What makes young people want to get good at something? What makes them catch fire, work hard, and persist despite difficulties? And, the all-important question—what can schools do to help kids bring the same passion and practice to academics that they bring to athletics, the arts, and crafts? These are the questions Kathleen Cushman explores in her latest book, Fires in the Mind. She gets answers from the people who know best—students themselves. More than 160 adolescents from diverse backgrounds around the United States contributed to her project and more than half of them are quoted in her book. Their experiences prompted observations and suggestions that could affect the way teachers help students to gain mastery in the classroom.
 |
| Kathleen Cushman (Courtesy photo) |
Longtime residents of Harvard may remember Kathleen Cushman as a journalist and one of the publishers of the original
Harvard Post during the 1970s and '80s. Over the course of 35 years, she has written or coauthored 20 books, many resulting from her work as a reporter following national efforts for changes in education. In 2000 she cofounded the nonprofit What Kids Can Do, which publicizes the work and voices of youth on subjects concerning their lives and learning.
The first half of Fires in the Mind examines how young people catch a spark and what it takes for them to persist and get really good at something outside of school. While none of the ideas is particularly surprising, seeing the ideas described as a process definitely clarifies the way learning takes place. And hearing the importance of each step from a young person's perspective gives it credibility. Voice after voice describes the excitement of learning the habits of an expert and working toward mastery.
However, when attention turns to academic knowledge and skills, the students have a different story to tell. Here voice after voice testifies that schooling seldom generates a comparable drive for mastery. As one student put it, "[Teachers] go too much by the book. They worry about the perfect answer, rather than worrying about if we've learned something." The focus of Fires shifts to exploring how schools might transfer the excitement of learning from one realm to the other. The students look at how the same principles that governed their passion for learning things outside of school might be applied in the classroom.
In talking about how they got interested in the outside activities that had engaged them most, young people had established that it was not innate talent but rather a relationship or an opportunity. Someone important to them had offered a chance to explore something together. The same could happen in school, kids said, "if adults opened the door." That door could open if teachers treated their classes "as more of a conversation, rather than a lecture." Students said that it helps if a teacher brings a topic to life by building an emotional connection to the material—telling a personal story, describing a conflict, creating a mystery, asking a compelling question, or making an association with a person. Doing something fun with peers can also light a spark.
Once drawn into a challenge in school, students said they kept at it if teachers coached them through the kind of deliberate practice that helped them move ahead in areas like athletics and the arts. From the kids' perspective such deliberate practice involves a number of steps. Students say the first step is: Let us see what we're aiming for. In outside activities kids find inspiration and motivation in seeing examples of "best work" in their fields. In the classroom, teachers could show exemplary work by others as a way to appeal to the spirit of competition and to give students confidence that they could rise to the same level as their peers. Showing students "real world" uses of academic knowledge can also create interest.
 |
"Break down what we need to learn" is the next step for students. Such was not the experience of one young man, who said, "[Teachers] would just throw out the material to us, not really explain it, so I kind of hated it." Students want classroom teachers to act as outside coaches do: first helping them identify the knowledge and skills they need, then setting realistic goals that they could achieve if they tried. It helps learning when a teacher breaks down a task into chunks and then assigns just the practice that a student is ready for.
Kids want teachers to "Give us lots of ways to understand." Deliberate practice must be geared to the individual and a concept needs to be presented in different ways—visual, tactile, aural. Students ask teachers: "Teach us to critique and revise everything we do." Deliberate practice means repeated attempts to get something right. One student talked about the importance of revision: "You get back a paper and maybe you didn't do so well on it. But the teacher will explain to you why, and you have an opportunity to redo it and turn it in to improve your grade. So it makes grades less important—it's more about learning to fix your mistakes."
Assess us all the time, not just in high-stakes ways, ask the students. Like a good coach, an expert teacher is always watching students for signs of progress or difficulty. Building in small "performances"—where students explain something to others, or write about an understanding, or take an ungraded pop quiz—gives important feedback to both students and teachers.
Chart our small success; ask us to work as an expert team; and help us extend our knowledge through using it, are three more ingredients in deliberate practice that students say are important for their learning.
After practice comes performance. Students said that in life outside school, they kept practicing something mostly because they knew they would have to perform. Whether it was at a ball game, a concert, or a bake-off, they knew they would have to show what they knew and could do. In school as well, students believe that anticipating a demonstration of their knowledge and skills helps them see academic practice in a new light.
Not surprisingly, the subject of homework drew a lot of criticism from the students. They argue that too often they don't see the point of doing it; it's often mindless repetition; it takes too much time; and they don't use it for anything after it's done. Moreover, everyone gets the same homework, no matter what each person needs to work on. As one student observed: "It's always been a predetermined assignment: 'This is what you're going to do.' It's always on the whiteboard even before you get into class, and it's not necessarily what students need at that point."
Evaluating homework in the light of the steps of deliberate practice for mastery, it does seem that students have some basis for their criticism. One student observed, "It feels like teachers are contradicting themselves when they take off points because you get a homework answer wrong. They're saying, 'Stay up, do homework, and then come back with it all right.' That's not practice, that's more like a test that comes at the wrong time!"
What would it take to turn homework into the kind of deliberate practice that would help students strengthen their skills and knowledge in academic subjects? Cushman suggests that "Perhaps the most powerful steps in that direction would occur when students could start to think of homework as 'getting good' at something—and when teachers could welcome feedback from kids on what best supports that developing mastery." Homework assignments would be evaluated against the steps of deliberate practice, and homework that meets the criteria of deliberate practice.
Fires in the Mind offers insights for parents and teachers into what adults can do to help inspire and coach young minds in engaging deeply in work that challenges them. We can begin by listening. As Bob Mackin, director of America's Choice High Schools, says in relation to Cushman's book, "When kids are finally given a voice, it's always amazing to me how on target their perceptions of schools are!" The student voices in Fires are smart, authentic, and persuasive. Specific ideas, checklists, and resources for teachers make the book practical as well as theoretical.