The Future of Learning by Harvard’s Ron Ritchhart

[Music] I'd like to commence by acknowledging the traditional owners the land in which we meet tonight the burner on people our respects to their elders past and present and and can I without being sounding too patronizing say just how incredibly proud I am of you the parents because I know that sort of commentary would give to students but it is wonderful to see how many parents have responded to want to be a part of this learning and to enter this partnership so thank you very much for them the one of the great quotes that came out of McKinsey report that you all know about is that no school can rise above the level of the quality of its teachers and we have over this last eight and a half years really sought to make sure that our investment lasts it may appear from time to time that it's more in terms of bricks and mortar and play spaces but the very large majority of what we've invested in that time has really been about improving the conditions of teaching and learning it has been about reducing amount of teaching that our teachers do especially across the secondary area it's been about reducing class sizes but it's also been about making sure that we've increased the opportunities for real quality in terms of professional learning and in terms of looking to how we do that and how we extend that program I know that in looking around I was fortunate few years ago to go to the future of learning at Harvard and it came at a time when we were trying to find somewhere within Australia a model for professional learning that we thought could take us to that next level and the reality was that we really couldn't find it we thought at the same time about do we invest in some type of Institute as we've seen that a number of schools but I would suspect that a lot of that investment has been very narrow and so very fortunate in terms of being joined by jackie coca who'd also had that same experience being the future of learning they became very evident to us that we weren't going to find it here nor we were going to find it just by instilling or putting somebody into a position within the college we considered two universities which seem to be offering something that we thought of high quality one was Cambridge Mama's Harvard and it's an Englishman can I tell you Ron it was very disappointing that it was Harvard but we live with these things and so that sort of journey started and it's been a three-year journey of Ron's involvement with the college who's now impacted upon more than 80 of our staff which includes all of our academic leadership teams right across the college but also many of those aspirational young leaders to make sure we're nurturing and developing and enriching at a much higher level it's interesting that when teachers come out of that experience whether they are early entry teachers or whether they are very experienced teachers that almost to a person the expressions they used it is the very best professional learning that they believe they have ever had at anytime and so that thing is an incredible endorsement of the work that you do I think we may all be already be observing some of the impact because I know that when I came here eight and a half years ago the number of students who were prepared to take on the additional challenges of IB and I'm not suggesting for a moment that that makes it more academic but we know it's more rigorous but we had 31 or 32 children each of those years next year we're going to see 66 children in year 10 who've indicated they intend to study the IB more than doubling those numbers and I think what that's come about is because of that richness that's coming into the classroom in terms of that development we're going to continue that as well in terms of a principal level I'm involved with a group of nine other Australian principals from New South Wales South Australian Victoria in leading learning that masses and that culminates this year and what I'm hopeful of is it will continue with some work that we hope to be able to be engaged with with the OECD that covers the future of learning and talks about 2030 for those of yous anyone got prepped children here fantastic because when you work this through what you know is that 2030 is there year 12 you and so when we think about it and we think it's a long way off those of us who've had children to go through realize it's gonna go very quickly and what will that future be like what is it that we think that is gonna really matter and so what I'd like you to think about is beyond just this near horizon as parents and I'd like you to start thinking about the horizon as Grandparents because when we look across we listen to all of the information about the state of education in Australia and how terribly is because of things like Pisa or NAPLAN can I say that those things don't worry me at all what worries me most is that we're moving into what I've term with the staff is something of a perfect storm because what we know is that in the next five to six years a very high percentage of the educational leaders in the country reach retirement age when we look at the profile of those teachers that teach in the math sciences we know that a disproportionate number of those are about to hit retirement age as well there are something like these 90 thousand students who will commence in Australian in Victorian schools in the next five years and what we're finding already is it's becoming remarkably difficult to find the quality of teachers to make sure that we can continue the educational standards that I think that we have become accustomed to and there is a great challenge there for schools but why there's a perfect storm is that beyond our shores there are other forces at work sounds like some evil part of some twist doesn't it but the reason I say that is that we know that there's about two hundred and eighty three thousand teachers in this country at the moment and when we go looking for teachers we seek them not just here but in other countries around the world what we know is the international school system is about to expand at a very high level and there is a view that there's going to be the requirement of an extra 220,000 english-speaking teachers to fill those jobs in the next ten years in an international schools around the world so think about that Britain would indicate that they are short in terms of quality teachers top end maths and Sciences we're hearing the same thing coming out of the major English educational speaking senses and yet what we know is there is something like 220,000 extra teachers they've never