Marshall Memo 617
A Weekly Round-up of Important Ideas and Research in K-12 Education
December 21, 2015
1. Turning “I can’t” into “I can” in a high-school chemistry class
2. A teacher shadows a struggling high-school student
3. An Israeli study of girls’ middle-school math challenges
4. Does a growth mindset make students better math problem-solvers?
5. High schools that combine academic and social-emotional learning
6. Anti-bullying insights from Sweden
7. Dealing successfully with traumatic memories
8. The debate on inclusiveness in college science classes
“Is this hard?” “Will I look smart?” “What will happen if I don’t do this?” “I’m not good at math.”
Carol Dweck on the math worries of students with a fixed mindset (see item #4)
“The fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, known as STEM, are a messy tangle of experiments, misunderstandings, dead ends, insights, collaborations, accidental discoveries, desperation, triumph, and the rest of the human saga focused on understanding the world around us.”
Jedidah Isler (see item #8)
“[I]n my class, I make failing harder work than passing.”
Angela Campbell (see item #1)
“Childhood fears and adult traumas are stored differently in the brain than happy memories. They are buried like porous capsules deep in the primitive regions, below awareness and beyond easy reach of conscious thinking and talking. They are buried so deep that they are separated from the normal flow of life, and so time cannot work its natural healing powers.”
David Brooks (see item #7)
In this article in The Journal of the Learning Sciences, Einat Heyd-Metzuyanim (Israel Institute of Technology and University of Pittsburgh) reports on the story of Idit, a student who was getting honors grades in math through seventh grade and ended up failing the subject two years later. Idit’s story shows how the emotional, social, and cognitive aspects of learning mathematics interact with one other – in this case, negatively. The case is more poignant because Heyd-Metzuyanim personally tutored Idit and wasn’t able to rescue her academically.
What happened? Idit and her mother reported that the cause of her failure in ninth grade was extreme anxiety during math tests. They said she knew the material “perfectly well” at home, but when it came time to take a test, she experienced a “blackout” and forgot everything she’d learned. Math had been easy for Idit in elementary school – except for fractions, which she said she hated. In Heyd-Metzuyanim’s interviews with Idit and her family, several other facts emerged:
“Having a positive mindset in math may do more than just help students feel more confident about their skills and more willing to keep trying when they fail,” reports Sarah Sparks in this article in Education Week. “It may prime their brains to think better.” Recent neuroscientific research at Stanford University is showing how students’ beliefs about math learning can produce more efficient brain activity. Lang Chen and his colleagues studied elementary students’ brains with fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) and found that those with a “growth” mindset about math did better at spotting correct and incorrect math problems than those with a “fixed” mindset, even after controlling for differences in IQ, age, working memory, reading level, and math anxiety. The brains of students with high positive-mindset levels had greater activity and faster, smoother connections in the areas associated with quick recall of facts and math problem-solving.
“This is very, very exciting,” said Stanford professor Carol Dweck (who was not part of this research project). “My hunch is that often in the fixed mindset your mind is preoccupied with ‘Is this hard?’ ‘Will I look smart?’ ‘What will happen if I don’t do this?’ ‘I’m not good at math,’ instead of getting that brain ready to do it.” It’s analogous to warming up a car on a cold morning before driving off – the engine is primed to work more efficiently. The key insight from this research is that the brain isn’t compartmentalized, with motivation separate from math problem-solving. “The emotion and thought structures in the brain are totally entwined, totally docked in the brain,” says Mary Helen Immordino-Yang at the University of Southern California. “If you are trying to do math and worrying about whether you are going to fail or not, rather than the process of doing math… that is not deep learning.”
Chen and Jo Boaler (also at Stanford) are hard at work on figuring out how to help students shift from a fixed to a growth mindset. “Mindset can change quite a lot across age and grade level,” says Chen, “so we really want to see how that change can relate to different brain functions and different math achievement.”
