Every time I find it painful to stand up after a meal either at home or a restaurant, I remember the title of this blog, which is a comment one of my aunts used to make every time she moved from a sitting to a standing position.

About 25 years ago, while I was living in New York I began to feel a lot of back pain after I sat a long time or walked a lot. I mentioned this to a friend who was a professional piano player. She said that she had begun to experience a lot of back pain a few years earlier both during her practice and when she was performing. A fellow musician suggested she visit a practitioner of The Alexander Technique.

I am now living in Japan so when I remembered how my back pain decreased when I worked to change the habits of how I stood, sat and walked in New York, The Alexander Technique did not come immediately to mind as a way to alleviate my pain. But out of the blue one of my wife’s graduate students who is a nurse mentioned in a conversation that her sister was an Alexander Technique practitioner!

We called her immediately and I have now had two sessions with her. Though it has been 25 years since I last had a session, after both sessions I felt as if I was re-living the sessions 25 years ago in New York.

I will not tax your mind with loads of a lot of details about what the Alexander Technique is about, just a few details. Frederick Alexander was an actor who was born in Australia in 1869. As young man he was frustrated because though he could speak with no problems with friends when he stood on a stage to recite Shakespeare he lost his voice. He decided to compare his posture when he spoke with friends and when he was on stage to recite Shakespeare. He noticed great differences between how he stood and moved in both settings.

Over time, he was able to overcome his loss of voice by standing on stage the same way he stood when he was chatting with friends.

You can find many more details about his life and his technique on the Internet. I just want to point out one lesson that I have been reminded of and learned in the two sessions I have just experienced in Japan.

In Japan, the chairs I set in at our dining room table are about 4 inches/12 centimeters lower than I sit in in New York. This means that when I sit in a chair in Japan my legs between my knees and my pelvis are pointing up rather than parallel with the floor. This puts a great deal of strain on my legs and back.

I have now put a 4-inch/12 centimeter pad on the chair I sit in when I eat. I can now sit down and stand up without putting my hands on the arms of the chair to ease me into either a sitting or standing position.

I had lunch with a person 25 years younger than I am last week in our apartment—American like me. He is the same height as I am. When he sat down I noticed that he braced himself on the arms of one of our dining room chairs. And when he stood up he propped himself up putting his hands on the arms of the chairs. His habits were the same as mine as just as detrimental to the long-term negative effects on our bodies.

I am excited by the Alexander Technique not only because I have found it beneficial to the way I sit, walk, stand and lie down but also because I think that Alexander has lessons for teachers that are in line with what I have been advocating for many years. I am not promoting the Alexander Technique for you to deal with your back pain, though I think it will alleviate it. Rather I am promoting Alexander’s ideas because they are in tune with what I have been advocating for decades to better understand our teaching.

1. Most of what we do is out of consciousness—I call this following rules and Alexander calls it following habits.

2. To change how we teach or sit or stand, we need to observe in minute detail a minute or two of our behaviors. Then we have to notice and feel the differences. It is only then that we can begin to change one of our behaviors slightly. If we sit on a chair that is too low for us so that our legs between our knees and pelvis are pointing upward rather than parallel with the floor, we need to put something on the chair seat so our legs are parallel with the floor. And we have to feel the difference.

If students use erasers during dictations so that you cannot see what words they wrote incorrectly you have to ask them to put their erasers in their pencil cases so that you can see what they wrote and how it is similar and different from what you said.

Small changes and no judgments! Alexander used the word “habits” because he had no interest in judging people about having bad posture or bad habits of sitting or walking. He just wanted people to learn awareness of how if they sat or stood or walked one way or another there would be different consequence. Ditto my long-term call to be descriptive and analytical rather than judgmental. The rules or habits we follow are inculcated in us through years. To make even small changes—something both Alexander and I advocate requires that we are non-judgmental.

An obvious but rarely easily forgotten underlying assumption that Alexander and I both stress is that we have to constantly ask how what we think is useful, positive, helpful, etc. might not be any of these things. Alexander gives an example of seats on chairs used in schools. Most of them re built at about a 15-degree slant. As a result, students have to learn back which causes them to rest the their spine on the back of the chair. This posture weakens our ability to sit upright.

Practitioners of the Alexander technique display photographs of children sitting up straight on a flat seat unaided by the back of their chair and of children sitting with their backs resting on the back of the chair. The shoulders of these students are slumped forward and their neck is leading forward.

Most people enjoy sitting on sofas and upholstered chairs. They enjoy sinking into the cushions. But the enjoyment we experience can easily lead to a weakening of the back and shoulder muscles and ultimately to back pain.

