Worthwhile Endeavours – Reflecting on the End of the Beginning

Quid hoc anno feci? What have I been up to this year?

i) First Steps:
     As I mentioned, my initial thesis was that modern digital technology has had a deleterious role in denuding the attention span and ability to focus of anyone who uses it. I was convinced that it was the primary driver in a fundamental change to the way people think. By being bombarded constantly with information and stimulation, our brains have been forced to adapt by rationing the amount of attention it can spend on any one stimulus. My contention was that, while it may be appropriate to skim and scan websites, blogs, and the many, many other sources of information we encounter, the transfer of this mode of thinking to topics and sources of information that may require more deliberate consideration (e.g. academic papers, works of literature, pieces of artwork, etc. etc.), would not be helpful. I suppose I was arguing that there was something inherently slowing about reading a book or other text in isolation from the many other types of stimulation, thus teaching by osmosis those immersed in those types of texts to think slowly, and that taking away these types of texts (and sources of information) would also take away opportunities to teach students to think slowly. My focus was on identifying, isolating, and (hopefully) remedying these negative effects. My conversations with Garth, Justin, Derek, Elissa and others at the second face-to-face, in particular, started me thinking about something that I hadn’t considered before: has technology caused the degradation of people’s ability to slow down and pay attention to detail, or has it enabled and even encouraged a rapidity of thinking that many of us default to in many situations when the need to think slowly is not immediately apparent.

ii) Reading, and reading, and (more) reading:

The second face-to-face had nudged me, then, to learn more about how thinking works, and what role technology has played in changing the way we think. I spent a lot of time reading, beginning with Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, an essential start for anyone wanting to learn about how we think. It was recommended to me a number of years ago by Lois Rowe, who was the Vice-Principal of Havergal College when I taught there from 2012 to 2014. A key take-away was that we all, inherently, are biased toward making our thinking more streamlined, efficient, and, in the end, fast. It takes deliberate presence of mind to shift our thinking to the “slow thinking” mode that has such an important place in our academic endeavours. This was a useful reminder to me that there hasn’t been some dramatic cognitive or neurological shift with the advent of digital technology — hastiness of thought has always been with us. Combined with reading provided to me by Anand Mahadevan,a colleague here at UTS who has a background in neuroscience, I realized that the types of environments provided by digital technology, and the over-stimulating environments it creates for us, have been more of an enabling factor, allowing us to get away with doing what we always prefer to do when faced with large amounts of information — move fast and shallow.

The issue, of course, is that we need to teach students how function in slow and deliberate ways within this digital landscape, while still being able to move quickly and nimbly in certain circumstances. It was at this moment, right around the time of the third face-to-face, that I recognized what I was really grappling with: not neuroscience, not even psychology, but something that has been printed on our report cards for a number of years now — self-regulation. I realized that I had to find a way to apply what I already knew about self-regulation and executive functioning to what I had learned about thinking, to teach students how to be self-regulating thinkers in a digital world.

iii) Strategizing:

It was at once liberating and daunting to be faced with this course correction. I had the chance to combine two domains I was familiar with into something that could be used to teach students how to be self-aware thinkers. My first step was to develop a list of success criteria for a self-regulating thinker. What would s/he be able to do? how would s/he approach thinking tasks and what it would be about this approach that was self-regulating, and how were these self-regulating aspects beneficial to the end result. Take a look at my Action Plan doc to see the criteria that I developed:

 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Fi1KsO5xUh3llemcar90b3DIKH0_s-T5N4dB_x-9hcw/pub

After a much longer period of time than I had anticipated, spent refining and adjusting criteria and then developing “observables” , I developed a working checklist that teachers could use to gauge the degree to which their students are self-regulating thinkers. I also developed a student self-assessment, to be deployed to begin the conversation with students about 1) what self-regulation actually is; and 2) how self-regulation applies to thinking in powerful ways.

iv) Action! 

