Teaching (or doing anything) while the world burns

Lately I've been feeling a bit overwhelmed by all of the problems in the world. I didn't really expect COVID-19 to surge again, and it looks like the speed of climate change is also exceeding expectations. I have been surprised by the degree to which racism is still endemic in our society, and our current state of political division is truly disheartening. It's as if the world is burning in more ways than one. How do you teach (or do anything) while the world burns? 

I think there are at least four ways, but a combo of the second two is the best (and BTW I think all of this burning craziness may be the beginning of growth).

Option 1: Give up

You can always just give up and either quit altogether or emotionally check out and just go through the motions.  Lots of folks are choosing this option, and I don't blame them. There is a time to quit, especially if you're close to retirement age, but for me, now's not the time. More on that below.

Option 2: Pretend it's not burning

Denial: It's not just a river in Egypt. A popular way of dealing with difficult situations is to pretend the difficult situation does not exist. I'm not sure if we do this because we think it will go away if we ignore it, or if we think "dwelling on it" will only make it worse. Likely it's a combination of the two. But either way, it doesn't work. Problems do not go away if you ignore them. They either get worse immediately, or they fester and come back to bite you. Only by facing them can you have any hope of solving them. This is true for relationship problems, and it's true when the world is going to hell in a hand-basket.

Option 3: Acceptance and inaction

You can accept that all of these things are happening around you, but just keep doing what you love--kind of a monastic approach, I suppose. Isolate yourself. Tend your garden. Walk your dog. Enjoy your family. Teach your classes. View the world's problems like bad weather that will pass. I guess it's what I've been doing with my art and brewing during the pandemic. It's an escape, and I can forget all about the chaos of the outside world for a while. 

There's some power to this approach. If everyone did this--living simply and accepting things as they are, we'd all be much better off, I think. But it's kind of hard to pull off, and the downside is that not everyone will do it, so the shit's going to keep hitting the fan, and at some point the flames will be outside our door. So I tend to lean more toward a balance with Option 4.

Option 4: Action

You can realize that teaching (or whatever it is you do) has a role to play in helping to solve the problems that surround us. In a war, not everyone is on the front lines, and the battle against climate change, racism, COVID-19, and political division needs supply lines as well. 

We live in the information age and yet a destructive ignorance abounds--ignorance about climate change, viruses, history and racism. And one thing I learned this past year is that somehow American schooling has failed to adequately educate the nation. But it's not about facts. We've failed to teach people to think critically, quantitatively, scientifically and humanely, and we need to do better. We have a huge role to play here as the world burns.

But ignorance and sloppy thinking are just the tip of the iceberg. There's also a tremendous lack of trust in our society right now. There's also a tremendous deficiency of empathy and compassion. And there's a tremendous loss of social support, despite all of our online connections. And if we are going to fight all of these "fires" that burn around us, we are going to need more empathy, compassion, trust, and social supports. We're going to need unity based on our common humanity. These skills of empathy, compassion and building trust, unity and social supports were not traditionally taught in school, but we need to teach them now. 

And most importantly, our students need teachers that care, safe places like schools and the support of their classmates, as they watch the world burn around them. But they'll also need help because they're not going to just watch. They'll need help because they are going to fight the flames--the climate change, the pandemics, the racism and division. Because they are going to make the world a better place.

The Bright Side

So there's lots to teach while the world burns. There's lots to do. But there's also lots to enjoy, because honestly it's always a joy working with young people--they are so full of life and openness and hope and potential. And the world, burning though it is, is still so full of wonderful things to explore with them. And the journey of learning, even though it can be challenging and frustrating and painful at times, is worth it all as we grow from it. 

In fact, sometimes the burning happens inside of us, also. Sometimes the old us gets burned up and something new grows. What's it like to teach while that happens? 

Fires are a natural part of ecosystems, triggering renewal and new growth. We're teaching, or doing whatever job it is we're doing, in a time of fire and renewal. And my hope is that it will bring the same kind of regeneration to all of us--everyone of you reading this, and everything.

A mission for 2021

 New year thoughts: “What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger?” and a mission for this year. 

What I Learned from my 3-Year Experiment with Project-Based Learning

I want to tell you the story of my journey in project-based learning and what it has taught me as a teacher an administrator.

In 2015, I took a job as director of E. O. Smith High School's Depot Campus. It's a program based on the Big Picture Learning model that focuses on learning through internships, advisories, and independent learning projects. I was excited. I had been experimenting with innovative models of education for years as a science teacher at the main campus. I'd created online and flipped classes, and had just finished what I considered my greatest achievement, a mastery-based, differentiated biology class. I saw the Depot program as an extension of what I'd been doing and an opportunity to continue to learn about and develop constructivist learning approaches like project-based learning. But as I walked past the several unfinished student murals on the walls of the little school, I should have known I was in for a challenge to my assumptions.

Year 1: Netflix and disillusionment

It is a pretty cool idea, when you think about it--kids engaged in things they're interested in. And if you take a look back at some of my blog posts from that first semester, you will pick up on the excitement I felt. But if you continue to follow my posts through the winter and into the spring, the story takes a twist. What I expected to see was students motivated by autonomy, mastery, and purpose and engaged in their independent work because they had the freedom to work on what interested them. But instead of working on their own projects during their daily "self-directed learning time," many watched YouTube or Netflix, played video games or just chatted. Only a couple of students ever completed the independent projects they had planned with their advisors that year.

I was disillusioned. What was going on?

Year 2: Hitting an invisible wall

So I gathered my team, and we all agreed that we needed a bit more structure. We reasoned that the students lacked basic organizational and other project-management skills, so we created "Project Block" to replace their "self-directed learning time." During this block, I would guide the students through a series of guided science projects, each one focusing on a different "project" skill, such as planning, troubleshooting, or research. Each project also allowed for student choice, and during the course of the year I tried a few different methods of tracking and monitoring student progress on their work. The goal of Project Block was that each student would successfully complete an independent project after the initial 8 canned projects.

