Rewiring STEM education 08-09

The idea that science skills are innate and great discoveries are made only by “lone geniuses” is losing traction in STEM. 

Before Lauren Aguilar began her freshman year of college, she had dreams of becoming a neuroscientist. She remembers sitting in a lecture hall for her very first course, Chemistry 101. The professor had required the students to read the first chapter of the textbook before arriving. As someone with a passion for STEM who had excelled in high school, Aguilar had been confident the course was going to go well.

But then she, a Latina woman, looked around the room. She didn’t see many people who looked like her, either women or men or women of color. “The seed of doubt was planted right then,” she says. “If there aren’t people like me here, then maybe this field isn’t for people like me.”

The professor began the class with a demand: Anyone who didn’t understand everything in the first chapter perfectly should immediately drop the class.

“I said, well, I didn’t understand everything perfectly, so this isn’t for me,” she says. “And right then and there I dropped that course and dropped that major. That one experience absolutely changed the course of my career.” 

This out-of-place feeling is not uncommon in STEM and contributes to the lack of diversity in STEM fields. The NSF’s 2018 STEM Inclusion Study showed that women and racial and ethnic minorities, as well as those who identify as LGBTQ and those with disability status, report more feelings of marginalization and experiences of exclusion in STEM fields compared to white men. 

The experience didn’t derail Aguilar’s dreams of a career in STEM. Instead, it propelled her into another field: social psychology. She wanted to try to understand what leads some people to feel like they belong in certain fields where others don’t, and how that leads to things like career engagement, learning outcomes, teamwork and innovation. Aguilar is now a diversity and inclusion consultant, helping organizations, many of them STEM related, create cultures of inclusion and belonging.

Breaking the mindset

According to Micha Kilburn, director of Outreach and Education at the National Science Foundation’s Joint Institute for Nuclear Astrophysics Center for the Evolution of the Elements, people have been studying STEM education for as long as we’ve been doing science. But it wasn’t until recent decades that these studies became more formal. Since then, the field of STEM education studies has been on the rise, with studies done both in academia and in industry, many dealing with diversity, inclusion and intervention. 

As part of her postdoctoral research at Stanford University, Aguilar collaborated with her advisor, Greg Walton, an associate professor in the department of psychology, and Nobel Laureate Carl Wieman, a professor in the department of physics and in the Graduate School of Education, to bring insights about STEM education to the field of physics and give educators tools to increase diversity in the field. In 2014, they published a paper called “Psychological insights for improved physics teaching” in Physics Today.

One important insight drawn in the paper, Aguilar says, is the idea of a “growth mindset,” which originated with Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck in her book Mindset. 

“Growth mindset is a set of beliefs that talent, intelligence and skill can be grown and exercised like a muscle, rather than being fixed or innate, like eye color,” she says. “If you have a fixed mindset, the most important goal is to prove your intelligence at all costs. When you run up against dead ends or are struggling and putting a lot of effort into something, it threatens your view of your intelligence and makes you fear that other people might find you out. 

“For people who have a growth mindset, effort is an exciting opportunity to learn and grow. It means you’re building that talent.”

In her research, Dweck found that these two mindsets lead to different learning processes and outcomes, causing people to engage in learning in very different ways. 

“Dweck has shown how different types of praise can produce different mindsets in children,” Wieman says. “A strong fixed mindset in a learner, teacher or parent is very much a self-fulfilling prophecy if nothing is done to intervene. The belief that you cannot succeed, and prominent authority figures telling you that you cannot succeed, is very effective at ensuring most people will not be successful at a challenging task. Even relatively small interventions can shift students of all ages from a fixed to a more growth mindset, and their performance improves accordingly.”

Genius culture

According to Aguilar, studies have shown that fixed mindsets are much more prevalent in STEM fields than in liberal arts.

“Something that’s problematic for STEM is this idea of a lone genius scientist,” she says. “It’s a stereotype about how work gets done that really leads people who don’t fit that stereotype to feel like they don’t belong.”

In more mathematical sciences such as physics, Wieman says, the idea that the skills required to succeed are innate is particularly persistent. 

“These beliefs are most strongly linked to math in our society,” Wieman says. “At some point it became fashionable to be ‘stupid’ in math and science. Rather than saying you or your child isn’t working hard enough and that’s why they’re doing poorly in math, you can say ‘he just doesn’t have a brain that is good for math.’”

Allison Olshefke, a recent physics graduate from the University of Notre Dame, believes that the idea that physics skills are innate has a lot to do with the history of the field. 

“I think there’s just this historical idea that the people who have made it really big in physics and have lasted through the ages were just inherently brilliant,” Olshefke says. “So that became what was valued as what was needed to make those kinds of contributions. 

“And that just reinforces itself. The people who show promise earlier on in physics without having to work as hard for whatever reason are going to be encouraged more from the beginning, and that encouragement is going to keep them going. And then we learn from that experience to encourage those same types of people in the next generation.”

