Get Outta' My Bubble and Don't Call on Me: Conversations About Introverts in the Classroom

Yesterday's Study Skills topic was how an introvert might feel in most classrooms, but mine in particular.

I'm a pacer. I rarely stand in the front of the class, and I am constantly on the move.  Proximity certainly helps with behavior management when there are restless or inattentive students, but to some students, it feels threatening when a teacher approaches from behind or mysteriously stops near their desk for no apparent reason. Some students expressed a strong desire to be in the middle of the class rather than on the margin; they felt exposed on the front row where they might end up two feet from a  teacher who might be observing them writing or working a math problem, for instance.  That heightened self-consciousness means they aren't engaging the content to best extent.  It's classroom "fight or flight;" they are exerting all their mental energy managing their emotional state.  By the end of the school day, the introvert is often completely spent from managing his or her feelings about the possibility of interaction.

Learning to express opinions, collaborate, and make connections extemporaneously are important life skills for students. Taking time to ask questions about where their stress points are helps teachers scaffold students toward developing those skills. Often their answers will surprise us. Introverted students may seem completely happy and compliant in a classroom, meanwhile viscerally managing some very definite preferences while the teacher obliviously holds forth about the causes of World War I, factoring, genetics, or Romeo and Juliet.  Study skills students this semester have become increasingly self-aware and have offered suggestions for alternatives.  When the discussion goes two ways and students believe teachers are open to changing our process for their benefit, the entire learning community benefits.

We discussed how teachers might informally assess for understanding rather than calling on individual students to respond to specific questions.  There are excellent technology-based solutions for formative assessment if a class has 1:1 devices, but as for traditional alternatives, many students who identified as introverts even disliked "turn to your partner and come up with three examples of..." because they felt pressure that a partner might rely exclusively on their insight—another stressful issue. Across the board, introverted students did not prefer group work, often for the same reasons.

Of one thing I'm certain:  the classroom is a round hole into which the infinite variety of student shapes often do not easily fit.  Regardless of the setting or content area, we have an obligation to constantly re-evaluate our practice based on how the content might be better engaged by the humans who share our classroom.

There is always more to be learned, and I'm thankful to these study skills students for teaching me so much this semester. I'll be a better teacher next year for having listened to them, and CCS students will benefit from their "guinea pig" status going forward, as we incorporate their ideas into our new Study Skills program for all seventh graders.

Quizlet Project Update: Persistence and The Power of Ten Minutes

Persistence is among the most important characteristics for success in life.  My mother, who taught for 35 years, called it "sticktoitiveness." The popular educational buzzword is "grit"; it is essential that students to learn to struggle with difficult content.  Exactly how much struggle is useful is a matter of debate among educators, but pretty much all of us can agree that cultivating a disposition that feels (buzzword alert) empowered when confronted with new and challenging material is a positive thing — in school, and in life.

Some students have bona fide "executive function" deficits, however, and for those students, envisioning how to structure their own study is a seemingly insurmountable task.  These same students have difficulty cleaning their rooms because it is hard for them to envision where to begin creating order out of chaos. Simply telling a student whose "inner executive" is poorly formed to "study the material" is not a helpful instruction, because planning how to attack the material is a difficult task. When that student goes to study, his binder may be filled with a jumbled collection of dogeared, torn papers from several chapters or indeed several classes.  Studying would require him to first complete a mechanical task so frustrating that he might study only part of the content, or may indeed become embarrassed that he cannot locate something he vaguely recalls is important, so he simply opts to quietly do poorly and feel lousy about himself. He does not persist. Feeling rotten about one's failed attempt at study does not often result in being hopeful about success the next time. In class, that student's head is down and his shoulders are slumped and he's praying silently for the bell to ring rather than engaging in the lesson. No eye contact from that student.

There have, however, been noticeable changes among this particular group of students since beginning our scheduled, almost daily, ten-minute practice sessions of relevant terms.  Our class researches and creates our Quizlet cards collectively before beginning to discuss a chapter.  Most of these students raise their hands far more often these days, because they anticipate they are bringing some knowledge to the party. They correct me if I misspeak.  They respond to my questions with vocabulary that is specific and academic, and their credibility within the classroom increases as they ask thoughtful questions themselves.  They may suggest edits to a Quizlet card based on material they encounter in the text. Their overall confidence entering the classroom is enhanced.  They actually sit up straighter in class.

