Tag Archives: causing learning

Esprit de Corps Elevates Teacher Capacity to Cause All Children to Learn

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Noble purpose and fraternity.  These are two aged concepts, yet they are the time-tested bonds uniting a band of people committed to a cause and to each other that allows them to move the proverbial mountain while others around them shovel gravel.  They are words that, if you must speak or define them to others, place the listener outside the circle of understanding of the power and force of esprit de corps. 

Esprit de corps is real.

What is it that causes collaborative work to reach a recognized higher plane of excellence?  As a French language term, esprit de corps is associated with both fictional and real-life manifestations.  We conjure D’Artagnan and the three musketeers yelling “One for All and All for One” and charging the guards of Cardinal Richelieu in the Alexander Dumas novel.  We hear the Marine Corps motto of Semper Fidelis (Always Faithful) and remember actual stories of courage in battle that are part of American lore.  Beyond Musketeers and Marines, how does esprit de corps apply to the work of teachers in a public school?  Or does it not?  I believe it does.

Esprit de corps cannot be manufactured.

We too often believe that teamwork and team management are the same as esprit de corps.  They are not.  I do not dis the value of teamwork.  Teaming adds the values of group membership, agreed upon group goals, concerted collegial work effort, and team recognition.  We form teams readily for our recreational activities, sports, and non-sports.  We team for organizational fund raising.  We team for a great number of spontaneous reasons – almost like crowdfunding – that draw us together for a short-lived purpose.

Organizational gurus work the circuit of conferences and book signings touting their recipes for increasing TEAM.  A common plan for increasing organization teamwork looks like this.

#1 – Know and communicate your clear WHY?

#2 – Create and communicate your value system

#3 – Live by your own values

#4 – Create a common aim

#5 – Hold a siege

#6 – Be aspirational

#7 – Celebrate

# 8 – Eat together

#9 – Communicate with passion

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/nine-secrets-creating-culture-esprit-de-corps-within-your-brown

If real esprit de corps can be artificially manufactured in this way, why then do we keep talking about low employee morale and trying to find the next magic bullet that will align employees to employment purposes?  Why do we look for the next guru and keep attending the next conference?  Because true esprit de corps is not manufactured, it is birthed and continuously nurtured.

Teaching as a calling.

When interviewing teacher candidates, I often ask “Is teaching your calling?”  “Calling” is another of those seemingly antiquated concepts, yet it is a feeler question to discern those who understand what it is to be innately drawn to a purpose greater than employment.  It exposes a teacher’s intrinsic motivations to teach.  The “called” are passionate about teaching.  A candidate who understands the question typically hesitates to ensure she heard the question correctly and then explains how her itch to teach cannot be satisfied with scratching – she needs to teach to fulfill her greater needs.  This is not to say that all teachers must feel the calling to be successful teachers; they do not.  There are many teachers who cause children to learn and consider teaching their job not their passion.  An intrinsic passion to the noble purpose of teaching is a fire that burns brighter in the called and pushes them to do more than their job without questioning why.

Fraternity + passion = esprit de corps

Add fraternity to passion and the seed of esprit de corps is born.  The fraternity may begin with two teachers with similar assignments seeing themselves not as individual teachers in separate classrooms but as partners in the same assignment.  Collaboration and mutuality build fraternity.  Sharing concerns, combined problem-solving, and the enjoyments of success based upon passionate commitment build fraternity.  Fraternity often begins with the tangibles of friendship and grows to the intangibles of brother- or sisterhood. 

Cadre building is a contributor to nurturing esprit de corps.  Strong cadres form themselves when individuals identify their common cause.  Cadres can be differentiated from spontaneous or assigned teams by the bonds of their fraternity.  Perhaps, a cadre is a super team, a team that exceeds teaming because its members are bonded with esprit de corps.  Building a cadre of impassioned teachers is easy – you just give the time and opportunity and this key question – “what should we do?” – then let them go. 

Some argue that cadre building begets favoritism and the separation of faculty into factions.  I argue that every organization that achieves significant purposes over time contains a cadre or cadres of impassioned persons at its core.  Nurtured by institutional goals, cadres of impassioned persons are the heart of esprit de corps.  Consider the school organizations that are recognized as high performing, elite, exemplary – you choose the word meaning extraordinary – and you will find esprit de corps, cadre strength, and impassioned work at its core.

Leadership nurtures esprit de corps then gets out of the way.