While nearly all students successfully completed the first 8 structured projects, only a couple of students successfully completed the fully independent project. It was as if they hit an unseen wall when they were fully on their own.

Year 3: Back to the drawing board

Maybe what the students needed was guidance all the way through the project process. So instead of a series of canned projects, the following year I worked with my students in small groups to develop science project ideas and carry them out. One group built a maze and started running experiments to see if hamsters could learn the maze. The other decided to try aquaponics. They grew trout in a fish tank and circulated the water into a second tank containing lettuce plants. The fish water fertilizes the pants, and the plants clean the water.

Both were very cool projects. It was exciting at first, but as time went on, it became harder and harder to maintain the students' momentum for new learning. The hamster project team resisted my efforts to encourage them to do more research and improve their experiments. The aquaponics team never developed any experiments, and though they successfully grew both trout and lettuce, they spent most of the time during Project Block on their phones, YouTube, or chatting.

Year 4: A new hypothesis

During the summer after the third year, I read a new book by John Hattie and his colleagues called Visible Learning for Science. In that book, he addresses the nagging question of why inquiry-based learning, problem-based learning and other such approaches, which make so much intuitive sense, have such low effect sizes. In other words, why aren't they effective? His answer is that they are effective if they are used at the right time--after the students have learned the basics. They are useful methods for extending and deepening learning, but not for initial knowledge acquisition.

And so I had a new hypothesis. Students could not do independent projects, not because they lacked generic project skills, but because they lacked the fundamental content-specific knowledge and skills needed or the specific projects they were working on. So I began the fourth iteration of our project-based learning experiment. I decided to teach students the basics of electricity and electrical circuits using the CASTLE curriculum, and then have them each do an independent electricity project after they mastered the skills they needed.

Year 4, Take 2:

The CASTLE curriculum is really cool. It is a hands-on, self-guided curriculum in which students read instructions, set-up experiments, make and test predictions, and then read summaries of concepts. But about half of my students were not able to progress quickly enough. This could have to do with the reading level, but I had solved that by making a series of instructional videos, and students still struggled to progress through the curriculum on their own. The CASTLE curriculum, it turns out, is actually more of a constructivist approach, and I'm not sure why I thought it would solve my problem in the first place. I think I was driven primarily by the need for a canned curriculum that required little lesson prep.

In any case, it was failing for most of my students, so I decided to give them two options: Continue with the CASTLE curriculum, or switch to lessons delivered by me. I would put together mini-lessons and hands-on activities and projects on a variety of science topics selected by the students. All but one chose the lessons.

And thus the final nail was hammered into the coffin of the 3-year long experiment in project-based learning.

Some may say that it's just a problem with this particular population of students. Many of our students struggle with attention, hyperactivity, impulsivity, anxiety, depression, and other issues that affect their ability to stay on task, complete work, and in general, find success at school. But it turns out that this is exactly the kind of student for which the project-based approach is often offered as a solution. And what is the goal of the projects anyway, if not learning? How did the projects become and end in themselves? When did "independence" start to trump learning?

For me, the experience of the past three years has been a cautionary tale of confirmation bias. I started with the assumption of project-based learning and then went through several cycles of trying to justify it. Ultimately, like a creationist finally coming to terms with the evidence for evolution, I have to go where the evidence leads.

Year 4, Update:

It is now March of Year 4 of my experiment, and my new approach of explicit instruction followed by projects has devolved into pure guided project work. It proved too difficult to use an explicit instruction approach while having to create a curriculum from scratch and on-the-fly.

For several weeks now, we have been working on optimizing baking soda rockets, and the students love it. They look forward to Project Block, but I have to remind myself that having fun is not the same as learning. Video games are fun. We need both.

Looking ahead

At this point, there are two paths I am considering:

1. Spend the summer developing a science curriculum based on Hattie's layered approach: Explicit instruction first, then projects.

2. This may seem like it comes out of nowhere, but I am toying with the idea of trying Mike Schmoker's approach next year. In his book, FOCUS: Elevating the Essentials to Radically Improve Student Learning, he argues for a greater emphasis on literacy across the curriculum. I am considering a reading- and writing-based approach to science at the Depot. Not only would this be a way to help them acquire the foundation of science knowledge they need, it would focus our energies where they need to be focused. Many of our students are at-risk and behind in their basic skills, so building confidence in reading, writing and math could trump any benefits hands-on science could offer.

My current working hypothesis is that engagement is not about student interest, but about their sense of competence. And I think this holds true for reading, writing, and math as well as anything else. My real goal is to prepare these kids for college or career, and I want to do whatever will move them in that direction.

You might think that this entire four year sequence represents a retreat from independent and personalized learning, and if you thought that, you would be correct. But I believe we must go where the evidence leads, and we do what is best for the students, even if it means abandoning, or at least revising our beliefs about learning. As John Hattie says, we must not "hold any instructional strategy in higher esteem than students' learning."

The obstacle becomes the path: A short commencement speech

There is an old Zen story about a king whose people had grown soft. He wanted to teach them a lesson, so he put a big rock in the middle of the main path to town, blocking the road. Then he hid in the woods to watch what they did.

One by one they came. Most just complained. Some would try a little to move it, then give up.

Finally, one lone peasant came along. He pushed and pushed at the rock. Tried to get his hands under it and lift. Nothing worked. Then he had an idea. He went into the woods and got a large branch and used it as a lever to move the rock.

Under the rock the king had hid a purse of gold and a note that said: “The obstacle in the path becomes the path. Never forget, within every obstacle is an opportunity to improve our condition.”*

You have all had your share of obstacles in your paths. But you didn’t give up. You found new levers.

And you found new strength.

Don’t forget that.

Don’t forget that there are always other levers, and there will always be new strength.

High school will not be your last obstacle. I can guarantee that.

So remember this lesson. Remember what happened when you didn’t give up.

Remember how the obstacle became your path.

And don’t give up.

