Kids' learning ability is in their DNA

You may think you're better at reading than you are at math (or vice versa), but new research suggests you're probably equally good (or bad) at both. The reason: The genes that determine a person's ability to tackle one subject influence their aptitude at the other, accounting for about half of a person's overall ability.

The study, published this week in the journal Nature Communications, used nearly 1,500 pairs of 12-year-old twins to tease apart the effects of genetic inheritance and environmental variables on math and reading ability. Twin studies provide a clever way of assessing the balance of nature versus nurture.

"Twins are like a natural experiment," said Robert Plomin, a psychologist at Kings College London who worked on the study. Identical twins share 100 percent of their DNA and fraternal twins share 50 percent (on average), but all siblings presumably experience similar degrees of parental attentiveness, economic opportunity and so on. Different pairs of twins, in contrast, grow up in unique environments.

The researchers administered a set of math and verbal tests to the children and then compared the performance of different sets of twins. They found that the twins' scores - no matter if they were high or low - were twice as similar among pairs of identical twins as among pairs of fraternal twins. The results indicated that approximately half the children's math and reading ability stemmed from their genetic makeup. A complementary analysis of unrelated kids corroborated this conclusion - strangers with equivalent academic abilities shared genetic similarities.

What's more, the genes responsible for math and reading ability appear to be numerous and interconnected, not specifically targeted toward one set of skills. These so-called "generalist genes" act in concert to determine a child's aptitude across multiple disciplines.
"If you found genes for reading," Plomin said, "you have over a 50 percent chance that those same genes would influence math."  That's not to say specialized brain circuits don't exist for different tasks, said Timothy Bates, a psychologist at the University of Edinburgh who was not involved in Tuesday's study.

"If those 'squiggles on a page' the young child encounters are math or prose, different brain systems, with different genes, are involved in learning to decode them," he said. The new study just illustrates that these genes build on a more general foundation of learning ability, he said.

The finding that one's propensities for math and reading go hand in hand may come as a surprise to many, but it shouldn't. People often feel that they possess skills in only one area simply because they perform slightly worse in the other, Plomin said. But it's all relative.  "You might think you're a little less good at math, but compared to everybody in the world, you're pretty good at math," he said.

That's great news for those who came out on top of the genetic lottery, but what about everyone else?
"We don't want to pit nature vs. nurture," Plomin said. "But for parents who still think kids are a blob of clay that you mold to be what you want them to be, I hope this data - and there's tons of other data like this - will convince people to recognize and respect individual differences that are genetically driven."

He sees parallels to obesity: People can no more control a genetic predisposition that causes them to struggle with arithmetic than they can control an inherited tendency to put on pounds. That doesn't mean nothing can be done to bring those students up to par - it just might take more effort. Plomin suggests individually tailored educational approaches could help, in which students could learn at different rates using different techniques, potentially assisted by the growing role of technology in the classroom. Finland consistently dominates international education rankings, and Plomin points to its strategy as a good example.

Finland has decided to do "whatever it takes" to bring every child up to a minimum level of literacy and numeracy needed to survive in the modern world. In practice, this has meant reducing class sizes, trying alternative learning approaches, and spending hours outside of class with any student who needs it.

Plomin also points out that genes don't predetermine performance. Appetite is just as important as aptitude, he said. "The brilliant mathematician - that's all they do for decades, they just think math and work on math," Plomin said. "It's not like it comes to them with a flash of inspiration. It's really a long, long process of thinking about these things."

The study results show that attitudes about learning are out of date and need to change, Bates said.
"Just as we no longer blame mothers for schizophrenia, we should be humble when blaming schools and parents for not every child learning as quickly as we'd desire," he said. "The implications, I think, are that children really do differ at very deep levels in how easily they learn."

Free Play is the BEST for Learning

  

A recent study shows that the more time children spend in structured, parent-guided activities, the worse their ability to work productively towards self-directed goals. 

The nationwide Primary School Leaving Examinations (PSLE) had just ended and these kids really deserved a good break from the studying routine. They ought to be given the autonomy to play and relax in the coming school holidays before they face their next hurdle in secondary school. For the next three long months, they can explore their neighbourhoods and discover the mysteries, treasures, and dramas they have to offer. This childhood idyll will hold true for some children, but for other kids, the coming of the holidays signals little more than a seasonal shift from one set of scheduled, adult-supervised lessons and activities to another.

Unscheduled, unsupervised, playtime is one of the most valuable educational opportunities we give our children. It is fertile ground; the place where children strengthen social bonds, build emotional maturity, develop cognitive skills, and shore up their physical health. The value of free play,  daydreaming, risk-taking, and independent discovery are important activities in the development of children’s executive functioning.

Executive function is a broad term for cognitive skills such as organization, long-term planning, self-regulation, task initiation, and the ability to switch between activities. It is a vital part of school preparedness and has long been accepted as a powerful predictor of academic performance and other positive life outcomes such as health and wealth. The focus of this study is “self-directed executive function,” or the ability to generate personal goals and determine how to achieve them on a practical level. The power of self-direction is an underrated and invaluable skill that allows students to act productively in order to achieve their own goals. Children who engage in more free play have more highly developed self-directed executive function.

