Katrina Schwartz

When Kids Have Structure for Thinking, Better Learning Emerges

Katrina Schwartz

United States / 26-08-2018 / Author: Katrina Schwartz / Source: KQED

Amidst the discussions about content standards, curriculum and teaching strategies, it’s easy to lose sight of the big goals behind education, like giving students tools to deepen their quantitative and qualitative understanding of the world. Teaching for understanding has always been a challenge, which is why Harvard’s Project Zero has been trying to figure out how great teachers do it.

Some teachers discuss metacognition with students, but they often simplify the concept by describing only one of its parts — thinking about thinking. Teachers are trying to get students to slow down and take note of how and why they are thinking and to see thinking as an action they are taking. But two other core components of metacognition often get left out of these discussions — monitoring thinking and directing thinking. When a student is reading and stops to realize he’s not really understanding the meaning behind the words, that’s monitoring. And most powerfully, directing thinking happens when students can call upon specific thinking strategies to redirect or challenge their own thinking.

 

 

“When we have a rich meta-strategic base for our thinking, that helps us to be more independent learners,” said Project Zero senior research associate Ron Ritchhart at a Learning and the Brain conference. “If we don’t have those strategies, if we aren’t aware of them, then we’re waiting for someone else to direct our thinking.”

Helping students to “learn how to learn” or in Ritchhart’s terminology, become “meta-strategic thinkers” is crucial for understanding and becoming a life-long learner. To discover how aware students are of their thinking at different ages, Ritchhart has been working with schools to build “cultures of thinking.” His theory is that if educators can make thinking more visible, and help students develop routines around thinking, then their thinking about everything will deepen.

His research shows that when fourth graders are asked to develop a concept map about thinking, most of their brainstorming centers around what they think and where they think it. “When students don’t have strategies about thinking, that’s how they respond – what they think and where they think,” Richhart said. Many fifth graders start to include broad categories of thinking on their concept maps like “problem solving” or “understanding.” Those things are associated with thinking, but fifth graders often haven’t quite hit on the process of thinking.

By sixth grade a few students are starting to include some strategies for thinking in their maps, such as “concentrate” or “don’t get caught up in things that aren’t relevant.” But by ninth grade many students include specific strategies for thinking on their concept maps, including “making connections,” “comparing” and “breaking things down.”

Ritchhart studied 400 students at a school focusing on cultivating a culture of thinking. The study had no control group, but Ritchhart could chart development of metacognition from 4th-11th grades.

“Students basically made a two-and-a-half year gain from what would be expected just from teachers trying to create that culture of thinking,” Ritchhart said. He admits that the study isn’t definitive, but to him it’s proof that when teachers focus on these ideas they do see improvement.

HOW CAN EDUCATORS HELP?

In a culture of thinking, students recognize that collective and individual thinking is valued, visible and actively promoted as part of the regular day-to-day experience of all group members. This type of culture can exist in any place where learning is part of the experience including school, after school programming or museum programs.

To help make these ideas more concrete, Ritchhart and his colleagues have been working to hone in on a short list of “thinking moves” related to understanding. To test whether these moves were really crucial, researchers asked themselves: could a student say she really understood something if she hadn’t engaged in these activities? They believe the important “thinking moves” that lead to understanding are:

  • Naming: being able to identify the parts and pieces of a thing
  • Inquiry: questioning should drive the process throughout
  • Looking at different perspectives and viewpoints
  • Reasoning with evidence
  • Making connections to prior knowledge, across subject areas, even into personal lives
  • Uncovering complexity
  • Capture the heart and make firm conclusions
  • Building explanations, interpretations and theories.

These thinking moves all point to the conclusion that learning doesn’t happen through the mere delivery of information. “Learning only occurs when the learner does something with that information,” Ritchhart said. “So as teachers we need to think not only about how we will deliver that content, but also what we will have students do with that content.”

One easy way to start asking students to be more metacognitive is to build in reflection time about thinking. Ask students to think about the lesson and identify the kinds of thinking they used throughout. That not only builds vocabulary around thinking, but it often gives kids confidence to name specific thinking strategies they used. Taking this time to reflect also reminds students that they did real work during the lesson.

THINKING ROUTINES

To get at how teachers make thinking visible, Ritchhart studied teachers who were very effective at helping student dive below surface level retention of information into really understanding material as it connects to the rest of their studies and their lives. He noticed none of them taught a lesson on thinking.

“They had routines and structures that scaffolded and supported student thinking,” Ritchhart said. This discovery led him and colleagues at Project Zero to develop “thinking routines” that all teachers can use to help students develop the habits of mind that lead to more understanding.