be required in those same environments in international settings there is something that we have to do as a nation beyond just what we're here to do tonight so I'm sending you away with a bit of a throwaway about things that I would like you to consider and about what it is that we want for our grandchildren not for our children because I do believe that there are some incredible concerns about the future we're coming back to the present I could say that is why we are so fortunate to have wrong with us here this evening he directs the coaches of thinking project he's also a fellow at the Melbourne University but what I'm most impressed about is a maths teacher and he these wonderful C maths teachers entering into this zone but also and I think my own mother see he wouldn't tell you he has had the Presidential Award for the teaching of mathematics which is the highest honor that you can extend to a teacher right across the educational system in the United States of America which is indeed a wonderful I acknowledge also the books that certainly have helped to guide my thinking tears of cultures making learning visible and also intellectual character but a new one and I haven't read which I understand is making numbers make sense which please mate Ron welcome thank you very much this evening I've organized my talk around kind of three big questions for us to explore together so the first question here is thinking about why is it that we need to transform schools into cultures of thinking why is that an important goal the second one is to kind of unpack that for you what are some of the key practices that we employ to develop a culture of thinking and then finally I want to kind of end the talk this evening giving you some very specific strategies that you can use as parents to help and support your child's learning and thinking just a kind of a little bit of background about kind of where these ideas have come from I've been a researcher at Harvard for over 20 years and originally this research and these ideas came from my studying of teachers who were really adept at getting students to think really good at developing their habits of mind they're thinking dispositions I spent a year in those classrooms really understanding what those teachers did so my research has always been grounded in best practice then went to Europe working there in Sweden and in Northern Europe at international schools and in 2005 to Melbourne where we worked at Bialik college in a research project for some 13 years at the same time I was engaged in a big research project in the state of Michigan that was originally funded by Dow Chemical and at the outset of that project I had an opportunity to meet with the CEO to get secured funding for the project and she told me a story she said here at Dow Chemical we have an internship program for secondary students we get the absolute best and brightest students she said but we've noticed something we give these young people a problem to solve in the lab and it's not too long before they give up and they come to us and they say well what's the answer and we have to explain to them in the real world of chemistry you don't work on problems you know the answer to so as you said as important as chemistry is and she says we're Dow Chemical we need people that know their chemistry she said it's not enough we need students who can problem solve who can persevere who can innovate who can collaborate and they felt that schools had become too narrowly focused on just preparing kids to pass tests and again they were very clear we need them to know their chemistry we need them to understand it at a deep level but we need more so they were very interested in funding our research there because they wanted to expand the view of Education so when we talk about a culture of thinking we are talking about deep understanding of the content area we are talking about helping students to perform very well but we're talking about more so to begin with and thinking about why culture matters I'd like for you to consider what to my mind is one of the most fundamental questions in education it's a question that all educators have to be asking themselves all schools all parents all community members all policymakers and that question is what do we want the students we teach to be like as adults so we're always concerned these days with outcomes well this is an outcome question it's just a different kind of outcome question could you take a moment and just kind of jot down a few ideas for yourself you can do this on your if you want if you got a pencil or something to write with but Johnny just a couple of quick responses there to that prompt what is it that you want when you think about the children that we collectively teach that we collectively are trying to grow into adults what do you want for them to be like as adults let's jot down a couple of ideas a couple of responses there and we're going to do something called a thinking routine and this thinking routine is called give one get one and the way this works in just a moment I'll ask you to stand up and turn to the person sitting next to you or behind you or in front of you and you're gonna give them one of the ideas you wrote down but when you do that you're going to explain why do you care about that why is that an important thing for children to grow into as adults and then they will repeat the process they'll give you one of their ideas so I'd like you to do this twice so have two very quick conversations with people around you in which you give them one idea they give you one idea so it's possible in your list and when you were talking with your partner that maybe perhaps some of these ideas came up and this isn't really meant to be a list more just kind of a sampling these qualities some of these often come up and many more and the way we refer to these is we often talk about these as being dispositions and a disposition is a part of a person's character it's a part of who he or she is becoming some of these items on the list too and perhaps some on yours you might hear people talking about today as 21st century skills which I always think is a little bit disingenuous because none of these things were invented in the 21st century they've been around for a very long time they're just becoming more important I think in the world today another framing that you hear as soon as these are referred to in the research as soft skills which is another framing that I actually don't care for because the research on soft skills shows that having these kinds of attributes are actually the best markers of success they are