In This Issue:

1. Grit is essential, but it has an underside

2. Reconsidering the part that good fortune plays in our lives

3. What is the role of brick-and-mortar schools in the age of Google?

4. Twenty psychological principles for successful teaching and learning

5. Thinking positively about networking

6. Can classroom “walkthroughs” add value?

7. Teens’ cellphone dependence

8. Does students’ in-school cellphone use widen the achievement gap?

9. Short items: (a) Online lessons in the arts; (b) AP art website

 

Quotes of the Week

“If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it would not seem so wonderful at all.”

            Michelangelo (quoted in item #1)

 

“The Internet is at one and the same time the most glorious fact-checker and the most effective bias-affirmer ever invented.”

            Michael Patrick Lynch (see item #3)

 

“Unfortunately, walkthroughs have not been done in the spirit for which they were inspired, so teachers don’t feel that they can trust the process.”

            Peter DeWitt (see item #6)

 

“In a career that spans 38 years, I have not seen any single diversion that so distracts students from reading, writing, thinking, and working. When the cellphone is in front of them, they are completely focused on it. When the cellphone is in the backpack, they are worried because they can’t see it.”

            Steve Gardiner (see item #7)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Grit May Be Essential, But It Has an Underside

            In this article in The Atlantic, writer Jerry Useem summarizes the essence of Angela Duckworth’s work on “grit” – that tenacity can be developed and is at least as important as intelligence in predicting children’s later success. In her just-published book, Grit (Scribner, 2016), Duckworth says perseverance and the pursuit of a single passion are also important in adults’ career success, and that grown-ups, like students, need to better understand the nature and prevalence of setbacks.

            In her early research, Duckworth realized that impulse control (vis. the marshmallow experiment) only partially explains why some children do better than others. By interviewing successful adults in a number of fields, she found an additional ingredient: how people process feelings of frustration, disappointment, and failure. Rather than cutting their losses and turning to something easier or different, they weren’t alarmed, stuck with it, and as a result were markedly more successful than those who gave up. This suggested to Duckworth that if we could change people’s beliefs about how success happens, we could change behavior.

            “But beliefs are themselves gritty and persistent,” says Useem. In addition, people often say one thing but secretly believe the opposite. For example, most adults say that effort is more important to success than talent, that they would rather hire for industriousness than intelligence. But researchers have revealed that most people really believe it’s about talent and IQ. Why this cognitive bias? Duckworth conjectures that if we really believed success was all about hard work, then shame on us for not being tennis stars or Nobel Prize winners. There but for the grace of grit go I.

            “Whatever its origins,” says Useem, “the bias has practical implications. Certainly, it suggests that my deep terror of letting anyone see my half-written article drafts is not irrational but adaptive. It perpetuates a myth that I’m a natural – the words just flow out, folks, as fast as I can type! – and hides the far more mundane truth: that the words come out fitfully and woodenly, gradually succumbing to a state of readability only after many seemingly fruitless sessions.” Michelangelo once humbly said, “If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it would not seem so wonderful at all.”

            This suggests that Duckworth’s admonition to embrace challenge needs to be qualified: Do it in private. Grit may be essential, but it isn’t attractive.

            “This can make for confusing career advice,” says Useem. “‘Try hard enough and you can do just about anything, as long as you don’t seem to be trying very hard’ is not the stuff of school murals.” The fact that highly successful people toiled for endless hours in private is not common knowledge to students and adults. We will search in vain for YouTube footage of Yo-Yo Ma practicing a difficult passage again and again, Ronald Reagan rehearsing a speech in front of a mirror, or Steve Jobs unveiling an unsuccessful iPhone. We see only the final, brilliant products. Without being aware that so much is beneath the surface, when we experience frustration, it’s easy to believe that we don’t have the right stuff and stop trying.

