Making school worse, faster

This post appeared in a series titled: The Global Search for Education: Our Top 12 Global Teacher Blogs that answered the question: What are the biggest mistakes teachers make when integrating technology into the classroom.

“Before the computer could change school, school changed the computer.”

-Seymour Papert

I love technology, and I use it every single day. I teach with it, and I learn with it. Without technology, my teaching and learning would suffer.

However, too much of what is being sold as “Education Technology” merely shoehorns technology in a way that supplements traditional, less-than-optimal teaching and learning practices which ultimately leads the classroom to revert to the way it was before.

Here are three mistakes schools and teachers make when integrating technology:

1. Technology is used to prove, instead of improve: Test and punish accountability regimes have convinced (and often mandated) that technology be used to mine students for spreadsheet friendly data. For too long, teachers have been lured by the efficiency of multiple-choice tests, and with the use of technology, it is easier than ever to reduce learning to tests and grades.

Psychologist Carol Dweck reminds us to ask, “Why waste time proving over and over how great you are, when you could be getting better?” Proving and improving are not the same thing and if we aren’t careful, technology can be used in wonderful ways to prove the quality of our schools and teachers without improving learning.

2. Technology is used by the teacher, not the students: Interactive White Boards (Smartboards) are the definitive example of how schools can spend a lot of time, effort and money on technology that is almost exclusively used by the teacher while students sit passively, waiting to be filled with knowledge.

In his book The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire called this the banking concept of education where, “Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor”. Too much of our school’s technology demands that students simply sit and do nothing.

3. Poor Pedagogy + Technology = Accelerated Malpractice: Classroom management and tracking programs like ClassDojo are used to elicit compliant behaviour and are sold as a daring departure from the status quo when really they are a tactic taken from the same behaviourist strategies that have been strangling the life out of classrooms for decades.

Schools and teachers who ignore technology risk becoming irrelevant to their students, and this is unacceptable. However, it is equally wrong to use technology as a 21st century veneer on the “sit-and-get, spew-and-forget” model of learning that has dominated our schools for too long.

Teachers and schools must be mindful of their pedagogical practices, because if they are not, technology will only make things worse, faster.

Here's how I use Stickman Art to assess

Years ago I dedicated myself to drawing more with my students, so I searched the Internet for how to draw Stickmen. That's when I came across a college student's web site where they shared their stickman doodles. Here is a booklet that shares examples of how to draw stickmen doing all sorts of stuff.

Here is a booklet of stickmen pictures
that my students sometimes use to inspire
their projects.

Drawing is something I've never done very much of, and so it shouldn't be any surprise that I'm not very good. Because I am not very skilled at drawing, I make sure to draw in front of my students so that they see how I cope with doing something that I am not very skilled at.

I make a point of modelling patience and perseverance while drawing. I also make a point of never being ashamed or insecure about drawing. I want my students to see that I am pleasantly frustrated about learning to draw. Despite my modelling, many children are incredibly anxious about drawing in front of others. When it comes to their drawing skills, too many of them have what Carol Dweck would describe as a fixed mindset.

I provide my students with copies of the above booklet to help nudge and inspire them towards drawing something. Some kids don't need it while others are desperate for somewhere to start. For them, this little booklet of stickmen is a lifeline to doing something creative and original.

To integrate drawing into language arts, I often have my students try and draw new and challenging vocabulary that we encounter in our reading, viewing and writing.

In science, I've had students create comic strips that illustrate their understanding for concepts and vocabulary like buoyancy and density. I've often used these drawing projects as a substitute for the multiple choice tests that I used to think were necessary to assess student learning.

Here's an example of a project that two students collaborated on as a way to exhibit their understanding in science class. It was displayed on the wall as a mural in the hallway near my classroom door.

After missing a payment, the fish mafia
sent Mikey to "swim with the humans."

(Styrofoam, which is less dense than water, will float
because the particles are less dense, or crowded. It
has a low mass with high a high volume
making it buoyant)

Having children draw their understanding for what they are learning in school can provide them with the opportunity to create something from scratch that is their very own... or we can have them fill in 1 of 4 bubbles...

Unfortunately, I have to admit that some children would rather opt out of having to engage in doing something creative in favor of filling in a bubble sheet -- instead of seeing this as a learning style to be accommodated, I see this as a problem to be solved.

And stickmen are a great place to start.

Grading: Where do I stand?

Don't ever let anyone tell you grading does not provide kids with feedback on where they stand. Grading is the definitive way of providing students with the information needed for them to know where they stand... in relation to their peers.

If we wanted to create a form of feedback that encouraged students to focus less about making sense of what they're doing and more on how successful they've been while comparing themselves to others, I could not think of a better system than grading.

Want proof?

