Dear all,
Hope you have all had a relaxing vacation. Am looking forward to seeing you all tomorrow. I am sure we all have lots of adventures to share with each other.
Will keep this short as it is still your vacation. Good article from the Atlantic about how we educate those key students in our classes, the original thinkers, and keep them engaged and empowered by their learning. Many of the suggestions are already embedded in our mission and pedagogy at ISHCMC. The important messages are:
- Keep a balance between structured and unstructured learning
- Release the teaching to the students
- Ensure students are allowed their own interpretations of the learning
- Have high expectations of the students and make them responsible for their learning
- Encourage students to ask great questions
- Autonomy in learning leads to Mastery
- Focus on values over rules
See you tomorrow,
Yours
Adrian
In his new book, Originals:
How Non-Conformists Move the World, the writer, Wharton
professor, and erstwhile magician Adam Grant
explores the circumstances that give rise to truly original thinkers. Through
stories of business “originals” such as the Bridgewater Associates founder Ray
Dalio, and the Warby Parker co-founder Neil Blumenthal, he explains how
unorthodox thinking can result in unprecedented success or—if shaped by
groupthink or myopic vision—miserable failure.
Grant is a gifted educator himself, and, as Wharton’s top rated teacher for the past
four years, knows a little something about identifying and cultivating original
thinking in his students. I asked Grant about the role teachers play in
educating original children, and how teachers and parents alike can protect
what’s special in these original children—traits that have the potential to
disrupt lesson plans today, but, if nurtured and protected, may just change the
world tomorrow. Below is a lightly edited and condensed version of our
conversation.
Jessica Lahey: There’s
a tension in education right now as educators reluctantly part ways with our
old reliable teaching methods—an orderly, silent classroom with students
organized alphabetically in rows and a teacher lecturing from behind a desk—and
begin to accept novel, research-based approaches to learning, such as
student-led inquiry; small group, peer-to peer teaching; and problem-based
learning. You seem to indicate that for truly original thinkers, order,
structure, and discipline might be antithetical to learning. How can teachers
balance a need for a structured learning environment while allowing for
original thinkers to thrive?
Adam Grant: There’s
evidence for a Goldilocks effect here: Too much structure, order, and
discipline can constrain creativity, but so can too little. In a classroom with
extensive constraints, kids don’t learn to think for themselves. Yet you can
have too much of a good thing: In psychology, we
often find that good things satiate and bad things escalate. Give kids all the
freedom in the world, and they can get caught in choice paralysis, lack
frameworks for figuring out how to approach a problem, or develop plenty of
novel ideas but fail to implement them. I think balance comes in alternating
different pedagogical approaches. Lecture for 10 minutes, then let kids develop
their own way of teaching the lesson learned and present it in small groups.
Research on theJigsaw Classroom shows that this can
reduce stereotypes and prejudice—and it’s a great way to nurture creative
thinking as well. Plus, one of the reasons that firstborns often have an
intelligence advantage over later siblings is a teacher effect: They spend more
time teaching, which helps them crystallize their own learning. Why not make
students teaching each other a norm in the classroom?
Lahey: In the
chapter of Originals titled “Rebel with a Cause,” you claim
that rebelliousness is a positive trait when it comes to educating kids who
will truly go on to change the world. What can teachers do to encourage
rebellion that leads to original, creative thinking?
Grant: Offer
students the chance to reinterpret something they’ve learned. This is obviously
easier to do in some subject areas than others—it works especially well in
domains where there are often competing theories, like history and literature.
After presenting some of Benjamin Franklin’s great achievements as an inventor,
social innovator, and politician, give kids the opportunity to investigate his
failures: Why was he late to the revolution? Once students learn about
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony’s leadership of the women’s
suffrage movement, ask them to reanalyze it from Lucy Stone’s perspective: Was
she the most important pioneer, and did Stanton and Anthony write her out of
the story?