Teachers talk a great deal about "metacognition," or "thinking about thinking." We believe there is tremendous benefit to helping students think deeply about their own reasoning process. Likewise, students benefit from studying how to study. Not only are students with anemic executive function learning the content more effectively, they are developing expertise in the different functions of an application with almost universal applications for their academic future.  They have opinions as to the efficacy of different Quizlet modes, and they instruct one another as to the best way to use it.  They counsel each other about the specific benefits of accessing it via the browser rather than the app. Consistently using this tool to efficiently self-assess has helped build a hopeful feeling of control for some who have not exhibited it in my class before.  Of course, the confident, naturally-organized students are still making "As". But all are learning to incorporate a pattern of distributed practice and self-assessment that they can employ when they encounter content that is difficult, unfamiliar, and overwhelming to master, as most students eventually do. 

The takeaway?  I want my students to develop an internal protocol that equips them to succeed. Learning to structure their rehearsal of content over several days using a specific process has reaped a payoff that is not only visible in my gradebook, but in their posture.  Especially for certain students,  I believe in the power of ten minutes.

Working Smarter, Not Harder: Our CCS Quizlet Project

Conway Christian School is committed to allowing our high school students to be involved in numerous co-curricular activities — from community service to athletics, drama, music, and more — that they might intimidated to try in a large public school environment.  We believe it creates a sense of community at school, and confidence that students can attempt new and different activities and succeed. Sometimes our students can sail along through junior high, based on fairly enriched backgrounds and stable homes, with little thought for developing a serious method for mastering challenging academic material on a tight schedule. When they arrive in high school, however, and all those new opportunities present themselves, some students can become overwhelmed.

Between transition stress and developmental issues, it's easy for many junior high students to feel they can't really get traction about how to do well.  Some feel baffled as to how to affect the outcome.  It's not enough for teachers to simply say, "try harder."  We've been watching the process from the junior high and high school side for a while, discussing strategies for better equipping students before ninth grade.  Toward that end, I'm running a pilot project with a web 2.0 app called Quizlet this nine weeks in my seventh and eighth grade history classes.

How we learn is a very individual process, but a 2013 study published here suggested many study techniques students use often have a very low payoff for the time spent on them, while other techniques would have benefit over a student's entire academic career and across all content areas. I've decided to focus like a laser on training my social studies students to use them effectively and consistently, tracking their compliance and their achievement.

So what are these "silver bullets" of study? Short and sweet, they are:

1.  Distributed practice. Think eating an elephant one bite at a time.  Students who review material ten minutes per day rather than two hours the night before a test have a serious advantage. One reason is that sleep consolidates learning, so having some "sleeps" between reviewing the material and testing over it is helpful. Being exposed to material initially imprints it lightly on our brains, then reviewing it again soon afterward sort of "smooshes" it deeper into the wrinkles of the brain. These regular, short review sessions not only help students perform better on tests, but result in increased long-term retention.

2.  Self-testing.  One problem for many students is that they try to study without ever  "knowing what they don't know." Creating scenarios where students engage questions, whether from end-of-section reviews in the text, from Cornell notes, or from flashcards, enables them to sort what they have mastered from what they do not know, and to use their time more efficiently. Careful, however: it's important for students not to assume the questions on an assessment will be worded exactly as their flashcards. That can result in sense of false competence. It's essential that we train students to self-assess while they read by trying to predict questions an instructor might generate over material they have been exposed to. These questions could be knowledge targets or higher-order thinking questions.

So, what common study methods did the researchers say were less effective?  According to the study, highlighting and underlining while reading yields very little benefit.  Re-reading and summarization, creating mnemonics, and mental imagery have narrow applications.  The data were so compelling that the researchers felt those techniques should be shelved for most applications and replaced with the two methods above.

Why Quizlet?  Quizlet allows me to create a closed class, have students join it, and track student behavior and progress.  Students can create flashcards and peer review them to make sure they are correct, then watch as they study using old-fashioned flash card techniques with a twist:  auditory learners can have the cards read aloud by the voice on the program and they can receive either the term first or the definition/description first.  Quizlet will  generate fill-in-the-blank, matching, true/false, or multiple choice quizzes. Students can flag the terms/concepts they have consistently mastered, and ask to be quizzed only over the ones they are missing.  They can generate a report over how many times they have missed or answered items correctly.  Students can even play timed games (only after they master the material), competing against others in the class.  Quizlet is available from a laptop, phone, or any other portable device to use between activities, while waiting in the doctor's office, or traveling to and from school.  Students can even print hard copies of the terms and definitions as cards or as handouts.

