P.O.W.E.R. & Thriving: Formulas for Success

We’ve been studying various ways to explain growth - leaning on traditional models of student development like Perry and Kohlberg. We also examined racial identity development models (see beverly Daniel Tatum's "Talking About Race, Learning about Racism"), another crucial area of growth. Movement through developmental models (ethical, moral, racial) can lead to an overall state of flourishing. 

One formula that measures how students flourish is what education professor Laura Schreiner calls the “thriving quotient.” Her formula accounts for the kind of growth we’d like students (and ourselves, as life-long learners!) to achieve. Schreiner breaks up her formula into five common sense factors: Social Connectedness, Positive Perspectives, Academic Determination, Valuing of Diverse Citizenry, and Engaged Learning.

She describes those ingredients in her essay, "The Thriving Quotient.” Social Connections speaks to fostering social capital and “soft skills” we need for collaborative work. Positive Perspective refers to positive psychology theories like Carol Dweck’s “Growth Mindset” and Angela Duckworth’s “Grit.” Academic Determination has to do goals, attitudes, and skills for growth. Value for Diverse Citizenry isn’t only about the ability to work well with different kinds of people. It’s about hope and the spirit of optimism that intergroup collaboration makes a difference. Engaged Learning accounts for actively participating in one’s learning.

Teaching Text Types: Music & Micro-Lecture on Masculinity

One of the most significant lessons I learned from the San Diego Area Writing Project (SDAWP) is the notion of simultaneously teaching two or three different text types about similar topic or theme. What a great way to analyze writing strategies and purposes by comparing and contrasting two compositions.

By text types, I mean one of three categories: narrative, informative, and argumentative, types cribbed from the Common Core. While I'm aware of (and in agreement with) certain criticisms of Common Core, I appreciate the simplicity of three categories. The text book I've used in the past lists nine text types, making the lesson more about memorizing terms than about applying strategies. Three is easier to handle. 

Last week, I asked students to consider two different compositions, an old school hip hop music video and a Youtube "micro-lecture." Both address language, bullying, and masculinity, but one leans more heavily on narrative, the other on informative. 

Attitude of Gratitude #14: Five Things I've Learned

Today's question asks me to reflect on five lessons I've learned during my teaching career, lessons that make me feel grateful. The biggest challenge this prompt poses is which five! So, in the order they pop up in my head, the list: 

Growth Mindset: Carol Dweck's book Mindset: The New Psychology Success of  has had a huge impact on my teaching. It takes time, but I see that nurturing a growth mindset encourages students to celebrate mistakes, see them as opportunities for growth rather than as proof of their inadequacy. Assignments feel, I hope, like experiments to improve decision making skills rather than measuring a static, immutable trait. 

Blogging. There is no substitute for writing to a real audience. Learning to assign blogs  compelled me to think of relevant, meaningful writing assignments that help students develop and publish their ideas. I get better at developing these assignments semester-by-semester. And the quality of students' writing (and their feelings about writing) improve accordingly.

Mutt Genres: A "mutt genre" is the kind of writing that only exists in first-year college composition courses, formulaic writing  no one ever reads (or writes!) outside of a classroom. Certainly, the notion behind teaching mutt genres is laudable: teaching form, structure, and rhetorical patterns is important. But we run the risk of training students that there is a single, right way to produce text, one that doesn't exist in the "real world." 

Recognizing the risk of  mutt genre assignments pushes me to shift focus. When I'm at my best, my assignments compel students to make intentional choices based on their purpose, audience, and their own voice - not on strict adherence to a generic formula.  I wrote about mutt genres in this post, and I hope to keep moving away from highly standardized, decontextualized prompts to to those that challenge students to solve problems real writers encounter. 

On Course: This is one of the first professional development programs I ever attended, and the lessons I learned at On Course reverberate today. Two concepts that  stuck with me are the difference between teaching and learning and  the difference between a victim and a creator mentalities. 

Critical Thinking Community: This was also one of the first professional development programs I attended, and just like On Course's lesson, what I learned from the Critical Thinking Community remains vitally important to my teaching. Being able to identify the elements of thinking  and the standards of reasoning helps me make lessons relevant and meaningful beyond my subject area. 

Naming the elements and standards helps students claim and strengthen their application of those concepts. I don't know about you, but I never took a class on what constitutes thinking and how to judge my reasoning. Not in psychology classes. Not in my education classes. Not even in when I took philosophy. I learned about cognition but not anything directly applied to improving my thinking. 

Their publication, Miniature Guide to Critical Thinking: Concepts and Tools, is indispensable. 

All these lesson improve my approach to designing learning experiences. That's for sure. The other through-line is that these lessons also apply to me. I have to maintain a growth mindset to stave off insecurities and fear of failure - and to recognize that it takes effort, not some innate talent, to be a good teacher. Blogging keeps me writing. I have to practice what I preach, and  remain will to feel the burn of finding and sharing my own voice. And so on. 

Big ups to those thinkers, writers, and organizations that make me a better designer of learning experiences. And to the folks who run the professional development programs where I work. 

