Neuroscience and learning

Two interesting articles related to children's brains crossed my inbox today.

Tiffany Lewis wrote a nice article on the importance of identifying and understanding what's going on with children's cognitive realities, rather than defaulting to the over-simplification of labels, in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, which is something we often talk about at TBS. The question of when to tell or inform a child about his or her unique cognitive structure is a very interesting one, as here at TBS we tend to wait to do this until sometime in middle school, when children have the capacity to process the information intellectually, and also the emotional implications that come from realizing one's unique gifts and challenges.

Wendi Pillars documented five effective tenants of teaching based on neuroscience. Four of her recommendations are well-trod at this point: return to information over time, slow down, develop close relationships with students (to relieve their stress), and establish the relevance of the ideas in connection with prior knowledge. It was the fifth idea - the fact that information that is presented first or last has a greater chance of being retained (the primacy-recency effect) - that jumped out at me for its implications about lesson structures.

The Second Annual K-8 Book Swap!

Leading up to our Read-a-thon on Friday, April 6, we are having author visits and the Book Swap. The actual swap where each child is able to choose a book to take home and keep will be held on Thursday, April 5. Books to swap should be brought in April 3-5.

Book Swap 2012 FAQ's

Q: When can we drop off our book to swap?

A: Books can be dropped off at the TBS curb on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, April 3rd-5th, during morning arrival, from 8:15-8:30. On April 3rd and 4th only, books can also be dropped off in the Swap Box in the front office. It would be the most helpful if books were brought in on April 3rd and 4th to allow for more sorting time before the Swap starts on April 5th.

Q: Is there a limit on how many books you can swap?

A: Yes. Each child will only get to pick one book to keep forever.

Q: Do all K-5 students need to bring in a book?

A: Since it can be hard for young children in K/1 to give up their treasured books, parents should not worry if their K/1 child could not part with one. Instead, we are asking the whole TBS community to bring in additional just right books to support our young readers.

Q: Is the ECC participating?

A: No, the ECC is not participating. We are considering expanding it in the future.

Q: Do I absolutely have to bring a book to take a book?

A: No child will be turned away from taking home a book during the book swap; we will make sure to have more than enough books on hand.

Q: What if a family wants to bring a bunch of books?

A: If a family donates more than one book, that is wonderful and we thank them. Remember that all children will get to choose one book at the Swap regardless of how many they have brought. All books dropped off will be included in the Swap. Those left over will be shelved in the various school libraries.

Q: Does the condition of the book matter?

A: Only books that are in good condition or better should be brought in.

Q: How do I know if a book is appropriate to swap?

A: They can be any level from picture books to middle school level, fiction or non-fiction.

Q: Is this book swap for grown-ups, too?

A: Not this year. We're going to do it just for students, and we'll consider expanding it in the future if we get more volunteers.

Q: When do kids get to pick their new books?

A: Students will get to “shop” and pick their books by class on Thursday, April 5th.

Q: I want to volunteer to help, and/or I have another question. To whom should I speak?

A: Parents please contact the Swap Organizer/Parent Volunteer Jean Littlejohn at

Math anxiety and brain function

A fascinating piece of research has just come out of the Stanford School of Medicine that confirms what seemed likely: math-specific fear interferes with the brain's information-processing capacity and its ability to reason through a math problem. In other words, math anxiety leads to decreased mental functioning in areas of problem solving, memory, and numerical reasoning when trying to engage in mathematical thinking!


What are the implications for classroom practice? First, we need to identify when students are experiencing math anxiety. Second, we need to educate students about the neurological impact that anxiety has on their brains (since it actually decreases their ability to successfully solve math problems) - we already know we don't like the experience of anxiety, but we need to understand how it actually affects us. Third, we need to teach students strategies to manage that anxiety.

One strategy I have been utilizing recently in my own practice of mindfulness (drawn from my reading of Fully Present: The art and science of mindfulness) that I think has potential application here is "R.A.I.N." R = recognize the emotion or experience. A = accept the emotion's existence (rather than suppress, repress, or fight it). I = investigate how the emotion makes you feel, on a physical level (not intellectual) - does your jaw get tight, breathing short, foot start to bounce, etc? N = non-identify, or tell yourself that this emotion and accompanying physical sensation is temporary and non-permanent, and that you are not that experience.