One way to develop a culture of thinking is to pick one of the thinking routines Project Zero has designed and use it over and over in a variety of contexts. Rather than trying each routine once, applying one routine in multiple ways will help make thinking in that way habitual. It becomes almost an expectation in a classroom, like other class norms.

One example of this that goes beyond the K-12 classroom comes from Harvard Medical School, where instructors were struggling to train students to listen to patients and make strong diagnoses based on the symptoms they heard. As an experiment, the medical school offered an elective module to students, where once a week they would join a fine arts class using the “See, Think, Wonder” thinking routine to observe art. After 10 weeks, all the medical students were assessed on clinical diagnosing and the students who had done “See, Think, Wonder” had improved much more than those who had not participated.

“One of the reasons we call them thinking routines is that through their use it is the thinking that becomes routine,” Ritchhart said. Project Zero is working with teachers around the country to apply thinking routines in the classroom and many have reported that after doing the routines in a structured way several times students naturally start using the protocols for everything.

Source of Article:

https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/44227/when-kids-have-structure-for-thinking-better-learning-emerges

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Why Teaching English Through Content Is Critical for ELL Students

Katrina Schwartz

United States / July 1, 2018 / Author: Katrina Schwartz / Source: KQED

Teaching grade-level content to students who have just arrived in the United States and whose English skills are limited is a difficult task. High school-level content specialists especially have little training on how to integrate language acquisition into their content. Often teachers deal with that by either dumbing down the curriculum to make it linguistically simpler or alternating between lessons focused on language and those about content.

Teachers in San Francisco were looking for better ways to teach their newcomer students the English skills they need, without losing a focus on the complex content all students should be learning. To do that, they looked to adopt some of the strategies of the Writing Is Thinking Through Inquiry(WITsi) work being done in New York City with the general education population.

Based on Judith Hochman’s work, at its core these strategies focus on building up students’ ability to put together sentences piece by piece*. Through an inquiry process, New York teachers discovered that their students’ writing was breaking down at the level of the sentence, making it difficult for them to express more nuanced and complex arguments.

Nell Scharff Panero developed the WITsi strategies and has been working with New York Renewal schools to implement them. As she watched teachers having some success, she realized the same strategies could be powerful for English learners. She has been working with language specialists to adapt the strategies for that population.

“Teachers are so responsive to this work,” said Amy Gottesfeld, a supervisor in San Francisco’s Multilingual Pathways Department. “They’re finding it hugely helpful and successful in terms of giving them concrete ways to integrate language into their content.”

San Francisco Unified School District is starting small, bringing together sheltered pathway teacher cohorts from seven high schools around the district. Together they look closely at student writing, share lesson ideas, and try to deepen their own understanding of the English Language and how to teach it through content.

“Given these strategies that support language, that support writing, without having to sacrifice the focus on content has felt liberating to people,” Gottesfeld said.

The program is intentionally set up around cohorts at each school so that teachers can collaboratively build the WITsi strategies into every class, regardless of content area. One activity asks students to write sentences using “but, because and so” correctly. These small conjunctions are powerful language markers that students often use incorrectly.

But when the science teacher is using “but, because, so” sentence routines to help students understand relationships in an ecosystem, while in the next room the history teacher is using the same structures to help students identify the effects of colonialism, it reinforces writing and thinking for students. And, it means students are getting explicit language development help throughout the school day, not only during their legally required English Language Development time.

“I was like, oh, this is what I’ve been missing,” said Anne Ryan, a history teacher in the sheltered language pathway for newcomers at Thurgood Marshall High School in San Francisco. She first learned about some of the strategies through an exchange with the Internationals Network for Public Schools in New York, whose teachers have become standouts in developing language alongside content. She was trying to use some tips she picked up at a conference on her own when SFUSD announced the current pilot. She jumped at the chance for more formal training on the strategies.

Teachers in Thurgood Marshall High School's sheltered language pathway collaborate during a professional development training about how to teach thinking through writing.
Teachers in Thurgood Marshall High School’s sheltered language pathway collaborate during a professional development training about how to teach thinking through writing. (Courtesy Amy Gottesfeld/SFUSD)

“I think that non-English Language Development and English teachers, a lot of us still have nervousness around how to really develop English and writing skills in our classroom,” Ryan said. “But it really is our responsibility as well. I think doing the WITsi has made that responsibility feel lighter and feel effective.”

