Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
40: Shifting from Industry to Well-Being w/ Dr. Susan Engel
18 Plays6 years ago
We are joined by Dr. Susan Engel, professor of developmental psychology at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Dr. Engel has authored a variety of publications and books, including The End of the Rainbow: How Educating for Happiness (not money) Would Transform Our Schools and A School of Our Own: The Story of the First Student-Run High School and a New Vision for American Education, among many more - including her latest book, The Children You Teach: Using a Developmental Framework in the Classroom. Furthermore, Dr. Engel co-founded the Hayground School, a non-profit school focused on experiential learning and the teachings of John Dewey.
In our conversation, we talk about so many important topics:
- Why is “next step” and industry-prep (e.g. “Preparing students for tomorrow’s industries.”) potentially a problem?
- Why is well-being imperative to learning? How does this contradict those who focus so much on rigor?
- How can we convince educators and administrators that progressive policies help students learn?
- How can we enact this research without eliminating standardized testing?
- How can testing (if shifted to other realms) actually help us in progressive education?
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Acknowledgments
00:00:09
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Human Restoration Project.
00:00:12
Speaker
My name is Chris and thanks for listening in today.
00:00:15
Speaker
First off, a special thank you to a few of our patrons that make our podcast possible, two of which are Michael Hyde and Jenny Lucas.
00:00:23
Speaker
Thank you so much for your support.
00:00:25
Speaker
You can learn more about the grassroots progressive education movement of the Human Restoration Project on our website at humanrestorationproject.org or follow us on Twitter at humerespro.com.
00:00:38
Speaker
On our website, you'll find a plethora of materials related to progressive education, including a large list of free resources, a ton of research-backed evidence, hidden general thoughts, ideas, and other things to share.
Dr. Susan Engel's Background and Early Experiences
00:00:51
Speaker
We are joined by Dr. Susan Engel, professor of developmental psychology at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts.
00:00:59
Speaker
Dr. Engel has authored a variety of publications and books, including The End of the Rainbow, How Educating for Happiness, Not Money, Would Transform Our Schools, and A School of Our Own, The Story of the First Student-Run High School and a New Vision for American Education.
00:01:15
Speaker
Furthermore, Dr. Engel co-founded the Hayground School, which is a non-profit focused on experiential learning and the teachings of John Dewey.
00:01:23
Speaker
Just first off, I would like to know how you got involved in education, what led you into the field of developmental psychology, and how you just got to all these different progressive ideas.
00:01:32
Speaker
Sure.
00:01:33
Speaker
Okay.
00:01:33
Speaker
Well, I'll actually tell you a funny story that's in my most recently published book, which is a book for teachers called The Children You Teach.
00:01:42
Speaker
And I tell the story I'm about to tell in that book, which is the first time that I worked with young children, I was 12 years old.
00:01:51
Speaker
And I was hired by a young woman in her early 20s who was running a summer camp.
00:01:58
Speaker
And she hired me to be her assistant because I lived nearby and I was very interested.
00:02:03
Speaker
I had a little sister, so I guess I thought I'd be good with little kids.
00:02:06
Speaker
And you may know what...
00:02:08
Speaker
this experience is like because you're a teacher.
00:02:11
Speaker
The minute I started that job, I knew I had a feel for kids.
00:02:16
Speaker
I just, it's not something that people talk about in the world of education, but I don't know why not because doctors talk about having good hands and an athlete might talk about having, you know, a good pace or a good spring in their legs or whatever, good diet coordination.
00:02:32
Speaker
And there's no reason why teachers wouldn't also have certain characteristics that just
00:02:37
Speaker
give them a feel for the work.
00:02:39
Speaker
So even as a 12 year old, I just knew I loved being around kids and I was good with them and they brought out the best in me.
00:02:47
Speaker
And I couldn't have told you then, and I'm not sure I could tell you now what that, what that was, but it was something, it was a feel for kids.
00:02:54
Speaker
That young woman didn't run the program the next year.
00:02:57
Speaker
And so I decided to run a program myself.
00:02:59
Speaker
So I was about 13 years old.
00:03:00
Speaker
I was very young when I started thinking about kids and what they were like and what you should do to give them the most interesting experiences and how to help them interact
From Literature to Developmental Psychology
00:03:10
Speaker
in a group.
00:03:10
Speaker
But I just sort of did it by sort of intuition.
00:03:13
Speaker
So fast forward, I got to college and I still liked working with kids and I still did it.
00:03:19
Speaker
But I thought that it had nothing to do with my academic studies.
00:03:23
Speaker
I wanted to study literature and I wanted to study philosophy.
00:03:26
Speaker
In fact, I
00:03:27
Speaker
I had an advisor at college who tried to get me to take a course in developmental psychology.
00:03:32
Speaker
But at that age, I was 17 when I started college.
00:03:35
Speaker
I didn't know what developmental psychology was.
00:03:37
Speaker
When he said psychology, I thought he meant therapy or I don't know what I thought.
00:03:41
Speaker
But I thought, I'm not interested in that.