But despite the pervasiveness of the idea that STEM skills are innate, discoveries in science are more often than not a product of hard work and collaboration, as evidenced by the recent discoveries of gravitational waves and the Higgs boson by experiments made up of thousands of scientists each. And, Olshefke adds, it’s not as if people are born with the ability to do calculus.

“The idea that math is language you need to learn to speak goes along with the growth mindset,” Olshefke says. “If you’re learning a new language, it’s going to look and sound completely unintelligible to you when you begin, but then as you work and practice, it’s going to get easier to understand.”

In an article called ‘The cult of genius,’ Julianne Dalcanton of the University of Washington says that in physics, there’s no more damning phrase than saying someone is a “hard worker.” In general, Kilburn says, our society is much more likely to view white and Asian men as brilliant, and women and other underrepresented minorities as hardworking.

“This idea that you have to be born a genius or born with talent hits the fields that are more mathematically inclined, in particular physics,” Kilburn says. “Physics, in particular particle theory, is at the far edge of the mindset that innate brilliance is the most important quality required to succeed. There have been published studies that show the more the field values brilliance or innate talent over dedication, the fewer women and underrepresented minorities that they have.”

Hidden biases and combatting stereotypes

Olshefke, who will soon begin a graduate program at Notre Dame to become a high school math teacher, spent a lot of her undergraduate career doing physics education research. Olshefke met Kilburn at a luncheon and found that the questions she was asking about gender diversity in physics and STEM resonated with her own experiences as a woman pursuing physics.

Olshefke became involved with a study Kilburn was doing in which they evaluated letters of recommendation written by high school teachers. They had seen in previous research that in academic letters of recommendation, there are language differences based on the gender of the applicant. 

“We wanted to find out if these implicit biases extended into high school letters of recommendation as well, since these letters of recommendation are written at a crucial time when students are applying to colleges and programs,” Olshefke says. “We wanted to make sure that everybody is getting recommended in a way that’s going to create an equal playing field for admittance into programs for STEM.”

They looked at letters of recommendation high school teachers had written for Notre Dame’s high school programs from 2013 to 2017. They looked through more than 1700 applications, pulling out words from categories that had been pointed out in previous research to try to identify differences between letters written for men and women. 

“We ended up really only focusing on two of the categories: grindstone words and ability words,” Olshefke says. “Grindstone words describe students as working hard, putting in a lot of effort, while ability words describe natural talent and innate skill. This idea that women are described as working hard more often and men were more likely to be described as innately talented was reflected in the letters that we read. 

“Yet when we looked at the quantitative portion of the recommendation where teachers rated students in different categories, women and men were rated identically throughout all of those. So we saw this disconnect between how teachers are quantitatively rating their students and how they're qualitatively describing their students.”

A fixed mindset can keep programs from admitting a diverse pool of candidates, and it can also drive candidates away, Aguilar says. When a STEM field or a particular STEM department, research center or firm espouses a fixed mindset, research shows that women and underrepresented minorities feel less trust in that organization. 

“They’re worried about not belonging,” she says. “They’re worried that they're going to be seen through the lens of a stereotype. Stereotypes are really just fixed perceptions of people.”

This sentiment resonates strongly with Olshefke, who was one of only three women physics majors in her year.

“As a woman in STEM,” she says, “you’d be less likely to raise your hand and ask a question during lecture because you didn’t want to reflect badly on women in physics. You’d be more afraid to go to office hours. You’d be worried people would think, ‘Oh, women don't understand things as quickly as men.’ Even though nobody is blatantly excluding you from doing anything, there’s still a little bit more fear because you’re different from everyone else.”

Olshefke remembers a time in high school when she was passed up for an “outstanding physics student” award because her teacher felt she didn’t ask enough questions in class. 

“I was the only girl in my class, so I wasn’t comfortable asking questions,” she says. “There was just a lack of understanding of what I was feeling in the class. I think it speaks to the same kind of lack of knowledge about how women and men are experiencing different worlds as they go through physics.”

Changing the face of STEM

One way to confront the issue of inequalities in STEM is by having conversations about the experiences of women and underrepresented minorities in physics. 

“There needs to be a discussion of experiences and what the issues actually are,” Olshefke says. “Having an open classroom and a supportive teacher who’s willing to talk about the issues that their students are going through will make a huge difference. It matches up really well with the growth mindset.”

When organizations have this growth mindset, Aguilar says, individuals from underrepresented backgrounds feel like they are going to be seen as individuals, not stereotypes, and respected and valued for their own contributions. They feel like they’ll have a chance to learn and grow.

“Decades of research has shown us that a growth mindset leads us to be more effective learners, teachers and managers, as well as creates a culture of inclusion and diversity in our STEM education centers,” she says. “Our brains develop and grow new neuronal connections every day. So if we believe in neuroplasticity, we need to believe in the growth mindset.”

