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Ed. note: Much like AHTR, but non-art history specific, Purposeful Pedagogy is a grassroots peer-led group that actively supports pedagogical inquiry for higher education teachers. PP is specifically geared towards providing support for graduate students who are teaching for the first time in a university setting, aiming to train junior teachers across disciplines at the university level. After attending the first annual meeting PP held at the CUNY Graduate Center last year, AHTR thought a word from their organizers-PhD students and faculty from Urban Education and Sociology disciplines across CUNY campuses-might be of interest to the AHTR community.

What follows will be especially helpful for anyone who is just getting started with their teaching practice. If you're an advanced or senior member of faculty in your department, you may want to consider sharing this resource (along with a copy of John Bean's Engaging Ideas - which should be every first-time teacher's life belt!) with graduate teaching fellows and teaching assistants. The Purposeful Pedagogy resources book can be found here, and, if you're NYC-based, they're offering a free workshops throughout the spring semester (more info here, and below).
Guest Author: Jonathan Ryan Davis
Most doctoral students enter the classroom without any formal teaching experience or pedagogical training. Instead, they are often provided, at best, a quick orientation that offers tricks before entering the undergrad classroom as teachers. As a result, graduate students begin teaching without any support or training to help them be successful. Not only does this do a disservice to the graduate student teaching the course, but to the students in their courses as well. To begin addressing this problem, a group of former public school teachers, experienced graduate student adjuncts, and concerned full-time faculty formed a group to address the lack of time committed to assisting graduate students new to teaching. We were frustrated with the lack of teaching support provided to us and our peers at the Graduate Center and wanted a venue to share our experiences and expertise with others so they could enter the classroom better prepared and more confident. This resulted in the creation of the Purposeful Pedagogy Workshop.

In designing the workshop, we tried to brainstorm what pedagogical foundation new teachers would need before entering the classroom and what was feasible to provide these individuals in a one-day workshop. We knew that one cannot teach someone how to teach in a day; but we realized there are basic principles that every new teacher should understand before entering the classroom. After much dialogue, we settled on the concept of Backwards Planning, which is outlined in much more detailed by Wiggins and McTighe in their book Understanding By Design (2005).

The basic premise behind Backwards Planning is that a teacher should begin the planning of their course, lessons, and activities by thinking about the end goal they want their students to learn or accomplish. In other words, the first step a teacher should take when preparing a course is solidifying what they want their students to learn by the end of the course. Once that is established, the teacher can then think about how they will assess whether students have learned that information and how they will specifically teach the content to help students achieve these goals.

Using Backwards Planning as a framework for the workshop, we created three core sessions on: planning syllabi and lessons, implementing lessons, and assessments. In each session, we tried to provide novice instructors with basic templates and samples that they could translate directly to their classrooms. However, since the goal of the workshop was, and is, to help prepare new teachers for the classroom and to ease the natural fear of teaching for the first time, we did not want to design sessions that relied solely on lecture. Instead, each session was crafted to integrate hands-on collaboration and application of the concepts taught. As organizers and facilitators, we understood that each new instructor has something to bring to the table and different experiences; therefore, we wanted to give people an opportunity to learn from one another and test out the strategies we were introducing. This created a very collaborative atmosphere where students were able to openly bounce ideas off one another and question, critique, and try the ideas presented by the facilitators.

For instance, in our "Planning" session, we provided participants with a Syllabus and Lesson Plan Graphic Organizer for helping plan a course syllabus for the first time. It begins with determining the main goal of the unit. Then, there is a space to brainstorm ideas before clustering those ideas into themes.

Next, it asks the teacher to think of the learning outcomes and assessments for each theme. From there, one can think of the readings that best apply to each theme. Lastly, the teacher can organize the themes and sub-themes into a practical sequence where ideas from one lesson build onto the next. During the session, the student-teachers worked with one another to fill out this graphic organizer for a fictitious course in their subject area to practice how they might craft their own syllabus. We then shared and critiqued students' work to evaluate what would work well in their future classes and why.

One of the fantastic things about our workshops the last couple years is that we have drawn from nearly 25 different departments at the Graduate Center. This shows the interest and need for pedagogical instruction and also has challenged us to create a full day of curricula that could apply to Art History, Economics, Theater, and Chemistry alike. We feel we were able to do this, but continue to tweak, adapt, and improve our content as we prepare for our Third Annual Purposeful Pedagogy Workshop, scheduled for March 7 th, 2014 (email and registration to be sent out next week, or contact kyla.benderbaird [at] gmail [dot] com.)

If you are interested in looking at the materials we provided participants in our Second Annual Workshop, you can go to our website (which is under construction and will be in better shape in a month-ignore the dates up there just now!). Just look for "Purposeful Pedagogy Workshop Binder": http://opencuny.org/purposefulpedagogy/

In addition to creating a full day workshop with basic templates, samples, and strategies for teachers, our hope in facilitating Purposeful Pedagogy is to create a community of passionate educators who can collaboratively work to improve their craft. That is why, for the past couple years, we have held monthly follow-up sessions to the workshop where we focus on one specific issue raised by graduate students and provide a venue where we can all come together to break down issues individuals are having to improve their and our craft. We understand that teaching (like learning) is an evolving process; we must challenge one another to continue to reflect and grow on our practice. To do this, we need to feel comfortable asking others for help and advice. Purposeful Pedagogy hopes to provide a venue where that can start.

While not all doctoral students will adjunct, most are seeking a career in academia. Therefore, it is critical that we start to think of ourselves not just as researchers, but as educators as well. This has not been the predominant mentality across academia; but it could be. We hope that our work with Purposeful Pedagogy can be a step in that direction.
Works Cited: Wiggins, G. & McTighe, J.(2005). Understanding by Design. Expanded 2nd Ed. USA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

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Teaching for the first time? Read "Purposeful Pedagogy"

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Ed. note: Much like AHTR, but non-art history specific, Purposeful Pedagogy is a grassroots peer-led group that actively supports pedagogical inquiry for higher education teachers. PP is specifically geared towards providing support for graduate students who are teaching for the first time in a university setting, aiming to train junior teachers across disciplines at the university level.

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What standardized tests should be measuring | Rob Brisk | TEDxColumbus

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What's the highest calling of higher education? St. John's College has some enduring answers.

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Students discussing Hegel's "Phenomenology of Spirit" in a seminar at St. John's College in Santa Fe, N.M. Credit Credit Adria Malcolm for The New York Times

SANTA FE, N.M. - Have I got a college for you. For your first two years, your regimen includes ancient Greek. And I do mean Greek, the language, not Greece, the civilization, though you'll also hang with Aristotle, Aeschylus, Thucydides and the rest of the gang. There's no choice in the matter. There's little choice, period.

Let your collegiate peers elsewhere design their own majors and frolic with Kerouac. For you it's Kant. You have no major, only "the program," an exploration of the Western canon that was implemented in 1937 and has barely changed.

It's intense. Learning astronomy and math, you don't merely encounter Copernicus's conclusions. You pore over his actual words. You're not simply introduced to the theory of relativity. You read "Relativity," the book that Albert Einstein wrote.

Diversions are limited. There's no swimming team. No pool. The dorms are functional; same goes for the dining. You're not here for banh mi. You're here for Baudelaire.

[Go beyond the headlines and behind the curtain with my candid reflections on politics, culture, higher education and more every week. Sign up for my newsletter.]
I'm talking about St. John's College, which was founded in 1696 in Annapolis, Md., is the third-oldest college in America and, between its campus there and the one here, has about 775 undergraduates. And I'm drawing attention to it because it's an increasingly exotic and important holdout against so many developments in higher education - the stress on vocational training, the treatment of students as fickle consumers, the elevation of individualism over a shared heritage - that have gone too far. It's a necessary tug back in the other direction.

I'm not saying that most students would take to it or that other schools should mimic it. The degree to which "the program" omits the intellectual contributions of women and people of color troubles me. But many schools would be wise to consider and better integrate its philosophy, which Walter Sterling, the dean of the Santa Fe campus, recently explained to me.

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Walter Sterling, the dean of the Santa Fe campus, left, and Mark Roosevelt, Santa Fe president, at St. John's College. Credit Adria Malcolm for The New York Times

"Your work and career are a part of your life," he said when I met with him and the Santa Fe president, Mark Roosevelt. "Education should prepare you for all of your life. It should make you a more thoughtful, reflective, self-possessed and authentic citizen, lover, partner, parent and member of the global economy." I love that assessment - the precision, balance and sweep of it.

And what better idiom for the instruction that he's describing than the classics? What better mooring? They're the foundation of so many of America's ideals and institutions. They're the through line from yesterday to tomorrow.

I visited St. John's out of respect for its orneriness and because it's making an announcement this week that's consistent with its mission of pushing back against the fashionable norm. For the academic year that begins in the fall of 2019, it's lowering its yearly tuition to $35,000 from $52,000, a change that recognizes how wildly the cost of college has risen and how few students pay the sticker price anyway.

St. John's College, founded in 1696, focuses on the classics. Credit Photographs by Adria Malcolm for The New York Times

The Santa Fe campus.

Some colleges keep that figure high, even if it scares away a few prospects, partly because it validates their prestige. Then they dole out deals, often regardless of need. It's a capricious, confusing and demoralizing process.

"We've resisted almost every trend in higher education that we consider naughty," Roosevelt told me, but they surrendered to what he called "prestige pricing" - until now.

St. John's wants more comers than it gets; this price cut may help. But the college also means to be a model of financial accessibility as well as of rigorous intellectualism. To stay flush, it's conducting a major fund-raising campaign, begun without any announcement two years ago, to raise $300 million by 2023. An alumnus, Warren Winiarski, the founder of the Stag's Leap winery, has agreed to match up to $50 million of contributions.

The St. John's method isn't cheap. No class is larger than 20 students; even so, some have two "tutors," which is what professors are called. They steer winding, soulful discussions that demand engagement. I eavesdropped on several. Three dynamics stood out.

The first was how articulate the students were. Something wonderful happens when you read this ambitiously and wallow in this many words. You become agile with them.

A St. John's freshman reading Homer's "Odyssey." Credit Adria Malcolm for The New York Times

The second was the students' focus. A group discussing Homer's "Iliad" spent more than 10 minutes on the phrase - the idea - of someone having his "fill of weeping." If digital devices and social media yank people from one trumpet blast to the next, St. John's trains them to hold a note - to caress it, pull at it, see what it can withstand and what it's worth.

The third dynamic was their humility. They weren't wedded to their initial opinions. They weren't allowed to be. And they moved not toward the best answer but toward better questions. In the "Iliad" and in life, is there any catharsis in revenge? Any resolution in death? Does grief end or just pause? Do wars?

Jack Isenberg, a senior, told me that St. John's had taught him how much is unknowable. "We have to be comfortable in ambiguity," he said.

What a gift. What an education.
I invite you to sign up for my free weekly email newsletter. You can follow me on Twitter (@FrankBruni).

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Opinion | The Most Contrarian College in America

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What's the highest calling of higher education? St. John's College has some enduring answers. SANTA FE, N.M. - Have I got a college for you. For your first two years, your regimen includes ancient Greek. And I do mean Greek, the language, not Greece, the civilization, though you'll also hang with Aristotle, Aeschylus, Thucydides and the rest of the gang.

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The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.
-George Steiner

Photographer Bill Hayes wrote a nice essay about Oliver Sacks' love of words, and he's been posting images of Sacks' hand-annotated books on Twitter:

Sacks " loved to write notes on the pages of books he was reading - thoughts, ideas, arguments with the author, diagrams." What a delight it must be to go through such a library (of 500+ books) and see Sacks' raw thoughts in margins and endpapers:

This is, of course, an ancient practice called marginalia. (A nice, short read on the subject is Mark O'Connell's piece, " The Marginal Obsession With Marginalia.")

I believe that the first step towards becoming a writer is becoming a reader, but the next step is becoming a reader with a pencil. When you underline and circle and jot down your questions and argue in the margins, you're existing in this interesting middle ground between reader and writer:

Patricia Lockwood put it this way:

There's a way of reading that is like writing. You feel in collaboration... You have a pen in your hand, you're going along in a way that's, like, half creating it as you go. And you're also strip-mining it for anything you can use... you're sifting for what could be gold.

Panning for gold, or "shopping for images," as Allen Ginsberg puts it in " A Supermarket in California."

Sometimes marginalia is the next best thing to punching an author in the face. I'm a huge fan of Sam Anderson's " A Year in Marginalia" in which he posts snapshots of his marginal comments:

The writing I enjoy doing most, every year, is marginalia: spontaneous bursts of pure, private response to whatever book happens to be in front of me. It's the most intimate, complete, and honest form of criticism possible - not the big wide-angle aerial shot you get from an official review essay, but a moment-by-moment record of what a book actually feels like to the actively reading brain.

Whether you're panning for gold or slinging shit at a dead man, marginalia turns reading into writing. (See Billy Collins' poem.) My friend John T. Unger once said to me, "Every piece of art I've ever made was because I saw bad and could do better, or saw great and needed to catch up."

In Sam Anderson's " What I Really Want Is Someone Rolling Around in the Text," he points out that marginalia used to be more of a social practice:

[P]eople would mark up books for one another as gifts, or give pointedly annotated novels to potential lovers.... Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the undisputed all-time champion of marginalia, flourished at the tail end of this period, and his friends were always begging him to mark up their books. He eventually published some of his own marginalia, and in the process even popularized the word "marginalia" - a self-consciously pompous Latinism intended to mock the triviality of the form.

I own books that were marked up by my father-in-law and my wife when they were in high school. Reading through them is like a kind of time travel - get to visit with them in the past. Sometimes I imagine my kids reading one of my books and coming across a note from me...

I love this idea of marginalia as a way to turn a book into a medium for conversation - a kind of literary note-passing. G.K. Chesterton's once went through a friend's newly-published book of aphorisms and answered each one with his pencil. (It was later published as Platitudes Undone.) Sam Anderson and David Rees wrote notes to each other in a copy of Dan Brown's Inferno. J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst actually used handwritten marginalia as a device in their novel, Ship of Theseus. (I was delighted to see readers swapping their marginalia for my book, Show Your Work!)

Finally, marginalia is a way of really owning your books and your reading experience. Here's Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren in their classic, How To Read A Book:

Full ownership of a book only comes when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it - which comes to the same thing - is by writing in it. Why is marking a book indispensable to reading it? First, it keeps you awake - not merely conscious, but wide awake. Second, reading, if it is active, is thinking, and thinking tends to express itself in words, spoken or written. The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks. Third, writing your reactions down helps you to remember the thoughts of the author. Reading a book should be a conversation between you and the author....Marking a book is literally an expression of your differences or your agreements...It is the highest respect you can pay him.

Read with a pencil! (I recommend Blackwing Palaminos.)

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The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.

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Advice

iStock

A couple of weeks after the end of my first semester of teaching as the instructor of record, I received "the packet" in my campus mailbox - an interoffice envelope stuffed with course evaluations from my students. Those evaluations mattered a lot to me at the time, as I was still figuring out this whole teaching thing. Was I doing a good job? Did my students like the class? And, more selfishly, did they like me?

Well, in this particular batch, one student certainly did not like either the course or me. In the comments section, the student flatly declared: "He was a real ashole."

The spelling in that quote is sic. In that moment - as I wrestled with both the shame of being deemed an "ashole" and the urge to laugh at the absurdity of that being the sum total of this student's assessment - I had my first experience with a question that faculty members regularly confront:

Do student course evaluations even matter?

Of course, the short answer is that they do, at least to the people who make the decisions about our futures in academe. Department chairs, deans, promotion-and-tenure committees - all of them and more use student evaluations to determine whether or not we are "good teachers," and, more consequentially, whether we should continue to teach on the campus.

I've never been completely comfortable with the weight those forms are accorded - neither when I was a department chair evaluating part-time faculty colleagues nor in my current role helping colleagues interpret the feedback they receive in their own course evaluations. At best, student evaluations of teaching are a flawed instrument; at worst, they're a cudgel used against faculty members, many of whom already occupy precarious positions.

In some departments, student evaluations are one part of a larger set of evidence used to assess teaching performance. But elsewhere they make up the bulk - if not the totality - of that evidence. We all know that the race and gender of faculty members can affect how their teaching is evaluated. And we've all heard horror stories of instructors who had consistently good ratings, except for that one outlier comment seized on by the promotion committee and used against the instructor. Some of us have lived those horror stories ourselves. As the psychologist Abraham Maslow famously observed, if the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail. This is a particularly apt description of the problems that can inhere in the faculty-evaluation process.

So we know student evaluations matter. Perhaps the better question is: Should they? Given their many demonstrable and potential flaws, why would we still use them to gather feedback on teaching and learning? It turns out the answer is more complicated than appearances suggest.

Certainly, students are not experts qualified to evaluate us on, say, whether we used the best and most applicable course readings. But they are experts on what they experienced and learned in a course, and they ought to have a voice. Just because their feedback is sometimes misused doesn't mean it's invalid or unnecessary.

In fact, course evaluations - despite their many problematic elements - may still provide the most accurate information available on teaching effectiveness. Elizabeth Barre, whose research into student evaluations - in particular, the metastudies of the subject - is essential reading, observed that "we have not yet been able to find an alternative measure of teaching effectiveness that correlates as strongly with student learning. In other words, they may be imperfect measures, but they are also our best measures."

And therein lies the rub: We need to assess teaching, and we often have to rely on not the best, but the least worst, option.

What does that mean, though, for the individual instructor opening a packets of evaluations at the end of a semester? What can we do with the results of these flawed instruments, as they aren't going anywhere anytime soon (and certainly not before our next portfolio review)? What follows are some suggestions - for individuals and institutions - on how we can use these tools constructively and appropriately, as opposed to employing them like Maslow's hammer.

One's an accident, two's a trend, three's a problem. Whenever I receive a batch of course evaluations, I immediately scan the comments left by the students. Only later do I look at the quantitative data summarizing the entire class. I know I'm not alone in that habit, and it's a natural reaction to want to see what our students actually said about the course - and about us.

But it's also hazardous. If you're anything like me, once you see a negative comment, it's over. It's like when a toddler pees in the pool; it only takes a small amount to ruin the whole thing. I could get a whole section's worth of rave reviews, but if there was one nasty comment, that's what I'm going to obsess over. It's as if the rest of the ratings didn't exist.

We need to avoid that trap. We wouldn't want our department chair or the tenure committee to seize on one isolated data point to characterize our entire teaching performance, so we shouldn't do that to ourselves, either. Look for trends, not outliers.

And don't ignore the quantitative results, either, as they can tell us a lot. For example, if in response to a question on the overall quality of the instructor, you see that 90 percent of your class responded with "good" or "excellent," then that one comment about how "awful" you were gets put into its proper place. Anecdotal data are not representative. It's the trends (perhaps most of the students said they would have appreciated more guidance on a particular assignment, for example) that tell us where to focus our energy. The whole point of feedback is to help us become better teachers, and we can't get there by obsessing about outliers instead of reflecting on the representative trends and aggregate results.

Don't take it personally. That's easy to say when you're not the one students are calling "ashole." As hard as it is to do in practice, though, we cannot let anonymous rants become a referendum on our personal worth.

Teaching is a difficult gig for many reasons, but chief among them is the degree to which we tend to tie our sense of identity and self-worth into our classroom performance. Because of that, we may lack the critical distance necessary to reflect honestly about our own pedagogy. Student comments can be mean - sometimes unintentionally and other times most definitely on purpose. Likewise, quantitative ratings can be lower on the Likert scale than we were prepared to see. And it hurts. Believe me, I know.

It's hard to take the long view in that situation, but it's essential to make the attempt. No one is a perfect teacher, and what works great one semester can bomb the next. The key to improving is to be, as Stephen Brookfield put it, a "critically reflective" practitioner. If all we take from a batch of evaluations is "I'm awful," or "I'll never be a good teacher," then we can't properly do the reflective work to diagnose what went awry and course-correct for the next time.

What story does this data really tell? Sometimes a course just goes badly. We don't teach at our best. Maybe there's a clutch of hostile students in class. Or maybe we got inserted as instructor at the last minute and couldn't prepare as well as usual. There are plenty of factors that can help explain negative evaluations, if we're honest.

We need to remember that data acquires meaning only through context. Every set of data has a story. When we interpret the results of our course evaluations, we should be thinking about the ways we'll tell our story - because if we don't, someone else will. That means taking advantage of whatever vehicles exist to help us both present our ratings and place them in the proper context. For example, as part of the evaluation process, some institutions ask faculty members to write a narrative, which would be an ideal spot to discuss the factors shaping the course-evaluation results. Another opportunity may arise via direct conversations with whomever is conducting our evaluation.

At some point we all must advocate for our own teaching. Was a course particularly difficult to manage? Did students chafe at the amount of reading or writing involved? Were there issues that affected the classroom dynamic? Was it a class that students traditionally dislike, or see as intimidating? Those and a host of other factors can affect student perceptions of the course. It's critical that we understand and are able to articulate that larger context to others.

It may feel like we're merely rationalizing, but abandon that mind-set. Honest advocacy of our teaching is not an exercise in excuse-making; it's making sure that the process works like it's supposed to. The only way to accurately assess teaching performance - no matter if it's us or someone else doing the assessing - is to put our data in its proper context. I've focused mostly on negative evaluations here because they're the ones that can derail our confidence and careers, but I don't want to discount the importance of positive student feedback and the need to tell that story, too.

How do we evaluate teaching, anyway? Given the well-known limitations of student evaluations, it behooves every department or institution to be careful how they are used. The best faculty-evaluation systems are multilayered and employ a number of different measures.

To be honest, student evaluations of faculty instruction ought more properly to be referred to as "ratings," since "evaluation" connotes a more complex, informed process than what's possible via these instruments. In assessment terms, student evaluations are only indirect measures of teaching effectiveness, and any assessment process dependent on indirect measures will not produce accurate information.

Instead, student evaluations ought to be treated as supplemental material. They should complement - but never overshadow - faculty narratives, peer observations, reflective dialogue, and sample teaching materials. Even more important, course ratings should be used equitably; their documented bias against specific faculty groups has to be part of the calculus. To assume that all student-evaluation data can be unproblematically used in the same way for every faculty member ignores substantial evidence to the contrary, and undermines the evaluation process.

Departments and institutions have an ethical obligation to be discerning in evaluating faculty members. Flawed processes create flawed results. It's incumbent on us to evaluate teaching with a process that centers faculty voices and experience, and assures that data will be interpreted with attention to context.

These suggestions won't make student ratings any less flawed but should help us reckon with the nature of those flaws and then proceed accordingly. As is often the case in teaching, the key is knowing how to use our tools appropriately. Well, that and not being an "ashole."

Kevin Gannon is a professor of history at Grand View University and director of its Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning. Browse his previous columns .

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In Defense (Sort of) of Student Evaluations of Teaching

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Advice A couple of weeks after the end of my first semester of teaching as the instructor of record, I received "the packet" in my campus mailbox - an interoffice envelope stuffed with course evaluations from my students. Those evaluations mattered a lot to me at the time, as I was still figuring out this whole teaching thing.

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Here's how it works:

We've chosen a rule that some sequences of three numbers obey - and some do not. Your job is to guess what the rule is.

We'll start by telling you that the sequence 2, 4, 8 obeys the rule:

Now it's your turn. Enter a number sequence in the boxes below, and we'll tell you whether it satisfies the rule or not. You can test as many sequences as you want.

Enter your first sequence here:

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A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving

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Here's how it works: We've chosen a rule that some sequences of three numbers obey - and some do not. Your job is to guess what the rule is. We'll start by telling you that the sequence 2, 4, 8 obeys the rule: Now it's your turn.

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Faculty Focus | Higher Ed Teaching & Learning

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We need to work more with students on seeing exams as something more than just grade generating experiences. Exams can be powerful encounters through which students learn course content and learn about learning. However, given the importance placed on grades, I'm not terribly optimistic about a lot of students discovering on their own what can be learned from an exam experience. We need to frame exams with a stronger focus on learning, and here's a great example.

It's a postexam review activity originally used in an introductory biology course where the exams were mostly multiple choice. The activity includes these components:

Correcting and Reflecting - With their graded exam returned, students were charged with providing the correct answer for each question missed and identifying the sources they used to correct the answer. Next, they had to explain why their original answer was incorrect. And finally, they had to tell why they missed the question. They did this by selecting from a list of possible reasons-such as misread the question, used incorrect logic, didn't know enough information-or providing an alternative explanation if their reason wasn't listed.

Examining Study Strategies and Behaviors - This component included a list of 16 study tools (e.g. flash cards and concept maps) and behaviors (e.g. regular class attendance and study times). Here students indicated the tools and actions they used to prepare for the exam and which ones they found most helpful.

Using Open-ended Reflection - Finally, students responded to a three-part question: 1) was the grade an accurate reflection of what they knew for the exam and how well prepared they felt; 2) what could they do to improve their learning prior to the next exam; and 3) what could the instructor do to improve their learning experience.

Students had one week after the exam to complete this assignment. It was worth up to 10 points with the exam worth 100 points. Students did the assignment after each of the three major exams, although the structure changed for Exams 2 and 3 to give students more flexibility in their analysis.

What makes this activity especially interesting is the analysis of the assignment undertaken by faculty and students (two are listed as first authors of this piece). It's reported in this reference and in a larger follow-up study highlighted in the May issue of the Teaching Professor newsletter. The sample size in this first analysis was small, even so the results raise some interesting questions. Not surprisingly, students were able to correct their answers. But when they tried to explain why their incorrect answers couldn't be right, only 62% of their responses received a "High Quality" score, using a rubric developed for the analysis. The authors make two points here: students may be able to correct answers and still not understand the material in the exam question; and this discrepancy "underscores a common limitation of multiple-choice questions to accurately assess student understanding." (p. 87)

Students in this sample were also convinced they were using the best methods to prepare for the exam. They relied heavily on materials provided by the instructor-study worksheets and a prelecture assignment. Any study approach that required motivation and self-direction, such as self-testing, regular study of the content, reading before attending lecture, were used significantly less often and only 11% believed approaches like these held much value, even though the effectiveness of these more self-directed strategies is widely supported by research.

Also, perhaps not surprising, almost half the students didn't feel their grade on Exam 1 reflected what they knew, and they regularly attributed that discrepancy to careless mistakes. "This suggests that they [students] believe using caution is the only measure they need to take to improve their performance on future exams." (p. 90)

Yes, this is a labor-intensive assignment, for teachers and students. Something the authors readily agree. But as the follow-up study reveals, it's an assignment that contributed to improved exam scores and promoted metacognitive development. Students learn the content and they learn more about learning the content. That's a big payoff, and assignments like this don't need to occur in every course. We need to think more strategically about where assignments (of various sorts) should be placed within a curricular experience.

References: Andaya, G., Hrabak, V., Reyes, S., Diaz, R. and McDonald, K. (2017). Examining the effectiveness of a postexam review activity to promote self-regulation in introductory biology students. Journal of College Science Teaching, 46 (4), 84-92.

Dang, N., Chiang, J., Brown, H., and McDonald, K. (2018). Curricular activities that promote cognitive skills impact lower-performing students in an introductory biology course. Journal of Microbiology and Biology Education, 19 (1), 1-9.

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We need to work more with students on seeing exams as something more than just grade generating experiences. Exams can be powerful encounters through which students learn course content and learn about learning. However, given the importance placed on grades, I'm not terribly optimistic about a lot of students discovering on their own what can be learned from an exam experience.

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"Most of these adults have been successful," Laufenberg said, "so then when you tell them to try things they're bad at or not successful at, you need to tell them it's OK, and give them a structure to get better." She suggests giving teachers specific examples.

'There needs to be a real timeline of three to five years, where you understand you are on a path of change, and you have to hold the line.' Diana Laufenberg, Executive Director of Inquiry Schools

The principal of Enosburg Falls High School in Vermont, Erik Remmers, gave several of his teachers permission to experiment with getting rid of grades in their class. Teachers wanted to do a competency-based assessment model in the hopes it would train students to focus on learning instead of grades. The teachers tested the approach by waiting until the end of the first quarter to give grades, updating students on their progress through conferences instead. Remmers made sure the two teachers clearly communicated the goals and expectations to students and parents, but then he took the heat when parents felt uncertain.

"I like to frame it as permission to learn," said Zac Chase, a Language Arts coordinator for St. Vrain Valley Schools who co-presented with Laufenberg. "We assume that people are really good at learning, but learning is really hard, especially for teachers because we're used to making other people do it." And learning how to teach in new ways often requires teachers to feel uncomfortable and disoriented at times.

Often a leader thinks they are giving teachers permission to try, fail and learn, but teachers don't trust that the permission won't eventually be revoked. Laufenberg suggests that leaders and teachers forecast together how the experiment or change might play out, and what permission will be needed down the road. Naming those things early, and getting verbal agreement from a leader, can free that teacher up to confidently experiment.

Teachers have a lot going on, and while it's tempting to think that setting them lose to try to fail will transform every classroom, in reality there are always bumps along the way. Teachers need support through those moments, and once again, it helps to forecast what support might be needed, confirm it is available at the start, and make sure teachers know how to ask for it.

In San Marcos, California, the district is pushing teachers to use technology to let kids create and showcase their work with a broader audience. There's also a lot of pushback and fear from educators. It's Adina Sullivan 's job to support their skill building, highlight teacher successes, and support teachers to go deeper after an initial attempt. Sullivan says it helps when teachers are willing to acknowledge their fears or concerns so she can address them. She bases her support on a strengths-based approach, pointing out brave teacher attempts and successes as often as possible.

The goal is to build the capacity of the teachers and leaders in the system gradually over time. That means the level of support should gradually diminish; if the changes don't continue without the highest levels of support, something is wrong. Another way to offer support is by connecting teachers doing similar things so they can learn from one another. Whatever the support, it's unrealistic to ask teachers or systems to change without it.
COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT
Big school changes don't just affect the educators in the building, so bringing students and parents into the conversation early is crucial. And as learning shifts to become more interdisciplinary, connected and real-world focused, there may also be community partners who can help support the vision.

How do we help create the "Ideal Graduate"? We have to become teachers who foster those traits in our Students... #learningmatters #shouttheawesomeHCS @DFlowTeaches @PDamianeas @nickieducate pic.twitter.com/DkSUkgZiRO

- Melissa Thomas (@melissa13thomas) February 26, 2018

"I walk into meetings assuming that everyone is on my side, whether they know it or not," Chase said. Assuming good intent and getting other people excited about the vision of change helps provide energy to teachers and administrators as they slog through work that can feel hard.

The gradeless experiment at Enosburg Falls High School has since grown into a schoolwide effort to abandon all traditional grades. It started five years ago when teachers began moving to standards-based grading. But the more they tried to focus on learning, the more grades got in the way.

"We tried to use different scales to change things up," said Gabrielle Marquette, who taught junior English at the time and is now the district innovation coach. "And the reality is kids were focused on the grade and not the learning."

The whole staff decided to go to a competency-based model with the incoming ninth-grade class, but knew it would be a big change for parents. Their engagement efforts started early and focused on personal, relationship-based strategies. For example, before the year started teachers invited incoming eighth-graders and their families to come to the school, eat pizza, and talk about what learning would look like.

They also introduced every ninth-grade parent to the online system measuring competency individually. Teachers volunteered to walk each parent through the online portal, explained what the visualizations meant, and answered questions with nearly a hundred families. "It was way more one-on-one conversations and really just trying to be personal about it," Marquette said.

Shifting to the new grading system has been hard for everyone. The competencies aren't pegged to grade level and each assignment might include only a few competencies, so it can be hard to tell how a student is progressing. Teachers who were excited about the change initially are struggling. But despite the challenges of upending the traditional school model, the community tends to trust those working at the school. The intense community engagement and transparency around the goals and reasons for the change have given the educators some breathing room to figure out how to make it work.
ACCOUNTABILITY
"This word is fraught with peril and has all sorts of connotations," Laufenberg acknowledged. "But if you do something, and faculty has been through all kinds of initiative burn, and there's no wraparound to make sure it's happening in a productive way, there's a good chunk of faculty who will sit and wait it out until that next initiative comes through."

In addition to gaining community support, giving teachers permission to try new things and supporting them as they experiment, leaders have to check in to make sure the changes are happening. Laufenberg worked for a district where all the elements of support were in place and the principal instructed teachers to leave their doors open so he could pop in and make sure things were moving forward. In rebellion, the teachers turned the lights off and taught in the dark.

"We had to have this massive intervention," Laufenberg said. "We gave you all these things, you said you got it, we gave you the permission, but no one was doing it." Especially when teachers are used to a new initiative every year, it's important that leadership send a consistent message and ensure it is happening.

Henry County Schools in Georgia is a big district spanning 50 schools in urban, suburban and rural areas. For the past four years, they've been steadily shifting toward a more "personalized" approach to learning. Each year eight or nine schools in the district go through a redesign process, so some schools haven't started the change while others are several years down the road. It's an unwieldy change process, but one with a clear vision.

"For us the full answer is kids being good decision-makers about what they learn and how they learn," said Karen Perry, the district's coordinator of personalized learning.

To keep schools accountable to the redesign plans they set forth, Perry sends teams of people representing different roles in the district to evaluate how well schools are implementing and give feedback. The school itself will have done some self-evaluation and compiled a portfolio of evidence to show how they are carrying out their vision. The district also provides a school change rubric that helps provide consistency.

Perry says the model is based on a long-standing district practice of "loose and tight." Schools have always had a lot of autonomy in Henry County, and they still do, as long as they are moving toward personalized learning. For example, the district says schools must have some kind of advisory, but the school decides how it looks, where it fits in the schedule and what curriculum it follows. The district says kids need to be setting goals, but the school decides what that looks like in practice.

The outside team highlight bright spots at the school and areas of growth, based on the school's own plan and the district rubric. "Almost always those things come back in ways that schools already knew," Perry said. But the advantage of having an outside group of educators present is that they may have some new ideas about how to solve the issue.

Perry says often the district has supportive resources that she can send to the school. For example, if a school's teachers are struggling to make projects deep and rigorous, she can send them a project-based learning coach, or recommend teachers visit another school in the district that has already confronted that problem.

I had the opportunity to sit in on an amazing K class @MCE_HCS! It is clear that these Ss are offered rigorous opportunities for learning and they actively monitor their progress! #ensuringsuccess #shouttheawesomeHCS @mcemustang @DFlowTeaches @JulezRulez71 @McCraryJennifer pic.twitter.com/8n9Yjdl8QT

- Melissa Thomas (@melissa13thomas) January 31, 2018

"It's this balance of mostly support, but some accountability as well. You've got to do what you said you were going to do," Perry said.

This project has also created more upward accountability. For example, as the schools began to make changes, their principals made it clear they needed the ability to flexibly staff their schools. And, they want more individualized professional development keyed toward their specific redesign plans.

"Principals have been asking for this school redesign rubric for a long time," Perry said. The district created it in response to principal feedback. "What they want is an outside point of view because they're down in it all the time."

The district has also recognized that in order to sustain this change, they need leaders excited about it. The GOLD Academy is a district leadership program centered on what it means to lead change. District professionals who want to improve or assistant principals who want to become principals can enroll, challenge their beliefs, think with a systems lens, and ultimately become the "bench" that will hop into action when leadership positions open up. Kerry hopes this emphasis on leadership will help sustain the changes they've made.
STAYING THE COURSE
"There needs to be a real timeline of three to five years, where you understand you are on a path of change, and you have to hold the line," Laufenberg said. "You can tweak, but the big idea, you've got to give it some time to take hold."

She says when leaders don't do this the staff stops trusting them. She knows that this kind of change work is hard and that at times it will feel easier to start over with something else, but she also believes that when change can be sustained it's incredibly rewarding work.

After four years in Henry County, Perry is already seeing the effects of staying the course. Despite the inevitable challenges, schools that are just entering the redesign phase are still enthusiastic about the process and the goals. Even better, "the quality of their conversation is so much better than our first cohort because we're so much farther down the road," Perry said.

Schools that have gone through the process later are learning from those that came before and they're seeing success. And it's easier for teachers to buy into the vision when they can see a class that looks just like theirs down the road, already succeeding.

"The district needs to be consistent in the message that this is what we're doing in Henry County schools," Perry said. And despite the fact that her district is on its third superintendent since the project began, that message remains loud and clear. In fact, the new superintendent came to the district because she wanted to be part of the innovation.

Laufenberg cautions change leaders to attend to all five of these areas to successfully make change. "This is a constant, persistent conversation you have to have in your system when you talk about changing something," she said. "It's all these things in concert with each other and constant re-evaluation of the full picture."

She suggests scheduling ways to check in with people in various roles across the district on each of these pillars to make sure the change effort stays on track. It's possible to continue pushing forward without one of these elements in place, but it's a lot harder.

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Five Ways to Sustain School Change Through Pushback, Struggle and Fatigue

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"Most of these adults have been successful," Laufenberg said, "so then when you tell them to try things they're bad at or not successful at, you need to tell them it's OK, and give them a structure to get better." She suggests giving teachers specific examples.

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"I can't think of a more meaningless, superficial, cynical way to evaluate learning."
~ Cathy N. Davidson

The work of teaching shouldn't be reduced to the mechanical act of grading or marking. Our talk of grading shouldn't be reduced to our complaining about the continuing necessity of it.

If you're a teacher and you hate grading, stop doing it.

Across education, we've normalized absurd levels of grading, test-taking, and standardized assessment. And yet letter grades are a relatively recent phenomenon. They weren't widely used until the 1940s. In " Teaching More by Grading Less," Jeffrey Schinske and Kimberly Tanner cite the first "official record" of a grading system from Yale in 1785. The A-F system appears to have emerged in 1898 (with the "E" not disappearing until the 1930s) and the 100-point or percentage scale became common in the early 1900s. According to Schinske and Tanner, even by 1971, only 67% of primary and secondary schools in the U.S. were using letter grades. The desire for uniformity across institutions was the primary motivator for the spread of these systems.

As I was preparing to write this piece, I looked through the sections on grading from a dozen or so U.S. teaching and learning centers. What I noticed across the lot of them is how their language around grading emphasizes "efficiency" (the word repeated incessantly) while reducing individual students to cogs in a machine that ultimately seems to have little to do with them. The work of grading is framed less in terms of giving feedback or encouraging learning and more as a way of ranking students against one another. Nods to "fairness" are too often made for the sake of defensibility rather than equity. What disturbs me is how effortlessly and casually this language rolls off Education's collective tongue. And I'm even more disturbed by how many otherwise productive pedagogical conversations get sidetracked by the too easily internalized ubiquity of grades.

The page from the Berkeley Graduate Division offering " Tips on Grading Efficiently " is pretty standard fare. The very first bit of advice on grading for new graduate student instructors raises more anxiety around grades than it alleviates. And at the same time, as is all too common, grading is something new teachers are encouraged to spend as little time on as possible: "Too often, time spent grading takes away from time spent doing your own coursework or research."

Without much critical examination, teachers accept they have to grade, students accept they have to be graded, students are made to feel like they should care a great deal about grades, and teachers are told they shouldn't spend much time thinking about the why, when, and whether of grades. Obedience to a system of crude ranking is crafted to feel altruistic, because it's supposedly fair, saves time, and helps prepare students for the horrors of the "real world." Conscientious objection is made to seem impossible.

I've been leading workshops on grading for years, and when I talk about why I don't grade, I often hear back some version of, "but I have to grade" ... because I'm an adjunct ... because my institution requires it ... because grading is necessary in my discipline ... because wouldn't you want your heart surgeon to have been graded? The need to navigate institutional (and disciplinary) pressures is real, but I would argue teachers grade in many more situations than grading is useful and/or actually required by institutions. And, as I've said before, I care less that my doctors are graded and more that they've read all the books of Virginia Woolf or Octavia Butler, because critical thinking is what will help them save my life when they encounter a situation they've never encountered before.

Peter Elbow writes in " Ranking, Evaluating, Liking: Sorting Out Three Forms of Judgement," "Let's do as little ranking and grading as we can. They are never fair and they undermine learning and teaching." I believe pedagogy is personal and idiosyncratic. My approach won't necessarily work in each classroom, at every institution, for all teachers, with every group of students. My hope with this and my previous posts about grading is to challenge stock assumptions, describe what has worked for me, and explore alternatives that might just work for others.

How I Don't Grade

I haven't put grades on student work since I started teaching as instructor of record in 2001. I have not felt I could be fully out about my approach to grading at every institution where I've worked. When I was a "road warrior" adjunct, teaching up to 9 courses at 4 institutions, how I talked about my pedagogy was different from one institution to the next. I had to balance my own approach with the specific requirements at each institution. But I can also say that none of the institutions where I've worked (including R1s, community colleges, liberal arts colleges) has entirely dictated how I had to approach assessment-at every single one there was sufficient wiggle room for experimentation.

My specific approach has evolved over 17 years. Currently, I have students write self-reflections 2 - 3 times throughout the term. The first of these is usually more directed (with specific questions) than the last (which opens into something more like an essay). My goal is to help students develop their ability to do this kind of metacognitive work. Self-evaluation and metacognition are not easy, even for me, so I give students space to figure out how to do this work as they go.

I often get asked if (and how) I deal with student anxiety. Of course, being asked to do this work is a challenge. For as much anxiety as grades can also create, being graded is something most of us find comfortable. Students are increasingly conditioned to work within a system that emphasizes objective measures of performance, ranking, and quantitative marks. It's important to acknowledge that these systems have been (in some cases intentionally) crafted to privilege certain kinds of students. It's also important to acknowledge that, in lieu of these systems, there are still tacit expectations that also favor already privileged students. Students who are female, black, brown, indigenous, disabled, neurodivergent, queer, etc. face overt and systemic oppression whether expectations are explicit or implicit. Soraya Chemaly writes in " All Teachers Should Be Trained To Overcome Their Hidden Biases," "Training teachers to understand bias will not eliminate it, but it could create an institutional environment in which it is clear that understanding bias and its effects is critically important."

It's also important that teachers (and institutions) open these pedagogical conversations to students. And that whether we're grading or not grading, we think critically (and talk openly with students) about our approach, assumptions, tacit expectations, actual expectations, etc. We don't prepare students for a world of potential oppression by oppressing them.

Over many years, I've found that not grading begins a set of necessary conversations among my colleagues, between me and students, and among students in my classes. What students write to me in self-reflections and self-evaluations is profoundly different from the kinds of interactions we would have in a purely transactional system. Their self-evaluations (which I sometimes call "process letters"), and my responses to them, become a space of dialogue, not just about the course, but about their learning and about how learning happens. Not every interaction rises to that level but many do. What happens with almost every single student is that any assumption I might make about them is squashed by what they write about themselves and their work. My view of students as complex and deeply committed to their education is fueled by the thousands of self-reflection letters I've read throughout my career.

At the end of the term, every institution where I've worked has required me to issue a final grade for students. So, I ask the students to grade themselves. I wish I didn't have to do this. I wish the conversation I had with students could focus purely on authentic assessment, process, and formative feedback. But I have found that asking students to give themselves a grade also makes the why and how of grades a valuable subject of the conversations we have-valuable because they will go on to be graded in other courses and thinking critically about how and why grading happens helps that become more productive for them.

I'm frequently asked what I do when I disagree with the grade a student gives themselves. I don't intend my answer to be flip, but I say some version of, "it isn't really my problem." If I'm going to give the responsibility of grading over to students, I have to let go of my attachment to the accuracy of that process. Instead, I give feedback, and the need for objectivity or accuracy gives way to a dialogue-one that is necessarily emergent and subjective. I do make clear on the syllabus (and in class) that "I reserve the right to change grades as appropriate." But I do this only very rarely, and I usually have to raise grades. The most common change I make is from an A- to an A for students who offer no good reason other than modesty for giving themselves the A- grade. (I have observed a distinct gender imbalance in this, with women students much more likely to give themselves an A-.) Ultimately, students get the full range of grades in my classes.

My favorite bit of feedback I've ever received from a student was that my course was "one of the hardest they'd taken, but it was an easy A." Hard, I think, because they were challenged in ways they wouldn't have otherwise been with "clear" guidelines and an objective rubric; easy, because "where they stood" in the course never felt arbitrary or mysterious.

Alternate Approaches to Assessment

As I've said, there is no single approach that will work for every teacher, with every student, or at every institution. I find that ungrading works better when a teacher feels they can fully own their pedagogical approach (which requires administrators and institutions to defend the academic freedom of teachers, especially adjuncts). There are lots of different possible paths toward ungrading, and smaller experiments can be just as fruitful as larger ones.

Grade Free Zones
Sometimes, it's hard to imagine diving right into the deep end of ungrading, so try having the first 1/3 of the term be ungraded, a sandbox for students to experiment inside before moving on to the more formal activities of a course. Or decide to grade only a few major assignments.

Self-assessment
I've already talked at length about how I use self-assessment. What I'll add is that this work is both part of my approach to the problem of grades and also an end goal in and of itself. Ann Berthoff writes in " Dialectical Notebooks and the Audit of Meaning," "Learning to look carefully, to see what you're looking at, is perenially acclaimed as the essential skill for both artist and scientist." Metacognition is a practical skill that cuts across disciplines.

Process Letters
If you're only grading a few assignments, you may not feel like you have enough information to determine a final grade at the end of a course. I have students write process letters, describing their learning and how their work evolves over the term. This can be text, including (or linking to) representative examples of work they don't otherwise turn in. You might also ask students to take pictures of their work as it evolves, add voiceover to a screencast, or I've had students shoot video for a film documenting their learning (a sort of behind the scenes reel for the class).

Minimal grading
In " Grading Student Writing: Making it Simpler, Fairer, Clearer," Peter Elbow describes what he calls "minimal grading," using a scale with only one, two, or three levels instead of giving students (admittedly bizarre) grades like 97%, 18/20, or A-/B+. Scales like these with too many gradations make it difficult for teachers to determine grades and even more difficult for students to interpret them. Elbow recommends scales with fewer gradations: [one] turned in, [two] pass/fail, [three] strong/satisfactory/weak. He also describes a "zero scale," in which some work is assigned but not collected at all. This frees the teacher from feeling they have to respond to, evaluate, or even read every bit of work students do. And this last, moving away from student work as a thing to be "collected," might actually prove best at creating intrinsic motivation to do the work of a course.

Authentic Assessment
In my film courses, I often ask students to organize a film festival or premiere in order to share their work for the class. These usually include talk-backs with the audience. Increasingly, I don't ask students to turn any assignments into me (aside from their self-reflections). The community of the class (including me
but not just me) becomes their audience. In a service learning course, this community expands even further beyond the boundaries of the class. In short, how can we create reasons more meaningful than points for students to do the work of a course?

Contract grading
Grading contracts convey expectations about what is required for each potential grade. In " A Grade-less Writing Course that Focuses on Labor and Assessing," Asao B. Inoue argues for "calculating course grades by labor completed and [dispensing] almost completely with judgments of quality." Students work toward the grade they want to achieve, and goal posts don't unexpectedly shift. These contracts can also be negotiated with the class. Either way, contract grading pushes against the relegating of people into categories, "A student," "B student," by keeping the focus on the work rather than the student. They can be humane in a way standardized teacher-centered rubrics usually are not. Contracts run the risk of centering grades even more than traditional grading, but at their best, the negotiating around the contract becomes a way for a group of students to collectively worry the edges of grading as a system.

Portfolios
Increasingly, many corporate e-portfolio platforms are walled gardens, giving students a regimented way of gathering together their work for the purposes of assessment. I prefer more authentic portfolios that have use value beyond the needs of individual, course, programatic, or institutional assessment. University of Mary Washington's Domain of One's Own project offers a space for students to do this kind of work, choosing a domain name, carving out space for themselves on the Web, and crafting a digital identity that exists outside (but also in conversation with) their coursework. It's a metacognitive space, but also one with immediate practical value (as a way to share their work with potential collaborators, employers, grad. schools, etc.).

Peer-Assessment
Peer-assessment can be formal (having students evaluate each other's work) or informal (just having students actively engage with one another's work). It can be particularly useful when having students work in large groups. I frequently have students work on projects that have an entire class (of 25 or more) collaborating. When I do this, I ask every student to write a process letter that addresses their own contributions as well as the functionality and dynamic of the team they're working with. With large group projects, it's hard for me to see what and how each student contributes, but these letters help me get a view into a process I might not otherwise be able to see. If it's a project students work on across the entire term, doing multiple process letters also allows me to get the information I need to step in and help when and where I'm needed.

Student-made Rubrics
I'm really not a fan of rubrics. Alfie Kohn, in " The Trouble with Rubrics," describes them as an "attempt to deny the subjectivity of human judgment." Rubrics are often recommended as a way to make standards for evaluation transparent, but for me, a 5x5 grid filled with copious text is bewildering and inscrutable. Rubrics have never helped me make sense of grading or being graded. Peter Elbow encourages making rubrics plainer and more direct, a 3x3 or smaller grid. The rubrics I find most exciting are ones crafted by students-so that the making of the rubric becomes an act of learning itself rather than a mechanism (or set of assumptions) created entirely in advance of students arriving to a course.

These alternative approaches can work on their own or in combination. With classes of 25 or 300. (You aren't going to write an individual letter responding to every student self-evaluation in a class of 300, but you can write a letter to the whole class, talking about the trends you notice and suggestions for moving forward.) Ultimately, any assessment strategy demands us to adapt, in the moment, as we encounter each new group of students. This attention to context, our own and our students', is what critical pedagogy calls for.

Grades are a morass education has fallen into that frustrates our ability to focus on student learning. But, if grades are going to control so many of the conversations we have in Education, at the very least can we be more creative in how we approach them?

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"I can't think of a more meaningless, superficial, cynical way to evaluate learning." ~ Cathy N. Davidson The work of teaching shouldn't be reduced to the mechanical act of grading or marking. Our talk of grading shouldn't be reduced to our complaining about the continuing necessity of it.

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February 2018 | Volume 75 | Number 5
Measuring What Matters

Dwayne Chism

In examining the effectiveness of a lesson, educators and coaches need to go beyond the "Eye Test."

One of the mistakes often made in assessing teacher effectiveness is to rely on the "eye test" (observable practices by the teacher) and the "energy" level felt within the classroom. While there is merit to this approach, at the heart of authentic teaching is deep student learning as a by-product. Student learning is the most meaningful measure of all instructional practices and must remain the litmus test, or gateway, to determining future teacher practice. The intention, or objective, of the lesson is one of the most important things students can learn, and providing students a clear target for their learning is crucial to success.1

In the same way that archaeologists might sift through a digging site to discover evidence that will help them piece together knowledge of a place or a people, educators are always seeking artifacts that might paint a more detailed picture of their students' learning. What students do, say, and produce are important artifacts in determining the impact of instruction. This does not minimize what a teacher does in the classroom, or deem it insignificant. However, we can only determine if a teacher's actions have impact by measuring what matters most-the level at which students have gained increased understanding, and how they appropriately exercise their newfound knowledge or skill.

To this end, I developed a learning-measurement tool (fig. 1) to assist teachers, coaches, and administrators in evaluating students' learning and to inform future practice by collecting two essential artifacts: Student voice and student work. These two artifacts are vital to ensuring internalized knowledge of content by all students. Each communicates the impact of instruction as well as the degree to which students are mastering target skills. Without these two pieces, learning that takes place in a classroom cannot be effectively determined.

Figure 1. In-Class Learning-Measurement Tool

This learning-measurement tool is best used by educators wishing to take a deep dive, through classroom observation, into how instructional practice influences student understanding.2 It connects students to learning outcomes and empowers teacher reflection, which leads to well-informed practice. The framework provided by the tool can be used in a variety of professional development structures, but for the purposes of this article, I will focus on two of them: individual one-on-one teacher coaching and learning labs (small-group teacher studies).

Let's take a closer look at how each of these meaningful measures can be collected, and the benefits of doing so.

Let Students Do the Talking

The use of the tool can be broken down into several phases. The first is considered the pre-brief conversation and takes place prior to the observation. The goal of the conversation is for the coach or study team to establish with the teacher how he or she will connect students to the learning target and determine what the desired responses from the students would be to two crucial questions (see Figure 1).

The second phase happens during classroom instruction, where the coach or study team and teacher talk to students as they are working independently and ask them the two questions in Figure 1: "What are you learning?" and "How do you know you are doing a good job?" They also collect samples of student work.

The final phase is a post-discussion where teacher and coach or study team analyze the artifacts they've collected to assess the students' levels of learning and to plan for the teacher's next steps in instruction. During this discussion, the observer(s) and the teacher examine how the instruction impacted the students collectively as well as individually by taking an in-depth look at what students can articulate about what they are learning and how this compares to the work they've produced.

The Learning-Measurement Tool at Work

In my work with the principals in Omaha Public Schools, we've been examining student learning by asking students those two foundational questions:

"What are you learning?"

"How do you know you are doing a good job?"

These questions may seem rudimentary, but they provide authentic evidence of student learning and can lead to honest conversation and deep reflection about teacher practice and the impact it had on student learning of the lesson. They have also proven to have an immediate return on investment.

Here is an example of student evidence collected during a lesson and the type of conversation that can ensue among colleagues. The learning target was for 3rd graders and asked them to identify prefixes and utilize them to change the meaning of root words.

Student 1:

"What are you learning?"

"We are looking at root words and how they change."

"How do you know you are doing a good job?"

"When I have identified the new meaning of the root words and share my answers with a peer."

Student 2:

"What are you learning?"

"I am circling prefixes that I find in sentences."

"How do you know you are doing a good job?"

"If I am doing my best work and complete my assignment."

Student 3:

"What are you learning?"

"I don't know." (Shrugged shoulders.)

"How do you know you are doing a good job?"

"When my teacher tells me I am doing a good job."

Student 4:

"What are you learning?"

"I am learning what a prefix is and how words change.

"How do you know you are doing a good job?"

"If I have read each sentence to find prefixes and can show my teacher how I use them in a sentence."

Student 5:

"What are you learning?"

"We are learning to find prefixes and to know how they give new meaning to words and to use them in sentences to help us be better writers."

"How do you know you are doing a good job?"

"When I have found the prefixes in the sentence and know the new meaning of each word. If I can use a prefix in a sentence and can share the meaning of my word with a friend.

If you look at these statements carefully, you can see that two of the students (student 1 and 4) have a basic knowledge of the purpose for learning, one has low-level knowledge (student 2), one has internal knowledge (student 5), and one student has no understanding (student 3). Each student further established this assessment of their knowledge level in the articulation of how they will know they are doing a good job.

The next step is to look at the students' work to see how their level of understanding of the learning target affected what they were able to produce. For this particular lesson, students were supposed to select a prefix they learned, combine it with one root word, and use the new word correctly in a sentence. Let's look at three student samples to illustrate the importance of looking at student work.

Student 1:

The thunder recaused my dog to bark.

Student 2:

I do not understand math because it is hard.

Student 5:

I was unhappy with my brother when he disappeared with the last cookie.

Each performance of understanding provides evidence of student learning. Student 5's artifact includes two words with prefixes that are used correctly in a sentence with appropriate context. This student has clearly internalized the target and is able to articulate and utilize the skill at a deep level. Student 2's artifact, however, shows a low-level of understanding. This student recognizes that "un" is a prefix but fails to see that "un" does not serve as a prefix in the word "understand." This student can recognize a prefix but is struggling with root words, the meaning of prefixes, and usage. Student 1's artifact shows a basic level of understanding. This student comprehends that "re" is a prefix meaning "again," but he could use additional support in determining appropriate root words to convey meaning.

After the teacher and coach or study team talk with students and examine their work, it is time to examine the post-discussion questions (Phase 3) in the observation tool to drive deeper levels of conversation around student learning. When the steps outlined in the tool are used effectively, the teacher will have a solid understanding of the level of student learning and the impact of his or her instructional practice on students. The questions should help guide conversation, and they can be adjusted to fit the needs of the teacher and coach.

During the post-discussion, teachers and coaches take a closer look at the student artifacts (their question responses and their actual work) and begin to identify gaps in learning. They then discuss next steps for individual or group instruction. In this particular example on prefixes, since two of the students had a basic to low level of understanding, the teacher may decide to provide additional small group support in recognizing root words and determining appropriate root words to convey meaning. The teacher may also conclude that she should utilize more checks for understanding during whole group instruction to allow for instructional adjustments during the modeled and guided portion of the lesson.

Listen to Learn

The response of students, not the actions of teachers, are the true meaningful measures that indicate learning. With a tool that helps record and reflect on student responses, reactions, and abilities, teachers can better understand the impact their instructional practice has on what students are able to say, do, and produce. This is vital when trying to meet the individual learning needs of all students. The challenge is for coaches and teachers to make time for these reflective conversations, which can help them move beyond mere "eye tests" to identify effective teacher practice and focus on the intent of instruction-student learning-and become better educators and listeners for their students.

Dwayne Chism is executive director of school support and supervision at Omaha Public Schools in Nebraska.

KEYWORDS

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Excavating the Artifacts of Student Learning

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February 2018 | Volume 75 | Number 5 Measuring What Matters Dwayne Chism In examining the effectiveness of a lesson, educators and coaches need to go beyond the "Eye Test." One of the mistakes often made in assessing teacher effectiveness is to rely on the "eye test" (observable practices by the teacher) and the "energy" level felt within the classroom.

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I've read and read. Trying to understand the basics of the research from the sciences of learning. Trying to integrate the research from the cognitive with the emotional domains. Trying to understand the path from research on how children, teens, and adults learn to specific practices and strategies educators can use in school design, instruction, learning activities, and assessing student learning.

One of the best sources I've found for understanding the cognitive and motivational domains is the Nature of Learning: Using Research to Inspire Practice published by OECD. In this article and the next, I'll walk you through some of the highlights.

I'd probably skip the first chapter - you've heard it all before why change is needed. Chapter two offers a helpful review of the historical development of educational theory. For my own learning, the real value of the paper started in chapter three with these ten cornerstone findings of cognitive research:

1. Learning is an activity carried out by the learner. Teachers can't just deliver curriculum and hope it sinks in. The trick is how to get learners to want to learn, to know how to learn, and to be mentally active. Then when teachers introduce new concepts and processes, the learners are ready to tackle it. Strategies to build make connections, student agency, motivation and engagement are all important.Teachers need to have content knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, and pedagogical content knowledge based on how students learn.

2. Optimal learning takes prior knowledge into account. Every educator knows this. However, it's very hard to address if there is a push to cover the curriculum in preparation for tests. One big step of "meeting students where they are" is knowing where students are in terms of prior knowledge and helping them to move from there to the next step. Mistakes are important to help identify prior knowledge (and prior misconceptions). We have to ask ourselves, if we know this is important, why are we pushing so hard to cover the curriculum?

3. Learning requires the integration of knowledge structures. Children are getting information and ideas from all over the place, not just the classroom. They may be making sense of it in their own way, or it may just feel like a cluttered closet. One of the jobs of educators is to help them organize knowledge within domains and across domains. There are lots of implications for educational practice, but two jump out at me. First, competencies can be used to organize domain structures to have meaning. That's what New Hampshire tried to do with their graduation competencies. Standards are just too small to be organizing structures. Second, interdisciplinary learning is important and schools need to be organized to support it. It's likely that our domain silos, which often get more rigid in high school, are constraining learning.

4. Optimally, learning balances the acquisition of concepts, skills, and meta-cognitive competence. Next time someone argues that facts are all they care about and we shouldn't be teaching concepts and meta-cognitive skills, it's worth reminding them that if facts matter, we should turn to the facts of cognitive research. Understanding one of these without the others leaves students vulnerable when dealing with real problems in the real world. If you don't have deep understanding of the concept, how do you know which process to use? If you can't take a step back and see how you are dealing with a problem, how do you figure out what you need to change your behavior or build your knowledge to learn it? Being competent to take on the challenges of college and careers means having all three: concepts, skills, and meta-cognitive skills.

5. Learning optimally builds up complex knowledge structures by organizing more basic pieces of knowledge in a hierarchical way. Individuals have different knowledge structures based on individual preference and previous experiences. This is another thing educators will have to bear in mind in understanding the learner and their progression. This finding is particularly important for how students learn procedures and apply them to complex problems. We cluster what we know and need to be able to pull out the sections we need for problem-solving. I have to say, Idid wonder about this one - Is it always hierarchical? Does this finding hold true for every culture? Might culture shape how information is organized with webs, circles or other constructs possibly in place?

6. Optimally, learning can utilize structures in the external world for organizing knowledge structures in the mind. It all starts with explicit learning goals. The job of educators is to organize the learning activities and the learning environment to help students create structures to organize their learning. This is a huge topic and relates as much to school design (are schedules developed to support strong project- or problem-learning?) as it does to design of curriculum and how the classroom is organized. Remember, it's not just content. Knowledge structures need to supporting concepts, skills, and meta-cognition.

7. Learning is constrained by capacity limitations of the human information-processing architecture. This finding is about working memory and how knowledge moves into long-term memory. Essentially, "working memory is a bottleneck" and we need to understand that and consider it in any design of schools, curriculum, and classroom practices. Getting knowledge firmly into long-term memory is critically important so that the working memory can be open to dealing with concepts and interdisciplinary learning when students go deeper. This finding is about equitably ensuring that all students have access to deeper learning. (FYI, chapter two in Breakthrough Leadership in the Digital Age by Hess and Saxberg has great information on this that could be helpful as a discussion tool.)

There are a number of practices that can help, including chunking, spacing over time so there is repetition, and simplifying learning materials. There are also a number of strategies based on students' emotional learning that can help reduce the working memory bottleneck. Students feeling safe, warm relationships, the ability to have some control over their actions - these can help too.