00:03:43
Speaker
I'm not doing that.
00:03:44
Speaker
I work with kids, but that's not what I'm here to study at college.
00:03:48
Speaker
Then finally, he was a very good advisor.
00:03:50
Speaker
So he convinced me to take this course in developmental psychology.
00:03:56
Speaker
love.
00:03:57
Speaker
I just knew that I had found my thing.
00:03:59
Speaker
I loved reading the theories about why children changed in the way they did, how they learned to talk, whether we should think of the mind as a malleable entity or one that was born with all its propensities and abilities.
00:04:14
Speaker
I loved the research.
00:04:15
Speaker
I thought it was magic the way that researchers made sense of
00:04:20
Speaker
everyday behaviors and the things that children said and did.
00:04:24
Speaker
I loved coming up with hypotheses and testing them.
00:04:26
Speaker
So I had found the second love.
00:04:28
Speaker
If children were my first love, psychology was my second love.
00:04:32
Speaker
It took me a lot longer to realize that it was more unusual than I had expected to put those two things together.
00:04:41
Speaker
And what I mean by that is I went on teaching to make money when I was a college student.
00:04:45
Speaker
By then, I couldn't stop doing developmental psychology.
00:04:48
Speaker
So I went to
00:04:49
Speaker
graduate school to become a developmental psychologist.
00:04:52
Speaker
But I also went on teaching because, again, I needed to make money and I liked working with kids.
00:04:57
Speaker
And I began to realize that those two groups of people weren't talking to each other, that teachers, for all their skills and knowledge and expertise,
00:05:05
Speaker
they didn't really have a grasp of how children develop, of how their minds change or don't change, how their behaviors are influenced by other people or not influenced and so forth and so on.
00:05:17
Speaker
And it was something that would strengthen their work, not weaken it.
00:05:20
Speaker
If they only could learn about that, it would make them even more perceptive, more skilled, have more resources.
00:05:27
Speaker
It would certainly be a help to them when they were convincing parents of doing unusual things.
00:05:33
Speaker
or doing things that parents were nervous about.
00:05:36
Speaker
And by the same token, I noticed that researchers didn't seem to really know about real kids.
00:05:40
Speaker
The kids they imagined were the kids in the lab who were nothing like kids on the playground or in the kitchen or in school.
00:05:46
Speaker
So I...
00:05:48
Speaker
began this interest of bringing those two things together.
00:05:52
Speaker
And then eventually I became a professor at Williams College and I began to get students who didn't only want to study developmental psychology, they wanted to teach.
00:06:02
Speaker
And that gave me this golden opportunity to put those two things together.
00:06:07
Speaker
So that's how I became a psychologist, very interested in education.
Bridging Educational Research and Practice
00:06:12
Speaker
And I'll just say by way of ending that answer,
00:06:15
Speaker
I began to realize that some of my most dearly held intuitions or ideas about education were based on good research.
00:06:26
Speaker
They made sense.
00:06:28
Speaker
And that the way to convince people they were good ideas was not to keep shouting it or, you know, just saying it again and again, but to show that the research backed up what I was saying about how children learn and what made them thrive and what were the best things to do for them in a school setting.
00:06:44
Speaker
Yeah, that's something that always shocked me.
00:06:47
Speaker
After I started looking into progressive ideas, there's always been this mentality whenever I spoke to teachers about this kind of stuff that it was kind of like the quote unquote hippie style of learning.
00:06:55
Speaker
Go, that's all that 1960s.
00:06:57
Speaker
That's all kooky stuff.
00:06:58
Speaker
But then you look at what people actually publish on this.
00:07:01
Speaker
And I mean, there's like literally thousands of studies.
00:07:04
Speaker
That back up everything from changing how homework looks and not grading to doing all sorts of kinds of things.
00:07:10
Speaker
It's shocking how much we know yet how little we actually practice, how little those two go together, at least in most schools, I would
Critique of Education's Shift Towards Job Readiness
00:07:19
Speaker
argue.
00:07:19
Speaker
kind of along the exact same lines to hone in on what you focus on in The End of the Rainbow.
00:07:26
Speaker
You point a lot of criticism at how schools use terminology that focuses on the industrial benefits of education.
00:07:33
Speaker
If we were to quote something, students of the 21st century will need to be innovators to work in tomorrow's industries.
00:07:39
Speaker
Could you go further into the problem with our overwhelming focus on job readiness or next step education?
00:07:47
Speaker
Sure.
00:07:47
Speaker
So as I talk about in that book, I think that was the focus on sort of job readiness that sort of came about during the Industrial Revolution, I think was sort of an accident.
00:08:00
Speaker
I think it was unintentional.
00:08:01
Speaker
So for time immemorial, the only people who got a formal education were the privileged.
00:08:07
Speaker
And it was considered a luxury.
00:08:10
Speaker
School meant not at work.
00:08:11
Speaker
And by extension, sort of the the
00:08:15
Speaker
gifts of literacy, of thinking abstractly, of pursuing philosophy, and then later science.
00:08:23
Speaker
Those were the privileges of the wealthy.