PS The obvious is difficult to see! As I completed this reflection I asked the person who helps me with the Alexander technique to observe me at my desk. She saw in a heartbeat that it was at least 4 inches too low. So I now have a 4 inch high piece of Styrofoam the shape of my laptop underneath my Mac Book Pro. I sit up straighter of course. And I have less pain in my back and legs.

68.8 Flesch Reading Ease Grade Level 8.7

As those of you who follow my blog know, I urge those of us who teach to constantly ask how what we think is helpful or useful might not be and how what we think is not helpful or not useful might be. I have recently read a number of articles that show that this advice is only rarely followed in teaching but in other areas. In the December 2012 issue of the Atlantic, I read one article about business leaders who saw only the positive side of moving manufacturing plants out of the US. As I read this conclusion, I think of all the fads in education in general and language teaching in particular that have proved to produce negative effects—the most recent being the focus on testing and a common reading list for all US public high school students. Charles Fishman had this to say about offshore production in his article: “There was a herd mentality to the off shoring. And there was some bullshit.” Many of the costs were hidden. (page 49)

The other item in the December 2012 Atlantic is a review of a book about a research psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School—Uri Simonsohn–who uncovers studies in which the authors use “sloppy statistical maneuvering and, in some cases, outright fraud” to support their beliefs. In other words, they are using data to support their beliefs and ignoring data that does not support their beliefs. (page 32)

Simonsohn is not alone in raising red flags about much research related to psychology. In the March 8^th 2013 issue of the Weekly Guardian, I read this headline with great distress: It’s time for psychologists to put their house in order. First and foremost, we must resolve to publish repeat studies and negative results.” Keith Laws, the author, not only describes flaws in the use of statistics but also points out that 67% of those he surveyed said that they reported their results selectively. And 74% said that they continued to collect data to support their claims because their initial data did not support their claims. The concluding paragraph is a devastating comment on research in psychology: “Psychologists, editors and reviewers have conspired to deny the rightful place of negative results and the importance of replication—psychology’s dirty little secrets. We must change.” (page 34)

I read the following comment in the Financial Times of 23 March 20013, page 6: “Cognitive biases and groupthink remain crucial in explaining how markets work and overshoot.” The title of the comment was “The blind faith in wishful thinking”. Gillian Tett, the author, does not claim that financial consultants and bankers manipulated the data as the psychologists did. She says instead that the bankers involved seemed to believe in their own hype just as those who advocated moving US manufacturing offshore believed their own unsupported claims. The fact that leaders of manufacturing companies and banks had their own money invested in what turned out to be disastrous decisions did not lead them to ask how what they thought was positive might in fact be negative. Gillian Tett makes a point of saying that the bankers were not engaged in deliberate malevolence. In the same way, I have never criticized teachers for doing what they think is useful. Rather I have tried to remind them that all of us can be easily trapped in a limited view of reality.

Recently, I have realized that many think that trying the opposite or breaking rules—my two mantras for understanding what we do with more clarity—some consider negative. I am attaching some associations teachers have made in workshops I have done recently that show that what I consider positive steps—breaking rules and trying the opposite—are seen as negative steps. But as the articles I have just described show unless we question what we do we will end up in the same hole as psychologists, bankers and manufacturers did in the last decades.

Enjoy.

John

700 words, rounded Flesch Reading Ease 50% Grade Level 12

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On what basis did the principals make their judgments? On a 20 minute observation!!!

Did the principals record the 20 minutes? Did they look at a transcript? Did they discuss the excerpt with te teachers? No! No! No!

In studies of classroom interaction such as The language of the classroom by Arno Bellack et al., which i have mentioned in previous blogs, agreement between 2 people coding the same exchange, using terms that have examples to illustrate them, agreement is between 50 and 90%! The coding of these exchanges–was the student stating facts or making inferences or relating the theme to personal experience to cite a few examples–which had been transcribed was as I just said never 100%. So having principals decide whether teachers are asking higher order questions or fact questions based on a live observation without looking at a transcription and comparing the principal’s decision with others is not valid in any sense of the word. The comments on a 20 minute observation are not only a waste of time but fail to indicate the complexity of classroom interaction.

Let’s say that one question the teacher asks is “Why did the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor?” The students respond saying “Well, the American government was about to impose an embargo on oil imports and it was going to this and that and the other thing.” On the surface, this “Why” question requires higher order thinking, not just the repetition of facts. But if the teacher had the previous day told the students the answer to the question, then the responses were not showing any thinking but only regurgitation. So the 20 minute observation is neither valid or reliable nor does it show any understanding of the complexity of classroom interaction, as I said in the previous paragraph.