good markers of success both academically as well as in life so if these are the things that actually lead to success we should be calling them that we should be calling them success skills rather than soft skills my favorite way though of talking about these comes from Ted sizer who had been a Dean at the Harvard Graduate School of Education he was instrumental in the founding of the research group that I work with project zero and they used to talk about these as the residuals of Education I kind of loved that framing if you remember from your long division days when you do it long division you've got something left over remaining sometimes that's referred to as a residual so for us to think about what is it that remains with students after they have left a school what is it that stays with them one year out three years out five years out and in my mind that is the mark of a quality education so if we are trying to truly educate our students we have to not just educate for the short-term but also for the long-term we have to think about what is it that will stay with them but when we look at any of these qualities and I guess anything on your list I expect none of them can be directly taught you know you can't do say a six-week unit on curiosity and then BAM every one way come curious it's not going to work so if we care about these and they can't be directly taught the question that naturally emerges is well how do we as parents how do we as a school help students to get there and the answer to that is through enculturation now my father is 90 years old and he read my most recent book he said you made that word up didn't you I had to assure him that I hadn't you can see the word culture there in the middle so enculturation means to learn through the culture but my favorite way of kind of encapsulating what that word means there's a famous quote from the Russian psychologist Vygotsky and that quote is children grow into the intellectual life around them so as both parents and as a school we have to think about what kind of intellectual life are we surrounding our students with do they see us taking risks in learning from mistakes do they see our passion and curiosity do they see us collaborating with other people do they see our problem solving so students aren't going to develop those skills on their own they will grow into them by being in a culture in which they can see the adults and see other students and see the community actively engaged in that process so when we talk about a culture of thinking this is the definition that we use in our project so we say that cultures of thinking are places so they aren't limited to schools or classrooms and in fact we can think about a family unit as being a culture of thinking so cultures think are places in which the group's collective as well as individual thinking is valued it's visible and it's actively promoted as part of the regular day-to-day experience of all group members so those bold words they're valued visible and actively promoted so I want to kind of do some kind of unpacking of those words in terms of what they mean when we talk about thinking being valued I've never been to a school that says oh we don't value thinking here what is more common as they say oh of course of course we do but if you really value something you have to be able to articulate well what is it specifically that you are trying to nurture and value and support so when we think about the kinds of thinking that are really important and in particular important in schools we think the kinds of thinking that will lead to understanding is particularly important the research on understanding and thinking about what it means to teach for understanding has been one of the things that Harvard has really kind of led the way at some 20 years ago the Spencer foundation funded one of the largest research projects in the world at the time to really develop a pedagogy of understanding so we've spent a lot of time trying to understand what is involved in developing understanding and we identified what we call eight thinking moves and you have a copy of this in the handout that you were given when she walked in today so as we were developing this we are the test for ourselves was well could you say you have understanding if you haven't engaged in this so we were trying to identify the kinds of thinking that seemed to be necessary for understanding so he said the idea of describing what's there being able to see and notice so if there's something you understand you can identify the various parts and pieces and aspect of that thing you are able to look and to see and notice more as a result of your understanding and far from being simple the ability to see and notice in any field is one of the ways we tend to recognize expertise so we expect that our doctors can look at x-rays and see and notice things we can't because of their expertise so that developing that ability is important for understanding asking questions and wondering you could easily imagine times and come up with lots of examples about when you have gained knowledge and information without asking any questions at all you can sit and listen to something you can read something you can get information knowledge without any questions but I think you'd be hard-pressed to imagine a time that you actually developed understanding without asking any questions because those questions are what lead us into the topic and what take us further rather than just sit at that informational level looking at things from different viewpoints making connections building explanations three things that really go to the heart of what it takes to build understanding so if there's an issue that we are trying to understand and we've only looked at that issue from a single perspective we recognize that our understanding is limited that having other perspectives begins to round out our understanding oftentimes when we're trying to understand something we are trying to build an explanation of it build an interpretation of it develop a theory around it and as we're doing that we're also making connections which again is one of the hallmarks of understanding and in fact one of the ways that people talk about the difference between knowledge and understanding is understanding is connected knowledge so you can have bits of knowledge that sit in isolation but when you develop understanding you are connecting that knowledge and that's one of the reasons why it is so powerful to teach for understanding because it doesn't neglect knowledge at all but it helps students develop the connections which serve them well