Sense and Sensation

A Historical Perspective In America, the purpose of education has rarely been made explicit.  Left entirely out of the US Constitution, provisions for schools were relegated to the states, only some of which took up the cause in the country’s earliest years.  Only recently have we begun to organize as a nation (for better or for worse), but even with these efforts under way, the discourse about the purpose of our education remains incoherent; luminaries lob volleys back and forth in the media, swinging between arguments like a pendulum.  The result is a system that competes with itself to define itself.  And students--not to mention teachers, who are challenged with creatively executing the work on the ground--end up caught in an uncertain limbo, attacked on all sides for failing to succeed at something that we have yet failed to define. But a historical look at America’s legislative and judicial relationship with education provides some help....

Moonshot Thinking At SXSW this past spring, a Googler gave a presentation about what Google calls Moonshot Thinking, the kind of no-holds-barred, imaginative, off-the-wall, visionquest thinking that solves problems ten times more effectively than existing solutions do.  This kind of thinking was what spawned the Google[x] office, a home inside Google for pursuing radical ideas, like self-driving cars, email accounts with virtually unlimited space, and more.  (The “x” in Google [x] is for ten--as in improving what’s out there by a factor of ten.)  The man speaking at SXSW was Astro Teller , who oversees Google[x], and goes by the title “Captain of Moonshots.” The session was an inspiration session, which means there wasn’t much in the line of content.  It meant to inspire with big ideas, but if you follow what’s going on in the tech world, most of it was familiar.  Despite these shortcomings, it did plant the expression “moonshot thinking” in my head, ...

We are on the cusp of a golden age of education.   The inner workings of the mind have been physically hidden for most of human history.  For millennia, our insights into these workings have come from artists and philosophers, whose reflections have opened up vast areas of study.  But now, in the last 20-30 years, cognitive scientists and neuroscientists have furthered our understanding, gaining a more literal "in-sight" into the mind’s inner workings, and through this, they have just begun to test, measure, and expand the work of the artists and philosophers before them. The information we are learning now is flooding what we know about learning itself. And it has reached a critical mass.  Absent this information, teaching has been an act of intuition and adaptation; it has been the work of teaching artists .  In the emerging scientific paradigm, though, discourse has shifted towards teaching as an act directed by hard knowledge about the mechanics of...

After helping found Facebook, Chris Hughes founded Jumo, a social network built around social causes.  I subscribed to education posts from Jumo, and one day I received a newsletter that coincidentally included two related articles--one about US education and one about Finnish education--and they revealed a remarkable contrast. Admittedly, the Finland-US comparison is apples-to-oranges (and groan-inducing by now); New York City’s school system alone is larger than all of Finland’s, and the demographic differences between the two nations is profound.  But what remains remarkable here is what each article focuses on when it looks at what is working. First, the pictures: in the US, students are sedentary at their desks.  In Finland, students are outside, wrapping their arms around trees...  ...even in the cold, snowy weather!  Already, we see dramatic difference in the two approaches. And second, the first few paragraphs of each article highlight n...

It’s easy these days (and a little cheap) to rail against the old school classroom as a teacher-centric, autocratic learning environment.  We hear this often; product marketers, overzealous reformers, and technothusiasts seem to express the sentiment that old school teaching is irrelevant in a high-tech world, or that if you’re not with what’s up-and-coming, you’re out to lunch, and you certainly can’t be providing a good educational experience for kids. But 2400 years ago, the Socratic method promoted discovery through asking questions, and we’ve explored how it does, indeed, provide a rich, cognitive experience .  We continue to hold this kind of teaching in high esteem. And 100 years ago, Dewey codified the ideals of experiential education, arguing that primary experience is essential to constructing understanding.  This is good teaching; it is a model of rich encoding , of multi-sensory experience.  In fact, at over a hundred years old, it rema...

Which is best:  Inquiry-based learning?  Technology-driven classes?  Socratic discussion?  Others?  These pedagogical approaches seem to have their own disciples, each claiming the One Pedagogy To Rule Them All.  How is a teacher to know?  How understand which to use when?  And why? I used to have a "grass is always greener" feeling about this.  I wondered: could everything my colleagues are doing be better than what I'm doing?  I always admired (and still do) the fervent proselytizing different schools of thought attract.  But clarity came for me when I made the realization in the previous blog post: that our habits and dispositions directly engage different stages of the cognitive process .  When I understood that the cognitive model of attention, encoding, storage, and retrieval explains how “non-cognitive skills” influence learning in different ways, then I began to consider how it might similarly cast our differe...

How a large-scale digital analysis of teacher comments led to a new understanding of why some people excel, and how we can use this information to shape educational environments and close gaps in student preparation. What are the habits and dispositions associated with success in school?  What behaviors and character traits lead to growth and development?  And how do these dispositions, these “non-cognitive skills,” relate to the science of learning--how do they inform, overlap with, or shape the cognitive functions of attention, encoding, storage, and retrieval? In the end, are habits and beliefs more important than the mechanics of the mind?  Or are the mechanics what drive our character? These questions lay at the heart of a task force I led that set out to address gaps in student preparation as they entered our school.  Researching these questions, however, researching character and performance, is tricky, because behaviors and character traits are not ...

On its own, cognitive science is helpful for understanding how the mind works; it's only useful, though, if we can apply this understanding to facilitate better learning. So how is the cognitive model for learning useful for educators?  Let’s review: learning happens in four cognitive stages: Attention , Encoding , Storage ( I and II ), and Retrieval .  And from the perspective of students , we can think of these stages working like this: Attention is the filtering out of the many stimuli of the world and the focusing on the information at hand. Encoding is the brain registering this information, processing sensory experience and attaching new information to old information. Storage is the consolidation of information and its movement from working memory to long term memory. Retrieval is the act of bringing long-term memory back into mind, back in to working memory and out into our experiences, silently to ourselves or publicly to others. As educators , ...

What saves our sanity, every day, is that we can forget.  It’s good that we forget things--even though sometimes we forget more than we want to--for if we never forgot anything we ever thought or saw, we’d drown in the information overload. For teachers, all this forgetting means that even if we sustain our students’ attention, even if we help our students encode information richly, and even if we create opportunities for students to consolidate that information in their minds--they will still naturally forget things.  Like patterns in sand on the beach that wash away, so will memories. And it turns out that the rate at which we forget things has been studied. Forgetting and Remembering In the late 1800s, a psychologist named Hermann Ebbinghaus tested peoples’ memories for both meaningless and meaningful information over time, and he developed curves that showed our rate of forgetting information.  (Ebbinghaus is that guy pictured above...) We lose inf...