Bringing instruction down to the level of the sentence forces the teacher to carefully identify the most important information she wants her students to learn that day, and build sentence-level activities around the main content goal. This practice often leads to more effective instruction, in addition to helping students build their language skills.

WITsi work in New York City Renewal schools with the general education population has uncovered similar sentence-level misunderstandings in high school student writing. In those cases, it’s often hard for high school teachers to accept that they have to go back and teach the basic building blocks of good sentence writing, then paragraphs, and finally essays. They feel that their students should already have those skills.

But with newcomer students, teachers are hungry for anything that will help them make their curriculum more accessible to students who don’t have language skills yet, but desperately need them. All of these strategies should be used in conjunction with the most important content of the day. The idea is to marry the linguistics with subject mattercontent at every step to make the language relevant, while helping students learn the content.

SEVEN BASIC WRITING STRATEGIES

1. Sentence boundaries: These activities are designed to help students understand what a sentence is and what it is not.

In the process, teachers can identify the parts of a sentence: noun, verb, object, but more than the grammar, these activities use content to discuss what makes a sentence. How can one tell if something is a fragment, or a run-on? Activities include matching different parts of a sentence to either make a complete sentence or repair a fragment. Or, teachers might ask students to sort sentences into fragments, complete sentences and run-ons.

“But again all the sorting that you’re doing is around the content that you’re studying,” Gottesfeld said. So, if the lesson focus is Alexander Hamilton, all the sorting and matching is related to his historical contributions. The dual approach is the most important part of all these strategies.

2. Recognizing different sentence types like statements, questions, exclamations or commands.

This includes helping students look for clues — does the sentence start with a question word, for example? While it may seem simple to a native speaker, expressing the content using various types of sentences can dramatically change meaning, an important concept for students to understand. Also, focusing explicitly on questioning helps empower English learners as question askers throughout the curriculum and in other learning settings.

3. Working with the coordinating conjunctions “but, because and so” to help students elaborate on their sentences.

Many students, even ones who speak English, don’t have a firm grip on the differences these words signal. “But, because, so” activities might start off with matching sentence stems to sentence ends based on the conjunction, and gradually become more difficult, ending with giving a student the three bases and having them complete the sentence.

This is often a favorite with teachers and students because it begins to open the door to more analytical thinking. Knowing how to use these conjunctions is not only a language rule, it indicates the student’s ability to think comparatively, to explain, to make connections.

4. Subordinating conjunctions

Subordinating conjunctions are an important way English speakers vary sentences structure and express complicated relationships between things. They’re also tricky for non-native English speakers, and deserve explicit introduction. Words that signal time and position are powerful expressions of analytical thinking. When teachers introduce subordinating conjunctions within a content lesson, it gives students more ways to express complex ideas and improves sentence fluency.

5. Sentence combining

Activities in this sequence include giving students two sentences and asking them to use a variety of techniques to combine them into one. Scaffolds might include giving students a word bank or conjunctions to choose from, while the most complex version might ask students to write a sentence with an independent and dependent clause on Alexander Hamilton that uses a conjunction. A core goal of these activities is to use relevant content to help students reduce redundancy in their writing by combining sentences. It’s also an opportunity to work on syntax within the context of content objectives. Students are motivated by the desire to be understood.

6. Appositives

Appositives are a language structure that allows the writer to rename a noun. This is another explicit language structure that makes student writing more interesting, specific and nuanced. But rather than making it a disconnected grammar lesson, teachers can use activities about their content that incorporate appositive practice.

Many English learners also struggle to follow the chain of references in texts with unknown words, so explicitly teaching about appositives can help with reading comprehension as well.

7. Sentence expansion with descriptors

In these activities students ask students to expand on a simple, unelaborated sentence by asking them to answer a series of questions aimed at teasing out details. A typical simple sentence might be, “Alexander Hamilton helped establish it.” The teacher then writes questions to identify the information that would elaborate this sentence: What did he establish? Why did he establish it? How did he do it? Who helped him? Once students have identified all these details, they rewrite or “expand” the unelaborated sentence into a much improved one that includes those details. This guided process helps model the way English sentences are constructed and is a precursor to revision.

“The ‘Writing as thinking’ presents somewhat of a sequence to introducing these strategies and approaches,” Gottesfeld said. “That feels new and clearly makes sense” to many teachers in the sheltered language pathways.

And when students have these clear sentence-level building blocks, practice them regularly, and understand the way they function to express ideas, teachers can use them in the most complex process of all: parallel revision.

