This list sticks to the (relatively) current, the books I’ve read or encountered since last May– obviously there are scores of fine books from years past every educator should consider for summer reading, but this is not that kind of list.

(If you are interested, here is my 2012 Summer Reading List. )

Asterisk by names are for “full disclosure;” they are friends and colleagues, so please recognize the potential of bias.

*Ken Kay, founder of Partnership for 21st century skills and edleader21, joined by his close associate *Val Greenhill, published this book last summer and it is, I think, a highly valuable guide for educational leaders.  Kay and Greenhill recognize the extent to which leading learning in fast-changing times is a traveling on a journey which will never arrive finally at the destination, a journey that requires not only a vision and a strategy but a process of inclusion and an obligation for communication and collaboration.  See my full review here.

Highly accessible, succinct, and compelling, this book identifies great questions we should all be asking about education in the future (and the present), and offers a set of valuable steps we could all begin taking now to realign.    Why would you not take the 80 minutes and $3 to read this book this summer?

 Using farming as metaphor for 21st century learning is funny to me, but November makes it work, and helps us to see what is new is old: that we’ve always learned best by doing things, taking care, working together, tackling real problems, generating meaningful solutions, producing and sharing.    And now, with the information, resources and tools available online, this practice is more available and more meaningful than ever before.   Great practical suggestions along with good inspiration.   I quibble with some details: November twice offers the idea we shouldn’t try to measure creativity because it will only dampen it, and cites only Dan Pink as support: I think there is more to say about the matter than dismissing it out of hand, but this minor matter doesn’t detract from the value of November’s book as a whole.

Rheingold: I’ve been raving about this book for a year, since I read in on vacation last July: I think it was certainly THE book of 2012, the one book every educator– including, by the way, everyone who is educating themselves, which ought to be, in the fast-changing 21st century, everyone– needs to read to understand the opportunities and the obligations to be a responsible, effective, digital citizen, collaborator, and contributor.  It’s a bit of a heavier lift than many of the other books on this list, but it is entirely worth the effort.   See full post/review here.

 Future Perfect isn’t as good a book as Where Good Ideas Come From, but it is a breezy read, (like a long Wired magazine article) with a semi-utopian message: by connecting, sharing, co-creating, we can save the world.   I’m in.   Beyond the specifics of the power of the internet and Web 2.0, the general idea of networks and their power is fascinating.   I wrote a lengthy post about the implications of the book and this message for educators here.

  This may have been the most hyped of the books on this list in the past year (not inappropriately so)– and Tough has drawn a lot of attention by his travels visiting many independent schools and other public forums to promote his message.   This is crusading journalism about who and what is really helping children grow, learn, and flourish, urging us to change the course of our children’s lives by recognizing that they need more than cognitive development: we must cultivate their emotional lives, their social skills, their learning strategies, and their character– not just for their own sake, but for their academic success in the long run.     You can find my extended discussion of Tough’s book here. 

  This short e-book has come under some fire in the past few months, and the controversy is well grounded.   The success he describes having achieved hasn’t been entirely easily replicated, and there is much greater complexity in the interplay of teachers and technology than he conveys.    But, you’ll smile and warm as you read of the wonders that happen when children are provided portals to the world, and you’ll ask yourself again: How well are we doing empowering kids and connecting them to the wealth of information and inspiration the web offers?

*Boss and Krauss strike again– this is Suzie’s third excellent book in the past six or seven years, and the second in two years.  Last summer I recommended Bringing Innovation to School; now I recommend this new title to every teacher and educator seeking to advance PBL and inquiry driven learning in their schools, but want to ensure they are maintaining  deepening rigor and depth of knowledge as they do.   PBL isn’t about assigning a project instead of a test; it is not about having kids work in groups while teachers catch up on grading; PBL is about the teacher acting as, as is written here, “the meddler in the middle” asking provocative questions and ratcheting every student up the cognitive ladder. 

 Susan Brookhart has emerged in the past six months as a new hero and educational/intellectual mentor for me.

These two books, one published in 2010 but only read by me in last 2012, and the other published last winter,  have the appearance of being a little wonky– ASCD published practical guides for beginning educators, maybe– and they do have some of that tone with lots of samples and “use this in your classroom” suggestions.    But it doesn’t take too long before you recognize that there is a lot more going on here: she has an agenda to improve teaching and learning by, as Wiggins too has done, changing deeply the principles and practices of classroom assessment. See my lengthy report on Assessing Higher Order Thinking Skills here. 

Work that Matters: This is a FREE (pdf) book, roughly sixty pages, which makes a fine addition to any summer reading list.   The folks at High Tech High co-produced this, and it is a great overview to their educational philosophy and practices, and for all who aren’t able to get there to visit, or even for those who are, this is a useful substitute or supplement.   High Tech High is certainly among the most important and inspirational flagships of 21st century learning, and although I can have my quibbles with certain elements, I think having at minimum a baseline understanding of their program is essential for any secondary educator in the US today.  Click here for my lengthy report on this book.