The authors studied the schedules and play habits of 70 six-year-old children, measuring how much time each of them spent in “less structured,” spontaneous activities such as imaginative play and self-selected reading and “structured” activities organized and supervised by adults, such as lessons, sports practice, community service and homework. They found that children who engage in more free play have more highly developed self-directed executive function. The opposite was also true: The more time kids spent in structured activities, the worse their sense of self-directed control. It’s worth noting that when classifying activities as “less structured” or “structured,” the authors deemed all child-initiated activities as “less-structured,” while all adult-led activities were “structured.”

All of this is in keeping with the findings of Boston College psychology professor Peter Gray, who studies the benefits of play in human development. In his book Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life, he elaborates on how play supports the development of executive function, and particularly self-directed control:

Free play is nature’s means of teaching children that they are not helpless. In play, away from adults, children really do have control and can practice asserting it. In free play, children learn to make their own decisions, solve their own problems, create and abide by rules, and get along with others as equals rather than as obedient or rebellious subordinates.

When we reduce the amount of free playtime in preschools and kindergartens, our children stand to lose more than an opportunity to play house and cops and robbers. Some elementary programs recognize the importance of play and protect its role in preschool and kindergarten.

Montessori schools and Tools of the Mind curricula are designed to capitalize on the benefits of self-directed free play and student-initiated activities. Tools of the Mind programs, for example, place even more importance on developing executive function than on academic skills. In their terminology, “self-regulation” is the key to success both in school and in life:

Kindergarten teachers rank self-regulation as the most important competency for school readiness; at the same time, these teachers report that many of their students come to school with low levels of self-regulation. There is evidence that early self-regulation levels have a stronger association with school readiness than do IQ or entry-level reading or math skills, and they are closely associated with later academic achievement. 

This is not news to most teachers, who, when tasked with educating increasingly crowded classrooms, hope and pray for students with well-developed executive function. The ability to self-direct can spell the difference between an independent student, who can be relied upon to get her work done while chaos reigns around her, and a dependent, aimless student, who is distracted by his classmates and must be guided from one task to the next.

Parents, if you really want to give your kid a head start in the coming school year, relinquish some of that time you have earmarked for lessons or sports camp and let your children play. That’s it. Just play. Grant them time free from your ulterior motives and carefully planned educational outcomes. Let them have dominion over their imaginary kingdoms while their evil dragons, white wizards, marauding armies, and grand battles for supremacy unfurl according to their whims and wills.

This is taken from an article written by Jessica Lahey, a correspondent for The Atlantic and a former English, Latin, and writing teacher. She writes about education and parenting for The New York Times and on her site, Coming of Age in the Middle, and is the author of the forthcoming book The Gift of Failure: How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed.

Educating Global Problem Solvers

What are the biggest problems in the world?

A humane educator once poses that question to his students and they mention war, poverty, climate change, and more. About a year ago, a group of Connecticut middle school students produced such a list. When they were asked whether they could image us solving these problems, only a handful out of the 45 students responded positively.

This humane educator who teaches about pressing global challenges and offers students the tools to become "solutionaries" for a more just and sustainable world has never encountered so much hopelessness in a middle school classroom, not even in the most underserved schools in the most disenfranchised communities.

Fortunately, he was able to turn their hopelessness around by leading them through a visualization. He asked them to close their eyes and imagine themselves as very old and approaching the end of their lives. He then described a very different world, one in which we'd solved our biggest problems. Then he asked them to imagine a child approaching them and asking what they had done to help bring about this better world, and he invited them to answer that child. With their eyes still closed, he again asked if they could imagine us solving our problems, and this time only a few did not raise their hands.

The educator felt relieved that it didn't take much to shift these students' sense of hope and efficacy, but the experience reinforced his belief that our education system needs to shift to ensure that we prepare our students to meet their future.

Given the enormous challenges we face, and the dire consequences of inaction, we educators owe it to our students to make certain they graduate knowledgeable, prepared, and empowered to participate in the necessary tasks of transforming destructive and unjust systems in production, agriculture, energy, transportation, and more into healthy systems through whatever careers they ultimately pursue.

What's ironic about the Connecticut children's initial lack of hope is that, despite the potential calamities we face, we're actually living in less violent, less discriminatory, and less cruel times than ever before in recorded human history. Add to that our capacity to communicate and collaborate with people across the globe and a vast, growing body of knowledge available on handheld computers, and there is every reason for our children to feel hopeful and enthusiastic. We've never been better positioned to solve our problems, and our students need to know that each one has an important role to play in bringing about a more just, sustainable, and humane world before it is too late. So it's up to us to provide an education that enables them to be the critical thinkers, creative innovators, and collegial collaborators.

How can we do this? Here are two ideas.

1. True Price

True Price is a humane education activity in which students analyze an everyday item, such as an article of clothing, an electronic device, a food, etc., and ask the following questions:

1. What are its effects, both positive and negative, on you as an individual consumer, on other people, on animals, and on the environment?
2. What systems support, promote, and perpetuate it?
3. What alternatives do more good and less harm, and if no alternative exists, what systems would need to change to make alternatives ubiquitous?