Duckworth found a way to teach the opposite lesson to the young researchers who work in her lab: she began circulating the many rejection letters she receives for articles she’s submitted to peer-reviewed journals, sometimes laced with savage attacks from anonymous professors on why her work shouldn’t be published. She’s basically telling her colleagues, This is what success looks like.

            Useem closes with one other concern about the applicability of Duckworth’s theory on adult careers. Her idea of sticking unswervingly to a single goal for a number of years may apply in universities and fields with relatively stable career pathways, he says, but it’s not good advice in an economy “where career paths twist and even vanish with little warning.” Isn’t it better to keep your head up, asks Useem, or have many irons in the fire? Duckworth admitted that she hadn’t thought of that. “Grit may carry risk,” she said, “because it’s about putting all your eggs in one basket, to some extent.” But Useem believes the message of grit is still tremendously important. You need some direction to get anywhere, and the myth of “the natural” is just that. Persistence matters.

 

“Is Grit Overrated?” by Jerry Useem in The Atlantic, May 2016 (Vol. 317, #4, p. 30, 32-33),

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/05/is-grit-overrated/476397/

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2. Reconsidering the Part that Good Fortune Plays in Our Lives

            In this article in The Atlantic, Robert Frank (Cornell University) says luck plays a bigger role in success than many people like to admit. And there’s a social-class tilt: “Wealthy people,” Frank reports, “overwhelmingly attribute their own success to hard work rather than to factors like luck or being in the right place at the right time.” That’s troubling, because researchers have found that when people think this way, they aren’t as generous and public-spirited and are less likely to recognize and support the conditions that made their success possible – for example, good public schools and high-quality infrastructure. Ironically, the “hindsight bias” of attributing success to internal factors makes fortunate people less likely to pass on their good fortune.

            Fortunately, there’s a way to short-circuit this cognitive bias. Yuezhou Huo carried out the following experiment. People were divided into three groups and promised a cash prize for completing a survey about a positive thing that had recently happened to them. The first group was asked to list things beyond their control that contributed to the event (they mentioned things like luck, a supportive spouse, effective teachers, or financial aid). The second group was asked to list personal qualities and actions that contributed (they mentioned hard work and wise personal choices). The control group was asked to explain why the good event had happened. After doing the survey, everyone was given the option of donating some or all of their cash prize to charity. Those who had been prompted to credit external causes donated 25 percent more than those who credited personal qualities or choices. The control group fell about halfway in between.

            The take-away from this and other similar studies: when we’re reminded of luck’s importance, says Frank, “we are much more likely to plow some of our own good fortune back into the common good.”

            There’s another benefit to recognizing the role of luck: it may actually improve our lives. Robert Emmons (University of California/Davis) and Michael McCullough (University of Miami) carried out the following experiment with three groups of adults. The first was asked to keep a diary of what made them feel grateful; the second kept track of what irritated them; and the third simply recorded the events of each day. After 10 weeks, the researchers reported dramatic changes among people in the first group:

-   Less-frequent aches and pains;

-   Improved quality of sleep;

-   Greater happiness and alertness;

-   More outgoing and compassionate;

-   Less likely to feel lonely and isolated.

No similar changes were recorded in the other two groups.

            Frank believes that just talking to others about the role of luck in our lives prompts people to rethink their life stories, recalling lucky breaks they’ve enjoyed along the way. He frequently tells the story of how he escaped death because an ambulance happened to be two minutes away when he had a medical emergency on a tennis court. “And because these conversations almost always leave participants feeling happier,” says Frank, “it’s not hard to imagine them being contagious.”

 

“Why Luck Matters – Much More Than You Think” by Robert Frank in The Atlantic, May 2016 (Vol. 317, #4, p. 19-22), http://theatln.tc/1Wsty7k

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3. What Is the Role of Brick-and-Mortar Schools in the Age of Google?