Teaching Adolescents to Become Learners.  Another FREE (!) book (pdf), this is a bit more academic, a bit drier, than most of the books on this list– but it is a highly informative and very important review of what is known about what we can do to “teach adolescents to become learners”– which is, let’s face it, no small feat.   (I say this as the father of a 14 year old!).   This might be more pertinent for administrators and counselors than for teachers as they design programs and interventions, but it could also be very useful for teachers who want to understand better how they can and should (must) supplement their curricular instruction with the appropriate strategies for learning success.   See my full report here. 

Stager and Martinez:  Gary Stager is a gadfly with an often acerbic voice (which is inherent, perhaps, in being a gadfly), and I don’t always enjoy his tone in online communications– but this book, written with Sylvia Martinez, (which I have to say I haven’t read in entirety yet), is dynamite, and spot-on with a very exciting trend, even movement today.   Learning by doing is oft-recommended, but generating the innovators of tomorrow is best supported by providing kids the inspiration, the tools, the resources, the spaces, the time, the modeling and mentoring to be tinkerers, programmers, and inventors today.  This book is a valuable addition to this project.

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“There are so many variables in what Duckworth calls the Non-Cognitive mosh-pit: how do you organize them into a comprehensible and clear framework?”

“I see the value of assessing non-cognitive qualities, and grit/perseverance in particular, but the real important thing is to teach and cultivate it: how is the best way to do that?”

In the past few months, because of my work with the SSATB Think Tank on the Future of Admissions Assessment, both of the above questions have arisen multiple times during my presenting, discussing, and consulting about NonCognitive assessment.

For both, I’ve been working on developing better answers, and– wow– the University of Chicago CCSR report embedded atop is a tremendous asset and resource for answering and addressing both questions.

The report came to my attention by being discussed, and indeed, celebrated at not one but two conferences I attended back to back in April, the Deeper Learning Network Conference at High Tech High in San Diego and the National Partnership for Educational Access in Boston.

But as much as I had heard it praised, it nevertheless exceeded my expectations.  This is a masterful overview and analysis of what matters among non-cogs in the service of supporting our students success to, through, and beyond secondary schooling.

Back to to the two top framing questions.  First, how can we best organize logically and coherently the array of attributes and activities that are aswim in this conversation?  In conversation recently with Angela Duckworth, she guided me toward what is a useful simplification, though really almost too much of an oversimplification, which is the same one used by the National Research Council in its highly valuable 2012 report, Education for Life and Work.

As stated, it is very simplified, but still useful: there are three domains, and we need to think about how we are recognizing, understanding, teaching and assessing each of them: Cognitive, Interpersonal, and Intrapersonal.

But, the Chicago Consortium on School Research report takes it a next level of complexity while retaining reasonable clarity and coherence.    As the graphic below (labeled 2.1) from the report shows, and it is a graphic worth studying closely,  five non-cog elements play together and converge to generate improved academic performance:

1. academic behaviors (like attending class and doing homework);
2. academic mindsets such as optimism, locus of control, and the Deck growth mindset;
3. Academic Perseverance, which is roughly equal to Duckworth’s grit, though the Chicago authors see it as a subset or specific manifestation of a broader grit personality trait;
4. Learning Strategies; and
5. Social Skills.

Onto the second question: what do we know about the malleability of these factors, and what is the best approach to teaching the one most currently being talked about, grit or perseverance.   The answer is in the graphic above, and I could just leave it at that, but at least for my own sake, let me spell it out.   

The report takes the issue of malleability very seriously– ultimately that is the purpose of this report, to scan and survey the Noncog terrain and report back where we should put our focus to make the most difference.

Of all the challenges posed by the implementation of the Common Core State Standards, this may be the greatest: if we are truly to be a nation of college-goers, we must not only raise the bar on what students learn but we must also leverage an understanding of noncognitive factors to teach adolescents how to become effective learners. In the absence of developing students as learners, current reform efforts are unlikely to succeed at increasing students’ readiness for college.

Our goal was to develop a coherent and evidence-based framework for considering the role of noncognitive factors in academic performance.. [and to] summarize the most promising levers for change.

For each of the five categories, the report carefully conducts a scholarly but entirely accessible review of the literature, asking five questions:

So what do they conclude?   This is the really interesting part, and it is entirely worth your time reading closely.  Academic Behaviors make for great academic performance, but this is almost self-evident: students who do their school-work and come to class will do much better than those who don’t.   But these behaviors, in and of them-selve, are not so malleable, and don’t deserve the primary focus for intervention.

What about grit?  When meeting with Duckworth last month, I understood her to say she sees grit as reasonably malleable and as a overlapping considerably,though not equating to, optimism and the growth mindset.   The authors here distinguish grit from the mindsets, and then argue that grit as a whole, across multiple domains,  is effectively equivalent to one of the Big Five set of largely fixed personality traits, that of Conscientiousness.   Hence, grit itself is not very malleable.

While Conscientiousness increases across the lifespan as individuals mature, psychologists generally agree that Conscientiousness is a “fixed trait,” meaning that there is little evidence that interventions or environment can substantially change this aspect of a person’s basic nature (Srivastava, John, Gosling, & Potter, 2003). Duckworth and colleagues (2007) suggest that grit should also be understood as a stable personality trait—perhaps a mistakenly overlooked facet of Conscientiousness. This does not mean that it is impossible to change a person’s grittiness but rather that doing so would be difficult.