I hope that you have also learned a few things about effort--that it’s not easy to move those stones, even with a lever.

But effort pays off with new opportunities.

Now that you’ve graduated, you automatically have multiplied your opportunities.

You can repeat that process of multiplication. Every obstacle you overcome, every challenge you take on will be a multiplier.

Jobs, college, new degrees, new learning, will all multiply your options.

That’s the point. It’s not about gold purses. I think the purse of gold coins was a little lame, actually.

Here’s my version: The guy works and works on the stone until he gets so strong he can move it. He becomes like Hercules. And then he walks to the city and gets a job as the king’s own bodyguard. Or something like that.

Or maybe this version: She moves the stone and finds that the path beyond is not just one path, but a whole bunch of paths to places she hadn’t even dreamed of.

The point is, the obstacle doesn’t become a prize. It becomes a path. A new path.

And here’s the other problem with the story. You’re not alone. You don’t need to move the stone alone. Reach out for help. That guy or girl should have gone and gotten some help with that lever. The story would be just as cool and so would you. Asking for help is not a sign of weakness. It takes guts to ask for help, just like it takes guts to keep pushing at those stones that don’t seem to budge and to go looking for levers.

See, that’s the other benefit to obstacles. They draw us together with other people, and that’s what’s really important in life.

So congratulations Depot Graduates! You moved this stone! And I am excited to see what you find beyond it!

And good luck as you continue on your paths and convert more obstacles into new paths to success.



*Thanks to Ryan Holiday for the Zen story and for his excellent book, The Obstacle Is the Way.

Notes to self on the eve of the first day of school

Here are some notes I'm making to myself as the school year starts up again. Maybe you can relate.

1. It’s like jumping in a cold pool or starting a tough workout. You just do it, and then it gets better.

2. Remember that it’s the same for the students. We’re all jumping in together.

3. Remember that it’s about the students. This is for them.

4. Do the best you can. There will be obstacles you can’t overcome. Students will have difficulties that are beyond you. No one expects you to work miracles. No one, that is, except you.

5. It’s OK if you don’t feel passion all the time. Maybe what is called for is just dogged determination and focus.

6. It’s OK if you fail. As Conor McGregor said, “I never lose. I win, or I learn.”

7. There’s value in the work, even if you don’t get the results you want. Not only are you learning, you’re making money, you’re supporting your family, you’re expressing love and honor and doing what life is asking of you.

8. There will be successes. There always are. There will be smiles. There will be rewards. You will help people, even if they don’t realize it.

9. There will be breaks. There will be rest. It won’t be a non-stop grind.

10. Make sure that it’s not a non-stop grind. Plan in plenty of rest and fun. Burnout is a very real thing.

11. Don't be an island. Don't be a hero. Lean on your supports.

12. Allow whatever is to be enough. Not that there is no need for improvement, but there is no NEED for improvement. The universe will be just fine without it.

13. Enjoy yourself. Every day. Find the pleasure in every moment. It will be tough, but have fun with it.

Give it your best shot. Assess. Repeat (Project Block v. 2.0)

Tracking student progress in Project Block

"It stings. It stings bad, but this is the fight business. I've been on the end of many defeats in my life and I've rose back, so I will not shy away from it. I will not make excuses for it. I will assess it and come back."

-Conor McGregor

It’s easy to get caught in the trap of evaluating your success in terms of actual results.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for data and evaluation, but what do you do when the data don’t show the success you want?

Option 1: Despair. You suck. Your job sucks. Your life sucks. Lay on the couch and give up.

Option 2: Roll with it. Regroup. Rebound. Reassess your efforts, and adjust. Hey, this is a fight, right? You are in a battle against entropy and gravity and whatever other frictions and fictions are trying to drag you and your clientele down.

For me, I’ll take Option 2. I’ll let that despair roll over me like water off a duck's back. I’ll acknowledge the failure and pain, but then I'll get right back in there for another round. I never thought this would be easy. I always knew it would be a fight. From they day I struggled through the birth canal, I knew this world was a tough place. So let’s go, shall we?

Case in point: Project Block. Our whole school program was founded on the idea that autonomy and independence are keys to motivation and learning. My first year here, students were given several hours per week to work on whatever they wanted to, but the lack of productivity and success I saw changed my mind on motivation and led me to create a more structured approach called Project Block.

In Project Block, students worked through a series of structured science projects of increasing complexity, each of which focused on different aspects of the project process, and then graduated to fully independent projects about midway through the year.

That was the idea, anyway. 

Well, the results are in. While almost all students (88%) finished the 8 structured projects and earned 0.5 science credits, fewer succeeded in completing their first fully independent project (71%), and even fewer succeeded in completing additional independent projects and/or meeting their own deadlines for key milestones after the first 9 projects. Of 19 additional independent projects begun:

8 completed the research step on time (42%),
6 completed their Trello/Bullet Journal planning assignment on time (32%),
2 completed their projects (11%), and
1 completed it on time (5%).

Not exactly the results we had hoped for. My current hypothesis is that these students, many of whom struggle with ADD and related issues, are simply not ready for independent work like this. 

We could give up. Roll over. Play dead.

But it's worth another shot.

We had a whole-school deliberative discussion at the end of last year to talk about how we could regroup and improve Project Block. The students came up with the following idea: Split the school up into groups by credit needs (science, social studies, English) and maintain structured projects throughout the whole year (unless students demonstrate the ability to work independently). 

We will also build in lots of explicit instruction in project planning and execution, and the whole thing will be guided by daily checklists.

Maybe we'll never have a successful independent project program, but we'll learn in the process, and as Marcus Aurelius wrote: 

"The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way."

The obstacle becomes the way we hadn't looked for--the way to new strengths and new paths.

Give it your best shot. Assess. Repeat. Advance.

The procrastination equation: Putting research into practice at the Depot

They were discussing different forms of government, and the conversation had degenerated into a frustrating chorus of "There is no right answer. It's all just a matter of opinion."