“We know that revision is critical for the writing process to support students in developing good writing,” Gottesfeld said. Parallel revision is a more structured way to help students revise their writing. Teachers might write “elaborate” next to a thought in a student’s paragraph and suggest the student think about the “but, because, so” strategy to carry out that elaboration. This practice can also make peer revision more useful, grounding the discussion in specific strategies the kids know well through prior practice.

“It puts the kid in a position where they have to think about language that they know and try to apply it,” said Joanna Yip, a former teacher in the Internationals Network who helped design the materials and activities SFUSD teachers are using. “It is an absolutely necessary component for kids who are learning the language.” Through parallel revision students begin to truly appropriate the language and transfer the piecemeal sentence-level work into paragraphs and even essays.

Yip said this systematic approach to language construction that WITsi offers is fairly new to many English language teachers, especially ones who see themselves foremost as content specialists and secondarily as teachers of English. Rather than chunking out the steps of writing a paragraph and asking students to follow instructions, parallel revision requires students themselves to do the thinking about which strategy responds to the teacher’s feedback.

Yip said a lot of English language teachers are well versed in using language frames, sentence starters, vocabulary work and scaffolding larger pieces of writing. They regularly use the cycle Pauline Gibbons champions, in which teachersbuild up background knowledge jointly as a class before asking students to do it on their own. “That’s all good and necessary,” Yip said, “but the one missing piece to those approaches tends to be there isn’t explicit instruction on how to build sentences.”

And keeping these strategies tightly tied to the content makes the language lessons useful to students. Too often when teachers try to focus on the nuts and bolts of language, they end up delivering a disconnected lesson on grammar that students don’t transfer to the writing they do in each content area.

“If they have opportunities to do this kind of work that is appropriate for their phase of language development, then over time they will gain that momentum as students,” Yip said. “When they feel supported in doing it, it’s a rigorous task, but a task they can manage.” She said it’s unreasonable to ask a student who has been in the country for three months to write an essay. And without carefully scaffolding writing strategies, that student may never get to the essay writing level.

A TEAM EFFORT

Evelyn Sulem is just finishing up her second year of teaching high school history. She said teaching in the sheltered language pathway isn’t a highly coveted position, so it often falls to newer teachers. But she enjoys watching the incredible progress her students make and plans to continue teaching newcomer students, especially now that she feels she has a few more tools and a supportive group of colleagues.

“I have definitely seen a massive progress in the level of English and in the level of content knowledge,” Sulem said about using the WITsi strategies. She meets with colleagues from other content specialties who also teach newcomers once a week. They share strategies and try to sync up their curriculum to reinforce vocabulary, concepts and language structures.

“We try to bring forth the vocabulary in all the disciplines,” Sulem said. Through this intensive WITsi work, she has also become more aware of the different English levels in her classroom. She is now carefully building more scaffolds into her lessons, using WITsi strategy variants to support her students to understand the history content. For example, students might complete the activities in their home language, or discuss the content with a partner in their home language before trying to use their English to write down thoughts..

“We teach history in a workshop style,” Sulem said. The social studies department at Lincoln wants to build students into critical thinkers who can analyze history. They try not to lecture from the front of the room, and have de=emphasized memorization. That’s even more important when students don’t understand the lecture anyway. “We don’t give any lectures, but we engage students with simple text which has history content,” Sulem said.

Sulem is grateful the WITsi work has given her more tools to reach her newcomer English learners, but she admits the work is very difficult. Many of her students arrived in the U.S. with interrupted educations, and their writing skills in a home language aren’t strong either.

“It makes me think about my own teaching practice in a different way,” Sulem said. “Students need visuals and need to be informed about the same theme in three different ways: speaking, writing and visually.”

And because she teaches a few sections of general education students, Sulem is applying tactics that work with her newcomers to all her classes. She thinks teaching English learners has made her a more creative teacher, helping her to guide kids to an analytical understanding of history using multimodal forms of learning. And when she can see a student is struggling to express a complex idea in their writing, she’s got more linguistic supports to help them get there.

*This piece has been edited to reflect that the WITsi strategies build on ideas originally developed by Judith Hochman.

Source of Article:

https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/51268/why-teaching-english-through-content-is-critical-for-ell-students

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How to Plan and Implement Continuous Improvement In Schools

Katrina Schwartz

USA / May 20, 2018 / Author: Katrina Schwartz / Source: KQED News

In the classroom, good teachers constantly test small changes to class activities, routines, and workflow. They observe how students interact with the material, identify where they trip up and adjust as they go. This on-the-fly problem solving is so common in classrooms many teachers don’t realize they’re even doing it, and the expertise they are gathering is rarely taken into account when schools or districts try to solve larger, systematic problems.