Next time you hand back that assignment with a grade and comments, sit back and watch the kids. I will almost guarantee they will look at two things - the first will be their own mark and the second will be their neighbour's mark. Ruth Butler's research confirms this.

While it is true that focusing on what you're learning and how well you are learning are not mutually exclusive, these two focuses lead to very different behaviours. Marilyn French puts it this way:

Only extraordinary education is concerned with learning; most is concerned with achieving: and for young minds, these two are very nearly opposite.

In his book The Schools Our Children Deserve, Alfie Kohn adds:

What could possibly be wrong with results? To answer this question, we first have to recognize that for people to think about how well they're doing is not at all the same as thinking about what they're doing. These represent two very different mind-sets for parents, students, and educators. 

Imagine two parents, for example, both of whose children mention that they wrote an essay in school that day. One parent wants to know how good the essay was and asks what the teacher said about it. The other parent asks about the essay itself and the process of writing it: Why did you choose that topic? Did your opinion about the subject change while you were writing? How did you decide what to include in the opening paragraph? 

Or imagine a student who comes home from school announcing that "she had a great day because she got an A, did better than her best friend, or ... won the spelling bee." These accomplishments reflect a very different set of goals than those held by a student who says "she had a great day because she finally mastered long division, read a wonderful story about India, or tried to solve a really difficult problem." One of these children regards learning as a means (to a grade or victory or just to being able to say she was successful). The other regards learning as an end.

When young minds see learning and achievement as opposites while so many adults see them as synonymous, things go badly. While it makes sense to occasionally stop and reflect upon how well we've been learning, most of our time should be spent focusing on what we are learning; and yet, I think it's pretty safe to say that most classrooms are carried away with grading, and so paradoxically and yet quite predictably, we wind up with learners that are more concerned with "levels of achievement than layers of learning." 

Because Learning oriented learners outperform results oriented learners, there's good reason why researchers like Carol Dweck say "Performance goals may well create the very conditions that have been found to undermine intrinsic interest." A wealth of research on this topic has led many to understand that "students who have been led to focus on how well they're doing tend not to do very well" and that "learning goals will lead to better task outcomes than will performance goals."

Kohn adds:

The process of assigning children percentiles helps to ensure that schooling is more about triumphing over everyone else than about learning.

By definition, grading can only ever be experienced as a reward and punishment, which is reason enough to be concerned, but as Kohn points out, grading inherently turns learning into a competition:

The second way of increasing the destructive potential of a performance orientation is to get students thinking not just about how well they're doing, but how well they're doing compared to everyone else. Learning doesn't stand a chance when the point is to keep up with, or triumph over, other students... The idea isn't for students to understand or even for them to perform well. The idea is for them to win.

Do grades tell kids where they stand?

Yes, they do.

In fact, they do a remarkable job of it; however, it would appear that this strength of grading turns out to be one of the very reasons the research suggests we shouldn't be using grading in the first place.

Educators have fiddled and fussed over getting grading right for a long time - during that time we've been enamoured with answering the question how do we grade better despite all the pitfalls and problems, when we should be asking why do we continue to grade at all in spite of the pressures to do so.

Carol Dweck's Mindsets

Carol Dweck's book Mindset is a must read for those who wish to see how the view you adopt for your characteristics such as personality and intelligence, can have profound effects on your success.

Essentially, the premise behind Dweck's book is that people with a growth mindset see their intelligence, personality and other traits as pliable and flexible - they can grow and develop through effort. Those who suffer from a fixed mindset, see their characteristics as set in stone - you are born with only so much, so you have to spend most of your life touting or hiding your abilities (or lack of). While the fixed mindset is busy proving how good they are the growth mindset is learning to improve.

Click on the picture below to view a visual of the two mindsets. Which are you?

Is success about learning or proving you are smart?

Carol Dweck offers some insight in her book Mindset:

Benjamin Barber, an eminent sociologist once said, I don't divide the world into the weak and the strong, or the successes and the failures... I divide the world in to the learners and nonlearners."

What on earth would make someone a nonlearner? Everyone is born with an intense drive to learn. Infants stretch their skills daily. Not just ordinary skills, but the most difficult tasks of a lifetime, like learning to walk and talk. They never decide its to hard or not worth the effort. Babies don't worry about making mistakes or humiliating themselves. They walk, they fall, they get up. They just barge forward.

What could put an end to this exuberant learning? The fixed mindset. As soon as children become able to evaluate themselves, some of them become afraid of challenges. They become afraid of not being smart. I have studied thousands of people from preschoolers on, and it's breathtaking how many reject an opportunity to learn.

We offered four-year-olds a choice: They could redo an easy jigsaw puzzle or they could try a harder one. Even at this tender age, children with the fixed mindset - the ones who believed in fixed traits - stuck with the safe one. Kids who are born smart "don't do mistakes," they told us. 