True Price is flexibility. It can fit into the core subjects of language arts, science, math, and social studies, as well as foreign language, art, economics, and more. It can be done in a single class, as a homework assignment, as a project, or through an elective. In the process of answering the questions above, students become better critical and creative thinkers, more conscientious choice makers, and more motivated change makers. The activity can also lead to projects that promote collaboration and problem solving.

A few years ago, the educator did a presentation at a high school on the True Price activity with a conventional cotton t-shirt made in China. While they couldn't know much about that specific t-shirt, there's a lot they do know about conventional cotton production: it uses large amounts of pesticides; child slaves work in cotton fields in Asia; sweatshop conditions are the norm in many factories; dyes, often dripped into the eyes of conscious rabbits in animal tests, are largely toxic; and a significant percentage of these toxins wind up in our waterways.

There are also positive effects. The production and distribution of a t-shirt employs many people, and its wearer is able to buy it at a reasonable price, but when asked for alternatives that do more good and less harm, students realized that we could, and should, do better. After the talk, one of the inductees exclaimed, "We should have been learning this since kindergarten!" She understood that without knowledge about unhealthy and unjust systems, we cannot change them.

2. Solutionary Teams

Debate teams are commonplace in high schools, and students learn excellent critical thinking, speaking, and persuasion skills through them. In debate, students are typically assigned one side or the other of a fabricated either/or question. Imagine, instead, solutionary teams where students work together to come up with innovative and cost-effective solutions to actual problems, whether in their own school, their community, their nation, or the world.

Youth yearn for meaningful education. Grateful letters were received after humane education presentations and courses were done. As one eighth grader wrote, "Spending that week in the course was the most inspiring five days of my life so far. It had made me realize how much just one person can do to help the world."

While this letter sounds positive, it does not speak well for the education system at large. A week-long course with a humane educator shouldn't be the most inspiring five days of any teenager's life. Her whole education should be inspiring. All of her teachers should be humane educators who infuse their curricula with relevance and meaning so that no child ever doubts his or her capacity and responsibility to contribute to a better world.

The Evolution of Learning for Future Generations

             

Remember the Jetsons? That iconic family of the future depicted in the 1960s cartoon? They lived in a futuristic society marked by flying cars and advanced technology -- and yet, they learned in a lecture-based system with the teacher (albeit a robot one) directing the process from the front of the room.

We have always struggled to envision the future, often superimposing new technology over our current views. Though the creators of the Jetsons did not have the constraints of standardized tests, limited budgets, or even gravity, their schools closely resembled those of the 1960s -- which, in many ways, still look like those of today. The challenge of imagining the future of learning can seem daunting. However, snapshots already exist. We just need to look beyond our current classrooms to identify some of the key tenets for our learning environments of the future.

Flexible, Customized Learning

The Jetson kids' schools, Orbit High and Little Dipper, mirror many of the teacher-centric learning environments that we see today. However, given the capabilities afforded by new technologies, especially mobile devices, learning no longer needs to be fixed and structured.

The reality of flexible, customized learning environments struck me when I started taking a spin class at the gym. Upon entering the room, I discovered that every bike had been deconstructed -- the handlebars and seats had been removed from the frames. Before beginning, I had an opportunity to set up my learning environment to best fit my physical stature.

Within current classrooms, most of us ask our students to sit in the same types of seats, to use the same texts, notebooks, and technology, and to work within an environment configured primarily by the teacher. Instead of imagining learning environments that look like today's classrooms, we could think about them through the lens of a spinning studio. Students enter the room each day and then configure their space to fit their intellectual stature.

At Eanes ISD in Texas, teachers have begun rearranging their classrooms to become fluid and mobile spaces as a result of their 1:1 iPad initiative. Idea paint covers portions of walls. Chairs and desks easily move for collaborative work, and space has been carved out for quiet, reflective thinkers.




Similarly, at the Hillbrook iLab, students begin their learning with a completely empty space. Tables, desks, chairs, and even walls can be moved to create the ideal environment to support the students' learning. In the future, rather than ask learners to conform to the space, the space could be adapted to the students.

Ubiquitous, Embedded, Invisible Technology

In much the same way that students may configure their physical learning spaces, they could also design their digital ones. Elroy Jetson regularly turned to his "homework helper" to support his learning. However, he had limited access to the machine given its size -- and that it was built into the wall.

It’s hard to believe that the Jetsons were forecasting the year 2030, because in many ways, the real future is already here. Mobile devices could enable Elroy to access his academic support from anywhere at any time. Fifteen years ahead of schedule, technology has truly become ubiquitous. In fact, it is so embedded in our society that all of us carry in our pockets the ability to access information and communicate with others.

In the future, educational technology could also be invisible. As Michael Cohen wrote in The Invisible iPad:

A truly revolutionary invention should, in time, become invisible. No longer is it viewed as something special, yet its effects are far reaching.

For our students, learning will be completely supported and infused with technology. Seamlessly, tools and apps will buttress the ways in which students consume course content, create artifacts and evidence of their learning, curate objects into an overarching learning experience, and connect with others from around the world. Teachers will no longer focus on how to fit technology into their curriculum. Instead, it will become just another facet of student learning.