Aguilar adds that the research has shown that diversity leads to better decision-making and more innovation. She cites a research study done with juries that compared one jury of all white jurors to another of mixed races. The juries had been asked to listen to a case and make a decision at the end. The researchers found that the more racially diverse juries actually considered more of the facts of the case in their deliberation and reached a more accurate or fair decision. 

“The reason was that each person felt like they couldn’t assume the perspective of everyone in the room,” she says. “They had to really think about each piece of information from all different angles and not make assumptions about what people would think or believe. It not only brings more ideas to the table, but it helps us challenge our own assumptions, be better thinkers and argue our points more clearly. It’s not just a nice-to-have, diversity is a must have to ensure that we make the best decisions and create the most innovative science.”

Learning to appreciate physics

In physics in particular, Kilburn says, having more diversity and inclusion could lead to new frames of thought and revolutions in our understanding of the universe.

“We think of physics as a very objective science, but for something to be truly objective, you have to ask all the questions and look at it from all perspectives,” she says. “If you’re training everybody through the same system and choosing the same types of people, then you’re going to ask the same types of questions. You might miss out on some of those left-field questions that lead to huge breakthroughs. If we want to be a really objective science, we have to ask questions from all angles, which requires people from all different backgrounds.”

Kilburn adds that creating a more inclusive culture in STEM will not just increase diversity in the fields but will also enable others to have an appreciation for it as well. 

“As soon as you tell somebody that you’re a physicist,” she says, “some of the most common responses are ‘I hated that class,’ or ‘I could never do that, you’re so smart.’ All students enter and leave the field with different proficiencies, but they all are capable of learning and appreciating the subject more. 

“The arts do this: Just because you couldn’t play the flute doesn’t mean you stopped listening to and appreciating music. I think that we don’t focus on physics appreciation as much as we could to combat that socially awkward loner genius stereotype.”

According to Wieman, everyone, regardless of their career, will be able to make better decisions if they have some understanding of STEM and how to use it. 

“Our way of life is so based on technology that one is regularly confronted by issues at work and home where STEM can help a person make better decisions,” he says. 

“More importantly, mankind is faced with critical decisions about things like energy sources and use of resources that will impact our world and species far into the future. These issues are fundamentally technical at their heart, so a person cannot make wise decisions on these issues without a grasp of STEM.  If we want to preserve democracy and our world, we must have all students learn STEM better, which research shows is quite possible if we improve the way we teach.”

View at the original source  

Please also read Shyam's article on STEM education.....

STEM (Science,Technology,Engineering,& Math) education in USA, The initiative, The interest, The action.  

Can the Minerva Model of Learning disrupt higher Education...04-14

Traditional universities — including Ivy League schools — fail to deliver the kind of learning that ensures employability. That perspective inspired Ben Nelson, founder and CEO of the six-year-old Minerva Schools in San Francisco. His goal is to reinvent higher education and to provide students with high-quality learning opportunities at a fraction of the cost of an undergraduate degree at an elite school. While tuition at top-tier universities in the U.S. can run more than $40,000 a year, Minerva charges $12,950 a year, according to its website. In a recent test, its students showed superior results compared to traditional universities while also attracting a large number of applicants.

Minerva is a disruptor and the traditional university establishment needs to adapt to its model and perhaps improve on it, according to Jerry (Yoram) Wind, emeritus marketing professor at Wharton. Nelson, who was previously president of Snapfish, an online photo hosting and printing service, and Wind spoke to Knowledge@Wharton about why the higher education model needs to change, and how the Minerva model could help.

An edited transcript of the conversation follows.

Knowledge@Wharton: Jerry, where is the future of education headed?

Jerry Wind: The future is now. It has been here for a while, and with Minerva, Ben has recreated the university of the future. Ben, describe briefly the Minerva concept, and then go into the recent findings of the CLA report (Minerva’s Collegiate Learning Assessment test).

Ben Nelson: We refer to Minerva as having been built as an “intentional university.” Everything about the design of the institution, what we teach, how we teach and where we teach it is based on what we know, and through empirical evidence, is effective.

In what we teach, we are classical in our approach, even though we’re [also] modern and progressive in the way we teach. For example, if you think about the purpose of a liberal arts education, or what the great American universities purport to teach, they will say ‘We teach you how to think critically, how to problem-solve, how to think about the way the world works and to be global, and how to communicate effectively.

“Universities … basically teach you academic subject matter and they hope you pick up all of the other stuff by accident.”
–Ben Nelson

When you actually look at how universities attempt to do it, they basically teach you academic subject matter and they hope you pick up all of the other stuff by accident.