00:08:26
Speaker
And deep down, intentionally or not, the uneducated were deprived of that kind of intellect, by and large, were deprived of that kind of intellectual life.
00:08:37
Speaker
When more and more children needed to be cared for out of the home because their parents were working out of the home, there developed this need for somewhere for kids to be while parents were working.
00:08:49
Speaker
And that sort of
00:08:51
Speaker
began the slow drift towards school for all, which has enormous benefits, obviously.
00:08:59
Speaker
But as that sort of took hold, the purpose of education shifted.
00:09:04
Speaker
It's a crazy paradox.
00:09:06
Speaker
And I'm no historian, but
00:09:08
Speaker
It seemed like as we began to think of education or formal education, school as a place for everybody, we also began to think, well, if it's for everybody, it better be a very different thing than it's been.
00:09:19
Speaker
If it's for everybody, how could it be the pursuit of enlightenment or higher order thinking?
00:09:24
Speaker
It better just be job training.
00:09:26
Speaker
That's at least a piece, I think, of.
00:09:28
Speaker
of how schooling became focused on this job readiness.
00:09:32
Speaker
And then that went hand in hand with the idea of thinking about all these kids that were going to need to be able to work and they were going to need to be able to work at whatever, you know, in factories or stores or at trades.
00:09:45
Speaker
And the idea of using school to get them ready for those things sort of just fell into place.
00:09:51
Speaker
The problem with it, I mean, there's so many problems with that model.
00:09:56
Speaker
And it's not one that people exist.
00:10:01
Speaker
one of the most selective colleges in the country.
00:10:04
Speaker
And I think by many measures, one of the best colleges in the country.
00:10:08
Speaker
I certainly love it and adore it.
00:10:09
Speaker
We get incredibly bright students and they're very motivated and they're very engaged, but they talk all the time about their college experience in terms of what it will, how it will help them improve.
00:10:20
Speaker
in the workplace, even though the best thing we can offer them is not training in some trade or some particular narrow career path, but rather an education that enables them to think in complex ways about complex matters, which is the world they're moving into.
00:10:38
Speaker
So that idea of schooling or education as being a pre-professional training ground has sort of permeated all levels of education.
00:10:48
Speaker
And it doesn't work, number one.
00:10:51
Speaker
You don't really prepare people for work by trying to train them in these narrow ways.
00:10:56
Speaker
And meanwhile, you spend all that time sort of unsuccessfully preparing them for particular, I don't know what, professions, and you lose the opportunity to
00:11:05
Speaker
to help them all become enlightened in the truest sense of that word, able to read complex material, to think about complex arguments, to consider various approaches to a problem, like a mathematical approach or a literary approach, to think like a social scientist or to think like a natural scientist.
00:11:24
Speaker
Those are all ways of thinking that any person
00:11:27
Speaker
citizens should be able to access at some level, if not at the professional level.
Fostering Critical Thinking and Curiosity
00:11:32
Speaker
And that's what a good education should give you.
00:11:34
Speaker
And that if you can't do everything, so if you were going to do that, you would have to let go of this kind of false sense that you're preparing people for jobs.
00:11:43
Speaker
And that doesn't even begin to get at what I think is the more fundamental question, which is, is school a place where kids develop a liking of
00:11:53
Speaker
for thinking and debating issues and deliberating over complex questions.
00:11:59
Speaker
And if you can't give them that liking for sort of higher order thinking, then you've lost whatever game you were playing.
00:12:11
Speaker
Thanks in advance.
00:12:37
Speaker
Kind of on the same lines, this is going to sound like a very obvious question, but I think it's worth mentioning.
00:12:43
Speaker
Why is it important that we focus on student well-being and curiosity and creativity rather than preparing them for the next step?
00:12:50
Speaker
So to preface that, I think about many educators who I had growing up or still maybe work with me, who say things like, well, they have to get used to it.
00:13:00
Speaker
Life isn't easy or they're going to appreciate it later.
00:13:03
Speaker
Or, you know, this is teaching them rigor and
00:13:05
Speaker
Or like a lot of times it's like code words for very like authoritarian do as I say and learn to live with it because that's how the world works.
00:13:13
Speaker
Right.
00:13:13
Speaker
Well, first of all, I think many people would now acknowledge that doing what you're told is a dangerous way for a society to function.
00:13:23
Speaker
If you have a whole society of people who are just doing what they're told, you're on the path to a terrible society, a society without invention, a society without democracy, a society without liberty, and ultimately a society without the ability to
00:13:41
Speaker
move on in any good way.
00:13:42
Speaker
So that would be terrible if we had a whole society filled with people who all they had been trained was to do what they were told.
00:13:50
Speaker
What most people, I think, would agree if they stopped and thought about it is that what you want are people who can think carefully about the way they live their life.
00:13:58
Speaker
make good choices, think about who they want governing society, and then also come up with good ideas and be innovative in the way that they solve problems, whether they're the immediate problems of the job they do or bigger problems of how their community can function or how their families should live or what they should do if they face a medical crisis.
