Learning & the Brain – Sam Goldstein (learning & schools)

Instinctual optimism and resilient mindset. Those are the two concepts that Sam Goldstein introduced in his Learning & the Brain keynote Hardwired to Learn: Creating Schools That Nurture and Grow Developing Brains. From his site: “Sam Goldstein, Ph.D. is a doctoral level psychologist with areas of study in school psychology, child development and neuropsychology.”

Instinctual optimism is Goldstein’s reply to the question, How do kids know they can? They are intrinsically driven to learn. Furthermore, as a result of this instinctual optimism, kids know that whatever it is, they can do it, hence the resilient mindset. Think of babies and toddlers you have known – they are instinctually optimistic and resilient about learning to walk, for instance. They don’t tend to ask, and aren’t told they can’t; they just go ahead and do it, taking in stride the bumps and falling down.

Both of these concepts remind me of Sir Ken Robinson’s TED Talk about creativity. Kids come to school eager, wide-eyed and filled with curiosity and creativity. (And Sir Ken says the schools proceed to educate the curiosity out of the kids.)

Goldstein went on to provide a little brain and gene background. He said that genes know in exactly which organisms they reside, and the “basic brain wiring plan is encoded in the genes.” That explains the nature part, but there is also a nurture portion, for although we may be genetically preprogrammed, brain development is also experience based.

At this point he posed three questions:

1. What is and is not intelligence?
2. How is intelligence different from knowledge?
3. How is intelligence different from achievement?

Given all of the above, Goldstein then talked about children and classrooms that nurture them. He felt strongly that it is “not our job to motivate kids, but to create an environment in which kids motivate themselves.” In creating such an environment, we need to consider (and all of the following are quotes)

• potential benefits and adversities of external rewards
• reinforcement of instinctual optimism
• providing opportunities for empathy and altruism (create community)
• providing competition in the absence of winning
• providing extrinsic reinforcers for effort and progress, and not for control [Behavior modification is for control, and Goldstein is not a big fan of this.]
• fostering opportunities for intrinsic control
• maximizing external consequences to control
• finding ways to enhance self-discipline
• setting limits in autonomous ways; helping kids learn to manage themselves instead of teachers managing them

Goldstein concluded by sharing two lists, of sorts: how to focus on student well being and describing the mindset of a resilient child. And he closed with a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson:

The secret of education lies in respecting the student.

The Pajama Game has been put to bed.

Alas, we have opened and closed, happily to thunderous applause and standing ovations. Well, what else would you expect from an audience of family, students and friends, and a musical that has some rousing songs, active staging and two great dances (Steam Heat and Hernando’s Hideaway), and of course some good acting to boot!

My regular posts will resume this week, but I wanted to mark the wonderful time I had in this production by sharing two more photos with you. The first is a backstage shot of three factory workers (I’m the one on the right). The second is the closing moments of Hernando’s Hideaway, and I’m the one in green.

Forecast this week includes two days in the 60s. While we may yet have some cold and damp weather, spring is on its way. Olé!

p.s. Those five satin dresses were made by a Math teacher in our upper school. One of the students took a picture of the five of us and I’ll be sure to share it in a future post. Satin dresses accompanied by heels sure did a lot to set the mood for our  tango dancing!

The Pajama Game

It may get a little quiet here for the next week or so. I’m having a blast being in the student~faculty musical at my school. This is a 30+ year tradition that brings together upper schoolers (grades 9–12) and faculty in the production of musical theatre. I’ve been in The Boys From Syracuse, Fiddler On the Roof, My Fair Lady, and now The Pajama Game.

We open on Friday, February 29th, and close the next evening on Saturday, March 1st. Definitely a limited engagement. Starting tomorrow night (Thursday the 21st) we have rehearsals every evening except for this Friday and Saturday.

That’s me and a student doing a “fin de leap frog” (not sure what that is, leave me a comment and I’ll get back to you) as part of the picnic scene for “Once A Year Day”. The musical is definitely a bit corny, absolutely dated, but nonetheless lots of fun.