We decided to have a curriculum that teaches these things, that breaks down critical thinking, creative thinking, effective interactions, and effective communications into component parts. [We wanted to make] sure that we don’t just teach them conceptually, and don’t just teach them in a context, but actually explain the concept and then have our students apply them actively from context to context to context.

Knowledge@Wharton: Could you share an example of how you do that?

Nelson: One aspect of critical thinking, for example, is evaluating claims. There are various ways of evaluating claims. Sometimes you use logic, sometimes you use reasoning, which is different than logic, sometimes you do statistical analysis which is different than the other two, and sometimes you just think of a counter example.

Now there are different [types] of critical thinking. One example: making a decision tradeoff. Should we go down Path A or Path B? The technique for making a decision tradeoff is perhaps thinking through the cost-benefit analysis, which is a type of critical thinking.

If you say ‘I’m going to teach you critical thinking’ and you just try to teach it as a thing you will never succeed. [It is important to] go through it systemically and do the component parts – that’s the first aspect.

The second aspect is if you teach a person an idea, say evaluation of claims, the mind gets trained in a particular context. When somebody makes a claim, let’s say on an investment opportunity, or a political claim, the mind doesn’t really transfer those skills from one field to another. This is one of the fundamental problems of transferrable education. The way that you teach that is to provide exercise and applications in multiple fields.

How we teach is also radically different. The science of learning shows that the dissemination of information [through] lectures and test-based methodology simply doesn’t work. Six months after the end of a traditional lecture and test-based class, 90% of the material you were supposed to have learned is gone from your mind. In an active learning environment you struggle through information, and two years after the end of the class you retain 70%.

All of our classes, despite [being] small seminars with 15 to 19 students at a time, are done via live video online where there’s a camera pointed at every student’s face. The students are actively engaged with the materials, [and it is] not the professor lecturing — professors are not allowed to talk for more than four minutes at a time. The students get feedback on how they apply what they [learn].
“Six months after the end of a traditional lecture and test-based class, 90% of the material you were supposed to have learned is gone from your mind.”
–Ben Nelson

Lastly [it is about] where we teach. We have created a university that takes advantage of the best the world has to offer. Being a Penn graduate, I always gravitated towards the idea of the urban campus. Our students live in the heart of cities in residence halls together, and have a very strong community. They spend their first year in the heart of San Francisco, but over the next three years across six semesters, as a cohort, as a group, they will travel and live in six different countries. So in their second year they go to Seoul and Hyderabad, and then to Berlin and Buenos Aires, then London and Taipei, and come back to San Francisco for a month to manifest their education and graduate.
Wind: While the concept is appealing, does it work? Describe the CLA test, and then talk about the implications of [your approach].

Nelson: The Collegiate Learning Assessment is provided by a third party nonprofit that has been testing and assessing students’ progress on critical thinking, problem-solving, scientific reasoning and effective communication skills for many years. It’s been administered to hundreds of thousands of students across hundreds of universities. It is administered to students at the beginning of their first year and at the end of their fourth year, and so you can measure [the] progress of students.

We provided [our students] the first-year test just before they started the first class at the beginning of the year. But rather than waiting four years, we gave our students the fourth-year test at the end of their first year, Eight months later, the results shocked us. Not only did our students after eight months have the highest composite score in the country compared to any other university that was assessing their students, the delta improvement they accomplished was higher than what the CLA has seen any university accomplish over four years.

Knowledge@Wharton: What drove those results?

Nelson: The silly answer would be to say, ‘Oh we’re brilliant and we’re great, and look at how amazing what we do is.’ The fact of the matter is we’ve got a lot of room to grow and improve. These results in many ways are much more damning of the existing system than they are generating praise for our brilliance.

We have taken publicly available scientifically published data on how the mind works. We’ve broken down the things that every university says that they teach or that they want to teach, and merely spent time putting together a curriculum that does that, and we’ve offered it to students. We’ve just done what anybody who would rationally approach trying to create a solution to a problem do.

I would bet you that if you had 100 institutions or 100 groups of people that were to do the same thing we would have done from scratch, we would have probably been better than some of them, maybe most of them, but not all of them. There would be some that on their first try would be even better than [us].

Wind: This is the value of idealized design. As opposed to trying to fix the current educational system by adding another course or trying to create a cross-disciplinary course, [Minerva] reexamines the whole purpose of education.

They didn’t go far enough, which is they are still within an academic context, and probably they will relax the academic context that is [with] semesters and the like, and get even better results. But even within this academic context and constraints, what they have done is amazing  –  the curriculum, the concept, and the way it’s developed for the benefit of the learner, and not the benefit of the faculty.

The [first] implication is, if you had a choice and you wanted to go to a university now, where would you go? If you want really great education, go to Minerva; [but if] you want to network, go to one of the top five schools — Penn, Harvard, Princeton, Yale and MIT. Minerva offers probably a different network than the traditional ones because it is a network of people who are willing to do it.

