Education, Mindset, Growth and Value

I am, among other things, a guitar teacher.  I’ve taught privately for ten years and I decided, this year, I would go get my credential and start making the big bucks (sarcasm?) in public education.  Class room teaching brings its own set of challenges.  With the onset of common core among our schools, staff development time is at a premium.  With this new prescribed teaching methodology there comes new ideas for class management and structure.  The problem is the questions being asked are how to teach and not what to teach.  The how is still very important, but the what is the fundamental; as with any structure, if the foundation is faulty the pillars holding the roof will, eventually, falter.

Common Core has a lot of buzz phrases (as with all educational models) that really excited me.  I work primarily at a junior high school - I also teach at a high school, all my meetings however take place with the junior high staff – and when I began to hear things like: argument instead of persuasion; academic discourse; Socratic seminar, I was excited.  The core teachers were/are scared about the change in style however I felt their excitement at the prospect of teaching children to use that most valued of tools of reason and logic: evidence!

This is where it gets fuzzy. The difference in argumentative and persuasive writing, as I’m told by the language arts teachers, is argument is derived from evidence whereas persuasion from opinion.   You see, in order for students to use evidence in the formation of an argument, they must be able to identify what evidence is.  Additionally, the students must be able to differentiate evidence from opinion.  Yet here’s the problem; in teaching “academic discourse” the school system has begun to train students using key phrases to communicate, all of which are opinion driven and not evidence driven:

·         While some people believe… I think…

·         The way I see it…

·         In my opinion…

“Make sure you cite the text to support your response.”  A text book is a secondary source. A text is always the synthesis of data into a conclusion from a 3^rd party and therefore invalid if trying to teach children to synthesis.  The work has already been done for them!  A valid source contains three things: a hypothesis, a method for testing said hypothesis, and the resulting data from exhaustive testing.

We’ve already a faulty foundation to our initial goal: to teach argument instead of persuasion because the very method of conveyance is secondary. Factual or not, we have side stepped the impetus of the exercise which is to teach students to prove an argument.  That is impossible using someone else’s synthesis of data.  We are, in fact, teaching students a logical fallacy: that truth comes from authority. 

In order to create academic discourse, by definition there must be differing opinions.  Using our flawed method today, students are taught to agree or disagree with someone else’s synthesis of data rather than amongst themselves, which is where the richest learning occurs.  Students are unable to develop truly original conclusions because they are not given the proper tools (data) to do so.

Finally, the purpose of the Socratic method is to arrive at a single conclusion or truth among a group.  A group which has, as individuals; examined the data, judged its legitimacy and drawn a conclusion.  The method of arriving at individual conclusions is challenged amongst the group until only one conclusion remains.

A great example of how a class may approach these three steps would be teaching the mathematical constant π.  Pie – π – is calculated as the circumference of a circle divided by its diameter. Regardless of its size, π is always the same.  Here’s a fantastic video and a fun experiment to measure and find π:

And another great example of how to measure the approximate circumference of a circle:

http://www.mathsisfun.com/activity/pi-approximation.html

When done as a class, each student will come up with a slightly different number.  The teacher could average all the numbers, or simply ask the students to round to the nearest hundredth decimal place.  When the students realize that, amongst all off them 3.14 is the most prevalent (or ideally only) answer the students will ask the question themselves.  Now ask them to find the circumference of a circle, using the diameter and this new number they have discovered.  After repeated correct examples, ask the question, “Would this work for all circles?” Let the class come to their own conclusion based on the evidence they themselves have uncovered.  Once they arrive at their conclusion you let them in on the secret: they have discovered for themselves the universal constant π.

As I’m almost certain you didn’t come here looking for a math lesson, and God knows I’m not qualified to give one, let me get back to the topic at hand: the education of our children. The above lesson does many things; it teaches problem solving, communication, repetition of a concept, it brings legitimate academic discourse with the opportunity to employ the Socratic method.  This is one of thousands of examples that could be given, it’s just the one I’m immediately familiar with.