"That's not true," I said, trying to keep the frustration out of my voice. "There are benchmarks. Some forms of government work better than others."

I'm not sure they got my point, but that kind of relativism is one of my pet peeves. Unfortunately, it infects many parts of society, including education. People in education often think that there are no real answers--no reference points by which to judge between the myriad of models and practices that promise to improve student success. But that's not true. Research has shown what works. The same science that brought us modern medicine and discovered global warming can help us educate our kids, and if we're not using it, we're fighting this battle blindfolded. Here's the story of how we're putting research into practice at the Depot, and how it's impacting our kids.

Last year was my first year at this little non-traditional school, and it soon became obvious that motivation was a serious problem. Motivation was low, engagement was low, attendance was low, task completion was low, and procrastination was high. Then I came across this article on procrastination from psychologist, Piers Steel. It was a thorough review of research related to motivation, and his "procrastination equation" became my guide. I took the liberty here to make it a bit more user friendly:

Utility is "how desirable a task or choice is for an individual." Expectancy is whether we think we will be able to complete the task, value is how much we value the outcome, the more impulsive among us will have a greater tendency to procrastinate, and the further away the deadline (the greater the delay), the more we'll put off the work.

Using the equation is simple. If utility is low, we procrastinate. To decrease procrastination, we need to increase expectancy and value and decrease impulsivity and delay. At the Depot this year, we're attacking all four factors of the equation.

Expectancy: According to Stanford psychologist Albert Bandura, "efficacy expectancy is somewhat susceptible to verbal persuasion and emotional arousal but is especially influenced by modelling and actual performance accomplishments." With this in mind, we are increasing our use of explicit instruction at the Depot, and our new Project Block is designed to provide students with a string of small successes to build upon. As of last week, about 60% of our students had completed 8 science projects, including hands-on projects, lab reports and a research paper, and had begun their first independent project.

Focused work during Project Block

The ALEKS online math system, which we also started using this year, is another way we're building self-efficacy. It offers a mastery-based approach the kids love, and our students' average progress on their courses is 54%.

And finally, we've really ramped up the 1:1 support this year. With a combination of interns and an instructional assistant, we are able to assign struggling students one-on-one help during ALEKS, Project Block, and any other time they need it.

Value: Dr. Steel points to classical conditioning as one way to increase the value factor. During our summer program, we were having trouble getting kids to do their online math work, so I was tossing around the idea of a token-based incentive system with Ellen. I had planned to make the tokens worth credits. "But what if they don't care about credits?," she asked. 

She was right. Many of our students don't seem to be motivated by threats of credit loss or offers of credit. So what did we do? We still offered credit, but we also tied the tokens to a field trip reward, and it worked. They really valued that reward!

We carried that same approach over into this year: Students earn poker chips for on-task behavior, and if they earn enough, they qualify for special field trips. Many students use our new progress tracking system to keep track of their chips and they value them so much that their anxiety about the chips has actually become a bit of a problem. My hope is that this system will build the habits of work that we adults call intrinsic motivation. According to Steel, this is exactly what happens--students associate reward with the work, and the work becomes intrinsically rewarding.

(Of course, they don't always succeed. The other day, I told a student he would not have enough chips to qualify for the field trip the next day. He pushed his few chips away on the table as if to disavow them and said, "I don't want any more chips!" His protest reminded me of my son when he was young. He wouldn't eat his Thanksgiving dinner, and the consequence was not getting any pie. "I don't like pie!," he repeated, as he marched around the table. The fact that chips can tap into their emotion is testimony that we've tapped into the value factor.)

Impulsivity:  Impulsivity is considered a personality trait, and Steel questions whether we can influence it much, but he does suggest two possibilities: stimulus control and automaticity. "Stimulus control," says Steel, "helps to direct behavior by indicating what is appropriate (i.e., rewarding) under any given circumstance," and I think the chips serve this purpose also. If students stay off their phones and on-task for 10, 15, or 20 minutes (we gradually increase the blocks of time), they receive reward chips. Most students earn the full amount of chips available during ALEKS Block and Project Block, and it's surprising to see how easily most of them can focus for 20 solid minutes under these conditions.

To increase automaticity, Steel recommends schedules and routines. This year we've implemented a new blocked schedule at the Depot, but there's more we could do with routines within the blocks themselves. Interestingly, Steel also mentions reducing choice as a means of helping those with high impulsivity. I think the blocked schedule has also helped here, especially the replacement of "self-directed learning time" with Project Block, but I'm still chewing on this one.

We've also added another research-based strategy to the mix to try to address the impulsivity factor--one that Steel didn't mention. Stephen, one of our teachers, has been teaching mindfulness during morning pick-me-up since the beginning of the year. They've gone over several techniques, from focusing on the breath to mindful eating, and they had a great time identifying thoughts and feeling invoked by popular songs the other day. Several students have said they have started to practice meditation on their own. Our hope is that this will help them not only manage stress but also increase focus.

Delay: Our new progress tracking system is designed to give students continuous, rapid feedback about their progress, and the timed chip blocks have provided small chunked goals for the students, but I think we can help students a lot more with handling delays. My goal for the second semester is to explicitly teach the students two methods of time/project management, and then reward them for each box checked off their to-do lists. (Hat tip to Elizabeth Brott Beese, a Ph.D. student from Purdue who spent some time studying our program, for pointing me in this direction.)

That is how we're using science to help our students. That's our goal, anyway, and so far it seems to be working. Engagement is up, attendance is up, and even task completion seems to be up. I was so excited to find Steel's article last year. It has provided a framework--a science-based guide for improving our program. So often in education, we bounce from one model to another, often without much confidence that any of it will work. But there's no need for that. There is a research base in psychology and education that we can use and build on. We're not blind, we don't stumble in the dark, and we don't have to reinvent the wheel. We can't afford to. Time is precious for every one of our students.

Resistance training: Big changes at the Depot

"I do not like Project Block. Nobody likes it. Everybody hates it."