In  education research, researchers come up with ideas they think will improve teaching and then set up laboratory experiments or classroom trials to test that idea. If the trial goes well enough that idea gets put on a list of research-approved practices. While research-informed practices are important, this process can often mean that the interventions are unrealistic or disconnected from the hectic reality of many classrooms, and are rarely used. But what if teachers themselves were the research engine — the spark of continued improvement?

 

 

 

The Carnegie Foundation is trying to bridge that gap in identifying techniques that work and «create a much more democratic process in which teachers are involved in identifying and solving problems of practice that matter to them,” said Dr. Manuelito Biag, an associate in network improvement science at the foundation. Biag previously worked on developing research-practitioner partnerships for Stanford’s Graduate School of Education.

For the past several years, under the leadership of Dr. Tony Bryk, Carnegie is trying to apply a structured inquiry process to problems in education, building the capacity of teachers, principals and district administrators to continuously improve. This type of improvement science started in manufacturing and has been used to successfully change human-based systems like healthcare.

The basic tenets of the process involve understanding the problem, defining a manageable goal, identifying the drivers that could help reach that goal, and then testing small ideas to change those drivers. When done in a network, this cycle of improvement is expedited as various participants test different change ideas and share their findings with the group. Through a constant interplay of these elements a few change ideas will rise to the top and can be scaled across a system.

UNDERSTANDING THE PROBLEM

Many of the biggest problems of practice have been around a long time and aren’t easy to solve. Too often when trying to improve something leaders jump to solutions before properly examining the problem. Understanding the problem requires valuing many types of knowledge. It means doing empathy interviews with participants in the system including teachers, staff, parents, and students. It involves bringing the best research literature to bear on the problem. And sometimes representing the processes involved in the problem can illuminate areas that are breaking down.

Biag said this stage is crucial and shouldn’t be rushed. He’s seen improvement projects that require up to a year of study to fully understand the problem, its root causes and the levers of change available to leaders. Often an improvement network will know it’s time to move on when participants feel saturated — they aren’t turning up any new perspectives or information.

“Sometimes it’s good to stop doing the research and try something,” Biag said. Implementing some change ideas often helps inform the problem and may even necessitate that the team revisit and revise the problem statement.

Courtesy of Carnegie Foundation

DEFINE THE GOALS AND FOCUS COLLECTIVE EFFORT

Once the group has a “good enough” understanding of the problem it’s crucial that they write a clear, succinct aim statement. It should be specific, measurable and focus on a challenging problem, but it should be doable.

The crucial question, Biag said, is “What’s within your span of control and what’s not? So when you act on this problem you aren’t wasting your time on the things that aren’t in your control.”

He often sees people define the problem too broadly. If the problem is an achievement gap between student populations, a group might say the root problem is inequality or poverty. Those things may contribute to the problem, but they aren’t within the control of teachers or principals or even districts to solve. A more manageable aim statement might be: “By June 2020 we’re going to increase from 45% to 90% the number of male students enrolling in credit bearing math courses at community colleges.”

“It has to be motivating enough for people to continue working on it for several months,” Biag said about the reach goal. But it must be specific and concrete enough that the group can see if change ideas are helping progress towards the goal.

“While an aim statement can look deceptively simple, you need to build trust and get on the same page with everyone in your network to even agree on where to focus your efforts,” Biag said. The network itself is important because it accelerates the pace of learning about potential solutions.

Once the aim is clear, the group brainstorms three to five primary drivers of the problem. These are the things the group believes provide the most leverage to meet the goal, and that are within the span of control. It’s crucial to only have a few of these, not twenty, because the network must work on all of them in tandem. Staying focused allows for more progress.

After identifying the most important drivers, network participants brainstorm change ideas that might affect those drivers. “The word change is very specific to improvement science,” Biag said. “It means an actual change in how you do work.” In other words, the focus is on the process and results in action. Change ideas are not things like “more money” or “more staff.” “It’s an actual change of a process or the introduction of a new process,” Biag said.

TEST AND BUILD EVIDENCE

Once the group has a good understanding of the problem, its root causes, what drives it and some ideas that will directly affect those drivers, it’s time to start testing them. Carnegie uses a “Plan, Do, Study, Act” (PDSA) cycle for testing ideas. The changes should be fairly small and the tester collects data along the way. It doesn’t have to be complicated data, just something to help analyze and track whether the change is moving the needle.

