, most of the highest-tech silicon chips are made in Taiwan; much of the specialized mechanical equipment for processing meat is made in the Netherlands and Germany; the glass walls of the Steve Jobs Theater in California were made in Italy, the massive carbon fiber roof in Dubai. 

The reason, says Grandin, might be that these and other countries give 14-year-olds the choice of pursuing a university or a vocational pathway. The latter “is not looked down on or regarded as a lesser form of intelligence,” she says. “And that’s how it should be everywhere, because the skill sets of visual thinkers are essential to finding real-world solutions to society’s many problems.”

“Society Is Failing Visual Thinkers, and That Hurts Us All” by Temple Grandin in The New York Times, January 12, 2023; Grandin’s 2022 book is Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions

In this Harvard Business Review article, Christine Porath (Georgetown University) says there’s been a definite increase in angry, uncivil, and obnoxious behavior in many workplaces around the world, including businesses, hospitals, restaurants, airlines, hotels, stores, and schools. In a 2005 survey, about half of workers said they were treated rudely at work at least once a month. In 2011, the percent rose to 55, in 2016 it was 62, and in 2022 it was 76 percent, with 78 percent saying they witnessed incivility in their workplace at least once a month.

            What’s going on? Porath believes stress is the biggest driver. “The pandemic, the economy, war, divisive politics, the changing nature of work, and continued uncertainty are all taking a toll,” she says. “And considering our reduced levels of self-care, exercise, and sleep, it’s no surprise that we have a tougher time regulating our emotions.” There’s also been a rise in the level of negative as opposed to positive emotions. 

            In addition, there are reports of weakened ties – a fraying of community and workplace relationships – exacerbated when people feel they aren’t valued, appreciated, or heard. Technology, especially social media, is part of the mix, feeding distraction, misunderstanding, disconnection, and rudeness. Finally, there seems to be more cluelessness; incivility, says Porath, “arises from ignorance – not malice. People lack self-awareness.” 

            Research suggests that rudeness “is like the common cold,” she says. “It’s contagious, it spreads quickly, anyone can be a carrier – at work, at home, online, or in our communities – and getting infected doesn’t take much.” Incivility spreads through negative facial expressions, belittling, ignoring, or rudeness, taking a mental and physical toll. It affects how we feel about ourselves, our working memory, our productivity, and our health. “Brief interactions signal respect or disrespect,” says Porath. “People feel valued when we acknowledge and thank them. When we cut people down, we make them feel smaller and uglier.” 

            How can we deal with the rising scourge of incivility? From her research, Porath draws these suggestions:

            • Hiring well – In interviews, probe for attitudes and skills that suggest an ability to deal with stress and rudeness on the front lines – questions like, “Tell me about a time when you’ve had to deal with stress or conflict at work. What did you do?”

            • Training and coaching – Building people’s skills in handling bad behavior is key to creating a safe and respectful workplace, says Porath. For starters, establish norms and expectations, including how to handle uncivil behavior (a hospital used a template for responses; a sample: Either you stop yelling at me, or it’s going to make it harder for me to give your mother her meds). People need to know how to de-escalate – how to bring down the temperature in a tense situation, when to get outside help, and how to handle their own emotional recovery afterward.

            • Empathy – Employees need training in listening, trying to understand the root cause of incivility, giving and receiving feedback, negotiating, managing stress, and mindfulness. An especially helpful reflective question: What’s the most generous interpretation of this behavior?

            • Recognizing and rewarding civility – This includes gestures of appreciation and gratitude from supervisors for handling stressful situations well, and orchestrating a peer-to-peer recognition process.

            • Modeling – “If you’re a leader,” says Porath, “your self-care sends employees a powerful signal.” This includes taking vacations, sharing your outside-work passions, and encouraging colleagues “to fill their buckets with people and activities that bring them joy and meaning.”

“Frontline Work When Everyone Is Angry” by Christine Porath in Harvard Business Review, November 9, 2022

“Growth mindset seems simple, but it’s easy to misunderstand and misapply,” says Jill Barshay in this Hechinger Report paper. “Researchers are still figuring out how best to incorporate the philosophy in schools. Classroom adoption has gotten ahead of the research, and a healthy skepticism is warranted.” Barshay summarizes her key takeaways from recent studies and interviews with several researchers, including Carol Dweck:

• Differential impact – Mindset interventions are far more beneficial for low-income and lower-achieving students, says Carol Dweck. But she believes all students should receive the interventions since higher-achieving students benefit in ways that may be hidden by the ceiling effect (their grades can’t get any higher).

• Defining intelligence – Starkly different findings in two recent studies of online mindset interventions might be the result of how intelligence is defined, says Barshay. Is intelligence raw brain processing speed and memory, which are quite stable throughout a lifetime? Or is it a mix of knowledge and skills, which can improve over time? The latter is closer to what most people think of as intelligence; developing it could be seen as the purpose of schooling. 

