There are lots of ways to get to know someone -- my two favourite ways are going for a walk & talk and playing a game. Board games are a wonderful way of developing a relationship with someone, and also a great way of assessing a child's skills including their creativity, collaboration, adaptability, resiliency, critical thinking, problem solving, patience, literacy and numeracy. Board games often require a broad range of knowledge, skills and abilities so they are a great way of assessing what someone knows and what they can do with what they know.
Because I have returned to teaching in a Children's Inpatient Psychiatric Assessment Unit, I find it helpful to play a game with a child so that we can start a casual, caring relationship before I help them with their anger, depression, self-harm, addictions and other problems. These kinds of problems are easier to work on after you've worked together to build a train, conquer Tokyo, cure a disease or bury treasure.
Here are four games I like to play with students and my family:
1. Ticket to Ride is a 5 player game where you score points by placing trains that connect cities. This is a wonderful game that is simple enough for those unfamiliar with games but challenging enough to keep everyone involved. The original game features cities in Canada and the United States, but there are many expansions and other stand-alone games that feature Europe, Nordic countries, India and Africa. This game could be played in about 60 minutes. My daughter Kayley learned to play this when she was 6. Watch a review of Ticket to Ride here.
2. King of New Tokyo is a 6 player dice game where your monster scores points by conquering Tokyo and other monsters. This game plays like Yahtzee where you roll and re-roll the dice to achieve special monster abilities. Players must balance short-term gains with long-term objectives. King of New York is another similar stand-alone game with a few more ways for monsters to destroy buildings and score points. Both are excellent games that can be played in about 30 to 45 minutes with children as young as 6. Watch a review of King of Tokyo here.
3. Pandemic is a cooperative game where players work together to fight 5 diseases from spreading across the world. Each player has unique special abilities that require them to collaborate in creative ways. The expansion Pandemic In the Lab makes for an even more enjoyable game as petri dishes are used to manipulate the diseases to find the cure. I spend a majority of my time as a teacher and a parent teaching children to collaborate with others, so I'm excited to see more and more cooperative board games being published. Pandemic is a slightly more complex game that requires more understanding for the rules than the other games on this list. Watch a review of Pandemic here and here.
4. Black Fleetis a four player game where players use their merchant ship to deliver goods around the Caribbean while using their pirate ship to steal and bury treasure to earn doubloons to purchase special abilities and win the game. This is a casual child friendly pirate game that can be played in 40 to 60 minutes. You can watch a review of Black Fleet here.
China’s capacity for innovation has become a hot topic for China, the U.S., and the rest of the world today. There is no question that China must innovate its way out of the “middle income trap.” But whether the country – which over the last thirty years has proven to be able to make everything – can create anything new remains questionable.
The question is not about whether the Chinese people are creative. Creativity is human nature. Genetically speaking, creativity should not have any ethnic bias or favor any one nation. If creativity is evenly distributed, China should have its equal share of the same genetic stock of creativity as any other nation. Given that its population size is more than three times of that in the United States, China should possess three times the number of great creative geniuses such as Steve Jobs. It also claims to be the only ancient civilization that has a non-stop history of over five thousand years and the most powerful empire in the world, which should have given it more time to accumulate creativity and innovation.
But China has produced very few inventions in science and technology that matter much in the modern world, at least not enough protect the nation from Western aggressions backed by scientific and technological innovations. Even today, despite its stunning growth in patent applications and scientific publications, the country has yet convinced many of its ability to innovate and invent.
China apparently has failed to turn its creative potential into significant innovations and inventions. What happened to all the creativity China had? How does creativity get lost in China?
Speculations abound. No single reason can be used to answer such complex questions. But a major culprit is the authoritarian spirit that advocates complete obedience to authority and results in policies that rewards compliance and punishes defiance. While many people believe obedience results in less creativity, it actually can boost creativity, making people more creative. But the creativity is not productive, in fact counterproductive because it is applied to simply demonstrate obedience, without actual compliance, resulting in token compliance – a form of cheating.