Annual TBS student art show

I hope you had the chance to come to the annual student art show Friday night, or Saturday morning. I am always so deeply impressed at the artistic thinking that Julianne and Benicia ask our students to engage in, and the ways in which student creativity enables them to create these fascinating pieces! And what a labor of love it is for the teachers to throw the show.

Thinking and Linking about Leadership #2

Back in January I put up a post on some articles about leadership that I had recently read. As I wrote then, reading about leadership is one of the ways that I push myself to remain reflective about my leadership practice. So, here's another entry of leadership-related articles I've read in the last two months. Some of these are specifically related to educational administration, some are presented as lists of things to do or keep in mind as leaders, some are interviews with leaders in various fields, and some are about leadership theory. Enjoy your grazing!

An interview with Jim Whitehurst

Understand your lenses, transform your leadership

11 things faculty want from their administrators

6 ways to share credit and improve culture

The difference between innovation and ideas

How can a teacher evaluation be efficient, valid, and effective?

An interview with Harry West

What is leadership success?

What are leadership "trump cards"?

Yes, principal quality influences student educational achievement

An interview with John Petrucci

An interview with Tim Bucher

A Harvard professor (finally) realizes lectures aren't great learning experiences

Disrupting tuition

Clayton Christensen, author of the highly influential book Distrupting Class, has an excellent new video about disruptive innovation posted last week at HBR. It's got me wondering if the way tuition works at independent schools presents an opportunity for disruptive innovation, and what that might look like. The only two options I'm aware of currently employed are partnering with outside funding sources such as corporations or funds, which comes with significant limitations and directives from those financial sources, or employing a sliding scale for tuition, which very few schools do sustainably, since tuition assistance essentially functions to create a sliding scale that is more predictable and manageable. Let me crowd-source this: anyone got ideas?

Mission Moments #3

Only you, dear readers, have the chance to click here to download the newest issue of the newsletter I write for the Elementary Division. Hear why word walls are important for emerging readers in Blackberry; how K/1 student voice is being cultivated in Laurel; how Sweet Briar teachers are using assessment; how Temescal teachers are developing student vocabulary; how Cerrito teachers are integrating art into the culture studies program; all about the interdisciplinary game-based project in Strawberry; and the work Laurie is doing to improve our literacy curriculum!

Today's elementary division meeting warm-up activity

I like to always begin our elementary division meetings with a warm-up activity that gets people involved and engaged with the group, and I try to come up with a new activity each time. For today's meeting, I asked each teacher to complete a sentence, and share their answers. The sentence starters from which they could chose were:

-When I was younger, I wanted to be...

-The best news I've gotten over the past week is...

-The biggest thing I'd like to accomplish before my next birthday is...

-If I could relive one event, it would be...

-A funny thing that happened to me as a child was...

Although some faculty had difficulty selecting which sentence to complete, this activity lead to great stories and lots of laughter all around the table, as we listened to stories of each others' childhood, or learned about the hopes and dreams of our colleagues.

NAIS Annual Conference, Day Three

The final day of this year’s NAIS conference began right at 8:00 am with the first of the day’s three workshops. Since the theme of the conference is innovation, I choose “Innovative Schools, Innovative Students” by Jonathon Martin, Head at St Gregory’s (AZ). I’ve enjoyed reading Jon’s blog and his posts to the Independent School listserve, and was excited to hear what he had to say about innovation. His presentation was essentially an overview of the concepts presented in some select recently published books on innovation, including Drive, Where Good Ideas Come From, and The Innovator’s DNA, which was useful from the standpoint of a data-dump on the concepts, but not in thinking about how these ideas are specifically applicable within schools. Unfortunately, as he ran short on time he accelerated the pace and volume of his speaking – choosing content coverage over depth.

For my next workshop I attended “Innovator’s Challenge Promotes Cross-Curricular Collaboration and Innovation”, presented by Penny Summers and Burn Jones of The Canterbury School (NC). They told the story of how they attempted to foster curriculum improvement through a specific project that arose from their leadership team’s shared reading of Curriculum 21 by Heidi Hayes Jacob (a book that has been on my reading list for some time). Listening to the narrative of the project was interesting, and I especially appreciated the constraints that they built into the project; that teachers work cross-disciplinarily with another teacher, that they connect with an outside organization, and that the project be considered within the context of the real work of the professionals in the field (biologists, writers, etc).