8. Learning results from a dynamic interplay of emotion, motivation, and cognition. Students simply can't be broken up into silos the way we can in organizations and domains of knowledge. Whenever we attempt to do so, we are going to be frustrated with the outcome. The problem is that researchers focus on specific areas, often pretty narrow in scope. Their professional environment demands this of them. Therefore, the demand for integrating the research and truly understanding the dynamics of emotion, motivation, and cognition is going to rest firmly in the world of educators and educator organizations.

9. Optimal learning builds up transferrable knowledge structures. I don't think there has been much discussion in the world of competency education about what the learning sciences tell us about transferring knowledge. We want students to have flexible expertise in using what they know to solve real-world problems. The authors in the paper suggest that we can teach in ways to prepare students for transferring knowledge. For example, they state that a precondition for transfer of knowledge is that students understand "the common deep-structure underlying two problem situations rather than the superficial differences." I don't know enough about this to have any opinions about how we go forward. I do think we should spend more time on this cornerstone finding.

10. Learning requires time and effort. Jeff Howard explained to me a long, long time ago that efficacy is the ability to determine how much time and effort is needed to be successful and the willpower to apply it. It has stayed with me because students simply have to apply more time and effort to learn things in different domains. Students with gaps or places where knowledge never worked its way into long-term memory and can be accessed as routine are going to have to apply more time and effort. This is obviously rooted in what we now short-hand as the "growth mindset." It's one of the keys, along with other character traits, that we need to cultivate in students for them to be successful.

In the next article on learning sciences, I'll highlight more from the paper The Nature of Learning.
See also:

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Ten Cornerstones of Cognitive Learning Sciences

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I've read and read. Trying to understand the basics of the research from the sciences of learning. Trying to integrate the research from the cognitive with the emotional domains. Trying to understand the path from research on how children, teens, and adults learn to specific practices and strategies educators can use in school design, instruction, learning activities, and assessing student learning.

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Here are a number of statements that may or may not apply to you. There are no right or wrong answers, so just answer honestly, considering how you compare to most people. At the end, you'll get a score that reflects how passionate and persevering you see yourself to be.

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Want to know how gritty you are? Find out by using the Grit Scale.

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Download past episodes or subscribe to future episodes of Hidden Brain by NPR for free.

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For the last decade and a half, I've engaged in anthropological research on higher education, identifying several challenges and mismatches between what we know about learning "in real life" and learning in college. In my most recent book, "I Love Learning; I Hate School": An Anthropology of College, I identified a number of ways that formal education has led to a lack of learning. Colleges promote credentials, obedience and the sorting of haves and have-nots, but not necessarily learning.

People kept asking me what I would do to improve things. And I said that if I could make one change, I would get rid of grades.

I'd been making some efforts in that direction, but still I fretted over how to make my pedagogy align with my theoretical understanding of how people learn. "Fretted" may be too light a term; I wondered if I could actually keep teaching if I didn't believe in the enterprise.

Last summer, as I prepared my classes, deeply immersed in the thinking that had led to the book, I decided I would go all the way and get rid of grades. Or at least, get rid of them as much as I could -- all the way to the end of the semester.

I had read many accounts of individual faculty members and whole colleges that were grade-free, but in mid-August, I discovered Starr Sackstein's book Hacking Assessment: 10 Ways to Go Gradeless in a Traditional Grades School, which gave me some cover in case students or administrators challenged this.

My reasons for wanting to get rid of grades were numerous: I felt as if students are fixated on grades above all else. Most faculty conversations with students include some discussions of grades: What do you want? What do I have to do to get an A? How can I improve my grade? What are the criteria for grades? And the professor takes on the role of a judge.

It felt like there was no space for adventure, zest, risk -- or even for genuine learning. Everything focused on pleasing the professor.

And in my research on learning and education, I had learned a lot about grades, such as:

Grading requires uniformity. It assumes uniform input, uniform process and uniform output. I stopped believing that was a useful way to approach student learning. Students don't start out the same. They don't have the same life experiences -- or even academic experiences -- during our semester together. They don't go to the same places afterward. They have different goals.

Grades don't provide adequate information. If the purpose of grades is to convey a student's accomplishment, adequacy, excellence, compliance, effort and/or gain in learning, then they fail. Is a student who enters already knowing a lot and continues to demonstrate knowledge at a high level, but then misses an assignment because of a roommate's attempted suicide and ends up with a B-plus, the same as someone who begins knowing nothing, works really hard, follows all the rules, does quite well and ends up with a B-plus? What information is conveyed? What about someone who loves biology and excels in those classes, but who loathes history, bombs in history classes and ends up with a 3.0 GPA? Compared to someone who muddles through every class and a similar GPA, yet with no passion, excellence or highs or lows? What do we learn from the GPA? What does a course grade mean?

Grades don't truly motivate students. Experts distinguish different types of motivation: 1) intrinsic, or doing things for their own sake and 2) extrinsic, or doing things for external benefits not inherently part of the activities themselves. I would also add fear and avoidance as big motivators, or doing something to avoid negative consequences.

Grades are the quintessential form of extrinsic motivation: they reward for accomplishment. But they are also threats: if you don't comply in every way, no matter how you feel about anything, you will be dethroned. Yet the fact is, most people are motivated by interest or need, not by arbitrary mandates.

Extrinsic motivation leads to the minimax principle. If the only thing you care about is something beyond the activity itself -- an extrinsic reward such as the grade -- it is sensible to do as little as possible to procure the highest possible reward (grade), which Arie Kruglanski, Chana Stein and Aviah Riter dubbed in 1977 the "minimax strategy" in instrumental behavior. Cheating, shortcuts, cramming ... all those make sense if the only goal is points or winning.

Students treat college as a game. Games are fun, but if the goal is amassing points and winning at any price, then game is the wrong model for college -- at least if learning, not just winning, is the goal. Of course, games can also be absorbing and done for their own sake -- playing Words With Friends or Grand Theft Auto -- so those types of games are fine. Maybe the problem is when it is seen only as a survival course.

Students see the rules as arbitrary and inconsistent. Different professors have different scoring -- participation, homework, teamwork or no teams, tests, showing your work, partial credit -- all of which appear to be plucked out of thin air and make no sense, as I found in my research on plagiarism. Citation? Sharing? Page length? Number of quotes? Consult notes or closed book? Students just have to figure out in each case what the professor wants. It all seems arbitrary, and therefore unconnected with anything meaningful or real.

Students are taught to focus on schooling rather than learning. Is the goal of school, including college, primarily achievement, success, accomplishment? Is the focus on learning the actual skills people will need or want outside college? Whoever asks them, "What are you learning?" instead of "How are you doing?" Or " What'd you get? "

In fact, people are consumed with curiosity and joy when they learn new things. Sometimes it's hard and sometimes it's needed (as for a workplace that changes), but learning happens all around us all the time -- TED talks, podcasts, Nova, adult ed, learning from WikiHow, lectures at libraries, church study groups, knitting circles, work challenges.

Grades encourage a fear of risk taking. Grades seem so consequential that students believe they can't take a chance on anything unproven. In most college classes, a mistake is punished by a lower grade, which is then averaged into the other grades, even if the student completely gets it forever after that initial try. Yet mistakes are information and contribute to learning. In tasks like riding a bicycle or submitting an article for publication, feedback about shortcomings is information. This helps with improving.
Solutions
I have tried to address these problems with solutions. Some of the tactics I have used in my own classes include the following:

Decenter grading. We don't talk about the point breakdown because I don't have one in my classes anymore. We talk about what the goals are for everything we do: for reading, writing, discussion, research and projects.

Emphasize the entire portfolio. A semester is a nice, long, luxurious time for a lot of activities, reflection, conversation, writing and wondering. At the end, we can assess the entire experience, rather than students worrying about how an early misstep is going to mean lack of success.

Have students develop an individual plan. I developed this myself on the model of an individualized education program (usually used in special education). I have since discovered two similar models: Universal Design for Learning and Individual Development Plan. The idea is to have students figure out how a class fits with their own lives, course of study and interests. Even if it is required, I want them to articulate some value for themselves. I try to meet with every student early in the semester and again midway through to talk about how prepared they are, what they are eager to learn or do, and what causes apprehension or even dread.

Encourage self-evaluation. If the genuine goal of college is to prepare students for life, then it's vital that they develop their own standards. So rather than ask students to submit work with the hope that I'll think it's excellent, I encourage them to develop honest standards and self-scrutiny. Every assignment is accompanied by students' written self-assessment of their work. What were they trying to get out of the assignment? What did they learn? What was successful? What was less successful? Why? What might they do differently? What would they like help with? That should serve them better in life than hoping that mediocrity will be seen as fabulous. Sometimes things aren't perfect -- and that's OK. But it is useful for them to understand and even articulate the reasons. (I didn't give myself enough time. I started too late. I didn't understand this. I couldn't really get into this subject.) Throughout our lives beyond college, we won't excel at and plunge enthusiastically into every single thing we do all day.

Conduct portfolio conferences. I begin the semester with a discussion with each student about their own individual plan. I try to meet with everyone at the middle of the semester and the end of it in a portfolio conference. I give them a document to complete prior to our meeting and instruct them to look back through all their work. The goal is to show them their learning, by comparing their early and later understanding, and to help them feel pride at their body of work. It also forces them to review the material, which research shows fosters retention. Students suggest their grade, which I can accept or not. No, not every student suggests an A.

Outcomes
I enjoyed my relationship with my students; I loved the atmosphere of the classroom; I believe that the encouragement of learning and even risk taking in the service of growth have been successful.

Students reflected that it allowed them to relax and focus on learning, perhaps for the first time. One student wrote in a reflection on one of my classes that used ungrading, "I honestly enjoyed writing for me, instead of necessarily for a professor or an outside source. I felt I had more freedom to express what I wanted to say, and I feel like I wasn't focused too much on making claims that could get me points."

I am confident that at least some of the students were sincere in generating their own adventure in learning.
Comments to Skeptics
I know this seems idealistic and, for many classes and many professors, impossible. Here are my thoughts on that:

Going gradeless can be done in a class of any size and of any type, though students may find it alarming and unfamiliar. Some faculty use something called "contract grading," which still uses a traditional scale but puts some of the control in students' hands.

You can provide opportunities for students to make choices, which allows them to find at least a tiny bit of intrinsic motivation even in the most conventional of courses.

Some assignments -- maybe small ones -- can still be risk-free and contribute to intrinsic motivation, by being utterly fascinating, completely useful or fun.

You can always offer low-stakes exercises that are perceived as enjoyable and not trivial, in any course.

And even if your supervisors are skeptical, as long as the process serves the central goal of contributing to student learning, they shouldn't object.

Here is one piece of evidence from a student who really trusted the process and responded honestly to the question "What assignment(s) pushed you to learn the most?" "While it ended up being one of my weaker pieces, I felt that my [project] was my most personally informative piece. I read so many different sources on the [topic] and really took a deep dive to explore the reasons why the [people do what] they do."

Isn't that a beautiful, honest analysis of learning? I wanted students to believe that this education is for them, not for me.

I can never go back!

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The significant learning benefits of getting rid of grades (essay)

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For the last decade and a half, I've engaged in anthropological research on higher education, identifying several challenges and mismatches between what we know about learning "in real life" and learning in college. In my most recent book, "I Love Learning; I Hate School": An Anthropology of College , I identified a number of ways that formal education has led to a lack of learning.

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Imagine a college course that requires students to give up computer and cell-phone technology for a month - and, in fact, to cease speaking entirely for that period.

Then imagine that the class is super-popular, with students clamoring to get in.

This scenario fascinates me because, if successful, it would be the polar-opposite situation to the one I wrote about last month, in which psychology professor Larry Rosen urged his colleagues to give students "tech breaks" to check their cellphones during college classes. On this view, traditional-age college students' brains are not yet fully developed and, thus, highly distractible.

Rosen's work, as he describes it in a Psychology Today post, has showed that when observed studying, university students (as well as students in younger grades) "were only able to focus and stay on task for an average of three minutes at a time and nearly all of their distractions came from technology."

Rosen goes on to write, based on interviews with thousands of students:

"When alerted by a beep, a vibration or a flashing image they feel compelled or drawn to attend to that distraction. However, they also tell us that even without the sensory reminder they are constantly thinking internally, 'I wonder if anyone commented on my Facebook post; or 'I wonder if anyone responded to my text message I sent 5 minutes ago' or even 'I wonder what interesting new YouTube videos my friends have liked.'"

What a dismal picture!

Scathing responses to Rosen's "tech break" recommendation weren't hard to come by. Though I'd written in my post about a group of seminar students I taught last month who didn't have a problem with distractibility (at least visibly), numerous comments at NPR's Facebook page focused only on the stereotypical, pulled-toward-their-phones students. One prominent theme was that college attendees who can't concentrate for 50- or 75-minute class periods shouldn't be in college at all.

Given all this, wouldn't a course where students give up electronics for a month contest this stereotype, along with the attendant notion that the biology of students' developing brains is the primary factor at work?

The no-technology, no-talking-for-a-month thought experiment I proposed is, in fact, I am delighted to report, a real-life scenario found in the "Living Deliberately" course taught by University of Pennsylvania religious studies professor Justin McDaniel.

McDaniel, who specializes in Buddhism and who spent several months living as a Buddhist monk in Thailand, was chosen as one of 10 "innovators" profiled by The Chronicle of Higher Education last month. The CHE piece, by Beckie Supiano, was fascinating for its explanation of McDaniel's focus: The course is subtitled "Monks, Saints, and the Contemplative Life," and the idea is to give the students some sense of what a monastic life, including its deprivations, might feel like - and what benefits might result.

But how did all this work in practice? How strict are these requirements? I emailed McDaniel to find out. He offered some details:

"[The students] do not talk or use the Internet, phone, text, radio, or TV at all. They do not talk to their family (unless it is emergency), but they can handwrite letters. They do not speak in other classes or to other professors. They do not use Internet or computer for other classes at all. They have to get permission from their other professors and they can sit in class and discussion sections, but cannot speak or participate in any online materials. It doesn't matter what their other class assignments are, they have to prepare to do it all offline before they go dark for a month.

[Students] get very good at preparing for the month, getting hard copies of readings, having a notepad to leave notes for their professors and other students, but absolutely no speaking and no electronics at all for a month (24/7). They have permission in emergencies to speak to health care or police and can speak to their designated partner in class or me in emergencies. Most never use that option. They have to write in their journal once every 30 minutes while they are awake, no matter what, and their writing and reflections get extremely interesting and moving.

Effort outside the classroom is required, too, in kindness projects designed by the students, who "do things like painting hallways in public schools, recording books for the blind (before the silent month), working to help community gardens, doing laundry for their classmates, making their own cheese and yogurt for classmates, volunteering in many different places, putting coins in parking meters, and tutoring disadvantaged children in Philadelphia."

Sometimes McDaniel takes the students' cellphones or computers for safe-keeping. Based on their journal entries and on years of experience, McDaniel can tell, he says, if his students are "using" - technology, he means.

Sometimes they slip up, but rarely. It's what McDaniel told me next that's the most intriguing part:

"Electronics are easy to give up for them, surprisingly. They are actually less addicted, I think, than people my age. What is hard is a feeling they are missing out on activities, chances to meet other people (in person), and loneliness. They actually love not having the electronics. They also have assignments starting at 5:30 a.m. and get to explore museums and go to live theatre and music."

Not so dismal after all! And not age-related, at least not in the sense of developing brains being at the center of the story.

The brains of McDaniel's students weren't scanned and compared with those of the students Rosen observed, so I can't say for certain that there's no underlying biological difference at work in the two groups - but I think it's highly unlikely.

McDaniel's students may succeed at this collegiate version of ascetism because they have the right kind of personality to do so: a self-selection bias at work, in addition to McDaniel's insight in choosing the students most likely to succeed from the applicant pool.

Still, the Living Deliberately course surely offers evidence for an anthropological rather than a neuroscientific perspective on college kids and technology. Patterns of "using" are heavily shaped by the social community and the expectations of normative behavior in those communities.

We don't need to be monks for a month to absorb the lesson here. We create our communities and those communities help shape our brains - even our brains on technology.

Barbara J. King is an anthropology professor emerita at the College of William and Mary. She often writes about the cognition, emotion and welfare of animals and about biological anthropology, human evolution and gender issues. Barbara's new book is Personalities on the Plate: The Lives and Minds of Animals We Eat. You can keep up with what she is thinking on Twitter: @bjkingape

Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

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Monks For A Month: College Kids Give Up Talking - And Technology

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Imagine a college course that requires students to give up computer and cell-phone technology for a month - and, in fact, to cease speaking entirely for that period. Then imagine that the class is super-popular, with students clamoring to get in.

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By Malcolm Harris, from Kids These Days, a book about millennials that was published this month by Little, Brown.

In April 2014, the Harley Avenue Primary School in Elwood, New York, sent a letter to the parents of its kindergartners, confirming rumors that the school would not be going ahead with its annual play.

Dear Kindergarten Parents and Guardians, We hope this letter serves to help you better understand how the demands of the twenty-first century are changing schools. The reason for eliminating the kindergarten show is simple. We are responsible for preparing children for college and careers with valuable lifelong skills and know that we can best do that by having them become strong readers, writers, coworkers, and problem solvers. Please do not fault us for making professional decisions that we know will never please everyone. But know that we are making these decisions with the interests of all children in mind.

These kids, the letter implied, could not spare two days from their regularly scheduled work.

What we teach and how we teach it is changing to meet the demands of a changing world, wrote the administrators at Harley Avenue. But what are the changes, exactly?

The main thing is that twenty-first-century American kids are required to work more than their predecessors. This generation is raised on problem-solving to the exclusion of play. Authorities from the Brookings Institution to Time magazine have called for an end to summer vacation and the imposition of year-round compulsory schooling. But the possible downsides of this trade-off are almost never discussed.

Parents, teachers, policymakers, and employers are all so worried that children won't "meet the demands of a changing world" that they don't bother asking what kids are expected to do to meet those demands, and what problems they're being equipped to solve. The anxious frenzy that surrounds the future has come to function as an excuse for the choices adults make for kids.

In America, unlike in much of the world, kids do not perform work. In this country, "child labor" evokes British industrialism, coal, and Dickens. And though some American children have always worked - especially on farms - the dominant U.S. view of childhood is that it is a time free from labor.

But it takes a lot of work to prepare yourself to compete for twenty-first-century employment. Adults are happy to remind kids of this, telling them, "Put your nose to the grindstone," "Stay on the right path," "Treat school like your job." When it comes to the right to organize, the dignity of labor, or minimum-wage laws, however, students are forced to be students rather than workers. It's a precarious position: America can no more afford to recognize children's work than it can afford for them not to do it. Meanwhile, disregarded and unregulated, the intensity and duration of this work have grown out of control.

Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine, a children's book from 1958, illustrates how learning is used to hide labor. Danny is a whiz kid always seeking ways to cheat on his homework; he has a habit of dragging his friend Joe into his half-baked schemes. Danny sets up two pens linked by a board attached to pulleys and a weight so that he can do his and Joe's math homework at the same time. He laments, "If only we could save even more time. You'd think six hours of school would be enough for them, without making us take school home."

Danny and his friends use a computer belonging to their absentminded science teacher to do their homework quickly, leaving more time for baseball and other hobbies. These kids aren't slackers; they just have better things to do with their time than homework. When a jealous classmate rats out the crew, Danny has to explain to their teacher, Miss Arnold, what they've been doing. Rather than concede that he's been cheating, Danny argues that all workers use tools to do tasks better and faster, and that he and his fellow students should not be prevented from doing the same.

Even though it's a children's book, Danny Dunn depicts one of the major conflicts of the second half of the twentieth century: whether labor-saving technology benefits workers or owners. Will the computer lead to the kids working less or working more? With the help of Danny's mother, Miss Arnold develops a plan - the same plan, in essence, that would determine the character of American childhood half a century after the book appeared: she increases Danny's workload.

Technologies that make work faster function in one of two ways: by reducing the time spent on the work or by intensifying the nature of the work. It's not hard to see which way it has gone in America. The story of the homework machine is a parable for how schoolwork has followed the same trend toward intensification as other forms of labor. The only compensation Danny gets for his effort and accomplishment is a sticker - a nontransferable award. On the micro level, this looks like one educator's clever effort to trick a student into learning more than he meant to. But Danny is not an outlier. American kids now find themselves in his situation: overworked, underengaged, gold-starred, and tired, wondering where their time went.

When it comes to primary and secondary schooling, American adults are able to hold a few conflicting stereotypes in their minds at the same time. On the one hand, it's generally acknowledged that students, facing stiffer competition for college admissions, are doing historically anomalous amounts of homework. Between 1981 and 1997, elementary schoolers between the ages of six and eight saw a 146 percent increase in time spent studying. Kids aged nine to twelve sustained a nearly 30 percent increase in homework, while their time in class increased by 14 percent.

On the other, students are depicted as slackers who are unable to pay attention, or entitled brats who need to be congratulated for every routine accomplishment, or devolved cretins who can't form a full sentence without lapsing into textspeak.

The labor of classically employed workers is measured in both total output and wages, but we don't measure a student's educational product except in arbitrary and comparative ways, such as grades, standardized tests, and school awards. Nevertheless, I feel justified in saying that American children's educational output has grown steeply over the past thirty years. But what does educational output even mean, and how might we try to measure it? Where does the product go?

Waged workers receive money to mark their expended effort - even though it represents only a fraction of their total output. The student equivalent is the grade: we say a student has "worked for" or "earned" her marks; the return of graded papers or report cards resembles the distribution of paychecks. The system aspires to train every student for grade-A work, then calls it a crisis when the distribution shifts in that direction.

The idea that underlies contemporary schooling is that grades, eventually, turn into money, or, if not money, then choice, or what social scientists sometimes call better life outcomes. In waged work we have the concept of valorization, which is the process by which laborers produce value above and beyond their wages and increase the mass of invested capital. But if no one is profiting off kids' scholastic work - teachers definitely don't - where does their product go? The sociologist Jürgen Zinnecker describes "the development of human capital" as a sink for students' hidden labor. In the simplest terms, this is what the kindergarten administrators at Harley Avenue Primary School stated in their letter: when students are working, what they're working on is their ability to work.

In 2013, an article appeared in The Atlantic with the title, "My Daughter's Homework Is Killing Me." The writer, Karl Taro Greenfeld, had attempted to complete the homework of his daughter, an eighth grader at a selective New York public school, to discover the exact nature of the labor that was keeping her up every night. He quickly found that he wasn't prepared to keep up:

Imagine if after putting in a full day at the office - and school is pretty much what our children do for a job - you had to come home and do another four or so hours of office work. . . . If your job required that kind of work after work, how long would you last?

This sort of intensive training isn't just for the children of intellectuals; the theory behind the rhetoric advocating universal college attendance is that any and all kids should aspire to this level of work. College admissions have become the focus not only of secondary schooling but of contemporary American childhood writ large. The sad truth, however, is that college admissions are designed to funnel young adults onto different tracks, not to validate hard work. A jump in the number of Harvard-caliber students doesn't have a corresponding effect on the size of the school's freshman class. Instead, it allows the university to become even more selective and to raise prices, to stock up on geniuses and rich kids. This is the central problem with an education system designed to create the most human capital possible: an increase in ability within a competitive system doesn't advantage all individuals.

In a world where every choice is an investment, growing up becomes a complex exercise in risk management. The more capital new employees already have when they enter the labor market, the less risky it is for their employers. Over time, firms have an incentive, as the economist Gary Becker put it, to "shift training costs to trainees." If an employer pays to train workers, what's to stop another company from luring them away once they're skilled? The second firm could offer a signing bonus that costs less than the training and still benefit. Paying to train a worker is risky, and risk costs money. As American capitalism advanced, the training burden fell to the state, and then to families and kids themselves.

Childhood risk is less and less about death, illness, or grievous bodily harm and more and more about future prospects. But if it is every parent's task to raise at least one successful American by America's own standards, then the system is rigged so that most of them will fail. The ranks of the American elite are not infinitely expandable; in fact, they're shrinking. Given that reality, parents are told that their children's choices, actions, and accomplishments have lasting consequences. The Harley Avenue letter is merely one of the more dramatic examples of this fearmongering. With parental love as a guide, risk management has become risk elimination.

By looking at children as investments, it's possible to see where the product of children's labor is stored: in their human capital. It's a kid's job to stay eligible for the labor market (and not in jail, insane, or dead). Any work beyond that adds to their résumé. If more human capital automatically led to a higher standard of living, this model could be the foundation for an American meritocracy. But millennials' extra work hasn't earned them the promised higher standard of living. By every metric, this generation is the most educated in American history, yet its members are worse off economically than their parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents. Every authority from moms to presidents told millennials to accumulate as much human capital as they could; they did, but the market hasn't held up its end of the bargain. What gives?

As it turns out, just because you can produce an unprecedented amount of value doesn't necessarily mean you can feed yourself under twenty-first-century American capitalism. Kids spend their childhoods investing the only thing they have: their effort, their attention, their days and nights, their labor time. (And, sometimes, a large chunk of whatever money their parents may have.) If the purpose of all this labor, all the lost play, all the hours doing unpleasant tasks, isn't to ensure a good life for the kids doing the work, if it isn't in the "interests of all children," then what is it for?

When you ask most adults what any kid in particular should do with the next part of her life, the advice will generally include pursuing higher education. As the only sanctioned path, college admissions becomes a well-structured, high-stakes simulation of a worker's entry into the labor market. Applicants inventory their achievements, being careful not to underestimate them, and present them in the most attractive package possible.

Then, using the data carefully and anxiously prepared by millions of kids about the human capital they've accumulated over the previous eighteen years, higher education institutions make decisions: collectively evaluating, accepting, and cutting hopeful children in tranches like collateralized debt obligations that are then sorted among the institutions according to their own rankings (for which they compete aggressively, of course). It is not the first time children are weighed, but it is the most comprehensive and often the most directly consequential. College admissions offices are rating agencies. Once the kid-bond is rated, it has four or so years until it's expected to produce a return.

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By Malcolm Harris, from Kids These Days, a book about millennials that was published this month by Little, Brown. In April 2014, the Harley Avenue Primary School in Elwood, New York, sent a letter to the parents of its kindergartners, confirming rumors that the school would not be going ahead with its annual play.

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It's when we get to the social world that things really get gnarly. A lot of our thinking is for bonding, not truth-seeking, so most of us are quite willing to think or say anything that will help us be liked by our group. We're quite willing to disparage anyone when, as Marilynne Robinson once put it, "the reward is the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved." And when we don't really know a subject well enough, in T. S. Eliot's words, "we tend always to substitute emotions for thoughts," and go with whatever idea makes us feel popular.

This is where Alan Jacobs's absolutely splendid forthcoming book " How to Think " comes in. If Thaler's work is essential for understanding how the market can go astray, Jacobs's emphasis on the relational nature of thinking is essential for understanding why there is so much bad thinking in political life right now.

Jacobs makes good use of C. S. Lewis's concept of the Inner Ring. In every setting - a school, a company or a society - there is an official hierarchy. But there may also be a separate prestige hierarchy, where the cool kids are. They are the Inner Ring.

There are always going to be people who desperately want to get into the Inner Ring and will cut all sorts of intellectual corners to be accepted. As Lewis put it, "The passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things."

People will, for example, identify and attack what Jacobs calls the Repugnant Cultural Other - the group that is opposed to the Inner Ring, which must be assaulted to establish membership in it.

Other people will resent the Inner Ring, and they will cut all sorts of intellectual corners in order to show their resentment. These people are quick to use combat metaphors when they talk about thinking (he shot down my argument, your claims are indefensible). These people will adopt shared vague slurs like "cuckservative" or "whitesplaining" that signal to the others in the outsider groups that they are attacking the ring, even though these slurs are usually impediments to thought.

Jacobs notices that when somebody uses "in other words" to summarize another's argument, what follows is almost invariably a ridiculous caricature of that argument, in order to win favor with the team. David Foster Wallace once called such people Snoots. Their motto is, "We Are the Few, the Proud, the More or Less Constantly Appalled at Everyone Else."

Jacobs nicely shows how our thinking processes emerge from emotional life and moral character. If your heart and soul are twisted, your response to the world will be, too. He argues that by diagnosing our own ills, we can begin to combat them. And certainly I can think of individual beacons of intellectual honesty today: George Packer, Tyler Cowen, Scott Alexander and Caitlin Flanagan, among many.

But I'd say that if social life can get us into trouble, social life can get us out. After all, think of how you really persuade people. Do you do it by writing thoughtful essays that carefully marshal facts? That works some of the time. But the real way to persuade people is to create an attractive community that people want to join. If you do that, they'll bend their opinions to yours. If you want people to be reasonable, create groups where it's cool to be reasonable.

Jacobs mentions that at the Yale Political Union members are admired if they can point to a time when a debate totally changed their mind on something. That means they take evidence seriously; that means they can enter into another's mind-set. It means they treat debate as a learning exercise and not just as a means to victory.

How many public institutions celebrate these virtues? The U.S. Senate? Most TV talk shows? Even the universities?

Back when they wrote the book of Proverbs it was said, "By long forbearing is a prince persuaded, and a soft tongue breaketh the bone." These days, a soft tongue doesn't get you very far, but someday it might again.

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It's when we get to the social world that things really get gnarly. A lot of our thinking is for bonding, not truth-seeking, so most of us are quite willing to think or say anything that will help us be liked by our group.

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Here's a funny thing about work: We spend more time with our colleagues than with our friends and family. Yet more often than not, we don't really understand our co-workers-because being honest with one another is scary.

When a teammate's lack of organization annoys us, we vent to others. When a boss says "this is fine" (not "this is great"), we wallow in anxiety. Many of us figure out our colleagues' personalities, preferences, and dislikes through trial and error, not through explicit conversation.

This strikes me as a colossal waste of time, productivity, and happiness. Ignoring these issues just leads to confusion and frustration, and, in time, can wind up threatening your job performance (and your paycheck).

Thankfully, there's a tool that every team can use to bypass workplace miscommunications and angst, helping to amp up every employee's potential and morale from day one. It's called a user manual.

Meet the "user manual"

In 2013, Ivar Kroghrud, co-founder, former CEO, and lead strategist at the software company QuestBack, spoke with Adam Bryant at the New York Times about his leadership style. Kroghrud revealed that he had developed a one-page "user manual" so people could understand how to work with him. The manual includes information like "I appreciate straight, direct communication. Say what you are thinking, and say it without wrapping your message," and "I welcome ideas at any time, but I appreciate that you have real ownership of your idea and that you have thought it through in terms of total business impact."

Kroghrud adopted the user manual after years of observing that despite individual dispositions and needs, employees tried to work with everyone in the same way. This struck him as strange and inefficient. "If you use the exact same approach with two different people, you can get very different outcomes," he says.

The user manual aims to help people learn to adapt to one another by offering an explicit description of one's personal values and how one works best with others. This shortens the learning curve for new employees, and helps everyone avoid misunderstandings.

Kroghrud says his team's response to his user manual is 100% positive. "I think it just makes them open up. And there's no point in not opening up, since you get to know people over time anyway," he explains. "That's a given, so why not try to be up front and avoid a lot of the conflict? The typical way of working with people is that you don't share this kind of information and you run into confrontations over time to understand their personalities."

Reading the interview, it struck me that it's not only leaders who ought to write user manuals. Having worked at Bridgewater Associates, a hedge fund notorious for creating " baseball cards " for every employee-which list each individual's strengths, weaknesses, and personality test scores-I know how helpful it can be to have a user manual of sorts for everyone on a team. So my editor and I decided to test it out.

How to structure the manual

The idea of describing all your personality quirks, values, and workplace desires in one page is overwhelming. To rein myself in, I followed the structure Abby Falik, founder and CEO of Global Citizen Year, used to write her user manual.

On LinkedIn, Falik describes how she "sat with questions like: Which activities give me energy, and which deplete me? What are my unique abilities, and how do I maximize the time I spend expressing them? What do people misunderstand about me, and why?"

She synthesized these answers into a six-section manual:

Each section contains four or five bullet points. While points may overlap between sections, the goal is to stay succinct and specific. Given many workplace conflicts stem from differences between employees' personal styles, these categories help ensure your colleagues (and you) understand not just who you are, but how to engage with you most productively.

Our experience: garnering relief and respect

While filling out my user manual, many responses felt run-of-the-mill: Interviews, first dates, and a life-long obsession with personality inventories have prepared me to recite how much I value honest, explicit feedback; personal relationships; and providing support for those I care about. And how little I can tolerate lying, pretense, or discrimination.

Fittingly, my editor (whom I chat with all day every day) wasn't surprised by my "resume level" responses. Nor was I shocked by hers, which included collaboration, humor, courage, specificity of feedback, and tight deadlines. Obvious as these core values may be to those we spend significant time with, documenting them gives colleagues a mental rubric to check when confusion or conflict-like a blunt statement or missed deadline-arise.

But sections like "How to help me" and "What people misunderstand about me" pushed both of us to go deeper, acknowledging the insecurities that colleagues may not notice on a daily basis. These insecurities-the ones we're good at hiding, and hesitate to probe in others-are the root of most workplace and personal struggles. While somewhat uncomfortable to document, sharing these descriptions was the most relieving and rewarding aspect of writing the manual.

As a chronically anxious person, I shared that I'm bad at compartmentalizing, so occasionally, personal struggles overwhelm and distract me at work. One way to help me is to create an environment where it's okay for me to admit I'm anxious and ask for some space. Flexible deadlines are also useful, as is knowing that I can occasionally leave the office early to rest. Upon reading this, my editor validated these feelings, saying she too struggles with anxiety. She gave me permission to step out whenever things get over my head. Simple as this sounds, I felt a massive weight lift.

I also wrote that I'm an intense over-achiever, and tend to excessively critique myself when I feel my work isn't up to par. To help, though it felt indulgent, I asked for praise when I do really well, as it motivates me to stay ambitious, and to be called out when I'm hating on myself. My editor admitted that she'd noticed this tendency, and would take a stronger stance next time I spiraled, as she knew I'd appreciate it, not be offended.

Lastly, as a naturally blunt person, I shared that people often perceive me as cold or single-minded. To help, I asked that colleagues let me know if I'm too brusque, and share their counterarguments, as the real sign of intelligence is "strong opinions, weakly held." After reading this, my editor shared a concern that she wasn't blunt enough with me. This was an excellent opportunity for clarification, as I told her I wouldn't want her to change her communication style to match mine, and that I valued learning from her softer approach.

While my editor's personal manual points are hers to share, they also facilitated invaluable clarity. For example, she wrote, "Help me protect my time. I have an easy time saying no to pitches, but when it comes to people asking for my help, I always want to say yes-so I can wind up overextended and overwhelmed." Given I Slack her at least hourly, reading this point pushed me to inquire whether the frequency of our conversations is overbearing-a worry I'd always held. She assured me that it wasn't, and we agreed to let each other know when we need space.

If anything, this process highlights the importance of including a call for feedback at the end of your manual. It's essential to acknowledge that this is a living document, to be adapted as you get to know yourself and your colleagues better. I pulled from Kroghrud's manual, which ends with: "The points are not an exhaustive list, but should save you some time figuring out how I work and behave. Please make me aware of additional points you think I should put on a revised version of this 'user's manual.'"

The takeaway

Fun and cathartic as our manual writing experience was, my editor and I couldn't help but wonder how much time and stress we could've saved by writing and sharing these manuals seven months ago, when we began working together. What's more, we considered how little we knew (and how much we wanted to know) about the dispositions and preferences of our coworkers.

Psychological safety -the ability to share your thoughts and ideas openly, honestly, and without fear of judgment-has been repeatedly proven the key to innovative, happy teams. Whether you're a manager or young employee, writing and sharing a user manual has a clear business payoff. The better a team knows one other, the easier it will be for them to navigate conflict, empathize with one another, and feel comfortable sharing, critiquing, and building upon one another's ideas.

Thirty minutes spent writing a manual can save hours analyzing and predicting what your colleagues like and hate. What's more, if my experience is anything to draw from, sharing manuals with your colleagues will build connection, and make you feel less alone. I know I'll take any opportunity to celebrate the fact that on the inside, we're all a little bit crazy.

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Completing this 30-minute exercise makes teams less anxious and more productive

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Here's a funny thing about work: We spend more time with our colleagues than with our friends and family. Yet more often than not, we don't really understand our co-workers-because being honest with one another is scary. When a teammate's lack of organization annoys us, we vent to others.

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Sometime around 1830, the great Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai created his most memorable artwork, The Great Wave off Kanagawa. In the woodblock print's stark asymmetry, it offers a timeless portrait of a world out of joint. Mount Fuji, the cultural heart of Japan, is shown displaced to one side - overpowered by a wall of water. Meanwhile, we barely notice the tiny figures of people riding fragile boats who seem powerless to influence the course of events.

Hokusai's image resonates today. We live in a time of VUCA - an increasingly popular acronym for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. Times of stability require only incremental adjustment and fine-tuning. Times of VUCA require bold innovation. Steve Jobs once famously observed in a time of crisis that "[t]he cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament."

The same challenge might well be on the minds of many organizational leaders today as they face an uncertain, disrupted, turbulent future. Welcome to the Age of Innovation.

Of course, this raises the question of what we mean by innovation, which is one of the most overused and poorly understood words in the lexicon.

Here is a brief semantic interlude: At its most basic, innovation is the process by which ideas are generated through human ingenuity, developed, and lead to the realization of value, whether seen in financial or social terms. My own definition of innovation takes things a step further: Innovation is a set of capabilities that enables the continuous realization of a desired future. Capabilities are abilities that are acquired through practice to achieve effects. Playing jazz piano, for example, is a capability; it doesn't come about simply by wishing or reading books. Innovation also needs to be about something. It needs to serve a purpose, hence the notion of what is desired. It is a process that is never completed, hence the term "continuous." It is also worth noting that innovation capabilities can be developed on multiple levels and result from the behavior of individuals, teams, organizations, and societies.

The Age of Innovation

Why is this the Age of Innovation?

Because a new generation of cultural visionaries has demonstrably coupled its ability to generate and develop new ideas to realize disproportionate value. The list of visionaries includes Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, and Larry Page, among many others.

Because a tidal wave of digital capability is disrupting existing business models and patterns of behavior. Remember Blockbuster, Tower Records, and Borders? All fell victim to disintermediation, the ability of end users to connect to the products and services they wanted in new ways.

Because worldwide there are at least 50 countries with national innovation agendas, chief innovation officers, and budgets to support this work. The field of large-scale innovation is back in vogue as political leaders increasingly look to innovation as the key to economic and social development. Countries worldwide are investing heavily in innovation capability; China's innovation agenda alone is said to be budgeted at $500 billion¹, while countries as diverse as Rwanda, Ireland, and Brazil have national chief innovation officers and strategies. In the United States, innovation as a federal agenda embraces everything from brain science to the human genome.

Because competition demands it. Developing innovation capability routinely shows up as one of the top priorities identified by CEOs. In a time of turmoil, the only capacity worth having is the ability to innovate faster than the competition.

Because the global challenges we face as civil society today far outstrip our current capacities to deal with them. To address climate change, human health, habitability, etc., we will have to innovate our way forward.

Because traditional jobs are giving way to an unknowable future landscape of employment. This is an era in which to be employable means to have the ability to quickly learn new skills - or, better yet, have the skills to create your own job. It is an era that favors the innovator and the entrepreneur. Individuals are empowered as never before with new technology-based capabilities to learn, collaborate, publish, and influence.

The Need to Innovate Education

I have identified four key drivers of the coming disruption that require an inevitable transformation of education.

Upside Down

Much has been made of the ability of new digital technologies to invert traditional authority and status hierarchies. In the digital domain, knowledge and skill are often inversely proportional to age. The phenomena of crowdsourcing and crowd-funding liberate the power of the many to influence the behavior of the whole.

Education is not immune to this dynamic. Traditional educational practice clearly expresses a vertical structure. It is built around an implied hierarchy of learnedness in which teachers, given their age and background, are presumed to have the knowledge worth sharing. The "sage on the stage" is authoritative, while students are compliant learners who ingest knowledge and demonstrate its acquisition through performance on standardized tests and assessments.

This hierarchy is intimately related to an industrial approach to learning that is increasingly out of step with the needs of a networked, digital age. The industrial model implies standardized curriculum, quality control metrics, efficiency, and batch processing. However, we are moving into a world of personalization, playlists, themes (not subjects), and demonstration of competencies in a portfolio (not check-off-the-box exams). This shift implies an expanded role for teachers as coaches, enablers, and facilitators.

Inside Out

Inside out involves a shift in the where and when of learning. In the old days, we had a homeroom and walked from classroom to classroom like ambulatory widgets in an assembly line synchronized to a common clock. The locus of learning today is shifting from the classroom, a fixed container with firm boundaries, to a 24/7, always-on platform - a blended learning environment that lives outside the boundaries of the classroom.

Disruption of education is being fueled by massive waves of change caused by digital technology. In his recent book, The Inevitable, Kevin Kelly observes that there are currently 60 trillion webpages, or 10,000 for every person on the planet, all created in approximately the last 8,000 days. And this is a participatory, not top-down, phenomenon. Some 65,000 videos are said to be posted to YouTube every day. This equates to 300 every minute.

And since YouTube is becoming the new self-directed classroom for Generation Z, these statistics hold special significance for educators. We live in a world increasingly fueled by the availability of powerful technologies for learning opportunities that exist outside the classroom and are in fact increasingly uncoupled from education. Augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), YouTube, Xbox, smartphones, and PlayStation are becoming the new classroom. For many students these days, learning is about what happens outside of school in the rich media soup of smartphones and gaming devices.

Events to Flows

The third major change is the transition from events to flows, which in turn transforms the how, or process, of learning. The industrial model requires discrete, measurable events that can be efficiently scheduled. The school year stops and starts on a fixed timetable, which refers back to the archaic reality of agricultural cycles that required students to be free to participate in farming. Students take a standard set of courses with a fixed sequence of exams. Standardized tests demonstrate college readiness, and graduation and prom are the icing on the cake.

Today, the potential exists for educational institutions to enable continuous evaluation and learning. The notion of a playlist as a list of tasks that students address on their own time to personalize their experiences changes the when and what of learning. And this has implications for higher education and beyond - as skills must be constantly developed through life to cope with new occupational and community challenges and opportunities.

In flow education, digital portfolios become increasingly important, as does the future of credentialing, which will evolve from scores on standardized tests to increasingly effective media for demonstrating competence. This also shifts the role of the teacher from inspector to enabler of holistic and practice-based learning. And in the so-called gig economy - with its requirement for just-in-time skills- badging, certification stacks, and micro-master's programs will increasingly supplement or even replace traditional degrees. New just-in-time certification models will enable the demonstration of work-related competencies to serve specific objective needs.

From Symbols to Experiences

The fourth and final dimension of the great wave that will transform education is the transition from symbols to experiences. This is a shift in the how of learning by the use of new, powerful media.

Most of us in senior positions grew up in an era of analog media and verbal literacy in which writing essays, penmanship, and manipulating words were considered to be core skills. These days, many students have a new concept of literacy. Some even actively avoid the effort of learning to write in cursive, preferring instead to work on keyboards. This is an era in which new artificial intelligence capabilities can enable a student to write a perfectly composed 10-page paper instantaneously when a topic is typed into a search bar. Perhaps it is search and curation, rather than composition, that should be seen as the new literacy.

The unit of learning is also changing. It is well known that young people prefer shorter experiences that involve motion media. YouTube has become a major repository and vehicle for learning among young people. Video games have profited in large measure because of their mastery of experience design and learning theory. The arrival of VR and AR as immersive technologies with the potential to create engagement is another dimension of the transition from symbols to experiences, as many initiatives - often backed by venture capital - strive to gamify the learning experience to make it even more relevant and engaging for learners.

Educating for Innovation

Worldwide, it is becoming abundantly clear that members of Generation Z - the generation born around the millennium - are more socially engaged and concerned about the condition of the world than previous generations. They are eager to learn the capabilities of innovation and entrepreneurship that will empower them to have a positive influence on the world.

The passion and idealism of this rising generation, however, is one of the most underutilized resources for good on the planet because there is a gap between what education usually provides and what young people need to know to thrive and to become socially active in the 21st century. This gap was poignantly illustrated to me by Gabe, a 12-year-old in New York, who told me point-blank, "I know I'm going to leave a legacy. I know I'm going to leave my mark. I just need someone to show me how."

What this new era requires is the ability to generate new ideas, to develop them through mastery of such skills as storytelling, design, and collaboration and then drive these ideas to the realization of value through entrepreneurship. These are skills that employers have stated clearly as among their most important criteria for employability. And this is the new blended set of capabilities that defines the landscape of innovation.

This relates to the mission that my organization, EdgeMakers, has set for itself: to create a new learning system for innovation and entrepreneurship that will activate the idealism of young people and allow them to make a difference ahead of schedule. We believe in the importance of a new approach to innovation learning that is integrated, practice-based, and purpose-driven. Purpose provides a "why" for learning. We have suffused the learning experience with societal challenges and "wicked problems" that provide the grist for developing skills while arousing a kind of civic mindedness and appetite for activism that the world needs. And we firmly believe that these capacities of innovation and entrepreneurship are learnable and teachable- and at a young age.

We also believe that educating for innovation can be a centerpiece of an educational institution's renewed focus on innovating education, a subject to which we now turn our attention.

So What?

Like it or not, education must transform; there is simply no alternative. It is a service industry in which its "customers" - students, parents, teachers, and funders - are increasingly dissatisfied. In my view, there is an "invalid social contract" in which students can do everything right according to the existing system and then find gaps in their employability and ability to thrive in the world.

The question that educators and educational institutions must now face is how to embark on the innovation journey. Every educational institution must prepare to navigate the Age of Innovation in the face of disruptive change. And while it is impossible to present a one-size-fits-all prescription, the following framework is intended as a starter kit to help educators and educational institutions begin that journey.

My experience shows that there are seven key ingredients that must be identified in a robust innovation agenda.

1. Vision. Innovation was defined earlier as the capability to continuously realize a desired future. Vision is the description of that desired future in concrete terms that provides the vector for innovation efforts. Vision answers the question: What will the world look like if everything works out?

2. Purpose. If innovation is the answer, what is the question? Why should we care about innovating, and what values and social priorities are being expressed through our innovation efforts? How will we make the world a better place?

3. Process skills. Generating and developing ideas involves a suite of process skills that are teachable and learnable, and improve through practice. Adopting techniques from design to create user scenarios, future narratives, and prototypes are examples of objective processes for creativity. So are techniques for ideation, brainstorming, and visualization. Facilitation is an underappreciated skill set that should be a cornerstone of everyone's learning experience.

4. Innovation infrastructure. Innovation is the result of combining three cardinal resources - ideas, capital, and talent - in an effective manner. Eliminate or delay any leg of the tripod, and innovation efforts will be hampered.

5. Narrative. Stories have a powerful ability to make ideas influential. When we hire an employee, satisfy a customer, or bring a sponsor on board, we have successfully used a story to motivate action and align effort. Stories are also critical to creating a sense of urgency, without which innovation efforts will fall short.

6. Culture.This refers to the set of beliefs that guide behavior or, stated another way, that really guide behavior. One wag described culture as what people do when the boss isn't around. Three values are key to a culture of innovation. Attitudes toward risk comprise a core cultural belief that can either enhance or impede creativity. Seeing risk as hazard will lead to conservatism. Seeing risk as learning will empower the bold. Cultures that focus on relentless business to the exclusion of needed white space for creative work will not get very far. And finally, curiosity and the desire to learn continuously are fundamental, especially in an era in which educators themselves must, in a sense, become students again.

7. Leadership. In an organization built around the core value of efficiency, the leader directs effort through formal authority. In an innovation-driven organization, the leader must evangelize for the vision, support talent, provide resources, and create a sense of possibility and desire for reasonable risk taking that informs the culture of the organization.

Two other matters must be mentioned in designing an innovation agenda for educational institutions. First, one is well advised to build innovation capability with an eye toward sustaining it. In my experience, most leaders underestimate the level of investment required - of time, mind-share, and resources - to turn innovation into an ongoing way of doing business.

Second, providing the best mechanisms for innovation stewardship is key to sustaining it. This involves answering the question of who is responsible and for what elements of the process. Stewardship occurs at three levels in an organization. Buy-in at the top of the organization is essential to an innovation agenda. And having leaders who understand their role in the overall innovation agenda is key. Leaders are keepers of the vision, storytellers-in-chief, and catalysts who empower others, make useful exceptions, and provide resources.

Sustainable innovation also requires sustained bottom-up leadership - the inclusion of "all of us." It is essential to have a robust flow of ideas and to create a culture of engagement.

What is most often missing in innovation initiatives is what I call the middleware - a coalition of the willing, in the form of an innovation task force or team - that is responsible and accountable for developing and managing the organization's innovation strategy. This innovation action group must be central. It cannot be successful if it's merely an exercise in form or the 11th item on a 10-item priority list.

How We Thrive

The twin agendas of innovating education and educating for innovation could not be more important, given the demands of the times, the profusion of new learning-relevant technologies, and the desire of Generation Z for a greater voice.

Education is always an answer to a question. It holds up a mirror to our society and to our values. In addition to its other responsibilities, education today must serve the goal of activating a sense of civic-mindedness in our young and equipping them to thrive in uncertainty.

John Dewey, a seminal thinker on education, stated almost a century ago that education was not only a way to gain content knowledge but also a way to learn how to live and realize one's full potential for the greater good. I agree with Dewey and take things one step further in saying that the purpose of education must be to enable the young and their teachers to thrive in the Age of Innovation.

Each educator and educational institution will have to find its own pathway. However, I hope this framework will enable all educators and schools to begin their innovation journey in a meaningful way.

Dubbed "Mr. Creativity" by The Economist, John Kao has spent the past 30 years growing his skills and reputation as an innovation activist, practitioner, and educator. His nonlinear noncareer reveals an eclectic set of accomplishments: Harvard Business School professor, Yale Medical School trained psychiatrist, Broadway and Hollywood producer, Silicon Valley entrepreneur, and Yamaha "Artist in Innovation" (perhaps no surprise since he played keyboards in Frank Zappa's band). He is currently CEO of EdgeMakers.

Notes

1. John Kao, China: The Next Innovation Nation, Amazon Kindle Store, 2016.

2. John Kao, Innovation Nation, Free Press, 2008.

3. Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable, Viking, 2016.
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Sometime around 1830, the great Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai created his most memorable artwork, The Great Wave off Kanagawa. In the woodblock print's stark asymmetry, it offers a timeless portrait of a world out of joint. Mount Fuji, the cultural heart of Japan, is shown displaced to one side - overpowered by a wall of water.

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Researchers who study academic history said they were not surprised that debate over young children and homework had resurfaced now. Education and parenting trends are cyclical, and the nation is coming off a stress-inducing, federally mandated accountability push that has put standardized testing at the center of the national education debate. Further, many parents say that homework has become particularly stressful since the arrival of Common Core, a set of rigorous and often confusing learning goals adopted by many states.

Tom Hatch, a professor of education at Columbia University's Teachers College and co-director of the National Center for Restructuring Education, Schools and Teaching, said homework wars were really a proxy fight about what constitutes learning. He added that they were intrinsically linked to the debates over standardized testing that have fueled the national "opt-out" movement.

"It's a small part of a larger conversation about how kids should spend their time," Professor Hatch said.

Similar battles have been playing out around New York City: After P.S. 118 in Park Slope, Brooklyn, eliminated mandatory homework this school year, some parents insisted that the school provide worksheets for their children anyway. At P.S. 116 in Manhattan's Kips Bay neighborhood, some parents threatened to leave after the principal, Jane Hsu, replaced "traditional homework" with voluntary recreational activities and family engagement - a program she calls "PDF," or "playtime, downtime and family time."

And P.S. 29 in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, has had schoolwide conversations on homework, so far deciding to preserve it, but focusing on keeping it "feasible," "meaningful" and "reasonable," said Rebecca Fagin, the school's principal.

There is no official tally on the number of the city public elementary schools that are altering their approach to homework. The Department of Education does not mandate amounts of homework, and most plans are cobbled together as part of a shared vision among a school's principal, parents and teachers.

Conversations about the value of elementary school homework have spread nationally. Brandy Young, a second-grade teacher in northeastern Texas, calls herself "the No Homework Teacher" and has a website that proclaims, "Let's make education GREAT again." In August, a letter she sent to parents announcing her decision to eliminate homework was shared more than 70,000 times on Facebook and received national media attention. In states from Florida to California, elementary schools are experimenting with no homework, or what some call "reform homework" policies, often with considerable resistance from parents - and sometimes teachers.

Alfie Kohn, the author of 14 education-related books, including " The Homework Myth," is a leader in the anti-homework camp. In a recent interview, Mr. Kohn described homework as "educational malpractice" and "an extremely effective way to extinguish children's curiosity." He noted that nations like Denmark and Japan, which routinely outperform the United States on international math and science assessments, often gave their students far less homework.

"They're not trying to turn kids into calculators on legs," he said.

On the other side of the argument is Harris M. Cooper, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at Duke University and the author of " The Battle Over Homework." He says he believes elementary school students should get small doses of engaging homework.

But Dr. Cooper's own research is often cited against him. A 2006 meta-analysis he conducted of more than 60 studies of homework's efficacy showed that doing homework did not necessarily increase an elementary school student's test scores or grades. Dr. Cooper updated the analysis in 2012, with similar results.

But Dr. Cooper said these studies did not take into consideration homework's obvious, but less trackable, benefits: teaching organization, time management and discipline. Small amounts of enriching and age-appropriate homework in the early grades, he says, serves as a good way for parents to observe their children's progress and to teach young people that learning doesn't happen only inside a classroom. He calls parents who seek to abolish after-school work "homework deniers."

Homework for young children has been a recurrent parenting issue since the beginning of the 20th century, according to Paula S. Fass, a professor emerita of history at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of " The End of American Childhood." Worries about its excesses have ebbed and flowed; students got heavy loads in the 1950s, when Americans were particularly worried about their ability to compete with the Russians after the launch of Sputnik. Homework spiked again in the 1980s with the release of the now-famous "A Nation at Risk" report, which indicated that American students were falling behind their peers in other parts of the world.

Today, though, worry about excessive homework is competing with anxieties about student achievement and global competition. The situation is compounded by an urge among parents "to have as much control over their children as possible," Dr. Fass said.

"What you are looking at is the tension between that progressive view that children need to be protected from being adults, and still these parents want their kids to succeed," she said.

The National Education Association and the National PTA have weighed in, suggesting that students get 10 minutes of homework per grade, starting in first grade - what educators sometimes refer to as the "10-minute rule." Dr. Cooper also endorses this policy.

The focus for many anti-homework parents is what they see as the quality of work assigned. They object to worksheets, but embrace projects that they believe encourage higher-level thinking. At P.S. 11 in Manhattan, even parents who support the no-homework policy said they often used online resources like Khan Academy, a nonprofit organization that provides free educational videos. The school's website also includes handwriting exercises, scientific articles, and math and reading lessons. Sophie Mintz, whose son is in second grade at the school, said that the no-homework policy had afforded him more time to build elaborate Lego structures.

But parents with fewer means say the new policies don't take into account their needs and time constraints, and leave them on their own when it comes to building the skills their children need to prepare for the annual state tests.

Ms. Sierra, the P.S. 11 parent who opposed the change, said that although the school included test prep materials on its voluntary homework site, she had a hard time getting her children to do the work.

"Now I can't say, 'Your teacher wants you to do this,'" she said. "It's just me.'"

Guadalupe Enriquez, another mother at P.S. 11, who works as a housekeeper, said she looked to the school to provide and monitor work at home. "Having a little bit of homework is good," she said.

At P.S. 118, the school in Park Slope, a homework policy that started last fall replaced required worksheets with voluntary at-home projects. Tensions have arisen there because the projects often turn out to be videos of after-school activities like gardening or science experiments, in which parents take a guiding role. Some children do presentations about family trips. Elizabeth Garraway, the principal, said that some families had expressed concerns that they didn't have the time and resources for exciting after-school activities or exotic family vacations.

She is working hard to dispel the idea that only certain after-school activities deserve attention, she said, and has encouraged families to consider play dates and trips to the park as good topics for presentations.

"You can do a presentation on anything," she said.

At the school on a recent morning, she showed off the results. In one third-grade class, a boy recently wrote, directed and recorded a "fireside chat" with his father, who played President Franklin D. Roosevelt. A girl arrived at school ready to showcase a PowerPoint presentation on Greek mythology. And Mia Bornstein, 8, showed up one morning with a broom handle bearing an oversize scroll that outlined life in ancient Egypt. Mia said she had worked on it with her mother, an artist.

How much time had she spent on it? Hours.

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Never Mind the Students; Homework Divides Parents

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Researchers who study academic history said they were not surprised that debate over young children and homework had resurfaced now. Education and parenting trends are cyclical, and the nation is coming off a stress-inducing, federally mandated accountability push that has put standardized testing at the center of the national education debate.

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One of the biggest challenges in K-12 education is finding an effective and productive way to evaluate teacher performance. In a world where technology is rapidly reshaping the classroom, it's natural to look to its potential, especially considering that many schools now have the technology to do classroom observation via video. However, these same schools aren't yet convinced whether the investment will change status quo evaluations. To find out, in 2012, the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard, where I work, piloted the Best Foot Forward Project (BFF), a study that grew out of the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project.

BFF began with pilot programs in large districts in Georgia and North Carolina as well as Relay Graduate School of Education. In an effort to gather data from large and small districts in both urban and rural areas, we then expanded the study to include Los Angeles Unified School District, the state of Delaware, and a number of districts in Colorado.

We randomly selected half the teachers to be in a treatment group that would take videos of themselves in the classroom. These videos were then passed along to their principals for evaluation purposes. We also had remote peers provide our treatment group teachers with formative feedback on their subject matter. The control group did "business as usual" when it came to their evaluations.

To capture the video, we used a camera that had been manufactured specifically for the project. It had two lenses so that it could record two different views of the classroom at the same time. In the last year of the project, we wanted to use technology that many teachers already had and knew how to use, so we also recorded with an iPad connected to a microphone and mounted on a Swivl tripod. We have since published a toolkit, available on our website, which advises educators on how to pick the right video technology for their district. It includes recommendations for cameras, microphones, and viewing platforms, such as Insight ADVANCE. As we had done in the MET study, we had teachers choose which videos they would submit to the principal for evaluation.
The results

Our two-year impact study ended in May 2015, and we found that teachers in the treatment group had a better experience of evaluation than those in the control group. Here are the top three reasons why:

The conversation was less adversarial. As anyone who has ever sat through a job evaluation can tell you, they can be combative, and it is hard to change the way you do your job based on a conversation in which you are constantly on the defensive. Using classroom videos as a common reference point, teachers and principals in our treatment group found that they agreed more during their evaluations, which made teachers more open to constructive feedback.

They got more specific and more actionable feedback from their principals. Audiovisual documentation made it clearer what teachers were doing right, as well as the areas in which they could use some improvement.

They saw more of what their students were doing. In today's tech-enabled classrooms, there's a lot going on at once, and teachers can't always take it all in. Videos helped them see what they were missing. One great example of this was a teacher who recorded a class, and only when watching the video realized that a student had been bouncing a golf ball against the wall throughout the entire period.

Principals benefited from video observation as well.

Their conversations with teachers were more fruitful. In the less adversarial atmosphere I described above, the door was more open to collaboration between principals and their teachers.

They spent more time observing instruction and less time doing paperwork. Although the principals in the treatment group did spend more time overall on the evaluation process than their peers in the control group, a greater percentage of that time was spent watching their teachers teach.

They had more flexibility in when they did their observation. Rather than taking time out of their school day to be in a certain classroom at a certain time, principals could watch videos at home, during lunch, or whenever was most convenient for them.

Interestingly, one of the areas in which principals struggled when watching videos was in seeing student behavior and performance.
District size matters
From the focus groups we held with Best Foot Forward participants, we observed notable differences among the different districts. Teachers from smaller districts, where they were accustomed to frequent observation, were less satisfied with the results of their video observations than teachers from big districts who had had fewer observations. This is probably because larger districts have more difficulty delivering quality feedback at scale. Principals are responsible for evaluating many more teachers within the same period of time.

Since completing BFF, we have had a great deal of international interest in video observation pilots from countries like Brazil, Argentina, Singapore, and South Africa. No matter where we continue our work, we look forward to finding ways to make teacher evaluations less about recrimination and more about collaboration.

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The benefits of adding video to teacher evaluations

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One of the biggest challenges in K-12 education is finding an effective and productive way to evaluate teacher performance. In a world where technology is rapidly reshaping the classroom, it's natural to look to its potential, especially considering that many schools now have the technology to do classroom observation via video.

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Synopsis

What makes a great music teacher so effective? Below are 19 clues, taken from the approaches of three renowned artist-teachers.

My oldest kid is currently in a phase where he tries to avoid explaining things by saying "it's complicated."

To his credit, some of the things we experience in life really are difficult to articulate in words - despite being clear to us in a non-verbal sort of way.

Like a child trying to explain what love is.

Or defining what it is that makes a great teacher great.

Have you ever wondered what exactly renowned teachers do during lessons that help their students make progress and sound better from week to week? Do they rely on the same key set of strategies? Or is it different from teacher to teacher? What's the secret sauce?

Three artist-teachers

Researchers Robert Duke and Amy Simmons were curious to learn more about the pedagogical approaches of individuals who are highly regarded not just as teachers, but as performers as well, and videotaped three renowned artist-teachers as they worked with their students in regular weekly private lessons - violist Donald McInnes, oboist Richard Killmer, and pianist Nelita True.

Altogether, about 30 hours of lessons were recorded, with students ranging in age from high school to doctoral-level students.