Children with the growth mindset - the ones who believed you could get smarter - thought it was a strange choice Why are you asking me this, lady? Why would anyone want to keep doing the same puzzle over and over? They chose one hard one after another. "I'm dying to figure them out!" exclaimed one little girl.

So children with the fixed mindset want to make sure they succeed. Smart people should always succeed. But for children with the growth mindset, success is about stretching themselves. It's about becoming smarter.

One seventh-grade girl summed it up. "I think intelligence is something you have to work for... it isn't just given to you... Most kids, if they're not sure of an answer, will not raise their hands to answer the question. But what I usually do is raise my hand, because if I'm wrong, then my mistake will be corrected. Or I will raise my hand and say, "How would this be solved?" or "I don't get this. Can you help me?" Just by doing that I'm increasing my intelligence."

When assessment becomes an exercise in encouraging kids to show off how good or smart they are, kids come to see mistakes and failures as things that should never happen.

This is at odds with what we know about truly successful people.

We know that a healthy and resilient attitude towards mistakes and failures is a mandatory characteristic for anyone who wishes to get really good at anything. But when teachers become more of a judge-in-waiting than a safe and caring ally, then kids can't help but confuse being right with learning.

I won't claim to prescribe the recipe for nurturing a growth mindset in children, but I have a feeling teachers who understand that assessment and measurement are not the same thing have considerable more success than those who confuse the two.

What we have here is a failure to communicate

Teaching children how to communicate is not an easy task. The proof might lay in how utterly ineffective many adults are at communicating with their peers, colleagues or even spouses - the truth is, many adults haven't developed the kinds of communication skills necessary to hold a job, advocate for their children or self, or to avoid unnecessary conflicts and confusion.

Let me be clear, I'm not just pointing the finger here - I'm very much a part of this indictment. Here's what I mean.

For some time now,  my 3 year old daughter Kayley has taken to being awfully grumpy when we leave her grandparents house, a play date, or any other fun event. She just doesn't want to leave. After tons of running and laughing, there does come a time when we have to go home, and so while I strap Kayley into her car seat for the trip home, I like to ask her if she had fun. Kayley's response lately has been a rather stern "NO!".

Now I know this isn't really true. After all, my wife and I have seen her run and play and laugh and jump and talk and yell... we know she's had a good time, but we just couldn't figure out why she was saying no and being so grumpy about it.

That's when I thought of an excerpt from Carol Dweck's book Mindset:

No parent thinks, "I wonder what I can do today to undermine my children, subvert their effort, turn them off learning, and limit their achievement." Of course not. They think, "I would do anything, give anything, to makem y children successful."Yet many of the things they do boomerang. Their helpful judgments, their lessons, their motivating techniques often send the wrong message.

In fact, every word and action sends a message. It tells children - or students, or athletes - how to think about themselves. It can be a fixed-mindset message that says: You have permanent traits and I'm judging them. Or it can be a growth-mindset message that says: You are a developing person and I am interested in your development. 

It's remarkable how sensitve children are to these messages, and how concerned they are about them. Haim Ginott, the childrearing sage of the 1950s through '70s, tells this story. Bruce, age five, went with his mother to his kindergarten. When they arrived, Bruce looked up at the paintings on the wall and said, "Who made those ugly pictures?" His mother rushed to correct him: "It's not nice to call pictures ugly when they are so pretty." But his teacher knew exactly what he meant. "In here," she said, "you don't have to paint pretty pictures. You can paint mean pictures if you feel like it." Bruce gave her a big smile. She had answered his real question: What happens to a boy who doesn't paint well? 

Next, Bruce spotted a broken fire engine. He picked it up and asked in a self-righteous tone, "Who broke this fire engine?" Again his mother rushed in: "What difference does it make to you who broke it? You don't know anyone here." But the teacher understood. "Toys are for playing, she told him. "Sometimes they get broken. It happens." Again, his question was answered: What happens to boys who break toys?

Bruce waved to his mother and went off to start his first day of kindergarten. This was not a place where he would be judged and labeled.

You know, we never outgrow our sensitivity to these messages. Several years ago, my husband and I spent two weeks in Provence, in the south of France. Everyone was wonderful to us - very kind and very generous. But on the last day, we drove to Italy for lunch. When we got there and found a little family restaurant, tears started streaming down my face. I felt so nurtured. I said to David, "You know, in France when they're nice to you, you feel like you've passed a test. But in Italy, there is no test."

Parents and teachers who send fixed-mindset messages are like France, and parents and teachers who send growth-mindset messages are like Italy.