For example, to show compliance to the government’s anti-corruption wishes, which include measures such as prohibiting government officials to enjoy expensive alcohol and elaborate banquets in luxurious restaurants, Chinese government officials have been found to be extremely creative: they put ultra-expensive alcohol such as Moutai in Coke bottles or ordinary drinking bottles; they move elaborate banquets to farm houses; they bring chefs from five-star hotels to cook their “working meals” in their local cafeterias. To comply with environmental regulations, local officials in more than one place creatively ordered mountainsides painted in green. In more than one provinces, local officials rushed to cover paved roads with soil and plant vegetables and soybeans to show the inspectors their compliance with government regulations about conserving farmland.
Shangyou Zhengce, Xiaoyou Duice, literally “the higher authorities have policies, the lower have countermeasures,” has become a common phrase to describe the phenomenon of “emperor-fooling.” This is why in China, the authority seems to always have their demands met and wishes granted by its people, albeit at great cost with wasted resources and creativity.
China’s recent campaign for innovation has met the same fate. To stimulate innovation, the government has employed all sorts of carrots and sticks. The Chinese people have again applied their creativity to realize the government’s wish.
Last month, a number of convicts received a reduction of prison term as a reward for their patented inventions. Former police chief of Chongqing Wang Lijun, now serving a prison term of 15 years for abuse of power was granted 254 patents, 211 of which were filed in one year. His counterpart Wu Changshun in Tianjin has 35 patents granted. Most of their patents were related to police equipment and accessories. They were commercialized but mostly purchased by their own departments, and earned them both royalties and fame.
About 10 years ago, Chinese governments showered money and glory upon Chen Jin, who claimed to have invented a sophisticated computer chip Hanxin #1 (or China Heart/Chip #1), which turned out to be a chip he bought from Motorola. However, he creatively hired some migrant workers to remove the Motorola label and managed to pass the inspection of Chinese officials and experts. A professor at Jinggangshan University found a creative way to have over 40 papers published in international journals, which earned him hundreds of thousands of RMB. But these papers were later retracted, together with about 30 from the same university, for fabricated and falsified data.
There are many more forms of creative and entrepreneurial token compliance. Fabricating research papers and faking journal publications for sale have become a multimillion-dollar enterprise in China, so has the creation and sailing of junk patents. Less courageous professors, medical doctors, nurses, engineers, and professional researchers resort to other forms of creative compliance: publishing the same paper in multiple places, splitting a paper into multiple publications, creatively modifying existing publications, or plagiarizing. As a result, China now receives more patent applications than the U.S. and publishes millions of scientific papers. But the majority of them are of low quality.
By nature, Chinese are no less creative than other people; nor are they less inclined to take risks, or more predisposed to cheating. The authoritarian spirit of absolute obedience to authority seems to direct creativity to risky cheating in order to realize the wishes of the high authority, which may or may not be shared by the people. In other words, while the emperor’s wishes cannot be denied, but people can creatively fool him.
China’s future rests on its ability to turn creativity into constructive innovations and inventions. But whether it can do so depends on how quickly it can change the authoritarian mindset.
This was written by Jay Trevaskis who is a teacher in Sydney, Australia. He tweets here and blogs here. This post was originally found here.
by Jay Trevaskis
I used this image in one of my classes earlier this year and thought I’d struck gold. I actually had but, sadly, the school “system” quickly tarnished it and gave me clearest indication that school, which is intended to increase our students desire to learn, in it’s institutionalized form can actually do the opposite.
I’ve been encouraged to use stories and stimulus materials to pique the student’s curiosity and to use the stories behind the pictures to challenge their thinking and actions. As the Olympic games were bearing down on us, we were doing a unit in our elective sports science class about “Issues in Sport”. I thought I’d use this famous image of the 1968 Olympic Games 200m Podium to discuss the place of sport in society and whether their is a place for protests in sport or at the Olympics.
