Pedagogy – Page 2 – Montessori Muddle

Drawing Faces: An Exercise in Heredity

A.C.'s demonstration of how to draw a face. — A.C.’s demonstration of how to draw a face.

My biology students are doing an exercise in genetics and heredity that requires them to combine the genes of two parents to see what their offspring might look like. They do the procedure twice — to create two kids — so they can see how the same parents can produce children who look similar but have distinct differences. To actually see what the kids look like, the students have to draw the faces of their “children”.

“I’m not going to claim that child as my own!”

I was walking through the class when I heard that. Apparently one student, who’d had a bit of art training, was paired with another student who had not.

Fortunately, I was able to convince the more practiced artist to give the rest of the class a lesson on how to draw faces. She did an awesome job; first drawing a female face and then adapting it a bit to make it look more male.

If nothing else, I tried to make sure that the other students registered the idea that proportion is important in drawing biological specimens — like faces — from real life. Just getting the proportions right made a huge difference in the quality of their drawings. The forehead region should be the largest (from the top of the head to the eyebrows), then the area between the eyebrows and the bottom of the nose, then the nose to lips, and then, finally, the region from lips to chin should be shortest. You can see the proportion lines in the picture above.

The adaptation stage, where she made the facial features more masculine, was also quite useful. The students had to think about what were typical male features and if there were a genetic basis to things like square chins.

Although all of the other students’ drawings improved markedly, including her simulated spouse’s, I don’t think my art-teaching student was absolutely happy with the end results after the one lesson. She ended up handing in two drawings of her own even though everyone else (including her partner) did one each.

However, having all the students on the same page, working with the same basic drawing methods, helped improve the heredity exercise because it reduced a lot of the variability in the pictures that resulted from different drawing styles and skill levels.

I also think that taking these interludes for art lessons are quite useful in a science class, since it emphasizes the importance of accurate observation, shapes student’s abilities to represent what they see in diagrams, and demonstrates that they can — and should — be applying the skills they learn in other classes to their sciences.

Discovering Progressive Education

Joshua Davis has a fascinating article on a math teacher who borough collaborative, self-motivated learning to students at a school in a drug-war-torn Mexican city. The results were excellent.

Davis also cites a study by Gopnik and others that showed that:

kids given no instruction were much more likely to come up with novel solutions to a problem.

↬ Ms. Douglass.

Turning off the Lights: How we Behave in the Darkness

Darkness can conceal identity and encourage moral transgressions.

— Zhong et al., 2010: Good Lamps Are the Best Police: Darkness Increases Dishonesty and Self-Interested Behavior in Psychological Science.

My students asked me today if we could turn off the lights during biology class and just use the natural light from outside. I’m usually not opposed, but it was overcast, so it would have been a little dark.

I put it to a vote and we had just one or two students who were against it. My policy in these cases, where we’re changing the working environment, is to respect the wishes of the minority unless there’s a compelling argument about why we should change things.

One student proposed a compelling argument. At least he proposed to try to find a compelling argument.

“If I can find a study that says lower light is better for learning can we do it?” he asked, with his hands hovering over his iPad.

“Sure,” I replied, “But not today. You can do it on your own time.”

We’ll see what he comes up with tomorrow. I, however, ran into this article that describes a study (Zhong et al., 2010) that found that, “participants in a dimly-lit room cheated more often than those in a lighter one,” (Konnikova, 2013).

While both groups performed equally well on a set of math problems, students in the darker room self-reported that they correctly solved, on average, four more problems than the other group—earning $1.85 more as a result, since they were being paid for each correct answer. The authors suggested that the darkness created an “illusory anonymity”: even though you aren’t actually more anonymous in the dark than in the light, you feel as though you are, making you more likely to engage in behaviors you otherwise wouldn’t.

–Konnikova, 2013: Inside the Cheater’s Mind in The New Yorker.

Konnikova’s New Yorker article is worth the read, because it summarizes other factors that encourage cheating as well as things to prevent it. Things that encourage cheating:

a messy environment,
if your peers all do it,
when the people you’re stealing from seem to have a lot,
when you’re thinking that your behavior is set in your genes and your environemnt (and you have less free will),
when you’re in (or even think you’re in) a position of power,
when you have achievement goals (think test scores), as opposed to mastery goals,
when you’re tired, or sleep-deprived.

The things that discourage cheating are the things the encourage some self-reflection, like:

the feeling of being watched (even just the presence of mirrors or pictures of eyes,
writing down an honor code,
being asked to think about your previous immoral behavior.
having a strong moral compass (some people are just much less likely to cheat than others.

And finally, it’s important to note that we will tend to rationalize our cheating, so we’re more likely to do it later.

So, I think it’ll take a lot of convincing to get me to turn off the lights, except perhaps on very sunny days.

Key Qualities of Teammates: Focused, Hardworking and Fun too

Today we reconstituted our small groups for science. One student was late getting their name into the bowl so did not get randomly assigned to a group, so I deviated a little from our standard procedure and asked him which group he thought would be the best for him. Not which group he most wanted to be in, but which group he could be most effective — and learn the most — in. But, as a means of following up on all of our discussion at Heifer about what makes a community, before I gave him the chance to answer I asked the entire class to identify what qualities they thought they brought to their groups, and then, separately, I asked them what qualities the would like their teammates to have.

Qualities students would like to see in other people in their working groups. — Figure 1. Qualities students would like to see in other people in their science working groups.