Nelson: Last year, for our third class ever, we received 20,400 applications. That is more applicants than MIT or Dartmouth got. The network you get in a Wharton or Harvard or Yale or what-have-you is [of] a certain kind. It is overwhelmingly American, [with] 80% or 90% from the U.S., and usually from particular socioeconomic backgrounds. Even though there is some diversity, it’s heavily weighted [in favor of that profile].

The Minerva network is radically different because 80% of our students are not from the U.S. — they come from 61 countries. We received these 20,000 applications from 179 countries. The experience and the network you build as you travel and live as a resident in these seven countries is unparalleled. If you want a global footprint, that’s what we provide.

Wind: The current educational system does not work. Implication two is that [universities] have to realize that they are being disrupted. At this stage [it is on a] small scale, but if other universities start adopting it, it can [become] large scale. [Minerva is] the disruptor here, and the signal to the legacy universities is, our model does not work. Stop trying to fix it by adding another Band-Aid, but try to rethink the educational system. And here you have a wonderful blueprint that works.

Nelson: We just wrote a book called Building the Intentional University, which is a blueprint for how other universities can create their own Minervas or reform in that sense. We are a residential university that grants undergraduate degrees with 120 credit hours, with majors and minors and electives and a general education curriculum. We are plug-and-play for universities. We offer potential salvation from disruption.

“The future is now. It has been here for a while, and with Minerva, Ben has recreated the university of the future.”
–Jerry (Yoram) Wind

What I have worried about is the other kind of disruptive force that can attack universities [and be] destructive, in the sense that in six months you get a high school degree, go to a boot camp and then get a six-figure job being a software programmer. We have put together an educational experience that enables university graduates to be better prepared than [with that] six-month boot camp. Because they are able to do higher level problem solving, they are going to be [software] architects as opposed to the programmers. They’re going to the ones that in a world of Watson and artificial intelligence and outsourcing are going to be much more future-proof.

Wind: An increasing number of people view employability as being critical, and a traditional university degree does not guarantee employability, [but] the new non-degree programs guarantee you a [job] position.

Knowledge@Wharton: Three or four years ago, a big potential disruptor was the so-called MOOC, or the Massive Open Online Course. A number of platforms came up [such as] Coursera, Udacity and EdX. It seemed like they were going to be disruptive, but that doesn’t seem to have happened. What happened with that so-called disruption and why did it fail?

Nelson: The jury is still somewhat out on that, and let me give you an example of what I think is happening on the surface. MIT had a master’s program in supply chain logistics, and it cost $60,000 for a two-semester program. As an experiment, [they put the] first semester on MOOCs, and rather than charging $30,000 for it, [gave] it away for free. If you want to get credit for it pay $250, [write] an exam, and then if you score well you [go] to campus, do a one-semester supplement, pay $30,000 and get a master’s degree.

This [halves] the cost of higher education for a master’s degree. Imagine if the Ivy League – or any university – [extended that to] all the courses they give academic credit for. Of the $250,000 that they are used to collecting and are reliant on [for each degree course, they] can only collect $100,000 because $150,000 is effectively given away for free. So far no university has an incentive to rock the boat too much on this. [However,] just because the disruption does not happen immediately doesn’t mean it won’t happen.

Wind: The concern is that especially for the leading universities, it’s an excuse not to innovate. They are saying, ‘Look how innovative we are; we have MOOCs, or we offer classes on Coursera,’ and basically the rest of the education stays exactly the same way as it was before. Some of the findings suggest that less than 5% of the people who start ever finish the courses on Coursera or EdX. But there are some encouraging signs that if you add to the traditional Coursera course or EdX interaction, and if you provide some more gamification principles in terms of getting involved, you can increase the numbers significantly.

The advantage of this — with MIT, Stanford, Penn and other universities putting all of these courses online — is that the role of the faculty becomes easier as a curator. This is the fundamental change that we have to see in education.

Knowledge@Wharton: [In addition to] a network, one other factor that the Ivy League universities offer is the brand. When you have this innovative model like Minerva, how do you establish a brand that is acceptable to students as well as employers?

Nelson: Minerva was built as a positive brand. When you meet somebody at Minerva you know that they have … been given systematic frameworks of analysis that they can apply effectively to the rest of the world. Our challenge is to propagate that brand, to get people aware of it. The good news is that the internet is a very good way of disseminating information. Brand building in today’s world doesn’t take centuries; it doesn’t even take decades.

Wind: The final word on branding is always [from] the consumer. One, the best carrier of the brand, and especially on the positive side, would be the alumni. So the value of the degree, the value of the Minerva experience is a function of how good the alumni are. Two, a lot [depends] of the employability and demand for the Minerva students.

Nelson: It’s too early to tell.

The Troublemakers 01-23

When students act out, why do we seek out flaws in their character? Shouldn't we instead search for the flaws in our schools and our teaching, holding us, the adults, primarily responsible?