But, the authors say, when we set aside the idea of a trait which is consistent across many domains, we can identify a specific aspect of grit, which they call academic perseverance– which is far more malleable.

our focus here is on academic perseverance rather than perseverance in some general sense. When we make this distinction, the answer to the question of malleability in a given context becomes a resounding “yes.” There is significant empirical evidence that students demonstrate different amounts of perseverance at academic tasks under differing conditions, supporting the idea that academic perseverance as a behavior in a specific context is highly malleable.

But, there is a major caveat, and this is the million dollar point in answer to the second question atop the post:    There is little to no research support that we can be effective intervening to improve grit, or academic grit, or academic perseverance, directly.   We can’t teach grit itself.

We can develop grit, however, by developing two areas which are very responsive to intervention, and which, together, build and develop academic perseverance: mindset and learning strategies.

The literature suggests two distinct pathways: supporting positive academic mindsets and helping students develop effective learning strategies. There is clear research evidence that students’ mindsets have strong effects on their demonstration of perseverant behaviors such as persistence at difficult tasks.

When students value the work they are doing, feel a sense of belonging in the classroom context in which they are working, feel capable of succeeding, and believe they will master challenging material with effort, they are much more likely to engage in difficult work and see it through to completion.

With the knowledge that the maximum opportunity for influence is on mindsets and learning strategies, it is good to see the useful information provided in each of these sections.    Mindset is a familiar one for me: I count Seligman’s trilogy– Authentic Happiness, Learned Optimism, and the Optimistic Child– and Dweck’s Mindset as among the very most important books, personally and professionally, I’ve read in the past twenty years.

Mindset is broken into four core beliefs and perceptions, which, now more than ever, every educator should take seriously as among their core responsibilities to affirm, support, and develop in every student.

1. I belong in this academic community.
2. My ability and competence grow with my effort.
3. I can succeed at this.
4. This work has value for me.

Every student, every day, all four: are we supporting and advancing these student beliefs?

The second is the so-called attibution theory, and is effectively Dweck’s growth mindset.  The report quotes Dweck:

The manner in which a child views an aversive event, such as failure, determines, in large part, the way in which he reacts to that event. Specifically, if a child believes failure to be a result of his lack of ability or a result of external factors beyond his control, he is unlikely to persist in his efforts. On the other hand, if a child believes failure to be a result of his lack of motivation, he is likely to escalate his effort in an attempt to obtain the goal.

The fourth is so important, and so aligned with so much of what is important in 21st century learning: providing greater transparency for every learning event for every student: what is the value of this learning, how can we apply it to things which matter to us, what is our personal and emotional connection and stake in this material?   These things are no longer just “nice to haves” but they are essential to the development of the mindset which leads to the perseverance which leads to the academic behaviors which make possible successful academic performance.

Learning Strategies are also essential, and are also highly malleable.

Learning strategies encompass several related psychological processes: metacognition, self-regulated learning, time management, and goal setting. Together, these concepts constitute a group of learner-directed strategies, processes, and “study skills” that contribute to academic performance.

First, learning strategies involve metacognition, defined as an individual’s knowledge of and control over his or her cognition.

A second and related point is that students learn more effectively when they monitor their own learning processes, determine when they are having difficulty, and adjust their behavior and/or strategies to tackle the task at hand.

I especially appreciated the explanation about strategies student can develop, and teachers should support students in developing, for deepening understanding.

While learning strategies generally involve metacognition (monitoring one’s understanding) or organizing time and resources (setting aside an hour with the TV turned off in order to read), other strategies are entirely cognitive and have the express purpose of increasing a student’s understanding or transferring information into memory.

Weinstein and Mayer (1986) identify three such subcategories of cognitive learning strategies: rehearsal strategies, elaboration strategies, and organizational strategies. Generally, the more a learning strategy involves manipulating or organizing material rather than just reviewing it, the more likely it is to result in deep understanding.

Are we doing enough as educators to develop these strategies?  How explicitly and emphatically are they taught?  I know there are many fine educators who frown on tests and end-of-semester exams, but I think that they have value in many ways, and one of those ways is the opportunity the present to focus student attention on study skills and learning strategies.   The exam is in two weeks: how should we review for it?   Let’s set goals and  plan a schedule for managing time in our studies; let’s figure out how we figure out what we know already and what we need to learn better;  let’s try different study techniques and determine which works best for our style of learning; let’s conduct practice tests and then work on applying what we’ve learned to new challenges; let’s intentionally do something a bit too hard, make mistakes, and learn from those mistakes.

This is the course that is is so important: Mindset and Learning Strategies are highly malleable and can be taught directly; they will then be the difference to the success of so many of our students, and that success instill confidence and reinforce mindset, leading to an academic perseverance which results, ultimately, in greater academic performance.    No, we don’t/can’t/shouldn’t teach grit directly, but we can greatly and positively change it for the better in every one of our students.

Read the report atop– add it to your summer reading– it is a great asset to the field of teaching and learning in the 21st century.

Grant Lichtmann is probably most familiar  to readers here:  formerly of Francis Parker School in San Diego, and just now a Senior Fellow of the Memphis based Martin Institute, he attracted, rightfully so, a great deal of attention for his “edu-journey” last fall  exploring and examining innovative practices at 60 schools.

