Is the Brain to Blame?

This NY Times opinion piece, co-authored by a neuroscientist and psychologist, proposes that many people hold the fallacious belief that psychological causes (intention) and biological causes (the physical laws that govern our brains) for behavior are completely separate. The reason that intention and biology are not completely separate causal functions is deceptively simple: all psychological states have simultaneously occurring biological ones.

While this piece was written in the context of the horrific recent shootings in Colorado, the point has led me to a series of questions related to best educational practices. For example, are all biological states associated with specific psychological states? Another way to ask this is if there is 1:1 correspondence between psychological and biological states (since we know that all psychological states have an associated biological state, but not if the biological states are unique to each psychological state), and if so, is it generalizable within or between individuals. If these pairs/connections exist, it could change the way we structure educational practices to be more responsive to the biological states of students' brains - a goal we already pursue based on what we know about their brains. For example, if we could implement activities that physiologically tuned brains into certain states most receptive to specific learning experiences (as we attempt to do by psychologically tuning student brains to feel safe, comfortable, and un-anxious), that would increase the effectiveness of the educative process.

Another thread of this that interests me is if brain characteristics can actually cause automatic behavior that is not reflective of the "true" person - what might be considered temporary insanity from a physiological, rather than psychological, standpoint. This could potentially provide a scientific basis for understanding the experiences of individuals going through periods of extreme neural growth or change, and lead to shifts in the way we deal with a variety of discipline and classroom management issues.

The implications of this understanding for character education are a third area for investigation. Just as we are educating students to be self-aware and reflective scholars who understand and make intentional choices about their learning habits to maximize their success, helping students begin to understand how the physical neurology of their brains impacts their psychological states, and thus their behaviors, rises to new prominence.

Connecting cultures through literature

Two Vanderbilt grads have launched a company called Teach Twice aimed at fostering international community development through literature, which I first heard about from Good.is. This is a great idea that has really made me think about our library at TBS, and the home libraries of our students and families.  It would be very worthwhile to go through the main library and each classroom library using different lenses of analysis - cultural awareness, gender diversity, etc. - and this sort of project fits in nicely with part of the TBS mission that speaks to engaging a changing world. Any parent volunteers to help take this on this coming year?

Thinking and Linking Pt.3

You can read previous linksets here and here (or here for all posts with the tag "articles").


The Washington Post has a great summary of Linda Darling-Hammond’s proposal for a framework for effective and professional teacher evaluation.

The NY Times offers what it calls “essential questions” for failure across various disciplines and professions. These could easily become age-appropriate lessons that integrate with our approach to developing critical thinking and meta-cognition about learning habits.

The Herald News reports on a school using the technique of learning walks to encourage collaboration among teachers. I've reported on my experience with learning walks seven or eight times on this blog (such as here and here).

This piece on GovTech presents arguments on both sides of bringing technology into lower elementary classrooms. This is a topic of that the elementary faculty discussed briefly during our year-end division meeting – what is developmentally appropriate technology for children of this age? What are our responsibilities to integrate digital technology into the classroom in ways that support the school's Technology learning outcome? Should we broaden the concept of technology to include brooms and mops, pencils and pens, rulers and protractors, and other hands-on practical life tools that we believe are also important for kids to use successfully?

The Huffington Post reports on a study that shows that yes, Virginia, the amount (and quality) of sleep impacts a student's performance in the classroom. Didn't we learn that from John Medina already?

Brad Kunz hits the nail on the head with his post on ASCD: good teaching should be focused on student learning and understanding, not on the evaluation or grade that a child earns. Good assessment is just a tool to help teachers gauge a child's progress in the arc of learning, not a means to evaluate and judge a child's worth. Besides, we all know that grades are completely subjective and actually damage children's intrinsic motivation.