At first, my wife and I asked each other why our daughter would lie about not having fun at Grandma-Grandpa's. You'll notice that our frustration was born out of a rather gross assumption - we were assuming that Kayley was in fact lying.

That's when my wife asked Kayley for some clarification. She asked her "Kayley, do want to leave?" Kayley lowered her head, started to cry and said, "No". Then I asked, "but did you have fun?" She reluctantly nodded yes.

The problem wasn't that she was lying. The problem was that her answer (No) was not for my question (did you have fun?). Her answer was for a question I never asked but one she was thinking of (do you want to leave?).

I'm sure we can all think of adults who don't say what they mean or hear what we say. Miscommunication is rampant among adults so we can only imagine how often it happens with children. Teachers and parents need to remember that they are the adult, and it is often their responsibility to diagnose items of miscommunication.

Conventional discipline programs tend to encourage adults to conduct triage on behaviours. The problem with this approach is that people are more than their actions. Kayley wasn't lying any more than Bruce was being impolite. Treat the (mis)behaviors and we risk merely treating the symptoms while ignoring the real problems to be solved.

Choosing to discipline Kayley, or enact some kind of consequence or punishment on her for lying would have been a massive exercise in missing the point. In addition, could you imagine how our relationship might suffer under such ignorant tactics?

If we truly care about being an authentic part of our children's development, we must take great care in understanding how and why working with kids will always trump doing things to them.

Kids need our presence not our praise

My daughter Kayley just turned three, and she has recently discovered that she can say "Look at me, dad!" and I will always look.

This got me thinking about what she's not asking me. You know she's never said, "Praise me, dad!"

I talk about abolishing rewards and punishments all the time with parents, teachers and friends, and it is amazing how we can come to some agreement over abandoning tangible rewards like medals, bribes like cash, verbal threats and punishments like spanking or even grounding, but if there is a topic we can't agree on it's the use of praise.

There are some great people like Alfie Kohn and Carol Dweck who write about this stuff all the time. I wrote a bit of a summary on the topic called Pondering Praise.

In my experience, praise is less for the kids and more for the adults.

Praise is cheap; hence why it doesn't buy us very much.

But the less time a parent spends with their child the more likely they might try and buy back that lost presence with something like praise.

Our children need us to work with them. Play with them. Notice them. Be with them.

What the kids need is our presence not our praise.

We inherit - and we also become

The nurture vs nature debate is a timeless one. Many people tend to polarize to one or the other and then dig their heals in and debate.

I was reading David Shenk's The Genius in All of Us and was blown away by this photo:

Otto and Ewald are identical (monozygotic) twins. That means they were born from twin embyos derived from  the same fertilized egg. They share the same DNA.

If you look closely you can see some very subtle differences.

Otto trained as a long distance-runner, and Ewald for strength events. Together, they trained for two very different athletic advantages.

Some would have us believe that we don't become. We are.

And while it would be ridiculous to suggest that anyone can literally do or be anything they want to, it is equally as foolish to see our abilities as set in genetic stone. David Shenk explains:

But the whole concept of genetic giftedness turns out to be wildly off the mark - tragically kept afloat for decades by a cascade of misunderstandings and misleading metaphors. In recent years, a mountain of scientific evidence has emerged that overwhelmingly suggests a completely different paradigm: not talent scarcity, but latent talent abundance. In this conception, human talent and intelligence are not permanently in short supply like fossil fuel, but potentially plentiful like wind power. The problem isn't our inadequate genetic assets, but our inability, so far, to tap into what we already have...

So where is this hidden talent?

How do we unlock this long lost source of success?

In her book Mindset, Carol Dweck points towards our minds:

Physical endowment is not like intellectual endowment. It's visible. Size, build, agility are all visible. Practice and training are also visible, and they produce visible results. You would think that this would dispel the myth of the natural. You could see Mugsy Bogues at five foot three playing NBA basketball, and Doug Flutie, the small quarterback who has played for the New England Patriots and the San Diego Chargers. You could see Pete Gray, the one-armed baseball player who made it to the major leagues. Ben Hogan, one of the greatest golfers of all time, who was completely lacking in grace. Glenn Cunningham, the great runner, who had badly burned and damaged legs. Larry Bird and his lack of swiftness. You can see the small or graceless or even "disabled" ones who make it, and the god-like specimens who don't. Shouldn't this tell people something?

Rather than seeing ourselves as prisoners of our genetics, it would be far more wise for us to realize that we can't even begin to quantify our unactualized genetic potential.

David Shenk summarizes this all nicely:

Our abilities are not set in genetic stone. They are soft and sculptable, far into adulthood. With humility, with hope, and with extraordinary determination, greatness is something to which any kid - of any age - can inspire.