Now, why don’t we teach this way?  As I mentioned previously staff development time is at a premium in my school district – there’s a lot of it.  We all, teachers and administrators, bear through it because we truly do want to serve our students to the best of our ability.  Today our staff attended two separate educational seminars.  A seminar on Mindset by Carol Dweck surprised and inspired me to write this today.  It wasn’t the book itself - I haven’t read it.  The topic of conversation gave me pause to reflect heavily on what I have done as an educator, both privately and in a class room; what effect we as a community of educators are doing and creating in society; how students adapt to our teaching methodology as teachers and parents.

The conflict begins in our visions.  Visions of humanity, of society, of ourselves.  It is the constrained verses the unconstrained vision of man. I exist with the constrained view of man which is to say, man is fixed: man can grow and learn and adapt but man is not perfectible.  I have witnessed the strengths and weaknesses of my individuality.  The unconstrained vision sees man as perfectible.  That there is one path that, should we find it, be the perfect road to lead man to absolute equality in skill and reward. The unconstrained vision views equality as a value of skill.  If skill is equal, opportunity can be chosen.  The constrained vision views equality as a value of opportunity.  That if opportunity is equal, skills can be chosen.

I’ll come back to this before I wonder too far off topic.

Myself and my generation learned from a very young age that if we weren’t immediately good at something we should avoid it.  Why is that?  Because of the perceived need to create self-esteem among the youth our parents and teachers, for the most part, told us how great we were.  Then the moment came when we weren’t immediately good at something.  What did we do then? The praise wasn’t there so we went back to doing things we were praised for.  It’s simple behavior conditioning, but we learned that self-esteem and self-worth are external – that people can give and take these away from us.  Nothing could be further from the truth. 

I didn’t have a legitimate sense of self-worth until I was 27 years old.

Mindset calls what I had, and what many of our students have, a fixed mindset.  Defined as having fixed ability or intelligence.  If the individual cannot do it perfectly they would rather not do it.  Can you see how the previous example could lead us down this road?  The inverse is called a growth mindset: believing that your intelligence grows as well as your skill and ability.  A growth mindset student takes criticism as an opportunity to learn whereas a fixed mindset student would take it as insulting.

Here’s a contradictory statement: failure is the leading cause of success. 

What?

It’s true! What is the thing all success stories have in common? They were willing to fail.  Michael Jordan says it best:

Students with a fixed mindset are unwilling to fail.  If it’s not perfect it’s not worth doing.  I find myself in this mindset all the time, I’m a perfectionist and I’ve got to get over that.  If I could go back in time and give my younger self one piece of advice it would be this: take every opportunity; value the failures more that the successes. 

How can I provide this opportunity for my students? In the manner in which I have already discussed.  Using what common core espouses can create these opportunities for students to fail, rise up, and succeed.

How can we help students keep a growth mindset all the time? By helping them internalize their self-worth – not continuing to externalize it.  As a music teacher, writer and general creative thinker the best way to do this is through the teaching of aesthetics.  Aesthetics is the acknowledgement of beauty: visually, aurally or spatially.  More importantly, it is the value of affect.  It is an opinion that students derive from within and communicate to their peers.  As teachers we foster that through recognition and not through praise.  Through aesthetics students can learn what, why and how they value things and people, and how they value themselves aesthetically (not through appearance but through achievement).

The national community of educators has an unconstrained vision of man. That if we can give each student equal skills they will be equal, but we see the failing of that vision every day in the trenches of the classroom.  Not every student learns at the same pace.  Some students are completely uninterested in topics, yet we would hold them to these standards because we believe we are making them equal.  Yet, if a student is gifted in music and poor in geometry do we foster his gifts?  No we punish him for his failings.  Were the tables turned, would you punish the student, in love with mathematics, for a failing grade in music?  Were that the case, how many Albert Einstine’s have we made into mechanics for not fostering their passions? How many Bill Gates have been put in middle management?  I believe Steve Vai says it best when talking about success in the music industry.  “I cultivate my strengths and avoid my weaknesses.”

It is the constrained vision of man that allows us to value what is innate.  We are equal in our opportunity to achieve.  Each of us was given life and a will to live it as we choose, and while skills can lead to opportunity ultimately it is the value of ourselves that pushes us to acquire a higher set of skills.  With a growth mindset students are capable whatever they can imagine.  My challenge to all educators is to learn to give the student room to imagine.  Our jobs are made much easier if we simply allow them to dream.