Courtesy of Carnegie Foundation

“Most schools and districts plan plan plan, then do, and then they never study,” Biag said. He advocates that planning include a prediction because participants are more likely to compare a new strategy with the expected effect. If the change idea didn’t function as expected there’s a lot to learn there.

Many of the best change ideas come from looking at what Carnegie calls “positive deviants” — the bright spots in a network. For example, if a network sets the aim of improving college readiness for English language learner students, when leaders are assembling their knowledge base they should talk to teachers who seem to be achieving better than average results with that population. Those teachers are “positive deviants” and networks should try to learn from the ways their practices differ from colleagues.

For example, High Tech High Charter Network leaders identified that they wanted to increase the number of African American and Latino males applying to four-year colleges. When they looked at drivers, they realized school attendance was lower for this group and hypothesized that the way teachers communicated with parents might be part of the issue. To try to eliminate variation in parent-teacher communication they tested a change theory that involved using a set of protocols for interacting with families.

They went through several iterations of the protocols, but when they hit on one that seemed to work they spread it throughout their network of schools. Now, when teachers meet with parents around achievement or discipline they all try to make it positive, share data about the student, and co-construct an action plan with the parent, among other things.

The key thing about working in a network is that different people can be trying different change ideas and sharing their data. “The idea is that you’re not all working on all the same things at the same time,” Biag said. “So you leverage the network, and the power of the network, to increase change ideas.”

Some ideas won’t work and will be abandoned. Others might seem promising, but more data is needed, so others in the network might try them too. Over time the change ideas that seem to really impact the drivers rise to the top.

“As you’re testing and building evidence you’re going to find ideas that work and then you can talk about spreading those ideas,” Biag said.

Courtesy of Carnegie Foundation

SPREAD AND SCALE

Even with the best ideas implementation can be hard. Biag said leaders need to weigh several factors when thinking about how to spread an idea that seems to work. How costly will it be to implement? What are the consequences of failure? How reluctant are the people involved? How confident is the leader in the change idea?

For example, if the change is a parent meeting protocol and the leader doesn’t think it’s a great idea and that the cost of failure will be high, perhaps she only tests it on her sister first. But, if teachers are ready for the change and there’s nothing to lose, then maybe the idea can scale up more quickly. This is where knowing one’s own system and culture becomes important.

It’s also worth thinking about who within the system needs to be on board for the plan to go well. Those folks can be powerful advocates if convinced that the change idea is a good one. “The best people are those who were pretty skeptical in the beginning and you were able to change them,” Biag said.

Another strategy is to roll out the idea with those eager to try it and then demonstrate success to those who are more fearful. It’s also necessary to be humble and willing to go back and test new ideas if the ones that seemed to work in the smaller group don’t work when scaled. Perhaps the aim statement needs to change, or maybe the drivers aren’t actually the most impactful.

“Our theory is possibly wrong and definitely incomplete; that’s kind of a Carnegie saying,” Biag said. He doesn’t want anyone to think this process is linear, rather it’s a cycle. And when people get comfortable with the cycle they build it into everything they do naturally. The biggest strength of continuous improvement is that it offers a path for systemic change, a way to build the capacity within the system, rather than building whole new systems.

“What we’re trying to do is implement these tools and ways of thinking to empower people to engage in this work,” Biag said. And that means having a bias towards action.

“You have to start before you feel ready. Your understanding of the problem will change over time and when you act on that problem the problem will change and so your understanding of that problem will change,” Biag said.

People learn how to think about continuous improvement through the process of doing it. They get better at narrowing in on motivating, but achievable aim statements. They learn to include more voices in the information gathering stage. The “Plan, Do, Study, Act” cycles become second nature, and analyzing data gets less scary.

Perhaps one of the best parts of continuous improvement is that it helps empower those within a system to see themselves as the drivers of change. The ideas come from practice as does the data. And while data is often associated with accountability requirements, this improvement process offers practitioners the opportunity to think about and evaluate data that are important to their practice.

In this process, the data is only worthwhile if it shines light on whether the change is working. And when data is used this way, it’s easier for educators to be transparent about what they’re seeing. Improvement is not about judgement, it’s a constant, normal aspect of professional life.

“You have to have a lot of humility to come to the realization that you don’t have the answers, and that you’re going to learn your way into this,” Biag said. “You’ve got to think about this as a learning journey. If you really had the answers to this problem we wouldn’t be talking about it.”

To see measurable progress on some of the most intransigent problems in education requires a systematic focus on improving in every aspect of the system. It’s not enough for one teacher to be amazing, or one school to outshine the others around it. All kids deserve an incredible education; and that can only happen by building on the strengths already found in the system.

