Recapturing Joy in Learning!

Kirsten Olson, Ed.D.Hillside SchoolApril 21, 2010

These Days

Whatever you have to say, leavethe roots on, let them

dangle

And the dirt

Just to make clearwhere they come from

-Charles Olson (1910-1970)

• Although middle class and

privileged, I always had the sense of hiding out in school

• Sense of “wrongness” of early grouping; awareness these practices were damaging

• Kids were labeling themselves• I was wary, self-protective• Children of color silent,

marginalized; no children of color in my honors courses

My Own Learning Story…

Joyful Learning Experience

Kirsten doing Little House on the Prairie

Highly accomplished learners

• Artisan and virtuoso learners

• Unconventional learners

• Literature on “flow” and creativity

• “My real learning never was in school.”

Too many students

• Weren’t thriving• Were “lost” in school• Were rebellious, angry• Were checked out• Were silent

• Barely half of minority students complete high school in four years

• Only 15% of low-income students earn a college degree within nine years of starting high school

Even among “highly successful” learners

• Sense of disconnection from learning

• Cynicism• Perfectionism• High achieving students

experiencing unprecedented pressure to be successful

Paradoxes of education

• Education more vital than ever • Go to school longer, more intensively• Yet many students turned off to learning,

diminished in school• Energy directed to opposition and “not learning”• Happens for even high attainment students who

are “successful”

Listening to students(without judgment)

• “Teachers don’t like me.”

• “The work is so, so boring.”

• “No one cares if I’m here or not.”

My research• 109 semi-structured

autobiographical interviews over 4 years

• “Portraiture” method (Lawrence Lightfoot, 1997)

• Initial interviews from 1-3 hours • Cross section of class, gender, race• Subjects ages ranged from 11-67• Themes generated from transcripts

of interviews

7 “types” of wounds

• Creativity• Compliance• Rebelliousness• Average• Numbness• Underestimation• Perfectionism

“I went to kindergarten as a happy child. Throughout my years in the educational system,

I lost a lot of my happiness, imagination and enthusiasm. It all faded away, confined to the

labels of the outside world, based on the concept of intelligence. The school system was

focused on organizing and labeling students based on so called innate abilities. If you get

good grades, test well, you are intelligent. This pierced my self-esteem armor over and over to

the point of self-hatred.”

“There was always something mechanical about school, a mold I never fit into, never quite understood. Although I knew inside that my writing was powerful and artistic, I

was unwilling to make myself vulnerable to someone else’s critique. The years of frustration and failures had taken a toll on my confidence and I found myself unable

to trust my own ability in the classroom.”

“I’m bored in school most of the time. Photography is the one time when I’m really interested.”

“I failed math throughout elementary school.

I failed Spanish twice in high school. During sophomore year biology we learned about

the circulatory system. When test day arrived I failed because I got my left mixed

up with the top and my ventricles confused with my aortas, but I knew it!

These events mark an angry theme throughout my life. I proceeded to cheat all

the way through high school. I started buying my science projects a year in

advance after the previous grade’s science fair.”

“I’m really good at school, but I’m very secretive about making mistakes. I always want to be right, and have the right answer. Otherwise, people think you are dumb.”

“ I told my teacher I wanted to go to college. He said I’d be pregnant

and drop out in two years.”

“The rich kids always knew how to be good kids.

So I guess it’s natural that the

schools wanted to work with them

more than the rest of us.”

“I can remember my first experience of tracking. It was in the third grade. I got put into a math class with all the working class kids, and kids of color, just like me. We were the dumb kids. My self esteem remains there to some extent to this day.”

“I’m one taco short of a combination platter.”

“Crazy. Stupid. Lazy.

I believed I was broken.”

What does “school wounding” mean to you?

• Does anyone you know have school wounds?• Do you?• What should we do about this?

School wounds:Interactions with the institution that lead students to

believe:

• They aren’t “smart” • “Ability” is inborn and fixed • Learning is boring• Mistakes show lack of ability

“Global” feedback

“You’ll be lucky to finish high school.”

“You’ll be flipping burgers for a living.”“Some people never learn math.”

“You’re a smart one.”“Everyone in the Smith family does well in school.”

Effect on manystudents

• Reduced effort• Lower persistence in face of difficulty• Less self-discipline• Attributions of success based on ability, not effort• Learned helplessness

Less courage in learning

• “I just started to doubt myself.” • “I don’t respond well to situations that aren’t well defined.”

Disconnection from pleasure in learning

“I stopped caring about why I had to

learn something. Just tell me how

to get the answer.”

Incredible impact of early school experiences on individuals

“That is like a moral shame at the kernel of

my being. I don’t like to talk about it with

anyone.”