In his talk below, he shares the news that schools are “bad at innovation,” but he won’t accept that change is hard– homesteading the prairie was hard, but change is uncomfortable.     The work is about teaching into the unknown, and because we know the future less well than we ever have known it before, most important is that we become, and we help our students become, self-evolving learners.

I love what Grant says about the new “sphere,” building on previous ec0-spheres such as the atmosphere and the biosphere, we have a new sphere only about 10 years old: the Cognitosphere.   Yes.   He doesn’t make these same references, but his term captures so much of what I am so excited about in my reading of John Seely Brown’s New Culture of Learning, Stephen Johnson’s Future Perfect, Wellman and Rainie’s Networked, and Rheingold’s Net Smart.

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Julie Wilson is launching a new organization, the Institute for the Future of Learning, coming out of her graduate studies at Harvard with, among others, Tony Wagner.     In this talk, she speaks of the importance of making learning meaningful today, and doing so by being serious about student engagement, real world connections, essential questions, and authentic audiences.   She shares concrete and vivid examples of schools, some of them associated with the Deeper Learning and 21st century learning movement such as New Tech Network and High Tech High, doing this right, and she asks us to work together to bring this kind of authentic student work to all students.

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Marc Chun, formerly of CLA/CWRA and the highly regarded Performance Task Academy, and now at Hewlett Foundation’s important Deeper Learning Initiative, offers an important talk about Transfer: What is it, What does it require, how do we support it?  Transfer may be among the, or the singular, most important goal of all teaching: can students take what they learn in one context and moment, in our classroom say, and apply it, later, to a new challenge, effectively.

There’s good stuff here: standout is Marc’s metaphorical examples of 007 and MacGyver.   Sometimes we want students to take what the tools we provide them, say an exploding pen, and apply it to the situations which they encounter– directly.   Relatively routine, something we can practice again and again: this is important to develop confidence and the skill of applied problem-solving.

But, it is also very limiting.  As Marc points out, most of our students will end up working in jobs which haven’t been invented yet.  In the case of MacGyver, problems emerge for which he hasn’t been trained exactly.   These novel situations demand novel solutions, which he must craft from the materials available to him, drawing from an array of prior knowledge, blending it and synthesizing it.   For these skills, students need the skills of collaboration, of critical thinking, of learning how to learn: of deeper learning.

Students do need experience with both 007 and MacGyver learning challenges– but in our schools today, we need to work harder to provide a lot more MacGyver.

Enjoyed greatly presenting this morning to several hundred CT educators at their annual summit.

My topic: What can we learn about creating 21st century learning from innovative PBL schools such as High Tech High, New Tech Network, Envision Schools and Science Leadership Academy.  

I should make a quick note here: my lessons learned analysis is based on my 15 days visiting innovative PBL schools such as High Tech High, New Tech Network, Envision Schools, and Science Leadership Academy.

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Fairfax County, which is headed by one of the nation’s finest superintendents, Jack Dale, has recently posted up a comprehensive website about PISA/OECD testing in their district, and it is fascinating and impressive in many ways.

The video above, produced by America Achieves, which is active in the OECD testing initiative in the US, offers a nice overview of the Fairfax program, and demonstrates the seriousness of the way in which they in the district intend to use and apply the results to improve learning.

PISA testing, newly available for individual schools and districts under the name of OECD test, was recently praised by Tom Friedman in his column, and has long been admired by thoughtful and informed educators such as Tony Wagner.   Simply put, it is a better kind of test, much more designed to evaluate students abilities to use what they have learned to tackle new and complex problems, evaluating their application and analytic skills.   Below is a video about the PISA test.

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But just because a test is better designed for assessing student skills and proficiencies doesn’t mean necessarily that it is especially effective in providing results and information which inform practice.    PISA/OECD, however, and in contrast to many others, has made this a priority, and Fairfax County is an exemplar.

I want to offer a number of commendations to and draw a few lessons from Fairfax County, America Achieves  and PISA OECD based on what has been posted on the County’s website here.  

1. Huge Kudos for the transparency of the County to share so boldly and generously everything about the OECD testing program.  When you go to the site and click on the tab,  School reports, you will find the full, comprehensive, detailed school testing result reports– un-redacted.  Now there is no student reporting here, privacy is honored, but the willingness to show and share is a model for every other school district and school.

2. The breadth and depth of the OECD testing report, entitled “How Your School Compares Internationally,” as can be seen in these examples, is staggering.   This is a 161 page document, with scores of boxes, figures, and tables.     Schools and districts are informed deeply about the effectiveness of their program and offered thoughtful, thorough analysis regarding opportunities for improvement.     For private school educators reading this post, there are even included sections comparing your school’s results to private school sampling across the US.    There are dozens of examples of useful sections– in one part of the report, where the impact of soci0-economics are assessed in your school and in national results, the report shares lessons from PISA research on how the most successful school systems in this regard support disadvantaged students.

3.  The people at PISA are clearly students of and practitioners in the developing field of graphically communicating information– and they have generated many interesting graphs in these reports.   See the slides below, downloaded from the Fairfax County Site, which showcases some fine examples.