I had have a wonderful lunch conversation with Mary, Anne, and Mo Lan from The Trinity School in Menlo Park. I had been on their campus for a CAIS accreditation training in October, and Anne lives in Oakland and worked at both Bentley and Beacon previously, and we built on those connections to discuss a range of issues, from accreditation to enrollment to strategic thinking.

For the final workshop of the conference, I picked “Moving The Mountain: Changing Faculty Culture from Within” by Alice Moore at Marin Country Day School (CA) and David Colon at Collegiate School (VA). This workshop took a widely divergent pedagogic approach from the others, in that the presenters posed a series of questions to the audience, giving us time to talk in small groups and then report back our answers, before sharing some other considerations and moving on to the next question. I appreciated the attempt to provide a structure that would allow for active thinking and engagement, in contrast to most of the other workshops of the conference, though my hope for an increased understanding of, or even a few pragmatic nuggets about shifting faculty culture was not satisfied.

The conference’s closing general session featured Amy Chua, Yale Law School professor and author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. After all the bad publicity her book had received, I was fully expecting to hear views that are widely divergent from my own, and thus was utterly shocked to hear how incredibly funny, self-deprecating, and thoughtful Amy actually was. Her perspective is far more complex than the media have depicted, and I found myself agreeing with many of the things she discussed, including the need to have high expectations for children, the importance of having them develop resiliency, the fact that genuine self-esteem comes from succeeding as a result of trying hard to do something challenging, the importance of balancing choice and freedom, and that happiness and success do not need to be mutually exclusive. Ultimately, her point is that Western parents have much to learn from Chinese parents, and vice-versa; that Chinese parents need to learn to nurture the whole child and cultivate the social and emotional lives of their children as well as the academic. In many ways, she was advocating for the exact sort of progressive education that we provide at TBS!

NAIS Annual Conference, Day Two

The theme of this year’s conference is innovation. The opening general session this morning began with an address by NAIS president Pat Bassett that made me feel extremely good about the work that we are doing at TBS. He began by proposing that the work of independent schools is to teach students to be “critical, creative and inventive thinkers”, which ties directly to our school-wide learning outcomes. He then went on to proclaim ten promising innovations in education:

1. adopting backward design and mapping of curriculum around skills, rather than subjects

2. documenting student outcomes via formative assessments and “demonstrations of learning” and digital portfolios

3. connecting appreciative inquiry, the strengths approach, and growth mindset – all subsets of the positivist psychology movement

4. globalizing independent schools

5. stage II greening of schools

6. “STEM and beyond” signature programming – the great differentiator of your program

7. professionalizing the profession – 6 or 7 day schedules to get all teachers with an affinity free on a certain day; different teams (brain based learning, flipped classroom, differentiated instruction)

8. public purpose of private education initiatives

9. online learning consortia for independent school-branded courses

10. teaching and using design thinking

I’ve italicized the five innovations on the list that we are currently utilizing, which I think is a great starting point for TBS given the enormous change pressures that we have experienced in the last five years. I also believe that we’ll be in position to begin pursuing items #6 and #8 above in the next year, in explicit initiatives and programs.

Unfortunately, I was entirely underwhelmed the presentation of the keynote speaker, Bill Gates. His talk was centered on four aspects of technology that he believes can revolution education: reimaging textbooks as interactive, scaling our best teachers via online videos, connecting thru social networks, and personalizing learning. While there are tremendous possibilities in these mechanisms, Bill’s storytelling was flat and lacked humor, his visuals were overly simplified, and he essentially dodged the tough questions during the Q+A. Here’s an example:

Q: What skills do you think will be needed in the future?

A: The basic ability to use the latest software.