Ongoing Diagnostics and Feedback

While the robot teachers from the Jetsons may have effectively managed classroom antics and disseminated content, they did little to differentiate instruction based on personal connections to students.

In 2009, Elizabeth City, Richard Elmore, Sarah Fiarman, and Lee Teitel wrote Instructional Rounds in Education. Applying lessons learned from teaching hospitals, they encouraged school and district leaders to conduct rounds in much the same way as doctors check on their patients. However, in classrooms of the future, not only could administrators complete rounds to provide professional feedback to teachers, but teachers could also conduct daily rounds with their students.

Imagine if teachers ran individualized diagnostics each morning to assess changes in learning, comprehension, and even emotional well-being. Based on that interaction, plans could be adapted to align with the learning status of each student. Rather than developing their curriculum in isolation, teachers could have time during rounds for collaborating with colleagues to create customized, flexible learning plans ensuring that each student received the best possible course of action. While the robot teachers may have been efficient for disseminating content, only a human teacher can nurture essential personal connections with students.

We Can See the Future from Here

In the future, students could learn in flexible, customizable environments designed to best meet their needs and choose from a virtually unlimited quiver of tools and devices. Teachers could continually assess and adapt curriculum to best support their students. And with ubiquitous access to mobile technology, learning is no longer constrained by an arbitrary time period or even the physical dimensions of a school. In the end, we could create resource-rich, student-centric, active learning environments for our students. One thing I wouldn't want to have, though: robot teachers.

Teaching Critical Thinking in Age of Digital Credibility

By the end of 2014, more than 3 billion people will have access to the Internet, which means that they (we) have the power to ask any question at any time and get a multitude of answers within a second. The responsibility for distinguishing between accurate, credible, true information and misinformation or disinformation, however, is no longer vested in trained and vetted experts — editors, publishers, critics, librarians, professors, subject-matter specialists.

Now, the enormity, ubiquity and dubious credibility of the information available to most of the world’s population is requiring each of us to become something of an expert on figuring out when we’re being misled or lied to. Perhaps, unfortunately, for the future of life online, few teachers or parents impart to young people the always useful but now essential skills of how to question, investigate, analyze and judge that link they just got in email or the factual claim they just found through a search engine.

I’ve been writing about digital media for nearly 30 years, and over that time, I’ve been asked over and over again by readers, critics, scholars and myself: “Do these personal computers, digital networks, webs of unfiltered information, mobile attention magnets do us more good than harm — as individuals, families, communities, and societies?” I have come to believe that the answer is: “It depends on how many people know how to use these technologies to their own benefit and that of the commons.”

In the course of writing “Net Smart: How to Thrive Online,” my guide to social media literacies, I concluded that the first literacy I would teach a person entering the world of social media is that of attention — the fundamental particle of thought and communication — and the second essential fluency is what Neil Postman and Ernest Hemingway called “crap detection.”

I devoted a chapter of “Net Smart” to crap detection, I teach it to my Stanford students, I made a publicly editable syllabus available to college and high school teachers. I organized a wiki about critical thinking during a workshop by educators. When students in my social media literacies class had to do makeup work, I asked them to create a document with useful, credible resources for crap detection. These students got off to such a great start that I asked people via social media to contribute to it, and it’s still a growing compendium of crap detection tools. Anybody can suggest a resource by commenting on the document.

Which is to say that as soon as I learned that Peter Taylor was teaching a master’s program on critical and creative thinking, I sought him out. The course description makes it clear that critical thinking is transformational — the person who learns critical thinking skills is a different person from who he or she was before: “The rationale for a master’s program of study in CCT is that an explicit and sustained focus on learning and applying ideas and tools in critical thinking, creative thinking, and reflective practice allows students involved in a wide array of professions and endeavors to develop clarity and confidence to make deep changes in their learning, teaching, work, activism, research and artistry.”

Taylor models what he teaches on his blog, his tweets, the course wiki and podcasts. When we talked recently, he started out by saying: “The big challenge of the program is to get students to take themselves seriously — not to perform according to some standards of mastery of content, but to identify projects that are really important to them to advance in the program and to continue afterward.” Taylor’s students learn to use social media and other tools to reflect on their learning as they are doing it.

In a blog post, Taylor focused on a definition of reflection by M.W. Daudelin as “Reflection is the process of stepping back from an experience to ponder, carefully and persistently, its meaning to the self through the development of inferences; learning is the creation of meaning from past or current events that serves as a guide for future behaviour." In other words, reflection enables learners to get beyond just acquiring knowledge and provokes them to dive into ways of changing themselves through what and how they learn.

Skills required to take on challenges of tomorrow

The world is ever changing especially as we are entering the digital arena. As such, youngsters today need to acquire skills that can enable them to take on challenges and opportunities that we may not even imagine at present.

The following are six tips which I think our youngsters would need to take on the challenges that they are likely to face in the years and decades to come.

1. Collaboration as a Value and Skill Set

Students of today need new skills for the coming century that will make them ready to collaborate with others on a global level. Whatever they do, we can expect their work to include finding creative solutions to emerging challenges.

