Sense and Sensation

When applied to education, the interdisciplinary act of teaching requires a different kind of deep knowledge and complexity. When students come from California and Korea, India and Idaho, New York and North Carolina, teachers must navigate enormous differences in academic experience and preparation.  How do we best welcome them?  How can we ensure they all have the opportunity to excel?  What makes up the essence of their shared experience?  These are questions of deep complexity—our own “wicked problems”—and they are questions no one teacher can answer.  Effective collaboration like the kind prompted by interdisciplinary work brings together disparate perspectives, moves us toward solutions, and inevitably brings us someplace new. While writing a song may not address real-world problems in the same way, it too expresses something of deep complexity—and it highlights the personal risk of collaboration. The workings of the heart and mind are moved sometim...

Image by Peter Nilsson and Brent Hale Bill Newell, co-founder of the Association of Interdisciplinary Studies and its Executive Director for over 30 years, agrees. Agreement, that is, is part of collaboration, and interdisciplinary work requires some agreeing. When describing true interdisciplinary work, Newell uses the word “interperspectival.” He says, “A discipline offers a perspective on the world: a way of evaluating knowledge. Interdisciplinary Studies draws on disciplinary perspectives and integrates their insights through construction of a more comprehensive understanding.” “There is the unfortunate presumption,” he continues, “that interdisciplinarity simply requires bringing people from different disciplines together and having them talk. Too often, the result of conversation between people with conflicting worldviews is that they agree to disagree. Or, they compromise. Interdisciplinary studies develops techniques for creating common ground that go way beyond ...

"Construction" designed by Diego Naive at the Noun Project Anyone interested in what successful collaboration looks like in a classroom might visit Deerfield’s American Studies class.  The integrated course has been team-taught by veteran teachers Frank Henry (English) and Bernie Baker (History) for over thirteen years. It’s two teachers in the same classroom with the same students for two periods in a row. They prep every class together, grade every assignment together, and even write comments on papers together; every returned essay has ink from two different pens on it. “There is no economy of time,” says Henry. “It’s not a more efficient way of teaching. But, the cost is negligible compared to what we believe students are getting out of it.”   The American Studies course began in the late ‘70s and had been taught by a string of other teachers. Frank Henry began teaching it when he arrived at Deerfield in 1982, and Baker joined when he came to Deerfield in ...

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 ...