I got a number of interesting answers to the question about what they thought their qualities were. I know how hard it is to self-assess sometimes so I required that they could only put positive qualities, and allowed them to ask their peers for an external perspective.

My favorite response was from one girl who asked her friend sitting next to her what her positive qualities were, and the friend responded, “bossiness”. She thought about that for a second, then nodded and said, “that sounds about right.” When I asked them both why they thought “bossiness” was a positive quality they explained that the one girl was good at taking charge when necessary, and telling everyone what to do. I couldn’t argue with that description, because I’d observed it in their previous group work. The key part though was the “when necessary”, because while she does take charge, she’s very good at managing her group: giving everyone the opportunity for input while still being decisive. Instead of bossiness, I’d probably have used the term “leadership”.

After they had the time to compile their list of qualities they wanted to see in teammates, we compiled a list on the whiteboard (see Figure 1). Perhaps it’s just that they know what I want to hear, but it was quite nice to see that the top two characteristics were:

focused, and
hardworking.

“Smart” and “fun” were the next most popular on the list, but after some discussion I/we decided to drop the “smart” since their criteria for smart was just having a basic level of intellectual competence, and it was somewhat less important than the other major qualities listed.

Of the remaining three major qualities that they’d like to see in teammates — focused, hardworking, and fun — I asked them each to pick the one they were going to focus on developing over the next month of group work. I asked a couple of the students who chose “fun” to reconsider since it was already one of their current areas of strength.

I then let them pick a second quality to work on from the full list, and had them write their two chosen qualities down somewhere prominent, because we’ll be checking in with them regularly over the course of the next month to see what specific things they’re doing to work on them, and how their efforts are going.

Then I let the student choose his group.

The discussion took the entire class period, and we did not get much “science” done, but if it can get students to be a bit more focused on their work it would be well worth the time.

Teaching with the Hands

Doug Stowe is an artisan who specializes in making small boxes. He also teaches woodworking and records his thoughts on the melding of education and craftsmanship on his wonderfully reflective blog, Wisdom of the Hands. For example:

In his introductory remarks published in the Teacher’s Hand-Book of Educational Sloyd, Salomon notes the difference between a trained artisan and a teacher. While the trained artisan is focused by necessity on the qualities inherent in the finished product, the teacher must be concerned with the qualities developed within the child. An artisan might step in to make sure the child gets the work right, while the teacher might step back to see that the child learns. In other words, the predisposition of the artisan vs. teacher may be leading in completely different directions.

— Doug Stowe: beyond craftsmanship on Wisdom of the Hands (blog).

I really like the core message here. I’m an advocate for apprenticeship learning: how better to learn to think and act like an experts. But the key lesson for the expert is that students need to be given the opportunity to experiment, and even to make mistakes, in order to learn.

After my own, rough, experiments with making a slide holder, I’d love to take a lesson from someone who knows what they’re doing.

P.S. Hat tip to Karin Niehoff of the Crescent Montessori School for the connection.

Overjustification Effect: Rewards Inhibit Intrinsic Motivation

Kids become less intrinsically motivated to do something when they expect a reward — grades, gold stars, special privileges — for doing them. In fact, when you take away the reward they’ll stop doing things they were previously interested in doing on their own. It’s called the overjustification effect (Lepper et al., 1973; summary here).

There’s been a lot of research demonstrating the effect. An overview of the research in 1995 (Tang and Hall, 1995) found that the effect extends across all age groups.

The primary theory that explains the effect is called Cognitive Evaluation Theory, and is very well summarized here. This theory suggests, however, that extrinsic motivation may not be bad in all situations, because praise and rewards can also server as a useful indicator to a student of their competence.

Grades Nullify the Benefits of Useful Feedback

Grades detract from learning so much that if you give students comments and grades, they tend to ignore the comments and focus on the grades. If you give them comments alone, they’ll actually learn from the comments.

When giving students feedback on both oral and written work, it is the nature, rather than the amount, of commentary that is critical. Research experiments have established that, while student learning can be advanced by feedback through comments, the giving of numerical scores orgrades has a negative effect, in that students ignore comments when marks are also given.

— Black et al., 2004. Working Inside the Black Box: Assessment for Learning in the Classroom in Phi Delta Kappan, Vol. 86, No. 1, September 2004, pp. 9-21.

Game Theory

UCLA professor Peter Nonacs teaches behavioral theory by letting students “cheat” in his “insanely hard” exams by letting them use whatever resources they want, including the web and working together. His objective is to have his students learn game theory by actually practicing it:

Much of evolution and natural selection can be summarized in three short words: “Life is games.” In any game, the object is to win—be that defined as leaving the most genes in the next generation, getting the best grade on a midterm, or successfully inculcating critical thinking into your students. An entire field of study, Game Theory, is devoted to mathematically describing the games that nature plays. Games can determine why ant colonies do what they do, how viruses evolve to exploit hosts, or how human societies organize and function.

— Nonacs (2013): Why I Let My Students Cheat On Their Game Theory Exam on PopSci.com.

My Environmental Science students are facing a similar problem with their final project. It’s a group project — their objective is to revamp the recycling system at school to make it work better — and I’ve been trying to get out of their way as much as possible. Not only do they have to figure out how to solve an environmental problem (they have an outline of how to do so in their text, but they have to figure out how to put it into practice), but they also have to figure out how to work together as a group to get the project done and write up a final report. The latter problem tends to be the harder, but in having to figure out how to lead, follow, and work as a team, it’s probably the more important lesson in the long term.