Providing a classroom culture for thinking and learning

Part One: From good to great without getting noses out of joint!
(This is the first of a two-part series)

By adapting the management theory of Jim Collins in Good to Great and Philip Lundin in Fish a classroom culture can be provided that gives freedom for both teachers and students to be on the leading edge of teaching and learning.

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The school is the sea. The students are the fi sh. If the sea is not kept at the right temperature the fish will die!

The right temperature is a school and classroom culture that gives both teachers and students the freedom to learn. Such a culture must not only be a nurturing one but also an adaptive culture able to adapt rather than adopt principles of greatness and excellence both from outside and inside the educational environment. All this is within the context of a disciplined approach to persisting and keeping on keeping on with the desired principles of greatness.

First is focus. To use a business concept, the core business of a school is to create an environment, which is able to grow learning. To do this it must not only be student focussed but also one that generates efficacious energy. Thus dreams – dreams that push the boundary – are needed to provide a catalyst which arouses the passion that gives the energy and enthusiasm. So our dream, which became our focus, was to be a leading edge school.

This dream could apply to every subject, every activity from the academic, to the cultural, to the social and more. Further to be on the leading edge suggests to be continually improving, to be taking responsible risks by trying new ways to accomplish things, to be seeking excellence, and overall invoking an overall positive suggestibility. In this way our focus empowered the teachers, the students, and perhaps surprisingly the larger school community especially the parents. Difficulties were a challenge to be remedied. A can do efficacious practicality, engendered positive expectations.

Dreams, to be realised, require what Jim Collins calls a ‘resource engine’: the practical actions and concepts that make things happen: the practical actions and concepts that in this case did make us a leading edge school. The Fish! philosophy gave this four-cylinder engine for us to adapt and use: attitude, play, make their day, and be present. To this basic model, customised extras were added: Learning Styles, Multiple Intelligences, Habits of Mind, and Emotional intelligence.

School wide a corporate discipline ensured that these aspects were constantly in the collective conscience of the school community.

A warning! Despite unpacking the resource engine in this way, it is always modular, being the sum of the parts and the synergy that brings.

Attitude

Change, or an attitude to be better than before, starts with the individual teacher. They must develop a personal attitude that, “Change begins with me.” If the school is to be the nurturing environment needed for the students, the fish, to flourish, the teacher’s role must be a mentoring one. To ‘do with’ students, not ‘to them’ is not just necessary it is crucial. This is an essential aspect of being student focused.

Central to this mentoring approach is the need to bring whatever is happening to the consciousness level. Dialogue between student and teacher and ongoing formative assessment that points the way are two ways of achieving this.

Words are metaphors, given subtly complicated emotional meaning which is constantly being framed by our experiences. “Get on with your work,” evokes a frame of something that is assigned, that is a duty, that is associated with loss of freedom, that is associated with difficult, that is associated with loss of pleasure, and other joyless terms. These are all negatives, compounding one on the other. On the other hand, “Here is your thinking and learning,” or “Here is your home MOLNIA thinking and learning,” has an opposite emotional meaning: succeeding, making a difference, doing better, and even fun. All these are positives: all potentially joyous.

When Pat from a school in Westchester County, New York made this change, she observed – “the children are responding to my change of the word ‘work’ during class time. I am now using the phrase ‘you have learning to do’ instead, and I can see their reactions. It’s interesting to think of the shift in their attitude, but not surprising. ‘You have work to do’ sounds so heavy and dismal; ‘you have learning to do’ sounds interesting, engaging and fun.” This is a tiny change in language but a huge mind shift in attitude.

If we want students to have the right attitude it is necessary to teach what skills they require so that they really do know and understand – the finer tuning of the resource engine. Attitude is a personal thing. No one else can choose an attitude for another person, so it was essential that they were not restricted by inadequate skills or lack knowing.

We can only know what we know. As I go out the door to the gym wearing my backpack, my niece’s four-year-old daughter stares at me “Are you going to school?” she asks in a surprised tone. She knows her older brother goes off to school each morning with his books and lunch in his back pack, so she relates what she knows about back packs to me. All she knows about a backpack is that they are worn when you go to school, so she “knows” that because I’m wearing a backpack I’m off to school!

This is where emotional intelligence came in with its two basic aspects – self management and managing others. These matched our desire to promote a can do efficacious attitude. Starting where the students were at, using authentic meaningful experiences, and consolidating at each sequential step before moving on, meant that it was a year-long process.

A Likert line was used to begin this process. On a scale of one to 10 students had to line up with one being mad, five being sad, and ten being glad. As the days and weeks went by the vocabulary was increased and modified, using the teachable moment wherever possible.

Once the Likert line sequence had provided a more relaxed attitude to publicly admitting emotions, and the vocabulary had begun to be developed, role play was introduced. This used simple authentic or near authentic examples that students could relate to, and that would be fun. Thus emotional energy was created here too. One of these role plays was in pairs where one student had spilled juice on another’s home learning project. One participant blurted out, “You’ve juiced my assignment,” accompanied by much mirth.

Later more complex situations were introduced. Things like your best friend has been chosen for a sports team, or a trip, or a cultural event and you have been left out. This could also be complicated by adding in a bystander, or a third or fourth friend.