When students act out, why do we seek out flaws in their character? Shouldn't we instead search for the flaws in our schools and our teaching, holding us, the adults, primarily responsible? Shouldn't we find better ways to understand the problem children, the ones we label the troublemakers?

I dreaded my first-period class. It was big and early — 29 bleary-eyed 11th- and 12th-graders yawning and slurping extra-large iced coffees. My students, recent immigrants and refugees from more than 25 different countries, spoke English with varying degrees of fluency, making my task of connecting with each particularly challenging.

And then there was Joe. 

He was funny, opinionated, and unceasing in his running commentary on our U.S. history class.

Sometimes it was a clarification: “It’s due when?” More often it was an opinion: “Those Nazis, I mean that’s messed up!”

He had one volume: loud. And he shared ideas as soon as they popped into his mind, unable to contain them a moment longer. His interjections could come at any time — during silent reading, group work, or while I was explaining an assignment. I was forever reminding him, “Please, Joe, try not to call out.” “Remember to raise your hand.” Sometimes I simply looked sternly in his direction.

He was always polite: “I got ya, Ms.” “Sorry, Ms.” “My bad, Ms.” He really would try. But three minutes later…

We teachers all have our Joes. Our students who consistently call out, talk back, refuse to participate or sit down or stay on task. They throw our lessons into disarray, make our heads pound. They keep us up at night strategizing, worrying. How can I connect? What strategies might work tomorrow? When, occasionally, these students miss school, class is unusually calm. Guiltily, we sigh with relief.

How do we reach and teach our troublemakers? Most teachers have binders brimming with ideas: shuffled seat assignments, tracking systems, rewards for on-point behavior. But when these fail, what can you do when it’s you alone in your class balancing 29 personalities, the clock ticking and your 40-minute-long class is almost up?

Too often schools’ response to misbehavior is exclusion: timeouts, visits to the principal’s office, suspensions, expulsions. It is the easy way out — often a form of triage when too many classes are overcrowded, understaffed, or undersupported. But, whatever the reason, exclusion damages our students’ futures.

Carla Shalaby, Ed.M.’09, Ed.D.’14, a former elementary school teacher, urges us to see and teach our most challenging students differently in her new book, Troublemakers: Lessons in Freedom from Young Children at School.

Shalaby introduces us to four rambunctious first- and second-graders: Zora, Lucas, Sean, and Marcus. These four have already been labeled as problems — by both school staff and peers. 

Shalaby set out to see school through their eyes. She followed them into classrooms and on school field trips. She accompanied them to the park with siblings, to karate class, and back home with their families. These four children leap off the page. They are daring, charismatic, silly, curious, creative.

But at school, they are outcasts. Shalaby paints a stark, but painfully recognizable portrait of a typical American classroom. School has “good students” and “bad students.” To be good is to follow teacher directions and rules, sit quietly, listen attentively, do what you’re told, conform. Those who deviate, question, or rebel are often excluded. And their exclusion sends a sharp message to their peers “that belonging to the classroom community is conditional, not absolute, contingent upon their willingness and ability to be a certain kind of person.”

Why is it, Shalaby asks, that when kids act out, we seek out flaws in their character? Shouldn’t we instead search for flaws in our schools and teaching — holding us, the adults, primarily responsible?

It is a question all educators should be asking.

Joe and I came to a head in late April. A guest speaker was finishing a presentation. Just as we were wrapping up, Joe shouted out, “Hey, you’re hot!” I regret to say I snapped. “Joe!” my voice loud and stern. “Come up here right now.” The bell rang, the class streamed out, and Joe shuffled up to my desk.

Troublemakers is not a book of strategies. Shalaby is clear that we cannot support our most disruptive students with cookie-cutter “behavior management” techniques. Rather than prescribe what to do, she offers up ideas for how to be, urging teachers to act first and foremost from a place of empathy, love, and understanding for all students.

But how do we as teachers go about putting this into action? In rereading the stories of these four young people, I was struck by six important truths these students teach us.

1. Keep children in class.

When we exclude our students, we are telling them: You don’t belong here. Exclusion shuts down opportunities for dialogue and understanding between us and our students. And exclusion triggers a vicious cycle. When we send students out, they miss essential academic content and skills. They return to class behind, confused, and even more likely to act out. These missed lessons add up and have long-lasting consequences. According to the Annie E. Casey Foundation, students who struggle to read proficiently by third grade are four times more likely to drop out or to fail high school. Across the country, approximately 3.5 million children are suspended from school annually. And African American and Latino students are three times more likely to be suspended than their white peers, according to 2014 data from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights.