That was what one student said as he came in and plopped down in his seat for "Project Block" this week.

It's just one of the big changes we've made this year at E. O. Smith's Depot Campus. For an hour and half, three times a week, we get all the students together in the Big Room, with Ellen and our new UCONN interns, Rose and Nick, and we work on projects together. It's meant to be a scaffold--to help them learn how to plan and carry out their own projects.

As I explained to my disgruntled student, even though our school was built on an independent learning model, there was too little of that going on--our students simply lacked the skills.

And they have to work hard during this block. We put a big timer on the screen, and for ten minutes they have to be 100% focussed on their work--no phones, Youtube, or talking. We take a short break, then repeat. The goal is to break the process down into short-term goals and build their ability to focus. A successful ten minute run means a poker chip, and poker chips add up to credits and rewards.

Last Wednesday, they worked through five 10-minute cycles like that, and they cranked through their biomes powerpoints, which are the first project in our climate change theme.

Each project will focus on a part of the project process, and we'll gradually release responsibility to them until they are able to work independently for an hour and a half, three days a week, on their own projects.

It's just one of the big changes we've made as we continue to work to build the Depot into a place known for hard work and innovation--a place where students can stand out through real world experience and really cool independent projects.


Of course, I expect a little resistance along the way, but that's OK. It's not supposed to be easy. It's supposed to make us stronger.

That goes for me and them.

How we beat the post-lunch summer program slump... this time

How's this for summer school? Start the day with breakfast and a mini-lesson about plants. Head outside to tend your thriving gardens, measure plants for your experiments, fertilize, water, weed, whatever needs to be done. At 11:00, head back in, make a fresh lunch together, and eat.

Sounds nice, doesn't it? Until you realize that the last two hours of the day are inside, working on online  Aleks math or Moodle biology.

It's tough to stay focused on stuff like that, and that's been our biggest challenge with the program this summer.

We had two choices at this point: Accept the current low level of afternoon engagement as something we can't change or see it as an obstacle that we can overcome. So here's what we tried this week:

"OK, guys, we're gonna make a game of this. I'm going to time you for ten minutes. Stay focused on your work, and you get a white poker chip. We'll take a quick break and restart the timer. Plus, you get a chip for every topic you finish on Aleks.com. Get 48 chips over the next four weeks, and you get full credit for this portion of the summer program... plus a bonus field trip."

They got through 5 full cycles of focused work and an average of twenty-something topics on Aleks! At one point, I placed a chip in front of a student, and he exclaimed, "Yes!"

I just finished my second run through Ryan Holiday's book, The Obstacle Is the Way, and this is his basic message: See obstacles as opportunities for growth, take action when you can, and persevere.

Who knows if this will continue to work for us, but if nothing else, this obstacle became an opportunity. For me, it was an opportunity to try out some gamification. For them, it was an opportunity for some small wins.

What if school was like a sport?

What if school was like an athletic team practice?

I was in a Twitter chat yesterday morning on the topic of school culture, and one teacher said a positive school culture "feels like home, looks like an athletic team practice."

What a beautiful and powerful image! What if kids came in all fired up (and maybe nervous), asking what the workout was going to be? What if school was like CrossFit for the mind? What would that look like?

To begin with, it would be highly structured. As I've written before, I've gone through a paradigm shift since I've been at the Depot. I used to think the less structure, the better. I imagined an organic, self-organizing, project-based learning environment in which students would be naturally motivated to learn. I found out the independent learning process needs to be scaffolded. At the Depot, we give the students tremendous freedom and hope they'll engage in complex projects on their own, but they often don't, and I think it's because they lack skills and confidence. They need more structure at the beginning. Then you remove the scaffolding as they progress until they are ready for full-blown independent learning. (Click here for a rough sketch of what that might look like.)

That structure would include plenty of explicit instruction, drill, and practice in basic skills with tons of feedback. Students need to master basic skills--math, reading, communication, planning, time management, self-control, motivation, and a sense of self-confidence before they will be able to design and tackle complex projects on their own.

Complex tasks are, after all, made of of simple parts put together. You may be able to teach them in context, but there's a reason basketball practice is not all made up of scrimmages.


As a thought experiment, I tried to imagine applying a project-based learning approach to a skill like Olympic lifting: "OK guys, in order to get stronger and be able to lift more weight, I'm just going to have you guys build a barn!" Nope. Won't work. Olympic lifting is a set of very complex movements and skills. Check out this video of just one movement--the snatch. It's even harder than it looks, and barn raising won't teach you that. On the other hand, how about training in all of the Olympic lifting movements and then going to the barn raising. Now we're talking. You may need to be told what to lift, but I'll bet you won't have any trouble lifting it. In other words, extract the skills, drill, and then reinsert them into the context, and do it all deliberately and intentionally.

Students working on their planking challenge.

Finally, in a world where school is a sport, there would be lots of goal setting and tracking, and tons of motivation, engagement, energy and celebration of small wins, big achievements and effort. Some of our students have been working on fitness goals that they set a couple of months ago. One group is working towards a 3:30 plank. They meet every day to increase by 10 seconds. Imagine if students approached all of their learning the same way?

I used to imagine that just by doing relevant and interesting projects the kids would learn. Now I see that is wishful thinking. Instead, let's turn the equation around--give them a strong set of essential skills first--and then they'll be ready for the heavy lifting of complex and creative tasks. They'll have the skills and they'll be ready for the game... and life.

This post is for a student

The guinea pig was missing, and they had to solve the crime.

The bloody guinea pig footprints were the most obvious evidence, but they they would have to analyze three more challenging clues: fingerprints, hair left at the scene, and blood spatter patterns.

It was all set up by one of our seniors. She's exactly the sort of student who thrives in this kind of school: independent, self-motivated, and focused on a passionate interest. In her case, that interest is forensic science.

The students, as you will see, loved it, but this senior has such high standards for herself that she could only see what went wrong.

This post is for her and all of my students who've had the wind in their faces for so long they have trouble seeing their successes and strengths.

