Confidence: The Secret to Test Success

Second period freshman English was a motley crew of the lowest-performing, worst-behaved, hopeless cases at my high school. On the first day of class they looked around the room and up at me and asked who I’d pissed off in the administration. “We’re the worst in the school and we’re all in the class for dumb kids.” For some reason I became a liar and an actress in that awkward moment because with great confidence I explained that they were quite mistaken and that actually this was an honors class. They didn’t really believe me, but they didn’t have any way to prove me wrong, and so our semester of “honors” English began.

The class was small and that group of eight posed no threat thanks to their desire to live up to their befuddling “honors” reputation. They worked hard that semester. They ditched most of their classes, but not mine. They supported one another and called our group a family.

The principal told me he didn’t expect them to pass the end-of-grade test but he didn’t want them in the other ninth grade classes where they would disrupt their peers and bring the overall scores down with their antics. So, from the start, my competitive nature established the goal that they would ALL pass the test. Passing the test was also required for them to move to sophomore English. Every one of them had been stuck in ninth grade for a few years thanks to this one course.

You’d think with such a goal I would have had a robust action plan in place, but I would have to say my greatest test prep strategy was simply telling them they would pass. They were honors students after all. They knew the material. They were reading novels (for many, this was a first). They could write. They were going to pass.

So on the day of the test they had to fill in the cover sheet with their names, my name, the title of the course, and whether or not it was an honors course. And you already know what they filled in. I could have cleared up my lie on that last day, but what would the point have been?

Every last one of them passed. It’s crazy what a little confidence can accomplish.

An Inspiring Reality Check

I came to Inspired Teaching in 2004 with a pretty high opinion of myself as a teacher. I’d worked with students grades 4 through college and always had a good rapport with my kids and good reviews from my administrators. At times I had questioned the academic impact of my teaching on the lives of my pupils, but casual comparison with my fellow educators always made it clear I wasn’t doing any worse than them – and in most instances I was better.

That was enough for me, until I took the Inspired Teaching Institute.

I’d been working with Inspired Teaching for a full year before I took their flagship course. I’d participated in enough workshops to know it would be interesting and probably entertaining, but I didn’t really expect to learn anything new. Boy was I in for a surprise.

Over the course of 5 weeks the facilitators led me through a rigorous process of self examination and teacher transformation. This is an outline of the process Inspired Teaching uses to accomplish this:

Step 1. Analyze and deepen my understanding of the ways I learn.

Step 2. Articulate and defend my philosophy of teaching and learning, including what I believe about children. Find room in my philosophy for an appreciation of children's natural curiosity and desire to learn.

Step 3. Make the connection to classroom practice - develop new strategies to make sure my philosophy of teaching and learning matches what I do in the classroom.

Step 4. Build the skills of effective teachers, including listening, asking thoughtful questions, observing, and communicating effectively.

Step 5. Practice! Create and practice new strategies that will make my classroom an active place of learning fueled by students' ideas. Arm myself with research that shows children learn best when they engage in work that is important and challenging.

And this is what happened to me:

• I realized that I had a lot to learn as a teacher and someday when I go back to the classroom I’ll be doing things completely differently.
• I learned that “better” than my fellow educators was still not good enough for my students.
  
• I learned that even if I thought I had high expectations for my students, the discipline systems I was using to control them conflicted with my belief that they had the capacity to govern themselves.
  
• I learned that teaching students the rules of grammar means little if I haven’t also empowered them to use those rules to strengthen their own writing.
  
• I learned so much more. I was truly humbled by the experience.
  

Before I took the Inspired Teaching Institute I believed I was a good teacher, and I had references in the world outside that experience to back up this belief. But after taking the course I discovered my desire to be an exceptional teacher and I became fully aware of the fact that this is something I can’t accomplish in a single course or a program. It’s something I’ll have to continually work towards my whole life.

Got Motivation? Not in this environment!

There has been a lot of talk in the news lately about what must be done to motivate students. How do we “get them to perform” on standardized tests? How do we “get them to achieve” at grade level? How do we “get them to behave” according to the rules and regulations of the school?

There’s a growing trend out there to bring money into the conversation. Our neighbors in New York City and Baltimore are experimenting with paying students for their test performance. In schools in DC, students are rewarded with pizza parties for good attendance. And in classrooms across the country students participate in “behavior modification systems” designed to recognize good rule-followers with sticker charts and prizes.

Though some of the approaches are new, the philosophy from which they are born is not. Over the past several years we’ve begun to operate under the assumption that kids need to be bribed into “doing well” in school. Perhaps this is because going to school isn’t very inspiring these days.

In many instances we’ve traded the joys of art, music, PE, even recess for more “instructional time” devoted to math and language arts. We’ve abandoned field trips for the same reason. In order to maximize this instructional time, we’ve had to minimize class disruptions so we’ve grown more strict about keeping students in their seats and off their feet. We have so much to cover in a school year; there’s no time for deviating from the standard curriculum so students’ individual interests cannot be pursued unless they happen to fit within the content we’re required to teach. And now we’re in the thick of testing season with the added pressure of filling any available mind space with the facts kids need to do well on the big exams. And we as teachers will be judged much more by how students do on these tests than they will.