2. Let children be heard, and really listen when they speak.

To be heard is to be respected and valued. I see the importance of this simple truth whenever I speak at length with a student. They come during lunch, or linger after school, seeking advice on how to talk with friends, parents. When I see a student upset, unusually surly, or argumentative, I try my best to carve out time to check in and see if they want to talk. Being open to listen, and being aware to ask, reinforces to our students that we see them and we value them. Frustratingly, too often rigid school schedules leave little space to meaningfully connect.

Joe and I finally sat down to talk, and to listen, on that late April afternoon. He shared with me his frustrations. I shared with him mine. We examined how I might feel when he interrupted the class and we examined the same interruption from his perspective. I shared my hopes for what he could achieve in my class; he shared his hopes, but also what he needed from me to achieve them. It was not a wholly

comfortable conversation for either of us, but it was a starting point.

In the following weeks and months, Joe still called out, still offered spontaneous commentary at full volume, but he did so less frequently. More often than before I intentionally asked him to lead a discussion or to share an opinion — creating space for him to be included, and to be heard.

No one wanted to work with Jenny. In groups, she argued, she was dogmatic, and she sulked when she didn’t get her way.

Mostly, Jenny was unpredictable. Some days she walked in with a bounce and a smile, eagerly pulling out her binder, taking notes in a flurry, and jabbing her hand into the air to confidently answer questions. Other days she slunk into class, slouching in her back corner seat, glowering.

In groups, she was the same. She could be full of ideas, ready to work and ready to encourage others to tackle assignments — be it a PowerPoint presentation on labor unions or an op-ed for our local paper. But other days she would stubbornly talk over her peers. When they didn’t comply, she refused to do any work at all.

I was at a loss about what to do.

3. Partner with families.

Teachers’ most powerful partners are our students’ families. They are the experts, our students’ first and most important teachers, and their fiercest advocates. Our families know their children’s strengths, their passions, and their struggles. Resounding research tells us that strong family partnership in schools is essential for student success, school success, and for our own success as teachers. These partnerships are perhaps most important for our troublemakers. We often only see one or two dimensions of our charges. What is more, we only see our students in a collective — as one of maybe 30 personalities vying for

attention. As Shalaby shows us when we follow Zora, Lucas, Sean, and Marcus outside classroom walls and school halls, we see strikingly different sides, personalities, and strengths of these young people. As teachers, we must try to know more of these dimensions.

Early in the fall I met with Jenny’s mother. Sitting together one evening I heard about Jenny’s journey to America, the family she left behind, her struggle to fit in. Her mother shared her hopes for Jenny’s future and some of the challenges she faced. We exchanged phone numbers and emails, and for the rest of the long year we checked in regularly.

And in the classroom, I shaped an approach from what I had learned. Every day I made a point of checking in — often in those few moments as students filtered in. “Today’s a bad day, Ms. Lander,” she would share with me. “I’m so sorry to hear that. Would you like to tell me why?” Often she would. Sometimes it was another class or friend that was proving frustrating; other times it was an argument with her mom. For such days we developed a pact. “What support can I give you?” I would ask. Jenny would think for a moment and then provide an idea. Maybe she needed to work solo, or maybe it would be helpful to write thoughts in her notebook. Sometimes simply sharing her mood seemed sufficient to help Jenny turn things around.

4. Seek out our students’ strengths.

All students have strengths. Perhaps they are avid photographers, basketball players, coders, or poets when not in school. But when it comes to our troublemakers, it can be easy for their assets to be overshadowed by behaviors that disrupt the carefully cultivated cultures of our classrooms. We cannot lose sight of these strengths. Yet it is not enough to know that our troublemakers are budding artists, scientists, and entrepreneurs. We must also seek to reframe and better understand the qualities we find most frustrating. Zora shouts out a reaction during read-aloud; her teacher labels her impulsive. But what if, Shalaby counters, we saw Zora’s expression as fearlessness? Sean is forever asking why. His teacher describes his behavior as badgering, but Sean’s mother sees him as questioning and curious.

In class, Jenny was often stubborn, demanding that other students follow her ideas, growing upset when they didn’t. What if I reframed her behavior? What if I saw Jenny’s obstinacy as confidence, a young woman unafraid to share ideas? Jenny had a powerful skill her peers could learn. What Jenny needed were strategies to help her leverage her confidence and tools to help her become a generous leader.

At lunch one day, I shared with her some of my observations. To my surprise, her eyes grew wide. Quietly she asked, “You think so, Ms. Lander?” “Yes I do, and I think you have real potential to be a class leader.” She was grinning.

And so we began, taking time in quiet moments to break down leadership skills, discussing elements she could practice. Jenny attacked each with a determined nod. She still struggled at times, still had bad days. But what I saw more and more was Jenny volunteering to lead and, slowly, succeeding.