Oh yes, and it’s also a wonderful test of visual memory, spatial memory, and kinesthetic memory as I learn lines (all two of them ), staging, and dances. Am actually rather pumped to be one of the dancers in “Hernando’s Hideaway”. By the way, the original musical was staged on Broadway the year I was born. Now go figure out how old I am!

Motivational Reflection

A search on this blog for “dopamine” will return a post about Feedback & Motivation along with most of my posts about neurotransmitters, of which dopamine is but one. In rereading my posts, I was reminded of the role of dopamine – one of the “feel good” neurotransmitters – in motivation.To quote myself:

If you’ve been following this blog then you know that the “feel good” neurotransmitters–serotonin, dopamine and endorphin–can be released by the brain in response to external stimuli such as exercise, laughter, singing, listening to music, and, perhaps the most powerful of all, positive feedback.

Positive feedback can make most of us feel good, and receiving that feedback can be motivational. In December, 2006, I applied to the Google Teacher Academy and part of the application process was to make a movie on one of two topics. I chose “Motivation and Learning” and made a Flash animation on the topic. Dopamine plays a starring role in the animation. (For the curious, I was accepted and attended the academy in February of this year. Quite stimulating!)This past Wednesday, August 29, was the opening day faculty meeting at my school, and the debut of the professional development activity that I created back in June. (The Prof Dev Series link at the top of the page will take you to a listing of the posts about that activity.)Being asked to create the activity was in and of itself a hugely motivating force. The actual time spent on creating the activity, and writing blog entries for each portion, proved to be an enormously satisfying and creative endeavor. Each day’s efforts and results motivated me to want to return the next day to continue the process. It was the very act of creating that provided my intrinsic motivation, and if there was any extrinsic motivation involved it was purely seeing the blog post and seeing the updated digital file for the activity.My next several posts will be about the activity and the following day’s speaker. For now, I am off to enjoy the glorious sunshine of this Saturday morning!

Rebuttal to Extrinsic Motivation

What now! A school that states its purpose and objectives with the inclusion of this philosophy:

to value learning more than propriety, to trust the unadorned pleasures of learning, unassisted by point scores, prizes, rankings, and punishments.

I started teaching in 1982 at St Ann’s School in Brooklyn, New York. Begun in 1965 by Headmaster Stanley Bosworth, St Ann’s was and is an upstart in the world of independent schools. One of St Ann’s hallmarks is that students do not receive grades, only anecdotal comments.

Alfie Kohn, well-known in certain circles as another educational upstart, believes that extrinsic rewards are useless in education, in raising children, or in creating a positive work environment. He expounds on this in his book Punished by Rewards: The trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and other Bribes.

The Study Guides and Strategies site, which I have referenced in previous posts, begins the Motivating yourself ~ extrinsic values page with the line: Print this and write three reasons someone else wants you to learn this. The text then goes on to suggest that learning to satisfy someone else’s criteria is not as effective as learning to satisfy your own, and to assist with the process they provide An exercise in Motivating Yourself.

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As to which type of motivation is best, I leave it to you to determine for yourself, but am willing to bet that both types have their place. The Cornell University College of Engineering provides some suggestions for Maintaining Morale & Motivation, and concludes:

In sum, both intrinsic and extrinsic methods of motivation are important and necessary.

And the University of Connecticut page, Tips for Rewarding Students for Good Performance (Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation), begins by stating:

Recent theories suggest that intrinsic and extrinsic motivation are not two opposing constructs, but rather two ends of a motivation continuum.

Extrinsic Motivation

We have two sons and in those early years of parenting, when we tried to get them to do what we thought was best, we used to define a difference between a bribe and an incentive. We’d tell them (and ourselves) that a bribe was something dangled to get a person to do something not necessarily good for them, and an incentive was something dangled to get a person to do something positively beneficial for them.