“Understanding Effective High Schools: Evidence for Personalization for Academic and Social Emotional Learning” by Stacey Rutledge, Lora Cohen-Vogel, La’Tara Osborne-Lampkin, and Ronnie Roberts in American Educational Research Journal, December 2015 (Vol. 52, #6, p. 1060-1092), available for purchase at http://bit.ly/1QUZEW4; Rutledge can be reached at [email protected].
In this Elementary School Journal article, researchers Robert Thornberg and Tomas Jungert (Linköping University) and Tiziana Pozzoli and Gianluco Gini (University of Padova) report on their study of how moral emotions and disengagement affect bullying and children’s willingness to defend a bullying victim. Here is their analysis of each dimension:
• Moral emotions – Empathy, sympathy, and guilt are linked to prosocial, moral behavior. The stronger these emotions, the less likely children are to engage in bullying and the more likely they are to defend someone who is being bullied; the weaker the emotions, the more likely children are to bully others and display pro-bullying behavior.
• Moral disengagement – This, explain the authors, is a “sociocognitive process through which people can disengage from moral control and thus commit inhumane acts toward other people without suffering negative self-sanctions.” Some examples: (a) cognitive restructuring (“Stealing is not really harmful when compared to murder”); (b) minimizing one’s agentive role (“I wasn’t the only one acting that way”); (c) minimizing, disregarding, or distorting the consequences (“I didn’t really hurt him; he’s okay”); and (d) dehumanizing or blaming the victim (“He’s an animal and deserves what he got”). Moral disengagement is positively associated with aggressive behavior, including bullying.
In their study of 561 Swedish elementary students, Thornberg, Jungert, Pozzoli, and Gini found that the level of children’s moral emotions – empathy, sympathy for victims, transgressive guilt, and guilt for bystander inaction – goes a long way toward explaining bullying and defending. These findings, conclude the authors, “suggest that anti-bullying programs can discourage bullying behavior and encourage defending behavior among students by counteracting and deconstructing moral disengagement and fostering and strengthening moral emotions. Developing a sense of personal responsibility is crucial. To reduce moral disengagement among students, teachers and other school staff need to make students aware of and challenge moral disengagement mechanisms when they emerge among them as well as enhancing the moral atmosphere of the school and classroom, because school climate or moral atmosphere has been found to be negatively associated with the prevalence of bullying and students’ tendency to blame the victim of bullying.”
A key school and parental role is to provide clear, explicit moral instruction, calling attention to victims’ distress and highlighting the actions that caused distress to elicit empathy and sympathy and counteract disengagement.
“Childhood fears and adult traumas are stored differently in the brain than happy memories,” says David Brooks in this New York Times column. “They are buried like porous capsules deep in the primitive regions, below awareness and beyond easy reach of conscious thinking and talking. They are buried so deep that they are separated from the normal flow of life, and so time cannot work its natural healing powers.” That’s why many victims of traumatic experiences have a vague, inchoate feeling of unease or depression and cope by emotional detachment, compartmentalizing their lives, shying away from commitment, suffering from nightmares, and sometimes numbing themselves with substance abuse.
The process of unearthing and dealing with these memory capsules is difficult, says Brooks, but with patience and resolve, people can do it: “They face their fears, integrate the good and bad memories – recognizing that many different truths lie side by side. After years, many build a sturdy sense of self and make lasting commitments that bring joy, strength, and peace.” There’s a parallel with broader social traumas like racial injustice and religious conflict. Brooks mentions three concepts that are helpful in the personal and societal arenas:
• Soft differences – This is the art of avoiding a binary, good/evil view of the world and allowing others the space to be themselves.
• Responsibility versus blame – “If you emigrated from Norway to the United States last year,” says Brooks, “you’re not to blame for the history of racism, but as a new American, you probably have a responsibility to address it. An ethos of responsibility is less defensive than an ethos of blame and provides a better context for cooperation, common action, and radical acceptance.”