• Mindset questions – When students are asked to agree or disagree with statements like, You can learn new things, but you can’t really change your basic intelligence, their definition of intelligence directly affects how they respond. “So growth mindset scores, which researchers use to prove their theories, may greatly depend on semantics and be unreliable,” says Barshay. 

• Counterintuitive results – Some studies have found that students with a fixed mindset may still believe they can make up for a lack of innate intelligence by working hard. And many experiments have found that students’ grades can improve after an intervention even if their mindsets don’t change. 

• Other factors – Mindset interventions do more than preach mental malleability; they also include tips about working hard, setting goals, using effective strategies when facing challenges, being tenacious, and more. “Maybe it’s all the other things that are included in a mindset intervention,” says Barshay, “but not growth mindset in and of itself, that are effective. This is a tricky theoretical knot to unravel. Imagine that someone complimented your beauty and also suggested you get a haircut. Then a week later you are asked out on a date. Was it the praise or the haircut that gave you more confidence and made you more attractive?”

• Pedagogy – Dweck and other mindset researchers are expanding their interventions, working with educators on the mindset language they use and how they teach, assign work, and assign grades. This positions mindset interventions as part of general school reform efforts.

• College, too – Dweck talks about mindset with her first-year students at Stanford. “They got into a lot of top schools,” she says, “but as they enter this new environment, they need a mindset booster. They’re struggling. They’re blaming themselves. They’re socially comparing themselves with others and judging themselves.” 

• The bottom line – “There is a growing body of evidence,” Barshay concludes, “that these short, online interventions might convince low-performing teens to believe in themselves and their ability to learn. A shift in mindset isn’t going to close the achievement gap; it’s no silver bullet. We still need to improve how schools teach. But small psychological boosts like this might help some students on the margin. And that makes this field of research worth watching.” 

“Does Growth Mindset Matter? The Debate Heats Up with Dueling Meta-Analyses” by Jill Barshay in The Hechinger Report, December 5, 2022

In this article in The Learning Professional, Jo Lein (Tulsa Public Schools and Johns Hopkins University) says that when she first started coaching teachers, she had no idea what she was doing. In post-observation conferences, she asked broad reflection questions, didn’t say what she really thought, and saw very little progress among the teachers she coached. 

            Lein believes she’s gotten better, and “fishbowl coaching” has been a key contributor – having several other coaches observe as she conducts a post-observation conference with a teacher, then getting feedback from her coach colleagues. “My first fishbowl experience was nerve-wracking but powerful,” she says. “I felt like I was sweating through my clothes with seven sets of eyes watching my every move.” After the teacher left, the coaches gave Lein valuable feedback, including that she hadn’t been direct enough. “You were uncomfortable with making her uncomfortable about feedback she needed to hear,” said one colleague.

            The group then watched another coach talking with a first-year teacher about his classroom management. The coach asked why he hadn’t given a consequence to a misbehaving student. “I was scared to give it to him,” said the teacher. “I didn’t know how he was going to react.” “Let’s unpack that,” said the coach. The teacher described a time when a student had exploded after being disciplined, said he didn’t want students to see him as “mean,” and was worried about being branded a racist if he was strict with students of color. The coach engaged the teacher in a role-play in which a consequence was given firmly and correctly, and the teacher saw the point: “It’s what I have to do to show them love.”

            Lein was so impressed with the potential of fishbowl coaching that she founded a nonprofit to serve underresourced schools around the state of Oklahoma, where three-quarters of classroom instructors do not have a background in teaching. Lein and a group of coaches start by building the capacity of a school’s principal, assistant principal, instructional coaches, reading specialists, and district ELL and special education specialists. They conduct several 20-minute observations, look at their notes, classroom artifacts, and student work, and discuss possible coaching points. They then have a fishbowl conversation one teacher at a time, followed by each coach getting feedback from their peers. A helpful sentence frame has been, It was effective when… Next time try…

            This protocol has worked well, says Lein, leading to significant improvement in coaches’ skills. Principals in target schools work with their assistant principals and instructional coaches to think about how to use these face-to-face conversations to improve teaching and learning in every classroom, often identifying specific instructional practices they want to see throughout the school. 

            Lein says fishbowl coaching “comes with some risks,” and offers the following suggestions for effective implementation:

            • Teachers’ comfort level – “Even in the context of a trusting coach-teacher relationship,” says Lein, “adding a public element to the feedback can undermine that dynamic and sometimes feel awkward.” Teachers might feel defensive and address the whole group of observers with background information or justifications for why what was observed isn’t representative of who they are as a teacher. To avoid this dynamic, Lein recommends using a video hookup with the fishbowl observers in another room. “Be sure the coach-teacher pair cannot see the other coaches,” she says, “nor their own images. Even though the teacher will know others are watching, the conversation will hopefully feel more routine and therefore more comfortable.” 