In either case, the “dangler” was usually a tangible reward used as a motivator. This is about as extrinsic as it gets – where somebody else both sets the goal and provides the reward for achieving that goal. Both the goal setter and rewarder, and the actual reward are all external to the person whose behavior is trying to be encouraged.

In the very long article, Trait intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, academic performance, and creativity in Hong Kong college students, published in the September/October 2002 issue of the Journal of College Student Development, the authors state that:

Factors that can turn off intrinsic motivation and promote extrinsic motivation include surveillance, competition, and rewards that do not provide performance feedback, such as paying a person for completing a task irrespectively of the quality of his or her work. [bold highlighting by me]

Is extrinsic motivation effective? We probably all know people, including ourselves, who at some point or other have used extrinsic motivation in order to get something accomplished. Stay tuned for the next post: Rebuttal to Extrinsic Motivation

Rebuttal to Intrinsic Motivation

On the other end of the spectrum is Steven Reiss, an Ohio State University professor of psychology. Reiss posits that perhaps intrinsic motivation does not exist. He goes on to state there are so many reasons people tend to do one thing or another that we cannot buttonhole their rationales into intrinsic or extrinsic motivators, but if we persist in doing so it involves making value judgments.

“There is no reason that money can’t be an effective motivator, or that grades can’t motivate students in school,” he said. “It’s all a matter of individual differences. Different people are motivated in different ways.”

You can read more about his theory on this Ohio State Research page. Stay tuned for the next post: Extrinsic Motivation.

Intrinsic Motivation

The University of Purdue at Calumet, Indiana, hosts the book Educational Psychology: A Practical Approach by Edward Vockell, Ph.D. The book consists of 18 chapters though unfortunately the last 13 have not been placed online. However, Vockell has posted a workbook to accompany his text, and the workbook goes through the first 14 chapters, so perhaps this project is a work in progress.

What piques my interest is Chapter 5: Motivating Students to Learn and particularly the section on Intrinsic Motivation, which contains an excellent chart summarizing the factors that promote intrinsic motivation. According to Vockell, these are:

• challenge
• curiosity
• control
• fantasy
• competition
• cooperation
• recognition

I can so easily apply these factors to what motivates me to swim.
~ The challenge consists of goals that are set by me and can be attained with “activity at a continuously optimal (intermediate) level of difficulty.” My challenge is always to swim further and faster.

– My curiosity focuses on how I can improve my freestyle, where “there is an optimal level of discrepancy between present knowledge or skills and what these could be” if I did something to improve my knowledge or skills. I tackled that initially by attending a swim clinic, watching swim videos, and reading articles, and each season include a variety of swim drills designed to improve both my strength and strokes.

– Most “people have a basic tendency to want to control what happens to them” and that applies to both professional and personal endeavors. There is no doubt that I control when, where and how long I swim (barring the interference of weather), sometimes swimming twice a day.

– If you believe you can do something, and form a mental (fantasy) image of doing that thing, you help propel yourself to be able to actually do it. Runners who race often maintain a mental image of crossing the finish line. I maintain an image of finishing the half-mile swim at the four Danskin Triathlons in which I participated.

– In the Danskin and in my daily swims, it’s all about finishing what you started out to do; it’s not about competing with someone else. However, there was definitely satisfaction in comparing each of my Danskin times, and I compare my daily swim with the previous day’s swim. Also in the Danskin I liked to compare my performance with my peer age group.

– I often swim with my husband, and we cooperate to swim synchronized freestyle laps. We aren’t fancy, but our arms are in synch. Swimming with him helps me to get faster and to use fewer strokes in the process. I think he benefits by being in the pool in the first place.

– And the recognition comes from neighbors at the pool who marvel at our distance and synchronized swims.

Next post: Rebuttal to Intrinsic Motivation

Musings on Motivation

Throughout the summer I am motivated to swim. What motivates me? Being outdoors, the sensation of gliding through the usually clear pool water, the exercise benefits, the way the muscles in my arms and calves get defined, the calming and energizing impact of swimming, the satisfaction of accomplishment, the nod to feeling strong and healthy.