The state of Florida has spent forty three million dollars to develop observation systems to evaluate teachers. What have the teachers learned from the observations that their principals have made? What have the principals learned? I would claim that they have learned nothing and that they are going through motions spending money that could be better spent on paying the teachers to record and analyze their interactions with their students to understand what they are doing and to begin to contrast activities that are useful with those that are not useful.

The focus on top down evaluation of students and teachers will not produce any changes in learning or teaching because the focus is on not on understanding but on evaluation, on so called improvement.

The forth three million spent in Florida if multiplied by other states means billions of dollars spent on what is quite a useless enterprise.

I am attaching an article I wrote about analyzing our teaching which would be more productive than the observation schemes that the state of Florida spent because they would put the analysis of what teachers are doing in the hands of teachers. If teachers cannot see how what they are doing is different from what they think they are doing and want to do, no evaluations form principals will enable them to make these connections.

The positive evaluations of teachers in Florida reported in the NYTimes article are not unusual. Adrienne Herrell and Michael Jordan wrote a book called Fifty Strategies for Teaching English Language Learners. In the book jacket the authors have inserted a DVD showing some of the strategies. In the lessons on the DVDs, the teachers speak from 140 to 160 words per minute. The students utter single words or repeat phrases or sentences the teacher says or chant as they read aloud. The authors say that they produced the DVD to accompany their book so that teachers could see examples of “exemplary teaching”. Like the principals in Florida, Herrell and Jordan fail to ask how what the teachers are doing that they think is useful might not be useful and what the teachers are doing that they might consider not useful might be useful. In short, they fail to apply the null hypothesis–trying to disprove what we think is true, the basis all any serious research.

I am attaching the shortest item I have written about trying to analyze what we do in a way that removes the blinders we all have on our eyes and in our ears.

Enjoy.

John

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When selecting building materials, contractors usually not only use terms like marble or granite but describe multiple characteristics of the stones being considered.

I am amazed by the fact that when most people discuss their teaching and when those who prepare teachers speak at conferences they rarely describe multiple characteristics of the words they use. “If you give your students an interesting topic, they will do communicative activities; if you start class with icebreakers your students will feel relaxed; it is better to focus on meaning initially so students do not feel tense when they speak–later you can focus on form.”

If two out of three people mistake objects we can see and touch why do we assume that those who hear abstract words understand them? And why do we not describe multiple characteristics of abstract words when contractors feel compelled to describe multiple characteristics of concrete words?

I have been mystified by this phenomenon for decades. Beyond Rashomon–Conceptualizing and Describing the Teaching Act (TESOL Quarterly, Vol. 11, No. 1; March 1977) was my first stab at dealing with the issue. Breaking Rules (Longman 1987) was an expansion of the article. The advantage of both of these is that they are thorough; the disadvantage is that they are quite dense.

I am attaching a recent reworking of the theme of the importance of analyzing what we do from multiple perspectives that I hope is more accessible.

John

abcs

PS Rashomon is the name of a short story about a woman who sells her hair. Kurusawa took the title and applied it to another story by the same author and made a movie of it. In the movie, various characters give different descriptions of the same event. I showed the movie in my classes for many years. Because the movie was made in Japan, there are English subtitles. In one scene, a large structure is shown during a rain storm with a lot of lightening and thunder. During the scene it is possible to see a person walking under the structure. The caption reads, RASHOMON. I paused the video at this point and asked teachers to write down what the meaning of the caption was. Common words were thunder, lightening, storm, rain, a person walking. In fact, the structure was a gate. Gates in Japan at the time of the action in the film were 3 or 4 stories high and there were rooms in the two structures that held the lintel–the wooden bar that sat horizontally on the two pillars.  Mon is Japanese for gate and Rasho is the name of a person so Rashomon is Rasho’s gate or the gate of Rasho just as we call the bridge that connects NJ and NY The George Washington Bridge.

To move against the tide of more and more testing, there is not much we can do as individuals. But we can supplement the tests we are required to give by having students record what they say and transcribe what they say and transcribe what we say. When a student writes “I walk faster than baby walk” after a teacher says “I can walk faster than a baby can walk” the teacher sees what needs to be practiced. Ditto when the same student writes “The plain can fly faster than bird fly” after the teacher says “A plane can fly faster than a bird can fly.” The student can see the corrections in his notebook. On another day when the patterns are practiced again all the students can compare what they wrote previously and see the degree of progress they are making.