As the students entered the room I had this image up on the wall waiting for them. At this time, I gave them no information about what it was, when it was or what was happening. I simply asked the students to do two things:
Write down everything they observed in the image
Write down any questions that you have about the image
It was slow to get started but with a little bit of prodding the students really got going, they were calling out the things they observed and others were writing down ideas they were hearing from other students, they were asking me lots of questions and I just told them to record all the questions they had. They’d wondered why they were wearing gloves, why they had no shoes, why were they facing the way they did, what was the badge they were all wearing and plenty more.
Once the observations and questions started to dry up, I shared with the class the key details: that it was a picture taken at the 1968 Olympic Games after the 200m Sprint. Once the students had this they were then able to go and find answers to the questions. The next 20 -30 mins was some of the most enjoyable moments of my teaching year. Some of the students had found footage of the race and were watching it, others were finding answers to their questions. All 18 students were ‘hooked’. They were calling out the answers they found “The two Americans were banned from going to the Olympics again. Why was that?” Good question, write it down was my response. “Peter Norman never represented Australia again after this either. Why wasn’t he allowed to compete? He didn’t make the salute.” Good question, write it down.
This went on for the remainder of the lesson. It was pretty to watch.
Then the bell rang.
I didn’t have my class for another 3 days. As they came in, again I had the same picture on the wall. The immediate response from most students was “What? Are we still doing that?”. The break had killed their enthusiasm and curiosity. It had drained all momentum that had been built as we worked toward talking about why human rights were important enough to these athletes that they’d risk being banned from competition and why an Australian who wasn’t living amongst the racial tensions of the USA at the time would stand up for the same thing. Or what we’d be willing to stand up for?
It made me realise it must be so frustrating for students to go from one lesson to the next regardless of where they are up to. To be fully immersed in a learning experience and have to stop, pack up and move to another lesson and start again.
I’ve got no answers to make it right other than to say that it’s broken. So much of our schooling is institutionalised and constructed to fit in the “timetable” to make it easier for teachers to work but how much of what we do is set up to make it easy for the students to learn and enjoy learning?
As someone who doesn’t have the power to change things, I can only ask the questions. I don’t even have a solid answer to my own questions really, but it’s becoming clearer how much of what we are doing is actually making it hard for students to grow in their love for learning.
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.
In the first study, MIT professor Laura Schulz, her graduate student Elizabeth Bonawitz, and their colleagues looked at how 4-year-olds learned about a new toy with four tubes. Each tube could do something interesting: If you pulled on one tube it squeaked, if you looked inside another tube you found a hidden mirror, and so on. For one group of children, the experimenter said: "I just found this toy!" As she brought out the toy, she pulled the first tube, as if by accident, and it squeaked. She acted surprised ("Huh! Did you see that? Let me try to do that!") and pulled the tube again to make it squeak a second time. With the other children, the experimenter acted more like a teacher. She said, "I'm going to show you how my toy works. Watch this!" and deliberately made the tube squeak. Then she left both groups of children alone to play with the toy.
All of the children pulled the first tube to make it squeak. The question was whether they would also learn about the other things the toy could do. The children from the first group played with the toy longer and discovered more of its "hidden" features than those in the second group. In other words, direct instruction made the children less curious and less likely to discover new information.
Does direct teaching also make children less likely to draw new conclusions—or, put another way, does it make them less creative? To answer this question, Daphna Buchsbaum, Tom Griffiths, Patrick Shafto, and I gave another group of 4-year-old children a new toy.* This time, though, we demonstrated sequences of three actions on the toy, some of which caused the toy to play music, some of which did not. For example, Daphna might start by squishing the toy, then pressing a pad on its top, then pulling a ring on its side, at which point the toy would play music. Then she might try a different series of three actions, and it would play music again. Not every sequence she demonstrated worked, however: Only the ones that ended with the same two actions made the music play. After showing the children five successful sequences interspersed with four unsuccessful ones, she gave them the toy and told them to "make it go."