00:14:18
Speaker
Those involve making informed decisions.
00:14:21
Speaker
And that's what you can learn to do in school.
00:14:24
Speaker
So to
00:14:25
Speaker
To cycle back to your question, you said, why should we care about things like curiosity and creativity and well-being in education instead of preparing for life?
00:14:36
Speaker
Or people who argue against that and say, well, what we need is to prepare these kids for life.
00:14:41
Speaker
Well, the first answer to that is if you were to really educate kids to feel curious and then pursue their curiosity and get interested in problems and then figure out how to solve those problems, you would be preparing them for life.
00:14:54
Speaker
I mean, if you did that well, you'd be preparing every single kid for a productive, thoughtful, civically engaged life.
00:15:01
Speaker
So we know as developmental psychologists that being curious is the reason why kids learn so much when they're sort of birth to three.
00:15:10
Speaker
That's why they're learning machines.
00:15:12
Speaker
And anybody who's been around a toddler knows that you can't keep them from exploring the world around them.
00:15:17
Speaker
So the real question for educators is how do we build on that?
00:15:21
Speaker
And what happens in many schools in this eagerness to train children in these narrow skills or to make them obedient is that we do the opposite.
00:15:29
Speaker
We turn that curiosity off, which is like turning off the engine to learning.
00:15:35
Speaker
Something that you wrote about in your book that I thought was really interesting was
00:15:40
Speaker
I believe that you gave either surveys out or you had teachers collect feedback from people and basically seeing what engagement was and found that essentially engagement didn't necessarily actually mean like students were asking questions about what they want to learn about or things of that nature.
00:15:57
Speaker
It was more, oh, they sat up straight and they looked.
00:15:59
Speaker
Yeah, I paid attention.
00:16:00
Speaker
Yeah.
00:16:00
Speaker
Compliant behavior.
00:16:01
Speaker
Do what you're told and you pay attention in many places.
00:16:05
Speaker
Grownups, if you, the child does that, if you see a child focused on their work in front of them and not fidgeting and not looking around and not wriggling, you often, a teacher or an educator will think, oh yeah, they're engaged.
00:16:19
Speaker
And probably what they really mean or what a psychologist would see is focus, which is important.
00:16:24
Speaker
It's not unimportant.
00:16:26
Speaker
And compliance, being able to follow rules.
00:16:28
Speaker
Again, not unimportant, but not the most important thing, because actually, if you flip this around and help a child...
00:16:36
Speaker
get really engaged, which is to be absorbed by something, to lose awareness of what's going on around you because you're so focused on the task, to have an internal sense or drive to learn more or achieve more with the project, whatever it is, then oftentimes children are focused, they do pay attention, and they're able to acknowledge or, you know, abide by rules.
00:17:01
Speaker
So engagement comes first, not after.
00:17:04
Speaker
And if you and like I said, developmental psychologists know this.
00:17:08
Speaker
I mean, watch any three year old who's wriggling around and looking around and shouting out or doing what three year olds do and then watch them get really absorbed in something they can.
00:17:19
Speaker
or rolling a ball or watching something fascinating that's going on outside the car window, they become totally absorbed and totally engaged.
00:17:28
Speaker
And that's what you want.
00:17:30
Speaker
So the thing that educators often forget is that what the school should do is build on natural development.
00:17:38
Speaker
not try to redirect it or thwart it.
00:17:41
Speaker
And that's what I'm arguing for in the book.
00:17:44
Speaker
So to go back to the question of curiosity or creativity and why those are important early on or well-being, it's because fostering those is the best foundation for the kinds of learning that are important later on.
00:18:00
Speaker
I mean, learning about mathematics or learning how to read a complex text or
00:18:04
Speaker
learning how to write software for a computer.
00:18:08
Speaker
It's not that those things are unimportant.
00:18:09
Speaker
It's just a question of what's the best way to get people able to do those things.
Convincing Stakeholders of Progressive Methods
00:18:14
Speaker
Yeah, and it's interesting too that it's kind of like once you take that very large step, all those solutions tend to fall in order.
00:18:21
Speaker
And that's essentially what you were just saying.
00:18:23
Speaker
It's very interesting.
00:18:24
Speaker
Like I used to be, I guess, quote unquote, the mean teacher, take my grading like super hyper seriously and everything was like always according to plan.
00:18:32
Speaker
Because that's just how as teachers you're typically taught, which is ironic because we were actually taught a lot about like frere and like push game to shove, make a lesson plan, do it this way.
00:18:40
Speaker
But ironically, I guess, and in a way,
00:18:43
Speaker
the second that we stopped giving out grades, students actually did more.
00:18:47
Speaker
It's just a matter of being okay with accepting that initial risk or that initial step that you might be afraid of taking, which actually builds into the question I would have for you, which is how do you go about convincing people that are used to the way that they were taught to teach or the way that they grew up and what is expected in a sense, maybe from their administrator or just the mantra of being a teacher?
00:19:11
Speaker
Because there's the idea like,
00:19:12
Speaker
You're a superhero teacher because you do this, this and this and you grade for four hours a day.