This is less time consuming than looking through all the items on tests and pointing out the mistakes students make. Scores are popular in many areas of life outside of the world of testing. Salaries of players on sports teams are determined by their scores. People who sell stocks get raises if the stocks they select do well.  So it is easy to see why tests are thought to be useful in learning as well.

I think that in all areas a focus just on numbers is dangerous. We have experienced the ways that those in financial institutions manipulated numbers. And in Australia a scandal has just been uncovered indicating that members of all sorts of sports teams have been taking drugs to enhance their performance for years.

Paul Tough, a New York Times reporter has just had a book published called How Children Succedd: Grit, Curiosity and the Hidden Power of Character. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). He followed students with very high test scores in high school during their college years.  Only 20 percent of the students he followed graduated from college. They had come from poor neighborhoods with little family support. But they did well on tests because of extra work on the part of their teachers and a wider range of activities than usually are available in inner city schools. But their test scores accounted for only about 1/3 of success. The title of his book indicates the other qualities that are important for success.

Just as I finished reading and pondering about the review of Tough’s book, which contains ideas I have advocated for decades without the type of evidence that he provides, I read an obituary of Alex Comfort. (I say obituary but since Comfort died in 2000 the piece is more a commentary.) At any rate, Matthew Sweet ,who wrote the comments, says that Comfort is unfortunately known best for his The Joy of Sex. He wrote on a wide range of topics: Authority and Delinquency, Art and Social Responsibility, Writings against Power and Death, to name a few. He wrote six novels, a handful of plays, studies of political corruption, medical ethics, Eastern philosophy, etc.

Comfort said that he wrote on this wide range of topics because of a belief in freedom from convention and the evil of all repression. I see tests as a form of repression and I believe that they have the potential to enforce convention rather than free us from convention. Comfort frequently said during his life that “bloody-mindedness was the greatest human virtue.” Tests cannot measure this virtue nor any other virtues. But as we saw with the financial scandals and the drug scandals in the world of sport, and the results of Tough’s book on inner city students, character, curiosity and the freedom to question everything are more important. Test scores can easily divert us from other much more important values such as how we relate to each other, respect others and understand differences to name a values that we fortunately cannot reduce to test scores.

After analyzing transcribed recordings of the teachers, they found that each teacher dealt with a different part of Kennedy’s speech. They also found that some teachers discussed free trade from a range of perspectives they were familiar with and did not have the students read or discuss very much of the material they had been asked to teach.

Ironically, though the teachers varied the content a lot, which the team had provided to keep what was taught constant, they did not vary the methods they used! The bulk of the questions asked, for example, were fact recall questions.

They wrote up their results in The language of the classroom, published in 1966 by Teachers College Press. The lead author was Arno Bellack.

I based my system of analyzing classrooms on Bellack et al. in Breaking Rules (1987). And the Birmingham team that developed a coding system for describing language classrooms came up a system very similar to the Bellack team.

In 1968, one James Hoetker wrote an article about the types of questions English teachers asked. (Research in the teaching of English, 2, 99-106.) Perhaps not surprisingly he found that fact questions were the most frequent among English teachers just as they had been among social studies teachers.

After his study of transcripts from classes, he teamed up with one William F. Ahlbrand to review studies that had been done on classroom interaction from the early 1900’s. In 1069 the published what I consider a classic: The persistence of the recitation. (American Educational Research Journal, 6, 145-167. They found what Charles Dickens satirized in hard times when he has a teacher called Mr. Gradgrind exclaim, “All I want are facts; facts alone are wanted in life.”

In more recent years, fact questions, which teachers usually already know the answers to, have been labelled “display questions”. Studies of ESOL classes find that ESOL teachers are following the pattern of the last 100 years!

Douglas Barnes calls questions that require no thought “final draft talk” and contrasts such questions with “exploratory talk”. His book, From communication to curriculum, 1976, is worth a read. Of course so is the book by Bellack et al. and the articles by Hoetker and Hoetker  and Ahlbrand. Sinclair et al.–the Birmingham team are equally useful and full of similar insights. I find it exciting when different people from different countries curious about teachers teaching different subjects at different levels come up with similar data and insights.

I am attaching two ways of grouping questions, one from Percival Gurrey, Teaching English as a foreign language, Longman 1955–9 types and the other, Curiosity, that grew out of questions I noticed students asking.

The questions were formed by students from the first sentence in this text. I had asked a dozen teachers to ask their students to write at least 6 sentences about the first sentence.