“Narcissistic Wounding”•Child is insufficiently positively mirrored by environment, harshly critiqued, not “seen”

•Develops insecurely attached, distorted sense of self (Seigle, 1996; Jacoby, 1991)

•Compelled to act out woundedness over and over until empathically healed (Golumb, 1992)

Lack of cultural discourse to describe school wounds

“School is supposed to kick you around.”

“School sucks for everyone--deal with it.”

“If I were smarter I wouldn’t be treated like this.”

For many, school is the “crucible” in which self-concept is formed

“For twenty-four of my thirty-six years, I was a student, and I was good at it… My success in school defined me—I was ‘smart’ and ‘a good student,’ and I reveled in that identity.”

“Kids who struggle are so sensitive to moments--especially bad ones. These moments shape their whole lives, their sense of themselves. Teachers’ little comments had huge effect on me.”

Underestimation of the effects of educational experiences on self- concept

“Naming our reality is the

only way to be free.”

Finding your “inner warrior”

To help heal the institution and make it better

“The reason why expression is so important is because without a voice people don’t get represented. Once someone is exposed they have the choice to live in ignorance or fight for freedom.”

How do you think people healed?

Path of healing

• Grief• Anger• Mourning

5 Stages of Healing

• Self blame and private shame

• Moments of insight, a change in self-concept

• Grieving, anger

•Critical consciousness around institution of schooling

• Reconciliation and reengagement

“Mr. Miller told me I could do it--demanded that. He saw something in

me when no one else did. He believed in me before I did.”

One person who cares…

The road is bumpy, not a Hollywood story…

“I needed a string of successes to start to believe in myself.”

“I needed to go somewhere else, somewhere new. If I was around anyone who knew me from my old school I would go back to being that screw up.”

An external change…

Context Matters

“Back in Utah, people got mad at me all the time for blurting things out, being rude…Now in graduate school, I’m pretty much the same guy, doing the same things, but here I’m considered brilliant, witty and insightful.”

“I had to learn how to believe in me.”

• Resilience can be “taught” • Learned to identify cognitive distortions• Locus of control: I have a choice about how to react to

this• Helping others

Joy in Learning Again

“I started to have the

confidence to enjoy

learning. I discovered I was good at

it.”

Remember a Joyful Learning Experience

What inspires a sense of pleasure in learning?

• Choice• Control• Down Time• Invitation• Novelty• Challenge

What’s lit up?

Neuroscience will save us from testing?

Neurobiology of learning

• Stress and anxiety reduce capacity for retention and higher-level thinking

• Pleasure in learning linked to creativity, attention, metacognitive competence

• Low-level, routinized work turns off the brain

Sources: Willis, J. (2007), The neuroscience of joyful education. Educational Leadership, Summer 2007, Vol. 64; Medina, J. (2008) Brain rules. Seattle, WA: Pear Press.

“Mass education was the ingenious machine constructed by industrialism to produce the kind of adults it needed…the solution was an educational system that, in its very structure, simulated this new world…the regimentation, lack of individualization, the rigid systems of seating, grouping and marking, the authoritarian style of the teacher--are precisely those that made mass public education so effective as an adaptation for its time and place.”

-Alvin Toffler, Future Shock, 1970

Trapped in an old fashioned institution

Designed to sort and track kids

Skills that mattered

• Memorization• Categorization• Compliance• Understanding

of hierarchy• Attention to

authority

New skills needed

• Ability to work in teams• Synthesize huge

amounts of information• Self-manage and

motivate• Exercise discipline and

creativity in undefined situations

Old Fashioned School vs. New Realities

• Information scarcity• Teacher in control• Teacher as source of

knowledge• Learning happens in school• Memorization,

categorization

• Information abundance• Learning happens everywhere• Teacher as guide/coach• Always plugged in• Multimodal, synthetic information creation

“If you had to design an environment that was going to most effectively turn off the human brain, it would be

the contemporary classroom.”-John Medina, Brain Rules

Truncated Ideas About Ability In School

•Human ability is enormously plastic, develops over the lifespan

•Develops in response to environment

• Effort most critical

Define Learning As “Product” •Overemphasis on low-level cognitive tasks

• “Rigor” still about memorization

• Inability to adapt to individual learners

• Frontal, “monolithic teaching” (Christensen,2008)

Teachers Rewarded for Old-Fashioned Practice

•Rewarded for controlling students and producing attainment

•Not rewarded for collaboration and learning together

•System still lacks knowledge about the core of its business: how people learn

•Students often get blamed

Old-fashioned motivational “techniques”

• Shaming, moralizing• Attributing “innate” characteristics to students• Overused positional authority--”do it because I

said so”• Create school wounds

“School Connectedness”

• Belief by students that adults and peers care about them as individuals and learners

• Promotes wellness and better educational outcomes in every arena

Fostering Love of Learning in Your Child

“We had a sense of play at home that balanced school.”