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4.   Having a high quality test and having a high quality report are the first two critical steps for employing external testing results– but the third is as well.   How do you then use the report internally?   Fairfax, as demonstrated on their website, is doing extraordinary work here as well, work that I think can be highly informative to the practice of others.   They offer this graphic for one way to communicate what they are doing. 

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On the Fairfax website, under the tab “School reports,” an eight week action plan is displayed, explaining how the leadership team will study the report in sections.   Even included are materials on how each weeks conversations will be conducted, with downloadable powerpoints.    The plan is embedded here below:

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Week 8, which has yet to occur on this schedule, is ultimately the most interesting– and I’d imagine it might only set the stage for a next phase, perhaps over the summer, of work taking the suggested actions from the conversation and mold them into an educational action plan.    Recognizing the outstanding transparency of Dale’s leadership, perhaps we can look forward to such a plan being published here in the months to come.

5.   Going into the actual analysis, what is so interesting and valuable is that OECD is helping schools and districts unpack, deeply, their results and find meaningful insights.   The report doesn’t just include student test results, but student survey data on topics such as their sense of self-efficacy, their reports of school disciplinary environments, the relationships they have with teachers, and their instrumental motivations, and more– broken out by student performance levels.    One example of many of what can be gleaned, quoting the report:

While 9 out of 10 top-performing students report that the teachers rarely have to wait a long time for the students to quiet down, only 7 out of 10 low-performing students have a similarly positive experience in their English classes.

More about OECD testing in the US is available at America Achieves, here. 

Again, my praise, admiration, and appreciation go to Fairfax County for making so available for sharing these materials.

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It was terrific to have the chance this month both to see the keynote from Angela Duckworth at NPEA and to have 90 minutes sitting with her in a small group conversation with the SSATB Think Tank.

As many now know, she has become something of “the guru of grit” in the last year or two, particularly with the attention brought to her work by the writing of Paul Tough in his book and New York Times magazine cover story.  She is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania.  I wrote about her work, her TEDx talk, and the Tough book previously here. 

Duckworth opened her keynote with the message that academic skill development is always interwoven with so-called “non-cog” skills.

The stuff kids need to learn in school is hard.   It’s really hard.  But it is not too hard.  Every child in my classroom– whether it took two hours or twenty hours– could learn this.    It isn’t quantum mechanics, it is Algebra.    In other countries most kids get it because they have the expectation that everyone can do this and they have attitude that it just takes a lot of work to get there.

“IQ is not the limiting factor for most of our children.” We shouldn’t tolerate lower expectations for some kids.

Algebra is hard in another way- psychologically, for instance.  Is it hard to persist when it is challenging.

“if you can build non-cog skills, you will boost academic achievement. It is NOT either/or, but BOTH/AND.”

The message, of course, about the value of persistence, is not just for our kids: it is for all of us.   As she explained, and tied it to her own work and the work of everyone in the audience at NPEA, doing the hard work of providing quality education to disadvantaged youth, “It’s not a one year or two year project for any of us in life, tackling something hard and trying to make a real difference.”

Grit is about “remaining loyal to your commitments.  Perseverance and Passion for long-term goals. Achievement = talent x effort. Anything multiplied by 0 = 0. Grit is about some talent but more about passion and perseverance.”

But we are all deceived, so much of the time, by the false impressions most others give off of gently gliding along the surface, like a duck with no worries.    ”We need to show kids, and help them see, that below the waterline we are all paddling furiously.”

Duckworth emphasized the importance of not just teaching grit in some narrow method, but of deeply “Building a culture of grit, making it self-conscious and publicly visible for all.”

In an amusing and telling example, she shared the importance in Finland of a term roughly equivalent to grit, “sisu.”   There, she explained, Sisu is surfaced constantly:  ”How’s your sisu today?”  ”I’m feeling a bit down in my Sisu this week.”

Duckworth, speaking to an audience whose lives are devoted to helping students succeed in K-12 and collegiate education, stated the problem boldly and baldly: “We are not succeeding– we are getting kids well prepared academically, but they’re still not succeeding in college and careers– what do we need to do differently?”

We need to research, design interventions, experiment, and study results. 

She then referred to what she called “The non-cog mosh pit” (a mosh-pit I’ve really been diving into over the past year):

• mindset,
• grit,
• resilience,
• goal orientation,
• social belonging,
• intrinsic motivation 

She told us she fears “The mosh pit is not useful because it is too wide, too broad, too much for kids to manage and focus on.”  

Give them something singular and specific: choose one and run with it and test along the way if it is working! 

I’m taking a pass on fully writing up her discussion of developing grit, and using “deliberate practice” as a tool for advancing one’s goals, one which both requires and builds grit, in a virtuous cycle, but if you are interested, and you should be, review the slides above for great suggestions.

Below I return to the discussion of assessing and selecting for grit.

In the Q and A section, there was one standout-question.  (As an aside, I’m increasingly taken with how much more interesting, often, presenters can be when asked quality questions, and as a presenter myself, I have to work harder to allow more time for this.)

The question was simple: What about Joy?   Grit as a characteristic doesn’t sound very joyful, and if I want my students and children to have an exuberant love of learning and to take great joy from schooling, maybe I shouldn’t emphasize grit?

Duckworth replied with a complete appreciation for the importance of the question.