2. Evaluate Information Accuracy

New information is being discovered and disseminated at a phenomenal rate. It is predicted that 50 percent of the facts students are memorizing today will no longer be accurate or complete in the near future. Students need to know how to find accurate information, and how to use critical analysis for assessing the veracity or bias and the current or potential uses of new information. These are the executive functions that they need to develop and practice in the home and at school today, because without them, students will be unprepared to find, analyse, and use the information of tomorrow.

3. Tolerance Within The Community

In order for collaboration to happen within a global community, job applicants of the future will be evaluated by their ability for communication with, openness to, and tolerance for unfamiliar cultures and ideas. To foster these critical skills, today's students will need open discussions and experiences that can help them learn about and feel comfortable communicating with people of other cultures.

4. Learning Through Their Strengths

Children are born with brains that want to learn. They're also born with different strengths -- and they grow best through those strengths. One size does not fit all in assessment and instruction. The current testing system and the curriculum that it has spawned leave behind the majority of students who might not be doing their best with the linear, sequential instruction required for this kind of testing. Look ahead on the curriculum map and help promote each student's interest in the topic beforehand. Use clever "front-loading" techniques that will pique their curiosity.

5. Use Learning Beyond the Classroom

New "learning" does not become permanent memory unless there is repeated stimulation of the new memory circuits in the brain pathways. This is the "practice makes permanent" aspect of neuroplasticity where neural networks that are the most stimulated develop more dendrites, synapses, and thicker myelin for more efficient information transmission. These stronger networks are less susceptible to pruning, and they become long-term memory holders.

Students need to use what they learn repeatedly and in different, personally meaningful ways for short-term memory to become permanent knowledge that can be retrieved and used in the future.
Students today need to learn to make memories permanent through opportunities where they can "transfer" school learning to real-life situations.

6. Using Their Brain Owner's Manual

The most important manual that we can share with our youngsters today is the owner's manual to their own brains. When they understand how their brains take in and store information (PDF, 139KB), they hold the keys to successfully operating the most powerful tool they'll ever own. Once these youngsters understand that, through neuroplasticity, they can change their own brains and intelligence and then build their resilience and willingness to persevere through the challenges that they will undoubtedly face in the future.

Learning in the internet era

Would a person with good handwriting, spelling and grammar and instant recall of multiplication tables be considered a better candidate for a job than, say, one who knows how to configure a peer-to-peer network of devices, set up an organisation-wide Google calendar and find out where the most reliable sources of venture capital are, I wonder? The former set of skills are taught in schools, the latter are not.

We have a romantic attachment to skills from the past. Longhand multiplication of numbers using paper and pencil is considered a worthy intellectual achievement. Using a mobile phone to multiply is not. But to the people who invented it, longhand multiplication was just a convenient technology. I don't think they attached any other emotions to it. We do, and it is still taught as a celebration of the human intellect. The algorithms that make Google possible are not taught to children. Instead, they are told: "Google is full of junk."

In school examinations, learners must reproduce facts from memory, solve problems using their minds and paper alone. They must not talk to anyone or look at anyone else's work. They must not use any educational resources, certainly not the internet. When they complete their schooling and start a job, they are told to solve problems in groups, through meetings, using every resource they can think of. They are rewarded for solving problems this way – for not using the methods they were taught in school.

The curriculum lists things that children must learn. There is no list stating why these things are important. A child being taught the history of Vikings in England says to me: "We could have found out all that in five minutes if we ever needed to."

One teacher once tried out with her class of nine-year-olds: "There is something called electromagnetic radiation that we can't see, can you figure out what it is?" The children huddle around a few computers, talking, running around and looking for clues. In about 40 minutes, they figure out the basics of electromagnetism and start relating it to mobile signals. This is called a self-organised learning environment, a Sole. In a Sole, children work in self-organised groups of four or five clustered around an internet connected computer. They can talk, change group, move around, look at other groups' work and so on.

One of them says: "Aren't we going to do any work?"
"What do you think you were doing?" asks the teacher.
"Learning about electromagnetism."
"What's work, then?"
"Work is when you say things to us and we write them down."

Methods from centuries ago may seem romantic, but they do get obsolete and need to be replaced. The brain remembers good things from the past and creates a pleasant memory of the "good old days". It forgets the rest. It is dangerous to build a present using vague memories of the good old days.

Any standard room in a Holiday Inn is better than the best facilities in an emperor's room in the 15th century. Air conditioning, hot and cold running water, toilets that flush, TV and the internet. The middle class lives better today than any emperor ever did. Going back to horse-drawn vehicles is not the solution to our traffic problems and pollution. Beating children into submission will not solve the problem of educational disengagement.

If examinations challenge learners to solve problems the way they are solved in real life today, the educational system will change for ever. It is a small policy change that is required. Allow the use of the internet and collaboration during an examination.

If we did that to exams, the curriculum would have to be different. We would not need to emphasise facts or figures or dates. The curriculum would have to become questions that have strange and interesting answers. "Where did language come from?", "Why were the pyramids built?", "Is life on Earth sustainable?", "What is the purpose of theatre?"

