Social Media Versus Critical Thinking

It’s August, and I’m sitting on the beach in a sand chair. Thirty feet in front of me is a young woman, about fifteen. She’s wearing a bikini, sunglasses, and an August tan. And she’s taking multiple pictures of herself with her iphone. Holding it up, smiling, not smiling, coyly looking over her Ray Bans, trying to get herself in profile, maybe get a glimpse of the water or blue sky behind her. After each pose for the phone, her expression flattens and she examines the picture. She does it again and again from different angles or in different positions. Sometimes she takes five or six pictures in the same pose. I’ve read twenty pages, and she’s still at it.

I know what she’s doing, and it makes me sad. For her sake, I wish she got a shot she liked and could spend the energy doing something else: swimming in the actually warm New England water or playing Kadima with her younger brother. But instead it’s picture after picture after picture.

I guess her photography is about getting a perfect image she can post on Snapchat or Instagram. Or maybe she’s trying to create a new profile pic for her Facebook page. I appreciate her persistence and can even appreciate the craft of a selfie. She’s trying to get the light, her expression, the right angle of her body. She’s trying to make it look natural and show herself having fun at the beach. None of these goals feels wrong. Except it bothers me that she’s not happy with any of those pictures, and she has to take them again and again. How they come out and how she looks are more important than anything else.

What I am witnessing in this young woman’s efforts is a regular element of interaction for teenagers. In her mind, she is creating an image that will allow her to interact better with others. She’ll get more likes, create more interest, generate more hits, and she’ll be interacting with her peers in a meaningful way.  And if we asked her, she’d tell us that what she is doing is social. I imagine that for many young people today, this kind of online communicating dominates their experience of interaction. But ironically, I see her taking these pictures by herself. The primary emotion I experience as I watch her is sadness and pity, and she is missing the chance to have meaningful interactions with her family. If this photo posting is a form of interaction, to me it looks controlled, solitary, and overly self-aware. Her standards are impossibly high. There is no spontaneity, no attention to the present moment, no space for something unexpected.

I think about this young woman in her English class when school starts in a couple of weeks. Maybe twenty five students sitting in a circle, a teacher--maybe someone like me--trying to lead them in a shared inquiry discussion or a lesson using essential questions. Maybe she’ll go to math class where a teacher will give her a challenge problem, and she’ll have to work right there in the moment and collaborate with her peers to figure it out. And there isn’t one answer. Multiple viewpoints or solutions are possible. The students will have to talk to learn. They will have to put their ideas out there, not be afraid of being wrong, and use each other’s ideas to energize new thinking. I might call this learning in the moment. It’s an essential quality of critical thinking.

For critical thinking to happen in our classrooms, certain behaviors are required. Students must be able to negotiate, encounter and solve problems as they come up, and learn by listening and thinking in the moment. They have to be comfortable being wrong, having their interpretations challenged, and disagreeing with each other. They’re going to be asked to justify their choices, take risks, and be creative. They are going to have to be confident, sincere, and vocal. But if their experience of interacting with each other is filtered and controlled through a device--and they consider that exchange the normal experience--a classroom where critical thinking is a mode of learning is going to feel scary and even hostile. This student might shut down. She will feel like she can’t control how her contribution is experienced by her peers, and because that expectation--and its impossibly high standards-- has become a reality for her, her ability to learn from her own process of critical thinking will be crippled.

So, what can I do about it? Just the act of noticing what kind of interactions students have and create online is a start. That and helping students see a distinction between what kind of interactions they have online and live interactions in the world. They aren’t the same thing. I have to show students what I mean. I feel like we could talk about this phenomenon more constructively as a faculty and share observations and strategies. We need to scaffolded activities that reorient them with spontaneous interaction. Maybe it’s a little strong to say we need to teach them socialization behaviors? I’m curious to know what you think.

Thanks, Catie, for getting the conversation started.

Avoiding the Bailout: Building Independence

At 2:30 on Thursday, seven of my sophomore biology students walk into my room.  Tomorrow is the deadline for retaking the genetics unit test.  We make a circle with the desks, and I hand out their first attempts at the test.  Three more students come in as we are starting to go over questions on the test they didn’t understand.  I’m writing on a small white board.  Students are writing notes for questions they missed.  “What was the answer to 6?”  “We are going over 4, right now.  Can you wait until we get to 6?”  The chaos of this particular afternoon is worse than I’ve experienced for after school help.  This particular group of boys (there is one girl here, also) are joking and distracting each other.  Their capacity for learning seems diminished right now.  I’m struggling to keep their focus, keep the emphasis on the learning and not just on the right answers.  I’m frustrated because none of these students have asked for help during this unit.  I know that I’m not serving them, and I sense that they are only here to raise their grade, not to understand the genetics.  The work I did to make sure they learned the content didn’t seem effective; I’m unhappy that the seedlings problem solving lab, the dragon genetics activity, practice problems, and review guide haven’t helped these students.  I’m sitting in a student desk after they leave, and I know, I have to change.