You might wonder why I made such a request. I believe that we need to practice language and if students write questions about a text and are edited by their teacher and then ask each other the questions and write the responses they get a great deal of guided practice. The amount of language they produce is like 10 to 20 times more than when they just response to the teachers questions.

When they ask each other the questions they are asked to look at their partner, not at their written questions so they do not just say words but speak. I ask the teachers to have the student responding in the pair to first write the question. Later they compare both the questions each said and wrote and the responses each said and wrote. As I said they have sometimes as many as 100 questions and responses written in their notebooks at the end of a segment of the lesson that might last only 15 minutes. This in contrast to most lessons in which they have nothing in their notebooks and have said only a few words. Some students of course say nothing. And saying individual words is quite a waste of time anyway.

If you write six questions about the first sentence before you look at the range of questions I display in the two attachments you might better understand the 9 types of questions in the grid and the curiosity questions in the other attachment.

Of course there are many other types of questions. One of my purposes is to have you ask your students to write questions about materials you are using and then group the questions in ways you and your students find beneficial.

A short trip in 1800

The three men dismounted from their horses as soon as they arrived at the fisherman’s house. After they took the saddles off of their horses and tied their reins to a tree, the fisherman’s son gave water and food to the horses.

The fisherman asked, “Do you want water and food now before you go to the island?” The oldest man said, “No, we must get there before dark. We can eat and drink as we travel.”

The fisherman then ran to the beach with the three men. The four men quickly pushed a currach from the beach into the water. They jumped into the currach, and the fisherman and the youngest man started to row away from the beach to an island one kilometer away.

When they arrived at the island, a black guillemot flew over them very quickly. It made very loud sounds from its throat, and then it swooped down close to them.

All the best.

John

curiosity

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Inside the English classrooms, there are huge posters — 3 feet high by 3 feet wide — with colored photographs of fruits and vegetables. Under a picture of 3 strawberries the caption is “strawberry” and under a vivid photo of a bunch of bananas the word “banana” is printed. During the classes I visited, teachers had laminated 10 inch by 12 inch vivid photographs of places in Chicago. One picture showed the Art Museum, one the lake, one a fountain. Under the photographs were the words “Art Museum,” “Lake,” “Fountain.” During the class the teachers pointed to one picture at a time and said the words in the captions and asked the students to repeat them 3 times. They then asked the students to say the words in their own language. Few did.

On a visit to another school a few days later I observed the teacher passing out flash cards with a piece of tape on each one. One card had the word arm pit, another ankle, another wrist, etc. Each student was to tape the flash card on the part of the body that their flash card had printed on it. When a student taped the flash card with thigh on the knee of the student who was the model, the teacher took the flash card off the thigh and taped in on the student’s knee.

What assumptions underline these universal activities which focus on words without any context? individual words? In what ways are the posters a total waste of money?

As you ponder these questions, look at a few words in your dictionary like rat, elephant, ocean liner, canoe.  If your dictionary has sketches or photographs of these words in 99% of the cases the rat and elephant are shown as if they are the same size. Ditto for the ocean liner and the canoe. Those who produce dictionaries like those who produce posters seem not to be aware that if you do not know the word “wreath” seeing a picture of one could mean that “wreath is a circle, green, red flowers” to name a few.  If you know the word pumpkin, you know that the picture is of a vegetable. But if you do not know, the picture cold be the color orange or  a round object, to name two possibilities. And with no indication of size–the wreath and Santa Claus are the same size in the poster — how can one who does not know the meanings of the words nor has not seen these items before understand?

I just received a photograph of the ocean from a friend’s apartment in Redondo Beach, California. The caption was “Winter.” If I show a picture of a lake and say “lake” I cannot assume that the learners have any idea of the meaning. The word “lake” could be a color, a season, as I just mentioned, water, the sky, peace to name a few possibilities.

The idea that one picture is worth a thousand words is, I think, an overstatement. In many cases, one picture can suggest many meanings that are different from the caption. I think that there would be no loss if there were no posters in schools with captions. I think that there would be gains if teachers used the words they thought were important in contexts and in patterns. Learning content words like pumpkin is not difficult. Students with bilingual dictionaries can get the meaning in a heartbeat. But pumpkin is not the problem.

The issue is the word order and the function words — or what I call A 4 words or 8 1/2 by 11 words because they all fit on one sheet of paper of this size. What are these words? Here is the short list —

is
are
was
were
and
but
or
in
on
where
when
it
I
then
when
how
he
a
the

— to name about 15% of them.