00:19:17
Speaker
How do you convince a coworker, convince an administrator that this is the direction that we should go?
00:19:23
Speaker
That's a really great question.
00:19:24
Speaker
And I've had some amazing experiences trying to figure that out.
00:19:28
Speaker
So one thing I notice is that if you just keep telling a teacher who's been trained in the way that you just described, you know, you should get kids to do things they're really interested in.
00:19:41
Speaker
You should loosen the reins a little.
00:19:43
Speaker
You should make the day a little more fluid, whatever.
00:19:48
Speaker
They don't listen because you're just giving them another set of instructions that are that
00:19:52
Speaker
might or might not replace the ones they've already been given.
00:19:55
Speaker
But there are two questions you can ask most teachers, teachers who actually like kids, and that's most teachers, I'm glad to say.
00:20:02
Speaker
There are two questions you can ask that often are very powerful.
00:20:06
Speaker
One is to ask them what their real, deep down in their heart of hearts, what's their goal for children educationally?
00:20:13
Speaker
Because no one will say that their goal is to get children all over the neighborhood or the state or the country
00:20:22
Speaker
to do math facts super quick or to spell a lot of words well or to learn how to identify the most important sentence in a paragraph.
00:20:31
Speaker
Because if people think about who's really well educated in their own lives, they will never say my uncle Noah because he can...
00:20:40
Speaker
do a math minute better than anybody I know.
00:20:43
Speaker
Or he can diagram a sentence like hell.
00:20:45
Speaker
If people don't think of that as what it means to be well-educated or to be an informed citizen, they'll say, you know, my Uncle Noah, because he's so thoughtful or he's so open to new experiences,
00:20:56
Speaker
Or he really knows how to put together information from different sources and come up with a new idea.
00:21:01
Speaker
So if they begin to think about what the real goal of education is, or my Aunt Marlene, because she really knows how to listen to people and think from other people's perspective.
00:21:11
Speaker
Another thing we value in the abstract is
00:21:14
Speaker
But if teachers get in touch with what they really think the goal of education is, and you work backwards from that, you say, okay, or maybe you have a more modest goal.
00:21:21
Speaker
Maybe you're a first grade teacher and you're real hard in your heart of hearts.
00:21:25
Speaker
Your goal is to get kids to love reading.
00:21:27
Speaker
So if you work bad, that's a great goal because it turns out if you love reading, the doors of schools are open to you forever.
00:21:36
Speaker
And there's no limit to what you can learn on your own if you love reading.
00:21:40
Speaker
So let's say that's a really great goal for a first or second grade teacher.
00:21:44
Speaker
If that's your goal and you work back from that, you will often see that the things you're actually doing again and again day after day are not things that will lead kids to love reading.
00:21:54
Speaker
If you think about, well, what does get a kid to love reading?
00:21:57
Speaker
Acting out stories, hearing stories read to them, having really good books.
00:22:01
Speaker
And the biggest number one thing is having a chance to actually read and enjoy the books that you're reading and
00:22:08
Speaker
If you think, okay, so if reading, a love of reading is my goal, and this is what we know from psychology are the steps.
00:22:16
Speaker
Oh, I left out the most important one.
00:22:18
Speaker
The biggest, most important factor in loving reading is, to begin with, the chance to have extended conversations.
00:22:24
Speaker
So if you thought to yourself, okay, so if I'm a really great first grade teacher, I will give my students a lot of chance to have a conversation.
00:22:32
Speaker
suddenly that makes sense because you think, well, we know that's what leads to reading.
00:22:36
Speaker
And we know that the real purpose of kindergarten and first grade or kindergarten to a second grade is to get kids to be readers.
00:22:42
Speaker
Suddenly what seemed like a radical, crazy idea doesn't seem that radical or crazy.
00:22:45
Speaker
It seems like the best path to achieving your goal.
00:22:50
Speaker
So that's one question you can ask is what's your real goal here?
00:22:54
Speaker
And then to work backwards from that.
00:22:56
Speaker
The other thing that I think works incredibly well, and I've seen it happen, I've seen it look like someone was
00:23:01
Speaker
turning a light on in their brain is when you ask teachers.
00:23:06
Speaker
And again, I say it's important that they love kids.
00:23:09
Speaker
If they don't love kids, none of this is going to work.
00:23:11
Speaker
But if they love kids and you ask them to think about the times in their classroom when kids are trying their hardest and really engaged and going through some kind of change, you know, understanding something that they didn't understand, able to do something they couldn't do before, working at a higher level than they have,
00:23:31
Speaker
previously, they will begin to identify the times in the day that are not necessarily what they've been told to do with students, but the times when kids are doing things that matter to them, that seem to have meaning, that captivate children as real children, captivate them the way that they really are, as imaginative, as physical, as social beings.
00:23:54
Speaker
And they can
Rethinking Standardized Testing and Assessments
00:23:55
Speaker
build on that.
00:23:55
Speaker
You know, I had a teacher, I wrote about this in my most recent book.