those connections aid to our retention and they aid to our ability to apply and to use our knowledge so the best preparation for test the research has shown whether the tests are low-level tests or not is always understand because it's going to aid retention and it's going to aid transfer as we are building our explanations we are using the evidence in front of us the information the data again using that to reason and to build those explanations the idea of uncovering complexity is the idea that understanding requires depth it is not surface level but we go deeply when we are trying to understand something and finally the idea of capturing the heart in forming conclusions which sounds like a very concluding task and it is but the way our minds work is our minds are constantly engaged in that process of thinking about ah what is this now how do I understand this now so we are constantly trying to distill the essence of the things we are trying to understand so we said that these eight thinking moves seemed to be necessary for understanding so that's the part of valuing thinking and so the teachers here at st. Leonard's are really trying to make sure that in all of their lessons they are aware of well what is the thinking we need students to do with this content and sometimes as parents when we want to help our child to develop their understanding when we want to help them with their homework it's not just helping them with the work but it's helping them to develop their understanding and this can be useful to us as parents to begin to think about well what kind of thinking might help to unlock this understanding that might help my student go my child go further well you'll also notice is that with each kind of thinking there's a question and we wrote those questions in the simplest most generic form we could and we considered those just starter questions but we need lots of questions as adults to help children develop their thinking around that so we could take any of those kinds of thinking today we take the idea of making connections and with that we might generate a whole host of questions that we might ask that would help facilitate that kind of thinking could you take just one minute now and with a person just sitting next to you look at the understanding map pick one of those kinds of thinking and see if the two of you can generate a few questions that you might ask that would help to facilitate that kind of thinking so just pick one on there just play around with coming up with some questions so having identified the kind of thinking we value the kind of thinking we're trying to promote then the question is well how is it that we can make that kind of thinking visible because thinking is something that happens individually happens in an individual's mind and it is an invisible process but as adults as parents as teachers we want to make that thinking visible so that we get a window into what's going on and a key way that we make thinking visible is through what we call thinking routines and we did one that give one get one was a thinking routine the idea of thinking routines emerge from that research I did it in classrooms where teachers were really effective at getting students to think what I saw was these teachers never once taught a thinking skills lesson instead they had routines and structures which they used to support and scaffold their students thinking a couple of years ago we produced a short video to kind of explain what thinking routines are so we'll watch that and then I'll talk a little bit more about them [Music] what can we as educators do to help students become better thinkers when I'd assume that a good place to start is to teach thinking skills but as teaching skills enough we often miss opportunities to use the skills we have simply by not noticing times when they might be useful good thinkers not only know how to think creatively critically and deeply they actually do it they have a repertoire of thinking moves to draw on they're inclined to use them and they're sensitive to the times when thinking would be helpful in other words they're in the habit of observing analyzing and questioning so can we teach this researcher educators at project zero have been exploring this question for many years and think the answer is yes the thinking routines they have developed as part of their research invite learners of any age to be close observers to organize their ideas to reason carefully and to reflect on how they're making sense of Sables these routines are flexible enough to be used to engage learners with any artifact system or concept including their own thought processes [Music] thinking routines are simple structures for example a set of questions or a short sequence of steps that can be used alone or with a group they are designed to be easy to remember practical and to invite a broad range of thinking moves if they are well suited to leverage the power of collaborative thinking and transfer easily to any context you can use them without training or prior experience figuring out how they work along with your students just by using them thinking routines help students go beyond the superficial inviting them to dig deeper by making the complex accessible through practice learners become sensitive to opportunities to use their thinking lose in the wild helping them to develop habits of mind that will sustain their curiosity inside and outside the classroom given the broad range of thinking routines available it might be tempting to try out as many routines as possible but this approach can turn them into mere strategies subverting a core aspect of their design that they get used over and over again choosing one core thinking routine for instance see think wonder and trying it out in as many contexts as possible is more likely to reveal the ways thinking routines can support individuals and developing habits of thinking and groups and developing a culture of thinking together once you and your students get comfortable with the idea of using a routine for structuring your thinking it's easier to branch out and find routines that fit well with the kind of thinking you'd like to invent for instance asking deep questions making connections coming up with explanations challenging those explanations and exploring alternative perspectives thinking routines might at first seem too simple but it is their simplicity that makes them easy to remember and to use rather than simplifying ideas thinking routines offer straightforward ways to sustain learners and their inquiry into complex problem spaces while it does take time using thinking routines