Those who produce dictionaries and posters seem to miss the point that words have meaning only in context and in relationship to each other. (Having said this, dictionaries contain a rich range of information not only about words but about how they are used and often they provide sentences with the words used correctly. But the sketches and captions of words like “book” under a book rather than “a book” are misleading. Book can mean make a reservation; it is a verb. But “a book” is a noun indicated by the “a.” The lack of the use of articles is, I think, a huge flaw and one reason non-native speakers do not use articles. Why would they? The dictionaries they use and the posters their teachers use omit the article.

Getting back to the picture of Lake Michigan in Chicago about which the teacher asked the students to repeat “lake” three times is really a waste of time, both because three repetitions are not likely to lead to retention, and because the word is not used in relation to other words. Here are some other options. Say these sentences: “The water is blue.” “Your uniform is blue.” “Give me a blue pen.” “Give me a black pen.” “The sky is blue.” “Point to the lake in the picture.” “Point to the sky in the picture.” “Point to the beach in the picture.” Of course some students will point to the lake when you say sky, but that is the point. It means that the picture and the caption alone are not useful. They have to see relationships between different words that refer to various parts of the picture.

Re. the parts of the body, rather than having students repeat arm pit, it is more useful to put the words in context and teach only one or two at a time. When in life do we point to all parts of our body and say the names for the parts? Never! At a doctor’s office we might say “My wrist hurts. ” But it is unlikely that we will say ” My head hurts; my armpit hurts, my ankle hurts, my thigh hurts, my foot hurts, my fingers hurt, my fingernails hurt, my eyes hurt, my lips hurt, etc. ” Here are some other options though they are not all that normal when we chat with others about body parts:

“Raise your left arm.”
“Raise your right arm.”
“Point to your left wrist.”
“Point to your right wrist.”
“Point to your left eye.”
“Point to your right eye.”

Though these are not normal sentences when we talk, they use the words in patterns rather than in isolation. And “point to” can be used with hundreds of words — “Point to the lake,” “Point to the ceiling,” “Point to the light switch,” etc.

Some of what we do in classes with new words can be somewhat natural — “Your uniform is blue.” And some new words will be somewhat unnatural, but at least they will be in context and will juxtapose words so that students can understand the contrasting meanings.

When I observe classes I note that 90% of the teachers follow the lead of the dictionaries. They say “Here is a book I bought yesterday.” and then write the word “book” on the board without the article or the other words in the sentence.

I am attaching a transcript from a DVD that is part of a book titled 50 Strategies for Teaching English Language Learners. The authors, Adrienne L. Herrell and Michael Jordan say that they produced the DVD to illustrate “exemplary teaching.” In the transcript  you will see that the teacher, Diane, introduces all nouns without articles. And you will see that she says things like “What might that look like?” which contains 5 function words and no content words! Yet she is dealing only with content words in her lesson. If the students can understand “What might that look like?” one wonders why she is teaching the words she is! Though my comments might sound like I am criticizing, I am simply trying to illustrate the importance of asking how what we think is helpful might be harmful and how what we think is harmful might be helpful. The fact that the authors of 50 Strategies did not ask these questions I think is very unfortunate. The fact that Dianne focuses on individual words out of context and says 447 words in contrast to the 37 or so that students say I also consider very unfortunate.  (The students said individual words in all but a few cases while the teacher said both individual words and many sentences as you will see when you read the transcript.) Again my goal is not to criticize them but to remind you that unless you record what you and your students do and then ask what assumptions about learning your activities are in tune with, and ask to what extent what you think is positive is perhaps negative, and what you think is negative is perhaps positive, you cannot understand what you are doing.

I say over and over in workshops and in on-line courses that you should believe nothing I say! I want you to analyze, explore and look at transcripts of what you are doing. Only then can you begin to see what you are doing in contrast to what you think you are doing and how what you are doing is in tune, and not in tune with your assumptions and ideas about how we learn. All the best.

John

PS Another consideration. Some words we use a lot. Many we never use but simply have to recognize, some in print and some when we hear them. “Trowel” in the attached transcript I would put in the recognize category. Ditto for “shovel”, especially for those who live in cities.

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“Let them fill their own pails!” Maria Montessori

Dr. Montessori, one of the first Italian women to become a physician, became interested in child development when she noticed some of the children she treated had learning problems. She developed a method of teaching children from her observation of children in many different settings, not just school or her medical office.