If esprit de corps can be a powerful force in schools, why doesn’t it exist everywhere?  Simply stated, esprit de corps flourishes where school leadership also is driven by noble purpose and fraternity, understands its dynamics, and gives these time, resources, and opportunity to work.  Although it seems that leadership sublimates the cadre, it does not – leadership nurtures cadre work, including giving earned and appropriate internal and external recognitions.  Cadre work can outgrow the apparent work of leadership, and this is the pivot point at which leaders and cadre collegial extend their excellence or leadership extinguishes the cadre.  It is a control issue.  Nothing kills esprit de corps more than the artificial controls of leadership operating for other purposes.

Too often leadership and their cultural design cause teachers to become independent contractors working in isolation in closed-door classrooms.  This is a real phenomenon in school historically and today.  It is too easy when this condition exists to do nothing and allow education to sink into mediocrity.

Every period of excellent in student outcomes is associated with teacher esprit de corps.

In hindsight, we can identify many schools that enjoyed a “golden era” of student successes.  Peel back the layers and you will find an esprit de corps that flourished with enlightened leadership and a band of teachers whose passion and fraternal instincts caused them to excel in the noble purpose of teaching.

Classroom Interactions Are Soccer Touches – Quality Touches Create Scoring Opportunities

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(This is a reposting from December 14, 2018. I repost this because the ability to create quality teacher and student interactions is needed even more today in 2024 post-pandemic schooling.)

“How many touches did you have?”

“How many were quality touches?”

“And, what did you do with your quality touches?”

I listen to kid-talk about their soccer game. I did not play soccer, so I am learning by watching and listening. A touch is a player getting a foot to touch the ball for a pass, shot, dribble, trap or tackle. I have learned that a tackle in soccer is not a tackle in football. Everything in soccer revolves around touches. Touch the ball and make good things happen.

The kid-talk is genuine. They are very candid in declaring or describing a good touch and in explaining how a touch failed. Interestingly, they talk about the importance of seeing ahead – how their preparation for a touch needs to be viewed by the next two or three touches to follow. Few touches immediately result in a score, but a quality touch in a sequence of quality touches can lead to a score or keep an opponent from scoring.

The same questions can be asked about what happens in a classroom at school. Causing learning is all about touches, of a different yet similar kind.

“How may interactions did a teacher have with a student?”

“How many of these were quality interactions?”

“And, what did the teacher and student do with their quality interactions?”

Like watching soccer, I visit classrooms to watch and listen for how a teacher causes each child in class to learn in that specific period of instruction. Unlike my viewing of soccer, I know what quality touches or interactions in a classroom look, sound and feel like. I look for a teacher’s intentional touches.

  • Questions or statements a teacher directs at the class or at a particular group of students to cause them to think and respond, to apply a problem resolution and share their solution with classmates, and to ask questions or make statements to set up the next questions.
  • Questions asked of a specific student to elicit a specific response.
  • Kicked questions that use one student’s response to seek agreement or disagreement from another student or to ask for add-on thinking from successive students.
  • Questions that are not to be answered immediately, but after more information and thinking have been exposed.
  • Questions that expose students’ readiness for the next teaching.

I listen for student questions and statements that expose what they know and can do with confidence, what they are unsure of, and what is just plain misunderstood. And, I listen for the teacher’s responses, the touches that reinforce, build confidence, clarify and correct. This type of interaction is essential. If there is a strong sense of teamwork between students and their teacher, I expect to hear these touches all the time. If there is no trust between students and their teacher, students will not risk exposing their uncertainties.

The sociometrics of classroom interactions are fascinating and telling. When the interactions ping-pong around between teacher and students, kids are scoring all the time. When the interactions are stilted, contrived, unidirectional, and closed, there is little scoring. Students just wait for the quiz or test without confidence that every student is able to share in a good score.

Interactions can be questions, as shown above. Interactions can be visual looks of support and reinforcement, quizzical looks that ask a question without words, a physical proximity that says “I care”, a kneeling down next to a child’s chair to make a conversation private, and a smile to say “well done.” A tally of the interactions between a teacher and all the students in a class rises to the thousands every day. How many are quality interactions?

For teachers, the ability to make quality interactions is a learned and acquired skill set. It is intentional within a teaching and learning design. It is mentally rehearsed. It is practiced often enough that students will risk their engagement. Good interactions beget more good interactions. Quality interactions are the heart and soul of good teaching.