The researchers then observed ~8-9 hours of video of each teacher, looking specifically for (a) teaching strategies that all three teachers used, and of these, narrowing in on (b) only those strategies that led directly to improvements in the students' playing, and which (c) were used in almost every lesson (and again, by all three teachers).

Despite being very different people, teaching very different instruments, it turns out these teachers' pedagogical approaches might fundamentally be more similar than different. The researchers identified 19 key elements that were common to each teacher's approach, which fell into three broad areas - (1) Goals and Expectations, (2) Effecting Change, and (3) Conveying Information.

What does that mean exactly? Let's take a closer look...

(1) Goals and Expectations
#1: "The repertoire assigned students is well within their technical capabilities; no student is struggling with the notes of the piece."
Lessons tended to be centered around issues of musical expression and interpretation. So students came to lessons with pieces already in their hands, and even with some musical ideas of their own.

Some students will of course need much more time and help with technical fundamentals, but this speaks to the kind of work that can be done when repertoire is not too far beyond a students' current capacity. Compare this with how a lesson would look when a student tries to tackle a piece of music that they love, but is simply too demanding for them technically to be able to do much with beyond just (barely) getting the notes out.
#2: "Teachers have a clear auditory image of the piece that guides their judgments about the music."
Even when teachers haven't come across a particular piece before, they are able to take what they know about the composer, style, etc. and apply what they do know in such a way that the lesson is just as helpful as if they did know the piece.
#3: "The teachers demand a consistent standard of sound quality from their students."
This is one of the two elements that seemed to trump everything else. No matter what they were working on at the moment, if the sound quality was anything less than beautiful, everything came to a screeching halt, and sound quality became the primary focus until it was raised to the teacher's satisfaction.
#4: "The teachers select lesson targets that are technically or musical important."
Interestingly, teachers didn't stop to work on every single imperfection - just the areas that would lead to the most meaningful or impactful improvement.
#5: "Lesson targets are positioned at a level of difficulty that is close enough to the student's current skill level that the targets are achievable in the short term and change is audible to the student in the moment."
Rather than focusing on areas of the students' playing that might still be over their heads, the teachers appeared to focus on adjustments that the student could make in the moment and experience immediate success with.
#6: "The teachers clearly remember students' work in past lessons and frequently draw comparisons between present and past, pointing out both positive and negative differences."
Sometimes it's easy for us to focus so much on how much more we have to do, that it's easy to forget how far we've come. Sometimes it's nice to get some perspective and a pat on the back from someone whose ears and judgment we trust.

(2) Effecting Change
#7: "Pieces are performed from beginning to end; in this sense, the lessons are like performances, with instantaneous transitions into performance character; nearly all playing is judged by a high standard, 'as if we are performing.' "
John Wooden once said, "If you don't have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?" Similarly, if we don't make it a habit to practice playing as we would for an audience/jury, the less-than-fully-committed, lackadaisical "meh" approach may follow us out on stage.
#8: "In general, the course of the music directs the lesson; errors in student performance elicit stops."
The students were usually stopped immediately upon making an error. The idea being, I think, to help the student hone their standards and gain a clearer understanding of what beautiful/accurate playing sounds like while the memory of the offending moment is still fresh in their ears and fingers.
#9: "The teachers are tenacious in working to accomplish lesson targets, having students repeat target passages until performance is accurate."
The teachers carefully selected areas for improvement that were achievable, so even if a student was struggling in the moment to get things sounding just right, the teachers didn't let the students off the hook by sending them home to practice; they continued to provide guidance, feedback, and model the desirable way to play the passage until the student finally got it right.
#10: "Any flaws in fundamental technique are immediately addressed; no performance trials with incorrect technique are allowed to continue."
This was the other thing that seemed to trump all else. If a student played something with incorrect technique, correcting this flaw became priority #1, and they didn't move on until the mechanics were fixed.
#11: "Lessons proceed at an intense, rapid pace."
There was a pretty rapid cycling between the teacher's instruction and students' playing attempts. As opposed to a teacher droning on for minutes while the student sits and gets cold and starts to forget what they were doing.
#12: "The pace of the lessons is interrupted from time to time with what seem to be 'intuitively timed' breaks, during which the teachers give an extended demonstration or tell a story."
That being said, teachers also seemed to know when it was time to sit back a bit and take a short breather from the intense back and forth of instruction/playing. And who doesn't love stories? Plus, it really does seem that occasional breaks in the flow of a lesson/lecture/presentation/etc. help us stay more engaged.
#13: "The teachers permit students to make interpretive choices in the performance of repertoire, but only among a limited range of options that are circumscribed by the teacher; students are permitted no choices regarding technique."
While there seemed to be appropriate flexibility in the musical aspect of how a phrase was played, the mechanics were not up for discussion. I found this to be really interesting. Because it seems like there are a range of approaches to the mechanics of playing as well.

(3) Conveying Information
#14: "Teachers make very fine discriminations about student performances; these are consistently articulated to the student, so that the student learns to make the same discriminations independently."
Much of the teachers' feedback seemed to be geared towards honing the students' ears. Helping them appreciate more of the subtle nuances and details that the teachers hear, so that they could continue to raise their standards and eventually, the level of their playing. After all, if they can't hear it, they can't work on it in the week between lessons.
#15: "Performance technique is described in terms of the effect that physical motion creates in the sound produced."
Remember #3 and #10? Teachers didn't talk about these in isolation, but always addressed technique as a means to the end of sound production, and...wait for it...
#16: "Technical feedback is given in terms of creating an interpretive effect."
...always toward the ultimate end goal of musical expression. As a wise person once said, "The only reason for mastering technique is to make sure the body does not prevent the soul from expressing itself."
#17: "Negative feedback is clear, pointed, frequent, and directed at very specific aspects of students' performances, especially the musical effects created."
In this study, there were more instances of negative feedback than positive, which goes against findings in some other similar studies. BUT, the feedback was very specific and clear, and seemed to be geared towards helping the students fine-tune their ability to discriminate between good playing and great playing.
#18: "There are infrequent, intermittent, unexpected instance of positive feedback, but these are most often of high magnitude and extended duration."
Of course, when the students did something nice and their teacher was genuinely pleased, (which happened at least once in almost every lesson), the teachers didn't hold back, and were very "emphatic and detailed" in the feedback they shared.
#19: "The teachers play examples from the students' repertoire to demonstrate important points; the teachers' modeling is exquisite in every respect."
As you can imagine, these particular teachers were probably quite inspiring to listen to whenever they demonstrated what they were asking...but I think the bigger idea is that their demonstration (whether played on their instrument or simply sung or gestured), effectively and clearly illustrated the musical essence of what they wanted their student to aim for.

Take action

The authors admit that it's unclear how generalizable these findings may be to all teachers and students, but it seems to me that many of the 19 are pretty universally applicable.

If you'd like to dig a little deeper, it's well worth checking out the complete results section of their paper, which also includes multiple video examples of each teacher illustrating many of the 19 elements described above: The Nature of Expertise
This article originally appeared at The Bulletproof Musician.
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What makes a great music teacher so effective? Below are 19 clues, taken from the approaches of three renowned artist-teachers. My oldest kid is currently in a phase where he tries to avoid explaining things by saying "it's complicated."

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SmartBlog on Education this month is exploring assessments and testing. Join us for original content in which experts explore the trends and highlight best practices.
The kindergarten teacher, who I was supposedly coaching, looked at me and apologetically said, "Sorry, there is nothing to observe today." It was the end of the school year, and she was pulling individual students aside to assess their reading skills. The other children were left to play on their own. I asked if I could stay and play with them. She shrugged her shoulders and said it was okay, but her expression indicated that I would be wasting my time.

The classroom, however, was buzzing with chatter and movement as I visited small clusters of children who had created their own play scenarios. One scenario was a restaurant, so a student approached me asking for help spelling items on a menu he was creating. Another group of students created a beauty salon and were designing different hairdos using a variety of art supplies. Another group narrated for me their dramatic super hero adventures using small plastic figures and blocks. Several other students were tucked away in a corner creating beautiful designs with crayons and markers.

After a half hour, I thanked the teacher and left the room. Later on as I reflected on that visit compared to my previous ones, I concluded that there was more learning going on that day, than I had observed on any previous visit; too bad that the teacher didn't see it.

I also understood on a deeper level why my coaching failed to help this teacher: We had very different versions of the nature of teaching and learning. It was as if we spoke different languages yet thought we were speaking the same one. This difference was like an invisible, but impenetrable wall that blocked the possibility of a substantive discussion that could have lead to positive changes. That invisible wall was why I observed a type of learning that she viewed as regrettable down time.

On her side of the wall, she was a very competent teacher with little need of coaching and who was I to imply anything different. That kindergarten teacher had been taught as a student and then trained as a teacher with the basic, but unvoiced, assumption that she must first and foremost gain and maintain control of her students as a class. Failing to do so would make teaching and learning impossible and be a sign of her incompetence as a teacher. So in this teacher's mind, she had learned and mastered the craft of teaching based on what I refer to as the "control to learn" assumption.

Here are some of the corollaries of that assumption:

Learning is dependent on teaching.

What should be learned is determined and defined by the teacher.

Teaching requires organization and management.

Teachers must use their authority and power to motivate students to learn.

Students must be assessed based on what they are taught.

Teaching is evaluated by how students learn what is taught.

Based on those corollaries, the teacher expected my coaching to give her some specific actions or words that would make the students more compliant and/or manageable. However, I coached her to adapt her teaching to the strengths and needs of her students. My view of teaching and learning was based a different assumption: People are born to learn and need the right conditions for their learning to flourish. Here are some corollaries to that assumption:

Students learn from everything around them and from each other, not just from a teacher.

Learning is not just a cognitive experience but involves emotions and the social context.

The teacher's role is to provide the right conditions for learning primarily by creating a safe and supportive environment.

A strong and trusting relationship between student and teacher is the foundation of a safe environment.

A teacher needs to learn about the interests, strengths and needs of each student in order to create the right conditions for learning.

Assumptions and their corollaries, however, are not meant to compete for the claim of truth. One set of assumptions does not necessarily have to cancel out the others. What those children were doing in the classroom that day can and should be interpreted in different ways.

I am not recommending that schools solely become places of free play and exploration. I am suggesting that "invisible" learning at least be acknowledged and allotted some time and space in our schools. As teachers recognize this learning, they will improve their practice. Teachers can play, explore and learn with their students. They can use what they learn from those experiences to craft more engaging lessons that they can teach to their students. These lessons can be springboards to enhance students' curiosity and desire to learn more. When students are engaged in meaningful learning in a safe environment, teachers are influencing students, not controlling them. They help them regulate their own behavior as part of the process of learning itself.

Too often these types of fundamental conversations are too threatening to those guided by different assumptions. Perhaps there is a fear of only exposing irreconcilable differences should the two versions of learning come to light. Moreover, most educators are also under too much pressure with too little time to feel that they can afford to have these discussions. Educators do need to talk and listen to each other about the nature of learning itself. It is the essence of their identity. As the words of Robert Frost remind us, "Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence."
Jim Dillon (@dillon_jim) has been an educator for over 35 years including 20 as a school administrator. He is currently the director of the Center for Leadership and Bullying Prevention. He has written three books, Peaceful School Bus (Hazelden), No Place for Bullying (Corwin) and Reframing Bullying Prevention to Build Stronger School Communities (Corwin). He writes a blog at www.jim-dillon.com. If you enjoyed this article, join SmartBrief's email list for more stories about education. We offer newsletters covering educational leadership, special education and more.

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SmartBlog on Education this month is exploring assessments and testing. Join us for original content in which experts explore the trends and highlight best practices. The kindergarten teacher, who I was supposedly coaching, looked at me and apologetically said, "Sorry, there is nothing to observe today."

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Steve Quatrano, a member of the Right Question Institute, a nonprofit research group, explains that the act of formulating questions enables us "to organize our thinking around what we don't know." This makes questioning a good skill to hone in dynamic times.

Asking questions can help spark the innovative ideas that many companies hunger for these days. In the research for my book, I studied business breakthroughs - including the invention of the Polaroid instant camera and the Nest thermostat and the genesis of start-ups like Netflix, Square and Airbnb - and found that in each case, some curious soul looked at a current problem and asked insightful questions about why that problem existed and how it might be tackled.

The Polaroid story is my favorite: The inspiration for the instant camera sprang from a question asked in the mid-1940s by the 3-year-old daughter of its inventor, Edwin H. Land. She was impatient to see a photo her father had just snapped, and when he tried to explain that the film had to be processed first, she wondered aloud, "Why do we have to wait for the picture?"

One might assume that people can easily ask such questions, given that children do it so well. But research shows that question-asking peaks at age 4 or 5 and then steadily drops off, as children pass through school (where answers are often more valued than questions) and mature into adults. By the time we're in the workplace, many of us have gotten out of the habit of asking fundamental questions about what's going on around us. And some people worry that asking questions at work reveals ignorance or may be seen as slowing things down.

So how can companies encourage people to ask more questions? There are simple ways to train people to become more comfortable and proficient at it. For example, question formulation exercises can be used as a substitute for conventional brainstorming sessions. The idea is to put a problem or challenge in front of a group of people and instead of asking for ideas, instruct participants to generate as many relevant questions as they can. Kristi Schaffner, an executive at Microsoft, regularly conducts such exercises there and says they sharpen analytical skills.

Getting employees to ask more questions is the easy part; getting management to respond well to those questions can be harder. When leaders claim they want "everyone to ask more questions," I sometimes (in my bolder moments) ask: "Do you really want that? And what will you do with those questions once people start asking them?"

For questioning to thrive in a company, management must find ways to reward the behavior - if only by acknowledging the good questions that have been asked. For example, I visited one company that asked all employees to think of "what if" and "how might we" questions about the company's goals and plans. Management and employees together decided which of these mission questions were best, then displayed them on banners on the walls.

Leaders can also encourage companywide questioning by being more curious and inquisitive themselves. This is not necessarily easy for senior executives, who are used to being the ones with the answers. I've noticed during questioning exercises at some companies that top executives sit in the back of the room, laptops open, attending to other business; they seem to think their employees are the only ones who need to learn. As they do this, these leaders are modeling precisely the kind of incurious behavior they're trying to change in others.

They could set a better example by asking "why" and "what if" - while asking others to do likewise. And as the questions proliferate, some good answers are likely to follow.

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Steve Quatrano, a member of the Right Question Institute, a nonprofit research group, explains that the act of formulating questions enables us "to organize our thinking around what we don't know." This makes questioning a good skill to hone in dynamic times. Asking questions can help spark the innovative ideas that many companies hunger for these days.

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How can so many people believe things that are demonstrably false? The question has taken on new urgency as the Trump administration propagates falsehoods about voter fraud, climate change and crime statistics that large swaths of the population have bought into. But collective delusion is not new, nor is it the sole province of the political right. Plenty of liberals believe, counter to scientific consensus, that G.M.O.s are poisonous, and that vaccines cause autism.

The situation is vexing because it seems so easy to solve. The truth is obvious if you bother to look for it, right? This line of thinking leads to explanations of the hoodwinked masses that amount to little more than name calling: "Those people are foolish" or "Those people are monsters."

Such accounts may make us feel good about ourselves, but they are misguided and simplistic: They reflect a misunderstanding of knowledge that focuses too narrowly on what goes on between our ears. Here is the humbler truth: On their own, individuals are not well equipped to separate fact from fiction, and they never will be. Ignorance is our natural state; it is a product of the way the mind works.

What really sets human beings apart is not our individual mental capacity. The secret to our success is our ability to jointly pursue complex goals by dividing cognitive labor. Hunting, trade, agriculture, manufacturing - all of our world-altering innovations - were made possible by this ability. Chimpanzees can surpass young children on numerical and spatial reasoning tasks, but they cannot come close on tasks that require collaborating with another individual to achieve a goal. Each of us knows only a little bit, but together we can achieve remarkable feats.

Knowledge isn't in my head or in your head. It's shared.

Consider some simple examples. You know that the earth revolves around the sun. But can you rehearse the astronomical observations and calculations that led to that conclusion? You know that smoking causes cancer. But can you articulate what smoke does to our cells, how cancers form and why some kinds of smoke are more dangerous than others? We're guessing no. Most of what you "know" - most of what anyone knows - about any topic is a placeholder for information stored elsewhere, in a long-forgotten textbook or in some expert's head.

One consequence of the fact that knowledge is distributed this way is that being part of a community of knowledge can make people feel as if they understand things they don't. Recently, one of us ran a series of studies in which we told people about some new scientific discoveries that we fabricated, like rocks that glow. When we said that scientists had not yet explained the glowing rocks and then asked our respondents how well they understood how such rocks glow, they reported not understanding at all - a very natural response given that they knew nothing about the rocks. But when we told another group about the same discovery, only this time claiming that scientists had explained how the rocks glowed, our respondents reported a little bit more understanding. It was as if the scientists' knowledge (which we never described) had been directly transmitted to them.

The sense of understanding is contagious. The understanding that others have, or claim to have, makes us feel smarter. This happens only when people believe they have access to the relevant information: When our experimental story indicated that the scientists worked for the Army and were keeping the explanation secret, people no longer felt that they had any understanding of why the rocks glowed.

The key point here is not that people are irrational; it's that this irrationality comes from a very rational place. People fail to distinguish what they know from what others know because it is often impossible to draw sharp boundaries between what knowledge resides in our heads and what resides elsewhere.

This is especially true of divisive political issues. Your mind cannot master and retain sufficiently detailed knowledge about many of them. You must rely on your community. But if you are not aware that you are piggybacking on the knowledge of others, it can lead to hubris.

Recently, for example, there was a vociferous outcry when President Trump and Congress rolled back regulations on the dumping of mining waste in waterways. This may be bad policy, but most people don't have sufficient expertise to draw that conclusion because evaluating the policy is complicated. Environmental policy is about balancing costs and benefits. In this case, you need to know something about what mining waste does to waterways and in what quantities these effects occur, how much economic activity depends on being able to dump freely, how a decrease in mining activity would be made up for from other energy sources and how environmentally damaging those are, and on and on.

We suspect that most of those people expressing outrage lacked the detailed knowledge necessary to assess the policy. We also suspect that many in Congress who voted for the rollback were equally in the dark. But people seemed pretty confident.

Such collective delusions illustrate both the power and the deep flaw of human thinking. It is remarkable that large groups of people can coalesce around a common belief when few of them individually possess the requisite knowledge to support it. This is how we discovered the Higgs boson and increased the human life span by 30 years in the last century. But the same underlying forces explain why we can come to believe outrageous things, which can lead to equally consequential but disastrous outcomes.

That individual ignorance is our natural state is a bitter pill to swallow. But if we take this medicine, it can be empowering. It can help us differentiate the questions that merit real investigation from those that invite a reactive and superficial analysis. It also can prompt us to demand expertise and nuanced analysis from our leaders, which is the only tried and true way to make effective policy. A better understanding of how little is actually inside our own heads would serve us well.

Philip Fernbach is a cognitive scientist and professor of marketing at the University of Colorado's Leeds School of Business. Steven Sloman is a professor of cognitive, linguistic and psychological sciences at Brown University. They are the authors of the forthcoming "The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone."
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Opinion | Why We Believe Obvious Untruths

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How can so many people believe things that are demonstrably false? The question has taken on new urgency as the Trump administration propagates falsehoods about voter fraud, climate change and crime statistics that large swaths of the population have bought into. But collective delusion is not new, nor is it the sole province of the political right.

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Listen to this post as a podcast:
When I worked with student teachers on developing effective lesson plans, one thing I always asked them to revise was the phrase "We will discuss."
We will discuss the video. We will discuss the story. We will discuss our results.
Every time I saw it in a lesson plan, I would add a note: "What format will you use? What questions will you ask? How will you ensure that all students participate?" I was pretty sure that We will discuss actually meant the teacher would do most of the talking; He would throw out a couple of questions like "So what did you think about the video?" or "What was the theme of the story?" and a few students would respond, resulting in something that looked like a discussion, but was ultimately just a conversation between the teacher and a handful of extroverted students; a classic case of Fisheye Teaching.

The problem wasn't them; in most of the classrooms where they'd sat as students, that's exactly what a class discussion looked like. They didn't know any other "formats." I have only ever been familiar with a few myself. But when teachers began contacting me recently asking for a more comprehensive list, I knew it was time to do some serious research.

So here they are: 15 formats for structuring a class discussion to make it more engaging, more organized, more equitable, and more academically challenging. If you've struggled to find effective ways to develop students' speaking and listening skills, this is your lucky day.

I've separated the strategies into three groups. The first batch contains the higher-prep strategies, formats that require teachers to do some planning or gathering of materials ahead of time. Next come the low-prep strategies, which can be used on the fly when you have a few extra minutes or just want your students to get more active. Note that these are not strict categories; it's certainly possible to simplify or add more meat to any of these structures and still make them work. The last group is the ongoing strategies. These are smaller techniques that can be integrated with other instructional strategies and don't really stand alone. For each strategy, you'll find a list of other names it sometimes goes by, a description of its basic structure, and an explanation of variations that exist, if any. To watch each strategy in action, click on its name and a new window will open with a video that demonstrates it.

Enjoy!
a.k.a. Chat Stations
Basic Structure: Stations or posters are set up around the classroom, on the walls or on tables. Small groups of students travel from station to station together, performing some kind of task or responding to a prompt, either of which will result in a conversation.

Variations: Some Gallery Walks stay true to the term gallery, where groups of students create informative posters, then act as tour guides or docents, giving other students a short presentation about their poster and conducting a Q&A about it. In Starr Sackstein's high school classroom, her stations consisted of video tutorials created by the students themselves. Before I knew the term Gallery Walk, I shared a strategy similar to it called Chat Stations, where the teacher prepares discussion prompts or content-related tasks and sets them up around the room for students to visit in small groups.
a.k.a. Values Continuum, Forced Debate, Physical Barometer, This or That
Basic Structure: A statement that has two possible responses-agree or disagree-is read out loud. Depending on whether they agree or disagree with this statement, students move to one side of the room or the other. From that spot, students take turns defending their positions.

Variations: Often a Philosophical Chairs debate will be based around a text or group of texts students have read ahead of time; students are required to cite textual evidence to support their claims and usually hold the texts in their hands during the discussion. Some teachers set up one hot seat to represent each side, and students must take turns in the seat. In less formal variations (which require less prep), a teacher may simply read provocative statements students are likely to disagree on, and a debate can occur spontaneously without a text to refer to (I call this variation This or That in my classroom icebreakers post). Teachers may also opt to offer a continuum of choices, ranging from "Strongly Agree" on one side of the room, all the way to "Strongly Disagree" on the other, and have students place themselves along that continuum based on the strength of their convictions.

Basic Structure: Students are divided into 4 groups. Three of these groups are assigned to represent specific points of view. Members of the fourth group are designated as "provocateurs," tasked with making sure the discussion keeps going and stays challenging. One person from each group (the "speaker") sits in a desk facing speakers from the other groups, so they form a square in the center of the room. Behind each speaker, the remaining group members are seated: two right behind the speaker, then three behind them, and so on, forming a kind of triangle. From above, this would look like a pinwheel. The four speakers introduce and discuss questions they prepared ahead of time (this preparation is done with their groups). After some time passes, new students rotate from the seats behind the speaker into the center seats and continue the conversation.

Variations: When high school English teacher Sarah Brown Wessling introduced this strategy in the featured video (click Pinwheel Discussion above), she used it as a device for talking about literature, where each group represented a different author, plus one provocateur group. But in the comments that follow the video, Wessling adds that she also uses the strategy with non-fiction, where students represent authors of different non-fiction texts or are assigned to take on different perspectives about an issue.
a.k.a. Socratic Circles
Basic Structure: Students prepare by reading a text or group of texts and writing some higher-order discussion questions about the text. On seminar day, students sit in a circle and an introductory, open-ended question is posed by the teacher or student discussion leader. From there, students continue the conversation, prompting one another to support their claims with textual evidence. There is no particular order to how students speak, but they are encouraged to respectfully share the floor with others. Discussion is meant to happen naturally and students do not need to raise their hands to speak. This overview of Socratic Seminar from the website Facing History and Ourselves provides a list of appropriate questions, plus more information about how to prepare for a seminar.

Variations: If students are beginners, the teacher may write the discussion questions, or the question creation can be a joint effort. For larger classes, teachers may need to set up seminars in more of a fishbowl-like arrangement, dividing students into one inner circle that will participate in the discussion, and one outer circle that silently observes, takes notes, and may eventually trade places with those in the inner circle, sometimes all at once, and sometimes by "tapping in" as the urge strikes them.
a.k.a. Affinity Diagramming
Basic Structure: Give students a broad question or problem that is likely to result in lots of different ideas, such as "What were the impacts of the Great Depression?" or "What literary works should every person read?" Have students generate responses by writing ideas on post-it notes (one idea per note) and placing them in no particular arrangement on a wall, whiteboard, or chart paper. Once lots of ideas have been generated, have students begin grouping them into similar categories, then label the categories and discuss why the ideas fit within them, how the categories relate to one another, and so on.

Variations: Some teachers have students do much of this exercise-recording their ideas and arranging them into categories- without talking at first. In other variations, participants are asked to re-combine the ideas into new, different categories after the first round of organization occurs. Often, this activity serves as a good pre-writing exercise, after which students will write some kind of analysis or position paper.
a.k.a. Speed Dating
Basic Structure: Students form two circles, one inside circle and one outside circle. Each student on the inside is paired with a student on the outside; they face each other. The teacher poses a question to the whole group and pairs discuss their responses with each other. Then the teacher signals students to rotate: Students on the outside circle move one space to the right so they are standing in front of a new person (or sitting, as they are in the video). Now the teacher poses a new question, and the process is repeated.

Variations: Instead of two circles, students could also form two straight lines facing one another. Instead of "rotating" to switch partners, one line just slides over one spot, and the leftover person on the end comes around to the beginning of the line. Some teachers use this strategy to have students teach one piece of content to their fellow students, making it less of a discussion strategy and more of a peer teaching format. In fact, many of these protocols could be used for peer teaching as well.

Basic Structure: Another great idea from Sarah Brown Wessling, this is a small-group discussion strategy that gives students exposure to more of their peers' ideas and prevents the stagnation that can happen when a group doesn't happen to have the right chemistry. Students are placed into a few groups of 4-6 students each and are given a discussion question to talk about. After sufficient time has passed for the discussion to develop, one or two students from each group rotate to a different group, while the other group members remain where they are. Once in their new group, they will discuss a different, but related question, and they may also share some of the key points from their last group's conversation. For the next rotation, students who have not rotated before may be chosen to move, resulting in groups that are continually evolving.

Basic Structure: Two students sit facing each other in the center of the room; the remaining students sit in a circle around them. The two central students have a conversation based on a pre-determined topic and often using specific skills the class is practicing (such as asking follow-up questions, paraphrasing, or elaborating on another person's point). Students on the outside observe, take notes, or perform some other discussion-related task assigned by the teacher.

Variations: One variation of this strategy allows students in the outer circle to trade places with those in the fishbowl, doing kind of a relay-style discussion, or they may periodically "coach" the fishbowl talkers from the sidelines. Teachers may also opt to have students in the outside circle grade the participants' conversation with a rubric, then give feedback on what they saw in a debriefing afterward, as mentioned in the featured video.

Basic Structure: One student assumes the role of a book character, significant figure in history, or concept (such as a tornado, an animal, or the Titanic). Sitting in front of the rest of the class, the student responds to classmates' questions while staying in character in that role.

Variations: Give more students the opportunity to be in the hot seat while increasing everyone's participation by having students do hot seat discussions in small groups, where one person per group acts as the "character" and three or four others ask them questions. In another variation, several students could form a panel of different characters, taking questions from the class all together and interacting with one another like guests on a TV talk show.
a.k.a. Pyramid Discussion
Basic Structure: Students begin in pairs, responding to a discussion question only with a single partner. After each person has had a chance to share their ideas, the pair joins another pair, creating a group of four. Pairs share their ideas with the pair they just joined. Next, groups of four join together to form groups of eight, and so on, until the whole class is joined up in one large discussion.

Variations: This structure could simply be used to share ideas on a topic, or students could be required to reach consensus every time they join up with a new group.

Whereas the other formats in this list have a distinct shape-specific activities you do with students-the strategies in this section are more like plug-ins, working discussion into other instructional activities and improving the quality and reach of existing conversations.

One of the limitations of discussion is that rich, face-to-face conversations can only happen when all parties are available, so we're limited to the time we have in class. With a tool like Voxer, those limitations disappear. Like a private voice mailbox that you set up with just one person or a group (but SOOOO much easier), Voxer allows users to have conversations at whatever time is most convenient for each participant. So a group of four students can "discuss" a topic from 3pm until bedtime-asynchronously-each member contributing whenever they have a moment, and if the teacher makes herself part of the group, she can listen in, offer feedback, or contribute her own discussion points. Voxer is also invaluable for collaborating on projects and for having one-on-one discussions with students, parents, and your own colleagues. Like many other educators, Peter DeWitt took a while to really understand the potential of Voxer, but in this EdWeek piece, he explains what turned him around.

A backchannel is a conversation that happens right alongside another activity. The first time I saw a backchannel in action was at my first unconference: While those of us in the audience listened to presenters and watched a few short video clips, a separate screen was up beside the main screen, projecting something called TodaysMeet (update: TodaysMeet has shut down. Use YoTeach! instead.) It looked a lot like those chat rooms from back in the day, basically a blank screen where people would contribute a few lines of text, the lines stacking up one after the other, no other bells or whistles. Anyone in the room could participate in this conversation on their phone, laptop, or tablet, asking questions, offering commentary, and sharing links to related resources without ever interrupting the flow of the presentations. This kind of tool allows for a completely silent discussion, one that doesn't have to move at a super-fast pace, and it gives students who may be reluctant to speak up or who process their thoughts more slowly a chance to fully contribute. For a deeper discussion of how this kind of tool can be used, read this thoughtful overview of using backchannel discussions in the classroom by Edutopia's Beth Holland.
a.k.a. Accountable Talk
Talk moves are sentence frames we supply to our students that help them express ideas and interact with one another in respectful, academically appropriate ways. From kindergarten all the way through college, students can benefit from explicit instruction in the skills of summarizing another person's argument before presenting an alternate view, asking clarifying questions, and expressing agreement or partial agreement with the stance of another participant. Talk moves can be incorporated into any of the other discussion formats listed here.

Whole Brain Teaching is a set of teaching and classroom management methods that has grown in popularity over the past 10 years. One of WBT's foundational techniques is Teach-OK, a peer teaching strategy that begins with the teacher spending a few minutes introducing a concept to the class. Next, the teacher says Teach!, the class responds with Okay!, and pairs of students take turns re-teaching the concept to each other. It's a bit like think-pair-share, but it's faster-paced, it focuses more on re-teaching than general sharing, and students are encouraged to use gestures to animate their discussion. Although WBT is most popular in elementary schools, this featured video shows the creator of WBT, Chris Biffle, using it quite successfully with college students. I have also used Teach-OK with college students, and most of my students said they were happy for a change from the sit-and-listen they were used to in college classrooms.

An oldie but a goodie, think-pair-share can be used any time you want to plug interactivity into a lesson: Simply have students think about their response to a question, form a pair with another person, discuss their response, then share it with the larger group. Because I feel this strategy has so many uses and can be way more powerful than we give it credit for, I devoted a whole post to think-pair-share; everything you need to know about it is right there.

TWO MORE YOU'LL LOVE

Since writing this post, I have learned about two more discussion strategies that teachers are finding to be incredibly effective and powerful for getting students to talk, especially about books and other texts:

This protocol has students come up with their own Thoughts, lingering Questions, and Epiphanies from an assigned reading. Teachers who have used this method say it has generated some of the richest conversations they have ever heard from students!

This strategy places students into one-on-one conversations, getting them to learn each others' names better and create a track record of what they talked about. Excellent for classes where you want to assess for discussion and help students get more comfortable with each other.

So what else do you have? I would like to think this is a pretty complete list, but I'm sure more strategies are out there. If you use a discussion strategy that's not mentioned here, please share it below.

Come back for more.
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The Big List of Class Discussion Strategies

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Here they are: 15 formats for structuring a class discussion to make it more engaging, more organized, more equitable, and more academically challenging.

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Listen to my interview with the Apollo School founders (transcript):
We've reached a point where most teachers embrace the idea of student-directed learning, the philosophy of being the guide on the side rather than the sage on the stage. We can also appreciate the value of cross-curricular studies, blending math and science, for example, or integrating arts and music into history class. So why are so many teachers still using the same old model, where we plan and deliver lessons in separate subjects, in lock step, using the same traditional schedule as we always have?

Two reasons, I think.

One, because it works, more or less. We move students through the system, they learn some stuff, pass tests, and graduate with an acceptable repertoire of knowledge and skills. Acceptable. Enough to function, to continue on to college and survive, more or less.

Except that lately, more and more voices are telling us that this repertoire of knowledge and skills isn't quite cutting it. Students aren't quite as adept at problem-solving and collaboration and inquiry as they need to be for the 21st century.

The other reason we stick to the traditional framework is the one I believe is more powerful: It's because we don't know how to change. We have no template for what school could look like if we restructured it to reflect priorities like cross-curricular connections, student self-efficacy, and inquiry-based learning.

Well, I have a template for you today, and I can't wait to show it to you.

Welcome to the Apollo School

The Apollo School is a program that operates inside a regular public school, Central York High School in York, Pennsylvania. Apollo is a semester-long, four-hour block of classes-English, social studies, and art-all blended together and co-taught by three teachers, one from each subject area. Throughout the semester, students are responsible for designing and completing four major projects, each of which is aligned with standards in all three subject areas.

Students set their own goals for each day based on whatever project they happen to be working on at the time: This includes independent and group work, one-on-one appointments with teachers, and attending optional, self-selected mini lessons taught by the teachers. By lunch time, when the Apollo block is over, students resume a regular schedule for the rest of the day.

How the Program Started

Apollo began when Greg Wimmer, a social studies teacher, and English teacher Wes Ward (pictured above), started playing around with the idea of combining their two classes. "Every time I would teach a piece of literature," said Ward, "I'd find myself talking about history. And I thought how convenient it would be-and really beneficial to the students-if they could have a history buff here to really challenge and push the kids to dig up more context of the poetry or stories we were reading."

Meanwhile, their school district was already shifting its whole instructional paradigm. Embracing an approach called mass customized learning, Central York School District was looking for ways to personalize the learning experience for every student. This approach was influenced by the work of Bea McGarvey and Charles Schwahn in their visionary book Inevitable: Mass Customized Learning: Learning in the Age of Empowerment.

This video explores that district-wide shift:

With encouragement from their principal, Wimmer and Ward joined forces with Jim Grandi, Central York's art teacher, and the Apollo School was born. They gave a presentation to prospective students the semester before the course started, and interested students in grades 11 and 12 enrolled voluntarily.

Central York still offers traditionally taught English, social studies, and art classes. This choice is all part of the variety offered by mass customized learning. "We have some courses that run in a hybrid format where they may meet with a teacher for a little bit but then be working independently or in groups, and then they're meeting back with the teacher again," explains Ward. "We have online courses where students check in once a week with a teacher, but the rest of the work is done online. So mass customized learning isn't necessarily Apollo. Apollo is one spoke of that wheel."

Course Requirements: Curriculum and Assessment

Over the course of a semester, Apollo students are required to complete four independent projects within a given theme, each of which must include some element of English, social studies, and art. Students are given a list of the required standards in every subject, and they are expected to meet each of these by the end of the semester.

"Since you have 40 students running in 40 different directions," Wimmer explains, "we decided they were the ones that needed to self-select the standards."

Ward describes how the process works. "At the start of every project, we have the students kind of designate which standards they're going to work towards, either showing mastery of or just practicing to get better at. Unlike most classrooms where the teacher is drawing up the lesson plans based on standards that are some invisible thing under lock and key, we actually share PDF files of all three of our subject area standards with students. They have them all semester long, so they're constantly aware of the expectations from each of us and what they're supposed to be mastering."

How students meet these standards is entirely their decision, and the road is not always smooth. "It's really genius to see them a week into their project realize that they're hitting the wrong standards," Wimmer says, "and then they go back and are able to change them and make the standards work for them."

When a project is completed, students meet with all three teachers in a setting not unlike the defense of a doctoral dissertation: They discuss goals, process, and outcomes, and explain exactly how they met each learning target. Students are also assessed on how well they met four thinking skills-reasoning, perspective, contextualization and synthesis-and two "soft skills"-communication and time management.

The whole group meets at the beginning of each day in Family Time.

A Typical Day

Each day starts with Family Time. "Around 7:45 we kind of corral them together into Greg's room and we call that Family Time," says Grandi. The length of that meeting can vary dramatically, from five-minute housekeeping sessions to hours-long conversations. "We've had full-on one hour to two-hour discussions where they're really generating the conversation and driving the topic about their own education. Those can be completely organic in that sense, and really rewarding."

Students use online software to plan out how they will use the four hours, in 30-minute blocks of time. This time might include independent research, creative work, group work, or one-on-one conferences students schedule with the teachers as needed.

Students meet with social studies teacher Greg Wimmer. Using an online form, students schedule one-on-one conferences with teachers as needed.

They are free to travel between the art room, which functions as a kind of makerspace, Wimmer's classroom, which students typically use for small group meetings, and Ward's room, which is often used as a quiet space for students to work alone.

"They can also go to our library or sit at one of the tables that's around our school and in extreme situations," Ward says, "they might even leave the school to go interview somebody in the community or to go shadow somebody in a certain career. We really try to push them beyond that normal setting."

Each student decides how to use Apollo's four-hour block of time. At the end of each project, time management is part of their final assessment.

Mini-Lessons

Another option students have in that four hour block of time is attending mini-lessons. Rather than teaching whole classes the same lesson at the same time, the teachers plan and teach optional mini-lessons within their subject areas. Some lessons cover basic content areas that meet certain standards, but most are delivered only after teachers see a need within the scope of what students are working on.

Optional. Did you catch that? Students are not required to attend mini-lessons; they choose to go based on their current needs. During family time, the teachers will advertise the lessons they are teaching that day.

"It's kind of like going to an education conference and having that smorgasbord of possibilities to choose from," Ward explains. "So it's entirely possible that Greg would be teaching a lesson about this particular conflict or this issue in current events. And Mr. Grandi might be offering an art lesson at the same time that I'm offering something in English, and the students get to pick and choose which one is more beneficial to them in their project at that point in time. We can turn around and offer the same lesson the next day, and they can switch and go to the other one, if need be."

The customization doesn't stop with the teachers: Students can also request mini-lessons on specific topics. Grandi recently had a student request a lesson on Frida Kahlo and other artists inspired by her. "So I said, 'Yeah, just give me two or three days to put that together and then I'll have that lesson for you.'"

Some mini-lessons are even taught by the students themselves. "Every student usually has something they can add to the group," Wimmer says. We have some students that are extremely good at technology, some who are good at building an online presence, and so we thought, why not have those students share their abilities and talents with one another?"

Art teacher Jim Grandi conferences with a student. Each student project includes an element of English, social studies, and art.

Positive Outcomes

When asked whether the program has produced the results they'd hoped for, Grandi says students go far beyond what they'd be able to do in a more traditional program. "When I'm teaching traditional classes, I try my hardest to plan really interesting lessons and projects for the kids to do. But I can't plan these projects. I could never plan a bioethics project for the whole class. I couldn't even hit all of the standards that I wanted to it. This way, (students) hit more standards as a class than I would ever have them hit if I was directing every single lesson."

Academics aside, the program has allowed teachers to develop the kind of relationships with students that just wouldn't be possible in a regular setting. "We've had some of these young adults come up to us and just ... things I've never even thought I would hear," Grandi says, "about how they would be scared to death to come to school Sunday night from anxiety, and how they love coming to school now, and they never have had conversations with adults or their teachers before, more than just, 'Here's your homework, here's your test.' We have real conversations with these people, I mean, these are people. The relationships you build are amazing." ♦

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The Apollo School: What 21st Century Learning Looks Like

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Listen to my interview with the Apollo School founders (transcript): We've reached a point where most teachers embrace the idea of student-directed learning, the philosophy of being the guide on the side rather than the sage on the stage.

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NORMALLY, I would have finished this column weeks ago. But I kept putting it off because my New Year's resolution is to procrastinate more.

I guess I owe you an explanation. Sooner or later.

We think of procrastination as a curse. Over 80 percent of college students are plagued by procrastination, requiring epic all-nighters to finish papers and prepare for tests. Roughly 20 percent of adults report being chronic procrastinators. We can only guess how much higher the estimate would be if more of them got around to filling out the survey.

But while procrastination is a vice for productivity, I've learned - against my natural inclinations - that it's a virtue for creativity.

For years, I believed that anything worth doing was worth doing early. In graduate school I submitted my dissertation two years in advance. In college, I wrote my papers weeks early and finished my thesis four months before the due date. My roommates joked that I had a productive form of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Psychologists have coined a term for my condition: pre-crastination.

Pre-crastination is the urge to start a task immediately and finish it as soon as possible. If you're a serious pre-crastinator, progress is like oxygen and postponement is agony. When a flurry of emails land in your inbox and you don't answer them instantly, you feel as if your life is spinning out of control. When you have a speech to give next month, each day you don't work on it brings a creeping sense of emptiness, like a dementor is sucking the joy from the air around you (look it up - now!).

In college, my idea of a productive day was to start writing at 7 a.m. and not leave my chair until dinnertime. I was chasing " flow," the mental state described by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in which you are so completely absorbed in a task that you lose a sense of time and place. I fell so deeply into that zone of concentration that my roommates once gave a party while I was writing and I didn't even notice.

But procrastinators, as the writer Tim Urban describes it on the blog Wait But Why, are at the mercy of an Instant Gratification Monkey who inhabits their brains, constantly asking questions like "Why would we ever use a computer for work when the Internet is sitting right there waiting to be played with?"

If you're a procrastinator, overcoming that monkey can require herculean amounts of willpower. But a pre-crastinator may need equal willpower to not work.

A few years ago, though, one of my most creative students, Jihae Shin, questioned my expeditious habits. She told me her most original ideas came to her after she procrastinated. I challenged her to prove it. She got access to a couple of companies, surveyed people on how often they procrastinated, and asked their supervisors to rate their creativity. Procrastinators earned significantly higher creativity scores than pre-crastinators like me.

I wasn't convinced. So Jihae, now a professor at the University of Wisconsin, designed some experiments. She asked people to come up with new business ideas. Some were randomly assigned to start right away. Others were given five minutes to first play Minesweeper or Solitaire. Everyone submitted their ideas, and independent raters rated how original they were. The procrastinators' ideas were 28 percent more creative.

Minesweeper is awesome, but it wasn't the driver of the effect. When people played games before being told about the task, there was no increase in creativity. It was only when they first learned about the task and then put it off that they considered more novel ideas. It turned out that procrastination encouraged divergent thinking.

Our first ideas, after all, are usually our most conventional. My senior thesis in college ended up replicating a bunch of existing ideas instead of introducing new ones. When you procrastinate, you're more likely to let your mind wander. That gives you a better chance of stumbling onto the unusual and spotting unexpected patterns. Nearly a century ago, the psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik found that people had a better memory for incomplete tasks than for complete ones. When we finish a project, we file it away. But when it's in limbo, it stays active in our minds.

Begrudgingly, I acknowledged that procrastination might help with everyday creativity. But monumental achievements are a different story, right?

Wrong. Steve Jobs procrastinated constantly, several of his collaborators have told me. Bill Clinton has been described as a "chronic procrastinator" who waits until the last minute to revise his speeches. Frank Lloyd Wright spent almost a year procrastinating on a commission, to the point that his patron drove out and insisted that he produce a drawing on the spot. It became Fallingwater, his masterpiece. Aaron Sorkin, the screenwriter behind "Steve Jobs" and "The West Wing," is known to put off writing until the last minute. When Katie Couric asked him about it, he replied, "You call it procrastination, I call it thinking."

So what if creativity happens not in spite of procrastination, but because of it? I decided to give it a try. The good news is that I am no stranger to self-discipline. So I woke up one morning and wrote a to-do list for procrastinating more. Then I set out to achieve the goal of not making progress toward my goals. It didn't go excellently.

My first step was to delay creative tasks, starting with this article. I resisted the temptation to sit down and start typing, and instead waited. While procrastinating (i.e., thinking), I remembered an article I had read months earlier on pre-crastination. It dawned on me that I could use my own experiences as a pre-crastinator to set the stage for readers.

Next, I drew some inspiration from George Costanza on "Seinfeld," who made it a habit to quit on a high note. When I started writing a sentence that felt good, I stopped in the middle of it and walked away. When I returned to writing later that day, I was able to pick up where I had left the trail of thought. Mitch Albom, author of "Tuesdays With Morrie," uses the same trick. "If you quit in the middle of a sentence, that's just great," he told me. "You can't wait to get back to it the next morning."

Once I did finish a draft, I put it away for three weeks. When I came back to it, I had enough distance to wonder, "What kind of idiot wrote this garbage?" and rewrote most of it. To my surprise, I had some fresh material at my disposal: During those three weeks, for example, a colleague had mentioned the fact that Mr. Sorkin was an avid procrastinator.

What I discovered was that in every creative project, there are moments that require thinking more laterally and, yes, more slowly. My natural need to finish early was a way of shutting down complicating thoughts that sent me whirling in new directions. I was avoiding the pain of divergent thinking - but I was also missing out on its rewards.

Of course, procrastination can go too far. Jihae randomly assigned a third group of people to wait until the last minute to begin their project. They weren't as creative either. They had to rush to implement the easiest idea instead of working out a novel one.

To curb that kind of destructive procrastination, science offers some useful guidance. First, imagine yourself failing spectacularly, and the ensuing frenzy of anxiety may jump-start your engine. Second, lower your standards for what counts as progress, and you will be less paralyzed by perfectionism. Carving out small windows of time can help, too: The psychologist Robert Boice helped graduate students overcome writer's block by teaching them to write for 15 minutes a day. My favorite step is pre-commitment: If you're passionate about gun control, go to the app stickK and fork over some cash in advance. If you don't meet your deadline, your money will be donated to the National Rifle Association. The fear of supporting a cause you despise can be a powerful motivator.

But if you're a procrastinator, next time you're wallowing in the dark playground of guilt and self-hatred over your failure to start a task, remember that the right kind of procrastination might make you more creative. And if you're a pre-crastinator like me, it may be worth mastering the discipline of forcing yourself to procrastinate. You can't be afraid of leaving your work un

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Opinion | Why I Taught Myself to Procrastinate

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NORMALLY, I would have finished this column weeks ago. But I kept putting it off because my New Year's resolution is to procrastinate more. I guess I owe you an explanation. Sooner or later. We think of procrastination as a curse.

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Everything you need to know about why procrastinators procrastinate

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Morning sessions will utilize essays on a common humanities topic to explore issues in leading discussions. Afternoons are spent in focus groups or in the Academy library doing research on teaching materials for participants to use in their home schools.

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Connecticut Association of Independent Schools -> Home

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When I started teaching, I assumed my "fun" class, sexuality and the law, full of contemporary controversy, would prove gripping to the students. One day, I provoked them with a point against marriage equality, and the response was a slew of laptops staring back. The screens seemed to block our classroom connection. Then, observing a senior colleague's contracts class, I spied one student shopping for half the class. Another was surfing Facebook. Both took notes when my colleague spoke, but resumed the rest of their lives instead of listening to classmates.

Laptops at best reduce education to the clackety-clack of transcribing lectures on shiny screens and, at worst, provide students with a constant escape from whatever is hard, challenging or uncomfortable about learning. And yet, education requires constant interaction in which professor and students are fully present for an exchange.

Students need two skills to succeed as lawyers and as professionals: listening and communicating. We must listen with care, which requires patience, focus, eye contact and managing moments of ennui productively - perhaps by double-checking one's notes instead of a friend's latest Instagram. Multitasking and the mediation of screens kill empathy.

Likewise, we must communicate - in writing or in speech - with clarity and precision. The student who speaks in class learns to convey his or her points effectively because everyone else is listening. Classmates will respond with their accord or dissent. Lawyers can acquire hallmark precision only through repeated exercises of concentration. It does happen on occasion that a client loses millions of dollars over a misplaced comma or period.

Once, a senior associate for whom I was working berated me for such a mistake and said, "Getting these things right is the easy part, and if you can't get that right, what does it say about your ability to analyze the law properly?" I learned my lesson. To restore the focus-training function of the classroom, I stopped allowing laptops in class early in my teaching career. Since then research has confirmed the wisdom of my choice.

Focus is crucial, and we do best when monotasking: Even disruptions of a few seconds can derail one's train of thought. Students process information better when they take notes - they don't just transcribe, as they do with laptops, but they think and record those thoughts. One study found that laptops or tablets consistently undermine exam performance by 1.7 percent (a significant difference in the context of the study). Other studies reveal that writing by hand helps memory retention. Screens block us from connecting, whether at dinner or in a classroom. Kelly McGonigal, a psychologist and lecturer at Stanford University, says that just having a phone on a table during a meal "is sufficiently distracting to reduce empathy and rapport between two people."

For all these reasons, starting with smaller classes, I banned laptops, and it improved the students' engagement. With constant eye contact, I could see and feel when they understood me, and when they did not. Energized by the connection, we moved faster, further and deeper into the material. I broadened my rule to include one of my large upper-level courses. The pushback was real: A week before class, I posted the syllabus, which announced my policy. Two students wrote me to ask if I would reconsider, and dropped the class when I refused. But more important, after my class ends, many students continue to take notes by hand even when it's not required.

Putting aside medical exemptions, many students are just resistant. They are used to typing and prefer it to writing. They may feel they take better notes by keyboard. They may feel they know how to take notes by hand but do not want to have to do so. They can look up material, and there's no need to print assignments. Some may have terrible handwriting, or find it uncomfortable or even painful to write.

To them, I'll let the Rolling Stones answer: You can't always get what you want, but sometimes you get what you need. My students need to learn how to be lawyers and professionals. To succeed they must internalize an ethos of caution, care and respect. To instill these values and skills in my students, I have no choice but to limit laptop use in the classroom.

Correction:

An earlier version of this article misstated how much laptops and tablets in the classroom hurt exam performance. Their presence lowered results by 1.7 percent, according to a study, not 18 percent.

Darren Rosenblum is a professor at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University.

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Opinion | Leave Your Laptops at the Door to My Classroom

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When I started teaching, I assumed my "fun" class, sexuality and the law, full of contemporary controversy, would prove gripping to the students. One day, I provoked them with a point against marriage equality, and the response was a slew of laptops staring back. The screens seemed to block our classroom connection.

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After watching this, your brain will not be the same | Lara Boyd | TEDxVancouver

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We tend to think of medicine as a science, but for most of human history it has been scientific-ish at best. In the first episode of a three-part series, we look at the grotesque mistakes produced by centuries of trial-and-error, and ask whether the new era of evidence-based medicine is the solution. Below is a transcript of the episode, modified for your reading pleasure. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post. And you'll find credits for the music in the episode noted within the transcript.
Our latest Freakonomics Radio episode is called "Bad Medicine, Part 1: The Story of 98.6." (You can subscribe to the podcast at iTunes or elsewhere, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above.)

* * *

We begin with the story of 98.6. You know the number, right? It's one of the most famous numbers there is. Because the body temperature of a healthy human being is 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Isn't it?

ANUPAM JENA: So, now I'm going to take your temperature, if you don't mind just open your mouth and I'll insert the thermometer. JENA: Perfect.

The story of 98.6 ...

PHILIP MACKOWIAK: ... dates back to a physician by the name of Carl Wunderlich.

This was in the mid-1800s. Wunderlich was medical director of the hospital at Leipzig University. In that capacity, he ...

MACKOWIAK: Oversaw the care and the taking the vital signs on some 25,000 patients.

Pretty big data set, yes? Twenty-five thousand patients! And what did Wunderlich determine?

MACKOWIAK: He determined that the average temperature of the normal human being was 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit or 37 degrees centigrade.

This is Philip Mackowiak, a professor of medicine and a medical historian at the University of Maryland.

MACKOWIAK: Well, I'm an internist by trade and an infectious-disease specialist by sub-specialty. So my bread and butter is fever.

There's one more thing Mackowiak is ...

MACKOWIAK: I am by nature a skeptic. And it occurred to me very early in my career that this idea that 98.6 was normal and then if you didn't have a temperature of 98.6 you were somehow abnormal just didn't sit right.

Philip Mackowiak, you have to understand, cares a lot about what is called clinical thermometry. And if you care a lot about clinical thermometry, you care a lot about the thermometer that Carl Wunderlich used to establish 98.6.

MACKOWIAK: His thermometer is an amazing key to this story of 98.6 .

So you can imagine how excited Mackowiak was when, on a tour of the weird and wonderful Mutter Museum in Philadelphia, the curator told him they had one of Wunderlich's original thermometers.

MACKOWIAK: I said: "Good heavens, may I see it?" And she said: "Sure, would you like to borrow it?" And I said: "Of course!" And so I was able to take this thermometer back to Baltimore and do a number of experiments.

The Wunderlich thermometer, Mackowiak realized, was not at all a typical thermometer.

MACKOWIAK: First of all, it was about a foot long, fairly thick stem and it registered almost two degrees Centigrade higher than current thermometers or thermometers of that era.

Two degrees higher - centigrade? Uh oh!

MACKOWIAK: In addition to that, it is a non-registering thermometer, which means that it has to be read while it's in place. So it would have been awkward to use.

Mackowiak noticed something else about the original Wunderlich research.

MACKOWIAK: Investigating further it became apparent that he was not measuring temperatures either in the mouth or the rectum. He was measuring axillary or armpit temperatures and so that in many, many ways his results are not applicable to temperatures that are taken using current thermometers and current techniques.

As it turns out, the esteemed Dr. Carl Wunderlich ...

MACKOWIAK: ... was not the most careful investigator ever to come on the scene.

The more Mackowiak looked into the Wunderlich data, and how the story of 98.6 came to be, the more he wondered about its accuracy. So he set up his own body-temperature study. He recruited healthy volunteers, male and female, and took their temperature one to four times a day, around the clock for about two days, using a well-calibrated digital thermometer in the patients' mouths. What did he find?

In his study, Mackowiak found the actual "normal" temperature to be 98.2 degrees. Not a huge difference - and yet, the whole notion of a "normal" body temperature was looking more and more suspect. Why? A lot of reasons. Temperature varies from person to person, sometimes so much that one person's normal would nearly register as nearly feverish for another person.

MACKOWIAK: It's almost like a fingerprint.

Temperature varies throughout the day - it's roughly one degree higher at night than in the morning, sometimes even more. And an elevated temperature isn't necessarily a sign of illness:

And so, Mackowiak concluded ...

MACKOWIAK: Looking at a rise in temperature as a reliable sign of infection or disease is inappropriately simplistic thinking.

Inappropriately simplistic thinking. It makes you wonder: if the medical establishment believed for so long in an inappropriately simplistic story about something as basic as normal body temperature - what else have they fallen for? What other mistakes have they made? I hope you've got some time; it's a long list:

JEREMY GREENE: You take a sick person, slice open a vein, take a few pints of blood out of them ...JENA: Drilling holes into people's skulls. VINAY PRASAD: It was literally taking someone to hell and back. TERESA WOODRUFF: It would cause a whole series of malformations and probably a lot of fetal death. JENA: Lobotomies. KEITH WAILOO: The overuse of a mercury compound. EVELYNN HAMMONDS: The Tuskegee case. WAILOO: Losing your teeth and having your gums bleed. WOODRUFF: DES and Thalidomide. PRASAD: We use sort of a cement. WOODRUFF: Hormone replacement therapy. WAILOO: The Oxycontin and opioid problem. MACKOWIAK: As a medical historian, it is patently obvious to me that future generations will look at what we're doing today and ask themselves, "What was Grandpa thinking of when he did that and believed that?" And they'll have to learn all over again that science is imperfect and to maintain a healthy skepticism about everything we believe and do in life in general, but in the medical profession in particular.
* * *
On today's show: Part 1 of a special three-part series of Freakonomics Radio. We'll be talking about the new era of personalized medicine; the growing reliance on evidence-based medicine; and especially - pay attention now, I'm going to use a technical term - we'll be talking about bad medicine.

We have a lot of ground to cover in these three episodes: medicine's greatest hits, the biggest failures, where we are now and where we're headed. In the interest of not turning a three-part series about bad medicine into a twenty-part series, we're not even going to touch adjacent fields like nutrition and psychiatry. Maybe another time. Let's start, very briefly, at the beginning.

Nearly 2,500 years ago, you had the Greek physician Hippocrates, who's still called the "father of modern medicine." You've heard, of course, of the Hippocratic Oath, the creed recited by new doctors. And you know the Oath's famous phrase - "First, do no harm." Even though, as it turns out, that phrase isn't actually included in the Oath. It came from something else Hippocrates wrote.

Nor do many contemporary doctors recite the original Hippocratic Oath; there's a modern version, written in 1964, by the prominent pharmacologist Louis Lasagna. The pledge begins: "I swear to fulfill, to the best of my ability and judgment, this covenant." It's a fascinating, inspiring document - and I think before we go too far, it's worth hearing some of it ...

LOUIS LASAGNA ADAPTATION OF HIPPOCRATIC OATH: "I will respect the hard-won scientific gains of those physicians in whose steps I walk, and gladly share such knowledge as is mine with those who are to follow. ... I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon's knife or the chemist's drug. I will not be ashamed to say "I know not," nor will I fail to call in my colleagues when the skills of another are needed for a patient's recovery. ... Above all, I must not play at God. I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart, a cancerous growth, but a sick human being, whose illness may affect the person's family and economic stability. My responsibility includes these related problems, if I am to care adequately for the sick. I will prevent disease whenever I can, for prevention is preferable to cure. ... May I always act so as to preserve the finest traditions of my calling and may I long experience the joy of healing those who seek my help."

It's comforting to think about the thoughtfulness, the nuance - the massive responsibility - that doctors pledge before they attempt to diagnose or heal us. How well has that pledge been upheld throughout medical history? We'll talk to a variety of people about that today, starting with this gentleman.

JENA: My name is Anupam Jena. I'm a health care economist and physician at Harvard Medical School.

So Jena, as both a practitioner and an analytic researcher, is especially useful for our purposes. Because one of the themes we'll hit today, several times, is that medicine, even though it's scientific, or at least scientific-ish, hasn't always been as empirical as you might think - and sometimes, not very empirical at all.

DUBNER: Here is an easy question: can you tell me please the history of medicine, or at least Western medicine in, I don't know three or four minutes? JENA: Let me first answer the meaning of life. DUBNER: Is that going to be easier? DUBNER: So it's easy to get indignant over the idea of these treatments that turned out to be so wrong. But understanding wellness and illness is hard, obviously. So when you look back at the history of medicine, do those interventions strike you as kind of shameful - you can't believe you're in the profession that tried things like that - or is that just part of the trial-and-error process that you accept? JENA: I certainly wouldn't call it shameful. The only thing that's shameful is when someone doesn't believe that they have the potential for being wrong and they don't have that desire to inquire further about whether something actually works or doesn't work. But the idea of trying things, particularly trying things that have a really strong plausible pathophysiologic basis, I think that there is nothing wrong with that. In fact, that's what spurred scientific discovery and many of the treatments that we have now. DUBNER: So, I have a broad question for you. The human body is, I think you and I would agree, and extraordinarily complex organism. And over history, doctors and others have learned a great deal about it. But if we consider the entire human body - from the medical perspective only, let's leave out metaphysics and theology and what have you - from the medical perspective, how would you assess the share of the body and its functions that we truly understand and the share that we don't really yet understand?
JENA: Huh, that's a tough one. We've made a lot of headway, but to put a number on it - I would say maybe 30 percent, 40 percent that we don't know. JEREMY GREENE: Ooh, that's a tough question for me to quantify.

I asked the same question of someone else.

GREENE: My name is Jeremy Greene. I'm a physician and a historian of medicine at Johns Hopkins.

So what's Greene's answer?

GREENE: There is a Rumsfeldian answer of the known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns. A different way of answering that question would have to do with what the idea of relevant science of medicine is.

For example?

And that's because there's been a lot of progress in how we're able to explore the human body.

JENA: There is the gross anatomy of the body, which you can see with your own eyes.

Anupam Jena again:

JENA: Then go a layer further and we're now at the microscopic anatomy of the body. So now what do the cells of the body look like when they are diseased under a microscope.

And now ...

JENA: Now go a layer further where you are now trying to understand things about the body that you can't even see with the microscope. And that's at, let's say, the level of the proteins in the cell, or even further down, the level of the DNA that encodes that protein. GREENE: By the end of the 20th century, there's a very strong genetic imaginary, which really helps to then fuel the excitement behind the human genome project. It's thought once we know the totality of the human genome, we'll know all we need to know about bodies and health and disease.

Of course we already know a great deal. And, to be fair, for all the mistakes and oversights in medicine, there's been extraordinary progress. What are some of medicine's greatest hits?

EVELYNN HAMMONDS: I'm sure every historian of science medicine would give you a different set of hits.

That's Evelynn Hammonds. She's a professor of the history of science and African-American studies at Harvard.

HAMMONDS: The ones that I typically think about are the introduction of more efficacious therapeutics and medicines. KEITH WAILOO: I would put something like the discovery of insulin right up there near the top.

That's Keith Wailoo. He's a Princeton historian who focuses on health policy.