            In this Chronicle Review article, Michael Patrick Lynch (University of Connecticut) explores the future of K-16 schooling when our students have the world’s collective knowledge in their handheld devices (and may someday have a chip implanted in their brains that allows them to access knowledge via a simple mental command). For centuries, educators have worried about the impact of new information technology: Plato thought the written word would diminish cognitive abilities like memory; a 19^th-century student might have asked, “Why go to college when you have a library?” and calculators were once banned in math classrooms.

            But the kind of information we have at our fingertips today is different, says Lynch. First, “Google-knowing” (the information we get from search engines, apps, and other digital interfaces) has taken on a major role in our lives. “We rely on it every day, all day long,” he says. “We routinely allow it to trump other sources. It is our default.”

Second, Google-knowing is outsourced knowing. “Ultimately,” says Lynch, “we are relying on the say-so, the design work, and the sheer cumulative weight of others’ preferences… That is what makes it so useful, and also so problematic. The Internet is at one and the same time the most glorious fact-checker and the most effective bias-affirmer ever invented. Google-knowing allows us to share in and with the world. And sharing, as Mom always said, is good – except when it isn’t.”

Access to incredible amounts of outsourced knowledge “can lull us into thinking we know more, or can know more, than we actually do,” says Lynch. “It is all right there to be found. In some ways that’s true – but it depends on where you look. And partly because there is just so much information to sort through, we online humans tend to look at small sets or ‘families’ of reinforcing sites. Unnoticed, this can make us more intellectually passive and deferential than is good for us – but it can also make us dig in, stick to our guns, come what may.”

So flesh-and-blood teachers are more important than ever, says Lynch, because only they can teach critical, reflective thinking. Students need to become very proficient at:

-   Discerning if a source is reliable;

-   Recognizing evidence;

-   Employing that evidence when challenged;

-   Understanding how the evidence hangs together and why it’s important (or not).

“To gain understanding is to comprehend hidden relationships among different pieces of information,” says Lynch. “In the case of history and science, the relationships are causal; in the case of literature, symbolic and emotional; in philosophy and mathematics, logical… Google-knowing is a terrific basis for understanding. You can’t connect the dots if you don’t have the dots in the first place. Yet Google-knowing, while a basis for understanding, is not the same as understanding, because it is not a creative act.”

In other words, understanding can’t be outsourced. The educator’s role is to facilitate the creative abilities that understanding requires.

 

“Teaching in the Time of Google” by Michael Patrick Lynch in The Chronicle Review, April 29, 2016 (Vol. LXII, #33, p. B10-B12), http://bit.ly/1Y2XIN3

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4. Twenty Psychological Principles for Successful Teaching and Learning

            In this report from the American Psychological Association, Joan Lucariello and nine colleagues synthesize key psychological principles and explain their implications for PreK-12 educators. The full report (see link below) has considerable detail on each one.

            • Principle #1: Students’ beliefs and perceptions about intelligence and ability affect their cognitive functioning and learning. Students with an “incremental” or “growth” mindset tend to focus on learning goals and are willing to take on challenging tasks to expand their intelligence or ability. Students with a “fixed” or “entity” view of intelligence feel the need to continually demonstrate or prove their ability and are hesitant to take on difficult challenges. Teachers can foster a growth mindset by encouraging students to attribute success and failure to effort and strategy and avoiding ability-based praise or criticism.

            • Principle #2: What students already know affects their learning. Prior knowledge can be “Velcro” for new knowledge, but what students “know” may also be erroneous. Teachers can gain insights on students’ current knowledge – and their misconceptions and knowledge gaps – by giving pre-assessments and putting the data to work in unit and lesson planning. Getting students to change their misconceptions requires especially careful lesson planning.

            • Principle #3: Students’ cognitive development and learning are not limited to general stages of development. Recent research has debunked earlier stage theories of learning and shown that students are capable of advanced thinking if specific knowledge and skills are in place. Baseline assessments are helpful in guiding how instruction should proceed, and heterogeneous grouping can foster peer learning.