Praising Effort vs Ability

Carol Dweck is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading researchers in the fields of personality, social psychology and developmental psychology. Her research has differentiated between two kinds of praise. Praising the child for their intelligence – “You must be smart at this” and praising the child for their effort – “You must have worked really hard”. In a study that Dweck conducted multiple times (because the results were almost unbelievable) two groups of students were given a task. One group was praised for their ability while the other was praised for their effort. Before being given any praise, the two groups were indistinguishable; however, after the praise was applied the two groups began to differ. When given another opportunity, the students who were praised for their ability seemed intimidated by a challenging task and overwhelmingly preferred an easier second task; whereas ninety percent of the students who were praised for their effort wanted the challenging, more difficult second task so they could advance their learning. “When we praise children for their intelligence,” Dweck explained, “we tell them that’s the name of the game: look smart, don’t risk making mistakes.”
When given a third opportunity to perform a challenging task, the two groups showed some similarities and some differences. Both groups performed poorly at the challenging task, but their response to this setback differed greatly. The praised-for-effort group proved to be far more resilient in their attitude towards the challenge. Despite their lack of success and frustration with the task, they proved to be far more willing to try different solutions and give it a go. However, Dweck explained “But the group praised for its intelligence hated the harder test. They took it as proof they weren’t smart.”

As if the results from this experiment weren’t enough to make us question our use of praise, Dweck had both groups do a task similar to the difficulty level of the initial test. The praised-for-effort group showed a 30 percent improvement, while the praised-for-ability group’s score actually plunged 20 percent. When both groups were asked to share their scores with others, “almost 40 percent of the ability-praised students lied about their scores. And always in one direction.” Dweck concluded, “What’s so alarming is that we took ordinary children and made them into liars, simply by telling them they were smart.”

Dweck’s book Mindset goes on to show the difference between students who have a growth mindset versus those who are stuck in a fixed mindset. People who have a growth mindset see their intelligence as something that is always growing slowly over time, and mistakes are opportunities to grow one’s intelligence. However, people who have a fixed mindset see their intelligence as a prefixed quantity and if you are smart enough, mistakes and failures just shouldn’t happen.

For an extensive look at this research read Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck

This is an excerpt from a larger article I wrote:

Why am I smart

There is a strong line of research that shows us that how people perceive their intelligence or success may be more important than whether they are intelligent or successful.
Let’s pretend little Sally did a ‘good job’. How might Sally explain her success? Here are a number of reasonable responses Little Sally might give:

•‘I worked my tail off for that project.’
•‘I’m just a natural at this stuff.’
•‘I guessed on like half the questions.’
•‘It was really easy.’

Let’s categorize these responses:

•Which are internal factors and which are external?
•Which are stable and which change over time?
•Which are in Sally’s control?


Attempting to identify how little Sally attributes her success or failure in this manner was developed by Bernard Weiner and it has proven to have some striking implications. Take a look at Sally’s responses again. Which response would you rather her attribute her success to? Sally might attribute her success to factors that are external (luck and difficulty), factors that are stable (ability and difficulty) or factors that are out of her control (luck, difficulty and ability). Most parents and teachers that I know would want Sally to attribute her success to effort because it provides a lot of optimism for future growth. The problem arises when we praise kids in a way that encourages them to focus on how well they are doing.

Alfie Kohn points out “When kids are led to focus on how well they are performing in school, they tend to explain their performance not by how hard they tried but by how smart they are.” This means kids are very likely to attribute their successes and failures to factors such as luck, difficulty and ability before effort. That is to say, they are likely to attribute their successes and failures to factors that are external, strictly stable and out of their control. Carol Dweck would describe anyone who attributes their successes and failures in this way as suffering from a fixed mindset.

There is a big difference between focusing on showing how good you are and focusing on showing how bad you’re not. And it might be worth reflecting on how much time we should even spend focusing on showing how good we are, when we could be spending our time learning and improving.

IQ: Misunderstood and Misused

Reflecting upon one's beliefs can be a very productive use of time, and I can think of no better time to do so than when we have come to mindlessly accept something as a given truth. When questions are no longer answered because questions are no longer being asked.

Intelligence-quotient (IQ) tests are a great place to start.

There are a lot of misconceptions surrounding IQ tests, mostly because of flat out ignorance. Most people don't understand their purpose nor do they understand how to properly use the results.

Here's some history.

Carol Dweck provides us with some insight from her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success:

Wasn't the IQ test meant to summarize children's unchangeable intelligence? In fact, no. [Alfred] Binet, a Frenchman working in Paris in the early twentieth century, designed this test to identify children who were not profiting from the Paris public schools, so that new educational programs could be designed to get them back on track. Without denying individual differences in children's intellects, he believed that education and practice could bring about fundamental changes in intelligence.