This is for her, because the students did it. They took notes as she gave them instructions. They looked under microscopes at hair they collected from the scene and compared it to hair from suspects. They experimented with the fake blood, dropping it from different heights until it matched the drops on the floor of the bathroom. They collected fingerprints from suspects and compared the whorls and loops to those found on the bathroom sink.

With the microscopes and hair, they narrowed it down to me and one student. They came to my office with a warrant and dragged me into the Community Room to interrogate me. They asked me about the suspicious bandage on my chin--the one that matched the scenario they had come up with. They asked me about the fingerprints, and finally, they asked me about the search history that had been pulled from my computer which included searches for guinea pig recipes (they are surprisingly common, by the way).

To sum it up, they had fun, even those who said they didn't, and they did a bunch of things they'd never done before, hopefully learning some critical thinking along they way.

But it didn't get off to a good start. The fingerprint dusting technique didn't work, and this student leader was ready to give up. True, she could have been better prepared. For example, she definitely should have tried the fingerprinting technique out before hand. But we've all been there, under-prepared, and every failure is a lesson learned. Next time, I told her, she'll be prepared.

And of course, as every teacher and leader knows,  "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy." No matter how much we plan, we need to be ready for the unpredictable interactions of our plan with human beings and the rest of reality. Our plan is not always at fault--it's just the nature of the universe to throw us curve balls, keep us on our toes and keep us strong.

"Failure," as a Honda engineer says in my all-time favorite video, "is the by-product of pushing the envelope." That's one reason I love CrossFit--it makes me push up against that envelope at least 3 or 4 times per week. I fail at something every time I work out. Every WOD kicks my butt and humbles me. Every Olympic lifting movement I do is a messy mixture of correct and incorrect parts, mostly incorrect.

School and work are fitness for the mind. Push the envelope, and aim high enough that you can expect failure, because failure is fuel. It gives us information to improve, and if we persevere, that's why we'll succeed, as Michael Jordan so powerfully put it. SpaceX persevered through four catastrophic failures of their Falcon rocket's ocean landings, but on their fifth try, just yesterday, they hit it: success.

As Mazer Rackham said in Ender's Game, "No one but the enemy will ever teach you how to destroy and conquer. Only the enemy shows you where you are weak."

In one sense, failure is our enemy, but in another, our friend. It shows us where we can improve, so that we can.

So this is my message to you, my forensic-scientist-to-be senior, and all of my students who have met with frustration so often that they can't see their success--whose lives have been just one huge obstacle after another:

1. Be open to seeing your successes, like the fun our students had with your workshop, even if they're mixed with failure, because you really are capable and successful, and

2. Embrace failure, because it is just a by-product of growth. It doesn't mean you're a failure. It means just the opposite: It means you are improving.

3. Don't expect perfection. It's a myth. Expect improvement. Demand constant improvement from yourself. You deserve it, and you are capable of it.

4. And you are improving. You're already awesome, you've already passed through so much fire, and you're only getting better. I can see it.

Motivation required... or provided?

"As you can see, I have a lot of goals."

"As you can see, I have a lot of goals."

That's how she introduced the final slide in her exhibition presentation.

She's an intern at a law office, where she does clerical work and regularly communicates one-on-one with the attorney's there.

Now she laid out her goals for the rest of her junior year: take the SAT, finish two math courses on Khan Academy, her internship project, and plan our trip to New York City.

It's exciting to see our students sharing the real-world learning they're doing at their internships, their growing independence as learners, and their plans for the future. We're in the thick of second trimester exhibitions, and I get to see every one--music production projects, work at a veterinary clinic and hospital, and more.

But they're not all like that. For every student like these, we have one that struggles to hold an internship or to complete their academic work. Though we provide all of the autonomy, mastery, and purpose they could dream of, they still struggle with motivation.

This is why we've implemented new tiered supports to try to boost the "Expectancy" factor in Steel's motivation equation:

And yet we're finding it's sometimes not enough. There are some who still struggle with the motivation they need to succeed at the Depot.

The Big Picture model requires students to work at internships, complete independent projects, and learn most of their math and science on their own, all while giving them only 60% as much direct instructional time as traditional students. This requires lots of intrinsic motivation. If we do all we can and they're still stagnant, then we need to make some tough decisions.

A Director of Special Services once told me, "One of the hardest lessons for an administrator to learn is that we can't help everyone," and that's become clear to me lately. Many who struggle at traditional school thrive in our model, but there are others who are not making progress, though we've ramped up support as much as we can. Hopefully, someday we'll be able to serve those students, because I think the autonomy, opportunity for mastery, and purpose we provide has the potential to bring out the best in every student. For now, the best support I can offer is to help them find a place that can give them what they need, like a doctor referring her patient to a specialist.

There was a lot of encouraging stuff going on this week. Not only did I get to sit in on some really awesome exhibitions, there were also 14 students who signed up for our Fitness Challenge, setting fitness and health goals they'll try to meet over the next three months! But in the midst of that, there were some tough decisions, some tough conversations, and plenty of wrestling with this issue of our purpose and limitations as a school.

In morning announcements on Friday, I started with a slide that said, "Welcome to the Depot! Motivation required." That little statement has been bothering me since then--do we help students find motivation, or do we require it?

My conclusion is, both. We scaffold the process until they develop sufficient intrinsic motivation to take full advantage of our model. That's the ideal we're working towards, but until then, there will be some we can't help.

It's a tough way to end a post, but it's not the end of the story, either for them or us. They'll hopefully move on to something that works better for them, and we'll move on toward the goal of helping more students "have lots of goals."

How a new school changed my views on motivation

Depot students work on their balsa airplane experiment.

I've always been a big fan of alternative education, innovative ways to teach and new kinds of schools. I've always thought that the way we run school is the biggest problem we have in education: traditional school crushes students natural desire to learn. But I think I'm going through a paradigm shift, again, and my views on education and motivation are changing.