in your classroom cultivates a community of thinkers with a culture of thinking supporting learners and becoming intentional in their shared pursuit of deep understanding so one of the routines that was mentioned there was the routine see think wonder and so I want to tell a couple of quick stories about that that really kind of thing demonstrate the power of thinking routines even though they are quite simple so at the Harvard Medical School they recognized that one of the challenges that doctors in training had was learning to give good clinical diagnosis so they ran an experiment in which they invited these doctors and training to spend ten weeks one day each week at the Museum of Fine Arts using the routines see think wonder to look at art so they looked at art got used to really noticing very carefully beginning to make interpretations from what they noticed and beginning to raise questions after those ten weeks they tested all of the students on their clinical diagnosis skills and found that by using see think wonder by looking at art that those students were actually much improved on that so a structure like that beginning to think about how is it we see how is it we notice in think from that really has its payoff its one of the most used routines another example of that same routine the colleague of mine at project zero a couple of years ago her sister became very ill and she had to fly across the country to be with her sister who lived in California and her sister was so ill that my colleague had to make all of the medical decisions for her and she told me she said you know I was getting really frustrated because I didn't feel like I was getting the information from the doctors that I needed to actually make these life and death decisions that were very important and she said at one point I found myself in a conference room with three or four doctors and she said without even thinking I found myself saying could you just tell me what you're seeing and then the doctors began to explain what they were seeing and what does that make you think and then they began to explain their interpretation but what are you still wondering and they raised their wonderings and she said the simple routine gave me all of the information I needed to make those decisions the doctors there didn't even know that routine but she used that to make their thinking visible to her so that she could go forward and make those decisions um one last example about thinking routines a classroom example to see how this actually looks in a classroom this is a year 10 maths class from the international school of Amsterdam the teacher here Emily slamming talking about how she uses a routine called chalk talk which doesn't use chalk uses text as instead how she uses that to make her students thinking visible both in my teaching and in my language more and more I found myself wondering what are my students thinking right now and what do I want them to be thinking right now this was a chalk talk that was done in conjunction with two other chalk talks to other questions in the same chalk talk period I was trying to do a pre assessment of my students to see what they had learned in their previous classes what they already knew about triangles and trigonometry students in my class have used to chalk talk before and they're getting more and more familiar with it and one of the things I've been emphasizing with them is to try and make connections with each other and with different groups so in this case one group had green markers one had black one had blue and you can see from the arrows that they are starting to make connections with each other and across thought ideas as they went around as well this one was about scalene triangle player also had one about trigonometry and the right triangle and they made connections back to those as well as they circled here it's interesting how students said I wanted to write this but I forgot the actual formula you have agreement and green but then someone in blue making the connection I already wrote this on the right triangle one someone else says no that's with all triangles and over here someone else has filled in the formula that the person writing in black had forgotten so what we're really seeing on this is the students beginning to think together and the interactions with the different colored markers are the different groups and the different handwriting's you can see them making comments to each other and supporting each other as they think through the scalene triangle so at this point as researchers we've created over 40 different thinking routines and it's not the teachers use all of those but they become tools and they aren't activities that we do in the classroom but we think about thinking routines as an opportunity to make the thinking routine so by using these structures students are scaffolded and supported in their thinking and the thinking becomes more visible both to them as well as to us as teachers when we talk about then how is it we actively promote thinking we do that by creating really powerful learning opportunities for students and in our research and drawing on research from a few other sources we've identified four really important ingredients to making learning opportunities powerful for students so the first one is the idea of novel applications so we need to put students in situations where they are applying their skills in new situations and this is really important because then they are learning to transfer and they are learning how those skills might actually be applied a compliment to that is that we also have to make sure that there's meaningful inquiry going on meaning that students are actually learning something new at the same time so as you can imagine we can certainly put students a situation where they are apply their skills but they may not be learning something new we want both of those things to happen so they were both practicing the skills they have applying those in new situations at the same time that they are learning something new and then a third is effective communication so that students are learning to communicate their ideas their thinking they are learning to use the language of the discipline so how is it we communicate in mass how is it we communicate in science in history in language in art and learning that those disciplinary techniques and forms and then finally the idea of perceived worth so the students feel that what they are doing is worthwhile it has meaning and purpose for them I said that these ideas kind of draw on some other research in addition to research that we've done at