One of the most memorable observations for me was a description of children filling their small play pails with sand or stones in Central park in New York City. Dr. Montessori noted that as soon as the children filled their buckets then turned them over and emptied them. They then started to fill them again, dump then and fill them over and over. When it was time to go home, parents or care givers often picked up a play shovel or used their hands to scoop up sand or stones so the buckets could be filled more quickly. Very frequently the children started to scream or cry as others put sand or stones in their play pails.

Dr. Montessori’s lesson from this was they the children wanted to fill their own pails. They wanted to be independent.

When I was president of International Pacific College in NZ, one of my responsibilities was to welcome students to the college in an opening ceremony. One of our goals at IPC was to encourage group work and student centered teaching. I thought that Montessori’s observation symbolized one of our central goals. So at the first opening ceremony I gave each incoming student a stone. I then told them why I gave them the stone, repeating Montessori’s story about children in Central Park in New York City.

Immediately after the opening ceremony I realized that by telling the incoming students why I gave them each a stone I contradicted her point! So at the next opening ceremony I asked the new students to write on a 3 by 5 note card why I gave them each a stone. “Why a stone and not an iPad or an iPod or a laptop computer?

As you read the reasons students wrote you will see the power of Montessori’s insight.

• The stone symbolizes how we should be in our studies—strong, determined, hard working.

• If I place a stone on a path it can be a way to lead others along where I have traveled—if we all leave our stones as pointers, others can follow us.

• I will be hard like a stone. I will not be bothered by the weather or small disappointments.

• I remember the story in the New Testament about hypocrisy. I will not cast the first stone.

• “A rolling stone gathers no moss.” Is a very common proverb—almost a cliché. But I want to take advantage of all the new experiences at IPC.

•If you polish a stone every day, it will shine. I will shine if I accomplish a few small goals every day.

• The word for stone and will in Japanese is the same. My stone will remind me that if I have a strong will to do something, I can do it!

• I consider the stone I received a milestone—an important symbol of a new stage in my life in a new country.

• When we drop a stone in a pond, we can see many, many ripples. I hope each day I can produce a few ripples in my life to help me grow.

• I will polish my stone every day as I hope to polish my English a bit every day.

• A stone is hard and therefore represents my strength in going overseas to develop new ways.

• Stones are shaped by their environment. I too want to be shaped by the new environment at IPC.

•Each stone, like each person is strong and special and beautiful in its own way.

• Individual stones are small but alone not that strong . But many stones bound together in concrete are very, very strong. In the same way, if each of us works together with others in our studies and in our activities, we will be bound together and be very, very much stronger than if we only act alone.

• Some stones from different continents have the same chemical composition and appearance—they are international, they cross boundaries as we are trying to do at IPC.

• When I look at the surface of my stone, the internal properties are not revealed. And so with people—I have to look beyond the surface to understand the internal properties of people.

• Each stone is precious in its own way. Each person is also precious in her or his own way.

• A stone seems worthless but without it, the rivers would be more polluted. We too are each important in our own way.

• John gave us stones to play with. It means we will have fun at IPC with parties!

• A stone represents land, the land of New Zealand. John gave a stone personally to each of us as a personal warm welcome not just to IPC but to NZ.

I was blown away by the richness and range of comments which all support Montessori’s observation. When I met students at events after they graduated many of them took out the stone that I had given them. They said they put it in their pocket or purse every day. Many parents come to our opening ceremonies and I had always given them stones also. When I met them I was astonished at the number of them who like the students carried the stone with them every day.

Small events, huge consequences!

John

Many unions and school distracts in the United States are discussing the need to base salaries and retention on the evaluation of teachers. Methods to evaluate the teachers include improvement in students’ test scores, analysis of teachers’ lesson plans and observation of classes by principals, department chairs or peers. Some universities and publishers are developing observation schemes so that when lessons are observed the teacher will know what the observers are looking for.

I have not seen one person suggest that teacher development would be more likely if teachers observed and analyzed their own interactions rather than be subjected to evaluation by outsiders, at least initially. After a few weeks, mutual discussion of transcriptions and student work is beneficial. By mutual I mean not only teachers having pair discussions by involving students in the detailed analysis of the interactions as well.

Nor have I seen anyone suggest that teachers should record and transcribe interactions from a couple of their classes at least once a week. Finally, I have not heard anyone suggest that we can learn a great deal both about what we are doing and the effects with transcripts that fit on one 8 ½ by 11 (A4) sheet of paper.

But the analysis of a small amount of data from many different perspectives is common in science. Here is a description of how Louis Rodolphe Agassiz (May 28, 1807 – December 14, 1873) a Swiss paleontologist, glaciologist, geologist and a prominent innovator in the study of the Earth’s natural history who was a professor at Harvard University followed this method.