We are devoting the first ten minutes of class every day in room 106 to a silent preview/review of material using Quizlet.  I am excited to see how we progress, but my early intuition is that it has already been worth every minute we have spent in 8th grade.  During this first chapter of our Quizlet project, I have noted students confidently using vocabulary in class discussion that comes directly from their review.  For now, that's the introduction.  I look forward to reporting on our progress soon.



Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K., Marsh, E., Nathan, M., & Willingham, D. (2013). Improving Students' Learning With Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions From Cognitive and Educational Psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4-58.

The Short End of the Stick, and the Rising Tide

Yesterday, a student got the short end of the stick in my classroom.  Specifics are inappropriate, but suffice it to say that, during a collaboration exercise in our classroom, I kept hearing over my shoulder noise that appeared completely unrelated to the exercise coming from one student group.  Eventually I asked the apparent offender to step outside. For students who have persistent issues with impulse control,  a momentary "step out" is often enough to allow the class activity to move forward, and to allow the student a moment to "re-set" before continuing.

When I retrieved the accused, it was almost time for class to be over.  I sat down with his group, and discussed the incident. I told them I had been telling others how proud I am of the progress the class had made this year and that I expected them to do what they were capable of doing without disruption. At the beginning of the school year this student, who genuinely struggles with staying on-task, a would have hung his head and felt like a big loser.  Yesterday, he made eye contact with me, and calmly, respectfully and with dignity advocated for himself, explaining exactly what he had been doing and how I had misconstrued the situation.  I apologized to him and to his group for jumping to the wrong conclusion, discussed the responsibility of all to keep the standard high during group work, and reminded them how proud I am of them. No apparent hard feelings.

Junior high students are in a "no man's land" between elementary school and high school.  They have a broad range of developmental maturity, and within a given week may display a varying capacities for self-control, depending on the context and peer group.  At the same time, they are often alternately needlessly hard on themselves and unbelievably clueless. They can exhibit the sensitivity of a brick, or tenderness and empathy beyond their years. Our journey has taken us from those first days — when this student could barely get to the right class with the right materials — to where we are today, where he was able to respond to an unjust charge from an authority figure in the most appropriate and thoughtful way.

I love the content I teach. At this level, however, the most important things for students to take out of the classroom are probably practical skills that will benefit them as they move forward with their education and their lives. His knowledge of The Great War will never help this student navigate a complication with his professor in college or with his future boss, but learning to have calm, productive discussions with someone when his performance is questioned will. Sometimes students grow because of us, and sometimes they grow in spite of us. At any rate, his stock really went up with me yesterday, and in the future, I'll be less reactive and more thoughtful with other students because of his maturity.  After all, a classroom is a community, and a rising tide lifts all boats.

Student News: Big Plans Coming!

Well, we are at the "lowest point" in the school year; the weather is cold, the kids are tired, and we still have a few weeks 'til Spring Break.  By this time, students and teachers have all seen one another's bag of tricks—or we think we have. Over the past two weeks I have found there are still things to learn, if I open my eyes.

We had a fun 7th grade Olympic Games unit, in which we researched countries and sports and learned about the games and ate Olympic-themed snacks (thanks, Christi!)  The biggest thing to come from the entire event, however, was that in doing the "Olympic Minute," I learned a lot about students that I did not know.

I learned that some students for whom everything else seems effortless were not at all comfortable with the thought of speaking over that intercom for 300 students and teachers to hear.  It is true that public speaking is really difficult for many people, but I learned that, for instance, Russell has a gift for both speaking and a facility for copywriting, and that Lane probably needs to go to work somewhere that he can put his gift of speaking to good use, since he got a standing ovation from the upperclassmen in the hallway.