            • Principle #4: Learning occurs within a specific context (e.g., a classroom, a lab, a textbook) and transferring or generalizing learning will not happen by itself. Teachers need to make real-world connections, teach in multiple contexts, and take the time to develop students’ understanding of deep, underlying concepts that can be applied in new contexts.

            • Principle #5: Acquiring long-term knowledge and skill is largely dependent on practice. Students experience a plethora of stimuli every day that lodge in short-term or working memory. Moving the most important items into long-term memory takes deliberate practice – attention, rehearsal, practice testing (the retrieval effect), spaced repetition over time, and interleaving material from different subject areas.

            • Principle #6: Clear, explanatory, and timely feedback to students is important for learning. Specific learning goals are the starting point, followed by feedback on what students have right and wrong that guides them to knowing what to do, becoming self-correctors, and taking ownership for their own learning.

            • Principle #7: Students’ self-regulation assists learning, and self-regulatory skills can be taught. Students need to learn planning, attention, self-control, and memory strategies.

            • Principle #8: Creativity can be fostered. Being able to generate ideas that are new and useful in a particular situation is an important 21^st-century skill, and it’s not a fixed trait that you either have or you don’t. Teachers should allow for a wide range of student approaches to completing tasks or solving problems (create, invent, discover, imagine if, predict), emphasize the value of different approaches, and avoid the tendency to see highly creative students as disruptive.

            • Principle #9: Students tend to enjoy learning and do better when they are more intrinsically rather than extrinsically motivated. The long-term goal is to get students to the point where they engage in activities for their own sake – where success and mastery are sufficient motivation to work hard and stick with the task.

            • Principle #10: Students persist in the face of challenging tasks and process information more deeply when they adopt mastery rather than performance goals. Mastery goals are about acquiring new skills and improving levels of competence, while performance goals are about showing one’s ability and doing better than others. Teachers should emphasize progress over past performance (versus normative evaluation and comparison to others), deliver feedback privately, get students working in cooperative groups, and encourage students to see mistakes as opportunities to learn versus evidence of low ability.

            • Principle #11: Teachers’ expectations about their students affect students’ opportunities to learn, their motivation, and their learning outcomes. “These beliefs shape the kinds of instruction delivered to students, the grouping practices that are used, anticipated learning outcomes, and methods of evaluation,” say the authors. “If faulty expectations are communicated to a student (whether verbally or nonverbally), that student may begin to perform in ways that confirm the teacher’s original expectation.” Teachers need to continuously self-check, for example: Where are students sitting the classroom? Are all students participating in discussions? Is written feedback delivered equitably?

            • Principle #12: Setting goals that are short-term, specific, and moderately challenging enhances motivation more than establishing goals that are long-term, general, and overly challenging. At least until middle adolescence, students aren’t skilled at thinking concretely about the distant future (e.g., succeeding in college). Teachers need to set goals that move students toward high achievement and gradually “stretch” the goals.

            • Principle #13: Learning is situated within multiple social contexts. These include families, peer groups, neighborhoods, communities, and the larger society. The more teachers know about the different contexts, the better they will do at creating a classroom culture that facilitates learning.

            • Principle #14: Interpersonal relationships and communication are critical to both the teaching-learning process and the social-emotional development of students. “Given their social nature, classrooms provide a critical context for teaching social skills such as communication and respect for others,” say the authors. “Developing successful relationships with peers and adults is highly dependent on one’s ability to communicate thoughts and feelings through verbal and nonverbal behavior.”

            • Principle #15: Emotional well-being influences educational performance, learning, and development. Teachers’ choice of vocabulary, effective modeling, and explicit teaching can help students develop a healthy self-concept and self-esteem; self-efficacy and locus of control; happiness, contentment, and calm; a capacity for coping in healthy ways with everyday stresses; understanding, expressing, and controlling one’s own emotions; and perceiving and understanding others’ emotions.

            • Principle #16: Expectations for classroom conduct and social interaction are learned and can be taught using proven principles of behavior and effective classroom instruction. Teachers need to start at the very beginning of the year and re-teach behavioral expectations throughout the year. Certain well-established programs like PBIS are very helpful.

