Category: Pedagogy

Poverty and how we speak

Rio de Janeiro slum (right) on hill, contrasted with a more affluent neighbourhood, as viewed from a tram in Santa Teresa; Cristo Redentor is in the left background. (Image by chensiyuan on Wikimedia Commons)

The way we write and the way we speak have an enormous impact on our success in life. Formal language has a sequential, cause-and-effect structure that favors steady continuity which facilitates logical argument. It’s what we try to teach. It is the language of education, office-work and, in our society, the middle class.

Casual language has a very different narrative structure, starting at the emotional high-point, emphasizing relationships and requiring audience participation. It is the language for engaged storytelling. In our society, for the most part, formal language is valued while casual language is not. Casual language is used, most often, by people in poverty.

The separation imposed by these two forms of language defines the “culture of poverty” described by Ruby K. Payne in her book, “Framework for Understanding Poverty“. Payne argues that there are profound cultural differences between the poor and the middle class that tends to propagate poverty from generation to generation.

The poor tend to value interpersonal relationships, emotional responses and short-term interactions while the middle class favors self-sufficiency, logical responses and planning for the future. And these values manifest themselves most obviously in casual versus formal language. Because language is cultural and is passed on with culture, so is poverty. Poverty is self-perpetuating.

[For] students to be successful, we must . . . teach them the rules that will make them successful at school and at work. – Payne (2003)

Payne’s work is popular, over one million books sold and she trains over 40,000 educators a year (Ng and Rury, 2009), but she is not without her strident critics.

Image from Jakarta by Jonathan McIntosh

A recent article in the Journal of Educational Controversy, (Dudley-Marling, 2007) contends that, “Payne’s assertions about the ways poor people live their lives are without foundation, at best misrepresentations of other people’s work, reflecting the basest stereotypes about the poor that have existed for over 100 years.” This article in turn inspired most of another volume’s worth of articles in response. Gunewardena (2009) contends that Payne principles “portend a dangerous form of social engineering.”

Most of the criticisms appear to be based on the fact that her work is anecdotal, not scientifically based, especially since there is some scientific evidence that conflicts with her observations. Ng and Rury, (2009) emphasize that poverty is a complex issue:

Our analysis, however, demonstrates statistical associations of varying strengths between children’s educational success and a host of different circumstances impacting their lives. Poverty itself is a serious issue, no doubt. Its lone impact may not be as significant as other factors, though, and it often works in conjunction with other disadvantaging variables. – Ng and Rury, (2009)

(Image by babasteve).

In thinking of applying this book, Michael Reinke’s review of Payne’s book concludes that, “a recommendation for use of this book either in the classroom or the general workplace would only come with some significant reservations.” Also, “A Framework for Understanding Poverty is a good start for the uninitiated student or professional working for the first time with a low income population. At the same time, it must be read in the context of a broader conversation on poverty. To view it as the sole source for developing classroom strategies would do a disservice to all involved.”

The greatest utility of Payne’s book may be where she discusses instructional techniques and how to improve instruction.

It is in the chapter where Payne has the most experience, “Instruction and Improving Achievement,” that she takes the more immediate approach. Identifying input strategies, designing lesson plans around cognitive strategies, and conceptual frameworks for instruction all provide a starting point for the teacher looking for assistance and for the student trying to learn. It may or may not be true that the concept of “hidden rules” has merit, but the teacher in the classroom–never mind the student–is likely to benefit from more concrete strategies addressing specific concerns. – Michael Reinke

Payne does back up her recommendations for instruction with the scientific literature so, as a result, a lot of it looks like what you see in the Montessori training. A piecewise comparison of Payne’s general instructional techniques and the Montessori Method (see Lillard, 2005) would make for an interesting project. I’ve also come across some good exercises that I think will apply very nicely to middle school.

Captured by PowerPoint

“PowerPoint makes us stupid” – Gen. James N. Mattis

When we create presentations we combine multiple sources of information and reinterpret them in new ways. Presenting demonstrates more sophisticated learning. Yet as we we organize and categorize we fit the reinterpreted information into models and these models themselves impose their own logic. Models are defined by their own rigidity of organization and thinking that can straightjacket both the viewer and the creator of the presentation.

PowerPoint is a ubiquitous and powerful tool. Most of students favor it for their presentations. However, PowerPoint’s model requires breaking things down into bulleted lists, a hierarchical array of topics and subtopics. It makes it harder to show interconnections.

The U.S. military is becoming worried that their extensive use of PowerPoint is making their job harder.