Questions that engage learners in a world of unknowns. Questions that will occupy their minds through their waking hours and sometimes their dreams.

Teaching in an environment where the internet and discussion are allowed in exams would be different. The ability to find things out quickly and accurately would become the predominant skill. The ability to discriminate between alternatives, then put facts together to solve problems would be critical. That's a skill that future employers would admire immensely.

In this kind of self-organised learning, we don't need the same teachers all the time. Any teacher can cause any kind of learning to emerge. A teacher does not need to be physically present, she could be a projected, life-sized image on the wall. A "Granny Cloud" of such volunteer teachers have been operating out of the UK and a few other countries into schools in India and South America for more than five years, using a combination of the internet and admiration to provide a meaningful education for children.

We don't need to improve schools. We need to reinvent them for our times, our requirements and our future. We don't need efficient clerks to fuel an administrative machine that is no longer needed. Machines will do that for us. We need people who can think divergently, across outdated "disciplines", connecting ideas across the entire mass of humanity. We need people who can think like children.

The Future of Education

From the cell phone alarm that wakes them to the tablets used to chat with friends and complete homework, today's students are surrounded by computer technology. It is ubiquitous, and critical to daily routines. Yet few understand how technology works, even as it becomes ever more intrinsic to how we solve business and community challenges.

Today, computer science helps retailers determine how to grow sales, and it ensures that law enforcement officers are in the right places to maintain public safety. It is the foundation for the smart grid, and it fuels personalized medicine initiatives that optimize outcomes and minimize treatment side effects. Computing algorithms help organizations in all industries solve problems in new and more effective ways.

Inseparable from the Future of Education

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, by 2020 there will be 1.4 million new computer science jobs. However, between current professionals and university students, we will only have 400,000 computer scientists trained to fill those roles.

Since it can take as many as 25 years to create a computer scientist, and since computer science skills are becoming increasingly integral for jobs in all industries, this skills gap is on track to emerge as a formidable economic, security, and social justice challenge in the next few years. Teachers, schools, parents, and industry must act on multiple fronts to address student readiness, expand access to computer science curriculum and opportunities, and help foster interest in computer science to ensure that it becomes a core component of every child's education.

Tackling the Challenges

Even though computer science skills are becoming increasingly important in the competitive global economy, there are some significant roadblocks that prevent schools from incorporating computer science into the curriculum and exposing more students to the subject.

Currently, very few schools make computer science available to students. This lack of course offerings is compounded by the fact that there is a significant lack of teachers who are qualified to engage students in computer science -- those who have a deep knowledge of the topic often take jobs in industry -- and a lack of student interest in taking these advanced courses, at least partly due to a misconception that computing experts are boring, male, and always in front of their computers.

Overall student engagement numbers are low even relative to other STEM fields, and female and minority students in particular are vastly under-represented in existing computer science courses.

This stunts the expansion of computer science, and prevent students from gaining the basic technology literacy that will be imperative for future workers in all fields. Communities, schools, and industry must work together to integrate computer science in schools from a young age to help both encourage diversity in technology-related fields and ensure that students of all ethnicities, genders, and socioeconomic backgrounds have the opportunity to learn these skills.

5 Steps for Taking Action Now

While a comprehensive, long-term plan is needed to incorporate computer science education in all schools and to ensure that students are prepared for the jobs of tomorrow, there are five simple steps that teachers, schools, parents, and industry can take today to integrate computer science into classrooms and begin to overcome the above-mentioned challenges:

1. Professional Development

Teachers can register for online or in-person teacher training courses to learn how to teach a computer science curriculum or integrate basic computer science principles into existing lesson plans.

2. Career Education

Parents, teachers, and schools can educate students about the career opportunities available to those who get computer science degrees. While it could mean working for technology giants like Apple and Oracle, students can also use computer science skills to advance healthcare research or help a non-profit build a case for government funding.

3. Student Incentives

Teachers can offer students extra credit for using free online learning tools to develop basic computer science skills and create a project.

4. Mentor Programs

Industry and schools can formalize a mentorship program that will encourage and support students to learn more about computer science and develop their skills inside and outside the classroom -- via after-school programs or co-taught lessons.

5. Coding for Kids

Parents can help kids develop confidence in their problem-solving abilities and explore computer science in action in their lives and communities with age-appropriate coding apps such as Scratch for younger children or MakeGamesWithUs for high school students.

Inseparable from the Future of Our Society

Students, parents, educators, and industry all have a vested interest in better integrating computer science into the K-12 experience. Our economic stability and national security depend on a population with solid computer science skills and coding literacy. As such, the future of education must focus on making computer science an integral part of every child's education to ensure that students of all genders and backgrounds have a chance to pursue these opportunities.

Academic Teaching Doesn’t Help Kids Excel In Life

Most of our current school system revolves around academics and I think it falls miserably short of what our kids need. To be honest, I think our academic system of education is highly overrated, at best. At worst, it destroys a number of our kids.

I’m not saying that our kids shouldn’t learn to read, or do math, or develop other valuable skills. But too often, the focus of our kids’ school day is Content with a capital C, with little connection to why it matters. Instead of learning together, many of our students spend hours filling in worksheets or copying down lecture notes that they could google in 30 seconds.