Since reading Daniel Pink's classic, Drive, I've been convinced that if we just give kids more autonomy, mastery and purpose (A.M.P.), they'll automatically flourish. I tested out some of these principles in my mastery-based biology class (with lots of encouraging results), and here at the Depot I've seen more evidence of the power of A.M.P.. We have students who were struggling in the traditional school, but are now thriving in our model. They have successful internships at vet clinics, law offices, schools, computer repair shops, photography studios, restaurants, and hospitals. They're writing novels, building bridges, planning field trips, growing mushrooms, studying languages and math online, building arcade stations, cooking delicious weekly breakfasts and soups for the school, and more.

But my engagement numbers in biology were not quite as high as I had hoped, and at the Depot, though there are many students thriving, there are just as many struggling. Nearly half our students struggle with attendance or academics. Nearly half have major social/emotional issues that leave them unable to take advantage of the autonomy our model provides.


It seems there's more to motivation than autonomy, mastery, and purpose. There's more to helping students succeed than increasing autonomy and real world learning.

I found this cool article by Piers Steel, in which he gives evidence for an alternative model of motivation (called TMT), which looks like this:

"Utility" is motivation. In this equation, "E" is expectancy, which includes whether you think you can do the task. "V" is how much you value the task. The funny looking "T" thing is the uppercase Greek letter, gamma, and it represents impulsivity and distractibility. Finally, "D" is the delay--how long you have to complete the task. Applying this formula, the way to motivate kids is to increase their confidence and competence, make it meaningful, decrease their impulsivity, and make the deadlines shorter.

I'm not sure how A.M.P. fits into this model (maybe it all gets lumped into "V"),  but in any case, I've had this gnawing feeling all year that my mental model--my paradigm--was missing something. Now I see that it's missing "E" and gamma. Many of my students either lack the skills they need, believe they lack them, or have other factors in their lives that make them unable to do the tasks. They have burdens, obstacles, and deficiencies that lower E or increase gamma.

This is why my paradigm is shifting: even in an innovative school where they have all the autonomy and real world connections they could dream of, many still struggle to find the motivation they need to succeed.

And this means we need to continue to ramp up supports. We've got the V thing taken care of with A.M.P., now let's work on E. We've set up a school that allows for highly valuable learning tasks, now let's get the kids to the place where they can take advantage of that.

The problem with modern schooling is not just a lack of autonomy and meaningful work, it's also a problem of a lack of supports for students who need it.

Mushrooms, microscopes, and building a structure that works for kids

One of our guiding principles at The Depot is "learning through interests," and one of our seniors exemplifies this. Last year, his internship mentor helped him learn to grow edible mushrooms. This year, this senior decided he'd like to teach other students to do the same.

He isn't getting any special credit for it. He won't receive a grade. He's just doing it.

With his fish tank full of fungi on the table, his Google Slides presentation, and some cool time lapse videos from YouTube, he had the whole crowd engaged as he explained the need for the right growing environment. Even some who rarely speak out were asking questions, and when he passed around the sign up sheet for the workshops he's going to offer, twelve students signed up. At least one was clearly excited about it. Who knows what the long term impact of this senior's leadership will be?

We see lots of instances of interest-driven learning, like the student who spontaneously set up one of the microscopes on Thursday and just started putting tiny pieces of whatever he could find under it--spit, blood, fingernail, chips, cheek cells.

The new "kitchen crew" we started this year has been a huge source of learning for these kids as they cook breakfast every Friday for the whole school, and many of our students are thriving in awesome internships, from law firms and vet clinics to computer and automobile repair shops.

But not all of our students are ready for self-directed learning. Even with freedom and ample opportunity to discover and pursue interests, many students have trouble with motivation and struggle to progress.

So we're extending our new tiered support system to include a "Tier 2 internship," which is a combination of Depot-based projects (cooking, designing bulletin boards, cleaning, etc.), volunteering, and explicit instruction in career skills and life skills from the Competency Rubric. Let's establish some small wins, build some confidence through basic competence.

I'm convinced that if we build the right structure--the right environment, these students will naturally thrive. To me, this is a big part of leadership--finding those rules, that structure that will allow that natural growth.

Like mushrooms (and every other living thing), humans are built to thrive within a certain type of structure. My goal is to find that structure--to find a better fit for human nature when it comes to school. And that's why I love being at the Depot--because I think we're on the right track.

Brights spots of engagement

That's one of our students on the slackine. It was one of our Friday Fitness options this week. It's much harder than it looks, but it's an addictive blast. And he was fully engaged. How can we get students to be this engaged in learning?

For this week's "pick-me-up" activity on Friday morning, I gave the students the data we've been collecting on engagement. Ellen, our instructional assistant, has been walking around at random times each day recording how many students are on-task. As I told the kids Friday morning, "on-task" is not the same as engagement, and certainly not the same as flow, but it'll have to do for now.

So I handed out the data--just a list dates, times, and percentages, telling them that I wanted them to be a part of this whole "empowerment evaluation" process I'm trying to implement here. I told them I wanted them to have a say in improving their school.

I talked about doing science on ourselves. Research. Making hypotheses and testing them against the data--looking for patterns.

And then what happened?


Well, there was at least one comment along the lines of "Man, we suck!"

There was also some blank staring at the sheet.

But there was also plenty of discussion, and plenty of observations being thrown around.

I didn't give them this graph--just the data.

A few were surprised that Monday was so high. There was at least one hypothesis about why that was the case.

Many noticed that Tuesday and Thursday were very low. But this didn't surprise anyone, since these are the internship days, when fewer students are here, and those who are here are waiting to go to internship or returning from internship.

So I asked them the central question, "Would you like to see these numbers increase?" After a few heartfelt answers of "Yes!" I reminded them that if you want to see something change, you have to change something. You can't keep doing everything the same and expect results to change (seems like I've heard that somewhere before...).


As I walked around checking on their work, there were several students jotting things down on the data sheet, but one student in particular stood out. His sheet was covered in calculations. He was a picture of engagement. In fact, I'm pretty sure he was in flow.