• Teacher selection – Fishbowl feedback is not right for every teacher. Lein suggests picking teachers who’ve established a positive, trusting relationship with their coach, have responded constructively to feedback in the past, and possess a baseline of teaching skills (struggling teachers might be overwhelmed by feedback on multiple items). Of course teachers should have a heads-up on times when they’ll get feedback with a fishbowl audience. 

• Logistics – It’s easy to let scheduling drive the process, says Lein – for example, a teacher’s planning period conveniently falls right after a classroom observation. “Resist this temptation,” she says, “and get creative with class coverage to ensure the right person for this experience.” 

• The coach on the spot – “Coaching is a complex job that requires deep analysis and interpersonal skills, cultural competence, and a deep understanding of curriculum and instruction,” says Lein. “Fishbowl coaching may reveal to the group that the coach lacks some of these skills, and that can leave the coach feeling embarrassed or inadequate compared to their peers.” This suggests that coaches should to be up to speed on basic coaching skills before doing a fishbowl. It’s also a good idea to identify specific areas for improvement beforehand – for example, framing action steps with a teacher. 

• Collective humility – It needs to be clear, says Lein, that fishbowl participants shouldn’t make comparisons among themselves, entering with a learning versus a performance orientation. A facilitator might say, “We are all going to learn something throughout today – from the smallest communication technique to huge instructional practices. The most important thing is that we are vulnerable and honest about what we do not know or do not feel comfortable with. This is why we are a team.” 

• Follow-up – Facilitators should have one-on-one conversations with coaches after a fishbowl, talking through any discomfort and making sure each educator has a clear and positive takeaway.

• Teacher evaluation policies – Fishbowls need to be conducted within the parameters of district or school agreements, says Lein, which often means making the experience voluntary for teachers and not including information from a fishbowl in a teacher’s formal evaluations. However, fishbowls can give insights on patterns of classroom practice and spur improvements within the official process. 

“Coaching can be isolating and confusing,” Lein concludes. “Self-doubt runs rampant. And just like teaching, coaching requires a specific set of skills that take a lot of practice and feedback. Fishbowl coaching provides a way to build those skills that leverages collaborative peer learning and reaches coaches on a larger scale than one-to-one support.” 

“Fishbowl Coaching Magnifies the Impact of Feedback” by Jo Lein in The Learning Professional, December 2022 (Vol. 43, #6, pp. 58-61); Lein can be reached at jo.mabee@gmail.com. 

In this article in Harvard Law Today, Clea Simon says the amount of misinformation on Facebook and other social media platforms points to the need for aggressive content moderation, starting with banning political ads containing falsehoods. But who gets to decide what’s true? Not Facebook, says Jonathan Zittrain (Harvard Law School); it’s a private company that’s “in the ad-selling business, not the truth-telling business.” Nor would we want government officials making those decisions; they’re part of the political process, not to mention First Amendment issues that would arise.

            Zittrain has a radically different idea. How about organizing groups of high-school students to vet online information under the guidance of their teachers and librarians, treating the activity like debate club and Model U.N. and giving academic credit for performing a vital public service? He believes the public would trust well-run student juries to “at least be earnest about trying to get to the truth” – groups that “even if we thought they got it wrong, wouldn’t cause us to repudiate the whole exercise.”

            In 2022, Harvard history professor Jill Lepore tested the idea with high-school history students in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont (she dubbed it “trial by teenager”). Each group was asked to decide if several online political ads were true enough to be posted on social media. “Public high schools are not communities of like-minded people,” says Lepore. “They are much more akin to a jury of random people selected for jury service.” But just in case one school had a lot of like-minded students, her juries were composed of students from two schools in two different states. 

            How did it go? “I think the students handled nuance exceptionally well,” says Lepore. “I found the students to be eminently fair-minded and responsible. I trust them a lot more than I trust any other mechanism currently being used to assess the accuracy of political ads on social media.” For example, a student group that evaluated four different ads came to four different verdicts, all of which made sense. 

In an online world driven by “likes” and “clicks,” says Zittrain, the idea might get traction, acting like a reality show. He believes that Facebook, as well as the general public, would be inclined to respect what the kids in Racine, Wisconsin (for example) had to say about political ads. Social media companies might even see it in their interest to financially support the student juries and abide by their decisions – saying in effect, The teens have spoken.

There’s another advantage, says Zittrain: “It’s hard for foreign state actors bent on propaganda to show up in classrooms.” 