Too often the lessons they attend are boring and irrelevant to their lives. And from my experience, most of this content is simply memorized, spewed out for an exam and then quickly forgotten. But beyond this, there’s often only one right answer, which frequently cultivates in our students a fear of failure.

SCHOOLS VALUE HOOP JUMPING

For the most part, kids who we consider “academic” tend to be good hoop jumpers. They’ve figured out the system and can navigate their way through the predictable demands of the system. But they are seldom truly engaged. Rarely are they transformed by their learning. They’re going through the motions.

I’ve come to realize that being “academic” doesn’t tell you much about yourself. Research shows that some of the least engaged students are the highest achievers. Think about that. They do well because they know how to “do school.” Is this really the best we have to offer them?

What if you’re not “academic”? Most of these kids pass through too many years of their young lives feeling like they don’t measure up. Feeling stupid. And for some, it radically alters their trajectory of their adult lives.

Unfortunately, too many students have to recover from school once they graduate. Is this really what we want for them?

PASSIVE TEACHING DOES NOT GIVE RISE TO LEARNING

In all honesty, I have to admit that I used to believe in this academics-oriented system. For many years, students were made to sit in straight rows where the teacher asked the questions, provided the answers and controlled their learning. In such a system, people generally believed that good grades mattered.

Take for example the learning of the English language, the passive teaching system had instilled the belief that the pinnacle of success in English was the ability to write “the essay.” Recently, I’ve started to ask people I know, “Do you ever write an essay?” I’ve never had one person say yes. I wonder how many teachers, except those who are taking university classes (or writing an opinion piece like this), ever write true essays. If I may be so bold, I wonder how many English teachers frequently write essays.

I’m not saying our kids shouldn’t be able to write. On the contrary, I think our students should be able to argue gracefully and persuade powerfully. They also need to know what they believe and why. I simply think the essay is a medium that has outlived its usefulness, at least in high school.

ACADEMICS FOR THE ACADEMICIANS

I’ve come to realize that being “academic” doesn’t tell you much about yourself. It tells you that you’re good at school, which is fine if you plan to spend your life in academia, but very few of our students do. It doesn’t indicate whether or not you’ll be successful in your marriage, raising your kids, managing your money, or giving back to your community. All things that matter much more than being good at school.

School should be a place where kids can discover what they love. They should be able to ask the questions that matter to them and pursue the answers. They should discover what they are passionate about, what truly sets their hearts and souls on fire. They should discover they can make a difference now. Above all, they should leave school knowing what they are good at.

Today, I think most kids graduate only knowing if they’re good at school or not. Often our students have many talents; they just don’t fit in our current curriculum because their talents are likely not considered “real knowledge.”

OUR STUDENTS LOSE THEIR CURIOSITY

We are born curious. Babies explore their environments to learn; they do it naturally without being told. Three-year-olds constantly, at times annoyingly, ask, “why?” And yet, by the time they attend school, they have all but lost their curiosity.

Recently I’ve been reading Amanda Lang’s The Power of Why. In it she states:

“Curious kids learn how to learn, and how to enjoy it – and that, more than any specific body of knowledge, is what they will need to have in the future. The world is changing so rapidly that by the time a student graduates from university, everything he or she learned may already be headed toward obsolescence. The main thing that students need to know is not what to think but how to think in order to face new challenges and solve new problems.” (p.14)

LEARNING HOW TO LEARN AND FAIL AND LEARN SOME MORE

Our school system doesn’t need to create kids who are good at school. Instead, we need to create an environment that engages learners, fosters creativity, and puts responsibility for learning where it belongs – with our students.

Instead of rote learning, teachers need to use content to teach skills. We need to build environments that allow our students to get messy and build things. Places where students learn how to learn, and know how they learn best. Where students engage in significant research, and learn how to identify credible resources amidst a plethora of information that, at times, may seem overwhelming.

Furthermore, our students need to be able to problem-solve, innovate and fail over and over again. Throughout all of this, our kids should be collaborating with one another, as well as virtually with students across the globe. They need to be able to communicate powerfully using the mediums of print, photography and video.

THREE QUESTIONS TO GUIDE STUDENT-DRIVEN LEARNING

To ensure effective learning for our students, we’ve to make them answer three questions, regardless of what we’re researching:

• What are you going to learn?
• How are you going to learn it?
• How are you going to show me you’re learning?

How they get to this last question is often their decision. The learning journey can be painful and messy, but well worth the work. I believe that if given the opportunity, most students can meet the real learning objectives and even exceed the expectations set for them.


The Difference Between Praise and Feedback

Parenting these days is patrolled by the language police. Sometimes it seems like the worst thing you could ever say to a kid is “Good job!” or the dreaded, “Good girl!”  Widely popularized psychological research warns about the “inverse power of praise” and the importance of “unconditional parenting.” The incorrectly phrased, indiscriminately doled out pat on the back can, we learn, undermine a child’s inner motivation to learn and achieve, promote a “fixed mindset” that will cause her to shrink from taking on any kind of challenge or effort, and maybe even destroy her sense of self worth.