00:23:59
Speaker
I had a teacher write to me
00:24:01
Speaker
He was, this was high school and he was talking about, I think he might've been a physics teacher and he taught really like the high level classes in his school.
00:24:09
Speaker
But he said, the kids, you know, they're just doing it because they were told they have to, or because they want to get a good score on their AP or whatever.
00:24:15
Speaker
He said, but I watch them after school in the after school program that I teach.
00:24:20
Speaker
And that's when they're most engaged.
00:24:22
Speaker
Then I can't stop them.
00:24:23
Speaker
They love it so much.
00:24:24
Speaker
I think it was a robotics class or something.
00:24:27
Speaker
And he said, what do I do?
00:24:29
Speaker
And I said, bring that into the school day.
00:24:31
Speaker
If you know that's what makes the kids work their hardest and think their best, why wouldn't you do that during the day?
00:24:37
Speaker
And he said, OK, I will.
00:24:39
Speaker
But it just took
00:24:41
Speaker
Getting him to think about his own experience and his own observations of children.
00:24:44
Speaker
I mean, nobody knows kids as well as teachers do.
00:24:47
Speaker
And nobody has the teacher's repertoire for thinking of things that are going to be engaging and challenging to kids.
00:24:55
Speaker
It's more a matter of letting them use that in the classroom.
00:24:58
Speaker
And too often they're not allowed to use their wealth of expertise and knowledge of kids.
00:25:04
Speaker
So feel so gross to ask this question every single time.
00:25:07
Speaker
But I know that if someone were listening to this or if you were talking at a conference and someone brought up a question, the first thing is going to be, well, what about standardized tests?
00:25:16
Speaker
What about SLOs or, you know, your learning objectives or whatever policy?
00:25:21
Speaker
An SLO.
00:25:22
Speaker
I don't know if that's just an Ohio thing.
00:25:24
Speaker
It's a student learning objective.
00:25:25
Speaker
So it's just basically.
00:25:26
Speaker
No, it's not.
00:25:27
Speaker
I just didn't know the initials.
00:25:28
Speaker
It's more it's goes beyond Ohio.
00:25:30
Speaker
Okay, cool.
00:25:30
Speaker
Then this will be relevant then.
00:25:32
Speaker
So, you know, your pre-test, post-test and, you know, seeing growth over time and all these things that tend to get bogged down at the end of the day and just taking a strict multiple choice test or something created by a robot or something that really has no relevance outside of for adults to track data so they feel good about themselves.
00:25:50
Speaker
How do you convince someone that's become just so attached to that mattering?
00:25:56
Speaker
Like, I think, for example, like a lot of times we'll talk about this at work.
00:25:59
Speaker
Well, yeah, but they're going to see our test scores.
00:26:01
Speaker
People are going to want to come to the school anymore or they're going to think we're not doing a good job.
00:26:04
Speaker
So at the end of the day, we really to make sure those test scores matter.
00:26:08
Speaker
And a lot of times that just leads to doubling down on traditional policies back to basics.
00:26:13
Speaker
How do we go about convincing people to basically bite the bullet on standardized testing?
00:26:18
Speaker
Well, if I had the answer to that question.
00:26:20
Speaker
Well, I'd have some great prize or a lot of money that I don't have.
00:26:24
Speaker
I mean, it's a very complex question.
00:26:27
Speaker
One way, and I talk about this in The End of the Rainbow, is to come up with alternative measures of the things you do value.
00:26:35
Speaker
So as I say in that book, we measure what we value and we value what we measure.
00:26:40
Speaker
Most teachers, if they're asked and they're being honest, they're
00:26:44
Speaker
will say that they don't really think standardized tests measure what they do, the most important stuff they do.
00:26:50
Speaker
And most of them will agree that it doesn't capture the most meaningful thing about their students.
00:26:55
Speaker
So the question and then they're stuck.
00:26:58
Speaker
So they're measuring one thing, but valuing a different thing.
00:27:01
Speaker
That's how I started my research on curiosity.
00:27:03
Speaker
I began to think, well, if teachers, which teachers often told me what they really cared about was not a standardized test score, but a child's love of learning or their curiosity or their interest in the world around them or their hunger for information.
00:27:16
Speaker
And then I think, OK, that's what they really value.
00:27:19
Speaker
But what they're measuring and what they're being measured by is
00:27:23
Speaker
is our tests that look at something completely different.
00:27:26
Speaker
And my impulse, this was like 14 years ago now or 15 years ago, was, okay, so let's come up with a measure of the thing we do value.
00:27:34
Speaker
Let's measure curiosity.
00:27:35
Speaker
And, you know, that led me on a 15-year odyssey to try to measure curiosity.
00:27:40
Speaker
So that's a whole other story about how I got involved in that work.
00:27:43
Speaker
But I would argue, and I have had this conversation with school people all over the country, that one of the things a school can do is say, okay, we'll let them do the standardized test because we have no choice.
00:27:55
Speaker
That's mandated and someone's going to look at those scores.
00:27:58
Speaker
And they're going to read too much into it, but that's their problem.
