Three ways to learn...

This is something I do in class, but as yet don't know if it has had any impact. There are three ways to learn, I tell students. The poorest way to learn is when teacher talks and you listen. This is inefficient because it has least participation or intent on student's part. Talking is mostly done by the teacher and its not in your control or of liking.  Worst, you can't avoid it, teacher can go on like a drone.

The second, more efficient, way to learn is when two people are talking to each other and you are just listening. This is better because someone else is doing the thinking and you can see the arguments for free. Also, the listener needs to focus on what is being said and one naturally starts judging - is it correct or makes sense. This has greater intent on listeners part and hence one learns better by listening to conversations.

But the most efficient way to learn is to talk to yourself, the self-talk. Here the intent and the participation is maximum. If you can debate with yourself, the sense of learning and depth of understanding is greater. You get most fun when you figure out the argument yourself.

Very often I follow these three ways in my class. I start my class by talking about a topic or a question. Then I do a controlled discussion amongst children. At this point, I often remind children of the second method of learning. By the end of the class, I leave some time for them to think and write on their own. I hope that this starts self-talk.

Knowledge+Skills

'Being good at something' has many components. One of the obvious parts is that you know a lot. An expert knows a lot about a specific subject. Since this is obvious, it has got all the attention in our schooling. We learn more and become specialized. We value people who know a lot. Also, given a long list of complicated things to learn, its easy to set a exam and give marks for the knowledge in any subject. Naturally, much of the teaching and testing is focused on how much one knows.

Yet there is a second important component to 'Being good at something' and that is - skills. Competency requires not just knowledge but also skills. Only when one has a fair amount of knowledge and high degree of a skill, can he/she be competent. However, our education system has largely ignored development of (say, academic) skills. Skills are difficult to teach, they required longer persuasion and hard-work. Taking the easy-route, schools have ignored teaching and testing skills. While knowledge is specific to a domain, skills are often cross-disciplinary and broad-based.

As a result, we find youngsters, when they finish schools, know a lot but they have mastered very little. Competency = Knowledge + Skills. Unless we are teaching both knowledge and skills, we are unlikely to produce versatile competent students.

Challenging them to challenge me

Teaching well is only half the problem in education, the other half is 'learning well'. This is a bigger problem because it requires motivation from students. While one is finding ways to teach well, one should also find ways by which students learn well. This part is often overlooked or not given enough time and efforts. Here are couple of things I do in class which have started to pay-off lately.

I often ask, What naughty thing did you do today ? or, Tell me one mind-boggling thing, or else I tell some mind-boggling things. Of late, some students have started coming back to me, on their own and tell me something new. A few ask me to give them a challenge, say a science question, or a maths puzzle or a origami challenge. This is pushing me into a corner, as I have to rush around to find newer challenges. The next day, they come back with the solutions. So I have managed to start the 'good learning' cycling in some of the students. This means that their half of the work is happening on their own.

This also takes-off some my teaching stress. I often use their answers and questions to start-off my class and integrate with what I am teaching. It brings greater willingness to learn. Remind yourself that - 'Learning well' is students' responsibility. It's the other half of 'good education'.

What Galileo discovered

I never thought a simple pendulum could generate so much excitement. We are studying estimation and measurements. One of the things that I wanted children to understand is the concept of 'per second'. So we decided to look at simple pendulum. Each group made a simple pendulum of different lengths using thread and stone.

The story goes that, Galileo was attending the church one Sunday and he noticed the swinging chandeliers. Using his own pulse, Galileo measured the oscillations. He found that oscillations can be used to keep exact time (which was useful for making clocks) and oscillations don't depend on the weight (which may have led him to the famous Pisa experiment). Would you want to discover what Galileo found out ? I asked, and the students got in to a frenzy.

Each group counted the number of oscillations in 10-20 seconds to find out its period (the number of oscillations per second). We did 5 measurements to get average and accurate period. They now know that more number of observations when averaged give accurate measurement. Tomorrow we will be tabulating all the lengths and periods and find out what the data tells us. What surprised me was the amount of excitement this generated. 

This confirms my hunch that children like to step into the shoes of Galileo, Newton, Darwin or Faraday. We should teach science as it was done by these great people. The way they found things for the first time !

Express yourself

It can be safely said that if you can't express it you haven't understood it. This, rather obvious fact, is grossly overlooked in classes today. The flow of information from teachers mouth to students hands and then to teachers eyes and ears is tightly controlled. The subject is broken into concepts and concepts into bullet points. You read these points, students write them and in exams they give back those points to you. This has hardly any space for students' expression.