“Research shows grittier people are happier.  We should note, however, that it is a rewarding kind of accomplishment happiness, not ‘fun’ happiness.  And we should not mistake that it is not always fun to work hard.”

She added that when she speaks of deliberate practice and daily disciplines and long-term pursuit of goals, she is NOT insisting or even advocating for grueling 4-10 hour work-sessions every day of the week.   Deliberate practice can be a matter of one or two hours a day, three or four days a week perhaps.

For more she recommended Seligman’s important book, The Optimistic Child.  In other parts of the program she also recommended  Dweck’s Mindset and, a true classic now available for free download at Kindle, William James 1899 (!) book, Talks to Teachers. 

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In a followup session, Duckworth joined in with two educators, one from Yes Prep and one from Mastery Schools: here are their slides.

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Over lunch, Duckworth joined our SSATB Think Tank on the Future of Admissions Assessment small group, for which regular readers here know I am consulting/writing, in a wide-ranging and entirely fascinating 100 minute conversation.   In person Duckworth is warm, upbeat, optimistic, and seemingly highly caffeinated: she speaks, with unflagging clarity, at a very fast clip.  It was a complete delight.

We began with a look at the Choate Student Self-Assessment, which uses a survey instrument closely analogous to Duckworth’s own grit survey.  It provides statistically significant information about applicants’ self-control, locus of control, and intrinsic motivation– and Duckworth latched on to the importance and interesting element of “locus of control,” explaining to us she thinks it is highly similar to Seligman’s emphasis on Optimism and Dweck’s on Mindset.

After we explained the purpose of our Think Tank research, she responded by saying, in essence, “of course you are doing this work; the project of spreading the word and developing new tools for assessing the non-cog domain is on everyone’s mind right now: College Board, ACT, ETS.   Indeed, there are now growing conversations about how and when we will build a Common Core equivalent for NonCog attributes.”

She said this is a great thing for our society.  ”The culture is shifting right now in such a significant way to recognize, appreciate, and form a common understanding of these concepts and their importance.”

“I can totally see why SSAT and independent schools would be taking a lead on this: Independent schools have so much more room to innovate and experiment.  Go for it.”

That said, she knows the wording continues to be tricky– what we call “non-cog” is still most certainly the result in very significant part of cognition– and so is somewhat oxymoronic.    What might we call it instead?  ”Personality, temperament, dispositions, character– they all have their drawbacks too.”   In the extensive work Duckworth has been doing with David Levin of KIPP schools and Dominic Randolph at Riverdale Country School, they are using more and more the word “character” though she acknowledges the term has its detractors and its baggage.   But, she told us, Levin is confident that through their efforts and their impact, they’ll change the problematic semantics of the term and breath into it new life.

She described for us a bit her work with an exciting new initiative, working with Levin and Randolph, called the “Character Lab” in New York City.    Among its excellent elements is a Teenage advisory boards, giving feedback to the lab researchers on what will and won’t work with teenage students.     The website for the character lab is listed but not yet launched, but bears close attention in the coming months and years.

Part of what is so exciting about the work being undertaken at the Character Lab is next generation work in assessing for character, including new and improved questionnaires, online performance game based activities, and situation judgement tests– all still in development and not yet available.  (Duckworth suggested they may still be seeking pilot schools and programs, and if you’d like your school to be a part of this, you might email the folks there and inquire.)

—

So what about assessing grit in high stakes situations, such as admission to selective schools? 

“I don’t endorse using grit assessment for high stakes evaluations”

Duckworth is an academic, and understandably wary of her work or words being misunderstood or applied in settings beyond their intent.  She is confident that her grit self-assessment tool is research based and effective– but she urges it not be used in high stakes ways where it can easily be faked or gamed.  She says that in addition to fakability, other problems are encountered.   Some inflate their scores not to “win” but just out of conscious or unconscious social desirability seeking, and even more problematic is that of reference bias.   When answering questions about how grittier you are, or are others, what are you comparing yourself or someone else to?   What frame of reference are you using?  Deciding your agreement to a statement “I am a hard worker” is highly problematic: the harder you work, often, the more often you spend time around people who are themselves mostly hard workers.

Quantifying these traits in high stakes ways is problematic too– there is a danger of numbers with decimal points, because people believe they are more scientific than they really are.  (Conversely, if you really want people to trust or give credence to your numerical reporting, always use a decimal point because people lend those numbers much higher deference because they seem so much more scientific).

“I think caution is merited.” Self-report, as well as parental and teacher reporting, are all problematic, though often in different ways.  In her most amusing statement during our discussion, she said “Look, every assessment is sucky in its own way, each has its own degree and dimension of suckiness.”

What to do?  ”Triangulate.”   Assess for grit by using multiple measures: self-assessment, teacher assessment, perhaps parental assessment, and resumes.   “Average them and the problems begin to cancel out.”

This was striking to hear, though perhaps it isn’t really surprising, because it aligned exactly with what was explained by the ETS evaluation expert, Rich Roberts, regarding the Missions Skills Assessment.  He used the same word, triangulation, as the technique by which what might otherwise be inaccurate measurements become more reliable.   Read my post about MSA here. 

As she explained in her presentation that morning, see slide 24, you can discover much about grit from student resumes.  