Every now and then, I hear teacher-talk that sounds like kid-talk about their soccer game, talking about how well a teaching episode felt as a result of quality interactions. Teachers know all about quality and no-quality touches with students.  The task is increase the number of quality, diminish the number of no-quality, and improve the likelihood of student scoring.  Goal!!!!!!

Suspending Reality Can Cause Learning.

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When a teacher suspends reality for the duration of an instructional unit, children have few limits to their learning.  Suspension opens possibilities for each child’s thinking and doing that the conditions of instructional normalcy and “same old” can limit.  While not quite make-believe, a suspended reality induces creativity and alternative thinking, and invites exploration and risk taking.

Close your eyes and listen.

A classroom is Never-Never Land for children when a teacher learns how to suspend reality.  She doesn’t need Tinkerbell’s dust.  As mistress of her teaching domain, she says, “Close your eyes and listen” as she walks around the classroom placing things on the tables around which children were seated.  “We are now in a place long ago when people just like you were trying to understand how to count their possessions and the things they saw in their world.  They knew there was more than one of almost everything, but they did not have any ideas about how number them.  When you open your eyes, you will find two piles of things on your table.  Your first job is to find a way to tell me how you determined how many things are in each pile.  Your second job is to tell me how you can combine the objects in the two piles into one pile without recounting them.  And your third job is to tell me how you can remove some of the items in the larger pile so that you have two equal piles with some items left over.  When you have completed each job, you will explain your thinking and reasoning to me.”  She waits while silently counting to 30.  “Oh, there is a slip of paper next to your piles with these three jobs listed.  And I expect that each table may have differing yet very appropriate explanations for me.”  She waits while silently counting to 15.  “Now open your eyes and begin.”  If children have questions, she answers the children at their table directly and not the entire class.

Problem-based learning (PBL)

I first encountered suspended realities at teacher workshops in problem-based learning at the Illinois Math and Science Academy in the late 1990s.  Our workshop team was so enthused we pursued more training and then organized a district training in PBL so that all teachers, no matter their assignment could add PBL to their instructional toolbox.  We were into building instructional toolboxes.

Although our training was only to add a possible teaching tool for each teacher, we still experienced the usual change theory pathway of new programs.  Our goal was professional development and pleasingly we experienced many teachers who found value in a new teaching strategy.  Interestingly, our secondary teachers adopted PBL more quickly and thoroughly than our elementary teachers.  ELA, social studies, and science teachers, some veterans, and some early career teachers, modified selected units for PBL applications.  Each teacher embedded initial instruction, modeling, formative assessment, and instructional adjustment in their PBL units, but these came at different places and times in their unit’s progression compared to their usual unit designs.

Twenty-plus years later veterans of our PBL training still display aspects of suspended realities.  They have refined their applications, made the teaching tool more their own, and use it wisely to cause children to learn.

Student-centeredness causes learning.

The big Duh! of suspending reality lies in the acceptance of student-centered thinking and outcomes.  Teachers assure that key skill sets, content, and concepts are taught and learned during suspended reality.  Post-assessments indicate that student learning in PBL or suspended reality units is as strong if not stronger than in traditional directed instruction units of learning.  The real differential is in student engagement.  When children understand the power that “you explain it me” it allows them to create answers, solutions, and outcomes, opens their willingness to think beyond “usual” and past “this is how I usually act/think in class”, and their level of excitement and “I can do” accelerates. 

We can only smile proudly at the conclusion of a suspended lesson or unit and a child demonstrates learning of the academic content and skills, an ability to hold out an individualized product, explain a solution that both makes sense to her and to her teacher, and be independent of other children or groups of children.

Using tools to cause children to learn – isn’t this why we became teachers of children?

Should I Know or Just Google It?

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A daily deluge of information from more than a thousand possible media sources requires a person to either have a broad background knowledge or constantly Google everything that is not familiar.  What a gift children receive from schools that intentionally teach a breadth and depth of academic subjects.  While graduation plans focus on post-secondary and career goals, it is a child’s knowledge of a broad range of subjects developed in grades 4 – 12, when they read to learn, that serves them on a daily basis in life after school. 

Today’s news – a case in point.

News comes to us in snippets.  Quick, short bursts of information that assume we have contextual knowledge within which to understand the momentary news flash.