I asked what he was finding, and he told me that he'd figured out that Wednesday's had the highest engagement, followed by Mondays and then Fridays. He'd done this by summing up all of the percentages for each day.

Why didn't he use the average? Because he was starting from where he was. I'm not sure he knew what an average was, or that it could apply here. Instead, he was working with what he knew to solve a new and meaningful problem.

Later, when he was back in his classroom, still working on the problem, I saw that he had a table constructed that included the numbers of data points for each day of the week. He had figured out that the different numbers of measurements on each day were important. When I asked him about it the problem, he replied, "Yeah, I know. I'm gonna even that out later."

Awesome. Awesome example of problem solving. Awesome example of motivation. Autonomy, mastery, and purpose in action.

He didn't have to do it (Autonomy).

He was in his flow channel (Mastery).

He was working on a real problem--to figure out what was happening with student engagement at his school (Purpose).

"One of the techniques for solving problems is called Bright Spots Analysis," I had told the students earlier that morning. "You look at the best days, and ask yourself why they are the best, and you try to replicate that."

This engaged student on Friday was a bright spot. Working with that data, doing some serious quantitative reasoning, he was as engaged as he was on that slackline. He was as engaged as I've ever seen him--as engaged as I've ever seen any student, for that matter.

Now if we can just replicate that.

Why study when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?

When we have to resort to external motivators, that means there's something wrong. Often, it means something we're doing is not fitting with human nature. That's why we have to force it.


And I have to wonder how much of our modern system of education and even civilization really is not a good fit for humanity at all.


Christopher Ryan tells the story of three natives of Tierra del Fuego, who were brought to England by Captain Fitzroy of the HMS Beagle to learn the ways civilization, in hopes they would serve as missionaries to their own people.

But when they were returned to their homeland, they just reverted to their old way of life--a primitive, hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

The good Captain offered to bring one of them back to England, but the man declined, saying he hadn't "the least wish to return to England," because he was "happy and contented" with "plenty fruits," "plenty fish," and "plenty birdies."

His response was similar to that of the Kalahari bushman who was asked why his tribe hadn't switched from their hunter-gatherer lifestyle to agriculture. He replied, "Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?"

This may apply to school in at least two ways.

First, who can blame young people who are enjoying their social lives, sports, hobbies, and freedom from responsibility, and whose parents are taking care of all their needs, if they choose not to work their butts off in school? Why bust their tails when there are so many mongongo nuts around and they haven't yet learned the "skill" of worrying about the future like we adults have?

Or maybe they feel a need to improve their lives, but their experience has told them that the educational system doesn't work for them. I imagine it doesn't take many suspensions or Fs on your report card to get that message loud and clear. No wonder these students "revert" to lifestyles they feel work better for them.




And I wonder how many young people, when presented with the modern education-career-retirement pipeline are simply not interested. And I wonder if that's a bad thing. After all, what's the point of all that education and career if it doesn't bring fulfilment, if it doesn't make us "happy and contented"?

Darwin and Captain Fitzroy didn't take the hint.  They were saddened by the inability of these "savages" to see the wisdom of the "civilized" way of life. But what if they were missing the point? What if they were the ones not seeing?

I wonder if we too easily assume that our modern systems are best without looking for how well they actually fit humans.

Why the success of everyone is up to all of us

The message of Malcolm Gladwell's provocative book, Outliers is either kind of discouraging or really exciting, depending on how you look at it.

According to Gladwell, it takes four things to be successful:

1) Practice. You need 10,000 hours of what has come to be called "deliberate practice" to become a world class expert. That's 8 hours a day, 7 days a week for 3.4 years.

2) In order to get that, you need plenty of lucky breaks, like Bill Joy, who basically just fell into lucky opportunities to get in tons of computer hours--at a time when they were hard to get, and at a time that positioned him precisely on the ground floor of an industry about to explode.

3) And you need the right upbringing--one that teaches you it's OK to ask for and, if necessary, fight for opportunities. You can't be like Chris Langan, the genius who's defeatist attitude he learned as an at-risk youth cost him a college education--twice.

4) This unhelpful attitude of powerlessness toward authority may also be passed on by your culture, so you need the right cultural heritage. And it helps to be from a culture that also instils a strong work ethic, like that of southern China, where the simplicity of the language and the lessons of rice farming combine to make people into mathematical powerhouses.

This can feel a bit discouraging if you're not someone who meets these criteria, like me, but here's why we shouldn't despair.

1) Subsequent studies have suggested that "deliberate practice" actually accounts for only one third of whatever it is that determines whether or not someone will become an expert. (Tim Ferriss also takes issue with the 10,000 hour rule. He's done it again and again--in months instead of years. It's all about how you learn, rather than how long.)

2) It's hard to argue with Gladwell about the importance of upbringing and culture. But it just means those of us without the best backgrounds will have to work harder, and that's no surprise to any of us. The good news is, change is possible, as the success of the KIPP schools demonstrates.

3) Gladwell's ideas echo Carol Dweck's concept of the growth mindset--the belief that talent and intelligence are not fixed, but flexible and responsive to effort and attitude. Gladwell says in a footnote that IQ is 50% genetic. If that's true, that gives us a lot of room for improvement by effort and strategy.

4)  There's been some controversy over the idea that success is determined by grit or perseverance. Critics seem to think this means blaming disadvantaged people for failure of attitude. But Gladwell's book shows us the balance--even "character" can be inherited, and changed.

5) More than anything, the central message of Galdwell's book, to me, was that, because success depends on these factors, there are things we can do--as parents, teachers, friends, as a society, to help everyone be successful. It's within reach.

If we can dump this outdated mindset that we live in some sort of global meritocracy where people automatically get what they "deserve" and realize that we are all subject to all of these external and internal factors--that some have great advantages, and others, great disadvantages, and that we can do something about that, "The world could be so much richer than the world we have settled for."