“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.” – Bumiller (2010)

Elizabeth Bumiller has an excellent article in the New York Times about the effect of PowerPoint on the military titled, “We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint“. It’s a great reminder of why students need to practice a variety of different presentation techniques.

slides impart less information than a five-page paper can hold, and that they relieve the briefer of the need to polish writing to convey an analytic, persuasive point. – Bumiller (2010)

Sharing and privacy online

How your personal information, provided to Facebook, has become accessible to the rest of the web.

People, kids and adults, are still adjusting to the privacy implications of sharing information online. Not only are we figuring out what to post for the public on social networking websites like Facebook or our blogs, but we’re also deciding what information we want to give to the websites themselves as companies try to tailor a unique online experience for each of us (as with targeted advertising). Laura Holson has an interesting article under the headline, “Tell-All Generation Learns to Keep Things Offline” about how some young adults are scaling back their online sharing as they realize how potential colleges and employers can use that information, especially negative information.

… people ages 18 to 29 were more apt to monitor privacy settings than older adults are, and they more often delete comments or remove their names from photos so they cannot be identified. Younger teenagers were not included in these studies, and they may not have the same privacy concerns. But anecdotal evidence suggests that many of them have not had enough experience to understand the downside to oversharing. – Holson, 2010.

Sharing is a way to increase transparency, which is often a good thing. Learning more about each other may help create a more peaceful world. But privacy can be equally important. We all make mistakes, say things we should not, do things we shouldn’t, especially when we’re young. When we recognize those mistakes and learn from them, there should come a time when they are not held against us.

The web needs a statue of limitations, say five years, so anything about us on the web that’s older than five years should not count. Or perhaps, just as minors can’t be held fully responsible for their actions under the law, non-adults should be held to a different standard on the web.

It is, however, notoriously difficult to erase anything from the web, and I tend to be quite conservative when it comes to sharing things online. Yet the greatest power of the internet, I believe, is that it is based a philosophy similar to the constructivist approach to education. In education the student is constructing their own learning, whereas on the internet, society is constructing and organizing information in ways that look a lot like learning.

So our class Wiki is private, as are our students’ blogs. They provide safer spaces for students to make mistakes, but gives them that essential experience of constructing the internet, not just taking away.

Learning science

al-Hassan Ibn al-Haytham (b. 965-1039) (Image from Wikipedia)

Science is, at its core, hypothesis testing. To learn science learn the scientific method: figure out the precise question to solve (as best you can); come up with an answer you think might work (hypothesis); test it; and repeat as necessary while modifying the hypothesis. Almost all science experiments for middle school through college involve following a set of instructions in the lab manual. Only in independent research projects do students actually go through the scientific process and then it’s difficult because they don’t have the experience.

Part of the problem is that it takes time. Time to muddle through the though process of trying to figure out what exactly is a tractable question to solve. Time to come up to with a reasonable, testable hypothesis. Time to figure out how to test it. Time for iterating through the process again, although, once you’ve set up your experiment the first time doing it again and again is not that hard or time-consuming.

With our Montessori Middle School’s six-week cycle of work, and even with the two weeks dedicated to the Natural World, students should be possible to get through this process for at least one problem. They would probably have to dedicate the two weeks to a single problem/experiment and it would probably be terribly slow in the beginning.

To discover the truth about nature, Ibn a-Haitham reasoned, one had to eliminate human opinion and allow the universe to speak for itself through physical experiments. “The seeker after truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them,” the first scientist wrote, “but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration.” – Steffens (2008) (Ibn Al-Haytham: First Scientist)

Montessorian on the web: Dr. Sarah Baird

Sarah Baird, from the Sea Pines Montessori Academy‘s Middle School, has recently started posting articles on K-12 education at Savannah K-12 Examiner. Dr. Baird was a research scientist (chemistry) before getting into Montessori so she’s not afraid to delve into the scientific literature to support her articles, yet her writing is targeted to a general audience.

“I am doing it to write (because I love it) and educate teachers and parents outside Montessori about our philosophy…. I feel like Montessorians keep all the info to themselves. We need to share and be proud to even have a little positive impact on our public schools,” Sarah Baird (2010) personal communication.

Having been blogging here for a few months I can say I greatly appreciate this sentiment, especially since one of the things I’ve been most impressed about with the Montessori approach is how it encapsulates so much of the modern pedagogy about constructivist education.

Score one for adding another intelligent voice with a Montessori perspective to the web.

Intrinsic motivation in the real world

rewards tend to focus the brain more narrowly on the specific task that earns the rewards—thus making it harder to encourage employees to develop creative, innovative solutions. – Laura Vanderkam (2010)

Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink

How do you motivate people in the creative economy? Apparently not with bonuses. The best way to get people to be creative is to motivate them in ways that “takes the issue of money off the table, so they can focus on the work itself” according to Daniel Pink in his book “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.” Laura Vanderkam’s (2010) review of the book in the City Journal provides an excellent overview.