Metaphor was the next addition to the mix. This was to develop more elaborated language, but still keeping to the simple and at least the near authentic. A secondary purpose was to allow more abstract ideas to be conceptualized. When a McDonald’s hamburger was given as the comparison, one student came up with, “I feel like a cold fry that has been dropped on the fl oor.” Another, in a more positive mood when a roast potato was the comparison stated, “I feel like a hot roast potato, crisp, salty and mouth-watering.”

An interesting sidelight here was that in sharing these likes and dislikes a common ground was developed. This not only meant an insight into the opinions and feelings of others but also gave a measure for their own situation. Often when these sessions were run after others had shared; students revised upward their own situation.

The above is a practical example of how the synergy of interdependent thinking morphs into the higher level thinking skills of Lorin Anderson’s New Bloom as the students analyse, evaluate and create.

Finally came as a practice field the use of secret squirrel.

Metacognition at the end of the year from both parents and students was unanimously enthusiastic. One boy who had been a troubled at risk student stated, “I have more positive feelings about self, school, and family. I never thought I was any good at school work but now I have changed my mind.”

A parent stated, “She is much better at turning her frustrations away from the negative to the positive.”

What had resulted was a growth mindset with a can do practical efficaciousness. Carol Dweck’s concept of mindset to describe how students think about their intelligence is well displayed here.

Those with a fixed mindset believe that they have unchangeable internal characteristic. To them effort simply does not count. This means they shy away from academic, or indeed any challenge to the extent of not even attempting simple challenging tasks that require problem solving effort. Worse they may develop disruptive behaviour patterns to mask their perceived inadequacies.

Those with a growth mindset see intelligence as malleable and therefore effort and persistence are seen as positives to confront challenges and solve problems. They focus on the strategies that they can use rather than worrying about how competent they are. Moreover, the mindset can be changed through perceptive teaching, just as the ‘at risk’ student mentioned above had his mindset changed through the emotional intelligence knowledge he gained.

Play

The brain is biologically programmed to attend first to information that has strong emotional content. When used thoughtfully the emotion inherent in play, to quote Bob Sylwester, drives attention and attention drives learning.

Georgette’s chocolate cake maths is an example of this. She wanted to break down built up emotional barriers to maths, specifically fractions, and decided to use chocolate as the catalyst. It was a visual, tactile, and tastebud way (senses) of teaching fractional numbers through play started with a cake (bar) of chocolate. When she opened it up, the kids were glued.

The serious business was that she was discussing fractional numbers and began with the naming of parts in the space on a number line between zero and one. The visual hook was ONE bar of chocolate, yet it was divided up equally into 80 pieces. The bar was then broken in half and – she looked for the vocabulary relating to fractional numbers: 50%, 1⁄2, and 0.5 of one whole. She then looked at other common fractions relating it back to numbers being less than one.

For the next lesson she brought a chocolate cake to school and revised last week’s lesson with extras added. Students had remembered the previous lesson and yet were still very enthusiastic to go over it again, this time using a different food.

Chocolate cake maths was intended to last for a few periods as part of the fractions unit, but when she stopped, the students carried on and sometimes she would arrive to class with several chocolate cakes on her table. So the students then had to help plan the lesson and she moved into problem solving, measurement, statistics etc. It is amazing how these now grown kids still remember those lessons.

Pauline’s play with ice cream was specifically designed for developing and remembering the appropriate math language for 3 dimensional shapes; cone, conical, sphere, spherical, rectangular flat. She decided a novel lesson may help as the brain programmed to pay attention to novelty. The students 7 and 8 year olds had to choose the most suitable tool to create a sphere of ice cream and place it on a cone using an ice cream scoop or a tablespoon to move the ice cream onto the two varieties of wafers – cones and fl at. If they got it correct and named the shapes they got to eat their creation.

The golden rule is that play is to support the teaching and learning required to achieve the educational objectives.

Very often students need to have what they are doing raised to the consciousness level. From time to time Barry would see an example of a Habit of Mind occurring in his classroom. He would then hum, like Pooh Bear, Hommmmmmm…. At that signal the whole class would join in. When the hum concluded the class was invited to state what the Habit of Mind that the teacher had seen being practiced was. The Hum had created a teachable moment. Students also inaugurated the hum when appropriate.

As the year went on variations were used to keep the idea fresh Sometimes the Hommmmmmm would be made longer or shorter, the class were not allowed to Hommmmmm until the teacher cut the conducting and must again Hommmmmm for as long as the teacher held the ‘note’ or Hommmmmm. Even the conducting could be varied by conducting with just fingers rather than arms.

At one level all this is just a bit of fun – play. However, at another level, by involving the emotions it makes the point powerfully.

Role play is also play – We used this a lot when I was in the New Zealand regular army, often making points through humour. When soldiers came up on charge in a commanding officer’s orderly room the conventional court procedures applied. The soldier was to be considered innocent until proven guilty. Thus a role play in which the officer stated to his sergeant to “March the guilty in!” invariably brought laughter but the juxtaposition with what should happen also made sure the point was well made.

Perhaps this a good point to reinforce that although we are unpacking the four major attributes of the resource engine individually one by one, the resource engine is modular with the parts overlapping and acting in concert as often as not. Thus role play can be considered as play, or as attitude, or perhaps both at the same time!

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Alan Cooper


Alan Cooper is an educational consultant based in New Zealand. As a principal, he was known for his leadership role in thinking skills, including Habits of Mind, learning styles and multiple intelligences, information technology, and the development of the school as a learning community. Alan can be reached at: 82napawine@gmail.com