  • The Houthis in Yemen are attacking merchant vessels in the Red Sea.  The Houthis, backed by Iran, are supporting the Palestinian cause in Gaza. 
  • The jet stream has drifted so far north that temps in Alaska will be in the 40s in January. 
  • Ozempic, developed to control type 2 diabetes, can assist others in dramatic weight loss. 
  • More than 350,000 jobs were added to the US economy in the past month.
  • The House may refuse to consider a bi-partisan bill passed by the Senate and kill an attempt to resolve border problems.

Being informed about current events requires an ever-broadening background knowledge of geography, politics, culture and religion, history, climate, meteorology, and prescriptive medicine to name only a few topics.  The news snippets jump from one to another so quickly and without providing context that a casual observer can easily throw up their hands with a “This is too much for me!”.  Of course, this is said assuming folks want to be informed. 

Scaffolds and spirals power background knowledge development.

Good curricular design in schools is built upon a planned instruction of subjects at the right time and at the right developmental level.  Coupled with teaching strategies that reinforce, expand, and grow a child’s knowledge base, children gain an active and working contextual knowledge of their world.  Graduates obviously do not know everything; they are not walking encyclopedias.  But their background knowledge is adequate for them to know that the issue of Israel and an independent Palestinian state has been a continuing and unresolved conflict since the end of WW2.  They know where the Red Sea is on the globe and how the Red Sea fits into global maritime routes.  And they know that the west-to-east jet stream directs weather patterns across North America and a jet stream across Alaska will cause the lower 48 states to have warmer to hotter temperatures.

Instruction of background knowledge is scaffolded beginning in early elementary classes so that all children have access to general information. Scaffolding ensures that all children receive developmentally appropriate learning.  Initial instruction provides facts that are developed into generalizations and generalizations are applied to newer information so that similarities and differences can be analyzed and evaluated.  Across grade levels information is spiraled from simple facts to increasingly complex and sophisticated knowledge.  Although children learn about United State history in elementary, middle school, and high school, each new rung on the social studies spiral causes more extensive understanding and consideration of our historical events and their importance to what is happening in our country today.

Taken as a whole, social studies, sciences, the arts, language and communications, human relationships each play a part in completing a child’s background knowledge.  It is impossible to sort out, to overvalue or devalue any educational experience, as all experiences lead to a better educated graduate – one who is prepared for a greater understanding of their world.

What knowledge is essential?

Robert Marzano in “Building Background Knowledge for Academic Achievement: Research on What Works in Schools (ASCD, 2004) wrote that our capacity to access and use background knowledge relies upon innate fluid intelligence and the frequency and repetition of our academic experiences or intentional learning episodes.  Marzano provides educators in this work and others with both the research and the “game plan” for instructional designs that will teach all children a wealth of content knowledge.  He addresses how educators can develop deep and meaningful academic experiences that will enrich a child’s mental storehouse of background knowledge.  In the book’s appendix, Marzano categorizes background/content knowledge in groupings that make learning of associated facts more effective and efficient.  I am a great fan of Marzano and his clinical approach to presenting strategies for improving the education of all children. 

The issue of fluid intelligence is child centric.  Ken Jennings, the GOAT of TV’s Jeopardy! may best personify the combination of fluid intelligence and intentional learning.  His quick-fire knowledge of trivia displays a phenomenal cache of specific AND background knowledge and his gift of instant recall.

Another author, E. D. Hirsch, Jr., wrote and later updated his take on “Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know”.  Hirsch makes a compelling argument that for a person today to understand current events and trends in the news a person must have contextual background knowledge.  Without background everything is new news.  A reading of Cultural Literacy is a wonderful checkpoint of what one knows, knew but forgot, or should relearn. 

Google and Siri are great!

When I was a child, my parents invested in a set of encyclopedias.  Our 1958 set of the Compton’s Encyclopedia truly was a financial investment as well as the purchase of “the” family source for things we did not know about.  We “dog eared” too many pages believing that turning down the corner of the page would always allow us to get right back to the latest facts we had learned.  Whether at home or in a library, sets of encyclopedias were our go to source for information.  However, like the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, encyclopedias and almanacs were as up to date as the day of the first printing and today they are museum pieces.

The Internet and search engines changed the world.  With a few keystrokes or spoken words, facts and information are at our fingertips.  Many children today tell me that it is not worth their time to study school subjects, because Google or Siri will tell them what they need to know.  In fact, I often am told that a college education is a waste of time and money, because “Google will tell me everything I need to know”.

Google or ask Siri to know but develop background knowledge to understand. 