It is not surprising that students are high on marks and low on understanding. The fault is not theirs but ours - we have left no spacein class for them to express what they think. This is a great loss because the process of expressing (call it explaining) is a powerful tool to promote understanding. A good explanation can tell us what we know and what we don't know. When a child tries to explain things, he/she is having an internal argument. If the child is correct then you will find a new and original explanation. If the explanation is wrong then you have greater chance to find out where the confusion is, either way you learn.

If you want to promote original thinking and true understanding then it is crucial that we spare time in our classes for students to talk. We should let them explain what they think in their own words. Expressing your thoughts verbally is a powerful tool to drive understanding.

Rigged

Are exams suppose to evaluate how well you have learned ? Then, by this standard, almost all exams are rigged. Over time we have somehow come to deceive ourselves. There is a simple test to tell us if we are truly testing childrens abilities. I need to explain.

For any test you give find the distribution of the marks children have got. You can do this by counting the number of children who got marks between 0-20, 20-40, 40-60, 60-80 and 80-100. Now plot the number students against marks between 0-100. If the test is fare and balanced you should get a curve that looks like the following.

If you were to plot the distribution of height of students in your class, you will also get the same Bell-shaped curve. How is it that such widely different things give you same curve ? Well, many things in life follow this curve because there is a range of competencies (or heights). But they are not totally random, they stay close to average competency or the average height.

In this Bell-curve you will have majority of students getting close to 50%, some are getting less and some are getting more than 60%. The average marks should be close to 50%. In such exam it should be easy to get above 30% and difficult to get above 70%. It would test everyone in class - those who are slow to learn and those who are fast to learn.

When the distribution of any measurement doesn't follow the Bell-curve, it may have many reasons. But the two most likely reasons are - either our class (or sample) was not balanced with a range of students, or our test was not balanced with a range of questions.

I bet that for most of the exams the Bell-curve is not balanced and centred at 50%. Most children get above 60%, many are close to 80% and a only a few get bellow 30%. The Bell-curve is considerably distorted and shifted to far right. The shifted and distorted curve is telling us that we are making it far easy for under-performers and we are dumbing down high-achievers. We are moving most of the class into average performance zone. This means that we are not differentiating under-performers and high-achievers well.

This is not surprising given that none of us, parents, teachers or students, want to take any risk. We want students to do well and move onto the next grade. Marks are usually like a barrier to cross. Once you are over it, you go to the next grade. Our exams reflect these desires. Exams act like a filter to promote students and not to evaluate competencies. We aren't treating marks as indicators of performance, but only as licence to get to the next grade.

However, this is perpetuating a larger tragedy. When the distribution is not Bell-shaped and centred at 50%, we failing to identify under-achievers and their deficiencies. We are also failing to recognize the true high potential of high-performers.

So next time you look at marks, as a teacher or a parent, ask for the distribution plot, Does it look like a balanced Bell-curve ? and ponder !

Compared to what ?

Can someone tell me how bad a hand writing should be before it can be called illegible ? Typically, when a teacher corrects a note book or an answer sheet, a badly written answer sheet can take twice as long to correct. As the hand writing degrades, teachers struggle to understand what is written. After all, the marks are to be given for the content alone – who cares if teacher takes twice as long in grading that paper. Most teachers evolve strategy to deal with badly written papers – they either correct them up-front or keep them pending till the end. 

Many urban schools have taken their eyes off the art of writing. We teach writing alphabets, then words and then cursive writing. Thereafter we do not enforce writing – it’s not in the syllabus. For many children down-hill journey starts from here. They adopt bad postures and use jell-pens. As the pressure to write lot and fast builds their hand writing degrades.

By the time children reach secondary school their hand-writing ranges from good (for a few) to ok, readable, bad and unreadable (for many). Badly written notes, illegible answer-sheets, poorly drawn diagrams now result in poor academic performance. But it’s too late.

It's hard to say when a teacher should give-up. However its easy to get consensus on a good hand writing. This is why we need to establish writing standards in schools. These standards help us, students and teachers, realize that one needs to be close to the standards. In absence of any such guidelines, we are on a slippery slope leading to illegibility.

Adopt fairly broad standards for good writing, push students to conform to them though not strictly. Instead of not having standards, not promoting it and then suffering from a range of illegible writings.