Algebraic thinking should be part of the upper elementary math curriculum, but as this article from the Harvard Education Letter points out, there's a huge difference between pushing 8th grade math to 3rd grade, and building off of what younger students already know and do in a developmentally-appropriate way. That's why we love the NCTM standards: the five strands of mathematical thinking - operations, geometry, algebra, measurement, and data analysis - should be taught at ALL grade levels.

Here's a short and sweet call for sanity from Renee Moore that resonates nicely with our approach to standardized testing.

In some ways, not understanding the importance of critical thinking skills is indicative of a lack of those same skills. This has to be some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.


I'll put up another installment next week (I've got a good collection still waiting for annotation and attention).

Distance learning gets redefined

This spring I posted a video of TBS parent Gene Wade talking about his new start-up, which is attempting to revolutionize higher education by offering a low-cost distance learning platform with academic rigor that is responsive to the cognitive development of the participants. Yesterday, CNN published an opinion piece about Udacity, another distance learning program at the college level, written by former Secretary of Education (and Drug Tzar) William Bennett. Putting aside the "puff piece" approach (Bennett basically takes Udacity founder Steven Thrun at his word for each claim that he makes), it's exciting to hear about another platform taking on the twin equity gates of college admissions and tuition. Now to figure out how to get free computers and internet access to anyone who wants it.....

In case you're wondering about what's new in online education in independent schools, check out the Online School for Girls, a consortium of schools offering online courses for high school students.

Senior Admin Meeting

Last week the Senior Admin Team - Mitch (Head of School), Mohammad (Business Manager), Diane (Advancement Director), Kathy (ECC Director), Gretchen (Middle School Director) and myself - spent a day and a half in a retreat-style meeting off campus at Gretchen's house.



We began with an activity Mitch designed, choosing one of three lenses to tell a personal story that connects to our current work. I knew the story I wanted to tell almost at once, and it was "connecting the dots" of my childhood feeling of happiness with my adult life (the other options were speaking to Ron Richart's concept of a culture of learning, or the TBS learning outcomes). As the youngest of four kids, I was expected to play a classical instrument - my siblings played oboe, clarinet, and trumpet, and I was taken to the symphony at age 9 and told to pick an instrument I liked. While my siblings cared passionately about their instrument and skill, and put in the requisite practice to gain first chairs in competitive youth groups such as BYSO and MYWE, I was relatively unhappy not just with the French Horn, but with having to spend so much time on an activity about which I lacked passion, and never put in the effort to achieve a high degree of skill or success. When I broke my two front upper teeth in 11th grade during a hockey game, it provided a perfect opportunity for me to shift instruments, and I began playing guitar.

Twenty years later, while my siblings love and appreciate music, they do not play instruments, whereas I play guitar every day. The lesson for me is that, as adults it's ok tell our children that "you will be do some athletic event to stay healthy" or "you will do some performing art", but it's equally as important to listen to them - and to help them find their voice - and be participants in the process, because that is how we can nurture their passions and prepare them for a meaningful life.

The second conversation of the afternoon was a generative discussion based on the results of this spring's family surveys. We looked in depth at areas of the results that spoke to our strengths and challenges, and identified low-hanging fruit we could immediately begin working on to make a difference to our families.

The next morning we again gathered at Gretchen's house, spending the morning in a leadership training with TBS parent Amy Huang of Trimergence. Amy had each of us fill out a self-assessment that measured the absolute and relative importance of logic, emotion, and intuition in our approach to our work, and from there had us identify our "door" on the Enneagram through the Nine Doors framework. We shared the results of our intelligence self-assessments, and dove into the subtleties of how each of us approaches our work, sharing stories and reflections and insights with each other, and thus beginning the process of coalescing our new team. This activity was a wonderful way to get to know Kathy, and the other members of the team in deeper ways, and it resonated closely with the training I have done in depth this year as part of my EQ development.

This conversation continued after lunch, with updates and discussions on practical topics such as the state of enrollment, development, the budget, and various other summer projects. We ended at 5:00 and met our spouses for a "thank you" dinner at Comal Restaurant in Berkeley (the construction of which involved at least three TBS families).