Source:

https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/51115/how-to-plan-and-implement-continuous-improvement-in-schools

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Cuando los estudiantes tienen una estructura para el pensamiento, surge un mejor aprendizaje

Katrina Schwartz

Estados Unidos / Autor: Katrina Schwartz / Fuente: Compartir Palabra Maestra

Siempre ha sido un reto enseñar para que haya entendimiento, por lo cual el Proyecto Cero de Harvard ha intentado descubrir cómo lo hacen los mejores maestros.

En medio de las discusiones sobre estándares de contenido y currículos y estrategias de enseñanza, es fácil perder de vista las metas más importantes de la educación, como son el dar a los estudiantes herramientas para profundizar su entendimiento cuantitativo y cualitativo del mundo. Siempre ha sido un reto enseñar para que haya entendimiento, por lo cual el Proyecto Cero de Harvard ha intentado descubrir cómo lo hacen los mejores maestros.

Algunos maestros hablan de la metacognición con sus estudiantes, pero a menudo simplifican el concepto describiendo solo una de sus partes: pensar sobre el pensamiento. Los maestros buscan que los estudiantes hagan una pausa y se den cuenta cómo y por qué están pensando y vean el pensar como una acción que están realizando. Pero en estas discusiones a menudo se quedan por fuera otros dos componentes esenciales de la metacognición: monitorear el pensamiento y dirigir el pensamiento. Monitorear es cuando un estudiante está leyendo y se detiene al darse cuenta que realmente no está entendiendo el significado de las palabras. Más importante, dirigir el pensamiento es cuando un estudiante puede recurrir a estrategias de pensamiento específicas para reorientar o cuestionar su propio pensamiento.

“Tener una rica base metaestratégica para el pensamiento nos ayuda a aprender en forma más autónoma, dijo Ron Ritchhart, investigador asociado senior de Proyecto Cero, durante una conferencia de Learning and the Brain. «Si no tenemos esas estrategias, si no somos conscientes de ellas, estamos esperando que otra persona dirija nuestro pensamiento».

Ayudar a los estudiantes a ‘aprender a aprender’ o, en los términos de Ritchhart, a convertirse en ‘pensadores metaestratégicos’ es crucial para el entendimiento y para volverse estudiantes de por vida. Para descubrir qué tan conscientes son los estudiantes de su pensamiento a diferentes edades, Ritchhart ha trabajado con escuelas en el desarrollo de ‘culturas del pensamiento’. Su teoría es que si los educadores pueden hacer más visible el pensamiento y ayudar a los estudiantes a desarrollar rutinas sobre el pensamiento, entonces se profundizará lo que piensan sobre todas las cosas.

Su investigación demuestra que cuando a los estudiantes de cuarto grado se les pide desarrollar un mapa conceptual sobre el pensamiento, la mayor parte de su lluvia de ideas se centra en lo que piensan y dónde lo piensan. «Cuando los estudiantes no tienen estrategias para el pensamiento, así es como responden – qué piensan y dónde piensan», dice Ritchhart. Muchos estudiantes de quinto grado empiezan a incluir en sus mapas conceptuales categorías generales de pensamiento tales como ‘resolución de problemas’ o ‘entendimiento’. Son cosas asociadas con el pensamiento, pero muchos estudiantes de quinto aún no mencionan el proceso de pensar.

En sexto, algunos estudiantes empiezan a incluir en sus mapas estrategias de pensamiento tales como ‘concentrarse’ o ‘no dejarse enredar por cosas irrelevantes’. Pero en noveno, muchos estudiantes incluyen en sus mapas conceptuales estrategias específicas para el pensamiento tales como ‘hacer conexiones’, ‘comparar’ y ‘descomponer las cosas’.

Ritchhart analizó a 400 estudiantes de una escuela y se concentró en cultivar una cultura del pensamiento. El estudio no tenía grupo de control, pero Ritchhart logró registrar el desarrollo de la metacognición desde el grado cuarto al 11.

«En esencia, los estudiantes lograron un avance de dos años y medio respecto a lo que podría esperarse solo de maestros intentando crear esa cultura del pensamiento», afirma Ritchhart. Él admite que el estudio no es definitivo pero a su modo de ver, es una prueba de que cuando los maestros se concentran en estas ideas, observan mejoras.

¿CÓMO PUEDEN AYUDAR LOS EDUCADORES?