Daphna ran through the same nine sequences with all the children, but with one group, she acted as if she were clueless about the toy. ("Wow, look at this toy. I wonder how it works? Let's try this," she said.) With the other group, she acted like a teacher. ("Here's how my toy works.") When she acted clueless, many of the children figured out the most intelligent way of getting the toy to play music (performing just the two key actions, something Daphna had not demonstrated). But when Daphna acted like a teacher, the children imitated her exactly, rather than discovering the more intelligent and more novel two-action solution.
All this brings new life to an old quote from Seymour Papert:
The scandal of education is that every time you teach something, you deprive a child of the pleasure and benefit of discovery.
But if this is true then perhaps it's not just preschool that shouldn't be like school. Perhaps all learners would be better off if every level of education was a little less like school.
While teaching my grade 8 students, I wanted to discuss the idea of distractions, so I read them an excerpt from Rework by Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson that discusses how interruption is the enemy of productivity:
Interruptions break your workday into a series of work moments. Forty-Five minutes and then you have a call. Fifteen minutes and then you have lunch. An hour later, you have an afternoon meeting. Before you know it, it’s five o’clock, and you’ve only had a couple uninterrupted hours to get your work done. You can’t get meaningful things done when your constantly going start, stop, start, stop…
And go all the way with it. A successful alone-time period means letting go of communication addiction. During alone time, give up instant messages, phone calls, e-mail, and meetings… Your day is under seige by interruptions. It’s on you to fight back.
My class proceeded to have a very interesting conversation about all of the distractions they have in the day. Many of them could relate to the ‘communication addiction’ that the excerpt referred to. We all admitted that sometimes we are the annoyed (the person who would like to tell others to ‘screw off’) and the annoying (the person who should be told to ‘screw off’).
It didn’t take long for some of my students to identifying other kinds of distractions that they were not responsible for. Ethan, a grade 8 student of mine, blogged his thoughts for me. Here’s Ethan’s take on how undemocratic school bells are:
School bells, the most ridiculous invention on earth. Some people want to spend a certain amount of time on certain subjects, for example; if I prefer math more than social, shouldn’t I have the right to stay as long as I like at math, and as long as I learn something and don’t screw off? No, instead, a inanimate, ringing tin can have the right to tell me what to do, where to go, and make decisions for me. A piece of metal has more authority than a living human being! Truthfully, this thought makes me feel small, and without any say. I think students should have the right to learn what they want, when they want, wherever they want and however they want to do it! If I could take health and science classes all day I would. Why? Because I am facinated about how things work, especially the human body. As for social, i don’t especially want to know what happened all those years ago. I’m also not saying that social is pointless either, many people find the past very interesting, just not me. School’s purpose in my eyes is to prepare you for the future, so why not be able to tune your studies to what you would like to become?
Ethan’s point is well taken. He’s begging for the opportunity to be given more rights and responsibilities than the archaic school bell schedule can ever give him. He’s searching for a more democratic version of schooling. It’s time we took students like Ethan seriously.
My guest today is David Wees, teacher and technology guru at Stratford Hall in British Columbia. David is also an important part of my Professional Learning Community, and I am pleased that he agreed to guest blog here today. You can check out his blog here and his twitter here.
By David Wees
Imagine this graph represents the possible relationships between accountability and creativity.
Where would you put the activities you do as a school? Here are some examples of activities some school do, and where I think they lie on the accountability vs creativity scale.
What you may notice about this graph is that, for the most part, activities which hold schools and students highly accountability are not associated generally with creativity and that activities which are highly creative can fall short of being very accountable. It's not a perfect graph, and I think that some of the examples could be moved, but the idea I think is pretty clear: the more you increase accountability, the less flexible the activity, and hence the less ability for students to be creative while completing the activity.