“When I sat me down before my tin pan, Agassiz brought me a small fish, placing it before me with the rather stern requirement that I should study it, but should on no account talk to any one concerning it, nor read anything relating to fishes until I had his permission so to do. To my inquiry “What shall I do?” he said in effect: ‘Find out what you can without damaging the specimen; when I think that you have done the work I will question you.’ In the course of an hour I thought I had compassed that fish; it was rather an unsavory object, giving forth the stench of old alcohol, then loathsome to me, that in time I came to like it. Many of the scales were loosened so that they fell off. It appeared to me to be a case for a summary report, which I was anxious to make and get on to the next stage of the business. But Agassiz, though always within call, concerned himself no further with me that day, nor the next, nor for a week. At first this neglect was distressing; but I saw that it was a game, for he was, as I discerned rather than saw, covertly watching me. So I set my wits to work upon the thing, and in the course of a hundred hours or so thought I had done much—a hundred times as much as seemed possible at the start. I got interested in finding out how the scales went in series, their shape, the form and placement of the teeth, etc. Finally I felt full of the subject and probably expressed it in my bearing; as for words about it then, there were none from my master except his cheery ‘Good morning.’ At length on the seventh day, came the question ‘Well?’ and my disgorge of learning to him as he sat on the edge of my table puffing his cigar. At the end of the hour’s telling he swung off and away saying, ‘That is not right.’ Here I began to think that after all perhaps the rules for scanning Latin verse were not the worst infliction in the world. Moreover, it was clear that he was playing a game with me to find if I were capable of doing hard, continuous work without the support of a teacher and this stimulated me to labor. I went at the task anew, discarded my first notes, and in another week of ten hours a day labor I had results which astonished myself and satisfied him. Still there was no trace of praise in words or manner. He signified that it would do by placing before me about a half a peck of bones, telling me to see what I could make of them, with no further directions to guide me.” From The Autobiography of Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, 1909.

Teachers do not have the luxury of having as much time as Nathaniel had as a student at Harvard. But they do have the same ability he had. And their one-page transcripts can be their fish and peck of bones.

When I am invited by teachers to join their conversations about their transcripts they universally say that what they thought they had been doing and what they actually did were different. They have also consistently said that they were able to see and hear what their students were saying and doing that was very different from what they had thought they said and did while they were teaching. During the half hour or so teachers spend on analysis of each 1 sheet transcript, they simultaneously see how they can change the tasks they have given. Said another way, analyzing and planning go hand in hand.

More and more doctors are having their operations video taped. Sports teams regularly watch video clips from their games.

922 words Grade Level 10 Flesch Reading Ease 62%

One purpose of Charter Schools is to provide different options for students. But if all schools have to follow the same standards how can Charter Schools or specialized schools like the Bronx High School of Science or the Martin Luther King High School in NY that prepares students to work in opera continue?

There is no goal in the Common Standards for teaching literature that deals with students’ emotional responses to what they read! They have to identify theme, compare characters, etc. But noting about emotional responses.

I did not see any goals related to the use of jargon and cliches in the Common Standards. But I did not read every word in them because they are so full of jargon and cliches that even if they have a goal related to these types of words the authors of the Standards themselves do not meet this goal.

In the article, the author, David Denby, mentions that Diane Ravitch did her doctorate at Teachers’ College, Columbia University. Though if we follow the rule an apostrophe is necessary after Teachers, in the more than 100 years that TC has been in existence, none of its publications use the apostrophe. Teachers College, Columbia is the correct usage. If students took a standardized test and they had to choose between Teachers’ College and Teachers College, they would loose points if they choose the item that follows the rule. So much for so called standardized tests.

The focus on language and math and history and the lack of focus on art, music, sports, crafts, information technology, to name just a few areas that are ignored to me is a tragedy. The fact that both US parties support the so called reforms means that they themselves do not meet any of the goals in the Common Core Standards because here and there in the document we are told that students have to learn to question what they read and see how many of the arguments in documents are false claims.

I think that the so called reforms are likely to increase failure as does Diane Ravitch.

Another must read to show a much richer set of goals which contain hardly any jargon or any cliches is Neil Postman’s The End of Education.

He never uses words like scaffolding which is one of the favorites of the authors of the Common Core Standards.

Read the Common Core Standards on the internet if you have trouble falling asleep. As you read them you will fall asleep in a heartbeat!

All the best.

John