            • Principle #17: Effective classroom management is based on structure and support at the classroom and schoolwide level. This means teachers are: (a) setting and communicating high expectations; (b) consistently nurturing positive relationships with a high ratio of positive to negative statements; and (c) providing a high level of student support.

            • Principle #18: Both formative and summative assessments are important and useful, but require different approaches and interpretations. Formative assessments are on-the-fly and used to improve instruction and learning in real time. Summative assessments measure learning at certain points in the year. Clear learning targets are important to both.

            • Principle #19: Students’ skills, knowledge, and abilities are best measured with assessments that have well-defined standards for quality and fairness. Some important questions on the validity of formative assessments:

-   How much of what you want to measure is actually being measured?

-   How much of what you didn’t intend to measure is actually being measured?

-   What are the intended and unintended consequences of the assessment?

-   What evidence do you have to support your answers to the first three questions?

Reliability is another key criterion of good assessments – are they consistent indicators of students’ knowledge, skills, and abilities?

            • Principle #20: Making sense of assessment data depends on clear, appropriate, and fair interpretation. This comes back to what the assessment was designed to measure, ensuring that the data are used in ways that improve teaching and learning.

 

“Top 20 Principles from Psychology for Pre-K-12 Teaching and Learning” by Joan Lucariello, Sandra Graham, Bonnie Nastasi, Carol Dwyer, Russ Skiba, Jonathan Plucker, Mary Pitoniak, Mary Brabeck, Darlene DeMarie, and Steven Pritzker for the American Psychological Association, 2015, https://www.apa.org/ed/schools/cpse/top-twenty-principles.pdf

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5. Thinking Positively About Networking

            Many professionals hate to network, say Tiziana Casciaro (University of Toronto), Francesca Gino (Harvard Business School), and Maryam Kouchaki (Northwestern University) in this Harvard Business Review article: “Although some people have a natural passion for it – namely, the extroverts who love and thrive on social interaction – many understandably see it as brown-nosing, exploitative, and inauthentic.”

            But in today’s world, networking is essential, say the authors, citing research that it leads to broader and deeper knowledge, higher-quality and more-innovative work, greater job satisfaction, and expanded professional opportunities. They recommend four strategies for overcoming an aversion to networking:

            • Focus on learning. Going into conversations with curiosity and an open mind produces far greater benefits than seeing them as a distasteful obligation. “If you’re an introvert, you can’t simply will yourself to be extroverted, of course,” say the authors. “But everyone can choose which motivational focus to bring to networking.” Faced with a work-related social function, rather than thinking, “I hate these kinds of events. I’m going to have to put on a show and schmooze and pretend to like it,” you can think, “Who knows – it could be interesting. Sometimes when you least expect it, you have a conversation that brings up new ideas and leads to new experiences and opportunities.”

            • Identify common interests. “Numerous studies in social psychology have demonstrated that people establish the most collaborative and longest-lasting connections when they work together on tasks that require one another’s contributions,” say Casciaro, Gino, and Kouchaki. “Task interdependence” is the key factor in the most productive networking relationships. Sometimes this involves researching a key individual who might be particularly helpful and then reaching out for advice or help.

            • Think broadly about what you can give. Junior people in an organization, as well as women and racial/ethnic minorities, sometimes feel reticent about reaching out to network with colleagues. There are ways to overcome this, say the authors. First, think more positively about your power in the organization. Second, find an area in which you have knowledge and expertise – for example, one low-level employee organized an after-hours soccer league, another contributed her knowledge of social media. Third, realize that more-experienced colleagues are often pleased to be asked for advice and are especially happy when they’re thanked publicly, or in a detailed private note, for contributing to your growth.

            • Find a higher purpose. People feel better about networking when they frame it in terms of helping others (in education, students and colleagues) versus their own professional advancement. “Any work activity becomes more attractive when it’s linked to a higher goal,” conclude the authors.