Accountability in this sense means how the activity and the student's performance of that activity, is shared with the student, the teachers, the school, and the wider community. Standardized tests are considered a "highly accountability" activity simply because everyone has access to how well pretty much any school did, and educators within those schools generally have access to their individual marks, and of course students get feedback about how well they did.
Creative activities to me are generally areas where the student has a lot of choice on how the activity will be completed, and how they will complete the activity. These are often the types of activities that I think students will actually be able to do once they finish their education, and according to Sir Ken Robinson, our schools fail to provide opportunities to students to do them.
There are a few activities which fall with higher accountability and decent ability for students to be creative, and we often find that these activities are not ones which are done by most schools. Anyway, I'm sure the model I have up there is imperfect, so I invite you to follow this link to this collaborative Google drawing I've started, and we can add other activities to this chart.
The problem with new ideas is that in their infancy the really really innovative and truly different ideas can look no different than the crazy, hair-brained ideas.
In their infancy, all ideas are fragile.
The trick here is two-fold.
Firstly, how do we create an environment where people feel safe to create these new ideas?
And, how do we create an environment where people can differentiate between the truly innovative and the truly stupid ideas?
Ideally we want to be able to competently answer both these questions; however, these two questions are cannibals - they eat away at each other. Uber-imagination and crazy creativity can lead to both innovation and waste-of-time ideas while pragmatism can act as a kind of quality control; however, things go awry when we place too much emphasis on control and not enough on quality. It's a precarious balancing act that can take on a life of its own.
Either way, we need to suspend our disbelief and knee-jerk skepticism (or even apathy) and allow all ideas to at least germinate. We can decide later if we want to support or squash them.
What leads to success? This is an excellent question that has no one right answer. So I'm going to take the easy way out and explain what is not the answer.
- grading does not lead to success -
Watch the TEDtalk and then read below where I show how grading is at best unhelpful and at worst harmful towards all 8 characteristics of success.
Passion
Real learning flourishes when kids learn for its own sake. There is a big difference between a kid who reads so he can win a free pizza and the kid who reads because he wants to know what happens in the next chapter. If we care why kids do the things they do... If we can admit that motivation matters, then we have to stop bribing kids with high grades and threatening them with low grades. Interestingly enough, research1 only confirms what our hearts know. When people are told, Do this and you'll get that, they are very likely to lose interest in the 'this' and care more about the 'that'. Just as true passion for your career can't be driven by the love for money, neither can the true passion for learning be driven by the love for grades.
Work
Learning can be hard work, and sometimes it is true that nothing comes easily, but learning can also be a lot of fun. However, in order for successful people to see hard work as fun, they need see how important effort truly is and how the idea of 'the natural' is largely a myth. Success comes from hard work, and hours upon hours of deliberate practice. Successful people understand that how you rationalize your success may be just as important as being successful. Or in other words, know why you are successful and being successful are both important. People who apply their success to external factors such as luck, task difficulty or lack of natural ability are likely to subscribe to a fixed mindset that sees intelligence and personality as finite qualities that are written in stone. The research2 shows that students who focus on their results - their grades - are likely to attribute their success to external factors. These students tend to rationalize their success or failure in terms of who they are rather than how hard they tried. And when they do this, they typically perform poorly and quit. Good
We want kids to get damn good at learning not grade grubbing, but this is exactly what happens when kids are given grades. When kids get their tests back from the teacher marked, what is the first question they ask of each other? When kids gets home from school after writing a test, what is the first question asked of them by their parents? Research3 shows the effects of grading and found that when students receive their work back with a comment and a grade on it, they look at two things: their grade and then their neighbors grade. If children aren't told explicitly, then they inevitably come to understand implicitly that grades are the point of school. What's wrong with this, you ask? In China, they have a saying gaofen dineng, and it translates to high score but low ability. Education in China has come to be a kind of punch line, a joke, because of their test-taking emphasis in school. The Chinese know that this kind of testing culture has come at a great cost - too many Chinese students are good at taking tests but nothing else.