Lahey: Rebels
without direction are a teacher’s worst nightmare and given enough power, can
derail just about any lesson plan. What’s the best way to give classroom rebels
a positive outlet for their rebellion without stifling it?
Grant: Give
them something to stand for, not just against. Ask them what they think is
wrong with the classroom—and then challenge them to make it better.
Lahey:
Teachers are in a unique position to serve as mentors for kids who may not
thrive in classroom environments that are often geared toward obedience,
teacher-pleasing, and the “because I said so” school of reasoning. What would
the ideal teacher mentor for an original kid look like?
Grant: A
teacher who provides kids with a great deal of responsibility. That means
having high expectations, but granting them the discretion to choose how they
will meet the expectations. And it doesn’t hurt to have a little distaste for
authority and rules yourself.
“Show them that some of the great original thinkers in history
were very similar to them.”
Lahey: In the
current educational framework, it’s easier to teach a room of conformist,
unoriginal, malleable children, and yet you assert that these are not the sort
of children who will go on to change the world. How can teachers push American
education in a direction that will foster the kind of traits that make for
original, innovative thinkers?
Grant: I love
the proposal from George Lucas that college applications should include a
creative portfolio. Every student makes something original: a film, a song, a
story, a piece of art. If we start there, I think we’ll begin seeing parents,
principals, and teachers clamoring for creative thinking skills to be taught
earlier in the education system. I’d also enjoy seeing more teachers take a
page out of the Right Question Institute and help
students learn to formulate great questions. As Warren Berger says, “Knowing the answers will help you in
school, but knowing how to question will help you in life.”
Lahey: One
story I hear a lot from the original thinkers I know is that they got in
trouble a lot in school for opting out of (i.e., refusing) to follow a directed
path or the instructions of the teacher. The classic story is they did not do
well in math because they wanted to figure out all the alternate ways to work
out that math problem rather than stick with the formulaic instructions handed
down by the teacher. How do we support original thinkers in their enthusiasm to
learn and explore and innovate while making sure we teach them what we need
them to know in order to move on from one lesson to another?
Grant: One
option is to give students the freedom to explore new solutions once they’ve
demonstrated understanding of existing ones. Borrowing Dan Pink’s language from Drive,
autonomy becomes a reward for mastery.
Lahey: I worry
about the mental health of original kids as they struggle to make their way through
a world that often wants them to shut up, sit down, and conform to the status
quo. Could you comment on this?
Grant: I worry
about it, too. School should be a place where kids learn to love learning, not
where they get stifled by drill sergeants. The psychologists Erik Westby and
V.L. Dawson found that teachers claimed to enjoy
working with creative children, yet the most non-conforming children are the
least likely to be the teacher’s pets. They raised two possibilities for how
original kids will respond. One is that “teachers’ unwelcoming attitudes may
alienate children from formal education.” The other is that “teachers’ dislike
of behaviors associated with creativity leads to the extinction of those
behaviors.” Either outcome is highly undesirable.
Lahey: How can
parents of original thinkers protect what’s special and different about their
children even as those children are being told every day at school to stop
doodling, stay inside the lines, do it the way I told you to do it, and stop
asking why?
Grant: Show
them that some of the great original thinkers in history were very similar to
them. Look at Einstein: He consistently rebelled against authority and
struggled in classes where he was pushed to follow the crowd. Fiction works
here too: Remind them that Harry Potter and Hermione Granger have to bend the
rules to fight against the dark arts.
Lahey: So,
what’s the first step? If we want to change our parenting and teaching today
and encourage our children to become originals, where should we begin?
Grant: Focus
on values over rules. The parents of highly creative architects, for example,
modeled and emphasized core values, and gave their kids freedom to figure out
how they wanted to express those values. The parents might say, “Respect for
others is important in this family. What kind of impact do you want to have on
others?” or, “We take joy in our work. What kinds of jobs sound like fun to
you?” When the kids grew up, they were more comfortable going against the
grain, because they had taken ownership over their own system of values that
guided them. It would be wonderful to see more teachers adopt a similar
approach.
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