There is so much more to say about all the other outstanding performances, but suffice it to say that I was reminded that your children are capable of so much more than we ask of them, and that I need to challenge them in new ways.  While we have been opening our class with a CNN Student News broadcast each day, I'll now be substituting a 5-10 minute Friday student newscast which will be created and presented by 7th grade students each week. I'm excited to see what they come up with.  Collaborating to create and present with technology is a twenty-first century skill many of you use each day in your own jobs.  I know these students will amaze, inform, and entertain us.

Thank you again for trusting us with them.

Another Week in the Books in Room 106

Another week in the books in Room 106. For 7th grade, it meant looking at the Greeks and the Persians and the famous battle of the 300 Spartans.  We've looked at what it took to build the kind of commitment that made soldiers stand to the last man in face of incredible odds against the juggernaut army of the Persians, and learned that the lives of Spartan boys in the fifth century B.C. were considerably tougher than the lives of CCS students today.  It took a lifetime of toughness and brutality to create the kind of soldiers Leonidas led.

For eighth graders, we've been looking at the runup to the American War for Independence, and today we sat with our eyes closed for a few moments trying to consider what circumstances might lead citizens of Conway today to believe it a viable solution to go home, open the gun safe, and head out into Laurel Park or Simon Park to engage the authorities in open combat like those colonists at Lexington and Concord did on that day.  We are examining ten years of increasing conflict and erosion of the native rights of Englishmen that had been guaranteed to those colonists in their colonial charters, and we are discussing the biblical admonition in Romans 13:1 to "be subject to the governing authorities." Hmmm.  How does that square with the idea of revolution?  It's a good discussion, and one that will continue next week.

Finally, in 10th grade World History, we turned a corner from Greece and touched on the Intertestamental Period (what was going on between Malachi and Matthew, anyway?) We looked at the Jews from the time of the Persians, who allowed the them to return to Jerusalem to rebuild the Temple, and watched the successors of Alexander the Great remake the Middle East in the image of Greece.  Hellenization profoundly affected the culture in which the Jews lived.  We observed the "evangelical paganism" of the Seleucids as Antiochus IV Epiphanes forced Jews to sacrifice to Zeus or be tortured or killed, and brought a pig into the Jewish Temple to be offered as a sacrifice to Zeus on the Altar of Burnt Offering.  The aftermath was slaughter.  We also looked at the translation of the Septuagint, and the origins of the Jewish festival of Hannakah.

A common thread is that the people in the history books were like us.  They lived their lives, worked hard, loved their families—in challenging circumstances subject to authorities who made decisions that profoundly affected their day-to-day lives.  They were drawn into the vortex of forces out of their control, and sometimes they made difficult and frightening decisions based on their convictions, while under the influence of those more powerful than themselves.

The search for meaning in all the history continues. I don't consider it my job to tell students the answers every question that studying history raises, but rather to help them discover how many questions can be asked, to encourage them to be careful evaluators of information and insightful questioners themselves, in the context of history as God's narrative.  In addition, I just love a good story.  Not all students will love the academic discipline of history, but if I can help them imagine themselves in another place and time, that will please me as well.  Thanks for trusting us with them.

This Week in Room 106: Resilience and Recovery

This week we’ve struggled a bit. After starting out on Monday with a plan, I became unexpectedly ill and missed two days, during which my plan got derailed and the continuity was interrupted for the students.  Apologies, certainly, but there’s a life lesson there for us all:  sometimes we have to drop back and punt. I’m still coughing and wheezing mightily, but I’m spending this morning amid piles of paper and plan on returning caught up on Monday. We’ll recover. Give me another day or so and all grades should be up to date.

I continue to be impressed with your children. Each class is a Duke’s mixture, of course:  students for whom everything seems easy alongside those who struggle to do each task, those to whom every issue seems to loom with great importance, and those who have difficulty getting motivated about any academic task.

After dealing with a couple of discipline issues that were disappointing early this week, I’ve observed indications of maturity and recovery that revealed a lot about who your young people are growing to be, and it has really encouraged me. Resilience is a quality that serves us all well, so I hope we are learning lessons that make us move on gracefully from moments of perceived failure, and those times when our life plans will inevitably be interrupted — such as by illness or other unexpected detours. 

I’d like to leave you with a piece of wisdom from my 87-year-old former educator father, who has watched a lot of young people through a lot of years of growing.

Nobody knows what a boy is worth,

and the world must wait and see;

for every man in an honored place,

is a boy that used to be.

~Phillips Brooks

God is not finished with them yet.