“Facebook and the Problem of Truth” by Clea Simon in Harvard Law Today, December 15, 2022

 “It’s easy to understand why educators feel threatened,” says Kevin Roose in this New York Times article. “ChatGPT is a freakishly capable tool that landed in their midst with no warning, and it performs reasonably well across a wide variety of tasks and academic subjects.” True, there are questions about plagiarism, accuracy, and the ethics of the writing it produces. “But after talking with dozens of educators over the past few weeks,” says Roose, “I’ve come around to the view that banning ChatGPT from the classroom is the wrong move.” Here’s why:

            • It won’t work. A school or district can block the app (as the New York City schools have done), but students will be able to access it using their phones, laptops, VPN, and other strategies. Tools being developed to watermark and detect ChatGPT-generated material can probably be defeated, says Roose. Besides, educators don’t want to spend their evenings and weekends playing whack-a-mole with students’ clever evasions. Better to allow the app in certain situations and revise homework and essay assignments to make them AI-proof or have them done in class. 

            • ChatGPT can be a teaching tool. Roose interviewed a high-school English teacher who allowed students to use the app to generate outlines for an essay comparing two short stories, then had them put their laptops away and write and revise their essays in longhand. The teacher said the process deepened kids’ understanding of the stories and taught them how to coax a helpful response from artificial intelligence. Material generated by ChatGPT is often wrong, which means it can be used for critical thinking and fact-checking. The app can also generate lesson plans – for teaching Newton’s laws of motion to a visual-spatial learner; to generate a “Friends” episode taking place at the Constitutional Convention; to explain the Doppler effect using language an eighth grader can understand. 

            • It prepares students for the world they will inhabit. ChatGPT is certainly disruptive to many existing K-12 practices, says Roose, especially “the basic principle that the work students turn in should reflect cogitation happening inside their brains, rather than in the latent space of a machine learning model hosted on a distant supercomputer.” Educators aren’t being irrational when they worry about students taking shortcuts and avoiding the hard work involved in becoming better writers and thinkers. 

“But the barricade has fallen,” says Roose. Tools like this will be everywhere in the years to come, and will only get better. “To be good citizens,” he concludes of today’s students, “they’ll need hands-on experience to understand how this type of A.I. works, what types of bias it contains, and how it can be misused and weaponized. This adjustment won’t be easy. Sudden technological shifts rarely are. But who better to guide students into this strange new world than their teachers?”

“A.I., Once the Future, Has Become the Present. What Do We Do Now?” by Kevin Roose in The New York Times, January 13, 2023

 In this Cult of Pedagogy article, Jennifer Gonzalez unveils the choices she and her colleagues made for the most helpful technology tools of 2022:

            • Chat GPT – “Everyone seems to be talking about it right now,” says Gonzalez. Released in November 2022, Chat GPT uses artificial intelligence to write essays, short stories, plays, and computer code in seconds. Many educators worry that it will be a plagiarism tool, acting as a ghostwriter for students. “I was in full panic mode,” says Gonzalez’s team member Marnie Diem. “This is going to change writing instruction forever.” She now has a more-pragmatic view: “It’s about finding a way that it can help our learning instead of doing our learning for us” – for example, doing research, explaining a concept, providing teachers with texts, generating lesson plans. But it still needs fact-checking and a human touch. 

            • TalkingPoints – This free app, available as a mobile app or text-only, allows teachers and parents to message each other in their preferred language, providing quick translation from English to over 100 other languages and back again. Once teachers know the home language of their students, they can send a message to all students and have it automatically translated to each family’s preferred language. 

            • AhaSlides – This app makes existing PowerPoint or Google Slides presentations more interactive by adding colorful, eye-catching live polls, quizzes, word clouds, brainstorming activities, spinner wheels, and other interactive features. The free version is limited to a few participants, with a license required for a larger group.

            • The Juice – This platform delivers five current events articles to grade 5-12 students every day – at four different reading levels. Articles come with key vocabulary, a quick comprehension check, infographics, an audio version, and links to other material. Students can automatically get articles at their current reading level, and a dashboard allows the teacher to see who is reading what and how students are doing on the quizzes. 

            • 1619 Project Pulitzer Center Resources – These free teacher-created materials use the original 1619 Project as a springboard for further learning about the impact of slavery through U.S. history. 

            • Along – This free digital reflection tool is designed to deepen student-teacher SEL connections and set up a system for regular check-ins. Teachers choose from a database of questions and resources to share with students, add their own response to a prompt, share it with students, and then students post their responses – in text, audio, or video. 

“6 Ed Tech Tools to Try in 2023” by Jennifer Gonzalez, Marnie Diem, Brandie Wright, Lucia Hassell, and Kim Darche in Cult of Pedagogy, January 11, 2023