What, exactly, is motivation? I think of it as the mental drive and desire to accomplish something in particular. Of course, if that’s the case, motivation alone will not cause the something in particular to be accomplished. Motivation has to be accompanied by action.

Where does the motivation come from? Extrinsic motivation comes from external factors, such as a reward for doing something. This type of motivation does not interest me because it does not originate with the person who will take the action. I am interested in intrinsic motivation, which comes from within and is defined by the person for themselves.

I was hugely motivated to write blog posts about the brain and how its various parts function. Why? I wanted to better understand the brain and I wanted to compile that information in one place that was easily accessible.

I have been marginally motivated to continue my blog posts since returning from vacation. To be sure, I wanted to continue writing, but missing from the equation was the determination to restart and the inspiration for how to broach the topics of interest.

Then it came to me while swimming a mile this afternoon. I have no difficulty motivating myself when I set my mind to it, when I make the goal my own, when the effort expended is satisfying and enjoyable even while it may be challenging or difficult. And it is all the more satisfying when there is some challenge, because then I have to apply effort and get my brain and body in gear.

So what was keeping me from writing? I couldn’t figure out how to begin. That is usually the culprit – the initial step(s) in getting started. Kind of like a day of mediocre weather where I could just as easily not swim, but then I acclimate to the water temp one step at a time, and before long I’m waist high and ready to push off and be immersed in the wet.

Feedback & Motivation

Marilee Sprenger notes in her book Learning & Memory – The Brain in Action that “the single most dynamic influence on the brain’s chemistry may be positive feedback.” If you’ve been following this blog then you know that the “feel good” neurotransmitters–serotonin, dopamine and endorphin–can be released by the brain in response to external stimuli such as exercise, laughter, singing, listening to music, and, perhaps the most powerful of all, positive feedback.

This brings me to my previous post, Intentional Wording, where I suggest that the words we use in providing feedback make a difference in how that feedback is perceived and valued. Generic statements usually are devalued because they are said too often to too many people, do not contain any specific comments that cause the listener to feel they are known by the speaker, and do not provide sufficient useful information.

In Teaching with the brain in mind, Eric Jensen states that feedback must be of good quality, accurate, timely, corrective and positive. Since more mistakes in learning tend to happen when something is first being learned, there are a number of ways to provide regular feedback that will assist the learner in making changes to their learning. Some of Jensen’s suggestions (page 55) for providing feedback include:

• model building
• peer editing
• pair-sharing
• using spell-check
• student presentations with audience feedback
• using a video, audio tape or mirror
• using a checklist or rubric

Besides using words as feedback, it is not uncommon to use a reward system as a motivator or as feedback. You’ve probably heard the spiel: if you perform such and such, then we will do thus and thus, or you will receive this and that. The implication of these words is that the activity should be done in order to receive the reward. Unfortunately, such a system impedes the goal of learning, which is learning for learning’s sake. Ideally, we want to foster intrinsic motivation and not extrinsic motivation. Purdue University Calumet’s School of Education has an online textbook by Edward Vockell, Educational Psychology: A Practical Approach, that contains much useful information. In particular, I refer you to Chapter 5, which is all about motivation, or skip directly to the chapter on Intrinsic Motivation.

Returning to Sprenger’s book, she sums this up in a paragraph that says it all:

Positive feedback raises serotonin levels and is itself a reward. We need to talk more with our students and give them the feedback they need. Recognition is more powerful than rewards. Celebrating at the end of a unit gives students an emotional memory that may help motivate them for the next unit. This celebration cannot be based on test results or behavior, however–or it becomes a reward.

And I love Sprenger’s solution for dealing with students who ask her what they will “get” if they score well on something.

I simply walk up to the student, take his hand, and shake it. The issue is usually dropped.