Focus
Grades do encourage students to focus - but grades are narcistic - grades encourage kids to focus on grades. In China, the gaokao is like the American's SAT but on steroids and ecstasy. College admissions in China are solely and entirely dependent on performing well on the gaokao4. And if they focus enough, the top performers on the gaokao are bestowed the honor and title of zhuangyyuan, and are turned into instant celebreties. So what's the problem? the research is showing that their importance and success isn't lasting much longer than that 15 minutes. Zhuangyuans who become distinguished leaders, accomplished engineers or creative entrepeneurs are the exception and not the rule. For the most part, these zhuangyuans excel on the tests and disapear into obscurity - leading many to question why the tests were so important in the first place. In the end, grades don't help kids to focus, they are ultimately a distraction from learning.
Push
Most people will agree that motivation is an important characteristic for successful people. Most people understand that there are two flavors of motivation - intrinsic and extrinsic - and most people would agree that successful people have a healthy dose of intrinsic motivation. The problem here is that the research5 shows that when kids are given a task and told this is an opportunity to learn rather than to do well, they are more willing to challenge themselves. When the classroom is sold as a place to show off how good you are, learning simply becomes a means to an end, and too often the most rational way to achieve the desirible end (a high grade) is to avoid projects that are challenging. Grades create an emphasis on performance and results that leads predictably to less intellectual exploration - or in other words, less learning.
Serve
Narcisim corrupts. Aboslute narcisism corrupts absolutely. Grades do nothing to encourage students to think of others. In fact, grades artificially turns the classroom into a competition - and the name of the game is to collect more As and look smarter than your neighbour. If your working on a group project that will be graded, its hard to see your lazy partner as someone you need to help; rather, it is more likely that you will see him as an albatross that the teacher unfairly dumped on you. Grades encourage you to focus on the wrong inequity - there are grades to be gotten and the albatross will hold you back; however, the true inequity is that you are learning and the albatross isn't - and so you need to help him. This is how true character education is born, but this kind of perspective is not the default. Be honest, how many of you can put a face to this albatross I speak of, someone from your schoolhood past whom you still resent because they held you back from higher grades? Be honest again, how many of you were the albatross? Research6 also shows convincingly that collaboration, as opposed to competition, is a far more productive way of becoming successful If we truly care about serving others, then we need to stop using grades to artifically pit students against each other.
Ideas
Bill Gates talks about having ideas, and ideas are important. To have ideas you have to have an imagination - but to actually produce something from that imagination, you have to be creative. Students who have come to see learning as a means to an end (high grades), tend to think less deeply while reducing the quality of their thinking. Reproduce the teachers knowledge, requires a lot less imagination and creativity than producing your own understanding. If the class is grading a test during class, and a student gets the question right, but totally guessed, what are the chances the student will say, "wait a minute, giving me credit here is misleading. I may have chosen the correct response but I actually don't have an understanding for what the question was asking me. Teacher, you can chose to give me credit or not give me credit, that's up to you, but I would like to take some class time right now and learn about the content of that question"? The plausibility of this is absurd. Learning should be like this, but grades won't ever allow it to be so. Research7 confirms that students who are more interested in understanding than succeeding outperform those who are distracted by scoring good grades.
Persist
Persistance and resiliency in the face of mistakes and failures is universally accepted as a critical characteristic of successful people. We know no one succeeds all the time, and we know that there is a lot to be learned from our failures. In order to succeed, we have to push our own limits. You will never create something new and creative if you aren't prepared to be wrong. However, grades explicitly tell children that the point of school is to succeed - or even to be better than others. If the point of school is more about proving how good you are and less about learning and improving, it's pretty hard to cope with being less than good. And this is exactly what the research8 tells us - people who come to see school as an exercise in collecting high grades are likely to fall apart when they experience a set back or frustration. They see mistakes and failure as things that should never happen. In contrast, successful people see mistakes as valuable information to be used to figure out what went wrong and then fix it. Grades do not encourage students to have a healthy and relilient attitude towards failure - too often they are simply debilitating. And if you need proof, just ask a student who has historically received low grades and ask them how motivating those low grades were for them.