WAILOO: It transformed diabetes from an acute disease into a disease that you live with. JENA: The medicine that comes to my mind is statins. Most cardiologists believe that probably statins should be in water by now. I mean, statins are a remarkable drug. They've been shown to have benefit in preventing heart attacks and prolongation of life among people who have had heart attacks and the same thing for stroke and other forms of cardiovascular disease. So they are probably, at least in the last 20 years, the biggest improvement. But there are many, many drugs that are like that. And to me, that is much more the story of what medicine has been able to do in the 20th century.

These are, truly, awesome interventions, for which we should all be thankful. One of the most remarkable developments over the past century and a half is the unbelievable gain in life expectancy: in the U.S., and elsewhere, it nearly doubled! It might be natural to ascribe that gain primarily to breakthrough medicines. But in fact a lot of it had to do with something else.

WAILOO: A lot of the advances in mortality and morbidity have come from, really, changes in the nature of social life. Infectious disease as the source of high mortality in the early 20th century began to drop long before penicillin and the antibacterials came along, in the mid century, because of improvements in housing, sanitation, diet, and sort of tackling urban problems that really created congestion and produced the circumstances that made things like tuberculosis the leading cause of mortality. HAMMONDS: For example, if you think about the reversal of the Chicago River - it used to flow into Lake Michigan, in the 19 th - century, and people were dumping their waste into it, and every summer, there would be hundreds of deaths of babies and children from infant diarrhea because the water was so contaminated. They reversed the flow of the river so it flowed downriver towards the Mississippi. And that significantly improved the health of the people who lived there.

So we've got public-health improvements to thank. And yes, better therapeutics and medicines. Also: new and better ways of finding evidence.

That's Vinay Prasad. He's an assistant professor of medicine at Oregon Health & Science University. Prasad treats cancer patients. But also:

PRASAD: The rest of my time I devote to research on health policy, on the decisions doctors make, on how doctors adopt new technologies, and when those things are rational and when they're not rational.

Which means that Prasad is part of a relatively new, relatively small movement to make medical science a lot more scientific:

Even though medical science seemed to be based on evidence, Prasad says ...
* * *
PRASAD: The reality was that what we were practicing was something called eminence-based medicine. It was where the preponderance of medical practice was driven by really charismatic and thoughtful, probably, to some degree, leaders in medicine. And you know, medical practice was based on bits and scraps of evidence, anecdotes, bias, preconceived notions, and probably a lot psychological traps that we fall into. And largely from the time of Hippocrates and the Romans until maybe even the late Renaissance, medicine was unchanged. It was the same for 1,000 years. Then something remarkable happened which was the first use of controlled clinical trials in medicine.

ANUPAM JENA: Alright, take a deep breath through your mouth, in and out. JENA: Good, okay. One more. JENA: One more.

Anupam Jena is an M.D. and a health care economist.

JENA: Alright, I'm going to lift up your shirt and listen to your heart.

In most developed countries, we tend to think of medicine as a rigorous science, and of our doctors as, if not infallible, at least reliable.

JENA: I think that the typical patient probably does look to their doctor for answers and they value very highly what that opinion is.

But as we've been hearing, the history of medical science was often "eminence-based" rather than "evidence-based." When did evidence really start to take over?

JENA: Evidence-based medicine has become hugely important in the last 25 to 30 years.

The movement is a result, Jena says, of at least two factors: Number one:

JENA: We're doing more randomized controlled trials and that tells us more information about what works and doesn't work.

And, number two:

JENA: Improvements in computer technology have now allowed us to study data in a way that we couldn't have done 30 years ago.

There's also been a movement to collect and synthesize all that research and all those data:

LISA BERO: So our vision is to produce systematic reviews that summarize the best available research evidence to inform decisions about health.

That's Lisa Bero, a pharmacologist by training, who studies the integrity of clinical and research evidence.

BERO: I'm also a co-chair of the Cochrane Collaboration.

The Cochrane Collaboration was founded in Britain but is now a global network. The "systematic reviews" they produce ...

Which means that whatever realm of medical science you're working on, you can access nearly all the evidence on all the research ever conducted in that realm - constantly updated, available on the spot. Compare that to how things used to work - looking up some 5- or 10-year-old medical journal to find one relevant article that may well have been funded by the pharmaceutical company whose drug it happened to celebrate. How is Cochrane funded?

BERO: We are primarily funded by governments and nonprofits.

What about industry money?

BERO: We don't take any money from industry to support any official Cochrane groups.

Which means, in theory at least, that the evidence assembled by the Cochrane Collaboration is pretty reliable evidence. As opposed to ...

IAIN CHALMERS: ... a whole variety of things. Opinion. What the doctor had been taught 30 years previously in medical school. Tradition. What they had been told to do by, or advised to do, by a drug-company representative that had visited them a week previously.

That is Sir Iain Chalmers, who co-founded the Cochrane Collaboration. He's a former clinician who specialized in pregnancy, childbirth, and early infancy. He was a medical student in the early 1960s. When Chalmers observed his elders in practice, he was struck by how much variance there was from doctor to doctor.

When he became a doctor himself, Chalmers worked at a refugee camp in Gaza. And, as he discovered ...

CHALMERS: Some of the things that I had learned at medical school were lethally wrong.

Like how you were supposed to treat a child with measles.

CHALMERS: I had been taught at medical school never to give antibiotics to a child with a viral infection, which measles is, because you might induce resistance, antibiotic resistance. But these children died really quite fast after getting pneumonia from bacterial infection, which comes on top of the viral infection of the measles. And what was most frustrating was that it wasn't until some years later that I found that there had been six controlled trials comparing antibiotic prophylaxis given preventatively with nothing done by the time I arrived in Gaza.

And those studies suggested that children with measles should be given antibiotics. But Chalmers had never seen those studies.

CHALMERS: So I feel very sad that in retrospect I let my patients down.

This led Chalmers to embark on a years-long effort to systematically create a centralized body of research to help attack the incomplete, random, subjective way that too much medicine had been practiced for too long. He was joined by a number of people from around the world - many of whom, by the way, were more versed in statistics than in medicine.

CHALMERS: So we embarked on these systematic reviews, about 100 of us. And that resulted at the end of the 1980s in a massive, two-volume, one-and-a-half-thousand-page book. At the same time, we started to publish electronically.

And so the Cochrane Collaboration became the first organization to really systematize, compile, and evaluate the best evidence for given medical questions. You'd think this would have been met with universal praise. But, as with any guild whose inveterate wisdom is challenged, as unwise as that wisdom may be, the medical community wasn't thrilled.

It took a long while, but the Cochrane model of evidence-based medicine did become the new standard.

CHALMERS: I would say it wasn't actually until this century. So one way you can look at it is where there is death there is hope, as a cohort of doctors who rubbished it moved into retirement and then death, the opposition disappeared. PRASAD: Yeah, so that's been the slower evolution.

That, again, is Vinay Prasad, from Oregon Health and Science University.

This was in the late 1940s.

PRASAD: And from then really until the 1980s, the end of the 1980s, we did use randomized trials, but they weren't mandatory. They were sort of optional.

One big benefit of a randomized trial is that you can plainly measure, in the data, the cause and effect of whatever treatment you're looking at. This may sound obvious but it is remarkable how many medical treatments of the past were conducted without that evidence. Anupam Jena again:

This is one of the trickiest things about practicing medicine day-to-day. Let's say you're a doctor, and a patient comes to see you with a persistent headache. You make a diagnosis, and you write a prescription. What happens next? In many cases, you have no idea.

The feedback loop in medicine is often very, very sloppy. Did the patient get better? Maybe. They never came back. But maybe they went to a different doctor. Or maybe they died? If they did get better, was it because of the medicine you prescribed? Maybe. Or maybe they didn't even fill the scrip. Or maybe they did fill the scrip but stopped taking it because they got an upset stomach. Or maybe they did take the medicine and they did get better but ... maybe they would have gotten better without the medicine? Like I said, you have no idea. But with a well-constructed randomized controlled trial, you can get an idea. Vinay Prasad again:

PRASAD: The moment I think in my mind that kind of set us on different course was a study called CAST.

CAST stands for Cardiac Arrhythmia Suppression Trial. It was conducted in the late 1980s.

The rise of randomized controlled trials led to a rise in what are called medical reversals. Vinay Prasad wrote the book on medical reversals, literally. It's called Ending Medical Reversal.

PRASAD: And you know, what is a medical reversal? Doctors do something for decades, it's widely believed to be beneficial, and then one day, a very seminal study - often better-designed, better-powered, better-controlled than the entirety of the preexisting body of evidence - it contradicts that practice. It isn't just that it had side effects we didn't think about. It was that the benefits that we had postulated, turned out to be not true or not present.

For instance ...

PRASAD: In the 1990s we would recommend to postmenopausal women to start taking estrogen supplements, because we knew that women before they had menopause had lower rates of heart disease, and we thought that was because of a favorable effect of estrogen. And then in 2002, a carefully done randomized control trial, found that actually, it doesn't decrease heart attacks and strokes; in fact, if anything it increases them.

I asked Prasad what first got him interested in studying medical reversal.

PRASAD: So I think I started to get interested in this even when I was a student, and I saw that there were some practices that had been contradicted just in the recent past, but were still being done day in and day out in the hospital. I mean, the example that comes to mind is the stenting for stable coronary angina. A stent is a little foldable metal tube that goes in a blocked coronary artery and the doctors spring it open, and it opens up the blockage. And stents are incredibly valuable for certain things. If you have a heart attack and there's a blockage that just happened a few minutes ago, and the doctor goes in and opens that blockage up, we're talking about a tremendous improvement in mortality, one of the best things we do in medicine. But stenting, like every other medical procedure, has something called indication drift where, yeah, it works great for a severe condition, but does it work just as good for a very mild condition? And so over the years, doctors has used stenting for something called stable angina. And stable angina is just that slow, incremental, narrowing of the arteries that happens to sadly all of us as we get older. But the bulk of stenting was this indication drift, and we thought it worked and made perfect sense. And then in 2007, a well-done study showed that it actually didn't improve survival, and didn't decrease heart attacks, which were, even to this day studies show that most patients who undergo this procedure believe it will do those things, and in fact it's been disproven for eight years.

And yet: while stenting for stable angina did decline, it didn't disappear. The rate of inappropriate stenting, Prasad says, is still way too high. This obviously starts getting into doctors' incentives - financial and otherwise - and we'll get into more in Parts 2 and 3 of this series. As Prasad makes clear, there's a long, long list of medical treatments that simply don't stand up to empirical scrutiny. Some common knee surgeries, for instance, where orthopedic surgeons take a tiny camera ...

PRASAD: ... take a tiny camera, make a tiny incision, and go in there, and actually sort of debride and remove those sort of scuffed and scraped knees. And in fact, people sort of felt a lot better. They had improved range of motion. There's no argument there. But you've studied against, maybe just taking ibuprofen, or maybe just doing some physical therapy. What if you studied it against making the patient believe that you were doing the surgery, but you don't actually do it? And, in fact, they've done those studies. Those are called "sham" studies. We give the appearance that, you know, we're going to do this procedure, and the only thing we omit is actually the debridement of the menisci and the cartilage. And in fact, when you do it that way, you find that the entire procedure is a placebo effect. DUBNER: What would be the incentives for me to do the study that might result in a reversal? Because we know how publishing works - whether it's in your field, in any academic field, or in the media as well - it's the juicy, sexy, new findings that get a lot of heat. And it's the maintenance articles, or the reversal articles, that nobody wants to hear about. So I would gather there are fairly weak incentives to doing the studies that would result in reversals - which also makes me wonder if there is a woeful undersupply of such studies, which means there probably would be even more reversals then there are. There's another example where we use sort of a cement that we inject into a broken vertebral bone, and that again was found to be no better than injecting a saline solution in a sham procedure, DUBNER: I'd love for you to talk about the various consequences of reversals, including perhaps a loss of faith in the medical system generally? and the cement itself cost $6,000, and I said, you know, at a minimum you can save yourself $6,000, and you don't need to use the cement. DUBNER: Okay, so how do you not throw out the baby with the bathwater? What are some solutions to a practice of medicine and medical research that results in fewer reversals?
PRASAD: Yeah, so I think that's a fantastic question. One of the things that we did in the course of our research was we took a decade worth of articles, in probably one of the most prestigious medical journals, the New England Journal of Medicine, and there was about maybe 1,300 articles that concern things that doctors do. About 1,000 of those articles were something new, something that came off, that's coming down the pipeline, the newest anticoagulant, the newest mechanical heart valve. And if you tested something new - exactly as you'd expect, 77 percent of those published manuscripts concluded that what's newer is better. But we also discovered about 360 articles tested something doctors were already doing, but if you tested something doctors were already doing, 40 percent of the time, we found that it was contradicted or a reversal.
DUBNER: And let me ask you one last question. I have a pretty good sense of, having spoken to you for a bit, of what has prevented in the past medicine from being more scientific or more evidence-based, but what do you believe are the major barriers still that are still preventing it from becoming as evidence-based as you'd want it to be?
PRASAD: So if you find out something you were doing for decades is wrong, you harmed a lot of people, you subjected many people to something ineffective, potentially harmful, certainly costly, and it didn't work. The second harm we say is this lag-time harm. Doctors, we're like a battleship. We don't turn on a dime. We continue to do it for a few years after the reversal. And the third harm is loss of trust in the medical system. And the deepest harm, and I think we've seen it in the last decade, particularly with our shifting recommendations for mammography and for prostate cancer screening, where people come to the doctor and they say, you guys can't get your story straight. What's going on? It's a tremendous problem. And I'm afraid that probably what we are doing is what we are making people feel like that there's nothing that the doctor does that's really trustworthy. And I'm afraid that that's sort of the deepest problem that we face, this loss of trust.

PRASAD: So that is a million-dollar question. One is medical education. You know we have a medical education where for two years, students are trained in the basic science of the body. Only in the latter years, the third and fourth year of medical school, are students trained in the epidemiology of medical science, evidence-based medicine, in thinking not just how does something work, but what's the data that it does work? And I've argued that needs to be flipped on its head. That the root, the basic science of medical school is evidence-based medicine. It's approaching a clinical question knowing what data to seek, and how to answer that in a very honest way. So that's one. The next category is regulation. And this is where you get into, you know, what is the FDA's role, and what does the FDA do. And I think many people in the community hope that products that are approved by the FDA are both safe and efficacious for what they do. But you know, we were faced with a problem in the 80s and 90s that we had never faced before, which was the HIV/AIDs epidemic. And advocates rightly said that we need a way to get drugs to patients faster, maybe even accepting a little bit more uncertainty. I think that was right. And I think that's still right for many conditions that are very dire, for which few other treatment options exist, and, which sometimes have very low incidence, so it's very hard to do those studies because very few people have it. But what's happened is that mechanism has been extrapolated to conditions that are not dire. That have very good survival. That don't have few options, have many options, and that many people do have. So we've had again sort of a slippery slope for what qualifies for this accelerated approval. So I think there's ways in which regulation can be adjusted. And then I think the last thing is the ethic of practicing physicians. You know, we have to have an ethic where when we offer something to someone, and there's uncertainty, we should be very clear about communicating uncertainty. I think it's a tragedy today that no matter what you think of stenting for stable coronary artery disease, that so many people who are having it done believe something that is clearly not true, that it lowers the rate of heart attacks and death. That's just factually not true, and the fact that many people believe that, I think speaks to the fact that as doctors, we allow them to believe it.

* * *

Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC Studios and Dubner Productions. Today's episode was produced by Stephanie Tam, with help from . The rest of our staff includes Shelley Lewis, Jay Cowit, Merritt Jacob, Christopher Werth, Greg Rosalsky, Alison Hockenberry, Emma Morgenstern, Harry Huggins and Brian Gutierrez. If you want more Freakonomics Radio, you can also find us on Twitter and Facebook and don't forget to subscribe to this podcast on iTunes or wherever else you get your free, weekly podcasts.
SOURCES
Here's where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:
RESOURCES

Anupam Jena, health care economist and physician at Harvard Medical School

Philip Mackowiak, professor or medicine and medical historian at the University of Maryland

Jeremy Greene, physician and historian of medicine at Johns Hopkins University

Evelynn Hammonds, professor of the history of science and African-American studies at Harvard University

Keith Wailoo, health policy historian at Princeton University

Vinay Prasad, assistant professor of medicine at Oregon Health & Science University

Lisa Bero, pharmacologist and co-chair of the Cochrane Collaboration

Sir Iain Chalmers, co-founder of the Cochrane Collaboration

MUSIC CREDITS

Ending Medical Reversal, Vinay Prasad, 2015, Johns Hopkins University Press

The Cochrane Collaboration

"A Critical Appraisal of 98.6F, the Upper Limit of the Normal Body Temperature, and Other Legacies of Carl Reinhold August Wunderlich," Philip Mackowiak, Steven Wasserman and Myron Levine, 1992, University of Maryland

Effective Care in Pregnancy and Childbirth, Sir Iain Chalmers, Murray Enkin and Marc Keirse, 1989, Oxford University Press

"A Decade of Reversal: An Analysis of 146 Contradicted Medical Practices," Vinay Prasad, et al., 2013, Mayo Clinic

"Mortality and Morbidity in Patients Receiving Encainide, Flecainide, or Placebo: The Cardiac Arrhythmia Suppression Trial," Debra Echt, et al., 1991, New England Journal of Medicine

"Optimal Medical Therapy with or without PCI for Stable Coronary Disease," William Boden, et al., 2007, New England Journal of Medicine

Paul Avgerinos, "Times a Tickin"

Paul Avgerinos, "Ladies Day"

Judson Lee Music, "Snoopin'"

Additional Scoring by Jay Cowit

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Bad Medicine, Part 1: The Story of 98.6 - Freakonomics

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We tend to think of medicine as a science, but for most of human history it has been scientific-ish at best. In the first episode of a three-part series, we look at the grotesque mistakes produced by centuries of trial-and-error, and ask whether the new era of evidence-based medicine is the solution.

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Although many of us can't increase the working hours in the day, we can measurably increase our energy. Science supplies a useful way to understand the forces at play here. Physicists understand energy as the capacity to do work. Like time, energy is finite; but unlike time, it is renewable. Taking more time off is counterintuitive for most of us. The idea is also at odds with the prevailing work ethic in most companies, where downtime is typically viewed as time wasted. More than one-third of employees, for example, eat lunch at their desks on a regular basis. More than 50 percent assume they'll work during their vacations.

In most workplaces, rewards still accrue to those who push the hardest and most continuously over time. But that doesn't mean they're the most productive.

Spending more hours at work often leads to less time for sleep and insufficient sleep takes a substantial toll on performance. In a study of nearly 400 employees, published last year, researchers found that sleeping too little - defined as less than six hours each night - was one of the best predictors of on-the-job burn-out. A recent Harvard study estimated that sleep deprivation costs American companies $63.2 billion a year in lost productivity.

The Stanford researcher Cheri D. Mah found that when she got male basketball players to sleep 10 hours a night, their performances in practice dramatically improved: free-throw and three-point shooting each increased by an average of 9 percent.

Daytime naps have a similar effect on performance. When night shift air traffic controllers were given 40 minutes to nap - and slept an average of 19 minutes - they performed much better on tests that measured vigilance and reaction time.

Longer naps have an even more profound impact than shorter ones. Sara C. Mednick, a sleep researcher at the University of California, Riverside, found that a 60- to 90-minute nap improved memory test results as fully as did eight hours of sleep.

MORE vacations are similarly beneficial. In 2006, the accounting firm Ernst & Young did an internal study of its employees and found that for each additional 10 hours of vacation employees took, their year-end performance ratings from supervisors (on a scale of one to five) improved by 8 percent. Frequent vacationers were also significantly less likely to leave the firm.

As athletes understand especially well, the greater the performance demand, the greater the need for renewal. When we're under pressure, however, most of us experience the opposite impulse: to push harder rather than rest. This may explain why a recent survey by Harris Interactive found that Americans left an average of 9.2 vacation days unused in 2012 - up from 6.2 days in 2011.

The importance of restoration is rooted in our physiology. Human beings aren't designed to expend energy continuously. Rather, we're meant to pulse between spending and recovering energy.

In the 1950s, the researchers William Dement and Nathaniel Kleitman discovered that we sleep in cycles of roughly 90 minutes, moving from light to deep sleep and back out again. They named this pattern the Basic-Rest Activity Cycle or BRAC. A decade later, Professor Kleitman discovered that this cycle recapitulates itself during our waking lives.

The difference is that during the day we move from a state of alertness progressively into physiological fatigue approximately every 90 minutes. Our bodies regularly tell us to take a break, but we often override these signals and instead stoke ourselves up with caffeine, sugar and our own emergency reserves - the stress hormones adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol.

Working in 90-minute intervals turns out to be a prescription for maximizing productivity. Professor K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues at Florida State University have studied elite performers, including musicians, athletes, actors and chess players. In each of these fields, Dr. Ericsson found that the best performers typically practice in uninterrupted sessions that last no more than 90 minutes. They begin in the morning, take a break between sessions, and rarely work for more than four and a half hours in any given day.

"To maximize gains from long-term practice," Dr. Ericsson concluded, "individuals must avoid exhaustion and must limit practice to an amount from which they can completely recover on a daily or weekly basis."

I've systematically built these principles into the way I write. For my first three books, I sat at my desk for up 10 hours a day. Each of the books took me at least a year to write. For my two most recent books, I wrote in three uninterrupted 90-minute sessions - beginning first thing in the morning, when my energy was highest - and took a break after each one.

Along the way, I learned that it's not how long, but how well, you renew that matters most in terms of performance. Even renewal requires practice. The more rapidly and deeply I learned to quiet my mind and relax my body, the more restored I felt afterward. For one of the breaks, I ran. This generated mental and emotional renewal, but also turned out to be a time in which some of my best ideas came to me, unbidden. Writing just four and half hours a day, I completed both books in less than six months and spent my afternoons on less demanding work.

The power of renewal was so compelling to me that I've created a business around it that helps a range of companies including Google, Coca-Cola, Green Mountain Coffee, the Los Angeles Police Department, Cleveland Clinic and Genentech.

Our own offices are a laboratory for the principles we teach. Renewal is central to how we work. We dedicated space to a "renewal" room in which employees can nap, meditate or relax. We have a spacious lounge where employees hang out together and snack on healthy foods we provide. We encourage workers to take renewal breaks throughout the day, and to leave the office for lunch, which we often do together. We allow people to work from home several days a week, in part so they can avoid debilitating rush-hour commutes. Our workdays end at 6 p.m. and we don't expect anyone to answer e-mail in the evenings or on the weekends. Employees receive four weeks of vacation from their first year.

Our basic idea is that the energy employees bring to their jobs is far more important in terms of the value of their work than is the number of hours they work. By managing energy more skillfully, it's possible to get more done, in less time, more sustainably. In a decade, no one has ever chosen to leave the company. Our secret is simple - and generally applicable. When we're renewing, we're truly renewing, so when we're working, we can really work.

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Opinion | Relax! You'll Be More Productive

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Although many of us can't increase the working hours in the day, we can measurably increase our energy. Science supplies a useful way to understand the forces at play here. Physicists understand energy as the capacity to do work. Like time, energy is finite; but unlike time, it is renewable.

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Easily create beautiful interactive video lessons for your students you can integrate right into your LMS. Track students' progress with hassle-free analytics as you flip your classroom!

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When I was in high school, I earned A's in all my math classes - until I took calculus. In algebra and geometry, I could coast on memorizing formulas, but now I had to think for myself.

It was disastrous, culminating in my getting a charity "C," and I barely passed my college calculus class.

The reason, I was convinced, was that I didn't have a math mind. I have avoided the subject ever since.

It turns out that I got it wrong. While it's unlikely that I could have become a math whiz, it wasn't my aptitude for math that was an impediment; it was my belief that I had the impediment to begin with.

I'm not the only person convinced that he can't like math. Millions of college freshmen flunk those courses and, because algebra is often required, many drop out of school altogether. A report from the Mathematical Association of America flagged math as "the most significant barrier" to graduation.

This fatalistic equation can be altered. In scores of rigorously conducted studies, social psychologists have demonstrated that brief experiences can have a powerful and long-lasting impact on students' academic futures by changing their mind-sets before they get to college.

Consider these examples from three recent studies:

* A cohort of sixth-grade students was taught, in eight lessons, that intelligence is malleable, not fixed, and that the brain is a muscle that grows stronger with effort. Their math grades, which had been steadily declining, rose substantially, while the grades of classmates who learned only about good study habits continued to get worse.

* When an English teacher critiqued black male adolescents' papers, she added a sentence stating that she had high expectations and believed that, if the student worked hard, he could meet her exacting standards. Eighty-eight percent of those students rewrote the assignment and put more effort into rewriting, while just a third of their peers, who were given comments that simply provided feedback, did the same.

* In a series of short written exercises, sixth graders wrote about values that were meaningful to them, like spending time with their family and friends. After this experience, white students did no better, but their black and Latino classmates improved so much that the achievement gap shrank by 40 percent.

There is every reason to be skeptical of these findings. Like magic spells cast by a modern-day Merlin, they sound much too good to be true. Why should brief interventions carry so much punch when more intricate and costly strategies - everything from summer school to single-sex education - are often less effective?

Innovative social-psychological thinking, not magic, is at work here. These interventions focus on how kids, hunched over their desks in the back of the classroom, make sense of themselves and their environment. They can be brief but powerful because they concentrate on a single core belief.

There are three strategies represented here. The first, pioneered by the Stanford social psychology professor Carol Dweck and illustrated by the initial example, aims to change students' mind-sets by showing them that their intelligence can grow through deliberate work. I've written about Dr. Dweck's theories as applied to college students, but they are just as successful with students in middle school.

The second uses constructive critical feedback to instill trust in minority adolescents, a demonstrably powerful way to advance their social and intellectual development.

The third intervention - and in some ways, the most powerful - invites students to acknowledge their self-worth, combating the corrosive effects of racial stereotypes, by having them focus on a self-affirming value.

These interventions are designed to combat students' negative feelings. I'm dumb, some believe; I don't belong here; the school views me only as a member of an unintelligent group. The first two experiences give students the insight that brain work will make them smarter. The third invites them to situate themselves on the path to belonging or to connect with their values in a classroom setting. The goals are to build up their resilience and prepare them for adversity.

The impact, in all these studies, is greatest on black and Latino students. That makes sense, since as adolescents they are far more inclined to see teachers as prejudiced and school as a hostile environment. As these youths come to feel more secure, they are likely to make a greater effort. Success begets success. They start earning A's and B's instead of C's, they take tougher classes and connect more readily with like-minded students.

An unpublished study by social psychologists shows that the impact echoes years later. African-American seventh graders who were asked to write about the most important value in their lives were propelled on an entirely different path from classmates who wrote about neutral topics. Two years later, the students in the first group were earning better grades and were more likely to be on track for college, rather than in remedial classes.

The reverberations persisted beyond high school. These students were more likely to graduate, to enroll in college and to attend more selective institutions.

Can this kind of intervention work on a grander scale? A 2015 study conducted by researchers at Stanford and the University of Texas suggests so. When 45-minute growth-mind-set interventions were delivered online to 1,500 students in 13 high schools scattered across the country, the weakest students were significantly more likely to earn satisfactory grades in their core courses than classmates who didn't have the same intervention.

Using the same approach nationwide, the researchers conclude, would mean 1.8 million more completed courses each year, hundreds of thousands fewer students departing high school with no diploma, slotted into dead-end futures.

Let's be clear - these brief interventions aren't a silver bullet, a quick-and-easy way to transform K-12 education. While they can complement good educational practice, they are no substitute for quality in the classroom.

Students who come to see themselves as the masters of their own destiny can take advantage of opportunities to learn, but only if those opportunities exist. They won't learn biology unless there's a biology class, and they won't learn to be critical thinkers unless the school makes that a priority. What's more, as the researchers are quick to point out, a brief intervention can't even begin to address the pernicious effects of poverty and discrimination.

Still, these experiences require a trivial amount of time, cost next to nothing and can make an outsize difference in students' lives. What's not to like?

David L. Kirp is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, a senior fellow at the Learning Policy Institute and a contributing opinion writer.

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Opinion | Nudges That Help Struggling Students Succeed

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When I was in high school, I earned A's in all my math classes - until I took calculus. In algebra and geometry, I could coast on memorizing formulas, but now I had to think for myself. It was disastrous, culminating in my getting a charity "C," and I barely passed my college calculus class.

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Education improvement efforts over the past two decades have focused primarily on articulating standards for student learning, refining the way we assess students' proficiency on those standards, and tying results to accountability. The one element still unaligned with these reforms is grading and reporting. Student report cards today look much like they looked a century ago, listing a single grade for each subject area or course.

Educators seeking to reform grading must combat five long-held traditions that stand as formidable obstacles to change. Although these traditions stem largely from misunderstandings about the goals of education and the purposes of grading, they remain ingrained in the social fabric of our society.

Obstacle 1: Grades should provide the basis for differentiating students.

This is one of our oldest traditions in grading. It comes from the belief that grades should serve to differentiate students on the basis of demonstrated talent. Students who show superior talent receive high grades, whereas those who display lesser talent receive lower grades.

Although seemingly innocent, the implications of this belief are significant and troubling. Those who enter the profession of education must answer one basic, philosophical question: Is my purpose to select talent or develop it? The answer must be one or the other because there's no in-between.

If your purpose as an educator is to select talent, then you must work to maximize the differences among students. In other words, on any measure of learning, you must try to achieve the greatest possible variation in students' scores. If students' scores on any measure of learning are clustered closely together, discriminating among them becomes difficult, perhaps even impossible. Unfortunately for students, the best means of maximizing differences in learning is poor teaching. Nothing does it better.

Assessments also play a role. Assessments used for selection purposes, such as college entrance examinations like the ACT and SAT, are designed to be instructionally insensitive (Popham, 2007). That is, if a particular concept is taught well and, as a result, most students answer an assessment item related to that concept correctly, it no longer discriminates among students and is therefore eliminated from the assessment. These types of assessments maximize differences among students, thus facilitating the selection process.

If, on the other hand, your purpose as an educator is to develop talent, then you go about your work differently. First, you clarify what you want students to learn and be able to do. Then you do everything possible to ensure that all students learn those things well. If you succeed, there should be little or no variation in measures of student learning. All students are likely to attain high scores on measures of achievement, and all might receive high grades. If your purpose is to develop talent, this is what you strive to accomplish.

Obstacle 2: Grade distributions should resemble a normal bell-shaped curve.

The reasoning behind this belief goes as follows: If scores on intelligence tests tend to resemble a normal bell-shaped curve-and intelligence is clearly related to achievement-then grade distributions should be similar.

A true understanding of normal curve distributions, however, shows the error in this kind of reasoning. The normal bell-shaped curve describes the distribution of randomly occurring events when nothing intervenes. If we conducted an experiment on crop yield in agriculture, for example, we would expect the results to resemble a normal curve. A few fertile fields would produce a high yield; a few infertile fields would produce a low yield; and most would produce an average yield, clustering around the center of the distribution.

But if we intervene in that process-say we add a fertilizer-we would hope to attain a very different distribution of results. Specifically, we would hope to have all fields, or nearly all, produce a high yield. The ideal result would be for all fields to move to the high end of the distribution. In fact, if the distribution of crop yield after our intervention still resembled a normal bell-shaped curve, that would show that our intervention had failed because it made no difference.

Teaching is a similar intervention. It's a purposeful and intentional act. We engage in teaching to attain a specific result-that is, to have all students, or nearly all, learn well the things we set out to teach. And just like adding a fertilizer, if the distribution of student learning after teaching resembles a normal bell-shaped curve, that, too, shows the degree to which our intervention failed. It made no difference.

Further, research has shown that the seemingly direct relationship between aptitude or intelligence and school achievement depends on instructional conditions, not a normal distribution curve (Hanushek, 2004; Hershberg, 2005). When the instructional quality is high and well matched to students' learning needs, the magnitude of the relationship between aptitude/intelligence and school achievement diminishes drastically and approaches zero (Bloom, 1976; Bloom, Madaus, &amp; Hastings, 1981).

Obstacle 3: Grades should be based on students' standing among classmates.

Most parents grew up in classrooms where their performance was judged against that of their peers. A grade of C didn't mean you had reached Step 3 in a five-step process to mastery or proficiency. It meant "average" or "in the middle of the class." Similarly, a high grade did not necessarily represent excellent learning. It simply meant that you did better than most of your classmates. Because most parents experienced such norm-based grading procedures as children, they see little reason to change them.

But there's a problem with this approach: Grades based on students' standing among classmates tell us nothing about how well students have learned. In such a system, all students might have performed miserably, but some simply performed less miserably than others.

In addition, basing grades on students' standing among classmates makes learning highly competitive. Students must compete with one another for the few scarce rewards (high grades) to be awarded by teachers. Doing well does not mean learning excellently; it means outdoing your classmates. Such competition damages relationships in school (Krumboltz &amp; Yeh, 1996). Students are discouraged from cooperating or helping one another because doing so might hurt the helper's chance at success. Similarly, teachers may refrain from helping individual students because some students might construe this as showing favoritism and biasing the competition (Gray, 1993).

Grades must always be based on clearly specified learning criteria. Those criteria should be rigorous, challenging, and transparent. Curriculum leaders who are working to align instructional programs with the newly developed common core state standards move us in that direction. Grades based on specific learning criteria have direct meaning; they communicate what they were intended to communicate.

Obstacle 4: Poor grades prompt students to try harder.

Although educators would prefer that motivation to learn be entirely intrinsic, evidence indicates that grades and other reporting methods affect student motivation and the effort students put forth (Cameron &amp; Pierce, 1996). Studies show that most students view high grades as positive recognition of their success, and some work hard to avoid the consequences of low grades (Haladyna, 1999).

At the same time, no research supports the idea that low grades prompt students to try harder. More often, low grades prompt students to withdraw from learning. To protect their self-images, many students regard the low grade as irrelevant or meaningless. Others may blame themselves for the low grade but feel helpless to improve (Selby &amp; Murphy, 1992).

Recognizing the effects on students of low grades, some schools have initiated policies that eliminate the use of failing grades altogether. Instead of assigning a low or failing grade, teachers assign an I, or incomplete, with immediate consequences. Students who receive an I may be required to attend a special study session that day to bring their performance up to an acceptable level-and no excuses are accepted. Some schools hold this session after regular school hours whereas others conduct it during lunchtime.

Such a policy typically requires additional funding for the necessary support mechanisms, of course. But in the long run, the investment can save money. Because this regular and ongoing support helps students remedy their learning difficulties before they become major problems, schools tend to spend less time and fewer resources in major remediation efforts later on (see Roderick &amp; Camburn, 1999).

Obstacle 5: Students should receive one grade for each subject or course.

If someone proposed combining measures of height, weight, diet, and exercise into a single number or mark to represent a person's physical condition, we would consider it laughable. How could the combination of such diverse measures yield anything meaningful? Yet every day, teachers combine aspects of students' achievement, attitude, responsibility, effort, and behavior into a single grade that's recorded on a report card-and no one questions it.

In determining students' grades, teachers typically merge scores from major exams, compositions, quizzes, projects, and reports, along with evidence from homework, punctuality in turning in assignments, class participation, work habits, and effort. Computerized grading programs help teachers apply different weights to each of these categories (Guskey, 2002a) that then are combined in idiosyncratic ways (see McMillan, 2001; McMillan, Myran, &amp; Workman, 2002). The result is a "hodgepodge grade" that is just as confounded and impossible to interpret as a "physical condition" grade that combined height, weight, diet, and exercise would be (Brookhart &amp; Nitko, 2008; Cross &amp; Frary, 1996).

Recognizing that merging these diverse sources of evidence distorts the meaning of any grade, educators in many parts of the world today assign multiple grades. This idea provides the foundation for standards-based approaches to grading. In particular, educators distinguish product, process, and progress learning criteria (Guskey &amp; Bailey, 2010).

Product criteria are favored by educators who believe that the primary purpose of grading is to communicate summative evaluations of students' achievement and performance (O'Connor, 2002). In other words, they focus on what students know and are able to do at a particular point in time. Teachers who use product criteria typically base grades exclusively on final examination scores; final products (reports, projects, or exhibits); overall assessments; and other culminating demonstrations of learning.

Process criteria are emphasized by educators who believe that product criteria do not provide a complete picture of student learning. From their perspective, grades should reflect not only the final results, but also how students got there. Teachers who consider responsibility, effort, or work habits when assigning grades use process criteria. So do teachers who count classroom quizzes, formative assessments, homework, punctuality of assignments, class participation, or attendance.

Progress criteria are used by educators who believe that the most important aspect of grading is how much students gain from their learning experiences. Other names for progress criteria include learning gain, improvement scoring, value-added learning, and educational growth. Teachers who use progress criteria look at how much improvement students have made over a particular period of time, rather than just where they are at a given moment. As a result, scoring criteria may be highly individualized among students. Grades might be based, for example, on the number of skills or standards in a learning continuum that students mastered and on the adequacy of that level of progress for each student. Most of the research evidence on progress criteria comes from studies of individualized instruction (Esty &amp; Teppo, 1992) and special education programs (Gersten, Vaughn, &amp; Brengelman, 1996; Jung &amp; Guskey, 2010).

After establishing explicit indicators of product, process, and progress learning criteria, teachers in countries that differentiate among these indicators assign separate grades to each indicator. In this way, they keep grades for responsibility, learning skills, effort, work habits, or learning progress distinct from assessments of achievement and performance (Guskey, 2002b; Stiggins, 2008). The intent is to provide a more accurate and comprehensive picture of what students accomplish in school.

Although schools in the United States are just beginning to catch on to the idea of separate grades for product, process, and progress criteria, many Canadian educators have used the practice for years (Bailey &amp; McTighe, 1996). Each marking period, teachers in these schools assign an achievement grade on the basis of the student's performance on projects, assessments, and other demonstrations of learning. Often expressed as a letter grade or percentage ( A = advanced, B = proficient, C = basic, D = needs improvement, F = unsatisfactory), this achievement grade represents the teacher's judgment of the student's level of performance relative to explicit learning goals established for the subject area or course. Computations of grade-point averages and class ranks are based solely on these achievement or "product" grades.

4 = All homework assignments are completed and turned in on time.

3 = There are one or two missing or incomplete homework assignments.

2 = There are three to five missing or incomplete homework assignments.

1 = There are numerous missing or incomplete homework assignments.

Teachers sometimes think that reporting multiple grades will increase their grading workload. But those who use the procedure claim that it actually makes grading easier and less work (Guskey, Swan, &amp; Jung, 2011a). Teachers gather the same evidence on student learning that they did before, but they no longer worry about how to weigh or combine that evidence in calculating an overall grade. As a result, they avoid irresolvable arguments about the appropriateness or fairness of various weighting strategies.

Reporting separate grades for product, process, and progress criteria also makes grading more meaningful. Grades for academic achievement reflect precisely that-academic achievement-and not some confusing amalgamation that's impossible to interpret and that rarely presents a true picture of students' proficiency (Guskey, 2002a). Teachers also indicate that students take homework more seriously when it's reported separately. Parents favor the practice because it provides a more comprehensive profile of their child's performance in school (Guskey, Swan, &amp; Jung, 2011b).

The key to success in reporting multiple grades, however, rests in the clear specification of indicators related to product, process, and progress criteria. Teachers must be able to describe how they plan to evaluate students' achievement, attitude, effort, behavior, and progress. Then they must clearly communicate these criteria to students, parents, and others.

No More "We've Always Done It That Way"

Challenging these traditions will not be easy. They've been a part of our education experiences for so long that they usually go unquestioned, despite the fact that they are ineffective and potentially harmful to students.

Education leaders who challenge these traditions must be armed with thoughtful, research-based alternatives. You can't go forward with only passionately argued opinions. To succeed in tearing down old traditions, you must have new traditions to take their place.

This means that education leaders must be familiar with the research on grading and what works best for students so they can propose more meaningful policies and practices that support learning and enhance students' perceptions of themselves as learners. Leaders who have the courage to challenge the traditional approach and the conviction to press for thoughtful, positive reforms are likely to see remarkable results.

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Education improvement efforts over the past two decades have focused primarily on articulating standards for student learning, refining the way we assess students' proficiency on those standards, and tying results to accountability. The one element still unaligned with these reforms is grading and reporting.

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Tristan Harris believes Silicon Valley is addicting us to our phones. He's determined to make it stop.

Olaf Blecker

On a recent evening in San Francisco, Tristan Harris, a former product philosopher at Google, took a name tag from a man in pajamas called "Honey Bear" and wrote down his pseudonym for the night: "Presence."

Harris had just arrived at Unplug SF, a "digital detox experiment" held in honor of the National Day of Unplugging, and the organizers had banned real names. Also outlawed: clocks, "w-talk" (work talk), and "WMDs" (the planners' loaded shorthand for wireless mobile devices). Harris, a slight 32-year-old with copper hair and a tidy beard, surrendered his iPhone, a device he considers so addictive that he's called it "a slot machine in my pocket." He keeps the background set to an image of Scrabble tiles spelling out the words face down, a reminder of the device's optimal position.
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I followed him into a spacious venue packed with nearly 400 people painting faces, filling in coloring books, and wrapping yarn around chopsticks. Despite the cheerful summer-camp atmosphere, the event was a reminder of the binary choice facing smartphone owners, who, according to one study, consult their device 150 times a day: Leave the WMD on and deal with relentless prompts compelling them to check its screen, or else completely disconnect. "It doesn't have to be the all-or-nothing choice," Harris told me after taking in the arts-and-crafts scene. "That's a design failure."

Harris is the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience. As the co‑founder of Time Well Spent, an advocacy group, he is trying to bring moral integrity to software design: essentially, to persuade the tech world to help us disengage more easily from its devices.

While some blame our collective tech addiction on personal failings, like weak willpower, Harris points a finger at the software itself. That itch to glance at our phone is a natural reaction to apps and websites engineered to get us scrolling as frequently as possible. The attention economy, which showers profits on companies that seize our focus, has kicked off what Harris calls a "race to the bottom of the brain stem." "You could say that it's my responsibility" to exert self-control when it comes to digital usage, he explains, "but that's not acknowledging that there's a thousand people on the other side of the screen whose job is to break down whatever responsibility I can maintain." In short, we've lost control of our relationship with technology because technology has become better at controlling us.

Under the auspices of Time Well Spent, Harris is leading a movement to change the fundamentals of software design. He is rallying product designers to adopt a "Hippocratic oath" for software that, he explains, would check the practice of "exposing people's psychological vulnerabilities" and restore "agency" to users. "There needs to be new ratings, new criteria, new design standards, new certification standards," he says. "There is a way to design based not on addiction."

Joe Edelman-who did much of the research informing Time Well Spent's vision and is the co-director of a think tank advocating for more-respectful software design-likens Harris to a tech-focused Ralph Nader. Other people, including Adam Alter, a marketing professor at NYU, have championed theses similar to Harris's; but according to Josh Elman, a Silicon Valley veteran with the venture-capital firm Greylock Partners, Harris is "the first putting it together in this way"-articulating the problem, its societal cost, and ideas for tackling it. Elman compares the tech industry to Big Tobacco before the link between cigarettes and cancer was established: keen to give customers more of what they want, yet simultaneously inflicting collateral damage on their lives. Harris, Elman says, is offering Silicon Valley a chance to reevaluate before more-immersive technology, like virtual reality, pushes us beyond a point of no return.

A ll this talk of hacking human psychology could sound paranoid, if Harris had not witnessed the manipulation firsthand. Raised in the Bay Area by a single mother employed as an advocate for injured workers, Harris spent his childhood creating simple software for Macintosh computers and writing fan mail to Steve Wozniak, a co-founder of Apple. He studied computer science at Stanford while interning at Apple, then embarked on a master's degree at Stanford, where he joined the Persuasive Technology Lab. Run by the experimental psychologist B. J. Fogg, the lab has earned a cultlike following among entrepreneurs hoping to master Fogg's principles of "behavior design"-a euphemism for what sometimes amounts to building software that nudges us toward the habits a company seeks to instill. (One of Instagram's co-founders is an alumnus.) In Fogg's course, Harris studied the psychology of behavior change, such as how clicker training for dogs, among other methods of conditioning, can inspire products for people. For example, rewarding someone with an instantaneous "like" after they post a photo can reinforce the action, and potentially shift it from an occasional to a daily activity.

Harris learned that the most-successful sites and apps hook us by tapping into deep-seated human needs. When LinkedIn launched, for instance, it created a hub-and-spoke icon to visually represent the size of each user's network. That triggered people's innate craving for social approval and, in turn, got them scrambling to connect. "Even though at the time there was nothing useful you could do with LinkedIn, that simple icon had a powerful effect in tapping into people's desire not to look like losers," Fogg told me. Harris began to see that technology is not, as so many engineers claim, a neutral tool; rather, it's capable of coaxing us to act in certain ways. And he was troubled that out of 10 sessions in Fogg's course, only one addressed the ethics of these persuasive tactics. (Fogg says that topic is "woven throughout" the curriculum.)

From Our November 2016 Issue

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Harris dropped out of the master's program to launch a start-up that installed explanatory pop-ups across thousands of sites, including The New York Times '. It was his first direct exposure to the war being waged for our time, and Harris felt torn between his company's social mission, which was to spark curiosity by making facts easily accessible, and pressure from publishers to corral users into spending more and more minutes on their sites. Though Harris insists he steered clear of persuasive tactics, he grew more familiar with how they were applied. He came to conceive of them as "hijacking techniques"-the digital version of pumping sugar, salt, and fat into junk food in order to induce bingeing.

McDonald's hooks us by appealing to our bodies' craving for certain flavors; Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter hook us by delivering what psychologists call "variable rewards." Messages, photos, and "likes" appear on no set schedule, so we check for them compulsively, never sure when we'll receive that dopamine-activating prize. (Delivering rewards at random has been proved to quickly and strongly reinforce behavior.) Checking that Facebook friend request will take only a few seconds, we reason, though research shows that when interrupted, people take an average of 25 minutes to return to their original task.

Sites foster a sort of distracted lingering partly by lumping multiple services together. To answer the friend request, we'll pass by the News Feed, where pictures and auto-play videos seduce us into scrolling through an infinite stream of posts-what Harris calls a "bottomless bowl," referring to a study that found people eat 73 percent more soup out of self-refilling bowls than out of regular ones, without realizing they've consumed extra. The "friend request" tab will nudge us to add even more contacts by suggesting "people you may know," and in a split second, our unconscious impulses cause the cycle to continue: Once we send the friend request, an alert appears on the recipient's phone in bright red-a "trigger" color, Harris says, more likely than some other hues to make people click-and because seeing our name taps into a hardwired sense of social obligation, she will drop everything to answer. In the end, he says, companies "stand back watching as a billion people run around like chickens with their heads cut off, responding to each other and feeling indebted to each other."

A Facebook spokesperson told me the social network focuses on maximizing the quality of the experience-not the time its users spend on the site-and surveys its users daily to gauge success. In response to this feedback, Facebook recently tweaked its News Feed algorithm to punish clickbait-stories with sensationalist headlines designed to attract readers. (LinkedIn and Instagram declined requests for comment. Twitter did not reply to multiple queries.)

Even so, a niche group of consultants has emerged to teach companies how to make their services irresistible. One such guru is Nir Eyal, the author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, who has lectured or consulted for firms such as LinkedIn and Instagram. A blog post he wrote touting the value of variable rewards is titled "Want to Hook Your Users? Drive Them Crazy." While asserting that companies are morally obligated to help those genuinely addicted to their services, Eyal contends that social media merely satisfies our appetite for entertainment in the same way TV or novels do, and that the latest technology tends to get vilified simply because it's new, but eventually people find balance. "Saying 'Don't use these techniques' is essentially saying 'Don't make your products fun to use.' That's silly," Eyal told me. "With every new technology, the older generation says 'Kids these days are using too much of this and too much of that and it's melting their brains.' And it turns out that what we've always done is to adapt."

Google acquired Harris's company in 2011, and he ended up working on Gmail's Inbox app. (He's quick to note that while he was there, it was never an explicit goal to increase time spent on Gmail.) A year into his tenure, Harris grew concerned about the failure to consider how seemingly minor design choices, such as having phones buzz with each new email, would cascade into billions of interruptions. His team dedicated months to fine-tuning the aesthetics of the Gmail app with the aim of building a more "delightful" email experience. But to him that missed the bigger picture: Instead of trying to improve email, why not ask how email could improve our lives-or, for that matter, whether each design decision was making our lives worse?

Six months after attending Burning Man in the Nevada desert, a trip Harris says helped him with "waking up and questioning my own beliefs," he quietly released "A Call to Minimize Distraction & Respect Users' Attention," a 144-page Google Slides presentation. In it, he declared, "Never before in history have the decisions of a handful of designers (mostly men, white, living in SF, aged 25-35) working at 3 companies"-Google, Apple, and Facebook-"had so much impact on how millions of people around the world spend their attention ... We should feel an enormous responsibility to get this right." Although Harris sent the presentation to just 10 of his closest colleagues, it quickly spread to more than 5,000 Google employees, including then-CEO Larry Page, who discussed it with Harris in a meeting a year later. "It sparked something," recalls Mamie Rheingold, a former Google staffer who organized an internal Q&A session with Harris at the company's headquarters. "He did successfully create a dialogue and open conversation about this in the company."

Harris parlayed his presentation into a position as product philosopher, which involved researching ways Google could adopt ethical design. But he says he came up against "inertia." Product road maps had to be followed, and fixing tools that were obviously broken took precedence over systematically rethinking services. Chris Messina, then a designer at Google, says little changed following the release of Harris's slides: "It was one of those things where there's a lot of head nods, and then people go back to work." Harris told me some colleagues misinterpreted his message, thinking that he was proposing banning people from social media, or that the solution was simply sending fewer notifications. (Google declined to comment.)

Harris left the company last December to push for change more widely, buoyed by a growing network of supporters that includes the MIT professor Sherry Turkle; Meetup's CEO, Scott Heiferman; and Justin Rosenstein, a co-inventor of the "like" button; along with fed-up users and concerned employees across the industry. "Pretty much every big company that's manipulating users has been very interested in our work," says Joe Edelman, who has spent the past five years trading ideas and leading workshops with Harris.

Through Time Well Spent, his advocacy group, Harris hopes to mobilize support for what he likens to an organic-food movement, but for software: an alternative built around core values, chief of which is helping us spend our time well, instead of demanding more of it. Thus far, Time Well Spent is more a label for his crusade-and a vision he hopes others will embrace-than a full-blown organization. (Harris, its sole employee, self-funds it.) Yet he's amassed a network of volunteers keen to get involved, thanks in part to his frequent cameos on the thought-leader speaker circuit, including talks at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society; the O'Reilly Design Conference; an internal meeting of Facebook designers; and a TEDx event, whose video has been viewed more than 1 million times online. Tim O'Reilly, the founder of O'Reilly Media and an early web pioneer, told me Harris's ideas are "definitely something that people who are influential are listening to and thinking about." Even Fogg, who stopped wearing his Apple Watch because its incessant notifications annoyed him, is a fan of Harris's work: "It's a brave thing to do and a hard thing to do."

A t Unplug SF, a burly man calling himself "Haus" enveloped Harris in a bear hug. "This is the antidote!," Haus cheered. "This is the antivenom!" All evening, I watched people pull Harris aside to say hello, or ask to schedule a meeting. Someone cornered Harris to tell him about his internet "sabbatical," but Harris cut him off. "For me this is w‑talk," he protested.

Harris admits that researching the ways our time gets hijacked has made him slightly obsessive about evaluating what counts as "time well spent" in his own life. The hypnosis class Harris went to before meeting me-because he suspects the passive state we enter while scrolling through feeds is similar to being hypnotized-was not time well spent. The slow-moving course, he told me, was "low bit rate"-a technical term for data-transfer speeds. Attending the digital detox? Time very well spent. He was delighted to get swept up in a mass game of rock-paper-scissors, where a series of one-on-one elimination contests culminated in an onstage showdown between "Joe" and "Moonlight." Harris has a tendency to immerse himself in a single activity at a time. In conversation, he rarely breaks eye contact and will occasionally rest a hand on his interlocutor's arm, as if to keep both parties present in the moment. He got so wrapped up in our chat one afternoon that he attempted to get into an idling Uber that was not an Uber at all, but a car that had paused at a stop sign.

An accordion player and tango dancer in his spare time who pairs plaid shirts with a bracelet that has presence stamped into a silver charm, Harris gives off a preppy-hippie vibe that allows him to move comfortably between Palo Alto boardrooms and device-free retreats. In that sense, he had a great deal in common with the other Unplug SF attendees, many of whom belong to a new class of tech elites "waking up" to their industry's unwelcome side effects. For many entrepreneurs, this epiphany has come with age, children, and the peace of mind of having several million in the bank, says Soren Gordhamer, the creator of Wisdom 2.0, a conference series about maintaining "presence and purpose" in the digital age. "They feel guilty," Gordhamer says. "They are realizing they built this thing that's so addictive."

I asked Harris whether he felt guilty about having joined Google, which has inserted its technology into our pockets, glasses, watches, and cars. He didn't. He acknowledged that some divisions, such as YouTube, benefit from coaxing us to stare at our screens. But he justified his decision to work there with the logic that since Google controls three interfaces through which millions engage with technology-Gmail, Android, and Chrome-the company was the "first line of defense." Getting Google to rethink those products, as he'd attempted to do, had the potential to transform our online experience.

At a restaurant around the corner from Unplug SF, Harris demonstrated an alternative way of interacting with WMDs, based on his own self-defense tactics. Certain tips were intuitive: He's "almost militaristic about turning off notifications" on his iPhone, and he set a custom vibration pattern for text messages, so he can feel the difference between an automated alert and a human's words. Other tips drew on Harris's study of psychology. Since merely glimpsing an app's icon will "trigger this whole set of sensations and thoughts," he pruned the first screen of his phone to include only apps, such as Uber and Google Maps, that perform a single function and thus run a low risk of "bottomless bowl-ing." He tried to make his phone look minimalist: Taking a cue from a Google experiment that cut employees' M&M snacking by moving the candy from clear to opaque containers, he buried colorful icons-along with time-sucking apps like Gmail and WhatsApp-inside folders on the second page of his iPhone. As a result, that screen was practically grayscale. Harris launches apps by using what he calls the phone's "consciousness filter"-typing Instagram, say, into its search bar-which reduces impulsive tapping. For similar reasons, Harris keeps a Post-it on his laptop with this instruction: "Do not open without intention."

His approach seems to have worked. I'm usually quick to be annoyed by friends reaching for their phones, but next to Harris, I felt like an addict. Wary of being judged, I made a point not to check my iPhone unless he checked his first, but he went so long without peeking that I started getting antsy. Harris assured me that I was far from an exception.

"Our generation relies on our phones for our moment-to-moment choices about who we're hanging out with, what we should be thinking about, who we owe a response to, and what's important in our lives," he said. "And if that's the thing that you'll outsource your thoughts to, forget the brain implant. That is the brain implant. You refer to it all the time."

Curious to hear more about Harris's plan for tackling manipulative software, I tagged along one morning to his meeting with two entrepreneurs eager to incorporate Time Well Spent values into their start-up.

Harris, flushed from a yoga class, met me at a bakery not far from the "intentional community house" where he lives with a dozen or so housemates. We were joined by Micha Mikailian and Johnny Chan, the co-founders of an ad blocker, Intently, that replaces advertising with "intentions" reminding people to "Follow Your Bliss" or "Be Present." Previously, they'd run a marketing and advertising agency.

"One day I was in a meditation practice. I just got the vision for Intently," said Mikailian, who sported a chunky turquoise bracelet and a man bun.

"It fully aligned with my purpose," said Chan.

They were interested in learning what it would take to integrate ethical design. Coordinating loosely with Joe Edelman, Harris is developing a code of conduct-the Hippocratic oath for software designers-and a playbook of best practices that can guide start-ups and corporations toward products that "treat people with respect." Having companies rethink the metrics by which they measure success would be a start. "You have to imagine: What are the concrete benefits landed in space and in time in a person's life?," Harris said, coaching Mikailian and Chan.

At his speaking engagements, Harris has presented prototype products that embody other principles of ethical design. He argues that technology should help us set boundaries. This could be achieved by, for example, an inbox that asks how much time we want to dedicate to email, then gently reminds us when we've exceeded our quota. Technology should give us the ability to see where our time goes, so we can make informed decisions-imagine your phone alerting you when you've unlocked it for the 14th time in an hour. And technology should help us meet our goals, give us control over our relationships, and enable us to disengage without anxiety. Harris has demoed a hypothetical "focus mode" for Gmail that would pause incoming messages until someone has finished concentrating on a task, while allowing interruptions in case of an emergency. (Slack has implemented a similar feature.)

Harris hopes to create a Time Well Spent certification-akin to the leed seal or an organic label-that would designate software made with those values in mind. He already has a shortlist of apps that he endorses as early exemplars of the ethos, such as Pocket, Calendly, and f.lux, which, respectively, saves articles for future reading, lets people book empty slots on an individual's calendar to streamline the process of scheduling meetings, and aims to improve sleep quality by adding a pinkish cast to the circadian-rhythm-disrupting blue light of screens. Intently could potentially join this coalition, he volunteered.

As a first step toward identifying other services that could qualify, Harris has experimented with creating software that would capture how many hours someone devotes weekly to each app on her phone, then ask her which ones were worthwhile. The data could be compiled to create a leaderboard that shames apps that addict but fail to satisfy. Edelman has released a related tool for websites, called Hindsight. "We have to change what it means to win," Harris says.

T he biggest obstacle to incorporating ethical design and "agency" is not technical complexity. According to Harris, it's a "will thing." And on that front, even his supporters worry that the culture of Silicon Valley may be inherently at odds with anything that undermines engagement or growth. "This is not the place where people tend to want to slow down and be deliberate about their actions and how their actions impact others," says Jason Fried, who has spent the past 12 years running Basecamp, a project-management tool. "They want to make things more sugary and more tasty, and pull you in, and justify billions of dollars of valuation and hundreds of millions of dollars [in] VC funds."

Rather than dismantling the entire attention economy, Harris hopes that companies will, at the very least, create a healthier alternative to the current diet of tech junk food. He recognizes that this shift would require reevaluating entrenched business models so success no longer hinges on claiming attention and time. As with organic vegetables, it's possible that the first generation of Time Well Spent software might be available at a premium price, to make up for lost advertising dollars. "Would you pay $7 a month for a version of Facebook that was built entirely to empower you to live your life?," Harris says. "I think a lot of people would pay for that."

Like splurging on grass-fed beef, paying for services that are available for free and disconnecting for days (even hours) at a time are luxuries that few but the reasonably well-off can afford. I asked Harris whether this risked stratifying tech consumption, such that the privileged escape the mental hijacking and everyone else remains subjected to it. "It creates a new inequality. It does," Harris admitted. But he countered that if his movement gains steam, broader change could occur, much in the way Walmart now stocks organic produce.

Currently, though, the trend is toward deeper manipulation in ever more sophisticated forms. Harris fears that Snapchat's tactics for hooking users make Facebook's look quaint. Facebook automatically tells a message's sender when the recipient reads the note-a design choice that, per Fogg's logic, activates our hardwired sense of social reciprocity and encourages the recipient to respond. Snapchat ups the ante: Unless the default settings are changed, users are informed the instant a friend begins typing a message to them-which effectively makes it a faux pas not to finish a message you start. Harris worries that the app's Snapstreak feature, which displays how many days in a row two friends have snapped each other and rewards their loyalty with an emoji, seems to have been pulled straight from Fogg's inventory of persuasive tactics. Research shared with Harris by Emily Weinstein, a Harvard doctoral candidate, shows that Snapstreak is driving some teenagers nuts-to the point that before going on vacation, they give friends their log-in information and beg them to snap in their stead. "To be honest, it made me sick to my stomach to hear these anecdotes," Harris told me.

Harris thinks his best shot at improving the status quo is to get users riled up about the ways they're being manipulated, then create a groundswell of support for technology that respects people's agency-something akin to the privacy outcry that prodded companies to roll out personal-information protections.

While Harris's experience at Google convinced him that users must demand change for it to happen, Edelman suggests that the incentive to adapt can originate within the industry, as engineers become reluctant to build products they view as unethical and companies face a brain drain. The more people recognize the repercussions of tech firms' persuasive tactics, the more working there "becomes uncool," he says, a view I heard echoed by others in his field. "You can really burn through engineers hard."

There is arguably an element of hypocrisy to the enlightened image that Silicon Valley projects, especially with its recent embrace of "mindfulness." Companies like Google and Facebook, which have offered mindfulness training and meditation spaces for their employees, position themselves as corporate leaders in this movement. Yet this emphasis on mindfulness and consciousness, which has extended far beyond the tech world, puts the burden on users to train their focus, without acknowledging that the devices in their hands are engineered to chip away at their concentration. It's like telling people to get healthy by exercising more, then offering the choice between a Big Mac and a Quarter Pounder when they sit down for a meal.

And being aware of software's seductive power does not mean being immune to its influence. One evening, just as we were about to part ways for the night, Harris stood talking by his car when his phone flashed with a new text message. He glanced down at the screen and interrupted himself mid-sentence. "Oh!" he announced, more to his phone than to me, and mumbled something about what a coincidence it was that the person texting him knew his friend. He looked back up sheepishly. "That's a great example," he said, waving his phone. "I had no control over the process."

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What Will Break People's Addictions to Their Phones?

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Tristan Harris believes Silicon Valley is addicting us to our phones. He's determined to make it stop. On a recent evening in San Francisco, Tristan Harris, a former product philosopher at Google, took a name tag from a man in pajamas called "Honey Bear" and wrote down his pseudonym for the night: "Presence."