How we teach students how to deal with failure is a hot topic.   Books like “The Gift of Failure” and “How to Raise an Adult” are  popping up.  Also swirling: grit, growth mindset, racing to nowhere, engagement, teacher evaluation systems, and new science of the brain and learning.   As teachers, we are also honing our focus on preparing students for the deep and wide waters of the future.  So, it feels natural that we would shelter and protect our students where we can.  Parents advocate with best intentions, others hover and some fully immerse themselves in their student’s education.  Teachers scaffold.  We support, preview, reteach, pace, differentiate, personalize and attempt to engage in the efforts of student learning.  But, how do we walk the line?  

Struggle

For the past few months, I have been reading, listening and thinking about struggle.  I’ve been trying to tease apart working independently from struggle, and I have come to the conclusion that to be capable of working independently, one must have capacity for struggle.  Not only that, but struggle is crucial to learning. Before we can fully define what it means to promote independence, we should look at what it means to impede it.

Paul Andersen (Bozeman Science, Horizontal Transfer) likens learning to getting in shape.  We know what it feels like to get in shape when we first start working out: pain, pain, pain, and then the body adapts, builds more mitochondria to get the cells the energy they need for the running, jumping, rowing, skiing movements.  We, and especially students, don’t think this applies to our brains.  Just as I cannot get in shape by watching Usain Bolt sprint 100 meters, I cannot solve a complex genetics problem at first glance.  My students at the review session weren’t ready to run the race because they weren’t in shape.  Not in shape for genetics, and in a larger sense they weren’t in shape for learning biology.

What is the bailout?  

We know the banks were bailed out in 2008, and we could argue about if that was right or wrong.  But, when do we bailout students inappropriately?  This happens when we never allow a failure to stand.  When there is always a way to roll back the consequences.  When consequences are not applied.  When tasks are too easy, when we don’t intervene when we should, when we allow things to slip by, we are bailing out the students.  I fully acknowledge that we need safety valves when the pressure builds too high.  We need to step in during times of crisis, we need to protect students from catastrophic failure.

When do we prevent independence skill building? When we don’t offer appropriate challenges.  When we are only looking for one type of answer.  When we only assign one type of task.  When all assessments are summative.  When all work is group work. When we promote learned helplessness. 

So, what does it look like to promote skills for working independently?  This is the harder question when the goal is for all students to succeed.  We need to provide students with interesting and challenging problems that are not easy to solve. We need to provide an atmosphere of trust and time for students to wrestle with the tasks. We need to allow for failure, both where stakes are minimal, and when the stakes are slightly higher.  We need to hold students accountable for the quality and timeliness of their work.  We need to emphasize that grades are a measure of learning, not a measure of effort.  

When I think about the types of students I want to leave my class, I want those who are ready to tackle the big problems: confident, skilled, creative, and ambitious.  I want the students who will climb the hill to enjoy the ride down.  I want the student who scoffs at the chicken door in line for the roller coaster.  

So, how will I work this into my classes?

1. I will work to avoid the bailout.  I will emphasize that not all learning is pay-out.  We will have the pain of getting in shape to contend with. If I can prompt students to stretch, then I can monitor their response to that stretch and ease before the breaking point.
2. I will bring independence to the forefront in many contexts.  I will ask students to offer their best skills to the group and then reflect on their progress.  “In this group today, you can count on me to _______________.”
3. For unit test make ups, I will require students to not only meet with me, but to demonstrate independent review and relearning.
4. I will have student reflect on their capacity to struggle with different types of tasks.
5. I will carefully define what I mean when I use the word independence with students.  Their ideas of independence often emphasize concepts of freedom or choice, when ours emphasize responsibility and tenacity.

Next month: Critical Thinking

When I wrote this piece, I consulted these resources:

• The Horizontal Transfer podcast by David Knuffke and Paul Anderson, especially Episode 22: A Courseload of Struggle
• Several of the essays from the 2014 series of Unity & Diversity on struggle, especially, “Get out of the water or you’ll drown.” And “If we want students to feel safe to fail, teachers need to model it first.” And, the foreward to the 2014 collection by Brad Williamson.
• Veritasium: Learned Helplessness
• NPR: How Schools are Handling an ‘Overparenting’ Crisis
• NYTimes: What if the Secret to Success is Failure?
• NPR:  Struggle for Smarts? How Eastern and Western Cultures Tackle Learning
• TED Talk by Angela Lee Duckworth: The key to success? Grit
• NYTimes: How to be Emotionally Intelligent
• Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

Thanks to:

• The instructors and the participants in the Summer-Fall 2015 Yarmouth Technology Course: Engaging Learners Using Technology for sparking the idea and supporting its growth.
• Anne Tommaso and Marita O’Neill for writing support