Really look to see if students have pursued one or two things, no more than that, at some length and depth, over several years.     Harvard Admissions Dean Fitzsimmons told us the same thing when we discussed this topic with him.

She continued with her advice, getting to the nitty-gritty.  Do questionnaires  make them good– ensure those statements are clearly and succinctly getting at exactly what you want to get at– use as few and short a tool as you can, make them real, grounded in experience, with language and concrete details familiar to kids.

If you can, and it is expensive, do a rubric: for each criteria, spell out in concrete and vivid detail what each category (1-7, say) looks like in practice, with associated observable actions.   Train people how to use these rubrics when interviewing or evaluating essays– train them carefully.

What about tasks?  Simulated performance tasks, for instance, or situation judgement tasks, to elicit this information?   They are great– and very hard to execute, expensive, complicated, hard to assess. “We are so far from having a library of tested, effective, quality tasks.”   But, they are working for it– as in the Character Lab (above).

When we pointed out that Choate has had relatively good success in research demonstrated validity of their self-assessments: what students say about themselves does correlate with their academic achievement a year or two later, she rallied a little bit from the depths of her skepticism.

“Yes– kids are shockingly honest on their surveys. Even adults are more so than you’d expect.”

“Often the problem is mostly a matter of inflation– few score themselves opposite of what they are, they just, pretty regularly/widely, inflate it a bit, so that they give themselves an extra point– which when you are comparing applicants, means it cancels out.”

“People are honest, research says, in part because they believe the psychologists designing the assessment have some sneaky way of telling when they are being dishonest– which we don’t, most of the time– but people think that and it keeps them honest.”

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Grit matters.   Duckworth pointed us to a lovely speech on the importance of grit given to parents at Taft School by its Head, William McMullen.   She pointed out we already see evidence of grit in what we collect– GPA is partly a result of grit, and not just cognitive/intelligence; recommendations do give us good evidence on this.

Let’s take grit, and the breadth of non-cog attributes, seriously and keep seeking ways to better recognize it, better select for it, and, most of all, better support and develop it in our students.

St. George’s: A Distinctive Model Addressing the Achievement Gap

I had the pleasure of seeing this presentation last week at NPEA: I found the program described extraordinary and profound, and the presentation inspiring and moving.

The slides include in the beginning some colorful (and tragic) images of Memphis and some appalling stats about the poverty there, but the key pieces begin on slide 42.    The graphs are for some reason a tad off-kilter in this slide format, but I think they are still mostly legible.

The story runs like this.   An independent (private) suburban/affluent/nearly entirely Caucasian PK-5 school until about 15 years ago, St. George’s now is a three campus PK-12 school.  That story by itself is anything but unique.    The difference is this: one of those three campuses hosts a second, entirely parallel educationally, elementary program, but in a mostly African-American (but now also increasingly Hispanic), inner city Memphis neighborhood.

Both programs are of course entirely equally St. George’s; the ECE and elementary students at each campus regularly do activities together, such as Skype conversations, field trips and as they grow older overnight trips;  and both elementary campuses feed into a single middle/high school campus.   Whereas because of geography the suburban campus is mostly white (though less so now than it used to be) and the Memphis campus is mostly non-white, (though not entirely– it is appealing to Caucasian families seeking a diverse urban educational experience), the 6-12 campus is an integrated multi-racial program.

I believe myself to be very knowledgeable about NAIS/independent schools nationally, and I have to say, I don’t know of a single other comparable program.   I asked Bill Taylor, St. George’s head who presented this session along with his excellent Memphis campus principal, whether he was aware of any similarly structured institution, and he told me he was not.

St. George’s success in closing the achievement gap for the Memphis campus students is breathtaking, and evidenced by the stats seen on slides 45-50.   Slide 45 demonstrates that 100% of their 3rd grade students have achieved reading proficiency, compared to 42%state-wide and 20% in Memphis.  In the upper elementary grades, slides show proficiency rates in the sixties to eighties– not perfect, but still vastly higher than the city numbers.

They explained in the session that some additional educational interventions were called for– a slightly longer school day, an additional teacher in some classrooms– but on the whole, the effect, they believe, is a result of a combination of the quality of school culture, the excellence of their instructional program, and the height of academic expectations they have for all students.

In my opinion, every independent school, particularly K-12 programs,  in the US should be examining the extraordinary and exemplary St. George’s model, and exploring whether when they can match it.  Perhaps it will take a decade, (perhaps two), but it shouldn’t be impossible– indeed, now we know it isn’t impossible.

(Not e that quotes are roughly paraphrased from my notes on our conversation, and are not verbatim).

Fitzsimmons clearly loves his work.   He told us he is himself a first-generation college-goer, and reflects on that regularly in his work.    On April 10, a date you’d think would be a bit hectic for an Ivy league admissions dean, he spent two hours with our Think Tank, from 830pm to nearly 1030pm!

In the opening NPEA panel, to which he contributed greatly, much of his message was the importance he placed, and the progress Harvard (and other Ivies) are making, on widening access to under-represented populations, particularly now the lowest family income groups.