00:28:01
Speaker
But meanwhile, let's measure the things we care about.
00:28:04
Speaker
And you can measure them.
00:28:06
Speaker
The idea that the only thing you can measure is the thing that's on a standardized test.
00:28:10
Speaker
First of all, a standardized test, that's a meaningless phrase in and of itself.
00:28:14
Speaker
It just means a test where you've come up statistically with a norm of how kids of a certain age or whatever, how they generally do so that you can compare each individual or an individual group of kids to that
00:28:28
Speaker
norm.
00:28:29
Speaker
You could do that for any number of tests and it doesn't have to actually be a paper and pencil test.
00:28:33
Speaker
It could be something else.
00:28:35
Speaker
But holding aside the standardized piece of that, let's just think about the things that are generally measured on those tests.
00:28:42
Speaker
They're fairly meaningless things.
00:28:44
Speaker
Like I said, like how to
00:28:46
Speaker
summarize something buried in the paragraph or how to do a lot of math problems very quickly.
00:28:52
Speaker
One of the things that's never measured in those math tests is whether you actually do use math to think about things that you need to think about, like how to find an address, to use a great example by the educational researcher Daniel Koretz, which
00:29:07
Speaker
He was with a group of mathematicians and other college professors, and they were in New York City trying to find an address, and they couldn't figure out how to find the address because they didn't realize they could use algebra.
00:29:18
Speaker
to solve the problems.
00:29:19
Speaker
We never measure people's disposition to use math, not only to solve practical problems, but to solve more complex abstract problems about the nature of the world around them.
00:29:29
Speaker
So you could come up with a test that would look at something like that.
00:29:33
Speaker
Or to take another example, since we know as developmental psychologists that extended conversations with children is the
00:29:46
Speaker
specific kinds of formal education later on, why don't we measure the conversations that are going on in classrooms?
00:29:53
Speaker
And again, you can't do that with a paper and pencil test, but you can collect data on that.
00:29:57
Speaker
Psychologists do it all the time.
00:29:59
Speaker
Record conversations and analyze them for depth and complexity and
00:30:04
Speaker
cooperation.
00:30:06
Speaker
So there are ways to measure the things that people like you and I might really value in an educational setting.
00:30:13
Speaker
A child's ability to identify interesting problems in the world around them and then try to solve those problems.
00:30:18
Speaker
That's something you could measure.
00:30:21
Speaker
You can measure helping and cooperation.
00:30:24
Speaker
And that's a long-winded way of saying that one thing I do think that people like us need to do is come up with a measure of the things that we value, because it will never fly.
00:30:35
Speaker
It will not be acceptable in society in 2018 or beyond to say, well, we care about certain things, but we're not going to measure them.
00:30:42
Speaker
We just want you to trust us with your children.
00:30:45
Speaker
That's not going to happen.
00:30:46
Speaker
So
00:30:46
Speaker
Yeah, that's a really good point.
00:30:47
Speaker
I've never thought about it that way in terms of the fact that researchers obviously look at these things.
00:30:52
Speaker
So why would that not factor in?
00:30:53
Speaker
That makes a lot of sense now that you mention it.
00:30:55
Speaker
So, yeah, and for people listening to your podcast who doubt that,
00:30:59
Speaker
they should think back to the most recent article they read, and I'm sure if they read magazines or newspapers, and I hope they do, that they've read in recent years about things like how people sort of control their appetite for dieting or what makes people fall in love or why some people gamble impulsively or what unconscious bias is.
00:31:22
Speaker
So these are things that psychologists figured out how to measure.
00:31:25
Speaker
And most of us accept the findings of that research.
00:31:29
Speaker
We trust that psychologists have figured out how to measure all these subtle, invisible, complex phenomena.
00:31:35
Speaker
So why wouldn't we be able to measure things like whether a child likes books or explores the world around her?
00:31:42
Speaker
or is able to engage in a complex conversation.
Implementing Small Changes for Engagement
00:31:45
Speaker
Those are not very hard to measure.
00:31:47
Speaker
And in fact, in all those examples, we already have ways to measure them.
00:31:51
Speaker
We don't even have to come up with the method.
00:31:53
Speaker
We just have to think about how to use it in a school setting.
00:31:56
Speaker
Kind of moving into, I guess, actually really like a final question.
00:32:00
Speaker
I guess this is subtly a very grandiose question, which is basically...
00:32:05
Speaker
What would be something that a teacher listening into this today could do tomorrow in their classroom that would make that much of a difference?
00:32:15
Speaker
Not something that would require a lot of planning or something that would be like, whoa, I can't do that right now.
00:32:21
Speaker
I read a whole book on that.
00:32:23
Speaker
What could be something they could just do?
00:32:25
Speaker
What a great question.
00:32:27
Speaker
First of all, I want to say that I love that question because
00:32:31
Speaker
Because I love the idea that teachers can try some of the ideas that we're talking about without having to cause a revolution in their school or throw out everything they already do or, you know, change everything.
00:32:45
Speaker
I don't think that's realistic and I don't think it's necessary.
