Melting Permafrost and a Warming Climate: Another not-so-Positive Feedback

There’s a lot of organic matter frozen into the arctic permafrost. As the arctic has been warming much faster than the rest of the planet, the permafrost soils are thawing out quite quickly. As they unfreeze, they set up a positive-feedback loop. The warming organic matter starts to decay releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, exacerbating the warming.

To generate the estimates, scientists studied how permafrost-affected soils, known as Gelisols, thaw under various climate scenarios. They found that all Gelisols are not alike: some Gelisols have soil materials that are very peaty, with lots of decaying organic matter that burns easily – these will impart newly thawed nitrogen into the ecosystem and atmosphere. Other Gelisols have materials that are very nutrient rich – these will impart a lot of nitrogen into the ecosystem. All Gelisols will contribute carbon dioxide and likely some methane into the atmosphere as a result of decomposition once the permafrost thaws – and these gases will contribute to warming. What was frozen for thousands of years will enter our ecosystems and atmosphere as a new contributor.

— Harden and Lausten (2012): Not-So-Permanent Permafrost via USGS Newsroom.

What Makes for an Effective School?

Dobbie and Fryer (2011) investigate the key things that make for an effective school. Effectiveness is based on test scores, which is a significant caveat, but most of their results seem reasonable.

Frequent feedback for teachers about their teaching from classroom visits,
Longer teacher hours, (10+ hours per week)

Middle school teachers at better schools worked over 10 hours a week more than lower performing schools.
Interestingly, salary had no discernible effect. It seems that the teachers did not even get paid more for putting in the extra hours. The willingness to put in these extra hours without extra pay implies a different philosophy and culture among the teachers of the “more effective” schools.

Data driven instruction – more effective schools “adjust tutoring groups, assign remediation, modify instruction, or create individualized student goals,” based on frequent feedback from interim assessments.
Feedback to parents – better schools have more frequent communication with students’ parents
High-dosage tutoring – The better performing schools were found to be more likely to offer tutoring where, “the typical group is six or fewer students and those groups meet four or more times per week”,
Increased instructional time – about 8% more hours per year
A relentless focus on academic achievement

This was assessed with a survey of principals. Those who put, “a relentless focus on academic goals and having students meet them” and “very high expectations for student behavior and discipline” as her top two priorities (in either order) scored higher on this assessment of the rigor of school culture.
I have serious reservations about this result. If the key focus of the school is on doing well on tests (as their “academic goals”) they should do better on the tests. This is certainly a good way to score better on standardized tests, but it has serious, negative implications when it comes to creating intrinsically motivated students.

These results come from comparing charter schools in New York City.

Sandra Cunningham has a rather cursory summary in The Atlantic, but her post’s comments section has some very interesting perspectives.

Teaching Your Kids how to Argue

All that arguing with your teenager is, basically, teaching them how to argue. You yell, they learn to yell. You listen, and make your rational arguments respectfully, and they learn to do the same — both with you and with others; so much so that it inoculates against peer-pressure.

Patti Neighmond has a nice story about the benefits of parent-teenager arguments, on NPR’s All Things Considered. One particularly interesting is that adolescents who learn to argue well are much less susceptible to peer-pressure.

Learning to Learn from Your Mistakes

When students are able to recognize mistakes and analyze them, they will learn faster and deeper. Jonah Lehrer summarizes a new study that shows that people learn faster when they spend the effort to learn from their mistakes.

When people notice that they’ve made an error, they have an instinctive negative reaction. Then we have the choice to either ignore the error or spend some time considering it – and learning from it. Guess who learn faster?

This research is based on Carol Dweck’s work on mindset, which shows that it’s better to praise effort rather than intelligence. A willingness to work hard (grit) is a much better attitude for learners. It turns failures into learning experiences, while focusing on intelligence actually discourages people from trying things at which they might fail.

… people learn how to get it right by getting it wrong again and again. Education isn’t magic. Education is the wisdom wrung from failure.

— Lehrer (2011): Why Do Some People Learn Faster? in Wired.

The Ingredients of “Character”

Some key performance-character strengths:

zest, grit, self-control, social intelligence, gratitude, optimism and curiosity.

— Tough (2011): What if the Secret to Success Is Failure? in The New York Times’ Education Issue

Paul Tough’s thought provoking article is a great overview of some of the recent research on character, and discusses a few attempts to instill character building into school.

Levin [co-founder of the KIPP network of charter schools ] noticed that … the students who persisted in college were not necessarily the ones who had excelled academically at KIPP; they were the ones with exceptional character strengths, like optimism and persistence and social intelligence. They were the ones who were able to recover from a bad grade and resolve to do better next time; to bounce back from a fight with their parents; to resist the urge to go out to the movies and stay home and study instead; to persuade professors to give them extra help after class.

— Tough (2011): What if the Secret to Success Is Failure?

Much of the work on character is based on the universal character characteristics identified in the book Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification (Peterson and Seligman, 2004) and the research of Angela Duckworth (her research page is a good place to find copies of her publications).

Duckworth’s Grit Scale, seems to be a remarkably good predictor of GPA, and perhaps more interestingly, corresponded inversely to the number of hours of television students watched: “gritter” students did better in school and watched less TV.

Among adolescents, the Grit–S [short Grit Scale] longitudinally predicted GPA and, inversely, hours watching television. Among cadets at the United States Military Academy, West Point, the Grit–S predicted retention.

— Duckworth and Quinn (2009): Development and Validation of the Short Grit Scale (Grit–S)

The grit survey would probably be a useful addition to the Personal World curriculum.

One interesting application discussed in the article is at the KIPP middle schools in NYC. There they issue a Character Report Card and integrate discussion of character into all the classes: a language class might talk about how much self control the protagonist in a novel has and how that works out for them.

I’d be extremely reluctant to have to grade my students on twenty four character traits. While it might be a useful rubric to have and discuss and build on students’ positive self-conceptions, I fear that it might also significantly reinforce the negative conceptions as well.

Imbuing a language of character as a subtext of the curriculum seems like a great idea however.

Performance vs. Moral Character

One important critique of much of this work is that it focuses on “performance” character, the character traits that predict high achievement, rather than “moral” character which focuses on the ability to work well with others.

These two perspectives on the same character traits need careful attention. From a performance perspective, social intelligence, can be seen as a way of getting ahead – something that is somewhat manipulative, but from a moral perspective, social intelligence is intrinsically beneficial to the person and the society around them.

And perhaps this is the biggest problem with performance-character. It is extrinsically motivated: do this and you will get this reward. The intrinsic nature of moral-character seems much more in line with a progressive approach to teaching. Certainly, much care should be taken in how we think about and include character building in education.

The Character Education Partnership has a number of lesson plans and best practices for all grade levels, that focus more on moral character.

Giving Students the Opportunity to Fail

Finally, Tough talks about the fact that students need the time and space to explore, try difficult things, and to fail, in order to really build character.

The idea of building grit and building self-control is that you get that through failure, and in most highly academic environments in the United States, no one fails anything.

— Dominic Randolph (2011) in Tough (2011): What if the Secret to Success Is Failure? in The New York Times’ Education Issue

This is tied into the central theme of the movie Race To Nowhere and the book The Price of Privilege, that argue that, for many affluent students, the stress of excessively high academic expectations are having some seriously negative effects.

People with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. – Joan Didion (1961), via Word on the Street (2010)

(hat tip to Ms. D. for the link to the article)