Harvard and specifically they draw on some research by a professor Fred Newman at the University of Wisconsin and one of the things that he did a fascinating study several years ago that answered a question that teachers all over the world have and that question is is the best way to prepare kids for standardized tests to spend your time preparing kids for standardized tests and the answer was no what he found was when students are in classrooms in which they regularly encounter powerful learning opportunities that is the best preparation even when it is a low-level test of just knowledge and skills because what that is doing is it's giving students the ability to transfer their skills constantly learning something new being used to challenge and seeing that learning is something that is worth while we're gonna finish up here now I'm kind of specifically talking about some things that you as parents can do and I've kind of labeled this portion of the talk nine apps for parents but when I talk about these apps that's just kind of a device I'm using to talk about you can't go to the store and download this so we will be doing these apps virtually so the first one here walking through them I did spend a lot of time on this graphic though I will let you know that so the first went here N squared so this stands for notice and name so one of the things that we as adults do and the help to promote thinking is we notice in name that thank you so even from a very young age a student makes a contribution we say ah that's a really interesting connection you just made that's a great prediction we add the language on to it so we notice a name and highlight the thinking and thus draw attention to it and that's one of the ways that students develop their metacognitive abilities their awareness of their own thinking and the strategies they have at their disposal this next one stands for the growth mindset and this comes from the research by Carol Dweck and Carol Dweck as a young researcher thought that what she was interested in studying when she thought she was really interested in studying how people deal with failure and so she created these tasks in which she had different puzzles and she would give people puzzles and they would constantly get harder and harder and what she planned to do was to make them hard enough that people would eventually fail and to see what happened and how they dealt with that failure not everyone failed now she made sure that puzzles were hard enough that people couldn't solve them but when some people couldn't solve them they didn't view it as a failure they viewed it as an opportunity to learn so then she became fascinated why is it that some people don't view this as a failure but view it as an opportunity to learn and what she found was it is the way people think about intelligence do they think about intelligence as something you can grow and develop or do they think intelligence is just something that is fixed and set something that you have so of course once she kind of hit on that that the way people view intelligence makes a big difference then she wanted to think about well what is it that causes people to develop this growth mindset versus a fixed mindset and what she found was the way that people are praised by parents and by teachers has a lot to do with whether they will develop a fixed or a growth mindset when students were praised for ability then that's praising their intelligence oh you're so smart you're really clever you're just good at this but when people are praised for their effort ah you worked really hard and you applied what you knew and that's where your success came from so you can do that next time those people developed more of a growth mindset so back to those puzzle problems she did an experimenter in which you gave one group that ability praise oh you're so good at this you are just a natural-born puzzle solver other people ah you worked really hard look how you took what you learned from the last puzzle and you apply that to here and you were successful praise them for their effort after that then she said you know I've got two other stacks of puzzles here um this one stack these are a little bit harder than what we've just been doing there well actually they're a lot harder they're kind of challenging and these these are about the same as what we've been doing which one would you like the people that just were told they are so smart they are so clever they are just good puzzle-solving picked the easy stack because when you praise ability you are praising the ego and so then people engage in ego protection this adult just thinks I'm really clever so I want them to keep thinking that so I better choose the easy one so I'm sure that they'll still think I'm good because if I choose those hard ones that I fail they're gonna say oh you weren't so good after all the people that were praised for effort chose the challenging stack then she sent them off to a room by themselves said would you record would you record how you do it was hidden camera in the room again bow stacks were actually the same so they're writing down and what they found was the students that were praised for their ability cheated on their recording another ego protection device I want this person to think I'm really good and so they cheated but the people that were praised for their effort cheated less if not at all and these studies were repeated in lots of different cultures because actually a TV station in Korea got you know read about this and we're fascinated and wondered if this was kind of a cultural thing I'm just a Western thing and they repeated it there found the exact same results so as parents thinking about how we praise our child praising them for the effort what they have done and it's not just good job better luck next time it's ah look how you learned how you can carry that forward that they need a learning oriented response so they can see how their efforts will contribute to their success the next one this has to do with challenges and I mentioned a little bit about challenging Carol Dweck's work but learning occurs at the point of challenge so we have to help children get comfortable with challenge so when things are not coming easily we don't want them to give up we want them to see ah that's actually good we don't need them to be frustrated because once you're frustrated learning drops right off but to recognize if you're just being challenged in you're being pushed a little bit that's a sign that you are learning that's great things if things are coming easily for you you are just practicing things you already know how