Sir Ken Robinson expresses concern for the current day misuse of IQ tests in his book The Element:

Ironically, Alfred Binet, one of the creators of the IQ test, intended the test to serve precisely the opposite function. In fact, he originally designed it exclusively to identify children with special needs so they could get appropriate forms of schooling. He never intended it to identify degrees of intelligence or mental 'worth'. In fact, Binet noted that the scale he created 'does not permit the measure of intelligence, because intellectual qualities are not superposable, and therefore cannot be measured as linear surfaces are measured.

It is sadly ironic that Binet intended on his IQ test to be a tool used to find ways to properly include children with the opportunity to gain a better education; however, the IQ test, for the most part, has been used as a gatekeeper to exclude children from further education.

I not only find it objectionable to bastardize the purpose of IQ tests, but I also find it objectionable to assume IQ tests are a valid and reliable indicator of a person's potential. In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell writes about Lewis Terman who made the study of the gifted his life's work. Terman took 1,470 children whose IQ's averaged between 140 and 200. Gladwell writes:

For the rest of his life, Terman watched over his charges like a mother hen. They were tracked and tested, measured and analyzed. Their educational attainments were noted, marriages followed, illnesses tabulated, psychological health charted, and every promotion and job change dutifully recorded...


"There is nothing about an individual as important as his IQ, except possibly his morals," Terman once said. And it was to those with a very high IQ, he believed, that "we must look for production of leaders who advance science, art government, education and social welfare generally."


... Terman believed that his Termites were destined to be the future elite of the United States.

Terman is not alone when it comes to placing so much faith in IQ. Gladwell points out that elite universities and high-tech companies place a great deal of importance in measuring the IQ, and that those students with the highest IQ have the greatest potential to be the best employees.

But there was a problem.

Terman's geniuses didn't prove to be all that successful in life. Gladwell explains:

By the time the Termites reached adulthood, Terman's error was plain to see. Some of his child geniuses had grown up to publish books and scholarly articles and thrive in business. Several ran for public office, and there were two superior court justices, one municipal court judge, two members of California state legislature, and one prominant state official. They tended to earn good incomes - but not that good. The majority had careers that could only be considered ordinary, and a surprising number ended up with careers that even Terman considered failures. Nor were any Nobel Prize winners in his exhaustively selected group of geniuses. His field workers actually tested two elementary students who went on to be Nobel laureates - William Shockley and Luis Alvarez - and rejected them both. Their IQ's weren't high enough.

In the end, critics of Terman's project said that had Terman simply chosen random children from the same kinds of backgrounds as Terman's Termites, and ignored IQ, he would have seen similar results.

Terman ended up reluctantly concluding:

We have seen that intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated.

This lack of correlation has been confirmed by others. Dan Pink's book A Whole New Mind explains:

Daniel Goleman, author of the groundbreaking book Emotional Intelligence, has examined an array of academic studies that have attempted to measure how much IQ (which, like the SAT, measure pure left-brain directed thinking prowess) accounts for career success... The answer: between 4-10 percent.

Sir Ken Robinson tends to agree with this evidence. In his book The Element, he writes about how we focus on asking 'how intelligent are you?' when we should be asking 'how are you intelligent'. Like Dweck, Goleman and Gladwell, Robinson explains that the IQ test was never to be used to determine someone's intellectual prowess - and standardized tests like the SAT measure a far too narrow defintion of intelligence. Robinson explains:

The SAT is in many ways the indicator for what is wrong with standardized tests: it only measures a certain kind of intelligence; it does it in an entirely impersonal way; it attempts to make common assumptions about the college potential of a hugely varied group of teenagers in one-size-fits-all fashion; and it drives high school juniors and seniors to spend hundreds of hours preparing for it at the expense of school study or the pursuit of other passions. John Katzman, founder of the Princeton Review, offers this stinging criticism: "What makes the SAT bad is that it has nothing to do with what kids learn in high school. As a result, it creates a sort of shadow curriculum that furthers the goals of neither educators nor students... The SAT has been sold as a snake oil it measured intelligence, verified high school GPA, and predicted college grades. In fact, it's never done the first two at all, nor a particularly good job at the third.

Robinson is not alone in his critcisms of the SAT. Alfie Kohn has written extensively on how standardized tests are at best unhelpful and at worst down right harmful. In his article Two Cheers for an End to the SAT, Kohn writes about what SAT actually does not stand for:

One imagines the folks at the College Board blushing deeply when, a few years back, they announced that the "A" in SAT no longer stood for "Aptitude." Scarlet, after all, would be an appropriate color to turn while, in effect, conceding that the test wasn't -- and, let's face it, never had been -- a measure of intellectual aptitude. For a brief period, the examination was rechristened the Scholastic Assessment Test, a name presumably generated by the Department of Redundancy Department. Today, literally -- and perhaps figuratively -- SAT doesn't stand for anything at all.