En una cultura del pensamiento, el estudiante reconoce que el pensamiento colectivo e individual es valorado, visible y activamente promovido como parte de la experiencia diaria habitual de todos los miembros del grupo. Este tipo de cultura puede existir en cualquier lugar en que aprender sea parte de la experiencia, como la escuela, las actividades después de clase o los programas de los museos.

Para ayudar a concretar más estas ideas, Ritchhart y sus colegas han estado trabajando en la creación de una lista corta de ‘jugadas del pensamiento’ relacionadas con el entendimiento. Para probar si estas jugadas eran realmente cruciales, los investigadores se preguntaron si un estudiante podría decir que realmente entendía algo si no se había involucrado en la actividad. Consideran que las ‘jugadas del pensamiento’ claves que llevan al entendimiento son:

  • Nombrar: ser capaz de identificar las partes y piezas de una cosa
  • Indagar: las preguntas deberían impulsar todo el proceso
  • Examinar diferentes perspectivas y puntos de vista
  • Razonar con base en evidencia
  • Hacer conexiones con el conocimiento previo a través de áreas temáticas, incluso con la vida personal
  • Destapar la complejidad
  • Captar el corazón y llegar a conclusiones sólidas
  • Desarrollar explicaciones, interpretaciones y teorías.

Todas estas jugadas del pensamiento permiten concluir que el aprendizaje no se da simplemente con la entrega de información. «El aprendizaje ocurre solo cuando quien aprende hace algo con la información», dice Ritchhart. «Por lo tanto, como maestros debemos pensar no solo en cómo transmitir el contenido, sino también en qué le pediremos a los estudiantes que hagan con dicho contenido».

Una forma sencilla de empezar a pedir a los estudiantes que sean más metacognitivos es reservar tiempo para reflexionar sobre el pensamiento. Pedirles que piensen sobre la clase e identifiquen los tipos de pensamiento que usaron a lo largo de ella. Así, no solo se desarrolla el vocabulario sobre el pensamiento, sino que a menudo se da a los estudiantes la confianza de nombrar estrategias de pensamiento específicas que usaron. Tomarse este tiempo para reflexionar también recuerda a los estudiantes que hicieron un trabajo real durante la clase.

RUTINAS DE PENSAMIENTO

Para entender cómo los maestros hacen visible el pensamiento, Ritchhart analizó a maestros que eran muy eficaces ayudando a los estudiantes a adentrarse más allá de la retención superficial de información, en la verdadera comprensión del material, en cuanto a la relación de este con sus demás estudios y con su vida. Se dio cuenta de que ninguno de ellos daba una clase sobre el pensamiento.

«Tenían rutinas y estructuras que sostenían y apoyaban el pensamiento de los estudiantes», dice Ritchhart. El hallazgo llevó a que él y a sus colegas de Proyecto Cero crearan «rutinas de pensamiento» que todos los maestros pueden usar para ayudar a los estudiantes a desarrollar hábitos de la mente que generen más entendimiento.

Una forma de desarrollar una cultura del pensamiento es tomar una de las rutinas de pensamiento diseñadas por Proyecto Cero y usarla repetidamente en diversos contextos. En lugar de probar cada rutina una vez, aplicar una rutina en numerosas formas ayudará a que se vuelva más habitual el pensar de cierta manera. Al igual que otras normas, se convierte casi en una expectativa en el aula.

Un ejemplo que va más allá del aula K-12 viene de la Escuela de Medicina de Harvard, donde los instructores tenían dificultades entrenando a los estudiantes para escuchar a los pacientes y hacer diagnósticos sólidos con base en los síntomas que escuchaban. La escuela de medicina hizo un experimento ofreciendo a los estudiantes un módulo electivo en el que participaban una vez a la semana en una clase de bellas artes y usaban la rutina de pensamiento de «ver, pensar y preguntarse» para contemplar el arte. Al cabo de 10 semanas, todos los estudiantes de medicina eran evaluados en diagnóstico clínico y los que habían practicado el «ver, pensar y preguntarse» habían mejorado mucho más que los que no habían participado.

«Una de las razones por las que las llamamos rutinas de pensamiento es que mediante su uso, pensar se vuelve rutinario», dice Ritchhart. El Proyecto Cero está trabajando con maestros en todo el país para que apliquen rutinas de pensamiento en el aula. Muchos han reportado que los estudiantes, después de hacer las rutinas en forma estructurada varias veces, empiezan a usar los protocolos en forma natural para todo.

Fuente del Artículo:

https://compartirpalabramaestra.org/columnas/cuando-los-estudiantes-tienen-una-estructura-para-el-pensamiento-surge-un-mejor-aprendizaje

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