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Neuroscientists still have a great deal to learn about the human brain. One recent MRI study sheds some light, finding that a certain kind of storytelling stimulates enormous activity across broad swaths of the brain. The takeaway is obvious: you should be listening to even more podcasts. Below is a transcript of the episode, modified for your reading pleasure. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post, as well as credits for the music in the episode. * * *
Our latest Freakonomics Radio episode is called "This Is Your Brain on Podcasts" (You can subscribe to the podcast at iTunes or elsewhere, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above.)

Let me warn you right off the bat: while today's episode of Freakonomics Radio is a regular, brand-new episode, it's also a fund-raiser; one of those episodes where we ask you to send money to WNYC, the public-radio station that produces our show. We'll talk about that more later, but if you just want to get it out of the way now, all you've got to do is click here. Or you can text the word "freak" to the number 698-66, and they'll text you back a donation link. In either case, you'll find all kinds of Freakonomics Radio swag available only to donors of this show ... Thanks in advance.

Now, moving on. As you surely know, there's a lot of amazing research going on these days into the human brain and a lot of amazing brain researchers.

Jack GALLANT: Hi, this is Jack Gallant.

So why'd we choose Jack Gallant from U.C. Berkeley to speak with? I could pretend it's just because he's very good at what he does, and very versatile.

GALLANT: I have done everything. I mean, I've done computer science, I've done psychology, I've done neurophysiology. So I call myself a computational and cognitive neuroscientist.

And all that would be true. But that's not why we chose Jack Gallant. We chose Jack Gallant because - well, because, he's on our team. Even if he didn't set out to be. And what team is that, you ask? It's Team Podcast. In his lab at Berkeley, Jack Gallant stuck research subjects in an fMRI machine - that stands for functional magnetic resonance imaging - and had them listen to podcasts.

GALLANT: We used them because they're compelling. You pay attention to them, you want to know the resolution to them, they're very powerful stories.

So, on today's show, we'll learn some things we didn't know about how the brain works, especially when it comes to language.

GALLANT: The brain areas involved in comprehending the meaning of language, are very, very broadly distributed.

And we'll hear how people are affected by the language in a podcast like, say, Freakonomics Radio.
* * *
Anders WEISS: I don't think I would have made the Olympics if I hadn't listened to that podcast, let's just put it that way.

We're starting today with Jack Gallant, he is a psychology professor who has his own brain-research lab at Berkeley.

Other things like ... language.

GALLANT: It turns out that language is a very interesting system for two reasons: a) Just like vision, language is hierarchically organized, so when you hear speech, it comes into your cochlea in the form of a sound spectrogram, which is just a sound frequency by time. And then from that sound spectrogram you extract phonemes and morphemes, and you can extract syllables and words and syntax and semantics and narrative. All of that information can be extracted from spoken narrative that you hear. That means since you can think about all of those levels of information, they must be represented somewhere in the brain. So we decided to take the tools that we had developed for vision, and to apply them to language.

This led to a research project, which led to a paper published this year in Nature by Gallant and his co-authors Alexander Huth, Wendy de Heer, Thomas Griffiths, and Frederic Theunissen. It's called " Natural Speech Reveals the Semantic Maps that Tile Human Cerebral Cortex."

GALLANT: So our stimuli came from the [MOTH RADIO HOUR STORIES USED BY GALLANT'S TEAM]: But when I got close to about 40 I suddenly thought, "Oh my God, this could be it, this could be what I end up doing, this could be on my tombstone: Tom Weiser, custom database engineer." And I thought, "No that can't be it, that can't be all there is."Kimberly REED: Suddenly I was just thinking, "Does she mean Mary Kay or does she mean Jesus?"Ethan HAWKE Jeffrey RUDELL GALLANT: These are largely autobiographical stories about love and loss and redemption. They're great stories. DUBNER: Did you use them because they're great, or did you just them because they were stories? GALLANT: We used them because they're compelling. They're interesting stories. You pay attention to them. You want to know the resolution to them. They're very powerful stories. So previous people had used these stories, mainly Uri Hasson at Princeton had started using these stories, and he found that they elicited a large amount of brain activity, because people are paying close attention to the stories. One of the problems you have in MRI experiments is oftentimes they are very boring. If you put somebody in an MRI scanner, which is a very uncomfortable place to be, and then you flash a word at them every five seconds for an hour, they get bored out of their skull. These stories are very interesting. You just lie in the magnet. You listen to these people telling these stories. You get lost in the stories. It's the best MRI experiment ever. And in fact, this is the only MRI experiment we've ever done where we didn't have to pay people to be in the study. They were just happy to lie there and listen to the stories. And that means you get a lot of signal, and in a regime like fMRI where we're signal-limited, getting more signal is always more better. It means we're going to have more information to model the brain. DUBNER: Okay, and the information that you gleaned from this study in order to model the brain - how fruitful is that, really, for you? GALLANT: Oh, the data we got from this experiment is really quite remarkable. I'm now at the point where in order to explain the results, I have to explain the method. Let me tell you how we analyze the data, because that's important. So people are lying in the magnet. They listen to a couple hours of stories. We measure brain activity. We're measuring changes in blood flow and blood oxygen at 50,000 or so different locations across the cerebral cortex while they listen to these stories. And the essential problem is to figure out, for each location in the brain that we measured, what information in the stories is driving activity at that location in the brain. : Two and a half weeks later, a black funeral wreath was delivered to me at my office with a note that said, "In memory of our son.": It was really really idyllic, snow and Vermont. And all this other stuff. And Michael, we're outside on this little deck outside of it and Michael's like "Look at that buck, get the shotgun, Ethan." And I'm like "What for?": So I get a phone call from my mom and she tells me that my father is about to get about on an emergency life flight from our home in Montana to go to Denver to get an emergency liver transplant. Moth Radio Hour. And this is essentially stand-up storytelling, right? Professional, semi-professional storytellers get up in front of the audience, and tell stories meant to sort of excite and interest the audience.

Gallant and his colleagues divided the stories into two linguistic categories: syntax, or the grammatical structure; and semantics, or the story's meaning.

GALLANT: So now we can probe each of the locations we measure in the brain to find out if it responds to different kinds of syntax, or if it responds to different kinds of semantics, or both. So this is a data-driven approach, in which each location in the brain will tell us in this procedure which specific kinds of features it prefers. And when you play this game, you find out that, exactly as you'd expect, these very simple features like spectral features and phonemes are represented in the primary auditory cortex, which is the first location in the cortex where auditory information comes from the ears.

But they also found something they weren't expecting.

GALLANT: This higher-level semantic information, the meaning of the stories, isn't really represented in the primary auditory cortex at all; it's represented further downstream in a large constellation of brain areas that represent different aspects of meaning. And that's actually the most interesting thing about this study, is the representation of semantics. We have information about the representation of all these different feature spaces, but the one very surprising thing from this study is that semantic information, the meaning of the stories, is represented broadly across much of the brain. All of those various areas of the brain represent different aspects of semantic information, in these really complicated maps that are very, very rich but fairly consistent across different individuals. DUBNER: Okay, here's my lay interpretation of what you're saying. Extremely lay. Super lay interpretation would be: podcasts, or radio, make your brain hum with mystery and delight. That's how I interpreted what you said. GALLANT: They make your brain hum. Whether that humming is mysterious and delightful kind of depends on whether you wanted your brain to hum or not. If you were planning to sleep, that might not be so good. DUBNER: But what I really want to know is how anomalous or how typical is this, I don't know, cross-network or broad humming in the brain?
GALLANT: Well, I have several things to say about this. First of all, it is traditionally thought - the lore in the language sort of world - is that language is very left-lateralized, and very localized, and not largely distributed. And that is true, for production. The key brain nodes you need to produce speech at the sort of after-semantics, the actual translating meaning into speech, those are left-lateralized, and those are bottlenecks, and damage there will cause severe problems with speech production. But remember we're not doing speech production here, we're doing speech comprehension. And the brain areas involved in comprehension, comprehending the meaning of language, are very, very broadly distributed. I think more broadly than anyone had expected. So yes, when you're listening to someone tell an interesting story, an enormous swath of your brain is being activated. For example, imagine I tell you a story about a dog. Well, okay, you know a lot of things about a dog. All of this different information, both the information in the stories and the information that is primed by the stories, the sort of memories that are dredged up by a story, are represented in a constellation of many, many different brain areas. Auditory information tends to be represented in certain locations in the brain and not others. Olfactory information is represented in certain locations in the brain and not others. Mathematical operations tend to occur in certain parts of the brain and not others. And if you're listening to a story that involves a dog barking and a dog smelling bad and a pack of dogs - a certain number of dogs, like four dogs - then that would activate different brain areas associated with all these different aspects of the stories.
DUBNER: I'm guessing you're not going to want to give me any advice as to how to make this podcast stimulate enormous swaths of the brain, but I would be an idiot to have you on the line and not ask. So, you know, are there words or ideas I should embrace? Should I favor dogs over cats? It sounds like you're very pro-dog. Should I, for instance, stop using long words like externalities and heterogeneity. Do you have any advice for me, Jack? GALLANT: Well, the underlying subtext of your question is that evoking large amounts of brain activity is good. I have no idea if that's true, okay, right? Let's just start there. If you ask me how can I evoke lots of brain activity, I can answer your question. If you ask me, should you, I have no idea. DUBNER: You really don't have any idea? Alright. I'll take what you got. How can I? GALLANT: Exactly. If you choose to create a story that elicits as much brain activity as possible - actually you already know how to do this. All journalists know how to do this. There's an old trope in journalism: if it bleeds, it leads. Because journalists all know that human interest stories, especially involving something nasty, like a violent thing, attract people's interest. And one of the facts that we know about the brain from the last 10 years or so of MRI, is that not only are there these rich representations of brain activity, but these representations are modulated and actually transformed by what you attend to. So social information is represented in many, many different locations in the brain, and people attend to bad social things that happen. So if you wanted to evoke lots of brain activity, you'd put a murder on the front page. That would attract everyone's attention and would evoke activity in all of socially related parts of the brain, and you would have your solution.

Okay, so here's what I've learned from talking to Jack Gallant. In order to ensure the ongoing success of this podcast, I should probably murder someone, live, on the air. But I'm not willing to do that. Maybe that's surprising to you - but I am not. So: Plan B?

Plan B is much better - it's simple, it's less bloody, and it's not even illegal. All it takes is for you to make a donation to WNYC to help them keep producing Freakonomics Radio. Even though this show attracts great advertisers, to whom we've very grateful, the public radio business model also relies heavily on listener donations.

So please click here to donate. Or you can text the word "freak" to the number 698-66 and they'll send you a link to donate and to claim your Freakonomics Radio swag - we've got t-shirts, mugs, and our brand-new Freakonomics Radio-logo Titleist golf balls! All of which are only available to donors. So please do this, would you? Now, if I were you, I'd be thinking, "How much money should I donate for a product that I habitually get for free?" That is a great question! A question that a Freakonomics Radio listener named Gil Adler asked himself.

Gil ADLER: I decided to apply the economic theory that I've learned in Freakonomics and apply it to how much I should donate. So I started with a theory that I would pay $1 per episode. And if I really enjoyed the episode then I would donate extra. And if the episode was below the standards that I had come to expect from Mr. Dubner and Mr. Levitt then I would subtract from that dollar. There was maybe an episode or two where I was so disappointed and so felt taken advantage of for my time where I felt as if I should have been paid to listen to those two episodes.

So what number did Adler finally land on?

ADLER: Yeah, it comes out to about $238 I believe for all the episodes that were produced at the time I had submitted my worksheet.

Personally, I think Gil is being a bit generous. I'm sure there were many more lousy episodes than he's saying. But we do try hard around here - and we do appreciate the generosity of Gil Adler and the many, many thousands of others who support WNYC. I sure hope that you are one of them.

Coming up on Freakonomics Radio, we hear from a bunch of Freakonomics Radio listeners who have used this show to their advantage.

David BELL: Honey, what's the ROI of buying a new mattress? Kelsey WARREN: I was having trouble with deep, complex thinking and this is where your podcast comes in. Anders WEISS: I listened to one probably halfway through and then I stopped.
* * *
Uh-oh. Guess we need to do better. Anyway, that's coming up, right after the break.

Welcome back to our special fund-raising episode. We already heard from the Berkeley cognitive neuroscientist Jack Gallant about how podcasts affect the brain. We also asked Freakonomics Radio listeners how our podcast specifically has affected their brain or other body parts.

Davina BRUNO: Hi, Freakonomics Radio. My name is Davina. I'm from Grenada but I live in Austin, Texas. I was actually really inspired by your "Hidden Side of Online Dating" episode. And I started my own online dating account and actually a few days later I met Phillip, who is on track to become my first and most serious relationship. So it's crazy for me to think that a podcast may have led to me finding real love.

That was Davina Bruno. Here's another listener named David Bell:

David BELL: It was probably less than a year ago and I would just blissfully fall asleep wondering why the sky was blue or what that coworker meant in that last confusing email. Now when I lie in bed I'm wide awake because of Freakonomics and I'm thinking about something, trying to engage my wife in conversation like, "What are the optimal names for our future children in order to maximize their earning potential?" Or, "Honey, what's the ROI of buying a new mattress?"

And here is Kelsey Warren:

Kelsey WARREN: I was in a car accident in March of 2013. I broke my back, my neck, my femur, punctured a lung, and most dramatically, suffered a trauma called "brain shear." My brain injury had knocked me back in time. Basically, I thought I was a kid and I acted like one. When I'd progressed closer to normal - I'm 26 years old - I hit a wall. I was having trouble with deep, complex thinking and this is where your podcast comes in. I started listening to Freakonomics and after a few months I developed into a more inquisitive, culturally aware, and thoughtful person. I can talk about anything now with sincere curiosity and patience, very much interested in the "hows" and "whys" that I was oblivious to just a year ago. So, thank you.

You're welcome, Kelsey, and I hope your healing continues. There's one more Freakonomics Radio listener I'd like you to hear from - a pretty new listener.

DUBNER: Hey Anders, it's Stephen Dubner how's it going? WEISS: Not too bad, how about yourself? DUBNER: Good. Nice to meet you. WEISS: Nice meeting you too.

Anders Weiss is a 23-year-old athlete; his sport is rowing.

DUBNER: When you first started rowing, what were your aspirations? WEISS: I wanted to go to the youth nationals and then get recruited to college. Getting recruited for rowing, it simplifies the process quite a bit. But I wanted to do well at youth nationals. In my senior year, I placed third, so I considered that a success. So I wasn't the best when I was growing up, but I wasn't the worst.

Weiss got recruited to row at Brown University, in Providence. And he qualified for the international Under-23 competition, the U-23s.

WEISS: I think the moment I decided I wanted to go to the Olympics and knew I could go for it was at U-23s when one of the coaches said, "I expect to see a lot of you at 2020." And I said to myself, "That's way too far away, that's not going to happen. I'm going for 2016." You know you're a young kid, you haven't really faced a lot of defeat and you're just - I was arrogant at that time. I was like, "I'm going to do it."DUBNER: And this was how long before the actual 2016 Olympics? WEISS: This was in 2013. DUBNER: So you were 20 years old or so. And you're thinking "Noooo."WEISS: That's so far away! No way!

After he graduated from Brown, Weiss did get an invitation to go to Princeton to work out with the U.S. Rowing squad and try to qualify for the 2016 Olympics on either the 8-man boat or the 4-man boat. He knew his chances weren't terrible ...

Now Weiss was facing a long, sad drive home to Rhode Island from the Olympic training camp in Princeton.

WEISS: I was so upset. I said to myself, "I can't spend 4.5 hours listening to Bieber or Taylor Swift or something like that." I needed something to take my mind off rowing. DUBNER: Had you ever listened to a podcast? WEISS: I listened to one probably halfway through and then I stopped.
DUBNER: And then what made you end up listening to a Freakonomics Radio show on that very happy trip back to Rhode Island?

WEISS: I opened up my phone. I went to podcasts to look at the ones to download, and Freakonomics Radio, one of my friends from college listens to you guys and I looked at the titles you had and I was like, "Alright this one sounds interesting. That one sounds interesting. Let's load em up."
DUBNER: WEISS: It was "How to Be More Productive."DUBNER: And why'd you pick that title? WEISS: Because everyone wants to be more productive. DUBNER: Good answer. WEISS: I was like, "All right, here we go. I'm always trying to learn something new and this seems like a good podcast to listen to to do that." W hat was the name of the episode, do you know?

We released that " How to Be More Productive" episode in April, as part of what we called Self-Improvement Month. It featured an interview with the writer Charles Duhigg.

WEISS: It was a very small segment of the podcast. I think it was like five minutes where it talked about Marine, Army Rangers, I believe. And how to get leaders out of them, they didn't say, "You're a natural leader," or something like that. They said, "You're hard-working and your success is built off hard work and not talent or not how a natural leader you are."DUHIGG (from episode): So this drill sergeant told me that he never tells someone who's a natural athlete that they just ran a good race. He only tells, like, the small, kind of, wimpy kids that they just did a great job running. The Corps, as a whole, never tells anyone that there's such a thing as natural-born leaders. because that implies that you don't have any control over whether you're a leader or not. Instead what they do is they compliment shy people who take a leadership role. And they say to them, "Look, I know it was hard for you to do that, but you did a great job."WEISS: And growing up I was always decently athletic and I always had pretty good success in athletics and the same was true in high school and college. And so I put in the work. You can't not put in the work, especially at Brown. So I was like, "Okay, I put in the work, but at the end of the day, all my success is going to be attributed to how good my body is for rowing." And after that podcast, I sort of had to do a 180 on that. It was more of a, "Okay, my talent's definitely helping me, but my total success is going to be determined by how much work I put in." And there was also another podcast there, I think it was "How to be Great at Anything," how much dedicated practice I was putting in. DUBNER: It sounds like you were a hard worker, but if I'm reading you correctly it sounds like you're saying even though you worked hard, a) you could work harder and b) you could work more strategically or engage in what we call deliberate practice. Was that kind of the light bulb that went off for you, which is, "Oh yeah, it's not like I'm lazy, but I can get a lot more out of me than I have been in the past"?WEISS: Yeah. So rowing is basically steady-state. That's how we train. It's a lot of steady state. And if you sort of let your mind wander during all those hours instead of "Okay, this is what I need to do to fix my technique or keep you engaged," you can row the hours and you can get the heart rate that you need to be but you're not gonna make the technical changes that you need to. And it's not like I was zoning out but I was like, "Okay, this technical change isn't working out very well, I'm going to just go back to steady state press," instead of, "All right, I'm going to practice this over and over for the 2 hours I'm on the water now and then the 2 hours I'm on the water in the afternoon, I'm going to nail it down. No matter how long it takes." And so it's sort of a shift away from doing the steady state to do the steady state; you know, get the heart rate to doing the steady state to improve; to put in the hours that would actually improve my speed instead of relying on how well my body was made to row.

By the time he got home to Rhode Island, having failed to qualify for the 2016 Olympics in the four-man boat or the eight-man boat, Anders Weiss was already thinking about one more option. He could try to qualify for the two-man boat, the coxless pair. In that event, the coaches don't decide who qualifies; it's only your time that matters. He got hold of a potential partner, a veteran U.S. rower named Nareg Guregian.

Weiss and Guregian had to go to a series of time trials. Finally, the moment of truth: the Olympic qualifying race, with only one team going to Rio to represent the United States.

Anders Weiss and his partner Nareg Guregian didn't medal in the Rio Olympics but they did pretty well, making it to one of the final heats. And you should definitely keep an eye out for Weiss in the 2020 Olympics.
* * *
Now, we can't promise this Olympian level of success for everyone who listens to Freakonomics Radio, but I do hope that listening to this show over time has made you at least a little bit more curious, a bit more optimistic perhaps, or more skeptical, or maybe it's just helped you pass the time in a slightly more meaningful way. If so, do me a favor and make a donation to WNYC so that we can keep producing this show. Thanks.

Coming up next week on Freakonomics Radio. Is innovation overrated? Should we be spending more time, and more money, on ... maintenance?

Larry SUMMERS: People always think more about how new ground can be broken than they think about how existing institutions can be sustained or existing facilities can be maintained.

In praise of maintenance - that's next time, on Freakonomics Radio.

Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC Studios and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Caitlin Pierce. Our staff also includes , Merritt Jacob, Christopher Werth, Greg Rosalsky, Noah Kernis, Alison Hockenberry, Emma Morgenstern, and Harry Huggins. You can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes or wherever else you get your podcasts. If you want more Freakonomics Radio, check out our archive, where we have every past episode. And you can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.
SOURCES RESOURCES ETC. Music
Here's where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

Brain Sequence scoring by Jay Cowit

Johnny Fiasco, "I've Lost My Floppy"

The Mackrosoft, "The Mighty Luconchu" (from Antonio's Giraffe)

Erik Haddad, "It Looks Easy"

Aaron Saloman, "Evil Action"

J. cowit, "Lazy Susan" (from Metamorphasis World Peace)

Jetty Rae, "Favorite Song" (from Drowning in Grain)

Jetty Rae, "Alien" (from Drowning in Grain)

Paul Avgerinos, "Anxious Race"

Fullscore, "The Race"

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This Is Your Brain on Podcasts - Freakonomics

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Neuroscientists still have a great deal to learn about the human brain. One recent MRI study sheds some light, finding that a certain kind of storytelling stimulates enormous activity across broad swaths of the brain. The takeaway is obvious: you should be listening to even more podcasts.

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Charles Isbell, a senior associate dean at the College of Computing, helped lead the effort. Mr. Isbell has a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence and machine learning from M.I.T., and he teaches those subjects at Georgia Tech. He translated his lectures into well-produced online videos while administering the same homework assignments, midterms and final exams. Tests are proctored by a company that locks down a student's computer remotely and uses its camera to check for cheating.

In theory, on-campus programs offer direct access to professors and peers. Mr. Isbell began noticing differences in that respect between his residential and online students. He was interacting much more with students who had never set foot on the Atlanta campus.

"I never see students at my office hours," he said. A few linger after class to ask scheduling questions, but that's about it.

Many of the thousands of online students, by contrast, are constantly interacting on a website set up for that purpose, where Isbell can log on and help. "I can jump in and say: 'No, you should be thinking about this,' " he said. "I spend more time helping them with assignments online than I ever do on campus. The experience for the students and for me is much richer online."

The on-campus program enrolls only 300 students or so, nearly all top students from other countries. It isn't easy to find room for more. Lecture halls and classrooms are expensive, and competition between departments for space is fierce. The online program has nearly 4,000 students, the large majority American. Many have organized study groups in their home cities. At that scale, there is almost always someone else online, day or night, to talk to about a thorny problem in machine learning.

The combination of a prestigious department, traditional degree and drastically lower price was something new in American higher education. Economists Joshua Goodman of Harvard, Julia Melkers of Georgia Tech and Amanda Pallais of Harvard decided to study the program. They were interested in whether Georgia Tech was simply recruiting students who would have enrolled elsewhere - or if the program was creating something new.

Fortunately, a quirk in the program created a kind of natural experiment. In the first year, Mr. Isbell and his colleagues didn't want to be overwhelmed by students while working out the inevitable kinks. So they ranked the applicants by their undergraduate grade point average and cut off admission at 3.26, yielding 500 students. Mr. Goodman and his colleagues compared the students just below the cutoff with those just above. Using a national database of college enrollment, they investigated where the rejected students enrolled instead.

Overwhelmingly, the answer was nowhere.

Barely 10 percent chose a different program. The vast majority simply didn't pursue a master's degree at all. The demographic profile of the online students shows why. The traditional on-campus students in the Georgia Tech master's program tend be young and just out college, with an average age of 24. The average age of the online students was 35. A sizable number were 45, 50 and older. Ninety percent were currently employed.

People with jobs and families can't just pull up stakes and move to Atlanta or Los Angeles for a year or two to study computer science. Nor can they afford to spend $57,000 out of pocket for a credential. Georgia Tech offered a prestigious, high-quality computer science program that was convenient and affordable. It was the only one.

Questions of technology and affordability in higher education have been dominated in recent years by so-called Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs. The Georgia Tech program grew out of a partnership with a MOOC company, Udacity. But while many MOOCS are offered by well-known universities, they don't lead to a traditional credential like the master's degree. (EdX, a MOOC consortium led by Harvard and M.I.T., recently started a series of " MicroMasters " programs.)

MOOCs are also usually free. The Georgia Tech program isn't free, because it costs money to oversee the courses and hire teaching assistants to grade homework assignments and exams.

The Harvard study suggests there is a vast untapped market for highly affordable degrees from prestigious colleges. The technology needed to build those programs exists today. But most prestigious colleges are currently sticking with the model that lets them offer degrees for $57,000 instead of the roughly $7,000 that it costs at Georgia Tech.

This year's presidential campaign has featured a robust debate about the cost of higher education. Hillary Clinton has proposed an ambitious and expensive plan to lower the price of college by subsidizing public institutions and lowering interest rates on outstanding student debt. But unless these policies are accompanied by strong incentives for colleges to be more like Georgia Tech, the college cost problem will remain.

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An Online Education Breakthrough? A Master's Degree for a Mere $7,000

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Charles Isbell, a senior associate dean at the College of Computing, helped lead the effort. Mr. Isbell has a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence and machine learning from M.I.T., and he teaches those subjects at Georgia Tech.

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"We cast the executives behind food marketing as controlling adult authority figures, and framed the avoidance of junk food as a way to rebel against their control," explained the researchers, led by Christopher Bryan at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and David Yeager at the University of Texas at Austin.

The real test came the next day, when the students were asked to choose which snacks they wanted in anticipation of a long-planned celebration. This selection took place in a different class, so it's likely no one knew that it had anything to do with the reading from the day before.

An interesting pattern emerged. Teenagers who had read the exposé article chose fewer junk food items than those in the control groups. They were 11 percentage points more likely to forgo at least one unhealthy snack, like Oreos, Cheetos or Doritos, in favor of fruit, baby carrots or trail mix, and seven percentage points more likely to choose water over Coca-Cola, Sprite or Hi-C.

That might seem like a small difference, but if sustained it would translate to the loss of about a pound of body fat every six to eight weeks, the researchers said - a public health triumph.

What I like about this study is that it doesn't just reframe healthy eating for adolescents; it recasts adolescent defiance for adults. It depicts teenage rebellion as a potential asset to be cultivated, rather than as a threat to be quashed.

Of course, we don't know if this behavior change will last longer than a day. To learn more, the researchers will be conducting another experiment next year, following teenagers' cafeteria choices for months after they've read the exposé article.

"What's really exciting about this study and other work like it is that if you can appeal to kids' sense of wanting to not be duped, you empower them to take a stand," said Dr. Ronald E. Dahl, director of the Center on the Developing Adolescent at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Dahl's own brain-imaging research suggests that adolescent brains are not inferior to adult brains, as is sometimes assumed; to the contrary, they may have special advantages in navigating social hierarchies and adapting to rapid change. "If they are motivated, you can change their behavior profoundly."

In 2000, an antismoking ad, created in consultation with teenagers, featured a group of young people that piled up 1,200 body bags outside the headquarters of a tobacco company - representing the number of deaths attributed to smoking each day in America. In the ad, an African-American youth calls out the company's sins over a megaphone, as an older white man peers down nervously from his office above. The spot and others in the campaign turned the Marlboro Man narrative upside down, reframing smoking as an act of corporate submission, rather than rebellion.

In 2009, a study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine estimated that the broader campaign, known as "truth," prevented some 450,000 young people from starting to smoke from 2000 to 2004.

People who have spent their careers working with teenagers have learned this lesson through trial and error. "There are two adolescent imperatives: to resist authority and to contribute to community," said Rob Riordan, co-founder of High Tech High, a network of California charter schools. He has found that as students work together toward a shared purpose, the impulse to resist authority fades.

Adults work harder when they have a higher purpose, too. Health care professionals, for example, wash their hands more carefully when signs remind them of the benefits to their patients' health rather than to their own, according to the organizational psychologist Adam Grant, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

But teenagers seem to be particularly sensitive to even a whiff of mission. In another study, also co-authored by Mr. Yeager, students who had been asked to reflect on the larger purpose of their learning were more likely to grind through math problems and resist the urge to watch viral videos or play Tetris. Their self-control increased, in other words, when they connected math to a larger cause. Teenagers who stop eating meat as an act of defiance display the same kind of tenacity, a phenomenon Mr. Yeager calls "spite vegetarianism."

"Adolescents have this craziness that we can criticize - or we can tap into," said Ron Berger, who taught public school for 28 years and is now the chief academic officer at EL Education, a nonprofit network of 150 schools nationwide. "This is a time in their lives when justice matters, more than any other time."

Schools affiliated with EL Education embed social purpose into the curriculum to try to make good use of this trait. At Polaris Charter Academy on Chicago's West Side, seventh graders learning about the Second Amendment decided to start a campaign against gun violence in their neighborhood. They created four public-service announcements, which aired on television; published a book about peacemakers in their community; and presented their work to the mayor.

Ameerah Rollins, now 16 and a junior at Richard T. Crane Medical Prep High School, was one of the seventh graders. At first, she said, "none of us really thought we would make much impact." But as the students began to interview local officials and organize community events, "I noticed that people were starting to look at us, to acknowledge what we were doing." Nine out of 10 of her classmates knew someone who had been shot or killed. Taking action felt like a way to begin to avenge those deaths. "It triggered something very personal. And when it became personal, we actually started to put in the work."

From her experience, Ms. Rollins concluded that teenagers may have a distinct capacity to change society. "With adults, they're more realists," she said. "They see how things happen, and they feel that maybe this isn't really worth it. But in seventh grade, we don't pay attention to the negativity. We never give up. A lot of people may see that as being naïve, but in reality, that's power."

Her class's experience raises other tantalizing possibilities: What else might teenagers be driven to do in the name of benevolent defiance? Could adolescents who learn about the profit motives of the beauty industry begin to see Photoshopped images as propaganda? Could they start to resent how video-game designers borrow slot-machine manufacturers' tricks to make their products more addictive? More important, could any of these mental shifts endure longer than a few hours?

Mr. Bryan and Mr. Yeager, the authors of the new food study, know they are working against a powerful consumer culture. Most obesity prevention efforts do not lead to any weight loss in young people, according to a meta-analysis of 64 programs. But they will soon test whether they can change the way their study subjects see junk-food ads long term - so that each new soda commercial acts like a booster shot of indignation, rather than temptation.

"Then the food industry is paying to undermine their own products," Mr. Bryan said, sounding downright adolescent.

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proceedings of the national academy of sciences

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Can Teenage Defiance Be Manipulated for Good?

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"We cast the executives behind food marketing as controlling adult authority figures, and framed the avoidance of junk food as a way to rebel against their control," explained the researchers, led by Christopher Bryan at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and David Yeager at the University of Texas at Austin.

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Ask people what's wrong in American higher education, and you'll hear about grade inflation. At Harvard a few years ago, a professor complained that the most common grade was an A-. He was quickly corrected: The most common grade at Harvard was an A.

Across 200 colleges and universities, over 40 percent of grades were in the A realm. At both four-year and two-year schools, more students receive A's than any other grade - a percentage that has grown over the past three decades.

Among older graduates, figures like these usually elicit a comment involving the words "coddled," "damn" and "millennials." But the opposite problem worries me even more: grade de flation. It happens whenever teachers use a forced grading curve: The top 10 percent of students receive A's, the next 30 percent get B's, and so on. Sometimes it's mandated by institutions; sometimes it's chosen by teachers.

The goal is to fight grade inflation, but the forced curve suffers from two serious flaws. One: It arbitrarily limits the number of students who can excel. If your forced curve allows for only seven A's, but 10 students have mastered the material, three of them will be unfairly punished. (I've found a huge variation in overall performance among the classes I teach.)

After analyzing grading systems, the economists Pradeep Dubey and John Geanakoplos concluded that a forced grade curve is a disincentive to study. "Absolute grading is better than grading on a curve," they wrote.

The more important argument against grade curves is that they create an atmosphere that's toxic by pitting students against one another. At best, it creates a hypercompetitive culture, and at worst, it sends students the message that the world is a zero-sum game: Your success means my failure.

A few years into my teaching career, I set out to change that attitude among my students. I started experimenting with grading schemes that would encourage community and collaboration - while still maintaining standards and assessing students individually.

In fairness, plenty of people believe in the opposite view - that the world is a zero-sum game - and that colleges (especially business schools like the one where I teach) should reflect that reality. I understand their view, but as an organizational psychologist, I've found that they're wrong.

Exhibit A: The time employees spend helping others contributes as much to their performance evaluations and promotion rates as how well they do their jobs. That's the punch line of a comprehensive analysis of 168 studies of more than 51,000 employees across industries: Leaders reward people who make the team and the organization more successful.

Exhibit B: I spent a decade studying the careers of "takers," who aim to come out ahead, and "givers," who enjoy helping others. In the short run, across jobs in engineering, medicine and sales, the takers were more successful. But as months turned into years, the givers consistently achieved better results.

Takers believe in a zero-sum world, and they end up creating one where bosses, colleagues and clients don't trust them. Givers build deeper and broader relationships - people are rooting for them instead of gunning for them.

Like most people in business schools, my students were intent on networking, but they focused their efforts outside their classes and regarded their in-class peers as competition. I decided to change that culture seven years ago, knowing it would be difficult. There's evidence that once a competitive culture emerges in a group, it's difficult to undo - people fall into a pattern of "cutthroat cooperation."

I began my experiment by writing unusually difficult exams. That was enough to motivate students to study hard. And I introduced a rule: No student will ever be hurt by another student's grade. After several voiced worries that they would all be hurt, I promised them that I would never curve downward, only upward. If the highest mark was an 83, I would add 17 points to everyone's score. Now one student's excellence didn't hurt another's grade.

But while that removed a level of competition, it didn't address the bigger goal, which was to make preparing for my exam a team effort. How could I get students to help one another?

Four years ago, I found a way. The most difficult section of my final exam was multiple choice. I told the students that they could pick the one question about which they were most unsure, and write down the name of a classmate who might know the answer - the equivalent of a lifeline on the game show "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" If the classmate got it right, they would both earn the points.

Essentially, I was trying to build a collaborative culture with a reward system where one person's success benefited someone else. It was a small offering - two points on a 120-point exam - but it made a big difference. More students started studying together in small groups, then the groups started pooling their knowledge.

The results: Their average scores were 2 percent higher than the previous year's, and not because of the bonus points. We've long known that one of the best ways to learn something is to teach it. In fact, evidence suggests that this is one of the reasons that firstborns tend to slightly outperform younger siblings on grades and intelligence tests: Firstborns benefit from educating their younger siblings. The psychologists Robert Zajonc and Patricia Mullally noted in a review of the evidence that "the teacher gains more than the learner in the process of teaching."

I had been trying to teach this lesson through my research on givers and takers, but it was so much more powerful for them to live it.

Creating an atmosphere in which students want to help one another also allowed them to benefit from another of the defining features of personal and professional relationships: transactive memory, which is simply knowing who knows best. In a marriage you don't need to know how to fix the air-conditioner if your wife does. In a work team you don't have to know how to perfect PowerPoint slides if your colleague is an expert.

Even in the world of finance, where success is supposed to be about raw brainpower, research shows that star investment analysts who join new firms see their performance drop for the next two years - unless they take their teams with them. It takes time to learn who knows what. Transactive memory makes it easier to ask for help - you know where to turn.

When students take the time to find out who has expertise, they become smarter at learning. And that's ultimately what we're trying to teach, isn't it? The mark of higher education isn't the knowledge you accumulate in your head. It's the skills you gain about how to learn.

By 2014, before the final exam, a student sent an email to the entire class announcing that she and a friend had reserved a room for Saturday afternoon studying, and anyone was welcome to join them. That night, another student suggested that the class could divide up the readings and write summaries. Two minutes later a third student responded: He had already taken the initiative to write a comprehensive study guide, which he shared with the entire class. Many students contributed their own insights, and one even made a practice quiz - a smart idea since it's well established that testing is a better way to learn than regular studying.

That year, the scores climbed another 2.4 percent. "Your class has changed the way students work together," one student wrote to me. "I've never seen a group of students so willing to help one another succeed."

Her note suggested that there was another powerful reason to abandon grading on a curve. One of the most robust predictors of stress, depression and burnout is a lack of belongingness and social support. And we know that when disadvantaged students are motivated to seek help their grades improve.

Colleges today are trying to deal with a substantial suicide risk among students and growing rates of depression and anxiety. On my most optimistic days, I wonder whether campus mental health would improve if more classes were designed to encourage participants to support one another. Would students be better off if they saw classmates as people who had their back, rather than as people who might stab them in the back?

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page SR3 of the New York edition with the headline: Free Students From the Grading Curve Trap. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Opinion | Why We Should Stop Grading Students on a Curve

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Ask people what's wrong in American higher education, and you'll hear about grade inflation. At Harvard a few years ago, a professor complained that the most common grade was an A-. He was quickly corrected: The most common grade at Harvard was an A.

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You're excited to implement video observation in your school or district. But how will it fit within your school or district's professional development plan?

This is a common question for organizations planning to implement a video coaching process. Technology platforms can make classroom observation easier, but it's up to you to decide what type of learning activities are a good fit to go beyond the "coach observes teacher" model.

At Edthena, a video coaching platform, we've been collecting the best ideas from our partners-teachers, principals, professors, and researchers-and sharing with organizations who are still defining their visions for success.

Here are three of the go-to ideas that we think could be implemented in any organization using video for PD.

Getting Started: Classroom Tour

Getting teachers comfortable with the idea of using video and building confidence with the technology are important steps in rolling out a video-powered PD process.

A great way for teachers to gain initial experience is asking them to upload a classroom-tour video.

In addition to familiarizing teachers with a video-powered process, this activity provides teachers access into peers' classrooms, helping them learn from each other and gain context for future observations which might occur.

How it works:

Teacher narrates a tour of their empty classroom, highlighting the various learning spaces and detailing why the room was arranged in a particular way

Teacher shares the video with a group of peers and coaches

Peers and coaches provide reactions and thoughts

Example classroom tour: Invest Your Teachers in Video Observation

When You're Ready: Virtual Learning Walks

Learning walks are becoming a popular strategy for sharing best practices throughout a school or district.

The common approach involves a small group of educators visiting a handful of classrooms during a certain content block or hour. Along the way they observe and study elements of practice that seem to be working and then highlight them in a debrief discussion. (The teacher observed usually is often not part of the debrief.)

But having teachers and coaches physically walk into each other's classrooms can be very disruptive for students. Combined with the difficulty of ensuring everyone is available at the same time during the school day, learning walks often turn out to be good ideas that are hard to execute.

Virtual learning walks, on the other hand, offer the same opportunities for gaining insight without the distraction to students and challenges of scheduling. There is the additional benefit that the teachers whose classrooms were observed can participate in the discussion.

How it works:

Teachers selected for observation during the learning walk record a segment of a lesson or learning activity

The teachers share their video with the group

Each learning walk participant provides the teachers with comment as well as replies to others' comments to spur conversation

More info on learning walks: Teachers Observing Teachers

Video Champion: Paired Improvement Cycle

Part of the value of the virtual learning walks is the active participation of the teacher who is being observed. They hear (and see) ways that they can change action in their classroom to lead to a more productive learning environment.

To further develop teachers' skills around noticing their habits and translating that into change, a more sustained effort to self-analyze is needed. The paired improvement cycle helps teachers do this while running an experiment to try a modified instructional practice.

Pairing with a colleague through this process helps build accountability for the participating teachers -- they make a commitment to enact a change to a peer who also commits to a change in their own classroom.

It's important to note that the colleague need not be in the same subject or grade. There is certainly benefit to shared, subject-matter expertise, but the main goal to this learning structure is to facilitate meaningful reflection while also encouraging follow-through from the teachers who participate.

How it works:

Week 1: Document baseline

Teachers self-select a focus area for the coaching the cycle, for example, use of checks for understanding. This focus could be informed by prior coaching conversations, but it should be teacher driven.

Teachers record video evidence of selected classroom practices and share with their peer.

Week 2: Commit to change

Teachers provide feedback on their partner's video.

Debrief meeting between coach and teachers to discuss what was noticed and generate ideas for change.

In the meeting, each teacher decides and commits to a specific instructional change or strategy.

Note: This meeting can be conducted virtually (e.g. video call)

Week 3: Enact change

Teachers implement changes and document outcomes with new video recording.

Week 4: Discuss implication

Teachers provide feedback on their partner's video.

Debrief meeting between coach and teachers to reflect on impact of changes and implications for future classroom practice.

It feels important to note that the change enacted in week three may not be a good one, and it's as much good outcome to determine that a strategy doesn't work for a teacher as it would be to determine that it had a positive impact on the learning environment.

See a version of this process explained: Making Observations More Meaningful For Teachers

Do you have other ideas based on your own experience? Let us know!

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Lights, Camera, Action: 3 Video Coaching Ideas You Can Implement Next Week - EdSurge News

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You're excited to implement video observation in your school or district. But how will it fit within your school or district's professional development plan? This is a common question for organizations planning to implement a video coaching process.

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What does it take to live a good life?

Surveys show that most young adults believe that obtaining wealth and fame are keys to a happy life. But a long-running study out of Harvard suggests that one of the most important predictors of whether you age well and live a long and happy life is not the amount of money you amass or notoriety you receive. A much more important barometer of long term health and well-being is the strength of your relationships with family, friends and spouses.

These are some of the findings from the Harvard Study of Adult Development, a research project that since 1938 has closely tracked and examined the lives of more than 700 men and in some cases their spouses. The study has revealed some surprising - and some not so surprising - factors that determine whether people are likely to age happily and healthily, or descend into loneliness, sickness and mental decline.

The study's current director, Robert Waldinger, outlined some of the more striking findings from the long-running project in a recent TED Talk that has garnered more than seven million views.

"We publish our findings in academic journals that most people don't read," said Dr. Waldinger, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. "And so we really wanted people to know that this study exists and that it has for 75 years. We've been funded by the government for so many years, and it's important that more people know about this besides academics."

The study began in Boston in the 1930s with two very different groups of young men.

In one case, a team of researchers decided to track Harvard college students through adulthood to see what factors played important roles in their growth and success. "They thought there was too much emphasis placed on pathology at the time and that it would be really useful to study people who were doing well in their young adult development," Dr. Waldinger said. The study recruited 268 Harvard sophomores and followed them closely, with frequent interviews and health examinations. In recent years the study has also incorporated brain scans, blood draws and interviews with the subjects' spouses and adult children.

At around the same time the study began, a Harvard Law School professor named Sheldon Glueck started to study young men from some of Boston's poorest neighborhoods, including 456 who managed to avoid delinquency despite coming from troubled homes. Eventually the two groups were merged into one study.

Over the decades, the men have gone into all walks of life. They've become lawyers, doctors, businessmen and - in the case of one Harvard student named John F. Kennedy - president of the United States. Others went down different paths. Some became alcoholics, had disappointing careers or descended into mental illness. Those who remain alive today are in their 90s.

Through the years, the study has produced many notable findings. It showed, for example, that to age well physically, the single most important thing you could do was to avoid smoking. It discovered that aging liberals had longer and more active sex lives than conservatives. It found that alcohol was the primary cause of divorce among men in the study, and that alcohol abuse often preceded depression (rather than the other way around).

The study has gone through several directors. Dr. Waldinger, who took over in 2003, is its fourth. He expanded the study so it focused not just on the men but also on their wives and children. The researchers began videotaping the couples in their homes, studying their interactions, and interviewing them separately about nearly every facet of their lives, even day-to-day spats.

As the researchers looked at the factors throughout the years that strongly influenced health and well-being, they found that relationships with friends, and especially spouses, were a major one. The people in the strongest relationships were protected against chronic disease, mental illness and memory decline - even if those relationships had many ups and downs.

"Those good relationships don't have to be smooth all the time," Dr. Waldinger said. "Some of our octogenarian couples could bicker day in and day out. But as long as they felt that they could really count on the other when the going got tough, those arguments didn't take a toll on their memories."

Dr. Waldinger found a similar pattern among relationships outside the home. The people who sought to replace old colleagues with new friends after retiring were happier and healthier than those who left work and placed less emphasis on maintaining strong social networks.

"Over and over in these 75 years," Dr. Waldinger said, "our study has shown that the people who fared the best were the people who leaned into relationships with family, with friends and with community."

Dr. Waldinger acknowledged that the research showed a correlation, not necessarily causation. Another possibility is that people who are healthier and happier to begin with are simply more likely to make and maintain relationships, whereas those who are sicker gradually become more socially isolated or end up in bad relationships.

But he said that by following the subjects for many decades and comparing the state of their health and their relationships early on, he was fairly confident that strong social bonds are a causal role in long-term health and well-being.

So what concrete actions does he recommend?

"The possibilities are endless," he said. "Something as simple as replacing screen time with people time, or livening up a stale relationship by doing something new together, long walks or date nights. Reach out to that family member you haven't spoken to in years - because those all-too-common family feuds take a terrible toll on the people who hold the grudges."

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The Secrets to a Happy Life, From a Harvard Study

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What does it take to live a good life? Surveys show that most young adults believe that obtaining wealth and fame are keys to a happy life. But a long-running study out of Harvard suggests that one of the most important predictors of whether you age well and live a long and happy life is not the amount of money you amass or notoriety you receive.

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There are several passages in the new book "Overloaded and Underprepared" that fill me with sadness for American high school students, the most driven of whom are forever in search of a competitive edge. Some use stimulants like Adderall. Some cheat.

But the part of the book that somehow got to me most was about sleep.

It's a prerequisite for healthy growth. It's a linchpin of sanity. Before adulthood, a baseline amount is fundamental and nonnegotiable, or should be.

But many teenagers today are so hyped up and stressed out that they're getting only a fraction of the rest they need. The book mentions a high school in Silicon Valley that brought in outside sleep experts, created a kind of sleep curriculum and trained students as "sleep ambassadors," all to promote shut-eye.

The school even held a contest that asked students for sleep slogans. The winner: "Life is lousy when you're drowsy."

Sleep ambassadors? Sleep rhymes? Back when I was in high school in the 1980s, in a setting considered intense in its day, the most common sleep problem among my peers was getting too much of it and not waking up in time for class.

Now the concern isn't how to rouse teens but how to lull them. And that says everything about the way childhood has been transformed - at least among an ambitious, privileged subset of Americans - into an insanely programmed, status-obsessed and sometimes spirit-sapping race.

Take one more Advanced Placement class. Add another extracurricular. Apply to all eight Ivies.

Lose a few winks but never a few steps.

"Overloaded and Underprepared," published on Tuesday, was written by Denise Pope, Maureen Brown and Sarah Miles, all affiliated with a Stanford University-based group called Challenge Success, which urges more balanced learning environments. The book looks at homework loads, school-day structures and much more.

And it joins an urgently needed body of literature that pushes back at helicopter parenting, exorbitant private tutoring, exhaustive preparation for standardized tests and the rest of it. This genre goes back at least a decade and includes, notably, Madeline Levine's "The Price of Privilege" and Paul Tough's "How Children Succeed."

But it has expanded with particular velocity of late. "How to Raise an Adult," by Julie Lythcott-Haims, came out last month. "The Gift of Failure," by Jessica Lahey, will be released in two weeks.

There's a unifying theme: Enough is enough.

"At some point, you have to say, 'Whoa! This is too crazy,' " Pope, a senior lecturer at Stanford, told me.

Sleep deprivation is just a part of the craziness, but it's a perfect shorthand for childhoods bereft of spontaneity, stripped of real play and haunted by the "pressure of perfection," to quote the headline on a story by Julie Scelfo in The Times this week.

Scelfo wrote about six suicides in a 13-month period at the University of Pennsylvania; about the prevalence of anxiety and depression on college campuses; about many star students' inability to cope with even minor setbacks, which are foreign and impermissible.

Those students almost certainly need more sleep. In a study in the medical journal Pediatrics this year, about 55 percent of American teenagers from the ages of 14 to 17 reported that they were getting less than seven hours a night, though the National Sleep Foundation counsels 8 to 10.

"I've got kids on a regular basis telling me that they're getting five hours," Pope said. That endangers their mental and physical health.

Smartphones and tablets aggravate the problem, keeping kids connected and distracted long after lights out. But in communities where academic expectations run highest, the real culprit is panic: about acing the exam, burnishing the transcript, keeping up with high-achieving peers.

I've talked with many parents in these places. They say that they'd love to pull their children off such a fast track, but won't the other children wind up ahead?

They might - if "ahead" is measured only by a spot in U-Penn's freshman class and if securing that is all that matters.

But what about giving a kid the wiggle room to find genuine passions, the freedom to discover true independence, the space to screw up and bounce back? Shouldn't that matter as much?

"No one is arguing for a generation of mediocre or underachieving kids - but plenty of people have begun arguing for a redefinition of what it means to achieve at all," wrote Jeffrey Kluger in Time magazine last week. He noted, rightly, that "somewhere between the self-esteem building of going for the gold and the self-esteem crushing of the Ivy-or-die ethos, there has to be a place where kids can breathe."

And where they can tumble gently into sleep, which is a gateway, not an impediment, to dreams.

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There are several passages in the new book "Overloaded and Underprepared" that fill me with sadness for American high school students, the most driven of whom are forever in search of a competitive edge. Some use stimulants like Adderall. Some cheat. But the part of the book that somehow got to me most was about sleep.

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Finland's Relaxed Approach to the First Day of School

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The global education pioneer eases students into the classroom.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTNmLt7QX8E

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LPA
American education catches a lot of flack for falling behind other countries in global rankings, but test scores aren't everything. The truth is, some of the most cutting-edge learning takes place on US soil.

We consulted education experts from Google as well as past assessments from InnoveEdu and Noodle to arrive at a comprehensive list of schools that embody innovation in a variety of forms.

There is the Arizona school where Native American students learn about sustainability and agriculture; the school in Michigan where kids learn about zoology; the New York City school for LGBT youth; and many more.

Together, the schools demonstrate that equations and vocabulary tests, while essential, aren't the only things that matter in schooling. They're a small piece of the much larger pursuit to mold young minds.

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The 14 most innovative schools in America

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American education catches a lot of flack for falling behind other countries in global rankings, but test scores aren't everything. The truth is, some of the most cutting-edge learning takes place on US soil.

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STOP STEALING DREAMS: Seth Godin at TEDxYouth@BFS

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Rethinking online education
by The first generation of online learning came with a lot of hype but didn't fully deliver on its promise. What does the future hold? Seth Godin
[This is the sequel to Stop Stealing Dreams, now reprinted on Medium.]

A few years ago, a computer science course online broke records and signed up 100,000 students. It was a revelation. Students from all over the world, without regard for their ability to pay, formal schooling or connections, were all able to take an advanced course from a world-class professor.

At a time when tuition at an Ivy League school is more than $40,000 a year ($5,000 a course), this online course delivered more than three billion dollars worth of higher learning aggregate value for free.

This is the sort of mammoth economic and access transformation that the internet enables.

The media was abuzz. Net theorists, teachers and organizations were excited because this was the beginning of a mammoth shift in the way everyone would learn everything. Not only a college education, but corporate training and everything in between.

Not mentioned in most of the articles was the fact that nearly 99% of the students that enrolled dropped out of the course. One thousand students graduated - an astonishing number, a huge contribution, but the tiniest fraction of the number that began the course.

In real life, a dropout rate of 99% endangers even a tenured professor's career.

But, you might say, it's the internet. We've come to associate the internet as low-engagement, a drive-by experience. We take for granted that the internet offers us things that are slightly flaky, or easy. So we're not surprised when the drop out rate is so high. Easy in, easy out.

But it doesn't have to be this way.

The course was as well-designed as a real-world lecture and the teacher was qualified and engaging, but it's not a surprise that the dropout rate was so high: As soon as education gets difficult (and useful education always gets difficult) it's social pressure, peer pressure and our own need to fit in and achieve that often keeps us going. The typical online course provides precious little of any of these elements.

Your peers can't see you, which makes it difficult to see yourself.

It's not surprising that traditional universities embraced online learning - it's at the heart of their charter. And countless organizations jumped in as well, because it appears to be not only a public good, but a cheap way to train your people, with zero marginal cost and plenty of upside for everyone.

Centralized content, top-down control of the syllabus, the ability to approve every interaction - these are the hallmarks of a process that fits most bureaucracies.

Here's the thing: large universities have built their institutions around lectures, tests and accreditation. So have many internal training functions.

Lectures are at the heart of the last century of higher learning. A proven scholar orates in front of a class of selected students.

Tests are the way institutions enforce compliance. They're the stick.

And accreditation is the carrot. Put up with the lectures and the tests and we'll give you the certificate, the scarce piece of paper that is (supposed to be) worth far more than the effort you went through to get certified.

In one question, then, an easy way to understand modern education: "Will this be on the test?"

The student absorbs, the student regurgitates, the student gets the prize of a degree (and a job).

Modern industrialized education is like a job because, in large measure, it's funded by the very same folks who offer jobs. It's like a job because school was invented to train us to be compliant in our jobs. And it's like a job because compliance is easy to scale.

We've seen that when knowledge jobs meet the internet, they change. And now we're seeing that online education is having trouble acting like a job as well.

Online courses can't offer too much in the way of credit (because there's too little scarcity) and online tests are difficult to administer in high-stakes situations. Worst of all is the fact that few people in the age of a TED talk will eagerly sit through a traditional lecture when there's little at stake.

This has led to an explosion of low-stakes, as-much-fun-as-vocational online courses like the well-executed ones offered by Skillshare and Udemy. But because the stakes are lower, the amount of transformative learning that goes on is lower. It's possible for a semester at Harvard Business School to change a life - but less likely it will happen in a lecture course online.

Traditional schooling is based on top-down power, fear and an elusive carrot. It uses brute force to move large numbers of people down a straight line of education toward a norm.

And the challenge for traditional educators is that when they go online, they have very little power, the fear that comes from hard work causes dropouts and the carrot feels very far away indeed.

Last year, I set out to try to find a different way to teach online. I decided that I wouldn't create an analog of real-life learning online, but instead create a fundamentally new way to cause change to happen.

I'm sharing the results of that process here, because I believe we're entering a new generation of online learning. This is how we built the altMBA.

At its core: enrollment, not tests. Experiences not media consumption. Peer to peer, not top down.

Enrollment is a simple concept: people are there because they want to be, eager to move forward, on precisely the same road that the course is. They are moving forward, and the job of the course isn't to cajole, it's to transform.

Students are on this bus because they want to be.

Experiences are at the heart of change. We change when we do something, when we interact with the world. Lectures weren't chosen as the default in traditional real-world courses because they maximize educational outcomes. They were chosen as the default because they are the best way to efficiently control 45 unenrolled students.

It turns out that the best way to cause change is for people to actually change someone or something else. We learn what we do, not what we're told.

Peer to peer scales. We have learned this from Facebook and from eBay and from Etsy and from Kickstarter and from airbnb etc. But school hasn't learned it yet, because the existing bureaucracies in most industries (and yes, education is an industry) are built on the control that comes from going top down.

I began by imagining the opposite of the current system: Create a course that was small, not large. Relatively expensive, not free. Real time not asynchronous. Open to some, not to all. Experiential, not lecture based. With live coaches...

The altMBA, the course we now run, has some surprising elements:

The backbone is a hand-built, peer-to-peer learning environment, not a series of lectures. In fact, there are no lectures at all.

Cohort-based, with groups of five to twenty people engaged constantly with each other (we use Slack as a surprisingly powerful peer-to-peer setting for experiential learning). There is very little time spent engaging directly from top down.

There are no lectures, no proprietary videos, no secret lessons. Instead, there's a deep syllabus of materials (some required, some optional, most of them free or low cost).

Almost all of the work happens through the 14 assignments our students take on in the course of the month. Every few days, they complete another one.

All of the final work product is in public. A lot like real life.

Every student reviews and then comments on several of the other students' assignments.

Every student takes the five or ten comments received and turns them into a reflective script, detailing actual change, actual growth.

Everything iterates, again and again.

The students attending are from dozens of cities, more than a handful of countries, time zones around the world, but every admitted student shares the same mindset of seeking true growth. Self-selection plus curated admissions means that the support network is strong. Enrollment-in the outcome and the process-is the secret of effective education.

...Enrollment-in the outcome and the process-is the secret of effective education.

A team of ten trained coaches is engaged with the students, holding office hours in videoconferencing software, cheering from the sidelines and holding people accountable - not to a system, not to a test, but to themselves.

And so we set expectations. Again and again, about how we do things around here.

The group is always on the edge of something - success, a breakthrough, exhaustion... and then they regroup and do it all again.

Everyone makes promises, everyone shows up, everyone connects.

The dropout rate is less than 2%. We graduate more than 98% of our matriculated students, an almost symmetric reversal of the typical online course.

Many of our students are getting generous and direct feedback for the first time in their career. And it sticks.

Online learning is no longer about the technology - off the shelf tech is already good enough. It's now about a series of choices that teachers and education impresarios can make (or shy away from).

"Is this voluntary or involuntary?"

"Am I doing this as a proxy for something else, as a payment to get the prize, or is the learning and the experience the prize?"

Transformational experiences almost always involve voluntary enrollment. Crossfit or running a marathon, a middle-aged man learning to play the cello, a teenager giving a TEDx talk. These aren't things we have to do, they are things we choose to do.

When a course begins with that voluntary mindset and then uses that enrollment to generously pile on expectations, connections and promises, the rules are different.

Consider that public school is also known as compulsory education. The posture of everyone involved is that this is something you must do, not something that is sought out.

"Will this be on the test," is a marker, an admission that few people involved in the process are actually willing participants. No test, no learning. No test, no credit. Few seek out tests, tests are something we do to people, not for them.

On the other hand, in the abundance-based economy of online learning, enrollment is essential. It's voluntary, after all. Voluntary like the Boston Marathon, voluntary like a course in public speaking.

Volunteers lean into their work, they gulp instead of sip.

Volunteers aren't given tests, they take an opportunity.

Volunteers don't want less, they want more.

The new generation of educators can now build courses that take these volunteers at their word, pushing them to do the hard work to actually make change happen.

If you want people to become passionate, engaged in a field, transformed by an experience - you don't test them, you don't lecture them and you don't force them. Instead, you create an environment where willing, caring individuals can find an experience that changes them.

The lecture doesn't go away from our culture, and neither do tests. But neither can be at the center of the online learning environment, not any more.

It's not easier to run a course this way, it's actually far more difficult. I'm not sure that matters. What matters is: Does the process work?

We're standing at a crossroads, even bigger than the one that the pioneers of public education saw a hundred years ago. Let's not waste it.

For more on the current state of education and how we got here, check out the free ebook Stop Stealing Dreams, which comes with a matching TEDx talk.

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"Will this be on the test?" - The Startup - Medium

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by The first generation of online learning came with a lot of hype but didn't fully deliver on its promise. What does the future hold? Seth Godin [This is the sequel to Stop Stealing Dreams , now reprinted on Medium.] A few years ago, a computer science course online broke records and signed up 100,000 students.

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In 2013, for the first time, a majority of public-school students in this country-51 percent, to be precise-fell below the federal government's low-income cutoff, meaning they were eligible for a free or subsidized school lunch. It was a powerful symbolic moment-an inescapable reminder that the challenge of teaching low-income children has become the central issue in American education.

The truth, as many American teachers know firsthand, is that low-income children can be harder to educate than children from more-comfortable backgrounds. Educators often struggle to motivate them, to calm them down, to connect with them. This doesn't mean they're impossible to teach, of course; plenty of kids who grow up in poverty are thriving in the classroom. But two decades of national attention have done little or nothing to close the achievement gap between poor students and their better-off peers.

From Our June 2016 Issue

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In recent years, in response to this growing crisis, a new idea (or perhaps a very old one) has arisen in the education world: Character matters. Researchers concerned with academic-achievement gaps have begun to study, with increasing interest and enthusiasm, a set of personal qualities-often referred to as noncognitive skills, or character strengths-that include resilience, conscientiousness, optimism, self-control, and grit. These capacities generally aren't captured by our ubiquitous standardized tests, but they seem to make a big difference in the academic success of children, especially low-income children.

My last book, How Children Succeed, explored this research and profiled educators who were attempting to put it into practice in their classrooms. Since the book's publication, in 2012, the idea that educators should be teaching grit and self-control along with addition and subtraction has caught on across the country. Some school systems are embracing this notion institutionally. In California this spring, for example, a coalition of nine major school districts has been trying out a new school-assessment system that relies in part on measurements of students' noncognitive abilities, such as self-management and social awareness.

But here's the problem: For all our talk about noncognitive skills, nobody has yet found a reliable way to teach kids to be grittier or more resilient. And it has become clear, at the same time, that the educators who are best able to engender noncognitive abilities in their students often do so without really "teaching" these capacities the way one might teach math or reading-indeed, they often do so without ever saying a word about them in the classroom. This paradox has raised a pressing question for a new generation of researchers: Is the teaching paradigm the right one to use when it comes to helping young people develop noncognitive capacities?

What is emerging is a new idea: that qualities like grit and resilience are not formed through the traditional mechanics of "teaching"; instead, a growing number of researchers now believe, they are shaped by several specific environmental forces, both in the classroom and in the home, sometimes in subtle and intricate ways.

The process begins in early childhood, when the most important force shaping the development of these skills turns out to be a surprising one: stress. Over the past decade, neuroscientists have demonstrated with increasing clarity how severe and chronic stress in childhood-what doctors sometimes call toxic stress-leads to physiological and neurological adaptations in children that affect the way their minds and bodies develop and, significantly, the way they function in school.