In The New York Times article Junior Meritocracy, Jennifer Senior writes that IQ tests may be more about measuring socio-economics and opportunity than intellect:

“An analogy people use a lot for this is planting corn,” says Barnett, from Rutgers. “If you want to know about the properties of different kinds of corn, you have to plant it in land that’s well fertilized and well irrigated. If you plant it in soil that’s dried up and rocky, you won’t know, because nothing will grow.” The same, he explains, goes for children. How can one possibly know anything about their minds if they’ve spent their first four years in unstimulating environments?




“People have the idea that with these tests you can cancel out socioeconomic background and get to some real thing in the kid,” agrees Nicholas Lemann, dean of the journalism school at Columbia and author of The Big Test, a history of the SAT. “That’s a chimera. If you’re a 4-year-old performing well on these tests, it’s either because you have fabulous genetic material or because you have cultural advantages. But either way, the point is: You’re doing better because of your parents.


Rather than promoting a meritocracy, in other words, these tests instead retard one. They reflect the world as it’s already stratified—and then perpetuate that same stratification.


“Instead of giving IQ tests, you could just as easily look at Zip Codes and the education levels of the parents to determine who gets the better schooling—you get a very high correlation between IQ and socioeconomic status in the first seven or eight years of life,” says Samuel J. Meisels, assessment expert and president of Chicago’s Erikson Institute, the renowned graduate school in childhood development. “Giftedness is a real thing, no question. But giftedness can be extinguished, and it can be nurtured.”

Kohn confirms what the SAT truly measures:

The SAT is a measure of resources more than of reasoning. Year after year, the College Board's own statistics depict a virtually linear correlation between SAT scores and family income. Each rise in earnings (measured in $10,000 increments) brings a commensurate rise in scores. Other research, meanwhile, has found that more than half the difference among students' scores can be explained purely on the basis of parents' level of education.

While there is plenty of evidence to question both the validity and reliability of IQ tests, there is an equal amount of reason to question IQ as a fixed quantity. Carol Dweck's entire premise behind her book Mindset is based on the idea that the view you adopt of yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life. She makes a clear distinction between a fixed and growth mindset:

If you have only a certain amount of intelligence, a certain personality, and a certain moral character -well, then you'd better prove that you have a healthy dose of them. It simply wouldn't do do to look or feel deficient in these most basic characteristics.


If we come to believe IQ is a fixed measurement of our intelligence, then we develop a mindset that encourages us to prove how smart we are. Rather than spending our time getting better at something, we feel the need to use our time showing everyone how good we are. Even worse are the people who spend all their time focusing on ensuring they don't look dumb - rather than continuing to improve and getting smarter.

I think we can all agree that there is a huge difference between trying not to look dumb and trying to get smarter. Dweck's point here is that we shouldn't ever see our IQ as a fixed quantity - we should see our IQ as something that can shrink and grow. So is there any evidence to support the idea that IQ can shrink and grow? Sir Ken Robinson offers a rather interesting anecdote in his book The Element:

IQ tests can even be a matter of life and death. A criminal who commits a capital offense is not subject to the death penalty if his IQ is below seventy... People can also improve their scores through study and practice. I read a case recently about a death row inmate who'd at that point spent ten years in jail on a life sentence. During his incarceration, he took a series of courses. When retested, his IQ had risen more than ten points - suddenly making him eligible for execution.

Jennifer Senior's article Junior Meritocracy also speaks to the idea that IQ is not fixed:

In 2006, David Lohman, a psychologist at the University of Iowa, co-authored a paper called “Gifted Today but Not Tomorrow?” in the Journal for the Education of the Gifted, demonstrating just how labile “giftedness” is. It notes that only 45 percent of the kids who scored 130 or above on the Stanford-Binet would do so on another, similar IQ test at the same point in time. Combine this with the instability of 4-year-old IQs, and it becomes pretty clear that judgments about giftedness should be an ongoing affair, rather than a fateful determination made at one arbitrary moment in time. I wrote to Lohman and asked what percentage of 4-year-olds who scored 130 or above would do so again as 17-year-olds. He answered with a careful regression analysis: about 25 percent.

I defy anyone to call a test that can achieve consistant results from the test-taker 25% of the time reliable. If IQ tests are guilty of all this, why the hell do we continue to place so much importance on these tests? What's worse is that despite all these harmful effects, people claim that we do all of this for the children.

Placing any kind of meaning on IQ tests equates to a kind of educational malpractice.