 

“Managing Yourself: Learn to Love Networking” by Tiziana Casciaro, Francesca Gino, and Maryam Kouchaki in Harvard Business Review, May 2016 (Vol. 94, #5, p. 104-107), no free e-link

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6. Can Classroom “Walkthroughs” Add Value?

            In this article in Education Week, author/consultant Peter DeWitt says that short classroom visits are getting a mixed reception from teachers, perhaps because:

-   Principals haven’t worked with their colleagues to clarify what they’re looking for in these visits, leading teachers to be wary of the process.

-   Principals focus superficially on curriculum coverage and the pacing calendar.

-   Principals look for teacher compliance with specific instructional practices versus whether students are learning.

-   Teachers don’t get meaningful feedback afterward.

“Unfortunately,” says DeWitt, “walkthroughs have not been done in the spirit for which they were inspired, so teachers don’t feel that they can trust the process.” All too often, the visits are not engendering “deep learning on the part of students, teachers, and the leaders who are doing them.”

DeWitt believes walkthroughs will be less superficial if principals and others pay attention to seven classroom phenomena:

            • Cooperative learning versus cooperative seating – About 80 percent of the time, DeWitt estimates, students sitting in groups are working on individual activities. This is not cooperative learning in the true sense of the word.

            • Real engagement versus compliant pretending – “Just because students are following the speaker or answering a question,” says DeWitt, “doesn’t mean they are actively and authentically engaged.”

            • Surface level versus deep-level questioning – Are teachers probing for understanding or just querying students on things they already know with questions that can be answered with one or two words?

            • Teacher talk versus student talk – One Australian researcher found that teachers ask about 200 questions a day and students ask two questions a week.

            • Teacher-student relationships – Visible Learning author John Hattie found that the quality of adult-child relationships can have an effect size of .72 and should be a major focus during classroom visits.

            • Mindset – Some schools say they are promoting a growth mindset, but on a day-to-day basis, they’re treating students as if their intelligence and talents are fixed.

            • How computers are used – Students may have good access to powerful tablets or laptops, but are they using them merely to fill out worksheets?

            [A major problem with walkthroughs is that the term is used to describe at least four different ways of handling short classroom visits: (a) “Learning walks” or “instructional rounds” as espoused by Lauren Resnick and Richard Elmore et al. – A team of educators visits classrooms and makes recommendations focused on the school’s self-identified “problem of practice;” (b) The Instructional Practices Inventory as promoted by Jerry Valentine – Administrators visit classrooms gathering data on specific checklist items and report to the faculty; (c) Building tour – Administrators cruise through all classrooms once or twice a day to “show the flag,” perhaps giving quick feedback to a few teachers on effective or less-than-effective practices; and (d) Mini-observations – Administrators systematically visit two or three classrooms a day, have face-to-face feedback conversations afterwards with each teacher, and send a brief written summary electronically. We need research comparing the impact of these quite different approaches so administrators can use their precious time in ways most likely to improve teaching and learning.   K.M.]

 

“The Myth of Walkthroughs: 8 Unobserved Practices in Classrooms” by Peter DeWitt in Education Week, April 19, 2016, http://bit.ly/1Z2G7ov

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7. Teens’ Cellphone Dependence

            In this Education Week article, Montana high-school teacher Steve Gardiner says his students are addicted to their cellphones. “In a career that spans 38 years,” he says, “I have not seen any single diversion that so distracts students from reading, writing, thinking, and working. When the cellphone is in front of them, they are completely focused on it. When the cellphone is in the backpack, they are worried because they can’t see it.” There are programs to help people who are addicted to gambling, sex, drugs, alcohol, and tobacco, but we have nothing to help teenagers who can’t go for more than two minutes without looking at their phones.