• Asymmetric rhetoric – If one person turns the volume up to 10, the other feels the need to match it – or become resentfully silent. “Rhetorical passion, which feels so good, can destroy conversation and mar truth and reconciliation,” says Brooks.
“Even after a tough year,” he concludes, “we are born into a story that has a happy ending. Wrongs can be recognized and put into context. What’s the point of doing this unless you’re fueled by hope and comforted by grace?”
In this New York Times article, Jedidah Isler (Vanderbilt University) quotes U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts’s questions in the recent Fisher v. University of Texas case: “What unique perspective does a minority student bring to a physics class? I’m just wondering what the benefits of diversity are in that situation?” Isler describes her reaction: “As a black woman and astrophysicist, I immediately became defensive of my own worthiness, and that of the black students I mentor and support every day. I wanted to scream my credentials from the rooftops… Of course, I deserved to be an astrophysicist, and my achievements prove it; but that’s not the point. I was worthy the first day I walked into the classroom… [M]y professors asked me if I wanted to understand physics, not what ‘unique perspective’ I might bring. I did want to learn physics, so they told me that I was in the right place.”
Scientific knowledge isn’t purely objective, Isler continues. It’s an evolving organism within the culture in which it’s taught: “The fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, known as STEM, are a messy tangle of experiments, misunderstandings, dead ends, insights, collaborations, accidental discoveries, desperation, triumph, and the rest of the human saga focused on understanding the world around us.” Because of this, classroom instruction can’t be through lecture, memorization, and regurgitation. Students need real-life examples of how Newton’s laws, for example, apply to the world.
“The purpose of the classroom is to build a tool kit and to understand what we know in the hopes of uncovering something that we don’t,” says Isler. “It’s the door through which we create new physicists. Closing that door to students of color unless they can justify their presence is closing the door to the kinds of creativity that can be shown only after a student has mastered basic skills. A physics class should interrogate and transfer the canon of scientific knowledge. Those students will go on to consider the many unanswered questions at the frontiers of what is known about the universe.” If we limit access to those classrooms, she concludes, “we also limit the production of new information about the world – and whose perspective that world will reflect. If that’s the case, then we all lose.”
“Being Black in Physics Class” by Jedidah Isler in The New York Times, December 17, 2015,
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This weekly memo is designed to keep principals, teachers, superintendents, and others very well-informed on current research and effective practices in K-12 education. Kim Marshall, drawing on 44 years’ experience as a teacher, principal, central office administrator, and writer, lightens the load of busy educators by serving as their “designated reader.”
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Core list of publications covered
Those read this week are underlined.
American Educational Research Journal
American Educator
American Journal of Education
AMLE Magazine
ASCA School Counselor
ASCD SmartBrief/Public Education NewsBlast
Better: Evidence-Based Education
Center for Performance Assessment Newsletter
District Administration
Ed. Magazine
Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis
Educational Horizons
Educational Leadership
Elementary School Journal
Essential Teacher
Go Teach
Harvard Business Review
Harvard Educational Review
Independent School
Journal of Education for Students Placed At Risk (JESPAR)
Journal of Staff Development
Kappa Delta Pi Record
Knowledge Quest
Literacy Today
Middle School Journal
Peabody Journal of Education
Perspectives
Phi Delta Kappan
Principal
Principal Leadership
Principal’s Research Review
Reading Research Quarterly
Responsive Classroom Newsletter
Rethinking Schools
Review of Educational Research
School Administrator
School Library Journal
Teacher
Teaching Children Mathematics
Teaching Exceptional Children/Exceptional Children
The Atlantic
The Chronicle of Higher Education
The District Management Journal
The Journal of the Learning Sciences
The Language Educator
The Learning Principal/Learning System/Tools for Schools
The Reading Teacher
Theory Into Practice
Time Magazine
Wharton Leadership Digest