to do so to help our students recognize challenge is a symbol of learning not a symbol of difficulty the next one here is it the importance of questions and we talked a little bit about questions in relationship to the understanding map but the story that I want to tell you here is a story of a Nobel Prize winner Isadora B Isadora be several years ago won the Nobel Prize in Physics and when he won the award the New York Times sent a reporter to interview him and one of the questions the New York Times reporter asked was how in the world did you become a scientist you grew up in an immigrant household in the Bronx no one on your street was a scientist your family members weren't scientists no one in your neighborhood was a scientist how in the world did you become a scientist and he said oh that's easy he said when all the other kids came home from school their mothers asked them what they did when I came home from school my mother asked me Izzie did you ask any good questions today that's what made me a scientist so encourage your child to ask questions because that passion that curiosity is what will drive them for a lifetime this next one stands for the difference between work and learning as parents and as teachers we always want to make sure that children are learning and sometimes children can look at an assignment or a task and they can approach this this is just work to be done and if they are doing that they are probably missing the learning and as parents it's easy to fall into the trap through no fault of our own as being monitors of the work because our child comes home and we say what's your homework what you have to do is your homework done can I see are you done so we become monitors of the work but teachers don't deliberately assign work they think there's learning there again the problem occurs if your child is just doing it as stuff to get done then they're probably missing the learning so I would encourage you to add one additional question you can still ask what's your homework what do you have to do but then ask them and what do you think your teacher wants you to learn from that that will reorient them on where the learning is and where the focus needs to be here gonna encourage you to let your child argue with you now that may not be much of a stretch but the reason for this in 2015 and the Journal of adolescents a study was reported looking at what are some of the things that made young people resilient and resistant to peer pressure particularly around delinquent behavior the use of drugs and other kinds of delinquent behavior and what they found was that children that came from households in which they were supported in arguing a case not being argumentative but arguing a case putting forth a position trying to persuade through reason and arguments were able to take those same skills into a peer situation so then when a peer presented doing something that was wrong they had the ability to refute that and say no let's not do this because another reason but children that came through more dogmatic households where they just were told no just do it because I said so then when their peers say let's just do it because I say so they went along with it so that ability you know it doesn't mean that you have to agree with your child that you're still the decider in your household so you can say nope not a good argument not persuaded but that ability to put forth reasons and to try to make a case and try to persuade someone is a highly transferable skill that will serve them in good stead this is the importance of time and we are learning so much more about the importance of unstructured time in children's lives that it is through unstructured time particularly in early childhood that children learn to develop creativity the children learn to deal with boredom that children learn to become self regulated learners because they have to begin to make decisions but when every decision is made for them they don't learn those skills we are also learning the importance and when I say unstructured time that also means time away from devices so we have to limit the amount of time our children are on there so that they learn to engage their minds they learn to make decisions around that so make sure your child has some unschedule time in which they are making their own decisions about how to fill up that time how to use that time that's when they will develop their curiosity their creativity and their passions this one stands for make your own thinking visible so as an adult when you are thinking when you are making decisions make that visible so your child sees how you go through that process when you make a mistake and when you reflect on that make that visible so they see how you think because again we grow into the intellectual life around us so we need to see the adults in our life how they think in that process share with them the things that you are curious and passionate about the things that capture your interest and this last one this is an acronym it stands for what makes you say that this is also a thinking routine it's one of the first thinking routines we developed when we were working in Sweden and the Swedish teachers took to calling this the magic question because they said all we have to do is ask that what makes you say that and all of a sudden all these wonderful things happen they said the thinking is just amazing in we find out so much more about our students there was a teacher one of the schools I work with here in Australia said you know all that what makes you say that she said that's not just for the classroom she says that's how I lived my life now she said I used to be really shy at like cocktail parties and things and I found if you just listen to people and you say well what makes you say that all of a sudden all this interesting stuff comes up and you sound so smart and clever and she said I used to get into all these fights with my husband and I found if I just don't say anything I say what makes you say that the stuff he was saying was completely different from what I was hearing so she said it saved my marriage so he said that way I'm actually say that jizz I'm a believer and that but if you start using what makes you say that with your child don't be surprised if they start using it back on you so with those apps and working together we can create really powerful learners and thinkers so thank you [Applause] [Music]

Channel: St Leonard's College

Views: 8,657

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Id: irGqNeaJiUU

Length: 48min 32sec (2912 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 27 2018