despite their schooling--not because of it

How to develop innovators. That's the tag line of Tony Wagner's recent article in the Wall Street Journal.

Samples:
"Learning in most conventional education settings is a passive experience: The students listen. But at the most innovative schools, classes are "hands-on," and students are creators, not mere consumers."

"In most high-school and college classes, failure is penalized. But without trial and error, there is no innovation."

"In conventional schools, students learn so that they can get good grades. My most important research finding is that young innovators are intrinsically motivated. The culture of learning in programs that excel at educating for innovation emphasize what I call the three P's—play, passion and purpose. The play is discovery-based learning that leads young people to find and pursue a passion, which evolves, over time, into a deeper sense of purpose."

How to develop leadership

From an article in the current Harvard Education Letter:

More Than IQ

Researchers found just this sort of inner motivation to be a common ingredient among the children they tracked who held leadership posts as early as high school. While there was “a little overlap” between those with the strongest inner motivation and those with top IQ scores, the data showed that stronger motivation trumped higher IQ in winning top roles in clubs. “The motivationally gifted were significantly more likely to be the leaders,” according to Adele Gottfried.

The importance of inner motivation to leadership is not surprising to Carol S. Dweck, psychology professor at Stanford and author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. She says the study offers a strong argument for schools “to do things fundamentally differently.”

“We have fallen into a culture that tests and labels—and we need to be creating people who are visionaries, who are risk takers, who know how to adopt a challenge and pursue it over time,” says Dweck.

Dweck says her work shows that those who are encouraged to have a “growth mindset” and find satisfaction in achieving their own intrinsic goals are more likely to persevere and succeed at tough tasks than those who are simply labeled “smart.” And yet both Dweck and Adele Gottfried point out that schools place such heavy emphasis on extrinsic rewards like test scores and classroom prizes that they risk stifling development of students’ inner drive.

When classroom teachers provide a rich variety of experiences and give students choices as they tackle required material, they help students take charge of their own learning, Adele Gottfried adds.

What's wrong with the teenage mind?

Alison Gopnik's catchy title for a Wall Street Journal article about the balance/imbalance between the motivation system in the brain and the control system -- before, during and after puberty.

Here's a sample:
At the same time, contemporary children have very little experience with the kinds of tasks that they'll have to perform as grown-ups. Children have increasingly little chance to practice even basic skills like cooking and caregiving. Contemporary adolescents and pre-adolescents often don't do much of anything except go to school. Even the paper route and the baby-sitting job have largely disappeared.

The experience of trying to achieve a real goal in real time in the real world is increasingly delayed, and the growth of the control system depends on just those experiences. The pediatrician and developmental psychologist Ronald Dahl at the University of California, Berkeley, has a good metaphor for the result: Today's adolescents develop an accelerator a long time before they can steer and brake.

This doesn't mean that adolescents are stupider than they used to be. In many ways, they are much smarter. An ever longer protected period of immaturity and dependence—a childhood that extends through college—means that young humans can learn more than ever before. There is strong evidence that IQ has increased dramatically as more children spend more time in school, and there is even some evidence that higher IQ is correlated with delayed frontal lobe development.

All that school means that children know more about more different subjects than they ever did in the days of apprenticeships. Becoming a really expert cook doesn't tell you about the nature of heat or the chemical composition of salt—the sorts of things you learn in school.

But there are different ways of being smart. Knowing physics and chemistry is no help with a soufflé. Wide-ranging, flexible and broad learning, the kind we encourage in high-school and college, may actually be in tension with the ability to develop finely-honed, controlled, focused expertise in a particular skill, the kind of learning that once routinely took place in human societies. For most of our history, children have started their internships when they were seven, not 27.

"the inside sort of things"

Writer Rick Ackerly tells Maggie's story.
"Maggie awoke one morning at the age of eighteen with the profound fear that after 13 years of school, 'I knew very little about myself and what I wanted in my life.'”

not acquired behind a desk

Great college essay by a Montessori alum.

Montessori Schools Do This

When many of our best thinkers think about how to make creative and innovative thinking part of our schools, they automatically think of Montessori classrooms.

From an interview with Cathy Davidson in Salon:

In the book, you have this fascinating statistic that 65 percent of kids born today will have careers that don’t exist yet. Right now, under No Child Left Behind, the school system puts tremendous emphasis on standardized multiple choice tests, which, as you point out, don't exactly train kids to think creatively about the technological future.

The whole point of standardized testing was invented in 1914 and modeled explicitly as a way to process all these immigrants who were flooding into America at the same time as we were requiring two years of high school, and men were off at war and women were working in factories. The multiple choice test is based on the assembly line – what’s fast, what’s machine readable, what can be graded very, very rapidly. It’s also based on the idea of objectivity and that there's a kind of knowledge that has a right answer. If you chose a right answer, you’re done.

It's really only in the last 100 years that we’ve thought of learning in that very quantifiable way. We’re now in an era where anybody can find out anything just by Googling. So the real issue is not how fast can I choose a fact A, B, C or D. Now if I Google an answer I’ve got thousands of possibilities to choose from. How do you teach a kid to be able to make a sound judgment about what is and what isn’t reliable information? How do you synthesize that into a coherent position that allows you to make informed decisions about your life?

In other words, all of those things we think of as school were shaped for a vision of work and productivity and adulthood that was very much an industrial age of work, productivity and adulthood. We now have a pretty different idea of work, productivity and adulthood, but we’re still teaching people using the same institutionalized forms of education.

So what do we do to change that?

First I’d get rid of end-of-grade tests. They demotivate learning, in boys especially. Establish more challenge-based problem-solving kinds of education. This is hardly revolutionary. Montessori schools do this. I would like to see more attention paid to how you go from thinking something to making something.

7 Sins of Forced Education

Rakesh Agrawal often sends me stories to read. Here's another from Psychology Today: "7 Sins of our system of forced education."

Don't get hung up on the section about schools as prisons. If you're interested in Gray's argument, read it. He's quite convincing. Otherwise, skip ahead to the section on The Sins.

Author Peter Gray says, "It is not easy to force people to do what they do not want to do. We no longer use the cane, as schoolmasters once did, but instead rely on a system of incessant testing, grading, and ranking of children compared with their peers. We thereby tap into and distort the human emotional systems of shame and pride to motivate children to do the work."

Be the best possible version of yourself

A note from Post Oak parent Rakesh Agrawal.





John:

A blog reading...
from the guy who created gmail at google and then started another company which he sold to Facebook. A good response, I think, to Amy Chua's Tiger Mother book that's been getting a lot of attention (I read it a few weeks back and have enjoyed using it as a springboard for discussing parenting with Shonali and friends).

Rakesh