00:32:47
Speaker
A lot of teachers are doing a lot of good stuff.
00:32:50
Speaker
in their classroom already, or they're doing stuff they must do.
00:32:55
Speaker
And that's fair enough.
00:32:56
Speaker
So I love the idea that you could do a little of this in your classroom and see how it goes and not make a big deal of it, but just find out if it engages kids and leads to something good academically.
00:33:09
Speaker
They could do two things.
00:33:10
Speaker
they could start paying attention to what really absorbs their students and then try to do a little more of it.
00:33:16
Speaker
It might be story time.
00:33:18
Speaker
It might be a particular kind of project.
00:33:20
Speaker
It might be a chance to investigate natural materials.
00:33:26
Speaker
It might be a chance to design their own experiments.
00:33:29
Speaker
It might be a chance just to have interesting arguments with one another over time.
00:33:35
Speaker
you know, important topics or to work together in groups that the teacher doesn't form for them.
00:33:40
Speaker
So they could just pay attention to what engages their students and then try to do a little more of it.
00:33:46
Speaker
That's one thing they could do.
00:33:48
Speaker
Another thing is if they already know something that their kids, their students find very absorbing, set aside 20 minutes, 30 minutes a day when they're just going to let devote themselves and their kids time to that thing.
00:34:02
Speaker
And again, it could be just reading books.
00:34:04
Speaker
It could be having conversations.
00:34:06
Speaker
It could be some topic that the kids are fascinated by.
00:34:10
Speaker
And just give it a little time.
00:34:12
Speaker
And even that can feel scary.
00:34:14
Speaker
You use the word risk.
00:34:15
Speaker
It can feel risky and costly, but it's not that big a risk.
00:34:19
Speaker
And
00:34:20
Speaker
There are untold payoffs to doing that in terms of what a teacher will learn about what works in their classroom and what their kids respond well to.
00:34:28
Speaker
The second thing I would say is teachers, if they're listening to your podcast, they're already doing this, I guess, but they could read one new thing about school.
00:34:39
Speaker
this approach to education that might give them some ideas or some bolster an argument or give them a new way of thinking about something.
00:34:47
Speaker
People underestimate the power of having a good way of thinking about something.
00:34:52
Speaker
So if as a teacher, you have a hunch about how you want to do things, and then you read what some, you know, interesting educator has written about it or psychologist or, you know, parent or whatever, it can really transform how you see your classroom and
00:35:07
Speaker
Seeing your classroom in a different way can lead to very good things.
00:35:11
Speaker
Exactly.
00:35:11
Speaker
And that speaks to the heart of my shift.
00:35:14
Speaker
After I started thinking about it, I just read one book, like an Alfie Kohn book, for example.
00:35:17
Speaker
And I was like, whoa, wait, there's so much information on this.
00:35:22
Speaker
And you can kind of go down the rabbit hole from there.
00:35:24
Speaker
There's shockingly not a lot of research that supports, I guess, quote unquote, the other side, if that's what you want to call it, like the very traditional notion, at least not those that support learning rather than just increasing your test scores.
00:35:35
Speaker
At least how that data correlates, if that makes sense.
00:35:37
Speaker
That's a great point.
00:35:38
Speaker
So I have a lot of colleagues who are some of them are developmental psychologists, but some of them are cognitive psychologists who study some very narrow thing about learning, like study habits for students.
00:35:50
Speaker
What makes you learn more, quote unquote?
00:35:53
Speaker
Your listeners won't see my little finger quotation, but whenever I ask them, well, what's learning in that study?
00:36:01
Speaker
What do you mean by learning?
00:36:02
Speaker
They will say, well, of course, it's an experiment.
00:36:05
Speaker
So what we mean is you hear a list of words and you can repeat them back one day later or one week later, or you hear some facts and you remember them in two weeks.
00:36:16
Speaker
And most people who do that kind of research are themselves highly educated and will at some point say, of course, that's not the most important thing about school.
00:36:25
Speaker
It's not what they would want their kids to be experiencing in school.
00:36:28
Speaker
And that goes back to what you just said, which is the research that supports the efficacy of certain study habits or the value of
00:36:38
Speaker
drilling kids on certain skills.
00:36:40
Speaker
They can show that in the lab and they'll stand by that, but very few of them would support that as an educational practice because they themselves wouldn't value that in their own educational experiences or the experiences they would want for their children.
00:36:54
Speaker
So I think you're right that there isn't a lot.
00:36:58
Speaker
There's plenty of research to support individual tools for getting kids to memorize things or become more obedient.
00:37:06
Speaker
But when you put all that together, even the researchers, most of them wouldn't argue that that in and of itself points the way to a good educational model.
00:37:16
Speaker
Most of the things that are done in school that aren't very good for kids these days are not based on good research.
00:37:22
Speaker
They're based on one little adjustment at a time to a series of social and political and economic events that no one really thought through, which is how we landed with this sort of ungainly and oppressive system that doesn't really work for children, but everyone feels locked in by it.
00:37:43
Speaker
Thanks again.