Each of us has within us an intricate stress-response network that links together the brain, the immune system, and the endocrine system (the glands that produce and release stress hormones). In childhood, and especially in early childhood, this network is highly sensitive to environmental cues; it is constantly looking for signals from a child's surroundings that might tell it what to expect in the days and years ahead. When those signals suggest that life is going to be hard, the network reacts by preparing for trouble: raising blood pressure, increasing the production of adrenaline, heightening vigilance. Neuroscientists have shown that children living in poverty experience more toxic stress than middle-class children, and that additional stress expresses itself in higher blood pressure and higher levels of certain stress hormones.

In the short term, these adaptations may have benefits, especially in a dangerous environment. When your threat-detection system-sometimes referred to as your fight-or-flight response-is on high alert, you can react quickly to trouble. But in the longer term, they can cause an array of physiological problems and impede development of the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that controls our most complex intellectual functions, as well as our ability to regulate ourselves both emotionally and cognitively.

On an emotional level, toxic stress can make it difficult for children to moderate their responses to disappointments and provocations. A highly sensitive stress-response system constantly on the lookout for threats can produce patterns of behavior that are self-defeating in school: fighting, talking back, acting up, and, more subtly, going through each day perpetually wary of connection with peers or teachers.

On a cognitive level, chronically elevated stress can disrupt the development of what are known as executive functions: higher-order mental abilities that some researchers compare to a team of air-traffic controllers overseeing the workings of the brain. Executive functions, which include working memory, attentional control, and cognitive flexibility, are exceptionally helpful in navigating unfamiliar situations and processing new information, which is exactly what we ask children to do at school every day. When a child's executive functions aren't fully developed, school days, with their complicated directions and constant distractions, can become a never-ending exercise in frustration.

Executive functions also serve as the developmental building blocks-the neurological infrastructure-underpinning the noncognitive capacities that educators are now so focused on. What this suggests is that if we want to help children demonstrate these qualities in school, there are two places where we need to change our approach. One is the classroom, where right now many fundamental practices of modern American pedagogy ignore this science of adversity. The second is where children's neurobiological identity begins to be formed, long before they ever set foot in kindergarten: the home.

The most important environmental factor in children's early lives, researchers have shown, is the way their parents and other adults interact with them. Beginning in infancy, children rely on responses from their parents to help them make sense of the world. Researchers at Harvard's Center on the Developing Child have labeled these "serve and return" interactions. An infant makes a sound or looks at an object-that's the serve-and her parents return the serve by responding to her babbles and cries with gestures, facial expressions, and speech. More than any other experiences in infancy, these rudimentary interactions trigger the development and strengthening of connections among the regions of the brain that control emotion, cognition, language, and memory.

A second crucial role that parents play early on is as external regulators of their children's stress. When parents behave harshly or unpredictably-especially at moments when their children are upset-the children are less likely over time to develop the ability to manage strong emotions and respond effectively to stressful situations. By contrast, when a child's parents respond to her jangled emotions in a sensitive and measured way, she is more likely to learn that she herself has the capacity to cope with her feelings, even intense and unpleasant ones.

But if a home environment can have a positive impact on a child's development, it can also do the opposite. One of the most influential studies of the long-term effect of a stressful early home life is the ongoing Adverse Childhood Experiences Study, which was launched in the 1990s by Robert F. Anda, a physician at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Vincent J. Felitti, the founder of the preventive-medicine department at Kaiser Permanente. Anda and Felitti identified 10 categories of childhood trauma: three categories of abuse, two of neglect, and five related to growing up in a "seriously dysfunctional household." They found that the number of these traumas a person experiences in childhood (a number that has come to be known as a person's ace score) correlates in adulthood with health problems ranging from heart disease to cancer.

More recently, researchers using variations on Anda and Felitti's ace scale have found that an elevated ace score also has a negative effect on the development of a child's executive functions and on her ability to learn effectively in school. A study conducted by Nadine Burke Harris, a pediatrician and trauma researcher in San Francisco, found that just 3 percent of children in her clinic with an ace score of zero displayed learning or behavioral problems. But among children who had an ace score of four or more, 51 percent had learning or behavioral problems. A separate national study published in 2014 found that children with two or more aces were eight times as likely as children with none to demonstrate behavioral problems and more than twice as likely to repeat a grade in school. According to this study, slightly more than half of all children have never experienced a serious adverse event-but the other half, the ones with at least one ace, account for 85 percent of the behavioral problems that children exhibit.

For children who grow up without significant experiences of adversity, the skill-development process leading up to kindergarten generally works the way it's supposed to: Calm, consistent, responsive interactions in infancy with parents and other caregivers create neural connections that lay the foundation for a healthy array of attention and concentration skills. Just as early stress sends signals to the nervous system to maintain constant vigilance and prepare for a lifetime of trouble, early warmth and responsiveness send the opposite signals: You're safe; life is going to be fine. Let down your guard; the people around you will protect you and provide for you. Be curious about the world; it's full of fascinating surprises. These messages trigger adaptations in children's brains that allow them to slow down and consider problems and decisions more carefully, to focus their attention for longer periods, and to more willingly trade immediate gratification for promises of long-term benefits.

We don't always think of these abilities as academic in nature, but in fact they are enormously beneficial in helping kids achieve academic success in kindergarten and beyond. Without them, the transition from home or day care to kindergarten is likely to be fraught, and the challenge of learning the many things we ask kindergarten students to master can be overwhelming. In the classroom, neurocognitive difficulties can quickly turn into academic difficulties. Students don't learn to read on time, because it is harder for them to concentrate on the words on the page. They don't learn the basics of number sense, because they are too distracted by the emotions and anxieties overloading their nervous systems. As academic material becomes more complicated, they fall further behind. The more they fall behind, the worse they feel about themselves and about school. That creates more stress, which tends to feed into behavioral problems, which lead to stigmatization and punishment in the classroom, which keep their stress levels elevated, which makes it still harder to concentrate-and so on, throughout elementary school.

Fast-forward a few years, to the moment when those students arrive in middle or high school, and these executive-function challenges are now typically perceived to be problems of attitude or motivation. When teachers and administrators are confronted with students who find it hard to concentrate, manage their emotions, or deal calmly with provocation, the first instinct often is not to look at them as children who, because of a lifetime of stress, haven't yet developed a healthy set of self-regulation mechanisms. Instead, the adults see them as kids with behavioral problems who need, more than anything, to be disciplined.

When children and adolescents misbehave, we usually assume that they're doing so because they have considered the consequences of their actions and calculated that the benefits of misbehavior outweigh the costs. So our natural response is to increase the cost of misbehavior, by ratcheting up punishment. One of the chief insights that recent neurobiological research has provided, however, is that young people, especially those who have experienced significant adversity, are often guided by emotional and psychological and hormonal forces that are far from rational. This doesn't mean that teachers should excuse or ignore bad behavior. But it does explain why harsh punishments so often prove ineffective in motivating troubled young people to succeed.

Most American schools today operate according to a philosophy of discipline that has its roots in the 1980s and '90s, when a belief that schools would be safer and more effective if they had "zero tolerance" for violence, drug use, and other types of misbehavior led to a sharp rise in suspensions. In 2010, more than a tenth of all public-high-school students nationwide were suspended at least once. And suspension rates are substantially higher among certain demographic groups. African American students, for example, are suspended three times as often as white students. In Chicago public high schools (which have particularly good and well-analyzed data on suspensions), 27 percent of students who live in the city's poorest neighborhoods received an out-of-school suspension during the 2013-14 school year, as did 30 percent of students with a reported personal history of abuse or neglect.

Sixty percent of Chicago's out-of-school suspensions in public high schools are for infractions that don't involve violence or even a threat of violence: They are for talking back to teachers, violating school rules, and disruptive behavior. With the neurobiological research in mind, it's easy to see that kind of behavior-refusing to do what adults tell you to do, basically-as an expression not of a bad attitude or a defiant personality but of a poorly regulated stress-response system. Talking back and acting up in class are, at least in part, symptoms of a child's inability to control impulses, de-escalate confrontations, and manage anger and other strong feelings-the whole stew of self-regulation issues that can usually be traced to impaired executive-function development in early childhood.

The guiding theory behind much of the school discipline practiced in the United States today-and certainly behind the zero-tolerance, suspension-heavy approach that has dominated since the 1990s-is behaviorism, which is grounded in the idea that humans respond to incentives and reinforcement. If we get positive reinforcement for a certain behavior, we're likely to do it more; if we get negative reinforcement, we're likely to do it less.

Clearly, on some level, behaviorism works. People, including children, respond well to behavioral cues, at least in the short term. But researchers are coming to understand that there are limits to the effectiveness of rewards and punishments in education, and that for young people whose neurological and psychological development has been shaped by intense stress, straightforward reward systems are often especially ineffective.

Roland G. Fryer Jr., a celebrated economics professor at Harvard, has spent the past decade testing out a variety of incentive schemes with public-school students in Houston, New York, Chicago, and other American cities that have school systems with high poverty rates. Fryer has paid parents for attending parent-teacher conferences, students for reading books, and teachers for raising test scores. He has given kids cellphones to inspire them to study harder. Altogether, he has handed out millions of dollars in rewards and prizes. As a body of work, Fryer's incentive studies have marked one of the biggest and most thorough educational experiments in American history.

And yet in almost every case, Fryer's incentive programs have had no effect. From 2007 to 2009, Fryer distributed a total of $9.4 million in cash incentives to 27,000 students, to promote book reading in Dallas, to raise test scores in New York, and to improve course grades in Chicago -all with no effect. "The impact of financial incentives on student achievement," Fryer reported, "is statistically 0 in each city." In the 2010-11 school year, he gave cash incentives to fifth-grade students in 25 low-performing public schools in Houston, and to their parents and teachers, with the intent of increasing the time they spent on math homework and improving their scores on standardized math tests. The students performed the tasks necessary to get paid, but their average math scores at the end of eight months hadn't changed at all. When Fryer looked at their reading scores, he found that they actually went down.

The stark fact that complicates incentive studies like Fryer's is that children who grow up in difficult circumstances already have a powerful set of material incentives to get a good education. Adults with a high-school degree fare far better in life than adults without one. They not only earn more, on average, but they also have more-stable families, better health, and less chance of being arrested or incarcerated. Those with college degrees similarly do much better, on average, than those without. Young people know this. And yet when it comes time to make any of the many crucial decisions that affect their likelihood of reaching those educational milestones, kids growing up in adversity often make choices that seem in flagrant opposition to their self-interest, rendering those goals more distant and difficult to attain.

Within the field of psychology, one important body of thought that helps explain this apparent paradox is self-determination theory, which is the life's work of Edward L. Deci and Richard M. Ryan, two professors at the University of Rochester. Deci and Ryan came up with the beginnings of their theory in the 1970s, when the field was mostly dominated by behaviorists, who believed that people's actions are governed solely by their motivation to fulfill basic biological needs and thus are highly responsive to straightforward rewards and punishments.

Deci and Ryan, by contrast, argued that we are mostly motivated not by the material consequences of our actions but by the inherent enjoyment and meaning that those actions bring us, a phenomenon called intrinsic motivation. They identified three key human needs-our need for competence, our need for autonomy, and our need for relatedness, meaning personal connection-and they posited that intrinsic motivation can be sustained only when we feel that those needs are being satisfied.

In their writing on education, Deci and Ryan acknowledge that many of the tasks that teachers ask students to complete each day are not inherently fun or satisfying; learning anything, be it painting or computer programming or algebra, involves a lot of repetitive practice. It is at these moments, they write, that extrinsic motivation becomes important: when tasks must be performed not for the inherent satisfaction of completing them, but for some separate outcome. When teachers are able to create an environment that fosters competence, autonomy, and relatedness, Deci and Ryan say, students are much more likely to feel motivated to do that hard work.

The problem is that when disadvantaged children run into trouble in school, either academically or behaviorally, most schools respond by imposing more control on them, not less. This diminishes their fragile sense of autonomy. As these students fall behind their peers academically, they feel less and less competent. And if their relationships with their teachers are wary or even contentious, they are less likely to experience the kind of relatedness that Deci and Ryan describe as being so powerfully motivating for young people in the classroom. Once students reach that point, no collection of material incentives or punishments is going to motivate them, at least not in a deep or sustained way.

All of which brings me back to the question of how to help children develop those mysterious noncognitive capacities. If we want students to act in ways that will maximize their future opportunities-to persevere through challenges, to delay gratification, to control their impulses-we need to consider what might motivate them to take those difficult steps. What Deci and Ryan's research suggests is that students will be more likely to display these positive academic habits when they are in an environment where they feel a sense of belonging, independence, and growth-or, to use Deci and Ryan's language, where they experience relatedness, autonomy, and competence.

So what do those academic environments look like? And how do we help teachers to create them?

A few years ago, a young economist at Northwestern University named C. Kirabo Jackson began investigating how to measure educators' effectiveness. In many school systems these days, teachers are assessed based primarily on one data point: the standardized-test scores of their students. Jackson suspected that the true impact teachers had on their students was more complicated than a single test score could reveal. So he found and analyzed a detailed database in North Carolina that tracked the performance of every single ninth-grade student in the state from 2005 to 2011-a total of 464,502 students. His data followed their progress not only in ninth grade but throughout high school.

Jackson had access to students' scores on the statewide standardized test, and he used that as a rough measure of their cognitive ability. This is the number that education officials generally look at when trying to assess teachers' impact. But then Jackson did something new. He created a proxy measure for students' noncognitive ability, using just four pieces of existing administrative data: attendance, suspensions, on-time grade progression, and overall GPA. Jackson's new index measured, in a fairly crude way, how engaged students were in school-whether they showed up, whether they misbehaved, and how hard they worked in their classes. Jackson found that this simple noncognitive proxy was, remarkably, a better predictor than students' test scores of whether the students would go on to attend college, a better predictor of adult wages, and a better predictor of future arrests.

Jackson's proxy measure allowed him to do some intriguing analysis of teachers' effectiveness. He subjected every ninth-grade English and algebra teacher in North Carolina to what economists call a value-added assessment. First he calculated whether and how being a student in a particular teacher's class affected that student's standardized-test score. Then, separately, he calculated the effect that teachers had on their students' noncognitive proxy measure: on their attendance, suspensions, timely progression from one grade to the next, and overall GPA.

Jackson found that some teachers were reliably able to raise their students' standardized-test scores year after year. These are the teachers, in every teacher-evaluation system in the country, who are the most valued and most rewarded. But he also found that there was another distinct cohort of teachers who were reliably able to raise their students' performance on his noncognitive measure. If you were assigned to the class of a teacher in this cohort, you were more likely to show up to school, more likely to avoid suspension, more likely to move on to the next grade. And your overall GPA went up-not just your grades in that particular teacher's class, but your grades in your other classes, too.

Jackson found that these two groups of successful teachers did not necessarily overlap much; in every school, it seemed, there were certain teachers who were especially good at developing cognitive skills in their students and other teachers who excelled at developing noncognitive skills. But the teachers in the second cohort were not being rewarded for their success with their students-indeed, it seemed likely that no one but Jackson even realized that they were successful. And yet those teachers, according to Jackson's calculations, were doing more to get their students to college and raise their future wages than were the much-celebrated teachers who boosted students' test scores.

Jackson's study didn't reveal whether these teachers increased their students' grit or optimism or conscientiousness and by how many percentage points. Instead, it suggested that that's probably the wrong question to be asking. Jackson's data showed that spending a few hours each week in close proximity to a certain kind of teacher changed something about students' behavior. And that was what mattered. Somehow these teachers were able to convey deep messages-perhaps implicitly or even subliminally-about belonging, connection, ability, and opportunity. And somehow those messages had a profound impact on students' psychology, and thus on their behavior.

The environment those teachers created in the classroom, and the messages that environment conveyed, motivated students to start making better decisions-to show up to class, to persevere longer at difficult tasks, and to deal more resiliently with the countless small-scale setbacks and frustrations that make up the typical student's school day. And those decisions improved their lives in meaningful ways. Did the students learn new skills that enabled them to behave differently? Maybe. Or maybe what we are choosing to call "skills" in this case are really just new ways of thinking about the world or about themselves-a new set of attitudes or beliefs that somehow unleash a new way of behaving.

So which messages most effectively motivate young people to persevere? And how does a teacher convey them to students? These are particularly lively questions in education right now, and the scholar trying most comprehensively to answer them is Camille A. Farrington, a former inner-city high-school teacher who now works at the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research. When she was teaching, Farrington sometimes felt mystified by the choices that some of her students made. Why weren't they more consistently motivated to work hard and thus reap the benefits of a good education? As a researcher, Farrington has carefully investigated this question, and in 2012, she and a team of colleagues published a report titled "Teaching Adolescents to Become Learners," which offered some novel answers.

The report was in many ways a reaction to the recent push among educators to identify, assess, and teach noncognitive skills. While Farrington agreed with the growing consensus that a student's ability to persevere in school was important, she was skeptical of the idea that perseverance could be taught in the same way that we teach math, reading, or history. "There is little evidence that working directly on changing students' grit or perseverance would be an effective lever for improving their academic performance," Farrington and her colleagues wrote. "While some students are more likely to persist in tasks or exhibit self-discipline than others, all students are more likely to demonstrate perseverance if the school or classroom context helps them develop positive mindsets and effective learning strategies."

They went on to identify a phenomenon they called academic perseverance-the tendency to maintain positive academic behaviors despite setbacks. What distinguishes students with academic perseverance, they wrote, is their resilient attitude toward failure. These students continue to work hard in a class even after failing a few tests; when they are stumped or confused by complex material, they look for new ways to master it rather than simply giving up. Academic perseverance, in Farrington's formulation, shares certain qualities with noncognitive capacities such as grit and self-control and delay of gratification. But unlike those personality traits, which psychologists have shown to be mostly stable over time, a student's academic perseverance, according to Farrington, is highly dependent on context. A student might be inclined to persevere in school in 10th grade but not in 11th grade. He might persevere in math class but not in history.

In essence, what Farrington found was this: If you are a teacher, you may never be able to get your students to be gritty, in the sense of developing some essential character trait called grit. But you can probably make them act gritty-to behave in gritty ways in your classroom. And those behaviors will help produce the academic outcomes that you (and your students and society at large) are hoping for.

What makes a student persevere in any given classroom on any given day? Farrington's answer is that it depends on his academic mind-set: the attitudes and self-perceptions and mental representations that are bouncing around inside his head. That mind-set is the product of countless environmental forces, but research done by Carol S. Dweck, a Stanford psychologist, and others has shown that teachers can have an enormous impact on their students' mind-sets, often without knowing it. Messages that teachers convey-large and small, explicit and implicit-affect the way students feel in the classroom, and thus the way they behave there.

Farrington has distilled this voluminous mind-set research into four key beliefs that, when embraced by students, seem to contribute most significantly to their tendency to persevere in the classroom:

1. I belong in this academic community.

2. My ability and competence grow with my effort.

3. I can succeed at this.

4. This work has value for me.

If students hold these beliefs in mind as they are sitting in math class, Farrington concludes, they are more likely to persevere through the challenges and failures they encounter there. And if they don't, they are more likely to give up at the first sign of trouble.

The problem, of course, is that students who grow up in conditions of adversity are primed, in all sorts of ways, not to believe any of Farrington's four statements when they're sitting in math class. This is in part due to the neurobiological effects of adversity, beginning in early childhood. Remember that one of the signal results of toxic-stress exposure is a hyperactive fight-or-flight mechanism, which does not encourage in students the soothing belief I belong here. Instead, it conveys opposite warnings, at car-alarm volume: I don't belong here. This is enemy territory. Everyone in this school is out to get me. Add to this the fact that many children raised in adversity, by the time they get to middle or high school, are significantly behind their peers academically and disproportionately likely to have a history of confrontations with school administrators. These students, as a result, tend to be the ones placed in remedial classes or subjected to repeated suspensions or both-none of which makes them likely to think I belong here or I can succeed at this.

Most American schools don't do a particularly good job of creating environments that convey to students, especially low-income students, the four beliefs that Farrington identified. What Kirabo Jackson seems to have discovered is that certain educators have been able to create such an environment in their own classroom, regardless of the climate in the school as a whole. Until recently, though, school-wide strategies that encouraged these positive mind-sets in students were rare.

Now, however, some new, more comprehensive approaches are emerging. Many of them draw on the neurobiological research that explains how a childhood full of toxic stress can produce obstacles to school success. They take as their premise that in order to help students overcome those obstacles, it may be necessary to alter some basic practices and assumptions within an entire school. These efforts target students' beliefs in two separate categories, each one echoing items on Farrington's list: first, students' feelings about their place in the school ( I belong in this academic community), and then their feelings about the work they are doing in class ( my ability and competence grow with my effort; I can succeed at this; this work has value for me).

One example of this comprehensive approach is Turnaround for Children, a school-transformation nonprofit that works in high-poverty schools in New York City; Newark, New Jersey; and Washington, D.C. According to research done by the organization, many of the behavior-management challenges that educators in high-poverty schools face are due to the combustible combination, in the classroom, of two cohorts of students. The first is a small group of students who have experienced high levels of toxic stress (and likely have high ace scores) and as a result are angry and rebellious and disruptive. This group, Turnaround estimates, represents between 10 and 15 percent of the student body in most high-poverty schools. Students in the second cohort have also experienced adversity and stress, but not to the same intense degree. These students are less likely to start trouble, but their highly sensitive fight-or-flight mechanisms are easily triggered when trouble arrives.

When Turnaround is contracted to work at a particular school, its intervention team, usually three or four people, begins by addressing the psychological needs of potentially disruptive students, sometimes offering them on-site counseling and mentoring, often referring them and their families to mental-health services. At the same time, the organization's team works to improve the classroom environment as a whole, coaching teachers in behavior-management techniques that dial confrontations down rather than up, and giving them strategies to help create a climate of belonging and engagement in the classroom.

Turnaround then expands its intervention to focus not just on the emotional atmosphere of the classroom but also on the teaching and learning that happens there. Last spring, I visited Middle School 45, in the Bronx, a high-poverty public school where Turnaround had been working for about a year. During my visit, much of the intervention team's focus was on encouraging teachers in what it called cooperative learning, a pedagogical approach that promotes student engagement in the learning process: less lecture time; fewer repetitive worksheets; more time spent working in small groups, solving problems, engaging in discussions, and collaborating on long-term creative projects. It's a style of teaching and classroom organization that is relatively common in independent schools and in wealthy suburbs but quite unusual in inner-city public schools.

For many teachers at MS 45, embracing this part of the Turnaround model was a challenge. Giving students more autonomy in their learning meant giving up control. And like many teachers at other high-poverty schools, those at MS 45 had come to believe that with students as potentially disruptive as theirs, strong, dominant teacher control was the only way to keep the classroom calm and orderly; handing over the reins would mean chaos. But Turnaround's coaches eventually convinced the teachers-or most of them, anyway-that giving students more opportunity to experience autonomy and to engage deeply in their own learning would improve their motivation and mind-set. When the teachers tried these new methods, they discovered, often to their surprise, that they worked.

That process was also in evidence at another school I visited recently: Polaris Charter Academy, on Chicago's West Side. Polaris is affiliated with a national nonprofit called EL Education. (The organization was known as Expeditionary Learning until October, when it changed its name.) The EL Education network is made up of more than 150 schools: urban, suburban, and rural; charter and traditional public; high-poverty and middle-class. Polaris, which enrolls students from kindergarten through eighth grade, has one of the more disadvantaged student bodies in the network: 94 percent of the students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, and the neighborhood where the school is located, West Humboldt Park, has high rates of violent crime, unemployment, and poverty.

Like Turnaround, EL Education uses two parallel strategies to try to develop the most beneficial academic mind-set in its students. The first strategy has to do with belonging and relationships; the second has to do with work and challenges. On the relationship side, the most important institution at EL schools is Crew, an ongoing, multiyear discussion and advisory group for students. Each EL student belongs to a crew, which typically meets every day for half an hour or so to discuss matters important to the students, both academic and personal. In middle school and high school, the groups are relatively intimate-10 or 15 kids-and students generally stay in the same crew for three years or longer, with the same teacher leading the group year after year. Many EL students will tell you that their crew meeting is the place where they most feel a sense of belonging at school; for some of them, it's the place where they most feel a sense of belonging, period.

Crew is the centerpiece of EL's strategy for immersing students in an environment of supportive relationships. But just as significant an element of the EL formula is its pedagogical strategy. Classrooms at EL schools are by design much more engaging and interactive than classrooms in most other American public schools. They are full of student discussions and group activities large and small; teachers guide the conversation, but they spend considerably less time lecturing than most other public-school teachers do. EL students complete a lot of rigorous and demanding long-term projects, often going through extensive and repeated revisions based on critiques from teachers and peers. They frequently work on these projects in collaborative groups, and many projects conclude with students giving a presentation in front of the class, the school, or even a community group. In addition, students are responsible, whenever possible, for assessing themselves; two or three times a year, at report-card time, parents or other family members come to the school for meetings known as student-led conferences, in which students as young as 5 narrate for their parents and teachers their achievements and struggles over the past semester.

The pedagogical guru behind EL's instructional practices and curriculum is Ron Berger, the organization's chief academic officer. Berger, who spent 28 years working as a public-school teacher in rural Massachusetts and an educational consultant before joining EL Education, clearly feels a special connection with those EL schools, like Polaris, that enroll high numbers of students growing up in adversity. When we spoke, he explained that this feeling of connection is rooted in his own childhood: He grew up with four siblings in a chaotic and unstable family. He knows firsthand how stress and trauma at home can unsettle and derail a child's development, and he understands that without the right intervention, the child may never recover from those early setbacks.

EL schools have been shown in independent studies to have a significant positive effect on academic progress. A 2013 study by Mathematica Policy Research revealed that students at five urban EL middle schools advanced ahead of peers at comparison schools by an average of 10 months in math and seven months in reading over the course of three years. The research also shows that an EL education has a greater positive impact on low-income students than it does on other students.

Berger said he is not surprised by that latter fact; he has a clear sense of the barriers that keep some low-income students from learning, and how and why the EL model might be able to help them overcome those barriers. "Some kids get withdrawn and protective," he told me. "Other kids get this kind of shell of being a tough guy, and they're frozen in school. Either way, it restricts them from being able to contribute in class, to be a part of discussions, to raise their hand, to show that they care about their learning. It holds back any kind of passion or interaction. They can't take risks in school, and you can't learn if you're not taking risks." Berger recognizes these behaviors, he said, because they are exactly what he himself did when he was a kid.

Students at EL schools, Berger said, can't hide the way that he did. Crew helps pull them out of their shell, and in class they're compelled daily to interact with their peers and teachers in group discussions and to collaborate on group projects, and before long that kind of interaction begins to feel natural. When I visited another EL school last spring, the Washington Heights Expeditionary Learning School (known as wheels), in Upper Manhattan, almost every classroom I observed was engaged in some kind of elaborate discussion or creative project that demanded involvement from every student. In one seventh-grade social-science class, the students were clustered in groups of four, working together with markers on a big poster. They had been assigned to represent either the Federalist or the Republican Party during the political debates of the 1790s, and they covered their posters with slogans and arguments supporting the case for their vision of government, preparing for a class-wide debate. The teacher glided from table to table, asking questions and offering advice, but for the most part the students managed themselves. I was struck by the unusual fact that these were middle-school students studying U.S. history who seemed genuinely to be having fun.

What's more, these students were among the most disadvantaged in the New York City public-school system. Eighty-eight percent of the student population at wheels has a family income that falls below the federal cutoff for a free lunch, and almost all are Latino or African American. They belong to a demographic, in other words, that in many big-city middle and high schools is seen as a behavioral challenge and an academic liability. In social-science class that day, however, they were learning complex material and behaving perfectly well-and not because they were incentivized with rewards or threatened with punishments, but because school was, for that period at least, actually kind of interesting.

Teachers and administrators at EL schools talk quite a bit about character-their term for noncognitive skills. The central premise of EL schools is that character is built not through lectures or direct instruction from teachers but through the experience of persevering as students confront challenging academic work. This, to me, is the most significant innovation in the work that is going on at EL schools. In general, when schools do try to directly address the impact that a stress-filled childhood might have on disadvantaged students, the first-and often the only-approach they employ has to do with their students' emotional health, with relationships and belonging. And while those students certainly need the sense of connection that comes from feeling embedded within a web of deep and close relationships at school, the crucial insight of EL Education is that belonging isn't enough on its own. For a student to truly feel motivated by and about school, he also has to perceive that he is doing work that is challenging, rigorous, and meaningful.

Approaches like those employed by Turnaround for Children and EL Education are growing in attention and prominence. But they are still quite rare. Most low-income students in the United States today are enrolled in schools where they are frequently disciplined but seldom challenged. That strategy clearly doesn't work very well for those students, and the research that psychologists, economists, and neuroscientists have been amassing in recent years now allows us to understand, more clearly than ever before, exactly why it doesn't work.

What is exciting to me about visiting schools like wheels and Polaris and MS 45 is that you can see the possibility, however embryonic, that a new approach to educating low-income children-one rooted in what we're discovering about brain development, human psychology, and the science of adversity-might now be emerging.

In December, the much-criticized No Child Left Behind Act, which dominated federal education policy for the past decade and a half, was finally euthanized, replaced by a new law that mostly shifts down to the states the accountability for student success that No Child Left Behind centralized in Washington, D.C. For all its flaws, No Child Left Behind had as its guiding principle a noble and important idea: that the academic-achievement gap between low-income children and their better-off peers could and must be closed. The law was spectacularly unsuccessful at accomplishing that goal-the gap in eighth-grade reading and math test scores has barely budged since 2003-but the failure of its methods doesn't diminish the urgency of its central goal.

Here's a hopeful thought: Perhaps with the demise of the law, the education debates that raged so furiously during the No Child Left Behind era-on charter schools and Common Core, teacher contracts and standardized testing-might now give way to more-productive discussions about what low-income children need to succeed. We know a lot more than we did when the law was passed about the powerful environmental forces that are acting on many low-income children, beginning in infancy. And we know a lot more than we used to about what interventions and strategies-both at home and in the classroom-most effectively help these young people thrive in school and beyond. A national conversation that starts from this growing scientific consensus and moves forward into policy might be our best chance to improve the lives of the 51 percent of American public-school students who most need our help.
This article is adapted from Paul Tough's new book, Helping Children Succeed: What Works and Why. This work was funded in part by a grant from the CityBridge Foundation, the education-focused foundation of Katherine and David Bradley, who also own The Atlantic.

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In 2013, for the first time, a majority of public-school students in this country-51 percent, to be precise-fell below the federal government's low-income cutoff, meaning they were eligible for a free or subsidized school lunch. It was a powerful symbolic moment-an inescapable reminder that the challenge of teaching low-income children has become the central issue in American education.

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5 Great Ways to Use Teaching Channel

Welcome to Tch! You've joined a community of thousands of educators who regularly watch videos of effective teaching and offer each other insight and support.

To start, here are 5 great tips to get more out of Teaching Channel.

Interested in the Common Core State Standards, engaging lesson ideas, or differentiation? Just click "Videos" on the top navigation bar. Use the left-hand filters to find what you want quickly.

In your workspace profile, tell us what grade and subject you teach. Then fill in your educational interests. We use this info to send you alerts when new videos match your interests.

Our newest feature, Q&A, enables you to ask a question in a teacher community committed to professional learning. And don't be afraid to answer a few yourself.

We won't let that happen at Teaching Channel. If you find a video you like, just click the lesson planner icon and you can save it to your workspace. You can even schedule email reminders for when you'd like to try out that video idea.

With the "Save to Tch" button on your browser's toolbar, you can save links to anything you find on the web in your personal workspace.

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5 Ways You Can Benefit From Teaching Channel's Website

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Welcome to Tch! You've joined a community of thousands of educators who regularly watch videos of effective teaching and offer each other insight and support. To start, here are 5 great tips to get more out of Teaching Channel. Interested in the Common Core State Standards, engaging lesson ideas, or differentiation?

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Educational Videos, Free Kids Videos and Technology | TeacherTube

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TeacherTube brings free videos and educational technology into the classroom as well as the home. Our kid's videos can be used as tools anywhere to help children learn. Click now and find out how we can help.

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Not the same as mindfulness, which focuses on emotional awareness, monotasking is a 21st-century term for what your high school English teacher probably just called "paying attention."

"It's a digital literacy skill," said Manoush Zomorodi, the host and managing editor of WNYC Studios' "Note to Self" podcast, which recently offered a weeklong interactive series called Infomagical, addressing the effects of information overload. "Our gadgets and all the things we look at on them are designed to not let us single-task. We weren't talking about this before because we simply weren't as distracted."

Ms. Zomorodi prefers the term "single-tasking": " 'Monotasking' seemed boring to me. It sounds like 'monotonous.' "

Kelly McGonigal, a psychologist, lecturer at Stanford and the author of "The Willpower Instinct," believes that monotasking is "something that needs to be practiced." She said: "It's an important ability and a form of self-awareness as opposed to a cognitive limitation."

This is great news for the self-identified monotaskers out there.

Jon Pack, a 42-year-old photographer in Brooklyn, was happy to hear that his single-minded manner might be undergoing a rebrand. "When I was looking for jobs and interviewing, they'd always want me to say, 'I'm a great multitasker,' " he said. "And I wouldn't. My inability to multitask was seen as a negative. Now I can just say, 'I am a monotasker. I am someone who works best when I focus on one thing at a time.' "

And the way we work can have effects that kick in long after we clock out.

As much as people would like to believe otherwise, humans have finite neural resources that are depleted every time we switch between tasks, which, especially for those who work online, Ms. Zomorodi said, can happen upward of 400 times a day, according to a 2016 University of California, Irvine study. "That's why you feel tired at the end of the day," she said. "You've used them all up."

The term "brain dead" suddenly takes on a whole new meaning.

A good sign you've task-switched yourself into a stupor: mindlessly scrolling Facebook at the end of the night or, as in Ms. Zomorodi's case, looking at couches on Pinterest. "I just stuff my brain full of them because I can't manage to do anything else," she said. "The sad thing is that I don't get any closer to deciding which one I like."

But monotasking can also make work itself more enjoyable.

"I can multitask - and do, of course; it's kind of essential - but I prefer to do one thing at a time," Hayley Phelan, a 28-year-old writer, wrote in an email. "If I keep looking at my phone or my inbox or various websites, working feels a lot more tortuous. When I'm focused and making progress, work is actually pleasurable."

Ms. Phelan isn't imagining things. "Almost any experience is improved by paying full attention to it," Ms. McGonigal said. "Attention is one way your brain decides, 'Is this interesting? Is this worthwhile? Is this fun?' "

It's the reason television shows we tweet through feel tiresome and books we pick up and put down and pick up again never seem to end. The more we allow ourselves to be distracted from a particular activity, the more we feel the need to be distracted. Paying attention pays dividends.

This is why, according to Ms. McGonigal, the ability to monotask might be most valuable in social situations. "Research shows that just having a phone on the table is sufficiently distracting to reduce empathy and rapport between two people who are in conversation," she said.

Twenty-five thousand people participated in Ms. Zomorodi's Infomagical project, which started the week with a single-tasking challenge. Upon completion, respondents agreed overwhelmingly that single-tasking was the No. 1 thing they wanted to carry into their post-Infomagical lives. "But they also said it was really, really hard," Ms. Zomorodi said.

Parents of young children found it difficult for obvious reasons, as did people with jobs that permit them less control over their time. In those cases, try monotasking in areas where you can: conversations with your children, reading a book in bed before they go to sleep, dinner or drinks with friends. After all, monotasking is a good skill to incorporate into all aspects of your life, not just work.

Even those with more flexibility can find themselves going to great lengths for a little bit of focus. Nick Pandolfi, who works in partnerships at Google, once traveled to northern Sweden in what he described as an "extreme" effort to monotask.

"I had to write my business school application essays, and I was having no luck spending an hour here and there after work and on the weekends," Mr. Pandolfi said. "I just wasn't inspired. After spending a few days hiking in the Arctic by myself, I was able to get all of them done in just a few days."

Transcontinental trips aside, Ms. Zomorodi stressed that it was important to find ways to practice. "Start by giving yourself just one morning a week to check in, and remind yourself what it feels like to do one thing at a time," she said.

Mr. Pandolfi and Ms. Phelan use exercise to aid them, albeit in different ways. "If I need to get through a big project and don't want to get distracted by my inbox and the minutiae of the web, I hop on the treadmill desk," Mr. Pandolfi said. Ms. Phelan makes a point of running outside, weekly, "without listening to music or anything else."

Monotasking can also be as simple as having a conversation.

"Practice how you listen to people," Ms. McGonigal said. "Put down anything that's in your hands and turn all of your attentional channels to the person who is talking. You should be looking at them, listening to them, and your body should be turned to them. If you want to see a benefit from monotasking, if you want to have any kind of social rapport or influence on someone, that's the place to start. That's where you'll see the biggest payoff."

So is monotasking a movement? "It's not there yet," Ms. Zomorodi said. "But I think it will be."

If enough people pay attention to it, that is.

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Read This Story Without Distraction (Can You?)

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Not the same as mindfulness, which focuses on emotional awareness, monotasking is a 21st-century term for what your high school English teacher probably just called "paying attention." "It's a digital literacy skill," said Manoush Zomorodi, the host and managing editor of WNYC Studios' "Note to Self" podcast, which recently offered a weeklong interactive series called Infomagical, addressing the effects of information overload.

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As laptops become smaller and more ubiquitous, and with the advent of tablets, the idea of taking notes by hand just seems old-fashioned to many students today. Typing your notes is faster - which comes in handy when there's a lot of information to take down. But it turns out there are still advantages to doing things the old-fashioned way.

For one thing, research shows that laptops and tablets have a tendency to be distracting - it's so easy to click over to Facebook in that dull lecture. And a study has shown that the fact that you have to be slower when you take notes by hand is what makes it more useful in the long run.

In the study published in Psychological Science, Pam A. Mueller of Princeton University and Daniel M. Oppenheimer of the University of California, Los Angeles sought to test how note-taking by hand or by computer affects learning.

"When people type their notes, they have this tendency to try to take verbatim notes and write down as much of the lecture as they can," Mueller tells NPR's Rachel Martin. "The students who were taking longhand notes in our studies were forced to be more selective - because you can't write as fast as you can type. And that extra processing of the material that they were doing benefited them."

Mueller and Oppenheimer cited that note-taking can be categorized two ways: generative and nongenerative. Generative note-taking pertains to "summarizing, paraphrasing, concept mapping," while nongenerative note-taking involves copying something verbatim.

And there are two hypotheses to why note-taking is beneficial in the first place. The first idea is called the encoding hypothesis, which says that when a person is taking notes, "the processing that occurs" will improve "learning and retention." The second, called the external-storage hypothesis, is that you learn by being able to look back at your notes, or even the notes of other people.

Because people can type faster than they write, using a laptop will make people more likely to try to transcribe everything they're hearing. So on the one hand, Mueller and Oppenheimer were faced with the question of whether the benefits of being able to look at your more complete, transcribed notes on a laptop outweigh the drawbacks of not processing that information. On the other hand, when writing longhand, you process the information better but have less to look back at.

For their first study, they took university students (the standard guinea pig of psychology) and showed them TED talks about various topics. Afterward, they found that the students who used laptops typed significantly more words than those who took notes by hand. When testing how well the students remembered information, the researchers found a key point of divergence in the type of question. For questions that asked students to simply remember facts, like dates, both groups did equally well. But for "conceptual-application" questions, such as, "How do Japan and Sweden differ in their approaches to equality within their societies?" the laptop users did "significantly worse."

The same thing happened in the second study, even when they specifically told students using laptops to try to avoid writing things down verbatim. "Even when we told people they shouldn't be taking these verbatim notes, they were not able to overcome that instinct," Mueller says. The more words the students copied verbatim, the worse they performed on recall tests.

And to test the external-storage hypothesis, for the third study they gave students the opportunity to review their notes in between the lecture and test. The thinking is, if students have time to study their notes from their laptops, the fact that they typed more extensive notes than their longhand-writing peers could possibly help them perform better.

But the students taking notes by hand still performed better. "This is suggestive evidence that longhand notes may have superior external storage as well as superior encoding functions," Mueller and Oppenheimer write.

Do studies like these mean wise college students will start migrating back to notebooks?

"I think it is a hard sell to get people to go back to pen and paper," Mueller says. "But they are developing lots of technologies now like Livescribe and various stylus and tablet technologies that are getting better and better. And I think that will be sort of an easier sell to college students and people of that generation."

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Attention, Students: Put Your Laptops Away

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As laptops become smaller and more ubiquitous, and with the advent of tablets, the idea of taking notes by hand just seems old-fashioned to many students today. Typing your notes is faster - which comes in handy when there's a lot of information to take down.

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Since its release seven years ago, Minecraft has become a global sensation, captivating a generation of children. There are over 100 million registered players, and it's now the third-best-selling video game in history, after Tetris and Wii Sports. In 2014, Microsoft bought Minecraft - and Mojang, the Swedish game studio behind it - for $2.5 billion.

There have been blockbuster games before, of course. But as Jordan's experience suggests - and as parents peering over their children's shoulders sense - Minecraft is a different sort of phenomenon.

For one thing, it doesn't really feel like a game. It's more like a destination, a technical tool, a cultural scene, or all three put together: a place where kids engineer complex machines, shoot videos of their escapades that they post on YouTube, make art and set up servers, online versions of the game where they can hang out with friends. It's a world of trial and error and constant discovery, stuffed with byzantine secrets, obscure text commands and hidden recipes. And it runs completely counter to most modern computing trends. Where companies like Apple and Microsoft and Google want our computers to be easy to manipulate - designing point-and-click interfaces under the assumption that it's best to conceal from the average user how the computer works - Minecraft encourages kids to get under the hood, break things, fix them and turn mooshrooms into random-number generators. It invites them to tinker.

In this way, Minecraft culture is a throwback to the heady early days of the digital age. In the late '70s and '80s, the arrival of personal computers like the Commodore 64 gave rise to the first generation of kids fluent in computation. They learned to program in Basic, to write software that they swapped excitedly with their peers. It was a playful renaissance that eerily parallels the embrace of Minecraft by today's youth. As Ian Bogost, a game designer and professor of media studies at Georgia Tech, puts it, Minecraft may well be this generation's personal computer.

At a time when even the president is urging kids to learn to code, Minecraft has become a stealth gateway to the fundamentals, and the pleasures, of computer science. Those kids of the '70s and '80s grew up to become the architects of our modern digital world, with all its allures and perils. What will the Minecraft generation become?

"Children," the social critic Walter Benjamin wrote in 1924, "are particularly fond of haunting any site where things are being visibly worked on. They are irresistibly drawn by the detritus generated by building, gardening, housework, tailoring or carpentry."

Playing with blocks, it turns out, has deep cultural roots in Europe. Colin Fanning, a curatorial fellow at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, points out that European philosophers have long promoted block-based games as a form of "good" play that cultivates abstract thought. A recent paper Fanning wrote with Rebecca Mir traces the tradition to the English political philosopher John Locke, who was an early advocate of alphabet blocks. A century later, Friedrich Froebel - often called the inventor of kindergarten - developed block-based toys that he claimed would illustrate the spiritual connectedness of all things. Children would start with simple blocks, build up to more complex patterns, then begin to see these patterns in the world around them. Educators like Maria Montessori picked up on this concept and pioneered the teaching of math through wooden devices.

During the political cataclysms of the 20th century, European thinkers regarded construction-play not merely as a way to educate children but also as a means to heal their souls. The Danish landscape architect Carl Theodor Sorensen urged that areas in cities ruined by World War II be turned into "junk playgrounds," where children would be given pickaxes, hammers and saws and allowed to shape the detritus into a new civilization, at child scale. (Several were in fact created in Europe and were quite popular.) In Sweden, educators worried that industrialization and the mechanization of society were causing children to lose touch with physical skills; they began teaching sloyd, or woodcrafting, a practice that continues today.

When Fanning first saw Minecraft, he felt a jolt of recognition. Nearly all these historical impulses were evident in the game. "It's striking to me how much this mirrors the appeal and the critical reception of Minecraft," he says. "In Scandinavian toys, the material of wood has had a really long association with notions of timelessness and quality and craftsmanship." In Minecraft, as he notes, wood is one of the first resources new players gather upon entering the game: chopping trees with their avatar's hand produces blocks of wood, and from those they begin to build a civilization. Children are turned loose with tools to transform a hostile environment into something they can live in.

Block-play was, in the European tradition, regarded as a particularly "wholesome" activity; it's not hard to draw a line from that to many parents' belief that Minecraft is the "good" computer game in a world full of anxiety about too much "screen time." In this way, Minecraft has succeeded Lego as the respectable creative toy. When it was first sold in the postwar period, Lego presented itself as the heir to the heritage of playing with blocks. (One ad read: "It's a pleasure to see children playing with Lego - Lego play is quiet and stimulating. Children learn to grapple with major tasks and solve them together.") Today many cultural observers argue that Lego has moved away from that open-ended engagement, because it's so often sold in branded kits: the Hogwarts castle from "Harry Potter," the TIE fighter from "Star Wars."

"It's 'Buy the box, open the box, turn to the instruction sheet, make the model, stick it on the shelf, buy the next box,' " the veteran game designer Peter Molyneux says in a 2012 documentary about Minecraft. "Lego used to be just a big box of bricks, and you used to take the bricks, pour them on the carpet and then make stuff. And that's exactly what Minecraft is."

As a Swede, Markus Persson, who invented Minecraft and founded Mojang, grew up amid such cultural influences and probably encountered sloyd in school himself. In Minecraft, Persson created what Fanning calls "a sort of digital sloyd."

Persson, now 36, was a child of the '80s computer scene who learned to program when he was 7 on his father's Commodore 128. By the time he was in his 20s, he was working for an online photo-album site and programming games in his spare time at home, an apartment littered with game CDs and soda bottles. He released the first version of Minecraft in 2009. The basic play is fairly simple: Each time you start a new game, Minecraft generates a unique world filled with hills, forests and lakes. Whatever the player chops at or digs into yields building blocks - trees provide wood, the earth dirt and stone. Blocks can be attached to one another to quickly produce structures. Players can also combine blocks to "craft" new items. Take some stone blocks, add a few pieces of wood, and you make a pickax, which then helps you dig more quickly and deeper, till you reach precious materials like gold, silver and diamond. "Mobs," the game's creatures ("mob" is short for "mobile"), can be used for crafting, too. Kill a spider, and you get spider silk, handy for making bows and arrows.

In its first year, Minecraft found popularity mostly among adult nerds. But sometime in late 2011, according to Alex Leavitt, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Southern California, children discovered it, and sales of the game exploded. Today it costs $27 and sells 10,000 copies a day. (It's still popular across all age groups; according to Microsoft, the average player is between 28 and 29, and women make up nearly 40 percent of all players.) Persson frequently added new features to the game, like a "survival mode," in which every 20 minutes evening falls and monsters attack - skeletons shooting arrows, "creepers" blowing themselves up when they get close to you - forcing players to build protective shelters. ("Creative mode" is just about making things.)

Persson also made it possible for players to share their works. You could package your world as a "map" and post it online for others to download and move around in. Even more sophisticated players could modify Minecraft's code, creating new types of blocks and creatures, and then put these "mods" online for others to use. Further developments included a server version of Minecraft that lets people play together on the Internet inside the same world. These days, kids can pay as little as $5 a month to rent such a server. They can also visit much larger commercial servers capable of hosting hundreds or thousands of players simultaneously. There is no single, central server: Thousands exist worldwide.

The game was a hit. But Persson became unsettled by his fame, as well as the incessant demands of his increasingly impassioned fans - who barraged him with emails, tweets and forum posts, imploring him to add new elements to Minecraft, or complaining when he updated the game and changed something. By 2014, he'd had enough. After selling Minecraft to Microsoft, he hunkered down in a $70 million mansion in Beverly Hills and now refuses to talk about Minecraft any more.

I wanted to know whether the European tradition of block-play had influenced him, but Persson politely declined to be interviewed. Via a public reply to me on Twitter, he explained that he "sold Minecraft to get away from it."

Nearly everyone who plays Minecraft, or even watches someone else do so, remarks on its feeling of freedom: All those blocks, infinities of them! Build anything you want! Players have recreated the Taj Mahal, the U.S.S. Enterprise from "Star Trek," the entire capital city from "Game of Thrones." It's the most obvious appeal of the game. But I first started to glimpse how complex Minecraft culture can be when I saw what kids were doing with what's called "redstone," the game's virtual wiring. My two sons had begun using it: Zev, who is 8, showed me an automated "piston door" and stone gateway he built. Gabriel, who is 10, had created a "minigame" whose actions included a mechanism that dropped anvils from a height, which players on the ground had to dodge.

Redstone transports energy between blocks, like an electrical connection. Attach a block that contains power - a redstone "torch," for example, which looks like a forearm-size matchstick - to one end of a trail of redstone, and anything connected to the other end will receive power. Hit a button here, and another block shifts position over there. Persson ingeniously designed redstone in a way that mimics real-world electronics. Switches and buttons and levers turn the redstone on and off, enabling players to build what computer scientists call "logic gates." Place two Minecraft switches next to each other, connect them to redstone and suddenly you have what's known as an "AND" gate: If Switch 1 and Switch 2 are both thrown, energy flows through the redstone wire. You can also rig an "OR" gate, whereby flipping either lever energizes the wire.

These AND and OR gates are, in virtual form, the same as the circuitry you'd find inside a computer chip. They're also like the Boolean logic that programmers employ every day in their code. Together, these simple gates let Minecraft players construct machines of astonishing complexity.

One day this winter, I met Sebastian, a 14-year-old, at his home in New Jersey, where he showed off his redstone devices. One was a huge "trading post," a contraption that allows players on either side of a large wall to trade items through an automated chute. It required a large cluster of AND gates, he said, and took him several days to figure out.

"Hop down here," he said, moving down into a subterranean pit beneath the apparatus and looking around. (In Minecraft, you see the world from the viewpoint of your in-game avatar.) It was like being in the bowels of a factory: the redstone sprawled in all directions. He pointed out different parts of the wiring, rattling off components like an architect at a construction site. "Coming in from these two wires are the lever inputs from the side - and from over here, the other side. And what these do is, when they're both on, they power a piston, which pairs redstone to this block up into this tower dispenser."

Mastering redstone requires rigorously logical thinking, as well as a great deal of debugging: When your device isn't working, you have to carefully go over its circuitry to figure out what's wrong. One fifth grader I visited, Natalie, was assembling a redstone door on her iPad while I watched. But nothing happened when she flicked the "on" lever. "I did that wrong," she said with a frown, and began tracing her way through the circuit. Eventually the problem emerged: A piece of redstone was angled incorrectly, sending the current in the wrong direction.

This is what computer scientists call computational thinking, and it turns out to be one of Minecraft's powerful, if subtle, effects. The game encourages kids to regard logic and if-then statements as fun things to mess around with. It teaches them what computer coders know and wrestle with every day, which is that programs rarely function at first: The work isn't so much in writing a piece of software but in debugging it, figuring out what you did wrong and coming up with a fix.

Minecraft is thus an almost perfect game for our current educational moment, in which policy makers are eager to increase kids' interest in the "STEM" disciplines - science, technology, engineering and math. Schools and governments have spent millions on "let's get kids coding" initiatives, yet it may well be that Minecraft's impact will be greater. This is particularly striking given that the game was not designed with any educational purpose in mind. "We have never done things with that sort of intent," says Jens Bergensten, the lead Minecraft developer at Mojang and Persson's first hire. "We always made the game for ourselves."

Other Minecraft features resemble the work of software engineers even more closely. For example, programmers frequently write code and control their computers through a bare-bones interface known as the "command line," typing abstruse, text-based commands rather than pointing and clicking. Many programmers I know complain that while the point-and-click world has made computers easier to use for everyday people, it has also dumbed us down; kids don't learn the command line the way they would have back when personal-computer use emerged in the '70s and '80s. This is partly why newcomers can find programming alienating: They're not accustomed to controlling a computer using only text.

But Minecraft, rather audaciously, includes a command line and requires players to figure it out. Type "t" or "/" while playing the game, and a space appears where you can chat with other players or issue commands that alter the environment. For example, typing "/time set 0" instantly changes the time of day inside the game to daybreak; the sun suddenly appears on the horizon. Complex commands require a player to master chains of sophisticated command-line syntax.

One day last fall, I visited Gus, a seventh grader in Brooklyn. He was online with friends on a server they share together, engaging in boisterous gladiatorial combat. I watched as he typed a command to endow himself with a better weapon: "/give AdventureNerd bow 1 0 {Unbreakable:1,ench:[{id:51,lvl:1}],display:{Name:"Destiny"}}." What the command did was give a bow-and-arrow weapon to AdventureNerd, Gus's avatar; make the bow unbreakable; endow it with magic; and name the weapon Destiny, displayed in a tag floating over the weapon. Gus had plastered virtual sticky-notes all over his Mac's desktop listing the text commands he uses most often. Several commands can be packed into a "command block," so that clicking on the block activates them, much as clicking on a piece of software launches it.

Mimi Ito, a cultural anthropologist at the University of California, Irvine, and a founder of Connected Camps, an online program where kids play Minecraft together, has closely studied gamers and learning. Ito points out that when kids delve into this hackerlike side of the game - concocting redstone devices or creating command blocks - they often wind up consulting discussion forums online, where they get advice from adult Minecraft players. These folks are often full-time programmers who love the game, and so younger kids and teenagers wind up in conversation with professionals.

"It's one of the places where young people are engaging with more expert people who are much older than them," Ito says. These connections are transformative: Kids get a glimpse of a professional path that their schoolwork never illuminates. "An adult mentor opens up these new worlds that wouldn't be open to them," she adds. Of course, critics might worry about kids interacting with adults online in this way, but as Ito notes, when there's a productive task at hand, it's similar to how guilds have passed on knowledge for ages: knowledgeable adults mentoring young people.

Ito has also found that kids' impulse to tinker with Minecraft pushes them to master real-world technical skills. One 15-year-old boy I interviewed, Eli, became interested in making "texture packs." These are the external shells that wrap around 3-D objects in the game, like a drape thrown over a table: Change the pattern on the drape, and you can change what the object looks like. Designing texture packs prompted Eli to develop sophisticated Photoshop skills. He would talk to other texture-pack designers on Minecraft forums and get them to send him their Photoshop files so he could see how they did things. He also began teaching himself to draw. "I'd be downloading the mod," he says, "looking at the original texture and saying, 'O.K., how can I make this a little more cartoony?' " Then he would put his own designs up on the forums to get feedback, which, he discovered, was usually very polite and constructive. "The community," he says, "is very helpful."

While Minecraft rewards this sort of involvement, it can also be frustrating: Mojang updates Minecraft weekly, and sometimes new updates aren't compatible with an older version. Players complained to me about waking up to discover that their complex contraptions no longer worked. One player spent weeks assembling a giant roller coaster whose carts were powered by redstone tracks only to have an update change the way rails functioned, and the entire roller-coaster mechanism never worked again. Others ruefully described spending months crafting cities on their own multiplayer servers, only to have a server crash and destroy everything.

For Ito, this is all a culturally useful part of the experience: Kids become more resilient, both practically and philosophically. "Minecraft is busted, and you're constantly fixing it," she says. "It's that home-brew aesthetic. It's kind of broken all the time. It's laggy. The kids get used to the idea that it's broken and you have to mess with it. You're not complaining to get the corporate overlord to fix it - you just have to fix it yourself." This is a useful corrective to other software. "IPhone apps are kind of at the opposite end," Ito says. "And the way that kids react when things are broken in the Apple ecosystem versus the Minecraft ecosystem is totally different. With [Apple] it's, 'Why are they broken?' Whereas with Minecraft it's like - 'Oh, they messed with something again, it's broken, we have to go figure out what they changed.' There's a sort of resignation to that the fact that you're tinkering all the time."

Because Minecraft is now seven years old, Ian Bogost will soon have students at Georgia Tech who grew up playing the game. The prospect intrigues him. "I'm very curious to see what their attitude to technology is," he says.

Two years ago, Ava, a fifth grader who lives on Long Island, whom I met through her aunt, a friend of mine, tried Minecraft for the first time. She started a "survival" world and marveled at the jagged hills receding into the distance. But like most new players, she had no idea what to do. Night fell, mobs arrived and a skeleton staggered toward her. She mistakenly assumed it was friendly. "I was like, Oh, hi, how are you?" Ava says. "And I died after that."

Minecraft is an incredibly complex game, but it's also - at first - inscrutable. When you begin, no pop-ups explain what to do; there isn't even a "help" section. You just have to figure things out yourself. (The exceptions are the Xbox and PlayStation versions, which in December added tutorials.) This unwelcoming air contrasts with most large games these days, which tend to come with elaborate training sessions on how to move, how to aim, how to shoot. In Minecraft, nothing explains that skeletons will kill you, or that if you dig deep enough you might hit lava (which will also kill you), or even that you can craft a pickax.

This "you're on your own" ethos resulted from early financial limitations: Working alone, Persson had no budget to design tutorials. That omission turned out be an inadvertent stroke of genius, however, because it engendered a significant feature of Minecraft culture, which is that new players have to learn how to play. Minecraft, as the novelist and technology writer Robin Sloan has observed, is "a game about secret knowledge." So like many modern mysteries, it has inspired extensive information-sharing. Players excitedly pass along tips or strategies at school. They post their discoveries in forums and detail them on wikis. (The biggest one, hosted at the site Gamepedia, has nearly 5,000 articles; its entry on Minecraft's "horses," for instance, is about 3,600 words long.) Around 2011, publishers began issuing handbooks and strategy guides for the game, which became runaway best sellers; one book on redstone has outsold literary hits like "The Goldfinch," by Donna Tartt.

"In Minecraft, knowledge becomes social currency," says Michael Dezuanni, an associate professor of digital media at Queensland University of Technology in Australia. Dezuanni has studied how middle-school girls play the game, watching as they engaged in nuanced, Talmudic breakdowns of a particular creation. This is, he realized, a significant part of the game's draw: It offers many opportunities to display expertise, when you uncover a new technique or strategy and share it with peers.

The single biggest tool for learning Minecraft lore is YouTube. The site now has more than 70 million Minecraft videos, many of which are explicitly tutorial. To make a video, players use "screencasting" software (some of which is free, some not) that records what's happening on-screen while they play; they usually narrate their activity in voice-over. The problems and challenges you face in Minecraft are, as they tend to be in construction or architecture, visual and three-dimensional. This means, as many players told me, that video demonstrations have a particularly powerful explanatory force: It's easiest to learn something by seeing someone else do it. In this sense, the game points to the increasing role of video as a rhetorical tool. ("Minecraft" is the second-most-searched-for term on YouTube, after "music.")

That includes Ava on Long Island - who, after being killed by skeletons, began watching "survival mode" videos to learn how to stay alive. Soon she had mastered that, and also discovered the huge number of YouTube videos in which players review "minigames," little challenges that some Minecraft devotees design and load onto servers for others to play. (In one popular minigame, for example, players are shown a sculpture made of blocks and then try to copy it exactly in 30 seconds.) For young Minecraft fans, these videos are a staple of their media diet, crowding out TV. Ava's mother is genially baffled by this. "I don't understand it," she told her daughter when I visited them last fall. "Why are you watching other people play the game? Why don't you just play?"

Ava had recently started her own YouTube channel with her friends Aaron and Patrick, where they play and review minigames. Her father set up a high-quality microphone on a telescoping arm bolted to the computer desk; her sister drew Ava a white sign that says: "RECORDING." (Its back says: "NOT RECORDING JUST WANT YOU TO BE QUIET.") As the family's gray cat wandered around Ava's keyboard, she dialed up Patrick on a Skype video call.

When they record a video, they improvise freestyle banter while playing, and simply start all over again if something goes awry. (Which, Patrick said dryly, "happens often.") So far they have 19 subscribers and have posted 21 videos.

She played a recent video for me, in which they tried to navigate a difficult map filled with lethal, flowing lava. Their conversation is loose and funny; it's like listening to two talk-radio hosts, or perhaps the commentary over a game of basketball - if the commentary were delivered by the athletes themselves, while they play.

Considered as a genre, YouTube Minecraft videos are quite strange. They take elements of "how to" TV - a cooking show, a home-renovation show - and blend them with the vocal style of podcasting, while mixing in a dash of TV shows like "Orange County Choppers," where ingenious mechanics parade their creations.

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Since its release seven years ago, Minecraft has become a global sensation, captivating a generation of children. There are over 100 million registered players, and it's now the third-best-­selling video game in history, after Tetris and Wii Sports. In 2014, Microsoft bought Minecraft - and Mojang, the Swedish game studio behind it - for $2.5 billion.

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In January, I devoted every walk from my home to the train to the contemplation of work details, hoping to improve my recall of them. That was my New Year's resolution, and so far I've stuck to it.

In every one of those walks I was also retracing a memorization technique known to the ancients and shown by modern science to be highly effective.

The " Rhetori ca ad Herennium," written in the 80s B.C. by an unknown author, is the first known text on the art of memorization. (It's also the oldest surviving Latin book on rhetoric.) It teaches the "method of loci," also known as the "memory palace." As its names suggest, the approach involves associating the ideas or objects to be memorized with memorable scenes imagined to be at well-known locations ("loci"), like one's house ("palace") or along a familiar walking route.

You can test the method for yourself. If you're like most people, you would not easily commit to long-term memory a 10-item shopping list. But I bet you could remember it - and for more than a few minutes - if you first visualized it along a walk through your house: The entryway of your house is festooned with toilet paper; your kitchen sink is full of lobsters, dancing; a bathtub-size stick of butter melts on your dining room table; your family is singing karaoke in a swimming pool of hummus in your living room; your hallway is so full of grapes you cannot avoid crushing them with each step; your stairway has a runner of lasagna noodles slippery with tomato sauce; a mooing cow is being milked in your bedroom; stalks of corn grow down from the ceiling in the spare bedroom; a crop of multicolored mushrooms blooms in your shower.