I was worried about Henry. It was only week two, but already I could see him slipping into a pattern. He barely took notes and chattered continuously with the boys next to him. He had yet to turn in a piece of homework. But I noticed too that in discussions he was engaged, offering thoughtful comments about the growth of cities during the Industrial Revolution. I held Henry back one afternoon. I shared my observations. How could I support his learning? He looked around the empty classroom.

“I should probably move seats,” he mused.

“That sounds like a strong idea. Where would be best for you to sit?” I asked. We talked through different possibilities and he settled on a spot across the room, among another, more studious, but also silly group of boys.

The next morning, Henry strode confidently to his new seat, and as the class progressed, it was as if another child had walked in that morning. He took notes, led discussions, and was quick to throw his hand to the sky with an idea about the impact of the growth in business monopolies. The new Henry showed up again the next day, and the day after.

5. Strategize with students.

We can only guess as to why a student might call out or fail to do homework. Rather than assume we know the answer, ask. From our students we can better learn what hurdles they face and in what ways we can support their success. And in doing this we demonstrate our commitment to our students.

As fall chilled to winter, Henry flourished in my class. He still forgot his homework sometimes, still had to be occasionally reminded to stay on task. But he had found a group of friends who could be goofy and yet also grapple with charting the effects of the Spanish American War. I watched excitedly as he grew in confidence, one of the first to raise his hand to answer a question or share an opinion.

A few weeks later, I learned that this was not the Henry that appeared in his other classes. He confided this to me one afternoon when he came seeking advice. In other classes, he described, he was always the troublemaker, always being sent out, always blamed for something. He didn’t know what to do. Many of his teachers seemed to have such a negative opinion of him. Most importantly, he was upset because he wanted so deeply to make his father proud.

I saw an opportunity.

“I see you in my class,” I told him, my voice slow, deliberate. “I see how hard you work and how well you can do.” He nodded a little shyly. Together we could talk through strategies that might help in other classes. But I also had another idea, a challenge.

6. Create opportunities for students to realize their potential and be publically recognized for their academic achievements.

All students are capable of achieving remarkable things, they just might need our help to do so. In raising the stakes, but also the support, we can create opportunities for students to explore at the edge of their capabilities. And when they do succeed, celebrate these achievements. Our troublemakers are too often only publicly acknowledged for their disruptions. We can change this pattern by intentionally creating opportunities to publicly recognize their strengths.

I am a journalist as well as a teacher, and I believe it is critical that my students learn to write clear and powerful prose. Halfway through the year I had my class embark on an op-ed project, writing on issues they cared about, the very best selected for publication in the local newspaper. Sitting with Henry on that fall afternoon I proposed an idea. What if he worked toward being one of those 10 students whose op-eds were published?

These six ways of being are not enough. Shalaby argues, and rightly so, that our troublemakers are “canaries in the coal mine.” These children, in their defiance, are warning us of something fundamentally destructive — in Shalaby’s words, toxic — about our schools and our expectations for all young people.

School is a place that prioritizes the group at the cost of the individual. Too many schools require students to conform, to sit silently, to do without questioning. Too few schools allow time for creative student-driven exploration or provide space to form meaningful relationships with peers and adults. Such school structures hurt all our students’ futures, but it is only our troublemakers who rebel forcibly enough to make us take notice.

I think of my own classes packed with close to 30 teenagers. I see them for barely 40 minutes a day. In that time I try to connect with and support this diverse collection of individuals. But I have never felt that I have succeeded — or can succeed 100 percent. This failure weighs heavy.

Shalaby urges us to reimagine the classroom. We must also reimagine schools. Top to bottom we desperately need to question the structure, the curriculum, the role of teachers, the role of students. We need a system of education that supports all types of learners, not just some learners. We need a system that will support teachers in reaching every student. And we need schools that nurture our students’ curiosity and individual strengths.

A week after Henry and I talked, he came into my classroom all fired up. His father, he told me, was very excited about Henry’s determination to write an op-ed. He was hoping to support him at home and might even put a down payment on a computer to help his son write. “If I get my op-ed published,” Henry confided, “I’ll make my father so proud.”

These six ways of being are not enough. Shalaby argues, and rightly so, that our troublemakers are “canaries in the coal mine.” These children, in their defiance, are warning us of something fundamentally destructive — in Shalaby’s words, toxic — about our schools and our expectations for all young people.

School is a place that prioritizes the group at the cost of the individual. Too many schools require students to conform, to sit silently, to do without questioning. Too few schools allow time for creative student-driven exploration or provide space to form meaningful relationships with peers and adults. Such school structures hurt all our students’ futures, but it is only our troublemakers who rebel forcibly enough to make us take notice.

Throughout December and January Henry doggedly worked to research, write, and edit. It was not always easy — he needed many reminders and cajoling — but we kept at it. As we approached the deadline, Henry began showing up early and staying late to edit.

In February, nine student op-eds were published in the paper. Henry’s was one of them. It was one of the strongest. I couldn’t have been more proud.

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