After the longer-than-expected development phase, I was left with about a month or so of time to begin deploying what I had developed. I quickly came to peace with the fact that I would only be able to finish the “surveying the land” phase of my action plan: the diagnostic/pre-assessment of students, beginning the conversation with students about the topic of self-regulated thinking, and some initial attempts to use the teacher assessment checklist to gauge students’ proficiency with respect to self-regulated thinking. I used the student self-assessment piece with two grade nine classes and found that students were generally very interested in learning more about how they think, why they think that way, and how they might tweak their thinking to improve their ability to perform certain tasks. Students, in general, were very up-front about the fact that they do not often (or ever) think about their own thinking, unless pushed to do so by their teachers. They hadn’t thought about the idea that we think in ‘fast’ and ‘slow’ ways, interpreting fast thinking to be what they do when they are in a rush, and slow thinking what they do when they have time (which they said they never had). The experience was a very useful one for me, allowing me to begin the process of designing a series of instructional interventions to address, nurture, and support the various competencies I had identified in my teacher-checklist for self-regulating thinkers. The survey revealed that students were aware of the different kinds of thinking tasks (analysis, evaluation, synthesis, creation, etc.), but had not really ever thought about how they about these tasks. One student wrote something on his survey that was both encouraging and enlightening: “I had never thought about who I think about things before!”

Beginning this critical aspect of self-awareness, helping students to become “masters of their own [mental] domains” is where I feel we as teachers have always, and will always, be able to make valuable contributions to our students’ lives. When I think back to my own schooling and examples of the truly valuable lessons I learned, many of the moments that stand out are ones that made me step back and think about who I am, to slow down and look inward. My efforts this year have been an attempt to develop a tool that teachers can use to help cultivate this inward gaze in students, and to assess students’ progress as the journey toward self-regulating thinking continues.

What lies ahead: Next Steps

The immediate future for this endeavour involves building on the momentum I have with the grade nine classes I have worked with on self-regulated thinking by building explicit instruction of the thinking and self-regulatory competencies I have identified into my lessons and units. I have some ideas about specific areas of the Latin curriculum where this could be done and look forward to the challenge of infusing what I already do with my newfound insights. This progress of curricular adjustment will segue nicely into my next great project — rethinking how I plan courses, setting aside the sequential, unit-by-unit model of course planning, and developing a sort of helical model of skill development. Derek Doucet and I have already started batting ideas around and I look forward to seeing what results we can produce from another great year of learning, in what would be my second ‘season’ as a member of Cohort 21.

Epilogue (to an Unending Adventure):

As I proceed forward from the ‘end’ of my first year as a member of Cohort 21, I feel it important to reflect on what I have experienced this year. To say that my Cohort 21 experience thus far has been rewarding and enriching would be to sell the experience far too short. I have been afforded the opportunity, the incentive, and the impetus to delve deeply into an issue that have found both fascinating and infuriating: why is it so difficult to get teenagers to slow down and think carefully when I need them to. Amid the many other priorities of a fifth-year teacher, with a fifteen-month old (at time of writing) at home, I find it difficult to believe that I would have made the time to consider some of the bigger pieces of my teaching puzzle. In many ways, day-to-day teaching becomes (pardon the interesting analogy) very much like the water-tight compartment system on the R.M.S. Titanic: the doors between the many compartments remain down and (unlike the actually Titanic) sealed as each separate compartment is dealt with. Whether the analogy is a cruise liner or the idea of ‘siloing’, the point is that, left to her or his own devices, a young teacher like me would naturally have prioritized the issues that affect the ‘here and now’ — lessons, units, assessments, student well-being, co-curriculars, etc., etc. Once nudged toward stepping back and taking on a meaningful piece of research, however, I realized just what I would have missed had I kept my focus on the here-and-now: the fact that larger-scale issues (like adolescent attention spans) are the root causes of the very things I would have been trying to plan for with very little (or no) contextual data. In short, I have learned that it is impossible to address the here and now without looking at underlying causes and factors. I knew this, of course, from many years of studying history, and had even taught this very fact to many history students learning about causation. What Cohort 21 let me, pushed me, to do is to improve what I do in the here and now by addressing deeper, more foundational issues in a way that is supported by research and best practice. When asked when a colleague about why I would recommend Cohort 21 to fellow teachers, I found myself talking less about my current project (although I feel it is important) and about the face-to-face sessions, and even the valuable network of wonderful professionals with whom I am now connected, and much more about the mindshift involved in truly embracing the experience of being a Cohorter. I talked about how I have embraced the need continuously improve practice by addressing root causes. I talked about I, a recovering perfectionist, became ‘ok’ with incompletion by rejecting the value of something’s ever being complete. This ‘end of the beginning’ mindset is a very powerful one, and one that I strongly recommended to that colleague, and would recommend to anyone else. I am a far better teacher now than I was before, if only because I have been unwittingly nudged into the sort of growth mindset that Justin, Garth, and the many other experienced Cohort 21 leaders embody. I’m okay with ‘not there yet’ because, as I’ve seen this year, ‘in progress’ is where most worthwhile endeavours can be found. I can’t wait to continue the journey, wherever it takes me.