If you were a student in this environment you might need an incentive to get up in the morning and go to school. (Indeed, all the talk of merit pay implies teachers need that push as well.) At a young age you might not question being bought for a slice of pizza, extra recess time, or a couple of bucks.

But when you grow up and get into the real world, nobody pays you to be a good parent. If you get paid to go to college, it’s only because you’ve worked hard to be a strong student or athlete. You get paid to work, but nobody pays you to have the right qualifications for the job, or the motivation to keep it. No one is going to hand out checks to folks who treat their spouses and family members with dignity. You don’t get a pizza party for showing up to a meeting on time.

While there are often short-term rewards for the prizes and payoffs we currently use to keep students “on track” in school, there may also be real long-term problems associated with failing to instill intrinsic motivation in our young people.

We can only build the intrinsic motivation to learn in our students if we make the learning itself an appealing option. As a student, I can look forward to going to school because I want to know what happens in the next chapter of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, or because I am excited about the building project we’re doing in geometry. I can even look forward to going to school to take the test if I know it will give me an opportunity to show off how smart I’ve become this year. But if I’m asked to go to school to meet AYP, you’re going to have to sweeten the deal for me because that goal has nothing to do with what matters to me as a young person.

What is Inspired Teaching doing to improve education?

Because of the work of Inspired Teachers and principals, we are changing the way DC’s children are educated one student, one school at a time. And they have shown that we have the potential to do so much more.

For example: here in DC, in Ms. Vee Lindsay’s classroom, students are researching their neighborhood by interviewing residents, traveling to the city archives to uncover old maps and planning documents, conducting surveys, and learning how to use web-based information tools. They’re turning their findings into presentations that they will share with a historical preservation organization. They are learning by doing.

Inspired Teaching is rooted in the belief that every student possesses the ability to think critically, learn and understand information, and solve complex problems—and that students should spend their time in school doing just that.

We believe teachers and principals can be the agents of change who can make this happen.

And the approach works. Our results show that teachers are spending less time dealing with discipline problems and more time teaching. Their students are engaged in more challenging, meaningful work. Not only do test scores rise and attendance rates go up, but students and teachers report that they like school better.

This year, we are working with over 1000 teachers citywide, through our courses, mentoring, and whole school partnerships. And the demand continues to grow-with a waiting list of schools that want to become Inspired Teaching partner schools. We are exploring opportunities to bring Inspired Teaching to students, teachers, and principals outside DC and we’re working alongside the DC school district to help a number of schools slated to merge build a positive culture and build their students’ achievement.

Working Memory: The Conscious Processing of Information

(Notes from a chapter of the same name in Brain Matters: Translating Research into Classroom Practice by Patricia Wolfe)

Getting students to remember what we teach for more than 15-20 seconds is not easy, but it’s also not impossible if we understand how the brain works and make use of strategies that get information to stick.

The Cocktail Party Effect

• Even when lots of people are talking all around you, it is possible to pay attention to one person who is talking directly to you. Using selective auditory attention, your brain allows you to pay attention to the information that is most relevant.

• However, it is nearly impossible to consciously process two trains of thought at the same time, especially if they involve the same sensory modality.

Implications for your teaching: It is important to minimize classroom distractions as much as possible because you don’t really want it to resemble a cocktail party, but when students are working in groups it may very well sound that way. So, if a lot is going on in your room at a given time, think of ways to make distractions work to your favor by providing additional ways for students to learn. For example, make the things you post on your walls informative so your visual learners can take in something new and important when they’re gazing around the room. If you or your students are giving an oral presentation, try to include an additional learning modality in your talk. Can you include visual charts or pictures? Can you incorporate movement into the learning process?

The Magical Number Seven (Plus or Minus Two):
Our span of immediate memory tends to be around 7. The number of digits children can recall accurately increases by one every two years until a mental age of 15 at which point the magical number of 7 is reached.

Implications for your teaching: When I learned vocabulary words in school I usually had lists of 20 words to memorize in a week. Years later I probably only remember a fraction of the words I was taught, partly because I was given too many to learn at one time. When I taught vocabulary to my students I only gave them 8 words to learn in a week but at the end of the year they were able to define and use almost every word they learned during the week. The old phrase “less is more” applies here!

Rote Rehearsal
Rote rehearsal is repeating the information over and over, but this strategy for memorizing typically works better with skills or habits than with content.

Implications for your teaching: Rote rehearsal happens to be the main strategy we use when trying to get students to learn a lot of material – so it’s interesting to note that it doesn’t actually work that well when it comes to content. So, when teaching content, we should rely more on these other strategies than on repetition of the facts.