Our Own Learning Stories…

Have powerful effects on how we see our child’s.

Ghosts in the Classroom

“The line between me and my kid at that moment didn’t exist. I was hyper-vigilant, hyper-protective. They weren’t going to hurt my boy.”

Steppingstones In Your Learning Journey

JOY IN LEARNING

“It comes from within.”

“Flow” in learning

• “A state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it at even great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.”-Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990)

FLOW: Focused concentration vs. “messing around”

• Challenge just right • Task is deeply relevant• We have “task pleasure:”

The way we are learning is pleasurable

• We are bored when we are underchallenged

• High challenge on boring tasks does not produce engagement

-David Shernoff, “Flow States and Student Engagement in the Classroom” (2002)

How do you produce that for kids?

Become Your Child’s “Chief Learning Officer”

• Learning happens everywhere• Notice all kinds of learning• Support passions• Non-competitive• Mistakes a part of learning• Enthusiasm!

“Exploratory”

• Child-initiated projects • Require real investigation, sense of play,

non-competitiveness • Down time

The importance of choice..

• “When teachers choose, I feel caged in.”

• “I learn best when I get to choose.”

Control: Learning is a journey with a lot of mistakes

“Children who undertake to do things, like my five-year-

old-friend Vita who is beginning the very serious study of the violin, do not

think in terms of success or failure but of effort and

adventure. It is only when pleasing adults becomes

important that the sharp line between success and failure

appears.”

-John Holt, 1980

Down time: Learning is dreamy, and requires time off.

Cognitive literature on importance of play

• Lack of play linked to anxiety, depression

• Lack of play reduces high-level cognitive growth (Brown, et al 2008)

Play IS learning“The activity of learning involves doing what you do not know how to do, which is not the same as pretending you know what you are doing.”

-Unscripted Learning: Using Improv Activities Across the K-8 Curriculum, Lobman and Lundquist (2007)

“We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.”

-George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

Novel and Inviting: Learning is volcanic!

What Kind of Learner Does Your Child See You Being?

“Is there something you’ve always wanted to do but were afraid you weren’t good at? Make a

plan to do it.”

Become an “effort” theorist• From fixed to growth mindset

• Human ability grows over the lifespan

• GRIT: persistence, self-discipline, ambition

Examine Your Language Practices

• Abandoning “bright” and “dumb” labels• Don’t compare children• Children are surprising! We never know someone’s “potential”• Feedback is most powerful grounded in evidence• 5 to 1

The dangers of “smart.”

Dear Kirsten,

People decided I was “smart” when I was young.

What that meant for me in school was that my relative strengths and weaknesses went unnoticed and unsupported. Admitting I needed help with anything put my self-concept on tenuous ground. Perhaps I wasn’t smart after all. Likewise, the importance of my discipline and hard work were consistently minimized. After all, I was born “smart.” What more was needed. Living up to smart is a pressure I carry today with an Ivy League doctorate and a position of authority. Duck and cover. Minimize mistakes. Stay “smart.”

Nobody likes smart.

-Superintendent at one of my workshops, September 2009

Labeling

• Labels shape perception and create experience

• “Labels are the lazy man’s way of thinking…”

Interacting Positively With School

Self Knowledge

• What are my “ghosts?”• What is the purpose of education?• Do we agree as a couple?• In what situations do I tend to get activated?• What is the best way to support THIS learner?

Check your ego at the door

• Not the moment for you to work out your own issues

• Your child’s well-being is your purpose

• Is what I am doing helping my child?

Frustrations are real…

• Positive, supportive interactions are always more effective than negative, adversarial

Proactive and knowledgeable

• Know a lot• Network• Get help• Be prepared to (respectfully) describe best

practices to school personnel• What else can we do to support this child’s

learning?

•Encourage students to be active in managing their own learning

•Encourage knowing “the contours of your own mind”

•Students as activists around wounding school practices

•Create language for discussing wounding practices

Older Students

Last resort

• Move on• Believe in your child• Change of scene can be enormously

beneficial

“Through all my bruises and battles, I found my inner warrior. Whether we know it or not, the warrior developed over years of fighting for our identities in school--surrounded by families who

fought side by side with us--and in our struggles in the workplace and society. In the end, this is who we are.”

-Jonathan Mooney, bestselling author and learning differences advocate

“No one knows your child like you do. Never, never give up on your kid. They always need you to be their wise advocate, to believe in them, and to believe in their love of learning.”-Parent in Wounded By School

“Education is soul crafting.”-Cornel West

Joy in Learning Again

“I started to have the

confidence to enjoy

learning. I discovered I was good at

it.”