… leaders create an environment where people want to do their best. This involves giving people lots of autonomy over their time, their tasks, their techniques, and their teams; providing them an opportunity to work toward mastery of their professional craft; and imbuing their work with a sense of purpose. Laura Vanderkam (2010)

And translated into education Pink advocates the same approach as Montessori,

encourage mastery by allowing children to spend as long as they’d like and to go as deep as they desire on the topics that interest them. – Pink (2010)

It’s good to be reminded of the importance of intrinsic motivation every now and then. There are always forces, most often subtle but sometimes not, that push toward making sure students do well in the standardized tests and cover everything in the curriculum. High schools want to see good grades in all the subjects.

But what if a student just wants to write, and they just pour their heart into it. The other subjects suffer, especially the least interesting ones, but my goodness how their writing improves. What then? …

Self-respect rather than self-esteem

[S]elf-esteem is but a division of self-importance, which is seldom an attractive quality. That person is best who never thinks of his own importance: to think about it, even, is to be lost to morality. Self-respect is another quality entirely. Where self-esteem is entirely egotistical, requiring that the world should pay court to oneself whatever oneself happens to be like or do, and demands nothing of the person who wants it, self-respect is a social virtue, a discipline, that requires an awareness of and sensitivity to the feelings of others. It requires an ability and willingness to put oneself in someone else’s place; it requires dignity and fortitude, and not always taking the line of least resistance. – Dalrymple, 2010.

Self-respect is earned, while self-esteem is not. That at least is the argument of Theodore Dalrymple, who defines this interesting distinction between self-esteem and self-respect based on his observations as a prison psychiatrist. What people want is a “just appreciation of one’s own importance and of one’s own worth.” To assume that one is entitled to respect because of one’s intrinsic strengths is destructive because it says that you don’t have to do anything to get respect. But respect is earned. Both importance and worth are values that are ascribed by others, by society, and to earn them requires effort and achievement. Self-respect is the appraisal of oneself based on one’s contribution to society.

It’s an interesting argument in semantics at the very least, but the fundamental argument at least aligns with the proper way to use praise and rewards. By praising the effort you acknowledge the importance of work in achieving goals, building self-respect, rather that praising intrinsic abilities (“you’re so smart”) that engender a sense that the student is entitled to do well.

One has only to go into a prison … to see the most revoltingly high self-esteem among a group of people … who had brought nothing but misery to those around them, largely because they conceived of themselves as so important that they could do no wrong. For them, their whim was law, which was precisely as it should be considering who they were in their own estimate. – Dalrymple, 2010.

Theodore Dalrymple is a conservative in the dictionary sense of the word. He argues the importance of tradition and personal responsibility. He also strongly believes that healthy culture must satisfy the need of people to belong to something larger than themselves. So much so, that despite being an atheist, he argues that religions, some types of religions at least, have an important role in society.

Praise and rewards

Looking through the Greater Good Science Center‘s blog post on how to raise kind children, I was struck, as I usually am, by the somewhat counter-intuitive finding that we should not reward good behavior (helping in this instance).

Very young children who receive material rewards for helping others become less likely to help in the future compared with toddlers who only receive verbal praise or receive no reward at all. This research suggests that even the youngest children are intrinsically motivated to be kind, and that extrinsic rewards can undermine this tendency. – Carter (2010)

While I have not yet looked to see if there is any direct research on this topic with regards to adolescence, this is part of the Montessori philosophy. Lillard (2007; Ch. 5) has an entire chapter on Extrinsic Rewards and Motivation that gets to the same point. She cites the research that gets to the specific point that extrinsic rewards, rewards that come from the outside such as praise, tend to demotivate once the rewards are removed.

Engaging in a well-liked activity with the expectations of a reward led to reduced creativity during that activity and to decreased voluntary participation in that activity later. (Lepper et. al., 1973) in Lillard (2007; Ch. 5)

Rewards have negative effects when they are clearly stated, expected, and tangible; read this book and you’ll get $5; or do this work and you will get better grades. However, rewards can work if you’re dealing with subjects that students find uninteresting and there is a very clearly specified set of steps that they can learn by rote.

“[R]ewards are often effective at the moment of their offering, so if there are no long-term goals, rewards help without causing harm down the road.” Lillard (2007; p. 157)

Rewards can help with basic learning, like memorizing facts, but intrinsic motivation is essential for tasks that require higher-level more creative thinking.

I try to praise or give tangible rewards very rarely, though it is often hard. Students look for praise sometimes (and sometimes for the oddest things), so when I do complement I try to use what Carter calls growth-mindset praise and say something like, “See, practice really pays off.” Praise the effort, not some intrinsic value the students have.