Christopher Reeve and SATs

In Carol Dweck's book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, she demonstrates the dramtic difference between a growth and fixed minset. One sees life as always changing and developing while the other see things like intellect as a fixed quantity that you either have or don't have. The following is a moving excerpt from her book:

Sometimes people with the growth mindset stretch themselves so far that they do the impossible. In 1995, Christopher Reeve, the actor, was thrown from a horse. His neck was broken, his spinal cord was severed from his brain, and he was completely paralyzed below the neck. Medical science said, So sorry. Come to terms with it.

Reeve, however, started a demanding exercise program that involved moving all parts of his paralyzed body witht the help of electrical stimulations. Why couldn't he learn to move again? Why couldn't his brain once again give commands that his body would obey? Doctors warned that he was in denial and was setting himself up for disappointment they had seen this before and it was a bad sign for his adjustment. But, really, what else was Reeve doing with his time? Was there a better project?

Five years later, Reeve started to regain movement. First it happened in his hands, then his arms, then legs, and then torso. he was far from cured, but brain scans showed that his brain was once more sending signals to his body that his body was responding to. Not only did Reeve stretch his abilities, he changed the entire way science thinks about the nervous system and its potential for recovery. In doing so, he opened a whole new vista for research and a whole new avenue of hope for people with spinal cord injuries.

My favorite part of this exerpt is where Dweck asks what else, other than attempting rehabilitation, would be more worthy of Reeve's time? Granted, the whole idea of retraining your nervous system to properly communicate with your own body after such a horrific accident is a little far-fetched, but seriously, what else should Reeve's have spent his time doing?

It was worth a shot, wasn't it? What makes it so isn't that he succeeded. Sure it makes for one hell of a story because he did find some success, but even had he not regained movement, the time and effort he placed into rehabilitating himself is nothing short of admirable.

In school, I fear that adults claim to be the all-knowing predicters of the future. As if we can guage how successful our students will be based on the information we observe and measure while they are in grade school.

Don't you see how foolish this is. I mean, if Christopher Reeve's doctors thought they could see his future - one dominated by incapacity, and they were wrong - what does that say about our predictions.

Research has already shown that our almighty tests like the SAT have proven to be horrible at predicting the future. Alfie Kohn writes in his article Two Cheers for an End to the SAT:

SAT's don't predict the future. A considerable amount of research, including but not limited to a summary of more than 600 studies published by the College Board in 1984, has found that only about 12 to 16 percent of the variance in freshman grades could be explained by SAT scores, suggesting that they are not particularly useful even with respect to that limited variable -- and virtually worthless at predicting how students will fare after their freshman year (and whether they will graduate).

We can talk assessment and accountability until we are blue in the face, but until we can come to grips with how utterly meaningless grades and tests really are, our school systems will continue to view a large population of students as drop-outs-in-waiting.

Literally, Christoper Reeve couldn't stand up for himself, but figuratively he stood taller than the doctors who thought they knew better.

It's time teachers and parents stood up for children and the education they deserve.

The behaviourism infection

"There is a time to admire the grace and persuasive power of an influential idea, and there is a time to fear its hold over us. The time to worry is when the idea is so widely shared that we no longer even notice it, when it is so deeply rooted that it feels to us like plain common sense. At the point when objections are not answered anymore because they are no longer even raised, we are not in control: we do not have the idea; it has us."

This quote could be used to describe any idea that we come to mindlessly accept as a given truth, but when Alfie Kohn wrote these words in his book Punished by Rewards, he was referring to Behaviourism.

Behaviourism is the belief that everything we are can be reduced to our behaviours.

It has infected our homes and schools.

And, for the most part, we don't even know it.

When parents and teachers choose to do things to children, we are subscribing to behaviourism. For example, if I use bribes or threats (rewards and punishments) to make children do their homework, their chores, be polite or even to learn - I am really saying that I don't care why they do what I want them to do - it is good enough if they just behave it.

Alfie Kohn, and many others, including me, propose a better way. Rather than doing things to children, we would rather see parents and teachers work with their children.

Rather than ripping my child away from the play area after they stole another child's toy, I might sit with them for a moment and model or discuss the proper way of sharing. Rather than giving my students zeroes or deduct late marks from their late assignments, I would work with them to find out why it was late and then help them to actually learn whatever it was that I found important enough to make into an assigment.

For more on how to work with children, rather than just doing things to them, I have a couple books to suggest to you:

• Unconditional Parenting, Punished by Rewards and Beyond Discipline by Alfie Kohn
• Drive by Daniel Pink
• Mindset by Carol Dweck
• Hold on to your Kids by Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Mate
• Kids are Worth It! by Barbara Coloroso

My first 4 years of teaching, I subscribed to behaviourism and I didn't even know it. I was just teaching the way I was taught, but my last 5 years of teaching, I have subscribed more to constructivism and working with my studnets.
Working with > Doing things to. Period.