Take a few moments to burn these images and locations into your mind (adding motion, sounds, smells and tactile sense to your imagined scenes helps). We'll test your memory with an imaginary trip to the grocery store at the end of this article.

Joshua Foer wrote a book about how he trained to win the United States Memory Championship. He points out that we're so good at forming mental maps and recalling images that we hardly notice it. Recall the last party you attended at a home you had not previously visited. Though you probably only walked through the house a few times, you can probably remember most or all of its layout and location of major furniture. Anything else distinctive you saw - like unusual or appealing pieces of art, vivid wall colors - and the faces of people you met are probably also easy to recall. Effortlessly, you retained hundreds or thousands of visual memories and spatial details.

Research backs this up. After people viewed thousands of images for a few seconds each, studies found that, on average, they could correctly distinguish over 80 percent of them from images they had not seen. This remained true even when the comparison images were of the same object in a slightly different position (like the same cabinet open versus closed or the same telephone at a different angle). Another study found people could usually recall objects they'd seen even after seeing hundreds of intervening ones, demonstrating that visual memories of objects are stored long-term.

It makes sense, then, that numerous studies, extending back decades, show that the method of loci improves memory. Using the approach, people who could remember only a handful of numbers - seven is the norm, give or take a few - were trained to recall 80 to 90.

Another study found that the method doubled the proportion of people who could remember at least 11 of 12 grocery list items. Students who applied it in an undergraduate economics course outperformed those who did not on an exam. Medical students who used the method of loci to study the endocrine system learned more than those who did not.

Patients who have had treatments known to impair recall and cognitive function - like coronary bypass surgery and surgery and chemotherapy for breast cancer - improved their memories with the method of loci. As a memory aid, it's superior to rote memorization and converting items to images alone. Placing those images in a memory palace helps recall.

Before books were common, the method of loci helped lawyers and others retain and recall information necessary for their jobs. The locution "in the first place" is a holdover from this ancient method of memorizing speeches. It works because it harnesses humans' evolved skill at remembering details of locations, which helped hunter-gatherers recall what was edible and where to find it, and what was poisonous and how to avoid it.

It does not take an extraordinary mind to develop an extraordinary memory. Competitors in memory championships or those seen on Fox's " Superhuman" - memory athletes - weren't born with photographic memories. They have practiced for years using the method of loci, supercharged with other mnemonic methods. With them, some can memorize hundreds of random numbers in a few minutes or the order of cards in a deck in tens of seconds. But, as Mr. Foer learned, memory athletes' memories excel only in areas they've trained - they still misplace their keys like the rest of us.

Indeed, science shows that these are normal minds after extraordinary training - the same hardware running different software. Brain anatomy of memory athletes and those without exceptional memories are the same. Because they have trained specifically to recall numbers and faces, memory athletes outperform others in doing so. But recall of magnified images of snow crystals - for which memory athletes have not trained - is identical. After observing a game for five or 10 seconds, master chess players can recall the positions of nearly all the pieces. A novice can recall only a few. The difference is training, not exceptional memory. Shown a random configuration of pieces that could not arise in a game, chess masters are no better than novices at piece position recall.

My commute has become my memory palace, not for groceries, but for aspects of my work. Features of certain landmarks - specific houses and parks I pass - have become loci for them, converted to images and scenes of my own invention. I figuratively walk through my work as I literally walk to it. For example, I associated an analysis of the time patients wait for care with cars waiting at an intersection I cross.

We think memorizing is laborious, boring work because we've been taught to do it by rote. You may recall, as I do, countless hours in third grade poring over multiplication tables or, in ninth grade, endlessly conjugating French (or Spanish) verbs, or in 11th grade, incessantly reciting Macbeth's "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow" soliloquy in the attempt to firmly place them in long-term memory. These brute-force approaches are dull because they're devoid of any creativity.

In contrast, the best memorizers place the most flamboyant, bizarre, crude and lewd images and scenes (and their actions) in their memory palaces. The more distinctive, the more easily they're recalled. This is why the Puritans recoiled from the method of loci - they knew students were relying on "impure" and idolatrous imagery - and it fell out of favor as an educational tool. Today our memories are eroded by external memory devices like cellphone cameras and apps.

Now, about that grocery list. In your mind, enter and walk back through your house. What do you see? Can you get all 10 items?

(Separately, we've created a short interactive quiz that tests your memory. Give it a try.)

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An Ancient and Proven Way to Improve Memorization; Go Ahead and Try It

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In January, I devoted every walk from my home to the train to the contemplation of work details, hoping to improve my recall of them. That was my New Year's resolution, and so far I've stuck to it.

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A 2,000-year-old technique called the memory palace helped one of our contributors improve his memory. Can it work for you?

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Don't Help Your Kids With Their Homework

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And other insights from a ground-breaking study of how parents impact children's academic achievement

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And there is little agreement on what skills matter: Self-control? Empathy? Perseverance? Joy?

"There are so many ways to do this wrong," said Camille A. Farrington, a researcher at the University of Chicago who is working with a network of schools across the country to measure the development of social-emotional skills. "In education, we have a great track record of finding the wrong way to do stuff."

Schools began emphasizing social-emotional learning around 2011, after an analysis of 213 school-based programs teaching such skills found that they improved academic achievement by 11 percentile points. A book extolling efforts to teach social-emotional skills in schools such as the KIPP charter network and Riverdale Country School in New York, "How Children Succeed" by Paul Tough, appeared the next year.

Argument still rages about whether schools can or should emphasize these skills. Critics say the approach risks blaming the victim - if only students had more resilience, they could rise above generational poverty and neglected schools - and excuses uninspired teaching by telling students it is on them to develop "zest," or enthusiasm. Groups that spent decades urging the country toward higher academic standards worry about returning to empty talk of self-esteem, accepting low achievement as long as students feel good.

But teaching social-emotional skills is often seen as a way to move away from a narrow focus on test scores, and to consider instead the whole child. It may seem contradictory, then, to test for those skills. In education, however, the adage is "what's measured gets treasured"; states give schools money to teach the subjects on which they will be judged.

Next year, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a test of students in grades four, eight and 12 that is often referred to as the nation's report card, will include questions about students' social-emotional skills. A well-known international test, PISA, is moving toward the same.

The biggest concern about testing for social-emotional skills is that it typically relies on surveys asking students to evaluate recent behaviors or mind-sets, like how many days they remembered their homework, or if they consider themselves hard workers. This makes the testing highly susceptible to fakery and subjectivity. In their paper published in May, Dr. Duckworth and David Yeager argued that even if students do not fake their answers, the tests provide incentive for "superficial parroting" rather than real changes in mind-set.

"You think test scores are easy to game?" said Martin West, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who is working with the districts in California. "They're relatively hard to game when you compare them to a self-report survey."

Students might be tested on performance, as in the "marshmallow test," in which children were told they could have a sweeter reward if they waited. Those who waited scored higher in self-control. But those tests are too time-consuming to use on a large group of students.

Other researchers have proposed calling or texting students at regular intervals to check their behavior and frame of mind, or monitoring Facebook or Twitter to observe patterns of behavior. But privacy concerns would almost certainly disqualify those.

Transforming Education, a Boston-based group that is among the biggest proponents of teaching social-emotional skills, argues that they are so important that schools have to begin testing for them, even if perfect measures do not exist.

The group worked with the school districts here - which count one million students, or 20 percent of the state total, in cities including Los Angeles and Oakland - to choose four measures to evaluate: growth mind-set, social awareness, self-efficacy and self-management.

The districts tested 10,000 students in 2014, and nearly 500,000 students last year, surveying things like how many days the students had come to school prepared (self-management), and whether they believed it was more important to be talented or to work hard (growth mind-set).

Just two years ago in her classroom in a trailer here at Visitacion Valley Elementary School, Ms. Cooney struggled with the kind of management problems that often confront young teachers.

Her students, mostly poor and living in a nearby housing project, were bouncing around the classroom, playing with their phones instead of paying attention, fighting out interfamily beefs. Even if they wanted to learn, they were not.

Ms. Cooney, 27, took a two-hour training session in a student-behavior program and began playing " good-behavior games." They look like regular lessons, except that they begin with students identifying goals for good behavior, and end with her assessing what went right and wrong.

On a recent day, students took notes on their reading as Ms. Cooney moved with a kind of Zen bustle around the classroom, grading papers and consulting one-on-one while she watched for things she would compliment the class on later - keeping bodies still, focusing on the task - and quietly noted bad behavior.

For every 1,000 minutes of good behavior earned, the children win 15 extra minutes of recess.

"I'm really saving minutes that would be lost to transitions, settling disputes and behavior problems," Ms. Cooney said. It can be exhausting, but not nearly as much as teaching before. As she said, "Would you rather put out fires, or prevent them?"

Social-emotional learning will count for 8 percent of a school's overall performance score; no teacher will lose a job for failing to instill a growth mind-set.

Noah Bookman, the chief accountability officer for the districts, said he understood the concerns about testing. But, he said, "This work is so phenomenally important to the success of our kids in school and life. In some ways, we worry as much if not more about the possibility that these indicators remain on the back burner."

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Testing for Joy and Grit? Schools Nationwide Push to Measure Students' Emotional Skills

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And there is little agreement on what skills matter: Self-control? Empathy? Perseverance? Joy? "There are so many ways to do this wrong," said Camille A. Farrington, a researcher at the University of Chicago who is working with a network of schools across the country to measure the development of social-emotional skills.

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Our latest podcast is called "Think Like a Child." (You can subscribe to the podcast at iTunes, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above. You can also read the transcript, which includes credits for the music you'll hear in the episode.) Why would anyone want to think like a child? Aren't kids just sloppy, inchoate versions of us, who can't even say " I Don't Know "?

Hardly. As Stephen Dubner and Steve Levitt describe in their new book, Think Like a Freak, thinking like a child can be very fruitful.

LEVITT: I think the beauty of thinking like a child ... is that sometimes doing things differently and simply and with a kind of joy and triviality leads you to a really special place that as an adult you don't get to go to very often.

Kids are relatively unbiased; they don't carry around many of the pre-conceptions that adults do. And, as we all know, kids don't "pay attention" the same way that adults do. This makes them more likely to notice or care about things that the rest of us don't - and, if you happen to be a magician, it makes them a hard audience to fool. In the podcast, you'll hear from journalist and magician , author of Fooling Houdini: Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks, and the Hidden Powers of the Mind. We brought Stone down to WNYC to perform for a room full of middle-schoolers from I.S. 318 in Brooklyn (thanks, guys!). You'll hear the results and you'll hear Stone dissect what happened:

STONE: [Adults] watch it and they're waiting for the punch line, and then they sort of see it, and then they maybe go back and think about it. With kids, you get this sense that with every step of the way they're trying to understand it. From the second they see it, they're always coming up with theories.

You'll also hear from Alison Gopnik, who has done fascinating research on children's cognitive processes and development. Gopnik is a professor of psychology and philosophy at the University of California-Berkeley and the author of The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life. Gopnik describes how modern research shows that kids are much more than just underdeveloped adults, and that they have a variety of traits we'd do well to smuggle across the border into adulthood:

GOPNIK: Think of the kids as being the research and development division of the human species. And we're-adults-we're production and marketing. So from the production and marketing perspective, it might look like the R&D guys are really not doing anything that looks very sensible or useful. They sit around all day in their beanbag chairs playing Pong and having blue-sky ideas. And we poor production and marketing people, who are actually making the profits, have to subsidize these guys! But of course, one of the things that we know is that that kind of blue-sky, just pure, research actually pays off in the long run.

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Think Like a Child: A New Freakonomics Radio Podcast - Freakonomics

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Our latest podcast is called "Think Like a Child." (You can subscribe to the podcast at iTunes, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above. You can also read the transcript, which includes credits for the music you'll hear in the episode.) Why would anyone want to think like a child?

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Learning Styles on Wikipedia
Criticism on Wikipedia
Learning Styled on InfEd

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a human being develops cognitively from birth throughout his or her life through four primary stages of development: sensorimotor (0-2)

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and formal operational (11-). assimilition is incorporation of new experiences into existing mental schema

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knowledge is distributed across a network of connections to people and information - learning consists of the ability to construct and traverse those networks

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entertainer and new romantic - the problem of self-judgement in assessment.

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the learning of new forms of activity as they are created

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rather than the mastery of putative stable

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the area of capabilities that learners can exhibit with support from a teacher or peer.

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Learning Theory - What are the established learning theories?

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This Concept Map, created with IHMC CmapTools, has information related to: Learning Theory, zone of proximal development The area of capabilities that learners can exhibit with support from a teacher or peer., organisational learning Nonaka & Takeuchi, Montessori constructivism, Lave & Wenger situated learning, Piaget constructivism, Philosophy Dewey, The church Theology, text & conversation theory An organization is created and defined by communication.

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Sir Ken Robinson: Changing education paradigms

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In this talk from RSA Animate, Sir Ken Robinson lays out the link between 3 troubling trends: rising drop-out rates, schools' dwindling stake in the arts, and ADHD. An important, timely talk for parents and teachers.

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Benjamin Zander: The transformative power of classical music

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Benjamin Zander: The transformative power of classical music

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Benjamin Zander: The transformative power of classical music

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Benjamin Zander has two infectious passions: classical music, and helping us all realize our untapped love for it -- and by extension, our untapped love for all new possibilities, new experiences, new connections.

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How To Be A Great Teacher, From 12 Great Teachers

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How To Be A Great Teacher, From 12 Great Teachers

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Great teachers have two things in common: an exceptional level of devotion to their students, and the drive to inspire each one to learn and succeed.

At NPR Ed we're just about halfway through our 50 Great Teachers project.

We've profiled teachers at all levels, in all subjects, from all over the country and overseas too. The series has taken us from rural Drumright, Okla., to a mountaintop in Israel. From a jazz class in New Orleans to a Boy Scout troop in South Central LA to the lost world of ancient Greece.

And so we've taken a moment here to pull from those stories some of the thoughts and lessons from those teachers that have stuck with us.

Together, they almost make a mini-guide for teachers.
1. Realize Teaching Is A Learned Skill
"I'm really trying hard to dispel this idea that teaching is this thing you're born to do and it's somehow natural to everyday life. I don't think either of those things is true."
Deborah Ball, dean of the School of Education at the University of Michigan. 2. Get To The Truth
"I'll tell you the truth, you tell me the truth. The rest is commentary."
Molly Pollak, 40-year veteran middle and high school English teacher, New York City 3. Build Trust
"Swimming is the easy part. It's the trust part that's the most difficult for them."
Conrad Cooper, swim teacher, Los Angeles 4. Assume a Secret Identity
"Giving myself a name, Mr. Spider, gave me an out. It gave me a way to express a side of me I musta had but never took out."
Mathias Schergen, "Mr. Spider," elementary school art teacher, Chicago 5. Be A Sparring Partner
"All these students around me, they can easily come, and they can challenge me. They can reject me. They can oppose me. They can laugh with me. Sometimes they can even laugh at me. They can!"
Aziz Royesh, teacher, Afghanistan 6. Be Someone To Watch Over Them
"I want them to say, 'At least one person, Miss Begay, is there every day for me. Miss Begay is going to wonder where I am if I go missing. There will be one person looking out for me, and it's Miss Begay.' "

Tia Tsosie Begay, a 4th grade teacher in Arizona.
7. Be A Teacher, Not A Friend
"It's important to support them. It's important to respect them. It's important to nurture them. But, a friend? No."
Nick Haley, rowing coach in Portland, Ore. 8. Believe In Their Success
"The same tools the schools use to show they cannot succeed, we use them in opposite way."
Ali Shalalha, principal, Beit Jann Comprehensive School, Israel 9. Recognize It Takes Vulnerability To Learn
"It takes a lot for any student, especially for a student who is learning English as their new language, to feel confident enough to say, 'I don't know, but I want to know.' "

Thomas Whaley, 2nd grade teacher, Patchogue, N.Y.
10. Look For The Success Stories
"I know that you cannot save everybody. But if one of them could just go along, complete his education, go to college, and I see him in the future doing something positive with his life, that makes me think that what I was doing is all worthwhile."
Rodney Carey, high school equivalency teacher, New Orleans 11. Blow Off Steam, But Remember Why You're Here
"Yeah, there's days where I complain. And the people I complain to think I'm insane because I haven't left this place. But these kids deserve better."
Sarah Hagan, high school math teacher, Drumright, Okla. 12. Be Grateful To Your Own Teachers
"I am the product of great teachers. They can show you something that you have never seen before. And awaken that little something inside of you that you've never seen before."
Ainissa Ramirez, mechanical engineering and materials science professor, and science evangelist

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How To Be A Great Teacher, From 12 Great Teachers

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Great teachers have two things in common: an exceptional level of devotion to their students, and the drive to inspire each one to learn and succeed. At NPR Ed we're just about halfway through our 50 Great Teachers project. We've profiled teachers at all levels, in all subjects, from all over the country and overseas too.

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When tech culture only celebrates creation, it risks ignoring those who teach, criticize, and take care of others.

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COLLEGE course syllabuses are curious documents. They represent the best efforts by faculty and instructors to distill human knowledge on a given subject into 14-week chunks. They structure the main activity of colleges and universities. And then, for the most part, they disappear.

Some schools archive them, some don't. Some syllabus archives are public, some aren't. Some faculty members treat their syllabuses as trade secrets, others are happy to post them online. Despite the bureaucratization of higher education over the past few decades, syllabuses have escaped systematic treatment.

Until now. Over the past two years, we and our partners at the Open Syllabus Project (based at the American Assembly at Columbia) have collected more than a million syllabuses from university websites. We have also begun to extract some of their key components - their metadata - starting with their dates, their schools, their fields of study and the texts that they assign.

This past week, we made available online a beta version of our Syllabus Explorer, which allows this database to be searched. Our hope and expectation is that this tool will enable people to learn new things about teaching, publishing and intellectual history.

At present, the Syllabus Explorer is mostly a tool for counting how often texts are assigned over the past decade. There is something for everyone here. The traditional Western canon dominates the top 100, with Plato's "Republic" at No. 2, "The Communist Manifesto" at No. 3, and "Frankenstein" at No. 5, followed by Aristotle's "Ethics," Hobbes's "Leviathan," Machiavelli's "The Prince," "Oedipus" and "Hamlet."

"The Communist Manifesto" ranks as high as it does (for those wondering) because, like "The Republic," it is frequently taught in multiple fields - notably in history, sociology and political science. Writing guides are also well represented, with "The Elements of Style" by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White at No. 1, as are major textbooks, led by Neil Campbell's "Biology" at No. 4.

What about fiction from the past 50 years? Toni Morrison's "Beloved" ranks first, at No. 43, followed by William Gibson's "Neuromancer," Art Spiegelman's "Maus," Ms. Morrison's "The Bluest Eye," Sandra Cisneros's "The House on Mango Street," Anne Moody's "Coming of Age in Mississippi," Leslie Marmon Silko's "Ceremony" and Alice Walker's "The Color Purple."

Top articles? Garrett Hardin's " The Tragedy of the Commons" and Francis Fukuyama's " The End of History." And so on. Altogether, the Syllabus Explorer tracks about 933,000 works. Nearly half of these are assigned only once.

Such data has many uses. For academics, for example, it offers a window onto something they generally know very little about: how widely their work is read.

It also allows us to introduce a new publication metric based on the frequency with which works are taught, which we call the "teaching score." The score is derived from the ranking order of the text, not the raw number of citations, such that a book or article that is used in four or five classes gets a score of 1, while "The Republic," which is assigned 3,500 times, gets a score of 100.

Many academics are uncomfortable with this sort of numerical reduction of intellectual work. Taken in isolation, we share this concern. But there is a broader context here: At present, publication metrics basically involve counting the citations of a given academic work in other academic publications. And since it can take years for an influential work to accumulate citations, shortcuts have become popular, such as the " journal impact factor," which scores journal articles based on journal rankings that are determined by the journals' own frequency of citation in other journals.

Such metrics are controversial, and with good reason: They capture only a narrow range of the things academics do and value. Journals, in particular, exist mostly to advance the state of research in specialized fields, and therefore they privilege work that is often by necessity (though also sometimes just by ingrained habit) esoteric. This is not a bad thing, but when used to derive performance metrics, it creates a clear set of signals to academics about how they should be spending their time and whom they should be writing for.

IF you like the idea of a more publicly engaged academy, you need to look elsewhere for incentives. And that's where we think our "teaching score" metric could be useful. Teaching captures a very different set of judgments about what is important than publication does. In particular, it accords more value to qualities that are useful in the classroom, like accessibility and clarity. A widely taught but infrequently cited article is an important achievement, but an invisible one to current impact metrics.

We don't think either approach to measuring the influence of a work is better than the other. But we do think that the academy is better off when it has multiple methods for valuing the wide range of work academics do.

An important caveat about the Syllabus Explorer results: They reflect the collection of syllabuses that we have gathered so far, which is large enough to give interesting results but far from complete. It is a work in progress on many levels, and one that depends on a culture of open bibliographic data-sharing in the academy.

Because of a complex mix of privacy and copyright issues concerning syllabuses, the Open Syllabus Project publishes only metadata, not the underlying documents or any personally identifying material (even though these documents can be viewed on university websites). But we think that it is important for schools to move toward a more open approach to curriculums. As universities face growing pressure to justify their teaching and research missions, we doubt that curricular obscurity is helpful.

We think that the Syllabus Explorer demonstrates how more open strategies can support teaching, diversify evaluation practices and offer new perspectives on publishing, scholarship and intellectual traditions. But as with any newly published work, that judgment now passes out of our hands and into yours.

Joe Karaganis is vice president of the American Assembly, a public policy institute at Columbia. David McClure is a software engineer at the Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research at Stanford.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page SR9 of the New York edition with the headline: What a Million Syllabuses Can Teach Us. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Opinion | What a Million Syllabuses Can Teach Us

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COLLEGE course syllabuses are curious documents. They represent the best efforts by faculty and instructors to distill human knowledge on a given subject into 14-week chunks. They structure the main activity of colleges and universities. And then, for the most part, they disappear. Some schools archive them, some don't.

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How can we create an education system that works for kids, instead of against them? Watch eight inspiring talks (and one beautiful performance) from TED's May 2013 PBS special, given in their entirety.

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At project's end, we reviewed the many illustrations we received from teachers around the country and distilled our lessons learned in the " Themes and Conclusions " page. And, we collected a selection of the most compelling illustrations. Click on any image to view full screen and see one-by-one. Enjoy!

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In the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don't like. Here's why that's disastrous for education-and mental health.

Andrew B. Myers / The Atlantic

Something strange is happening at America's colleges and universities. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense. Last December, Jeannie Suk wrote in an online article for The New Yorker about law students asking her fellow professors at Harvard not to teach rape law-or, in one case, even use the word violate (as in "that violates the law") lest it cause students distress. In February, Laura Kipnis, a professor at Northwestern University, wrote an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education describing a new campus politics of sexual paranoia-and was then subjected to a long investigation after students who were offended by the article and by a tweet she'd sent filed Title IX complaints against her. In June, a professor protecting himself with a pseudonym wrote an essay for Vox describing how gingerly he now has to teach. "I'm a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me," the headline said. A number of popular comedians, including Chris Rock, have stopped performing on college campuses (see Caitlin Flanagan's article in this month's issue). Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Maher have publicly condemned the oversensitivity of college students, saying too many of them can't take a joke.

Listen to the audio version of this article: Feature stories, read aloud: download the Audm app for your iPhone.
Two terms have risen quickly from obscurity into common campus parlance. Microaggressions are small actions or word choices that seem on their face to have no malicious intent but that are thought of as a kind of violence nonetheless. For example, by some campus guidelines, it is a microaggression to ask an Asian American or Latino American "Where were you born?," because this implies that he or she is not a real American. Trigger warnings are alerts that professors are expected to issue if something in a course might cause a strong emotional response. For example, some students have called for warnings that Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart describes racial violence and that F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby portrays misogyny and physical abuse, so that students who have been previously victimized by racism or domestic violence can choose to avoid these works, which they believe might "trigger" a recurrence of past trauma.

Read Follow-Up
Some recent campus actions border on the surreal. In April, at Brandeis University, the Asian American student association sought to raise awareness of microaggressions against Asians through an installation on the steps of an academic hall. The installation gave examples of microaggressions such as "Aren't you supposed to be good at math?" and "I'm colorblind! I don't see race." But a backlash arose among other Asian American students, who felt that the display itself was a microaggression. The association removed the installation, and its president wrote an e-mail to the entire student body apologizing to anyone who was "triggered or hurt by the content of the microaggressions."

This new climate is slowly being institutionalized, and is affecting what can be said in the classroom, even as a basis for discussion. During the 2014-15 school year, for instance, the deans and department chairs at the 10 University of California system schools were presented by administrators at faculty leader-training sessions with examples of microaggressions. The list of offensive statements included: "America is the land of opportunity" and "I believe the most qualified person should get the job."
Notes
The press has typically described these developments as a resurgence of political correctness. That's partly right, although there are important differences between what's happening now and what happened in the 1980s and '90s. That movement sought to restrict speech (specifically hate speech aimed at marginalized groups), but it also challenged the literary, philosophical, and historical canon, seeking to widen it by including more-diverse perspectives. The current movement is largely about emotional well-being. More than the last, it presumes an extraordinary fragility of the collegiate psyche, and therefore elevates the goal of protecting students from psychological harm. The ultimate aim, it seems, is to turn campuses into "safe spaces" where young adults are shielded from words and ideas that make some uncomfortable. And more than the last, this movement seeks to punish anyone who interferes with that aim, even accidentally. You might call this impulse vindictive protectiveness. It is creating a culture in which everyone must think twice before speaking up, lest they face charges of insensitivity, aggression, or worse.

We have been studying this development for a while now, with rising alarm. (Greg Lukianoff is a constitutional lawyer and the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which defends free speech and academic freedom on campus, and has advocated for students and faculty involved in many of the incidents this article describes; Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist who studies the American culture wars. The stories of how we each came to this subject can be read here.) The dangers that these trends pose to scholarship and to the quality of American universities are significant; we could write a whole essay detailing them. But in this essay we focus on a different question: What are the effects of this new protectiveness on the students themselves? Does it benefit the people it is supposed to help? What exactly are students learning when they spend four years or more in a community that polices unintentional slights, places warning labels on works of classic literature, and in many other ways conveys the sense that words can be forms of violence that require strict control by campus authorities, who are expected to act as both protectors and prosecutors?

Power, identity, and speech in the new American university
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There's a saying common in education circles: Don't teach students what to think; teach them how to think. The idea goes back at least as far as Socrates. Today, what we call the Socratic method is a way of teaching that fosters critical thinking, in part by encouraging students to question their own unexamined beliefs, as well as the received wisdom of those around them. Such questioning sometimes leads to discomfort, and even to anger, on the way to understanding.

But vindictive protectiveness teaches students to think in a very different way. It prepares them poorly for professional life, which often demands intellectual engagement with people and ideas one might find uncongenial or wrong. The harm may be more immediate, too. A campus culture devoted to policing speech and punishing speakers is likely to engender patterns of thought that are surprisingly similar to those long identified by cognitive behavioral therapists as causes of depression and anxiety. The new protectiveness may be teaching students to think pathologically.

How Did We Get Here?

It's difficult to know exactly why vindictive protectiveness has burst forth so powerfully in the past few years. The phenomenon may be related to recent changes in the interpretation of federal antidiscrimination statutes (about which more later). But the answer probably involves generational shifts as well. Childhood itself has changed greatly during the past generation. Many Baby Boomers and Gen Xers can remember riding their bicycles around their hometowns, unchaperoned by adults, by the time they were 8 or 9 years old. In the hours after school, kids were expected to occupy themselves, getting into minor scrapes and learning from their experiences. But "free range" childhood became less common in the 1980s. The surge in crime from the '60s through the early '90s made Baby Boomer parents more protective than their own parents had been. Stories of abducted children appeared more frequently in the news, and in 1984, images of them began showing up on milk cartons. In response, many parents pulled in the reins and worked harder to keep their children safe.

The flight to safety also happened at school. Dangerous play structures were removed from playgrounds; peanut butter was banned from student lunches. After the 1999 Columbine massacre in Colorado, many schools cracked down on bullying, implementing "zero tolerance" policies. In a variety of ways, children born after 1980-the Millennials-got a consistent message from adults: life is dangerous, but adults will do everything in their power to protect you from harm, not just from strangers but from one another as well.

These same children grew up in a culture that was (and still is) becoming more politically polarized. Republicans and Democrats have never particularly liked each other, but survey data going back to the 1970s show that on average, their mutual dislike used to be surprisingly mild. Negative feelings have grown steadily stronger, however, particularly since the early 2000s. Political scientists call this process "affective partisan polarization," and it is a very serious problem for any democracy. As each side increasingly demonizes the other, compromise becomes more difficult. A recent study shows that implicit or unconscious biases are now at least as strong across political parties as they are across races.

So it's not hard to imagine why students arriving on campus today might be more desirous of protection and more hostile toward ideological opponents than in generations past. This hostility, and the self-righteousness fueled by strong partisan emotions, can be expected to add force to any moral crusade. A principle of moral psychology is that "morality binds and blinds." Part of what we do when we make moral judgments is express allegiance to a team. But that can interfere with our ability to think critically. Acknowledging that the other side's viewpoint has any merit is risky-your teammates may see you as a traitor.

Social media makes it extraordinarily easy to join crusades, express solidarity and outrage, and shun traitors. Facebook was founded in 2004, and since 2006 it has allowed children as young as 13 to join. This means that the first wave of students who spent all their teen years using Facebook reached college in 2011, and graduated from college only this year.

Andrew B. Myers

These first true "social-media natives" may be different from members of previous generations in how they go about sharing their moral judgments and supporting one another in moral campaigns and conflicts. We find much to like about these trends; young people today are engaged with one another, with news stories, and with prosocial endeavors to a greater degree than when the dominant technology was television. But social media has also fundamentally shifted the balance of power in relationships between students and faculty; the latter increasingly fear what students might do to their reputations and careers by stirring up online mobs against them.

We do not mean to imply simple causation, but rates of mental illness in young adults have been rising, both on campus and off, in recent decades. Some portion of the increase is surely due to better diagnosis and greater willingness to seek help, but most experts seem to agree that some portion of the trend is real. Nearly all of the campus mental-health directors surveyed in 2013 by the American College Counseling Association reported that the number of students with severe psychological problems was rising at their schools. The rate of emotional distress reported by students themselves is also high, and rising. In a 2014 survey by the American College Health Association, 54 percent of college students surveyed said that they had "felt overwhelming anxiety" in the past 12 months, up from 49 percent in the same survey just five years earlier. Students seem to be reporting more emotional crises; many seem fragile, and this has surely changed the way university faculty and administrators interact with them. The question is whether some of those changes might be doing more harm than good.

The Thinking Cure

For millennia, philosophers have understood that we don't see life as it is; we see a version distorted by our hopes, fears, and other attachments. The Buddha said, "Our life is the creation of our mind." Marcus Aurelius said, "Life itself is but what you deem it." The quest for wisdom in many traditions begins with this insight. Early Buddhists and the Stoics, for example, developed practices for reducing attachments, thinking more clearly, and finding release from the emotional torments of normal mental life.

Cognitive behavioral therapy is a modern embodiment of this ancient wisdom. It is the most extensively studied nonpharmaceutical treatment of mental illness, and is used widely to treat depression, anxiety disorders, eating disorders, and addiction. It can even be of help to schizophrenics. No other form of psychotherapy has been shown to work for a broader range of problems. Studies have generally found that it is as effective as antidepressant drugs (such as Prozac) in the treatment of anxiety and depression. The therapy is relatively quick and easy to learn; after a few months of training, many patients can do it on their own. Unlike drugs, cognitive behavioral therapy keeps working long after treatment is stopped, because it teaches thinking skills that people can continue to use.

The goal is to minimize distorted thinking and see the world more accurately. You start by learning the names of the dozen or so most common cognitive distortions (such as overgeneralizing, discounting positives, and emotional reasoning; see the list at the bottom of this article). Each time you notice yourself falling prey to one of them, you name it, describe the facts of the situation, consider alternative interpretations, and then choose an interpretation of events more in line with those facts. Your emotions follow your new interpretation. In time, this process becomes automatic. When people improve their mental hygiene in this way-when they free themselves from the repetitive irrational thoughts that had previously filled so much of their consciousness-they become less depressed, anxious, and angry.

The parallel to formal education is clear: cognitive behavioral therapy teaches good critical-thinking skills, the sort that educators have striven for so long to impart. By almost any definition, critical thinking requires grounding one's beliefs in evidence rather than in emotion or desire, and learning how to search for and evaluate evidence that might contradict one's initial hypothesis. But does campus life today foster critical thinking? Or does it coax students to think in more-distorted ways?

Let's look at recent trends in higher education in light of the distortions that cognitive behavioral therapy identifies. We will draw the names and descriptions of these distortions from David D. Burns's popular book Feeling Good, as well as from the second edition of Treatment Plans and Interventions for Depression and Anxiety Disorders, by Robert L. Leahy, Stephen J. F. Holland, and Lata K. McGinn.

Higher Education's Embrace of "Emotional Reasoning"

Burns defines emotional reasoning as assuming "that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: 'I feel it, therefore it must be true.' " Leahy, Holland, and McGinn define it as letting "your feelings guide your interpretation of reality." But, of course, subjective feelings are not always trustworthy guides; unrestrained, they can cause people to lash out at others who have done nothing wrong. Therapy often involves talking yourself down from the idea that each of your emotional responses represents something true or important.

Emotional reasoning dominates many campus debates and discussions. A claim that someone's words are "offensive" is not just an expression of one's own subjective feeling of offendedness. It is, rather, a public charge that the speaker has done something objectively wrong. It is a demand that the speaker apologize or be punished by some authority for committing an offense.

There have always been some people who believe they have a right not to be offended. Yet throughout American history-from the Victorian era to the free-speech activism of the 1960s and '70s-radicals have pushed boundaries and mocked prevailing sensibilities. Sometime in the 1980s, however, college campuses began to focus on preventing offensive speech, especially speech that might be hurtful to women or minority groups. The sentiment underpinning this goal was laudable, but it quickly produced some absurd results.

Among the most famous early examples was the so-called water-buffalo incident at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1993, the university charged an Israeli-born student with racial harassment after he yelled "Shut up, you water buffalo!" to a crowd of black sorority women that was making noise at night outside his dorm-room window. Many scholars and pundits at the time could not see how the term water buffalo (a rough translation of a Hebrew insult for a thoughtless or rowdy person) was a racial slur against African Americans, and as a result, the case became international news.

Claims of a right not to be offended have continued to arise since then, and universities have continued to privilege them. In a particularly egregious 2008 case, for instance, Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis found a white student guilty of racial harassment for reading a book titled Notre Dame vs. the Klan. The book honored student opposition to the Ku Klux Klan when it marched on Notre Dame in 1924. Nonetheless, the picture of a Klan rally on the book's cover offended at least one of the student's co-workers (he was a janitor as well as a student), and that was enough for a guilty finding by the university's Affirmative Action Office.

These examples may seem extreme, but the reasoning behind them has become more commonplace on campus in recent years. Last year, at the University of St. Thomas, in Minnesota, an event called Hump Day, which would have allowed people to pet a camel, was abruptly canceled. Students had created a Facebook group where they protested the event for animal cruelty, for being a waste of money, and for being insensitive to people from the Middle East. The inspiration for the camel had almost certainly come from a popular TV commercial in which a camel saunters around an office on a Wednesday, celebrating "hump day"; it was devoid of any reference to Middle Eastern peoples. Nevertheless, the group organizing the event announced on its Facebook page that the event would be canceled because the "program [was] dividing people and would make for an uncomfortable and possibly unsafe environment."

Because there is a broad ban in academic circles on "blaming the victim," it is generally considered unacceptable to question the reasonableness (let alone the sincerity) of someone's emotional state, particularly if those emotions are linked to one's group identity. The thin argument "I'm offended" becomes an unbeatable trump card. This leads to what Jonathan Rauch, a contributing editor at this magazine, calls the "offendedness sweepstakes," in which opposing parties use claims of offense as cudgels. In the process, the bar for what we consider unacceptable speech is lowered further and further.

Since 2013, new pressure from the federal government has reinforced this trend. Federal antidiscrimination statutes regulate on-campus harassment and unequal treatment based on sex, race, religion, and national origin. Until recently, the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights acknowledged that speech must be "objectively offensive" before it could be deemed actionable as sexual harassment-it would have to pass the "reasonable person" test. To be prohibited, the office wrote in 2003, allegedly harassing speech would have to go "beyond the mere expression of views, words, symbols or thoughts that some person finds offensive."

But in 2013, the Departments of Justice and Education greatly broadened the definition of sexual harassment to include verbal conduct that is simply "unwelcome." Out of fear of federal investigations, universities are now applying that standard-defining unwelcome speech as harassment-not just to sex, but to race, religion, and veteran status as well. Everyone is supposed to rely upon his or her own subjective feelings to decide whether a comment by a professor or a fellow student is unwelcome, and therefore grounds for a harassment claim. Emotional reasoning is now accepted as evidence.

If our universities are teaching students that their emotions can be used effectively as weapons-or at least as evidence in administrative proceedings-then they are teaching students to nurture a kind of hypersensitivity that will lead them into countless drawn-out conflicts in college and beyond. Schools may be training students in thinking styles that will damage their careers and friendships, along with their mental health.

Fortune-Telling and Trigger Warnings

Burns defines fortune-telling as "anticipat[ing] that things will turn out badly" and feeling "convinced that your prediction is an already-established fact." Leahy, Holland, and McGinn define it as "predict[ing] the future negatively" or seeing potential danger in an everyday situation. The recent spread of demands for trigger warnings on reading assignments with provocative content is an example of fortune-telling.

The idea that words (or smells or any sensory input) can trigger searing memories of past trauma-and intense fear that it may be repeated-has been around at least since World War I, when psychiatrists began treating soldiers for what is now called post-traumatic stress disorder. But explicit trigger warnings are believed to have originated much more recently, on message boards in the early days of the Internet. Trigger warnings became particularly prevalent in self-help and feminist forums, where they allowed readers who had suffered from traumatic events like sexual assault to avoid graphic content that might trigger flashbacks or panic attacks. Search-engine trends indicate that the phrase broke into mainstream use online around 2011, spiked in 2014, and reached an all-time high in 2015. The use of trigger warnings on campus appears to have followed a similar trajectory; seemingly overnight, students at universities across the country have begun demanding that their professors issue warnings before covering material that might evoke a negative emotional response.

In 2013, a task force composed of administrators, students, recent alumni, and one faculty member at Oberlin College, in Ohio, released an online resource guide for faculty (subsequently retracted in the face of faculty pushback) that included a list of topics warranting trigger warnings. These topics included classism and privilege, among many others. The task force recommended that materials that might trigger negative reactions among students be avoided altogether unless they "contribute directly" to course goals, and suggested that works that were "too important to avoid" be made optional.

It's hard to imagine how novels illustrating classism and privilege could provoke or reactivate the kind of terror that is typically implicated in PTSD. Rather, trigger warnings are sometimes demanded for a long list of ideas and attitudes that some students find politically offensive, in the name of preventing other students from being harmed. This is an example of what psychologists call "motivated reasoning"-we spontaneously generate arguments for conclusions we want to support. Once you find something hateful, it is easy to argue that exposure to the hateful thing could traumatize some other people. You believe that you know how others will react, and that their reaction could be devastating. Preventing that devastation becomes a moral obligation for the whole community. Books for which students have called publicly for trigger warnings within the past couple of years include Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (at Rutgers, for "suicidal inclinations") and Ovid's Metamorphoses (at Columbia, for sexual assault).

Jeannie Suk's New Yorker essay described the difficulties of teaching rape law in the age of trigger warnings. Some students, she wrote, have pressured their professors to avoid teaching the subject in order to protect themselves and their classmates from potential distress. Suk compares this to trying to teach "a medical student who is training to be a surgeon but who fears that he'll become distressed if he sees or handles blood."

However, there is a deeper problem with trigger warnings. According to the most-basic tenets of psychology, the very idea of helping people with anxiety disorders avoid the things they fear is misguided. A person who is trapped in an elevator during a power outage may panic and think she is going to die. That frightening experience can change neural connections in her amygdala, leading to an elevator phobia. If you want this woman to retain her fear for life, you should help her avoid elevators.

But if you want to help her return to normalcy, you should take your cues from Ivan Pavlov and guide her through a process known as exposure therapy. You might start by asking the woman to merely look at an elevator from a distance-standing in a building lobby, perhaps-until her apprehension begins to subside. If nothing bad happens while she's standing in the lobby-if the fear is not "reinforced"-then she will begin to learn a new association: elevators are not dangerous. (This reduction in fear during exposure is called habituation.) Then, on subsequent days, you might ask her to get closer, and on later days to push the call button, and eventually to step in and go up one floor. This is how the amygdala can get rewired again to associate a previously feared situation with safety or normalcy.

Students who call for trigger warnings may be correct that some of their peers are harboring memories of trauma that could be reactivated by course readings. But they are wrong to try to prevent such reactivations. Students with PTSD should of course get treatment, but they should not try to avoid normal life, with its many opportunities for habituation. Classroom discussions are safe places to be exposed to incidental reminders of trauma (such as the word violate). A discussion of violence is unlikely to be followed by actual violence, so it is a good way to help students change the associations that are causing them discomfort. And they'd better get their habituation done in college, because the world beyond college will be far less willing to accommodate requests for trigger warnings and opt-outs.

The expansive use of trigger warnings may also foster unhealthy mental habits in the vastly larger group of students who do not suffer from PTSD or other anxiety disorders. People acquire their fears not just from their own past experiences, but from social learning as well. If everyone around you acts as though something is dangerous-elevators, certain neighborhoods, novels depicting racism-then you are at risk of acquiring that fear too. The psychiatrist Sarah Roff pointed this out last year in an online article for The Chronicle of Higher Education. "One of my biggest concerns about trigger warnings," Roff wrote, "is that they will apply not just to those who have experienced trauma, but to all students, creating an atmosphere in which they are encouraged to believe that there is something dangerous or damaging about discussing difficult aspects of our history."

In an article published last year by Inside Higher Ed, seven humanities professors wrote that the trigger-warning movement was "already having a chilling effect on [their] teaching and pedagogy." They reported their colleagues' receiving "phone calls from deans and other administrators investigating student complaints that they have included 'triggering' material in their courses, with or without warnings." A trigger warning, they wrote, "serves as a guarantee that students will not experience unexpected discomfort and implies that if they do, a contract has been broken." When students come to expect trigger warnings for any material that makes them uncomfortable, the easiest way for faculty to stay out of trouble is to avoid material that might upset the most sensitive student in the class.

Magnification, Labeling, and Microaggressions

Burns defines magnification as "exaggerat[ing] the importance of things," and Leahy, Holland, and McGinn define labeling as "assign[ing] global negative traits to yourself and others." The recent collegiate trend of uncovering allegedly racist, sexist, classist, or otherwise discriminatory microaggressions doesn't incidentally teach students to focus on small or accidental slights. Its purpose is to get students to focus on them and then relabel the people who have made such remarks as aggressors.

The term microaggression originated in the 1970s and referred to subtle, often unconscious racist affronts. The definition has expanded in recent years to include anything that can be perceived as discriminatory on virtually any basis. For example, in 2013, a student group at UCLA staged a sit-in during a class taught by Val Rust, an education professor. The group read a letter aloud expressing their concerns about the campus's hostility toward students of color. Although Rust was not explicitly named, the group quite clearly criticized his teaching as microaggressive. In the course of correcting his students' grammar and spelling, Rust had noted that a student had wrongly capitalized the first letter of the word indigenous. Lowercasing the capital I was an insult to the student and her ideology, the group claimed.

Even joking about microaggressions can be seen as an aggression, warranting punishment. Last fall, Omar Mahmood, a student at the University of Michigan, wrote a satirical column for a conservative student publication, The Michigan Review, poking fun at what he saw as a campus tendency to perceive microaggressions in just about anything. Mahmood was also employed at the campus newspaper, The Michigan Daily. The Daily's editors said that the way Mahmood had "satirically mocked the experiences of fellow Daily contributors and minority communities on campus ... created a conflict of interest." The Daily terminated Mahmood after he described the incident to two Web sites, The College Fix and The Daily Caller. A group of women later vandalized Mahmood's doorway with eggs, hot dogs, gum, and notes with messages such as "Everyone hates you, you violent prick." When speech comes to be seen as a form of violence, vindictive protectiveness can justify a hostile, and perhaps even violent, response.

In March, the student government at Ithaca College, in upstate New York, went so far as to propose the creation of an anonymous microaggression-reporting system. Student sponsors envisioned some form of disciplinary action against "oppressors" engaged in belittling speech. One of the sponsors of the program said that while "not ... every instance will require trial or some kind of harsh punishment," she wanted the program to be "record-keeping but with impact."

Surely people make subtle or thinly veiled racist or sexist remarks on college campuses, and it is right for students to raise questions and initiate discussions about such cases. But the increased focus on microaggressions coupled with the endorsement of emotional reasoning is a formula for a constant state of outrage, even toward well-meaning speakers trying to engage in genuine discussion.

What are we doing to our students if we encourage them to develop extra-thin skin in the years just before they leave the cocoon of adult protection and enter the workforce? Would they not be better prepared to flourish if we taught them to question their own emotional reactions, and to give people the benefit of the doubt?

Teaching Students to Catastrophize and Have Zero Tolerance

Burns defines catastrophizing as a kind of magnification that turns "commonplace negative events into nightmarish monsters." Leahy, Holland, and McGinn define it as believing "that what has happened or will happen" is "so awful and unbearable that you won't be able to stand it." Requests for trigger warnings involve catastrophizing, but this way of thinking colors other areas of campus thought as well.

Catastrophizing rhetoric about physical danger is employed by campus administrators more commonly than you might think-sometimes, it seems, with cynical ends in mind. For instance, last year administrators at Bergen Community College, in New Jersey, suspended Francis Schmidt, a professor, after he posted a picture of his daughter on his Google+ account. The photo showed her in a yoga pose, wearing a T-shirt that read I will take what is mine with fire & blood, a quote from the HBO show Game of Thrones. Schmidt had filed a grievance against the school about two months earlier after being passed over for a sabbatical. The quote was interpreted as a threat by a campus administrator, who received a notification after Schmidt posted the picture; it had been sent, automatically, to a whole group of contacts. According to Schmidt, a Bergen security official present at a subsequent meeting between administrators and Schmidt thought the word fire could refer to AK-47s.

Then there is the eight-year legal saga at Valdosta State University, in Georgia, where a student was expelled for protesting the construction of a parking garage by posting an allegedly "threatening" collage on Facebook. The collage described the proposed structure as a "memorial" parking garage-a joke referring to a claim by the university president that the garage would be part of his legacy. The president interpreted the collage as a threat against his life.

It should be no surprise that students are exhibiting similar sensitivity. At the University of Central Florida in 2013, for example, Hyung-il Jung, an accounting instructor, was suspended after a student reported that Jung had made a threatening comment during a review session. Jung explained to the Orlando Sentinel that the material he was reviewing was difficult, and he'd noticed the pained look on students' faces, so he made a joke. "It looks like you guys are being slowly suffocated by these questions," he recalled saying. "Am I on a killing spree or what?"

After the student reported Jung's comment, a group of nearly 20 others e-mailed the UCF administration explaining that the comment had clearly been made in jest. Nevertheless, UCF suspended Jung from all university duties and demanded that he obtain written certification from a mental-health professional that he was "not a threat to [himself] or to the university community" before he would be allowed to return to campus.

All of these actions teach a common lesson: smart people do, in fact, overreact to innocuous speech, make mountains out of molehills, and seek punishment for anyone whose words make anyone else feel uncomfortable.

Mental Filtering and Disinvitation Season

As Burns defines it, mental filtering is "pick[ing] out a negative detail in any situation and dwell[ing] on it exclusively, thus perceiving that the whole situation is negative." Leahy, Holland, and McGinn refer to this as "negative filtering," which they define as "focus[ing] almost exclusively on the negatives and seldom notic[ing] the positives." When applied to campus life, mental filtering allows for simpleminded demonization.

Students and faculty members in large numbers modeled this cognitive distortion during 2014's "disinvitation season." That's the time of year-usually early spring-when commencement speakers are announced and when students and professors demand that some of those speakers be disinvited because of things they have said or done. According to data compiled by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, since 2000, at least 240 campaigns have been launched at U.S. universities to prevent public figures from appearing at campus events; most of them have occurred since 2009.

Consider two of the most prominent disinvitation targets of 2014: former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the International Monetary Fund's managing director, Christine Lagarde. Rice was the first black female secretary of state; Lagarde was the first woman to become finance minister of a G8 country and the first female head of the IMF. Both speakers could have been seen as highly successful role models for female students, and Rice for minority students as well. But the critics, in effect, discounted any possibility of something positive coming from those speeches.

Members of an academic community should of course be free to raise questions about Rice's role in the Iraq War or to look skeptically at the IMF's policies. But should dislike of part of a person's record disqualify her altogether from sharing her perspectives?

If campus culture conveys the idea that visitors must be pure, with résumés that never offend generally left-leaning campus sensibilities, then higher education will have taken a further step toward intellectual homogeneity and the creation of an environment in which students rarely encounter diverse viewpoints. And universities will have reinforced the belief that it's okay to filter out the positive. If students graduate believing that they can learn nothing from people they dislike or from those with whom they disagree, we will have done them a great intellectual disservice.

What Can We Do Now?

Attempts to shield students from words, ideas, and people that might cause them emotional discomfort are bad for the students. They are bad for the workplace, which will be mired in unending litigation if student expectations of safety are carried forward. And they are bad for American democracy, which is already paralyzed by worsening partisanship. When the ideas, values, and speech of the other side are seen not just as wrong but as willfully aggressive toward innocent victims, it is hard to imagine the kind of mutual respect, negotiation, and compromise that are needed to make politics a positive-sum game.

Rather than trying to protect students from words and ideas that they will inevitably encounter, colleges should do all they can to equip students to thrive in a world full of words and ideas that they cannot control. One of the great truths taught by Buddhism (and Stoicism, Hinduism, and many other traditions) is that you can never achieve happiness by making the world conform to your desires. But you can master your desires and habits of thought. This, of course, is the goal of cognitive behavioral therapy. With this in mind, here are some steps that might help reverse the tide of bad thinking on campus.

The biggest single step in the right direction does not involve faculty or university administrators, but rather the federal government, which should release universities from their fear of unreasonable investigation and sanctions by the Department of Education. Congress should define peer-on-peer harassment according to the Supreme Court's definition in the 1999 case Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education. The Davis standard holds that a single comment or thoughtless remark by a student does not equal harassment; harassment requires a pattern of objectively offensive behavior by one student that interferes with another student's access to education. Establishing the Davis standard would help eliminate universities' impulse to police their students' speech so carefully.

Universities themselves should try to raise consciousness about the need to balance freedom of speech with the need to make all students feel welcome. Talking openly about such conflicting but important values is just the sort of challenging exercise that any diverse but tolerant community must learn to do. Restrictive speech codes should be abandoned.

Universities should also officially and strongly discourage trigger warnings. They should endorse the American Association of University Professors' report on these warnings, which notes, "The presumption that students need to be protected rather than challenged in a classroom is at once infantilizing and anti-intellectual." Professors should be free to use trigger warnings if they choose to do so, but by explicitly discouraging the practice, universities would help fortify the faculty against student requests for such warnings.

Finally, universities should rethink the skills and values they most want to impart to their incoming students. At present, many freshman-orientation programs try to raise student sensitivity to a nearly impossible level. Teaching students to avoid giving unintentional offense is a worthy goal, especially when the students come from many different cultural backgrounds. But students should also be taught how to live in a world full of potential offenses. Why not teach incoming students how to practice cognitive behavioral therapy? Given high and rising rates of mental illness, this simple step would be among the most humane and supportive things a university could do. The cost and time commitment could be kept low: a few group training sessions could be supplemented by Web sites or apps. But the outcome could pay dividends in many ways. For example, a shared vocabulary about reasoning, common distortions, and the appropriate use of evidence to draw conclusions would facilitate critical thinking and real debate. It would also tone down the perpetual state of outrage that seems to engulf some colleges these days, allowing students' minds to open more widely to new ideas and new people. A greater commitment to formal, public debate on campus-and to the assembly of a more politically diverse faculty-would further serve that goal.

Thomas Jefferson, upon founding the University of Virginia, said:

This institution will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.

We believe that this is still-and will always be-the best attitude for American universities. Faculty, administrators, students, and the federal government all have a role to play in restoring universities to their historic mission.

Common Cognitive Distortions

A partial list from Robert L. Leahy, Stephen J. F. Holland, and Lata K. McGinn's Treatment Plans and Interventions for Depression and Anxiety Disorders (2012).

1. Mind reading. You assume that you know what people think without having sufficient evidence of their thoughts. "He thinks I'm a loser."

2. Fortune-telling. You predict the future negatively: things will get worse, or there is danger ahead. "I'll fail that exam," or "I won't get the job."

3. Catastrophizing. You believe that what has happened or will happen will be so awful and unbearable that you won't be able to stand it. "It would be terrible if I failed."

4. Labeling. You assign global negative traits to yourself and others. "I'm undesirable," or "He's a rotten person."

5. Discounting positives. You claim that the positive things you or others do are trivial. "That's what wives are supposed to do-so it doesn't count when she's nice to me," or "Those successes were easy, so they don't matter."

6. Negative filtering. You focus almost exclusively on the negatives and seldom notice the positives. "Look at all of the people who don't like me."

7. Overgeneralizing. You perceive a global pattern of negatives on the basis of a single incident. "This generally happens to me. I seem to fail at a lot of things."

8. Dichotomous thinking. You view events or people in all-or-nothing terms. "I get rejected by everyone," or "It was a complete waste of time."

9. Blaming. You focus on the other person as the source of your negative feelings, and you refuse to take responsibility for changing yourself. "She's to blame for the way I feel now," or "My parents caused all my problems."

10. What if? You keep asking a series of questions about "what if" something happens, and you fail to be satisfied with any of the answers. "Yeah, but what if I get anxious?," or "What if I can't catch my breath?"

11. Emotional reasoning. You let your feelings guide your interpretation of reality. "I feel depressed; therefore, my marriage is not working out."

12. Inability to disconfirm. You reject any evidence or arguments that might contradict your negative thoughts. For example, when you have the thought I'm unlovable, you reject as irrelevant any evidence that people like you. Consequently, your thought cannot be refuted. "That's not the real issue. There are deeper problems. There are other factors."

Greg Lukianoff is the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and the author of Unlearning Liberty. He is the the co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind, which originatedas a September 2015 Atlantic story.

Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist at the New York University Stern School of Business. He is the author of The Righteous Mind and the co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind, which originatedas a September 2015 Atlantic story.

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How Trigger Warnings Are Hurting Mental Health on Campus

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In the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don't like. Here's why that's disastrous for education-and mental health. Something strange is happening at America's colleges and universities. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense.

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Dan Meyer, the most famous math teacher in America, wants to radically change the way we learn math.

Imagine aliens have abducted you. They're kind enough creatures, however: Theirs is the slow-motion torture of trying to make you understand them. They flash their strange alphabet at you and prompt you with esoteric questions: Are you allowed to put this symbol here? To rearrange this into that? At first you struggle. Soon enough, though, you start to see patterns; eventually you begin to answer correctly.

This, Dan Meyer says, is how too many students experience mathematics. Meyer, 33, is perhaps the most famous math educator in America today. Good-looking and wholesome, he has long charmed audiences with a lopsided smile. He's amassed more than 40,000 Twitter followers, and his TED Talk, despite its less-than-thrilling focus on math curricula, has been viewed more than two million times. Meyer's out to change the way students learn math-to make the subject feel like an illuminating journey through the real world, rather than an abduction into an alien culture. "I need a question to carry me through my thirties," he wrote this summer on his blog. "I can't think of a better one than, 'What does the math textbook of the future look like?'"

Meyer has always been a self-directed explorer. As a high school sophomore in Ukiah, a small California town north of the Bay, he carted a calculus book home over winter break; by January, he'd jumped from pre-calculus to a calculus class, immediately outscoring his senior peers. Years later, as a twenty-two year old, Meyer set a Guinness record for the longest paperclip chain assembled in one day. (He turned it into a math lesson, of course.) For nearly a decade, Meyer has dissected his wide-ranging interests-movies, graphic design, and the daily life of a teacher-on his blog, which gradually caught the attention of non-teachers. In 2009, a post about the mathematics of the grocery store express lane landed him on the local television news. The next year he was named a Google fellow. Now, billing himself as a "Digital Mathematics Curriculum Consultant," he travels the country, sharing his gospel. This September, after he keynotes a statewide math conference in Nebraska, he will have worked with teachers in every state.

Meyer thinks technology can change the math classroom's reputation as a dull, mystifying, and even traumatizing place. But he doesn't think tech can fix everything. "There's limitations on what kinds of work can be done on a computer without a teacher," he said, referring to the recent interest in "adaptive learning" technology, which gives students instantaneous feedback to personalized schoolwork. "You'll never see a free-form argument of the sort that students do in our best live classrooms-and those are the sorts of skills that we cherish and reward in modern working life," he continued. Meyer is interested in math classrooms that involve discussion and debate, that have students building hands-on models. In his view, adaptive learning software just makes it easier to do alien-abduction mathematics-the kind where repeating right answers, rather than deep comprehension, matters most.

In 2008, a panel convened by President Bush called American math achievement "mediocre." Bush hoped to "keep America competitive." Given that success in mathematics is a strong predictor of college and career success, the panel was worried. The "delivery system" of the math classroom, their report declared, "is broken and must be fixed." Alien abduction, in other words, does not work. But in the years since, scores have changed little. On national assessments this year, math scores for both fourth and eighth graders ticked down, and only 40 percent of eighth graders met the proficiency bar.

"What does the math textbook of the future look like?"

Meyer frequently cites a statistic from the 2008 panel's report: 62 percent of algebra teachers said that their greatest challenge was unmotivated students. But through a quirk of personality, Meyer stumbled on a solution: "I saw stories-beginning, middle, end-in everything I taught," he told me. Mathematics, he realized, was built by thinkers responding to real challenges; capture these challenges in story, and students' curiosity can be piqued.

One popular feature of his blog is its repository of "Three-Act Math Tasks," which take the process of mathematical modeling and turn it into narrative. First, an intriguing question is translated into mathematical symbols; then, those symbols are manipulated to produce some result; and finally the results are used to help us better understand our world. A basketball player takes a shot, and it goes up, up-will it go in? Two friends choose different paths across a beach to get to a taco stand-who will get there first? A math teacher tries to break a paperclip Guinness record-will he do it if he keeps up his current rate? Each question can launch a mathematical story. Meyer calls this "some of the most challenging, exhilarating, democratic work your students will ever do" on his blog. By asking and answering seemingly math-free questions, Meyer can engage even students who dislike the subject. Students converse about those questions-making predictions, staking claims-before the mathematical symbols ever appear.

That's hard to do on paper. Traditional textbooks "perform the first and last acts for students," Meyer has written, "leaving only the most mathematical, most abstract act behind." Instead of beginning with a player taking a shot, the textbook provides an equation: x for time, y for height. Students just plug in an x value and compute. The swift jump to symbols turns away students who find them intimidating-or simply boring.

"The quadratic formula wasn't invented just to torment kids with a rhyme thousands of years later," Meyer told me. "We invented these skills for a reason. Part of a teacher's job is to help students see why." Too often, he says, teachers provide the aspirin of a math lesson before kids even know they have a headache.

Too often, Meyer says, teachers provide the aspirin of a math lesson before kids even know they have a headache.

In 2010, Meyer left his classroom to pursue a doctorate in education at Stanford. He traveled to so many speaking gigs that, at his first annual review, his advisors there recommended he come back when he could focus. But he stayed and buckled down, finding research-like Guershon Harel's ideas of " intellectual need"-that deepened his earlier thinking. This spring Meyer completed a dissertation that shows how peer-to-peer conversation can improve student comprehension, even in online environments. (The dissertation will be published next year, though in typical fashion, Meyer has made it available on his blog).

Today, Meyer is the Chief Academic Officer at Desmos, a San Francisco startup that offers an online graphing calculator. The company is now building on that tool by offering complete, interactive lesson plans. Like the calculator, the lessons are free to the masses; Desmos plans to profit by selling the product to corporate entities.

The lessons use interactive technology to help students begin with the concrete: One lesson starts with a slab of pavement that must be divided into equally sized parking spaces; another asks students to recreate an animation in graph form. The emphasis is slightly different than Meyer's old "Three-Act Tasks": exploration and communication are now privileged over stories. In the parking lot lesson, students draw and redraw their dividers, getting immediate feedback as cars try to pull into their spaces; only gradually do they begin to work with numbers and variables. Other modules ask students to share their models with the class, which allows them to revise their thinking based on the ideas of their peers. Desmos's lessons are based on the idea of constructivism, a theory that views knowledge as something that must be built by learners themselves.

This is a progressive and rather controversial notion. Developed from the ideas of Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget and American philosopher John Dewey in the twentieth century, it was popularized by reform-minded educators starting in the 1960s. In mathematics, constructivism and other "student-centered" forms of teaching have come under particular fire in mathematics: Are kids really supposed to discover 10,000 years of math all on their own? Meyer's advisor at Stanford, Jo Boaler, well known for her efforts to make math more widely accessible, has described a concerted effort to discredit her work.