            Why can’t students wait till the next class break or lunch time? Why must they text with their phones in their laps, hidden in their notebooks, or even inside their pockets? “They tell me how important it is to respond to their friends,” he says, “but the irony is that in paying so much attention to the friend on the other end of the cell connection, they blatantly ignore the friends sitting in the room with them. They walk down the hallways, oblivious to the hundreds of other students walking past them, in order to text a student on the other side of the building.”

            Gardiner knows there are ways to use cellphones as a learning tool, but even in these situations, he notices that most students are off-task, sneaking to use the phone for social purposes. “They cannot control good use of the device,” he says. “It controls them.” What will happen to them when they leave school – will they lose jobs because of their obsession and dependence?

 

“Cellphone Addiction Is No Joke” by Steve Gardiner in Education Week, April 27, 2016 (Vol. 35, #29, p. 23, 25), www.edweek.org

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8. Does Students’ In-School Cellphone Use Widen the Achievement Gap?

            In this article in The Atlantic, Kentucky high-school teacher Paul Barnwell has many of the same sentiments as Steve Gardiner in the preceding article. “Even when I know I’ve created a well-structured and well-paced lesson plan,” says Barnwell, “it seems as if no topic, debate, or activity will ever trump the allure of the phone.” The principal of this high-poverty school notices students using cellphones in ways that distance them from their peers. In addition, he says, exchanges in social media are at the root of most of the school’s disruptions and conflicts.

Barnwell and his colleagues are especially worried about the impact of cellphones on students who are struggling academically: “The phone could be a great equalizer, in terms of giving children from all sorts of socioeconomic backgrounds the same device, with the same advantages. But using phones for learning requires students to synthesize information and stay focused on a lesson or a discussion. For students with low literacy skills and the frequent urge to multitask on social media or entertainment, incorporating purposeful smartphone use into classroom activity can be especially challenging. The potential advantage of the tool often goes to waste.”

            Barnwell decided to do some research on cellphones in the classroom. He found a 2014 Stanford University study that said one-on-one access to devices – no sharing needed – had the greatest benefit. However, the researchers focused on laptops and computers, not cellphones. Other educators Barnwell contacted confirmed his observation that needy students seem to have the most difficulty staying focused on academic cellphone tasks. A study at the London School of Economics found that banning cellphones affected different students differently: A ban improved test-scores for low-achieving students and had no significant impact on high achievers.

Finally, Barnwell found a Kent State University study saying that among college students, greater daily cellphone use was correlated with lower GPAs. “If college students are affected by excessive phone use,” he says, “then surely younger students with too much access to their phones and too little self-control and guidance would be just as affected academically if not more.” One of Barnwell’s colleagues likened a permissive attitude toward cellphones to giving kids equal access to cigarettes and candy. “There is a reason that adults have tried to limit and regulate young people’s behavior,” he said, “given that teens are not as adept at understanding risk and cause and effect.”

            But perhaps bans are not the answer, concludes Barnwell – and indeed, New York City’s public schools recently lifted a long-standing ban on cellphones. Pennsylvania educator Brianna Crowley has the final word: “If educators do not find ways to leverage mobile technology in all learning environments, for all students, then we are failing our kids by not adequately preparing them to make the connection between their world outside of school and their world inside school.”

 

“Do Smartphones Have a Place in the Classroom?” by Paul Barnwell in The Atlantic, April 27, 2016, http://theatln.tc/1T6QUtn; Barnwell can be reached at [email protected],

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9. Short Items:

            a. Online lessons in the arts – Doodles Academy http://www.doodles-academy.org is a free website with lesson plans and other resources to encourage student creativity across the board and expand access to high-quality arts education.

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            b. AP art website – The Smart History website www.smarthistory.org has a wealth of resources on AP art – art history and geography, cultural heritage, materials and techniques, and more.

 

“Better Online Images, Multimedia Give Art History Education New Look” by Leo Doran in Education Week, April 27, 2016 (Vol. 35, #29, p. 1, 10), www.edweek.org

 

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