Marking for a Growth Mindset

I am interested in Carol Dweck's work on a Growth Mindset. Follow this link to see how the insights of a Growth mindset can be integrated into a school system that requires constant grades and tests. The article is written from a North American perspective but the advice is good for all educators.

Lecture vs Research based learning

This item on Donald Clark's blog is about the effectiveness of lectures vs researched based instruction. Although we don't lecture in schools, I think the benefits of the research based instruction are worth noting. We may not have the freedom to do this in the way carried out in the experiment, but can adopt some ideas from this approach.

Effective Schools

Here's the abstract from some recent research into the effectiveness of charter schools in the USA. The implications are well worth considering. There is a link to the entire report at the bottom of this page.

Charter schools were developed, in part, to serve as an R&D engine for traditional public schools, resulting in a wide variety of school strategies and outcomes. In this paper, we collect unparalleled data on the inner-workings of 35 charter schools and correlate these data with credible estimates of each school’s effectiveness. We find that traditionally collected input mea- sures – class size, per pupil expenditure, the fraction of teachers with no certification, and the fraction of teachers with an advanced degree – are not correlated with school effectiveness. In stark contrast, we show that an index of five policies suggested by over forty years of qualitative research – frequent teacher feedback, the use of data to guide instruction, high-dosage tutoring, increased instructional time, and high expectations – explains approximately 50 percent of the variation in school effectiveness. Our results are robust to controls for three alternative theories of schooling: a model emphasizing the provision of wrap-around services, a model focused on teacher selection and retention, and the “No Excuses” model of education.

What Makes Charter Schools Work

StudyBlue

StudyBlue is a free online flashcard study service. Create your own flashcards (with text, images sounds) and then test yourself. Also allows you to set up revison reminders on Facebook.

Gladwell, Dweck and The Power of Practising

I have written before about the work of Dr. Carol Dweck. Broadly speaking, she divides people into groups who believe our intelligence is fixed (‘fixed mindset’) and those who believe it can be developed (‘growth mindset’).

The former often tend to feel the need to ‘prove’ their intelligence and so are likely to shy away from tasks they perceive as too challenging in case they fail them. From this viewpoint it would show they are not intelligent. Those with the growth mindset see themselves on a path of expanding skills and knowledge. They are happy to tackle a challenge because they believe it will develop them.

We want our students to be resilient and to see ‘failure’ for what it is: an event and not a state of being. We need to encourage them to adopt a growth mindset.

Dweck’s ideas are complemented by Malcolm Gladwell’s findings in his book , Outliers. Here he explores and accounts for outstanding success in fields as diverse as sport, music and computing.

He reports the findings of research conducted 1990’s by the psychologist Ericsson at Berlin’s elite Academy of Music. Professors divided the students into three groups. First, the stars who would probably go onto have careers as world-class soloists. Next, the good. The third group would probably never play professionally but would become music teachers. Each group was asked the same question: over your career so far, from the day you picked up the violin, how many hours have you practised?

They all started playing at around the same age and in the first few years they all practised about the same amount: two to three hours a week. By eight differences began to emerge. The best were practising more six hours a week by the age of nine; eight hours by twelve; sixteen hours a week by the age of fourteen and by twenty they were doing well over thirty hours a week. In total they had amassed about 10,000 hours. Good students had a total of eight thousand hours and the final group about four thousand hours. They found the same pattern with amateur and professional pianists. Indeed, 10,000 hours of practising seem to be the identifying marker of peak performers in a range of fields.

But the most significant finding was the busting of the myth of the ‘naturally talented’. The study found no examples of any elite performer who didn’t work very, very hard. Nor did they find anybody who put in the maximum hours without making the top rank.

This is very significant for learners to understand. It’s tempting to think that outstanding performers are just ‘born’ that way. That other people are more successful because they just have natural talent (a fixed mindset perspective). In fact, whilst a certain amount of natural talent is necessary, it needs very hard work to develop it. However, provided that the work is done, then progress will be made (a growth mindset attitude).

If students (indeed any of us) can understand this, then it can feed intrinsic motivation. There is no external limitation (your natural ability) dictating that you cannot make progress towards your goals. If you want something enough and are prepared to work (very!) hard, then Gladwell ‘s and Dweck’s work suggest that you can only improve.

Of course, knowing what we want and being able to motivate ourselves are separate issues and I shall return to these later.

21st Century Skills

Donald Clark has written another thoughtful piece over at his blog. Hers' an extract that I thought especialy true.

Young people communicate and collaborate every few minutes – it’s an obsession. They text, MSN, BBM, Myspace, Facebook, Facebook message, Facebook chat and Skype. Note the absence of email and Twitter. Then there’s Spotify, Soundcloud, Flickr, YouTube and Bitorrent to share, tag, upload and download experiences, comments, photographs, video and media. They also collaborate closely in parties when playing games. Never have the young shared so much, so often in so many different ways. Then along comes someone who wants to teach them this so called 21^st C skill, usually in a classroom, where all of this is banned. I’m always amused at this conceit, that we adults, especially in education, think we even have the skills we claim we want to teach.

Tag Galaxy

Taggalaxy: Just type in the name of the image you are seeking (here's one for teaching) and watch the images float in and form a globe. What's more, tages will often form for related words, creating a sort of visual thesarus. Spin the globe around. Click on to enlarge an image. Less dramatic than Cooliris, but more gentle and pretty.