I confess to being an avid Googler and asker of Siri.  There are facts and information I do not know or have forgotten and these two are always willing to inform me.  My tablet, phone, and watch are conduits to a world of facts.  I ask and am told, but I do not always understand. 

News about Red Sea connects with me because I live near the bay of Green Bay, WI.  Green Bay is about 17 miles wide from where I live in Door County to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.  I was standing at a Door County overlook seeing the coast of the UP in the distance when I Googled the width of the Red Sea near Yemen.  I learned the narrowest width is 20 miles.  I have seen 1000-foot ore boats on the Great Lakes and Maersk cargo ships sea.  A Maersk is about 1300 feet in length.  As I looked to the north over the bay, I could visualize a cargo ship and its vulnerability to attack along the gauntlet of the Red Sea.  Google gave me the Red Sea dimension.  Background knowledge provided a context against which that dimension could be compared and an appreciation of what is happening in the Red Sea today.

Finally, background knowledge helps us to answer “so what” questions.  Facts are just facts outside of the framework of contextual question.  It is a fact that the world produces enough food each year to feed the entire population.  It also is a fact that people die of starvation every day.  Background knowledge sadly fills in the story between these two facts. 

Whenever I am in conversation with children, I listen to what they have to say and almost always respond with “… what do you think (or how do you feel) about that?”.  As children learn new information, we must assist them to put their new learning into context.  It starts with their thinking and feeling.  Once they begin to personally relate to the information, that information moves into Marzano’s field of background knowledge.

A child can Google or ask Siri anything, but only the child can make sense of what Google or Siri says.

Your Personal Pantheon of Teachers

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Miss Blaine knew.  She knew I liked stories and histories and language.  If I could read about it and begin to imagine it, I could know it and the more I read and imagined the more I wanted to learn.  And, she knew I was a quiet student seldom raising my hand but could give illustrated answers when called upon.  Miss Blaine knew me.  She was my teacher for two years – 4th and 5th grade, back-to-back with Miss Blaine – in the late 1950s.

Miss Blaine knew Carol and Richard and Mike W and Bruce.  They topped all the weekly charts for the 32 students in our classroom; those were early Boomer years when all classrooms were bulging.  Spelling, arithmetic quizzes, science check tests and annual ITBS assessments – these were our straight A’s champs week in and week out.   She fed them more assignments than the rest of us, and more comments on their projects, and more difficult books to read.  The more she gave, the better they did.  Miss Blaine knew Dick and Donnie and Steve Y struggled to read and do their math and she gave them more of her one-on-one time.  She knew when a child needed the boost of leading the class from her room to Miss Snyder’s art room, the little self-esteem boost of being picked by Miss Blaine to lead.

Miss Blaine knew how to hook each child in her classroom to cause each of us to learn.  She never looked at us sitting in our rows of desks with a solitary gaze but flitted her eyes from child to child as she spoke so that we knew she was talking to each of us intentionally.  She was short in stature and did not need to kneel or bend very far when she stood by my desk to comment on my work or ask a guiding question to keep me on track.  With eyes shut I can still summon her presence and my want to be a better student, to get more problems right on my nemesis math assignments, because she thought I could.

I would like to think that every student in every school experiences their own Miss Blaine.  Across the fourteen years of 4K-12 education, a random draw of Miss Blaine’s in elementary, middle, and high school, in grade level classes and in subject classes, is enough to make school and learning meaningful.  It is enough hooking by master teachers to keep children self-invested in their learning.

Consider your own history as a student.  Can you name your Miss Blaines?  Can you remember how specific teachers made a difference in your school life?  In your heart of hearts you know them as they knew you.

Miss Blaine, Mrs. Wendlent, Mr. Marshall, Mrs. McArthur, Mr. Cummings, Mr. Chute, Mr. Mixdorf, Mr. Hubacek – I am eternally grateful that you taught me. 

My listing these names does not mean I did not learn from each of the 80+ teachers who were mine in my kindergarten through senior year experience.  I indeed learned from all.  But, there really is a difference in a child’s connections with their teachers.  Some connections are as routine and pedestrian as the spending of common time and the management of 180 days’ of school work.  Other connections mark you for your lifetime.

My Miss Blaine is long gone, as are almost all my teachers.  So are many of my classmates.  We know that the effects of a person’s lifetime are short-lived, but while we live and remember the effects of the teachers who knew us and hooked us as learning children, the glory of their good teaching prevails.