After the opening session came the first one-hour workshop period of the day. I selected a workshop titled Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, presented by Helen Landry and Laurie Reider-Lewis. I struggled with buyer’s remorse for the first twenty minutes; though this workshop connected directly to one of my personal PD goals for the year, I was also interested in a workshop on changing school culture, and the initial introduction by the speakers didn’t instill confidence that the conversation would yield substantive growth in my understanding of the concept of mindfulness. It was only when we did the first exercise – a “body scan” – that I was able to slip into a more mindful mode, and thus become content with the structure of the workshop and open myself up to the learning possibilities it could present – for which I was promptly rewarded with several nuggets about using mindfulness with students. Being in this mindful state carried over for the remainder of the day, and had a positive impact on my engagement with the other workshops of the day.

After lunch and conversation with Mohammad, and browsing the exhibit hall, I headed to a workshop on implementing design thinking with students, given by Kim Saxe at Nueva School (CA). In 2007, Nueva partnered with the Design School at Stanford to launch a design lab, giving over 3500 square feet to a design studio. Learning how Nueva implements and teaches design thinking to students, and used it in the development of their own program, was inspirational and exciting. Design thinking is the process that Laurie Schoeffler and I are using to improve our K-5 literacy program this year, and this workshop gave me several good ideas about how to integrate the approach with our ongoing curriculum review as well.

For the final workshop of the day, Mohammad and I went to hear John Medina, author of the book Brain Rules (about whom, and which, I’ve blogged before). I’d read the book earlier this year, so I was a little disappointed by his presentation, as it was a case of “read the book, or go to class, but not both”. He focused on two of the twelve brain rules in his book – exploration and stress – and you can get the basic ideas of these concepts by watching the videos below.

The day closed with a series of social and professional connections featuring a revolving cast. First I met with Nancy Foy, a member of my Fellowship cohort, for a conversation about her upcoming transition to a Head of School position in Richmond, VA. After this I attended a gathering of progressive educators hosted by Peter Berner-Hays, head of The Little School in nearby Bellevue, to discuss marketing and presenting the idea of progressive education in modern culture. Next, I gathered three Bay Area educators – Steve Bileca from Brandeis Hillel, Jon Kohler from Redwood Day School (another Fellowship cohort member), and Damon Allswang from Beacon Day School – for a Mediterranean dinner at Lola’s Restaurant. Finally, I met up with three members of my Aspiring Heads cohort – Andrea Kelly from Packard (NY), Rehki Puri from the School at Columbia University (NY), and Michele Williams from Stevenson (CA) – for drinks and reflective sharing about our learning from the day.

NAIS Annual Conference, Day One

The National Association of Independent Schools' annual conference is an extraordinary opportunity to get inspired, connect with old friends, and take time and space to reflect on the work that I do at TBS. I feel very fortunate to be supported by the school to attend this conference on a yearly basis.

Though Wednesday is a pre-conference day, with optional three-hour workshops available for an additional price, day one was fully taken up by the concluding meeting of the Fellowship for Aspiring Heads in which I am participating.

The morning consisted of two ninety-minute sessions. Session one was lead by Mark and Judy at Triangle Consulting, who lead the fellowship work this summer in Atlanta. The agenda covered time management, mastering the school environment, resilience and patience, and staying calm in crisis. Session two was a conversation among four sitting heads about meeting the needs of various school constituencies: internal, external, self and family. The heads included Donald Brace at The Blue School (NY), John Barrengos at Independent Day School (CT), Rafael Castillo at Seattle Country Day (WA), and Kate Windsor at Miss Porter School (CT). After an overview from each person about one thread, we broke out into small groups for focused discussions on a specific thread. I joined the group lead by John, which quickly veered to the topic of navigating the search for a head position.

After lunch, three one-hour sessions provided a crash course in various topics. Session three, lead by Debra Wilson, NAIS’s in-house lawyer, focused on the legal issues and tax ramifications to understand when negotiating a salary and benefits package as a new head of school. Session four was a discussion of Boards and governance by Donna Orem, NAIS staff. And session five was an overview of the responsibilities of a business manager by Paul Ibsen, Business Officer at Providence Day School (NC).

Though there was a huge amount of information to capture and digest, the best part of the day was seeing the other members of my cohort, hearing the stories of their lives and work, and having the chance to slow down and think about how I have been using the ideas that I’ve learned in this fellowship to aid my work this year.