Attitude of Gratitude #11: A Most Important Lesson

I read the gratitude blog challenge this morning over a cup of coffee. I have a new morning routine, thanks to the folks at TeachThought. I get up a little bit earlier, get myself together as usual but also reserve a twenty minute chunk of time to eyeball the prompt and read other Reflective Teachers' posts for inspiration. This sets the tone for my day, and more often than not, the blog questions require lots of marination time. 

But today's question, "What is the most important lesson you want to teach your students?" required much less noodling. The first thing that popped into my mind was I want them to be problem solvers, to have the kind of reasoning skills to help them face the array of problems they will (and already!) encounter. And now, before going to bed, I'll pick up the thread I began following this morning, book ending my day with reflection. 

As an English teacher, I want students to figure out how to best express themselves in written form, using the conceptual knowledge of rhetoric and composition to guide their decision making process. This problem solving isn't about memorization, which has surprised most of the scholars in my class. Many enter my classes believing that success in English is a matter of mastering rote, mechanistic formulas, sans an authentic voice.


That's not the kind of scholarship I hope to nurture.

I work hard to imagine, devise, and create meaningful learning experiences that compel student to go beyond demonstrating they can define writing concepts. I want them to apply concepts to solve problems that real writers face. So my writing prompts, when I'm at my best, don't ask students to compose the standard five paragraph essay, those decontextualized writing situations that exist nowhere else but in a classroom. 

So the structure or shape of the assignments students complete have less to do with a formula. Instead, I hope that what they've written demonstrates they've attempted to solve problems the way real writers do, by thinking through the lens of our discipline, and by asking the kinds of questions real writers struggle with as they compose. Who is my audience? What is my purpose? What moves do I need to make to appeal to y readers' hearts and minds? What must I do to appear credible? And how do I maintain my voice throughout the process of crafting my composition? 

I hope that those kinds of questions find a home in students brains, becoming habits of the mind they can hone and practice long after they leave our classroom. 

Yet these questions don't necessarily have a right or wrong answer or a black-and-white solution. Solutions fall along a range between unreasonable and highly reasonable approaches. Lots of contingencies will condition their choices. And whatever approach selected should be just that: deliberately selected. 

I'm not avoiding the idea of a "correct" or "right" answer. Accuracy is an important intellectual standard. But accuracy is only one of many standards, including clarity, relevance, significance, depth, and breadth (I'm basically rehearsing the intellectual standards promoted the Critical Thinking Community, one my major teaching inspirations I wrote about earlier). Indeed, how can we even judge if something is accurate if the expression isn't  sufficiently clear? And an accurate statement, if irrelevant to the issue at hand, isn't good reasoning. 

I'm getting a little bit ranty here. So let me end by saying I want students to leave my class with sets of questions to help them approach the dilemmas they will (and currently!) face, problems we all encounter. Hooray for problem-solvers! 

Attitude of Gratitude #7: Inspirational Lessons

I'm one of those "professional development junkies," happy to comply with professional development regulations. I show up at practically everything. The snacks don't hurt, either. And, after listening to so many PD horror stories from colleagues from other schools and grade levels, I know I'm luck that wherever I've taught, they've had great PD offerings. 

So answering today's challenge, "What new learning has inspired you in your career?" means having to select from so many wonderful professional development activities I've attended.  Rather than pick one, I'll share what I've read for (or as a result of) PD programs: 

Growth Mindset: Since I first read excerpts from Carol Dweck's Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, I was hooked. It's helped me tremendously to motivate and encourage students who believe they don't have the skill or talent to succeed. At least once a week, I bump into an article or blog post that references Dweck's theory that it's more about practice than talent. And I've slowly found ways encourage that kind of thinking in my classes. Slowly. 

Digitally Enhanced Teaching: It's taken be several years of a gradual growth curve to feel comfortable with technology. The most important points along that curve were realizing the difference between adding a cool shiny digital layer to an assignment vs. leveraging technology to actually promotes and enhances the writing process. The two catalysts?  Troy Hicks' Crafting Digital Writing and Jose Antonio Bowen's Teaching Naked. The first got me to revise the way I use blogging in the classroom. The second helped me to rethink my views on social media and cell phones. I don't fully implement all their suggestions (wish I could!), but by degree, I'm getting more and more naked. 

Critical Thinking: Many years ago, the dean of our college introduced me to Linda Elder and Richard Paul's Critical Thinking Community, formerly known as the Foundation for Critical Thinking. The website it full of resources regarding the elements of thinking and standards we can use to evaluate our reasoning - for all grade levels. I've been incorporating their way of thinking about reasoning into all my classes, little by little. I refer to their starter booklet The Miniature Guide to Critical Thinking practically every week. Love. It.  

One thing these inspirations have in common is that i didn't "fully convert" overnight. The "aha moments" were intense, for sure. But It took a semester or two of marinating over their ideas, experimenting with one or two easy, doable changes at a time. Some mindsets and practices were easy to immediately modify for my setting. Others took longer to digest and modify, for instance, allowing students to keep their cell phones on their desk.  

A big take-away for me is I don't have to change all at once. When I decide to follow an inspiration, I can be selective. I can take my time, deliberating on what changes might work. After implementing changes, I can reflect on what students learned to make thoughtful, relevant revisions. 

Big ups to my workplace and the San Diego Writing Project for offering these meaningful,useful learning opportunities. Their gifts continue to shape my teaching philosophy and practice.