--------------------
What leads to success? I'm not sure. That's an intimidating question with any number of different answers, but I do know this - grading is not the answer, and the sooner we abolish grading from our classrooms the better.
What's that you say? You are made to grade by some external force such as your department, principal, superintendent, premier or governor?
Okay, but I would wager that you are probably grading more than they demand of you. I am willing to bet that you could assign and talk about grades less than you are now. I get that grades are not going to vanish over night - that's okay. I could live with a world that had kids only think of grades on report card day (at least until we could abolish report cards too - that is report cards as we typically know them: grade-spewing scripts)
Yes, many students have gone through their education with grading, and have gone on to be successful. But if you ask any of them, it is likely they're success was in spite of grades, not because of them.
If you enjoyed this TEDtalk by Richard St.John... if you find any truth in his 8 characteristics of success, then you owe it to yourself and your students to do everything in your power to make grades invisible in your classroom.
1 For more on rewards harm intrinsic motivation, read up on Edward Deci and Richard Ryan's Self-Determination Theory.
2 For more on how focusing on ability encourages a fixed mindset and how focusing on effort encourages a growth mindset, read up on Carol Dweck's book Mindset.
3 For more on how grades encourage shallow thinking and discourage creativity, see Ruth Butler's study that she conducted on elementary students in Isreal.
4 For more on the harmful effects of China's testing culture, read Yong Zhao's Catching Up or Leading the Way.
5 For more on the harmful effects of rewards, read Alfie Kohn's book Punished by Rewards. Dan Pink's book Drive is good too.
6 For more on how competition is inferior to collaboration, read Alfie Kohn's book No Contest.
7 For more on how grades discourage creativity and artificially limit thinking, read Alfie Kohn's The Schools Our Children Deserve.
8 For more on how grades discourage persistence and resiliency, read Carol Dweck's Mindset, and Alfie Kohn's Punished by Rewards, The Schools Our Children Deserve
1. Ticket to Ride is a 5 player game where you score points by placing trains that connect cities. This is a wonderful game that is simple enough for those unfamiliar with games but challenging enough to keep everyone involved. The original game features cities in Canada and the United States, but there are many expansions and other stand-alone games that feature Europe, Nordic countries, India and Africa. This game could be played in about 60 minutes. My daughter Kayley learned to play this when she was 6. Watch a review of Ticket to Ride here.
2. King of New Tokyo is a 6 player dice game where your monster scores points by conquering Tokyo and other monsters. This game plays like Yahtzee where you roll and re-roll the dice to achieve special monster abilities. Players must balance short-term gains with long-term objectives. King of New York is another similar stand-alone game with a few more ways for monsters to destroy buildings and score points. Both are excellent games that can be played in about 30 to 45 minutes with children as young as 6. Watch a review of King of Tokyo here.
3. Pandemic is a cooperative game where players work together to fight 5 diseases from spreading across the world. Each player has unique special abilities that require them to collaborate in creative ways. The expansion Pandemic In the Lab makes for an even more enjoyable game as petri dishes are used to manipulate the diseases to find the cure. I spend a majority of my time as a teacher and a parent teaching children to collaborate with others, so I'm excited to see more and more cooperative board games being published. Pandemic is a slightly more complex game that requires more understanding for the rules than the other games on this list. Watch a review of Pandemic here and here.
4. Black Fleet is a four player game where players use their merchant ship to deliver goods around the Caribbean while using their pirate ship to steal and bury treasure to earn doubloons to purchase special abilities and win the game. This is a casual child friendly pirate game that can be played in 40 to 60 minutes. You can watch a review of Black Fleet here.