Meyer dismisses his own critics as ideologues. If they see anything that deviates from clear, straightforward explanation, he says, "they have a fuse that is tripped, a certain surge goes through their brain," he said. "The question is not should we explain, but when should we explain." Meyer believes we need to provide certain experiences to students before we lecture: showing why a tool is needed, for example, or provoking cognitive conflict, or providing an opportunity to create informal algorithms before the standard algorithms are taught.

I'm a former high school math teacher, and I worked for five years coaching teachers in Mississippi. The students in the schools where I worked were nearly all African American, and many faced the steep challenges of rural poverty. When I first encountered Meyer's TED Talk in 2010, I was skeptical. But over time I saw too many students who were doing math just because they were told they had to; I began incorporating the ideas of constructivism into the lessons I developed for teachers. The few I could compel to try these lessons found their students' perceptions of the subject transformed.

"The question is not should we explain, but when should we explain."

But my initial skepticism-and the skepticism of the teachers I coached-is telling. Constructivism is now an old theory, but it's still uncommon, often associated with privileged private schools. (Meyer says he and his team test all their lessons in classrooms around the Bay Area, and aim to include a range of economic backgrounds and previous experiences with mathematics.) It's is an ambitious form of teaching, putting high demands on a teachers-who must respond in the moment to each student's developing ideas. That goes against the cut-the-workload-with-technology mentality pursued by Meyer's competitors, and it's a hard sell to administrators at struggling schools, who are often asked to make quick changes in test scores.

Which means Meyer's quest can't end with the creation of a few lesson plans, or even an entire textbook. He sees this as a generational project. "You really need the students in these classrooms to grow up and become teachers," he says. "At that point a cycle begins." The alien abductions will be over; math will be something that students do, rather than something that's done to them.

Boyce Upholt is a freelance writer and editor based in the Mississippi Delta.

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Dan Meyer, the most famous math teacher in America, wants to radically change the way we learn math. Imagine aliens have abducted you. They're kind enough creatures, however: Theirs is the slow-motion torture of trying to make you understand them.

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I've been thinking lately about how to make sure my students at Riverdale have the most inspirational educational experience possible. In some ways, prompted by some of your intelligent ways of managing individualized learning programs at AltSchool, this means moving a school with a relatively traditional and set educational program to adopting more of a stance of customization and flexibility and a focus on a foundation for lifelong learning.

Since our schools share some similar philosophies - of making, designing, and "ways of being," for example - I'm curious to know if we're facing some of the same issues. Although I see plenty of things as contemporary at Riverdale, such as our research on " character skills," students teaching mini-courses, or our Project Knowmad summer courses (that seek to teach without classroom walls) there are also elements of our educational practices that are proudly traditional and that we deeply appreciate and respect, such as close reading, Socratic dialogue, and the development of argumentation skills.

It seems that schools are expected to position themselves as either traditional - "chalk and talk," uniforms, a belief in canonical knowledge, a culture of discipline and compliance, or progressive - liberal, with more of a constructivist approach to teaching and learning, and a focus on the development of the individual building off his or her strengths rather than trying to mold children into a certain ideal mix of intellectual and personal capacities.

More and more, I find this binary both idiotic and not very helpful.

I guess I see many schools as combining some perennial educational practices and values with new innovative techniques and methods. I am not sure if I want to see schools become entirely digital. I love to see our students in gardens and talking with each other in impassioned ways. At the same time, I also think that digital technology is underleveraged in schools in general. Perhaps it is more of a question how we handle change and innovation in all schools.

I am less concerned with the form schools take as I am interested in the assumptions and outcomes of learning that tacitly undergird their day-to-day practice. And that is where I have a problem.

Many of us know far too little about learning, about cognition, and about how to construct the best learning environments for our students.

For example, the assumptions about literacy development and quantitative understanding in many schools are completely out of date. That is because the translation of research to school settings takes too long. This means our assumptions about learning and development are also outmoded. How do you change assumptions? How do you change educational outcomes? How can schools become more adaptive? I don't think it's easy.

Lots of schools, whether supposedly "traditional" or "progressive," have systems that specifically counter the concept of the " growth mindset " as researched by Carol Dweck. The idea of a growth mindset seems eminently sensible to most teachers and administrators; however, when it comes to the everyday culture of schools, that idea is not part of their structure. The concept of grading at the high school level is often "anti-growth" and more about fixed models of development. How can we change this retreat to the status quo that seems to happen so much in schools, even new ones?

Right now, four main sets of questions interest me:

What are the outcomes of an effective 21st-century education? In other words, what is/are the mindset(s) that we are trying to educate for? What common capacities do students from different backgrounds and cultures need, and how are they best developed and assessed? How can we uncover the misconceptions and false assumptions that guide our practices in schools? Unfortunately, many of the frameworks available for guidance, such as the Common Core or advanced placement courses, are not underpinned by informed learning principles.

What role does technology play or not play in developing these capacities in students? Obviously, it plays or will play some role, but the right blend of digital versus face-to-face seems curiously elusive. How can we improve the way we provide timely feedback to students, especially in developing capacities, such as creativity or resilience, that we do not understand as well?

How do we prepare students for a life of learning? I think the current split between academic curriculum and co-curriculum is misleading and unhelpful in achieving the ideal of a lifelong learner. A great educational program is broader than a course, a field trip, or an internship. How can we make sense of our learning in more holistic ways? For me, this is a question of proficiency-based outcomes with a focus on process more than results-based outcomes. This article by Arthur Levine focuses on this same idea in colleges and universities.

Finally, how can schools such as ours - that are engaged in ongoing experimentation - effectively share best practices and more effectively collaborate to make schools better? How do we break down the silos between the various sectors of education and more effectively share what works? How do we begin an inclusive movement for modern learning?

I'd love to know, Max, what you are thinking about in reference to some of these ideas and others? I look forward to conversing a bit in a few letters, but I also hope that our discussion may lead to some course of action that we could take together.

Yours,
Dominic

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I've been thinking lately about how to make sure my students at Riverdale have the most inspirational educational experience possible. In some ways, prompted by some of your intelligent ways of managing individualized learning programs at AltSchool, this means moving a school with a relatively traditional and set educational program to adopting more of a stance of customization and flexibility and a focus on a foundation for lifelong learning.

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The long read:  Should kids learn to code?

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The long read:  Should kids learn to code?

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Behind the sliding glass door of Makers Academy in Shoreditch, east London, one afternoon in early October, an inhouse yoga teacher was leading a group of casually dressed young men and women in an afternoon meditation. With its ping-pong table, hammock and stash of Nerf guns, Makers looks like every digital startup cliche. But it is a coding bootcamp, where adults who want to change careers pay £8,000 for a three-month crash course that promises to equip them for jobs in a digital world. Only half-joking, many refer to it as "Oxbridge meets the Royal Marines for developers".

Nine out of 10 applicants are rejected - the academy's profit comes from a levy on employers who hire its students, so it takes only those considered employable. Anyone who is judged not to be working hard enough is ejected in the first few weeks, which culls about another fifth.

The survivors sit at long banks of screens, where they are supposed to spend nine hours a day learning to program computers, although most choose to stay long into the night, practising what they have learned. They work in pairs to bounce ideas off each other and, although there is a helpdesk for those stuck on complex coding problems, there is no teacher to give instructions. The idea is to encourage self-sufficiency and the ability to muddle through with peers, as they will have to do when they reach the workplace. Every now and then, from an office in the loft, comes the sound of a gong being struck: the signal that another Makers graduate has just landed a job.

"Everyone should learn how to program a computer, because it teaches you how to think." It is now 20 years since Steve Jobs said those words, in an interview unearthed and released two years after his death. Last year, Britain became the first G7 country to introduce compulsory computer science on the school curriculum for all children aged five to 16. By the age of seven, all children will now be expected to be capable of writing and debugging a simple program. By 11, some will be exploring computing concepts once considered appropriate for undergraduates.

The idea that mastering code is as essential to a successful start in life as numeracy and literacy is starting to take hold of British parents. Christmas stockings this year will be stuffed with "smart toys" - brightly coloured programmable plastic robots, apps and even board games that promise to give kids a head start on coding.

How do you make toast? is a frequent interview question. The ideal answer is close to one a robot could understand

Since 2013, more than 140 million adults worldwide have downloaded a starter coding lesson from the industry-funded Hour of Code, a non-profit initiative that aims to increase access to coding skills. What is rather less clear, however, is how many finished and how many gave up halfway through. Learning to code, especially later in life, is not easy. It requires mastery of a problem-solving skill known as computational thinking: breaking down tasks into a logical sequence of smaller steps, discarding unnecessary elements, diagnosing errors and inventing new approaches when the first inevitably fails. (Coders have a saying that there are two solutions to every problem, and then a third that actually works.)

At its simplest, learning to code is simply learning to tell machines what to do. Code is the string of typed instructions a computer follows to do anything from displaying the word "hello" on a screen, to piloting a driverless car through traffic. Send a text, take money from a cashpoint or book a plane ticket, and you are relying on someone having written the code that makes it possible. And since it is impossible to write an app without learning to code, coding is the skill that stands between an entrepreneur with a bright idea and a saleable product in the iTunes store.

"'How do you make toast?' is an interview question for software developers, because it reveals whether you think computationally," explained Jordan Poulton, marketing manager at Makers Academy. "The ideal answer is a couple of steps away from something a robot could understand." And for a robot, clarity and precision are everything. "Take four steps forward, open packet of bread, remove one slice of bread", for example, is a better start than "put bread in toaster".

"Say you wanted to instruct a robot to randomly pick a name out of a hat, a lot of people will say: 'Give me a random name'," added Poulton. "But what you have to say is: 'Here are some names; randomly shuffle them and return one to me.' That's computational thinking."

It does not come naturally to most people. Programming experience and academic qualifications do not matter much to Makers - one recent star graduate was a paint salesman who left school at 16. But logical thinking, commitment and the ability to cope with uncertainty are crucial. Candidates interviewing for Makers courses are deliberately given problems they cannot solve, in order to test their reaction to failure.

Evgeny Shadchnev, a Russian-born software developer, started Makers three years ago with Rob Johnson, a self-taught programmer, after a conversation about the shortage of good developers in the UK.''Most of the time as a developer you don't really know what you're doing; your job is to take one really small step in the right direction and then work out how to do the next," he said. "We want people who are comfortable with that sense that there's no right answer."

"Everyone cries at some point," said Ruth Earle, a mother of two who worked as a carer for the elderly before taking the three-month Makers course at a friend's suggestion. "I always thought I was quite bright, that once I'd grasped something I could run with it. But every day you're faced with something new. Just when you think you can do something, it's taken away from you. It's like this constant reminder that you don't know everything."

Ruth finished the course in October last year, and is now a product developer at a financial journalism startup. At 40, she has embarked on a whole new career, earning £10,000 a year more than in her old job. One recent graduate was so excited to have landed a job that she vowed to have the Makers Academy logo shaved into her hair. Another recently turned the logo into a tattoo.

Just as years of compulsory English lessons failed to make novelists of most parents, coding lessons in school will not turn every child into a programmer. But the idea behind the new government initiatives is that new generations of children will not have to struggle through bootcamps in midlife, because those with an aptitude for coding will have discovered it at an early stage. And those who are less talented, it is thought, will at least gain an understanding of the digital world in which they now live.

The British tech industry, drawing on this new skilled workforce, will - in an ideal world - expand, develop, and create prosperity. But this shiny vision has created serious challenges for schools, as teachers are confronted with the task of conveying concepts that hardly existed when they were trained. There are uncomfortable questions, too, over the speed with which UK policymakers have embraced a Silicon Valley version of the future.

e are living at a time of such rapid scientific changethat our children are accepting as part of their everyday life things that would have been dismissed as science fiction a few years ago." It could be a line from a TED talk, but these words came from Harold Wilson, then the opposition leader, in Scarborough in 1963, as he addressed the Labour party conference on the threat posed to jobs by automation and the need for Britain to train thousands more scientists.

The threat for Wilson came from Russia, but by the 1980s it had shifted to the Japanese electronics industry. In the 2000s, when Japan was in recession, Gordon Brown, as Labour chancellor, was warning about competition from Chinese and Indian graduates. Today's perceived challenge is that Britain turns out fewer computer scientists than Poland.

In June 2006, shortly after the then opposition leader David Cameron hugged a husky to show off his environment-friendly nature, his friend and shadow chancellor George Osborne visited Silicon Valley. On the trip Osborne met everyone from the founders of LinkedIn and Mozilla to the venture capitalists who were bankrolling some of tech's biggest names. It was all part of a drive to rebrand the Tories as fresh and forward‑thinking. But, according to former special adviser Guy Levin - now executive director of Coadec, a lobby group for digital startups - Osborne returned genuinely "evangelising for tech".

Why, Osborne wanted to know, was there no British Google? He became preoccupied with the idea that, with Tim Berners-Lee's world wide web, Britain had basically invented the internet, yet failed to reap the rewards. But for Osborne, who as a nerdy teenager had spent hours in his bedroom teaching himself the early computer language Basic, there was a more personal draw. "He goes to Silicon Valley on holiday - he really, really is into this stuff," said a friend.

Osborne had a natural ally in the Tory strategist Steve Hilton, a tech junkie whose partner Rachel Whetstone had recently started working for Google (she has since moved to the taxi app Uber). Instrumental in bringing things together that autumn, however, was an ex-Treasury civil servant called Rohan Silva. The 25-year-old from Wakefield had been recommended to Osborne by Michael Gove, who was then still a journalist. Charming and quick-witted, Silva had a jackdaw's gift for spotting bright and shiny ideas.

"He was very much the 'new new thing person'. Whether it was arts or culture or tech, he'd always be hipper than anyone else you'd find in a political office," said Ed Vaizey, now the minister responsible for digital industries. Silva was a law graduate with no background in technology, but quickly became fascinated by it, and a speech he wrote that autumn for Osborne about the digital economy established him as "the digital guy" - the man who bridged the gap between twentysomething entrepreneurs and middle-aged politicians.

In the summer of 2007, Silva was dispatched on the first of at least three fact-finding trips to the US, along with Hilton and fellow policy adviser James O'Shaughnessy. They toured Google and Stanford university campus, met the social media theorist Clay Shirky and the founder of Craigslist, sucked up information on everything from smart cities to robotics, and returned buzzing.

These new moguls embodied old Conservative ideals of entrepreneurship and smashing monopolies, yet were young, idealistic and cool. They fitted the Tory modernisers' brand perfectly. That autumn, Cameron accepted an invitation to address Google's Zeitgeist conference in San Francisco, and gave a touchy-feely speech vowing to improve "general wellbeing" alongside GDP by fostering emotionally satisfying work. (Google's chairman Eric Schmidt returned the favour by addressing Conservative activists at that year's party conference in Bournemouth.)

With the British economy still booming, it was not the potential for creating jobs that initially interested Silva and Hilton, but the capacity for digital platforms to facilitate the flow of information between government and citizens. "We did things like, during the first spending review, opening [the consultation process] up to 500,000 civil servants. We said, 'We need to find savings, you know better than us where to find that time and money,'" recalled Silva.

Cameron also tried to emulate a project run by the then US senator Barack Obama, to discourage waste by requiring the publication of government spending figures, but according to Silva, "it just sank without trace. Frankly I was running out of road with George and David on this. And then the expenses scandal hit". When, in 2009, it became clear how much money had been fraudulently claimed by MPs, Cameron vowed to restore public trust, if elected, by opening the system to scrutiny. Transparency became a fashionable theme, and when Cameron was elected prime minister in May 2010, he made open-data projects a priority, taking Silva into Number 10 with him as an adviser.

Tech City was Silva's name for a small cluster of digital companies in east London

There was an instant culture clash between the clique around Cameron and Osborne, who instinctively embraced the Silicon Valley mantra of "move fast and break things", and a formal government machine that they felt had stopped evolving in the 1990s. But Silva's appointment was key. "We had this guy who was passionate about the issue, sitting in No 10 where he knew that if he pulled levers things could happen," said Vaizey. "He created Tech City and he deserves a lot of credit for that."

Tech City was Silva's name for a small cluster of digital companies in east London, which he felt could grow and attract others,and eventually become a showcase for British innovation. Tech City was initially just a "label and some support", Vaizey said, but that was enough to persuade Schmidt, who had developed a close relationship with the Treasury team, to build a new Google campus for startups at its heart. When John Chambers, the executive chairman of the US tech giant Cisco, came for a meeting with the prime minister and cited Tech City as one of his reasons for investing millions in the UK, the modernisers felt vindicated.

"It acts as a beacon that this government cares about tech," said Vaizey. "But it also became a test-bed for policy; by spending a lot of time with developers you could see in real time what issues were causing them problems." And one early, recurrent complaint was: "We can't get the people we need."

This digital skills gap remains the biggest concern for startups in the UK, according to Levin. They are particularly short of software developers, not to mention cyber-security experts who are able to protect customer data from increasingly organised and malicious hacks. (British security services are so desperate for coders capable of thwarting terrorist attacks on electronic infrastructure that GCHQ has begun to spray recruitment ads on Shoreditch pavements.)

A report from the government-funded UK Commission on Employment and Skills this summer found there was indeed a recruitment crisis in IT - although the rarely reported squeeze in mechanical engineering was worse. But if Britain was not producing enough computer science graduates to meet industry demand, those few available should have been snapped up. Puzzlingly, though, IT had the highest unemployment rate of any subject analysed by the Higher Education Statistics Agency. In 2013-14, 11% of graduate computer scientists were unemployed, compared to 5% of lawyers and 7% of linguists.

Dame Wendy Hall is professor of computer science at the University of Southampton, and ex-president of the British Computing Society. She claims a 95% employment rate for her students. "There are a number of universities, and I'm not going to name them, that take a lot of candidates who don't have the kind of qualifications ours have," she said. "They just aren't employable at the end of the course, for all sorts of reasons; they haven't got the background." The jobs are out there, she insisted, but "we need to support the people who do go on these courses that don't prepare you so well".

The skills gap may also have something to do with an industry in a hurry. The sheer speed with which companies now move from idea to product, coupled with the constant fear of being beaten to it by rivals, makes many smaller firms unwilling to risk hiring novices.

"The sort of people they want are experienced," said Levin. "You'll start with a very small, lean team; you get venture capital funding, you use that to hire in the best people from around the world." But recent changes in immigration policy have made it harder for startups to get visas for non-European programmers (US citizens are in particularly high demand, because they tend to have the most experience). Meanwhile, the supply of self‑taught geeks and gamers who once plugged gaps in digital operations is drying up.

The coding bootcamps springing up in London and Edinburgh are essentially a pop-up solution. Unlike universities, they are neither accredited nor inspected for quality of teaching, but they are willing to tweak their courses according to the fast-changing demands of clients. (The tendency of employers to moan about out-of-date university courses is matched only by the frustration of academics with employers who demand that their future staff be provided oven-ready, without any investment in their training.)

Even Makers Academy struggled initially to persuade smaller companies to hire and bring on its junior programmers. As chief operating officer Ruben Kostucki pointed out, if juniors cannot get experience, then ultimately you run short of experienced people. "The message to companies is: change your culture to be empowering about learning, take on young people." What both sides agree on is that this learning needs to start earlier.

ince the mid-2000s, a small band of academics,teachers and computer scientists had been trying, and failing, to convince ministers that school IT classes were lagging hopelessly behind the times. In Hall's words, they were "banging their heads against a brick wall". Teaching word processing packages and PowerPoint was all very well, they argued, but to become programmers, children needed to get under the bonnet and understand how computers work.

It was a 60-year-old Mancunian named Ian Livingstone who finally piqued the interest of Conservative tech enthusiasts. Livingstone is not a coder, but he does run a gaming company. "He kept saying to me - as a lot of people in the gaming industry said to me - 'We're teaching too many kids in schools how to use applications, not to build them,'" said Vaizey, who was shadow culture minister at the time. Shortly after becoming a junior culture minister in 2010, Vaizey asked Livingstone and visual effects entrepreneur Alex Hope to produce a report on creative industry skills.

Livingstone warned that he would be recommending compulsory computer science in schools. "You can put that in if you like," Vaizey told him, "but it's never going to happen." Computers did not seem to fit the then education secretary Michael Gove's vision of making children return to rote-learning Dryden. And so the report, published in February 2011, seemed destined for obscurity - until Eric Schmidt weighed in.

Non-specialists can teach basic office IT skills, but teaching computational thinking requires more in-depth knowledge

In May 2011, George Osborne - now chancellor of the exchequer - spoke at a Google Zeitgeist event. Afterwards, at a private dinner, Schmidt made a strong case for coding to be on the curriculum. He personally took the matter up with the prime minister too: "He basically went into No 10 and said, 'This is stupid; you've got this fantastic track record in the UK and you're just teaching people to use word processors,'" Hall remembered. But the debate really caught fire that August, when Schmidt used the Edinburgh International Television Festival's annual MacTaggart lecture to declare that failing to teach computing was "throwing away your great computing heritage". Sensing renewed interest, Vaizey dug out his report and began pushing it across desks.

Silva, meanwhile, had seen a chance to steal a march on the US. "We were always looking across at what Obama was doing, like they were two years ahead of us at school; and there was a set of people on the Obama administration wanting to get coding on the curriculum," he said. But the US federal system made it hard for a president to set the national curriculum, and Cameron did not have that problem. Silva "wrote a couple of papers, spoke to a couple of advisers" and Gove was swiftly persuaded.

In January 2012,following a Royal Society report that urged for computing to be compulsory in schools, the education secretary announced that the existing IT curriculum would be scrapped from the start of the next academic year. In its place would be a course constructed around the problem-solving skills involved in computational thinking, rather than specific technologies that would quickly date. Unfortunately, the new curriculum was rushed through before there were enough teachers capable of teaching it.

While it is relatively easy for non-specialists to teach basic office IT skills, teaching computational thinking requires much more in-depth knowledge. However, more than half of those currently working as IT teachers do not have a computing degree, according to research by the National Association of Head Teachers.

In the autumn of 2014, eight weeks before the more demanding new curriculum was to be introduced, two-thirds of staff were still not confident teaching it, according to a survey carried out by Nesta, an independent charity promoting innovation. Around 11% of schools struggled to fill IT teaching posts last year - more than experienced difficulties finding physics and chemistry teachers. Female specialist IT teachers remain rare, although much in demand as role models for girls in a traditionally male-dominated area.

A voluntary network of after-school clubs and weekend "coding dojos" - youth clubs where kids play around with programming - is thriving, but leaders are thin on the ground, even though these groups use the skills of industry experts and enthusiasts as well as trained teachers. Code Club, a not-for-profit initiative running after-school clubs in one in 10 primaries, has a waiting list of 600 additional schools that want a club but cannot find a leader. Code Club recently launched an IT teacher training programme after heads repeatedly reported they were having difficulties recruiting. It may be years before what happens in classrooms matches the Whitehall vision. "The challenge is (getting) enough teachers; it's just going to take a few years for that to be as we would all want it to be," admitted Silva.

Tech companies have stepped into the breach, offering advice on curriculum content as well as funding for teacher training. This has worried some teachers who fear, as the teaching union the NASUWT put it, giving industry "the chance to engage with schools in ways that go well beyond corporate altruism".

Google rejects any suggestion that it is in this to flog IT products, arguing that it works with teachers and even with rivals in the public interest. "This isn't about us making money in schools and that's certainly not how we talk about it at all," said Mike Warriner, head of the engineering division at Google UK. "It's very much about helping us build the skills people need in future so that down the line we can continue to innovate. We're pretty much the number-one digital economy on the planet and keeping that position is important."

What is not in doubt, is that digital business will be part of a post-crash economy. Digital jobs expanded three times faster than the national average between 2009 and 2012, and are pretty much "the only area where employment growth is happening" across Europe, according to Andreas Schleicher, director of education and skills at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris. Without them, Tech City executives frequently suggest, London might still be in recession.

It is still a relatively niche field. According to research for a digital skills task force set up under former Labour leader Ed Miliband, fewer than one in 10 jobs may require advanced skills such as coding in the near future.

Excitable industry claims about creating millions of new jobs by 2020 (tactfully described by one well-placed industry source as "more a campaigning tool" than anything) may not hold water, but the UK Commission for Employment and Skills still estimates that another 300,000 digital jobs could be created by 2020. New potential growth areas range from virtual-reality gaming to the " internet of things ", which will enable machines to, effectively, talk to one other - for example, your fridge might ping a message to your phone when there is no more milk left, or you might turn on the central heating before you get home via a smartphone app. All this means ever more sophisticated fridges and thermostats; and ever more coders to programme and fix them.

London, meanwhile, is currently beating both Wall Street and Silicon Valley in pioneering fintech, a blend of financial services and digital technology that aims to revolutionise high-street banking for customers and strip out costs for banks. But as Rohan Silva - who left Downing Street at the last election to found his own startup - pointed out, Wall Street is not taking that lying down.

Bill de Blasio, the New York City mayor, announced earlier this autumn that computer science will be compulsory in the city's schools within the decade. In two years' time the city will open a specialist science and technology university campus, largely funded by private donors, with the aim of turning New York into a world-beating digital hub. "Given that a tech cluster is all about talent, I really worry that New York's going to leapfrog London, and when that happens we've really got to do the same here," said Silva. But before opening new universities, the first step is getting would-be coders as far as GCSE.

y 4pm on a grey September afternoon most of the pupils of St Joseph's primary school in south Manchester had long left for home. Upstairs in the half-empty year six classroom, 10-year-old Edgaras stood by the interactive whiteboard, showing the after-school coding club his remixed version of a classic Sonic computer game. His Sonic, he explained, looks "more grown-up" but can also run faster and jump higher. Prompted by the club's leader, Linda Macaulay, a retired professor of computing, to show his workings, he clicked a button. The screen filled with a bewildering patchwork of brightly coloured blocks.

This is Scratch, a computer language developed specifically for young children. It consists of blocks of text, which contain simple written instructions. These snap together like Lego to create basic programs, which children can use to make quizzes, games and animations. They can also adapt someone else's code to make it work faster or better.

For the teaching staff at St Joseph's, which set up the club almost three years ago under the Code Club umbrella, it is as much about boosting self-esteem and widening horizons as finding the next Martha Lane Fox. Although the tech industry is overwhelmingly male-dominated, this group, typically for a Code Club class, comprises roughly 40% girls. Yet girls tend to drift away from computing in their early teens - boys outnumber girls at A-level computer science by nine to one.

"One 13-year-old told me she would rather be in garbage disposal than work in technology," said Belinda Parmar of LadyGeek, a consultancy for tech businesses that also runs regular workshops to encourage girls into the industry.

But Parmar suspects there are deeper factors driving teenage girls away. "Girls don't want to fail. They seem to fear it more than boys, and the whole thing about learning to code is that you make mistakes. You've got to accept failures." She hopes compulsory computing until 16 will encourage more girls to stick with it.

Great programmers tend to be what the Cambridge neuroscientist Simon-Baron Cohen calls "systemisers", excelling at logical analysis and spotting patterns, but not always good at reading people. Tech companies are naturally heavy on systemisers, as exemplified by Facebook's initially clumsy responses to privacy concerns, or Apple offering to pay for female staff to freeze their eggs in an effort to attract more women to the company's staff. "If you look at who's using technology, a lot of us are empathisers," said Parmar. "The people making the product are not."

Perhaps that is the single most honest argument for teaching everyone to code: to give everyone an equal shot

Although Baron-Cohen's work suggests that women are more likely to be empathisers, Parmar suspects that simply recruiting more women will not change the culture by itself (systemisers tend to hire people of both sexes who they think are like them and seem to "fit in"). The most universally appealing products, Parmar argues, are those combining both skill sets. "Twitter is a perfect systemiser-empathiser collaboration. The rules are really clear, you've only got 140 characters, but you need to respond appropriately to others and you can be very expressive." The ideal employee of the future may need to be able to work well with both people and machines; to "think human" as well as to think computationally.

Cabinet Office minister Matthew Hancock, who is increasingly influential in overseeing tech policy across government, is one of life's Apple Watch wearers. But even he argues that "soft skills" such as relating to other people will always be highly prized. "Human skills will become more important, as technology is able to replicate things that can be done automatically," he said. "I think there's lot of evidence that that's happened already."

Research last summer from David Deming, associate professor of education and economics at the Harvard graduate school of education, certainly suggests that "thinking human" in a machine age is a surprisingly useful skill. Tracking what had happened to American jobs and wages since the 1980s, Deming found that jobs requiring both low maths skills and few interpersonal skills fared predictably badly. But so did professions requiring excellent maths and low social skills, such as actuaries, because these number-crunching jobs were easily taken over by computers

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Should your kids learn to code? | Gaby Hinsliff

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Behind the sliding glass door of Makers Academy in Shoreditch, east London, one afternoon in early October, an inhouse yoga teacher was leading a group of casually dressed young men and women in an afternoon meditation. With its ping-pong table, hammock and stash of Nerf guns, Makers looks like every digital startup cliche.

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PRE-test anxiety reducing exercises for students

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PRE-test anxiety reducing exercises for students

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Growth Mindset: Clearing up Some Common Confusions

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Growth Mindset: Clearing up Some Common Confusions

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A body of research has shown that telling children that they're smart and implying that their success depends on it fosters fixed mindsets. When these children later experience struggle, they tend to conclude that their ability is not high after all, and as a result they lose confidence, so our praise has the opposite effect of what we intended. On the other hand, praising hard work or strategies used, things that children control, has been shown to support a growth mindset.

This research was designed to learn more about one of the ways to support a growth mindset, not to identify all there is to fostering a growth mindset. When people newer to the growth mindset framework initially learn about this research, they sometimes conclude that we should simply praise children for working hard. But this is a nascent level of understanding. First, exhorting students to work hard would be an attempt to directly change behaviors without changing the underlying belief about the nature of abilities.

Second, students often haven't learned that working hard involves thinking hard, which involves reflecting on and changing our strategies so we become more and more effective learners over time, and we need to guide them to come to understand this. For example, a novice teacher who sees a student trying very hard but not making any progress may think "well, at least she's working hard, so I'll praise her effort," but if the student continues to do what she's doing, or even more of it, it's unlikely to lead to success. Instead, the teacher can coach the student to try different approaches to working, studying, and learning, so that she is thinking more deeply (i.e. mentally working harder) to become a better learner, and of course the teacher should do the same: reflect on how to adjust instruction. "It's not just about effort. You also need to learn skills that let you use your brain in a smarter way. . . to get better at something." ( Yeager & Dweck, 2012.)

Third, cultivating growth mindsets involves a gradual process of releasing responsibility to students for them to become more self-sufficient learners, and praise is a communications technique that tends to be more helpful earlier in that process of building agency. Later on, adults can ask students questions that prompt them to reflect, so that they're progressing down the path toward independence.

Fourth, praise and coaching are not the only, or most powerful, ways to foster growth mindsets. For example, another method is modeling lifelong learning and making it visible, which gets us to the next confusion.
Confusion #3: Growth mindset is about changing young people, not adults
Some recent criticisms paint growth mindset work as solely focused on the students and not the adults. This is a misunderstanding of what growth mindset efforts are about. In our work with educators, we encourage the adults to start with themselves. If we don't work to shift our own mindset about ourselves and our students, then we won't work to change many other important things in the system necessary to improve education. Furthermore, our efforts to foster growth mindsets in students are likely to fail because we will say and do things that reflect our fixed mindset beliefs, which students will notice. We must deeply explore mindsets within ourselves and then gradually work to develop our own growth mindsets and our habits as learners. This means authentically working to become better at what we do throughout our lives, including how we teach and how we create contexts that help students thrive, and making our learning process visible to one another and to students.

We encourage the schools we serve to train teachers early in their growth mindset efforts, involving reflections and discussions on adult beliefs and continuous improvement practices. We provide professional learning resources to help them do so. Dr. Dweck and other mindset researchers speak about the importance of fostering a growth mindset in adults and have researched the mindsets of educators, managers, leaders, and other grownups. Growth mindset research is about learning how we humans can all become more motivated and effective learners, not about how we can change students but not ourselves.
Confusion #4: All that matters is what's in the mind
Another confusion about mindset is that the only determinant of success is our mindset. But that's not the case. Context, culture, environment, and systems matter. For one thing, people's mindsets (as well as other beliefs and behaviors) are strongly shaped by the people around them. Beyond that, people's destiny is not only a function of what's within them, but also of what's around them. A lot of the early mindset research studies focused on individual's minds because they were seeking to understand how humans work. But mindset researchers recognize, research, and speak about the importance of shifting culture, context, and systems, and both researchers and practitioners actively work on that aspect of change efforts.
Confusion #5: Improvement is all about changing beliefs and not doing anything else
Related to that, another confusion we see, also reflected in recent commentaries, is that growth mindset work is solely about fostering the belief that we can improve, but not about changing the educational system or actually doing anything about that belief. Carol Dweck has talked extensively about changing learning tasks, testing practices, and grading systems. Too many tasks and teaching approaches are superficial, irrelevant, unengaging, and not learner-centered. We do need to change these tasks, the curriculum, and the pedagogy. We need to change the idea that school is about testing rather than about learning. We also need to better tackle broader issues such as childhood trauma and lack of exposure to early reading. People who dive deeper into growth mindsets learn about how important these issues are and how we might begin to address them, and a growth mindset helps them take on the challenges. As David Yeager and Gregory Walton point out:
[Mindset] interventions complement-and do not replace-traditional educational reforms. They do not teach students academic content or skills, restructure schools, or improve teacher training. Instead, they allow students to take better advantage of learning opportunities that are present in schools and tap into existing recursive processes to generate long-lasting effects . . . Indeed, [Mindset] interventions may make the effects of high-quality educational reforms such as improved instruction or curricula more apparent (Deepening our understanding over time Yeager & Walton, 2011 Growth Mindset Enables Change ). Let's Learn Together
As with anything else, the deeper we go into mindsets, the deeper our understanding becomes. Over time, more nuanced questions arise, such as about the relationship between mindset and performance, results, failure, potential, assessments, mistakes, and many other things. For example, early on a teacher who is learning about mindset may start oversimplifying mistakes as always being 'good', but this can confuse learners, as mistakes are not always something we should seek to do. With time we start distinguishing stretch mistakes, sloppy mistakes, aha-moment mistakes, and high-stakes mistakes.

Research has shown that developing a growth mindset is beneficial in a variety of contexts, from education to the workplace to interpersonal relationships to sports to health. It leads people to take on challenges they can learn from, to find more effective ways to improve, to persevere in the face of setbacks, and to make greater progress, all of which we need to further cultivate in education. Furthermore, there is evidence that its benefits are most pronounced for people who face negative stereotypes, such as underserved minorities and females in STEM, and as a result growth mindset efforts can narrow the achievement gap.

Growth mindset is a seemingly simple concept, but there is a lot of nuance to the framework and its applications. I hope that this article helps clarify common misconceptions. We invite people to continue diving deeper into this body of work and engage in explorations together. We welcome further feedback because it takes a village, or more precisely, all of us, to foster better learning.

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Growth Mindset: Clearing up Some Common Confusions

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A body of research has shown that telling children that they're smart and implying that their success depends on it fosters fixed mindsets. When these children later experience struggle, they tend to conclude that their ability is not high after all, and as a result they lose confidence, so our praise has the opposite effect of what we intended.

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The first 20 hours -- how to learn anything | Josh Kaufman | TEDxCSU

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The first 20 hours -- how to learn anything | Josh Kaufman | TEDxCSU

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The first 20 hours -- how to learn anything | Josh Kaufman | TEDxCSU

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The benefits of a bilingual brain - Mia Nacamulli

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The benefits of a good night's sleep - Shai Marcu

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Skills and Strategies | Annotating to Engage, Analyze, Connect and Create

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Skills and Strategies | Annotating to Engage, Analyze, Connect and Create

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What do your students think annotation looks like? For many, it probably begins and ends with the image of an assigned novel bristling with yellow Post-its.

But to annotate simply means to add a note to a text - whether marginalia in a book, or a comment on Facebook or YouTube. Even if they don't realize they're doing it, young people are annotating constantly as a natural way of engaging with the world.

In this post we hope to both expand their definition of what annotation can be and inspire them to experiment with new ways of doing it - in class and out.
What Does It Mean to Annotate? Expanding the Definition
An annotation is a note added to a book, drawing or any other kind of text as a comment or explanation. It is an age-old learning practice, older than books themselves, one used by medieval scribes in the very process of transcription.

For many, it is a natural extension of reading. As Sam Anderson puts it in a 2011 essay for The Times Magazine, his college habit of making notes in the margins of books "quickly began to feel, for me, like something more intense: a way to not just passively read but to fully enter a text, to collaborate with it, to mingle with an author on some kind of primary textual plane."

For teachers, it can be a technique to slow readers down, deepen their engagement and aid in comprehension and analysis, skills few need to be convinced matter in the era of the Common Core. For students, though, that exercise can sometimes feel artificial.

Yet annotation is something we all do all the time and can include everything from footnotes to criticism, graffiti to fan fiction. What is social media but spaces where people annotate texts and images, the digital margins of our daily lives?

Sam Anderson writes:

We are living increasingly in a culture of response. Twitter is basically electronic marginalia on everything in the world: jokes, sports, revolutions. The best parallel in critical writing might be online episode recaps of TV shows: a viewer rolling around in a work of art, noticing it deeply, not just (as critics too often do) resorting to distant acts of intellection. Marginalia is literature's TV recap, although even more satisfying: real-time commentary happening in the core of the thing being commented upon.

On NYTimes.com and on The Learning Network, thousands of comments, or annotations, are posted by readers daily on issues from free speech on college campuses to drone racing. All comments are moderated, and the system allows both readers and Times journalists to reply to and "recommend" them.

Annotation in academic settings is typically considered a means to an end, a basis for class discussion or points made in a final paper. But annotation can also be a kind of end in itself, or at least more than a rest stop on the way to intellectual discovery. This becomes especially true when annotation is brought into the public and collaborative space of social reading online, and students can see their classmates' comments alongside their own.

And with recent innovations in web annotation like the ability to add multimedia marginalia like that in the image at the top of this post (done by Jeremy Dean's students at St. Stephen's Episcopal School in Austin, Tex.), the process of annotation can feel more fun and engaging than dutiful.

Several years ago, the website Genius (formerly Rap Genius) was established to annotate music lyrics hosted on its platform. It's proven to be something young people happily do on their own, discussing the word choices and poetic devices used by their favorite musicians in the same way their teachers ask them to discuss great works of literature in class.

For example, hundreds of users recently contributed annotations to Kendrick Lamar's lyrics for the song "The Blacker the Berry," and over a million and a half people have viewed that annotated text. In all likelihood, most of these readers and annotators were young people of high school and college age, though it's true that the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon also added an annotation to the final couplet of the track.

Genius is now adding a growing list of nonmusical texts to its website - including many classic literary texts like the Langston Hughes poem at the top of this post - and has also developed a plugin for users to use in annotating other websites.

Ask your students how many kinds of annotation they can find - around the Web and out in the world. Then create a kind of "annotation gallery" of possibilities to inspire their own work.

For instance, here are just a few from The Times:

- The series Anatomy of a Scene invites film directors to comment on their own work. Here, Ava DuVernay narrates a sequence from "Selma":

- Crowdsourced graphics like this 2014 series of maps, " Your Biking Wisdom in Ten Words," take user annotations to create something both useful and well designed. This article explains.

- On the Learning Network, our most popular form of annotation is our weekly What's Going On in This Picture? discussion, in which hundreds of students discuss what they see in a captionless photo. A moderator from Visual Thinking Strategies engages with them live, and the "backstory" about the photo is posted several days later.

Here, for instance, is a screenshot from a recent discussion:
Why Digital Annotation, and How Do I Do It?
Digital annotation is close reading 2.0. Through the visualization of the process of highlighting and noting words, phrases and sentences, students are forced to keep their thinking and writing "close" to the text and its evidence. And, when done with others, students can create what feels like a social network for close reading - a way of working many find much more engaging than individual analog annotation.

There are a variety of tools out there that allow you to annotate digital texts collaboratively. Most of us have probably done this in Word or Google Docs. There are far fewer tools that allow you to annotate the actual web, where annotations are linked to specific text at specific web addresses like "learning.blogs.nytimes.com/".

Genius's Web Annotator is one of them. By installing Genius's browser extension, you and your students can annotate any page on the Internet, though all annotations must be public.

Diigo is another tool for annotating the web, but with a decidedly more educational focus, including the ability to annotate in private groups. Diigo has number of other tools in addition to annotation that might be attractive to students and teachers, such as an outlining tool. While student and teacher accounts at Diigo are free, their features are limited and the service is ultimately based on a subscription model.

A third option is the free web annotation tool developed by the nonprofit Hypothesis. It shares much of the same functionality as Genius and Diigo - it's predominantly a browser extension, and it too offers private groups - but unlike the other two, it is both open source and, like the web itself, based on open standards. It also has an education department focused on supporting teachers and students using the service.

#ANNOTATE the entire Internet with @Genius. Our new @Genius billboard is on Canal & Centre St. in NYC #BABYCORE pic.twitter.com/HxWqfIBse9

- Rap Genius (@RapGenius) February 9, 2015

Eight Ways to Experiment With Annotation Using The New York Times
Each of the ideas below can be done individually or collaboratively; on paper or digitally; and on their own or with other annotation strategies.

Though all of them allow an instructor to weigh in and pose questions, the teacher's role here is as co-learner in the reading process, observing and coaching student thinking on the side.
Annotation to Wrestle With and React to a Text
This is the broadest and probably most familiar form of annotation for students - the kind of conversation with a text that readers have been having as long as books have existed.

It's the marginalia Sam Anderson writes about in his essay and exhibits in " A View From the Margins," his series of audio recordings on 12 months of reading, and annotating, everything from "1Q84″ by Haruki Murakami to "Bleak House" by Charles Dickens (the latter of which, he says, inspired "my most explosive LOL in my entire year of reading").

The Learning Network has an entire lesson plan devoted to doing it the old-fashioned, analog way - but if you'd like to experiment with doing it digitally, you might look at what Sarah Gross, a high school teacher and contributor to our blog, did recently using Hypothesis with her senior class as they read the Opinion piece "What Really Keeps Women Out of Tech."

Click on the highlighted words and sentences to see how she and her students posed questions and responded to them, added personal reactions, made connections and replied to one another. You can see that it feels very much like sitting in on a class discussion. This is one of the primary benefits of collaborative annotation in the classroom: Students engage texts and one another before meeting face to face, making that meeting all the more energetic and productive.

For another example, check out how Grant Schubert, a composition teacher at Rock Valley College, prompts his students to comment on The Times's recent piece, " The Lonely Death of George Bell." As he writes, "Act like you are scribbling in the margins of your favorite book, but this time your whole class and a weirdly energetic teacher gets to read your notes."

In both examples, you'll see that an annotation need not be, and often is not, an answer. A simple question mark can flag a word or passage for discussion, for instance. Directing students to annotate in this way creates a sort of heat map for the instructor that can be used to zero in on troubling sections and subjects or initiate class discussion. And while the teacher can respond to such student annotations, a possible follow-up exercise could involve students responding to one another instead.

Here are some things students can do as they annotate - many of which we take on in greater depth in the other exercises below:

Circle unfamiliar words or references.

Mark passages with symbols like question or exclamation marks.

Highlight important lines or sections.

Connect parts of the text to other parts with arrows.

Note emotional reactions.

Post questions.

Make connections to other texts or to their own lives.

Summarize difficult concepts.

Add related images.

Add links to related information.

Note how the piece is structured, or how the author uses language in interesting ways.

React to the content over all.

Note patterns, themes and motifs.

Annotating Current Events to Add Context and Enrich Background Knowledge
To read a daily newspaper and understand reporting about continuing stories - whether the Islamic State, the 2016 presidential race, the migration crisis in Europe or racial tensions on college campuses - often requires background knowledge students don't have.

Though The Times and other news sources are increasingly publishing "explainers" that offer a bigger picture (like this one, on the Islamic State), showing students how to do this kind of glossing for themselves and one another teaches them a skill they can use for the rest of their lives. There is something very powerful about seeing students begin to imagine themselves as scholars, responsible for guiding a real audience through a text, whether their own peers or a broader intellectual community.

A 2012 Learning Network lesson plan, Easy Access: Creating Annotated Versions of News Articles, details ideas for having students try this, whether alone or in collaboration with others - although collaboratively is perhaps the better choice since they can share the burden of research.

Throughout, students can also be encouraged to practice skills like rephrasing research material appropriately and citing sources using different formatting styles.

For an example before they try it themselves, students might look at The Times's annotation of Pope Francis' September address to Congress, in which reporters with expertise in different areas explain the context of many of the pope's statements.

When they're ready, here are some of the kinds of annotations they might add:

Definitions for terms.

Dates for events or documents.

Maps or geographic references for events or locations.

Historical and other background information for events mentioned.

Statistics or demographics relevant to locations or groups.

Biographical information for key players.

Brief histories of groups or organizations mentioned.

Explainers and informative graphics.

Video clips, slide shows, photographs, charts and graphs.

Related news articles and footage.

Annotating With Multimedia
One of the most powerful aspects of writing online is the ability to include images and other multimedia elements in one's compositions. The screenshot at the very top of this post shows a powerful example from Genius.com of students composing analysis using both image and texts.

And, of course, as the front page of any day's New York Times illustrates, newspapers rely on images just as much as they do on text to draw readers in.

Ask students to read an article and add images - photos, maps, illustrations, GIFs, graphics, videos - to help bring the story to life. This is also an opportunity to teach students about rules governing use of images, and editorial tasks like captioning and attribution.

These images can simply be representative (a reference to Lincoln annotated with a photo of the 16th president, for example), but more advanced students might also think about how images themselves make arguments and serve other rhetorical purposes.

For help with this, you might try our lesson plan Making Arguments Through Art, which looks closely at the "Op-Art" found in The Times, such as this recent drawing illustrating the Op-Ed columnist Frank Bruni's October take on the Republican presidential field:

Jeb Bush is in big trouble. Ted Cruz lurks. What a chaotic, incendiary political season //t.co/M1yNZY2DN4 pic.twitter.com/DP5V4M8RyX

- NYT Opinion (@nytopinion) October 11, 2015

Students can also use their imaginations to annotate texts with their own drawings, photographs or videos in line with the relevant sources of textual inspiration. Whether completed individually or collaboratively, this exercise can result in some wonderful illustrated editions of course texts. For inspiration, have a look at Nathan Blom's Annotated Literature Projects at LaGuardia High School for the Arts.
Annotation as Argument
Students are already very familiar with this kind of annotation, even if they don't realize it. They see it every day as they click around the web. It's what Donald Trump is doing in the video above, and it's what they do when they post a review of something on Yelp or Rotten Tomatoes, comment on an opinion someone expresses on Facebook or tweet a reaction to a news or sports event or TV show.

One place students can go to see a great deal of thoughtful argument: reader comments on Times articles. Often, in fact, the comments are as interesting as the article itself.

Have them choose a topic that interests them or about which they have strong opinions, then scroll through what other commenters have appended. For instance, here one reader pushes back on ideas in a piece by the comedian and actor Aziz Ansari about acting, race and Hollywood:

Or, have students examine the Learning Network's Student Opinion feature. We post a question every school day and invite students to comment on it - and have even rounded up 301 questions that invite argument writing.

For example, we recently asked, Should High Schools Drop Football Because Too Many Players Are Getting Injured? and Quinn B. answered. As you can see, five of his fellow commenters recommended what he had to say:

Next, you might invite students to move to more formal analysis of rhetorical strategies and fallacies by having them read and annotate Times Op-Ed pieces. Framing their opinions as annotations of specific statements or facts can remind them that our arguments should be grounded in actual evidence. And allowing students to express their opinions in the margins of the web, and helping them become responsible and thoughtful as they do it, is a huge part of what it means to be literate both on online and in democratic society generally.

Students could be asked simply to respond to the reading with their thoughts, as in a dialectical reading journal, or to employ specific cultural or persuasive strategies in their rhetorical intervention. For instance, they might annotate to identify the use of logos, ethos and pathos.

Annotation can also serve as a kind of "rehearsal space" for formal writing. As your students practice "talking back" to Opinion pieces in The Times, they might consider it preparation for their own argumentative essays, perhaps to submit to our annual contest, which we'll feature again in Feb., 2016.

As with all the ideas in this post, this can be done independently or collaboratively. Done independently, students can compare their articles and discuss how different authors establish their authority or commit common fallacies. Focused on a suite of articles relating to a specific topic, students might be asked to note patterns of expression.

Another idea: Ask students to fact-check a claim made in an article. This can be especially powerful in the case of political speeches or Op-Ed pieces. Annotations should be based on related research and should evaluate the truthfulness of the original claim using predetermined criteria. Here is an example of how professional political reporters have done this at PolitiFact using the Genius annotation tool. Climatologists have also done this using Hypothesis to comment on popular news coverage of climate change.
Annotating to Make Connections
In her essay " Reading Antarctica," Kamila Shamsie writes about reading "Moby Dick" while on a boat to Antarctica - and finding herself annotating as she went:

I never annotate novels; it seems odd to think anything I might write in the margins could add to rather than detract from what is printed on the page. But from the start, the echoes between what I was reading and what I was seeing around me seemed to ask for me to take note, quite literally.

While your students might not have at hand as dramatic a parallel between their own experience and a text, annotating explicitly to make connections between what they're reading and the rest of the world can help them see why particular texts matter and are still relevant today.

We try to foster this kind of thinking on the blog in many ways - through our Text to Text series and via this activity, for example. We love when readers do it naturally, the way Sarah Gross's students connect the article on women in tech to other articles around the web, to the movie "The Imitation Game" and, as a student named Jesse Doppelt did, to their own work - a project on sexism and the TV show "The Big Bang Theory."

Here are some ways students might annotate for making these kinds of connections, via posting comments, links, images or anything else that makes each connection clear:

Parts of the text that remind you of your own life and experiences, or those of someone you know.

Parts of the text that are not at all like your own life and experiences, and why.

What you have read, seen or listened to that in some way reminds you of this topic or aspects of it.

Ways in which this same topic is explored elsewhere, or in other formats.

Events, issues, people, places or things elsewhere in the world connected to this topic or aspects of it.

Events, issues, people, places or things in history that seem connected to this topic.

Annotation as Research Skill
This exercise offers a slightly different take on what it means to annotate. Instead of having students note specific words and passages, they are, instead, simply tagging a series of texts on a particular topic in order to collect, categorize and organize them.

Direct students to find articles relating to a topic they will be researching. Some web annotation tools like Hypothesis include a tagging or bookmarking feature that can be used to organize research. For instance, a class at Washington State University Vancouver is currently collaboratively researching the topic of education policy and has tagged its work 'EduPol'.

If your students are researching, say, Shakespeare for a paper on "Hamlet," they could collect information on literary elements via tags like "setting," "tone" or on themes like "uncertainty," as shown ikn this example used in the Hypothesis guide for students.

To create a digital version of a traditional annotated bibliography from here, page-level annotations can be used to summarize the sources, and in-line annotation can further break down and begin analyzing arguments. Using tagging and annotation in this way, teachers can follow along and engage students in their research processes.
Annotating History
Invite students to annotate archival news reports about a major historical event you are studying. You might use our On This Day feature to find interesting front-page news, from the moon landing to the sinking of the Titanic, or use Times Machine to page through copies of The Times from 1851 to 1980 as they originally appeared.

Here, for example, is how students in Mark Sample's Davidson College edX course on "Electronic Literature" revisited Robert Coover's 1992 essay on hypertext in The New York Times Review of Books, using Hypothesis.

Some questions students might consider as they annotate:

How is this report, written at the time of the event, different from the historical perspective about the event as explained in textbooks, encyclopedias and elsewhere?

How is the contemporary coverage of the event different from how we understand this event today in general?

What is interesting about the style, language or structure of this report? What does it tell you about its time and place?

For more ideas about bringing the past and present together through newspaper archives, visit our lesson plans for the 100th anniversaries of the sinking of the Titanic and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, or see our 2014-15 series Throwback Thursday.
Free Annotation
After students have practiced digital annotation of various kinds alone and in groups and become comfortable with the way a particular platform like Hypothesis works, set them free to annotate whatever they like.

For instance, you can assign them to roam through The New York Times, or any other newspaper, as part of an inquiry project, adding comments on the things that interest them. And you can follow their work as they go. If you are using Hypothesis, each user's annotations are streamed on their public "My Annotations" page, and teachers can monitor student work like a portfolio rather than on individual texts if so desired. (You can click on a user name attached to an annotation or search the Hypothesis stream for a user name to locate this page. Here, for instance, is Jeremy Dean's, and you can see he's been annotating everything from a Times article on the new Quentin Tarantino movie to a recent Supreme Court decision.)

Many of the exercises above presume that students are annotating together on a shared course text. But the nature of web annotation is that we can see the notes of others even if we are not reading the same text. In this way, we can attend to annotations as texts themselves. Like scrolling through a friend's Facebook page or Twitter feed, seeing someone else navigate the world through annotation can be compelling and edifying.

How do your students annotate? What experiments have you tried? Annotate this piece yourself by posting a comment.
Jeremy Dean has taught English at both the college and high school levels. He started the education initiative at Genius and is the current director of education at Hypothesis.
The authors of this post will be part of a panel presenting on " Annotating the World: Digital Tools for Close-Reading Nonfiction" at the N.C.T.E. convention on Nov. 20.

Update: Here are the slides from our presentation, with work from The Learning Network, Genius, Hypothesis, Vocabulary.com, and Sarah Gross, one of the teachers whose work is featured in this post.

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Skills and Strategies | Annotating to Engage, Analyze, Connect and Create

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Annotation is not just a classroom exercise, but something we all do all the time. With these ideas we hope to expand students' notions of what annotation can be and inspire them to experiment with new ways of doing it - in class and out.

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Active Learning Is Not Our Enemy: A Response to Molly Worthen

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If the social media response I have observed is any indication, then it is fair to say that Professor Molly Worthen's Op-Ed in Sunday's New York Times ("Lecture Me. Really.") has been a bit polarizing among college instructors. In brief, Worthen valorizes the lecture as the engine for student learning in humanities courses (particularly those...

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BEFORE the semester began earlier this fall, I went to check out the classroom where I would be teaching an introductory American history course. Like most classrooms at my university, this one featured lots of helpful gadgets: a computer console linked to an audiovisual system, a projector screen that deploys at the touch of a button and USB ports galore. But one thing was missing. The piece of technology that I really needed is centuries old: a simple wooden lectern to hold my lecture notes. I managed to obtain one, but it took a week of emails and phone calls.

Perhaps my request was unusual. Isn't the old-fashioned lecture on the way out? A 2014 study showed that test scores in science and math courses improved after professors replaced lecture time with "active learning" methods like group work - prompting Eric Mazur, a Harvard physicist who has long campaigned against the lecture format, to declare that "it's almost unethical to be lecturing." Maryellen Weimer, a higher-education blogger, wrote: "If deep understanding is the objective, then the learner had best get out there and play the game."

In many quarters, the active learning craze is only the latest development in a long tradition of complaining about boring professors, flavored with a dash of that other great American pastime, populist resentment of experts. But there is an ominous note in the most recent chorus of calls to replace the "sage on the stage" with student-led discussion. These criticisms intersect with a broader crisis of confidence in the humanities. They are an attempt to further assimilate history, philosophy, literature and their sister disciplines to the goals and methods of the hard sciences - fields whose stars are rising in the eyes of administrators, politicians and higher-education entrepreneurs.

In the humanities, there are sound reasons for sticking with the traditional model of the large lecture course combined with small weekly discussion sections. Lectures are essential for teaching the humanities' most basic skills: comprehension and reasoning, skills whose value extends beyond the classroom to the essential demands of working life and citizenship.

Today's vogue for active learning is nothing new. In 1852, John Henry Newman wrote in "The Idea of a University" that true learning "consists, not merely in the passive reception into the mind of a number of ideas hitherto unknown to it, but in the mind's energetic and simultaneous action upon and towards and among those new ideas." The lecture course, too, has always had skeptics. In his 1869 inaugural address as president of Harvard University, Charles Eliot warned that "the lecturer pumps laboriously into sieves. The water may be wholesome, but it runs through. A mind must work to grow."

Eliot was a chemist, so perhaps we should take his criticisms with a grain of salt. In the humanities, a good lecture class does just what Newman said: It keeps students' minds in energetic and simultaneous action. And it teaches a rare skill in our smartphone-app-addled culture: the art of attention, the crucial first step in the "critical thinking" that educational theorists prize.

Those who want to abolish the lecture course do not understand what a lecture is. A lecture is not the declamation of an encyclopedia article. In the humanities, a lecture "places a premium on the connections between individual facts," Monessa Cummins, the chairwoman of the classics department and a popular lecturer at Grinnell College, told me. "It is not a recitation of facts, but the building of an argument."

Absorbing a long, complex argument is hard work, requiring students to synthesize, organize and react as they listen. In our time, when any reading assignment longer than a Facebook post seems ponderous, students have little experience doing this. Some research suggests that minority and low-income students struggle even more. But if we abandon the lecture format because students may find it difficult, we do them a disservice. Moreover, we capitulate to the worst features of the customer-service mentality that has seeped into the university from the business world. The solution, instead, is to teach those students how to gain all a great lecture course has to give them.

When Kjirsten Severson first began teaching philosophy at Clackamas Community College in Oregon, she realized that she needed to teach her students how to listen. "Where I needed to start was by teaching them how to create space in their inner world, so they could take on this argument on a clean canvas," she told me. She assigns an excerpt from Rebecca Shafir's "The Zen of Listening" to help students learn to clear their minds and focus. This ability to concentrate is not just a study skill. As Dr. Cummins put it, "Can they listen to a political candidate with an analytical ear? Can they go and listen to their minister with an analytical ear? Can they listen to one another? One of the things a lecture does is build that habit."

Listening continuously and taking notes for an hour is an unusual cognitive experience for most young people. Professors should embrace - and even advertise - lecture courses as an exercise in mindfulness and attention building, a mental workout that counteracts the junk food of nonstop social media. More and more of my colleagues are banning the use of laptops in their classrooms. They say that despite initial grumbling, students usually praise the policy by the end of the semester. "I think the students value a break from their multitasking lives," Andrew Delbanco, a professor of American Studies at Columbia University and an award-winning teacher, told me. "The classroom is an unusual space for them to be in: Here's a person talking about complicated ideas and challenging books and trying not to dumb them down, not playing for laughs, requiring 60 minutes of focused attention."

Holding their attention is not easy. I lecture from detailed notes, which I rehearse before each class until I know the script well enough to riff when inspiration strikes. I pace around, wave my arms, and call out questions to which I expect an answer. When the hour is done, I'm hot and sweaty. A good lecturer is "someone who conveys that there's something at stake in what you're talking about," Dr. Delbanco said. Or as Ms. Severson told me, "I'm a pretty shy person, but when I lecture, there's a certain charisma. This stuff matters to me - it saved my life."

Good lecturers communicate the emotional vitality of the intellectual endeavor ("the way she lectured always made you make connections to your own life," wrote one of Ms. Severson's students in an online review). But we also must persuade students to value that aspect of a lecture course often regarded as drudgery: note-taking. Note-taking is important partly for the record it creates, but let's be honest. Students forget most of the facts we teach them not long after the final exam, if not sooner. The real power of good notes lies in how they shape the mind.

"Note-taking should be just as eloquent as speaking," said Medora Ahern, a recent graduate of New Saint Andrews College in Idaho. I tracked her down after a visit there persuaded me that this tiny Christian college has preserved some of the best features of a traditional liberal arts education. She told me how learning to take attentive, analytical notes helped her succeed in debates with her classmates. "Debate is really all about note-taking, dissecting your opponent's idea, reducing it into a single sentence. There's something about the brevity of notes, putting an idea into a smaller space, that allows you psychologically to overcome that idea."

Technology can be a saboteur. Studies suggest that taking notes by hand helps students master material better than typing notes on a laptop, probably because most find it impossible to take verbatim notes with pen and paper. Verbatim transcription is never the goal: Students should synthesize as they listen.

This is not a "passive" learning experience, and it cannot be replicated by asking students to watch videotaped lectures online: the temptations of the Internet, the safeguard of the rewind button and the comforts of the dorm-room sofa are deadly to the attention span. But note-taking is not a skill professors can take for granted. We must teach it. Dr. Cummins assigns one student in each day's class the task of not only taking notes, but also presenting a critique of her argument at the next class meeting.

This kind of work prepares students to succeed in the class format that so many educators, parents and students fetishize: the small seminar discussion. A lecture course teaches students that listening is not the same thing as thinking about what you plan to say next - and that critical thinking depends on mastery of facts, not knee-jerk opinions. "We don't want to pretend that all we have to do is prod the student and the truth will come out," Dr. Delbanco told me.

Such words of caution are deeply unfashionable. But humanists have been beating back calls to update our methods, to follow the lead of the sciences, for a very long time. One hundred and sixty years ago, when education reformers proposed training students only in the sciences or "temporal callings," John Henry Newman defended the humanities as a repository of moral and cultural knowledge, but also as crucial disciplines for teaching a student how to think, "to disentangle a skein of thought, to detect what is sophistical, and to discard what is irrelevant." Such a student learns "when to speak and when to be silent," Newman wrote. "He is able to converse, he is able to listen."

Molly Worthen is the author, most recently, of "Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism," an assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a contributing opinion writer.
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BEFORE the semester began earlier this fall, I went to check out the classroom where I would be teaching an introductory American history course. Like most classrooms at my university, this one featured lots of helpful gadgets: a computer console linked to an audiovisual system, a projector screen that deploys at the touch of a button and USB ports galore.