The anxiety is such that parenting blogs circulate actual word-for-word scripts for parents to use in such difficult situations as the sidelines of a swim meet, or after a music recital. There are long lists of forbidden words and phrases, too.

What are these researchers really getting at? Are the particular words we use to talk to our kids so important? And how do we convey positive feelings without negative consequences?

Process Praise

Some of the most prominent psychologists behind all of this talk about talking are Stanford University’s Carol Dweck, author of the book Mindset, and Edward Deci and Richard Ryan at the University of Rochester, whose research the education author Alfie Kohn relies heavily on in his books including Unconditional Parenting. Both Dweck and Deci are theorists of human motivation, but they emphasize very different perspectives on praise.

Dweck’s studies have focused on the effects of “process praise,” which means praising effort or strategy: “You must have worked very hard on this painting!” This is opposed to “person praise,” which labels people with phrases like, “You are really good at painting!” “You must be a genius!”
The idea is that reinforcing effort contributes to children’s beliefs that they can get better at things if they try, the vaunted “growth mindset.” But praising traits feeds the belief that talent is fixed, which makes kids less willing to take on new challenges that might expose them as less naturally able.

Most of Dweck’s research has focused on process praise given by strange adults interacting with children in a research study environment. But in a recent study, her team coded videotapes of parents praising their one to three-year-old children. They found that the greater use of process praise with these very young children predicted their later desire to take on new challenges, which in turn influenced these children’s math achievement seven years later, in fourth grade.

“Kids are thrilled by the idea that they can grow their brains through their effort and strategy,” Dweck says. “Praising strategy and focus and improvement gives them actionable information and a reason to try hard.”

Praise and Personhood

Simple, right? Not so fast. Writers such as Kohn have condemned all praise, including Dweck’s “process praise,” as little more than “sugar-coated control.”

The idea is that parental praise is manipulative, intrusive, and undermines both children’s intrinsic enjoyment of what they’re doing and their own internal sense of whether they are, in fact, doing a good job or trying hard.

Kohn cites Deci and Richard Ryan, and their colleagues including Guy Roth and Avi Assor at the University of the Negev in Israel. All of them have found in a series of studies that when parents express any kind of “conditional regard,” it harms young people’s developing autonomy, causing them to feel pressured to achieve, to feel shame if they don’t, and to suppress negative emotions and experiences. Conditional regard includes positive reinforcement, the practice of offering praise in exchange for desired behavior.

“If you tell your kids, ‘You’re a good boy for taking out the trash,’” they may feel that if they don’t take out the trash, they’re not worthy of your love,” says Deci. “You need to express that you love them and approve of them no matter what they do.”

Verbal rewards are a pretty central weapon in the parenting arsenal, especially when it comes to academic achievement. Deci and his colleagues found that offering your warmth and approval in exchange for academic achievement does work, in the sense that it causes young people to be more invested in trying to do well in school. But it’s a devil’s bargain that backfires emotionally in the form of “maladaptive self feelings.”

The controversial recent book The Triple Package, coauthored by “tiger mom” Amy Chua, purported to explain why certain ethnic groups tend to outperform others in education, occupational status and earnings. Two of the three traits the authors describe are a superiority complex accompanied by insecurity—a pretty good description of what researchers say can be the outcome of too much conditional parental positive regard.

Praise vs. Feedback

Parents are not perfectly controlled Siri-like bots but human beings with positive and negative emotions that are going to arise in response to specific actions by children. So is there any way to channel and communicate your sincere feelings to your kids without doing lasting harm? Surprisingly, despite their differing views on praise, Dweck and Deci tend to agree on the right course of action.

With regards to the “sugar-coated control” idea, Dweck says, “I basically agree that we overpraise.” Her intention in talking about process praise is to redirect this impulse more constructively. Instead of mindlessly kvelling over every finger painting or math test — or even just telling kids to “try hard!” — her recommendation is to get more involved with what a kid is doing. “Appreciate it. Ask questions. If we see that a child is using interesting strategies we can ask about them. Talk to them about their thought processes, how they can learn from mistakes.” Encourage your child to actively seek both positive and negative feedback in order to grow and improve.

Deci says something similar. In addition to assuring children of your continuous love and regard, “You want to understand what your child is thinking and feeling, to be respectful toward them. Asking questions is a far better idea than giving praise”—or criticism for that matter.  The idea is to support the development of a child’s autonomy by taking his perspective.

If you’re on the sidelines at a soccer game, it’s easy to pull out some pre-scripted phrase like “I love to watch you play!” or “You’re a natural!” It’s harder to watch your kid so you can tell her, “When you made that pass in the second quarter, I could see that you’ve been practicing your footwork a lot,” or to take the time to ask, “What was your favourite part of the game?” and really listen to the answer.

Providing helpful, detailed, encouraging feedback and appreciation requires paying attention to what kids are doing, and listening to what they are saying. This takes time and energy. Dweck says what she sees all too often are time-pressured parents who reach for a quick sugar fix instead. “We are a praise-addicted culture. I don’t think parents are going to stop praising.”