He told us of taking the Harvard undergrad population in the past six years or so from 11% to 17% Pell Grant eligible.  We’ve come a long way from asking ourselves whether “we were truly going to be  players in the educating of future leaders or boutiques for the wealthy and advantages.” “Private higher ed is back in the game.”   For 90% of Americans now, in contrast to ten years ago, it will cost less per year to send kids to Harvard (and other elite privates) than to their in-state flagship public institution.”

Still on the panel, he emphasized: “We need to look at all the human qualities of all our applicants, in all their complexity.”

In our smaller Think Tank conversation, he reminded us issues around expanding admissions criteria are neither new nor narrowly restricted: in the seventies Dean Willingham (?) of Williams College argued for the importance of selecting applicants for “persistent followthrough” which presages today’s focus on “grit,” and even today in China, land of the GaoKao, they are creating ways to accommodate rural applicants with lower test scores but greater perceived character traits than their urban peers.

Fitzsimmons told us that in round numbers at Harvard, which is as most know extraordinarily selective (2200 admitted out of 35,000—note that these 35,000 are those high school seniors self-selecting themselves to apply to Harvard), roughly 75% are admitted exclusively or especially for cognitive qualities, and 25% are admitted for the “bump” their applications get by demonstrated compelling non-cog attributes.    To compare these two groups finds no difference, he told us , in their success rate as undergrads: both have extremely high graduation rates, both at about 98%.

He said that among the things most important for their process is the teacher and counselor recommendations—particular when a student is rated as “one of the best in the past ten years.”

He also was emphatic about the importance of welcoming any and all student work which applicants wish to share: “we’ve been big on the portfolio piece for a long time.”

 Admissions decisions at Harvard are not easy to make, but the long-time Dean told us they try to stay focused on two or three key questions for every applicant:

What kind of difference will this student make at Harvard, and how will he/she contribute to the learning of his/her peers in the College?

What will this student do as a graduate of Harvard; what kind of impact will she or he potentially have in the world over the next 75 [!] years?  

“You try to get kids who will create new knowledge and be at the frontiers of their field.”

Speaking of the importance of grit, which Paul Tough and Angela Duckworth have elevated to prominence in the last year, Fitzsimmons said that of course it is important and of course they try to evaluate it in applicants.    But, he said, remember where it can often be most easily and valuably observed: in whether applicants have put in their “10,000” hours, (not literally, but Gladwell/Outliers figuratively) in some particular pursuit—in music, in athletics, in art or other activity.  (For me as a high school student, it was in political activism and internships).

“We want people with Energy, Drive, and Commitment: we use these three words a lot in our discussions.”

Essential though to understand when evaluating applicants’ energy, drive, commitments is that not all kids have the same playing field.  He was passionate with us about the importance of recognizing, remembering, and honoring that some kids have to work, work hard, work 20-40 hours weekly to support their family (“especially children of undocumented parents” he reminded us) and others have to do the same hard work, but inside their homes, supporting and even effectively parenting younger siblings.  This has to be part of the analytical equation for disadvantaged/under-represented applicants he emphasized with passion.

Fitzsimmons tacked over to a discussion of the new College Board President David Coleman, who came from his previous work as chief “architect” of the Common Core standards, and applauded his direction, encouraging the idea that the SAT will become more about measuring academic achievement in disciplines, not as much about aptitude.     He told us he views the ACT and SAT as just about the same, with very little significant difference, and that they have found, over the 20+ years he has managed admissions at Harvard, that subject specific tests– SAT II, AP, IB tests— are much more predictive of academic success than the SAT.   “It is a no-brainer: make these tests more about academic subjects students study, and it becomes revealing of meaningful hard work, not smarts, and motivates kids to do the right kind of learning, subject material, not test prep.”

“You don’t want to take not-nice people: we almost never take a ‘nasty’ kid.”

Personal qualities and character traits, he told us, are “BIG” in their process.

Learning for its own sake, intrinsic motivation, is a key to what they look for in applicants.  Among the things they rate on their 1-6 scale, reviewing essays, applications, recommendations, and interview reports,  are

• love of learning,
• intellectual curiosity,
• open-ness to new ideas and people,
• and intellectual originality.

Our think tank was struck by this last especially, and we discussed how those kids who are overly coached, or overly test-prepped, or overly pushed onto the notorious “road to nowhere” are perhaps especially unable to demonstrate “intellectual originality.”

Our conversation turned to one of the central topics of our Think Tank—if you were to choose just one non-cog attribute, what would you choose?

Fitzsimmons didn’t want to choose one—and pointed out the central problem of isolating and focusing on a particular trait as particularly important.  The problem?  “All good things are related (inter-twined, connected) to all good things.”   You can’t isolate them, and they overlap so much of the time.

“It would be great though to identify clearly key traits, traits you really think are great for kids to develop,  and the observable correlated actions, and then declare how important they will be to the admissions process.   By deciding what’s most important in addition to the cognitive (IQ/intelligence, standardized testing), and promulgating that we are selecting for them in assessment, we will have a really positive impact on these traits becoming widely taught, reinforced and learned, even if, as we do, we find a diminishing of our ability to discriminate among applicants with these traits.   That will be a tradeoff worth having.”

Last Friday and Saturday I had the great pleasure of visiting a school I view as a true flagship of the 21st century learning movement, High Tech High in San Diego, and attending the first annual Deeper Learning Network conference, DL2013,which was held on the campus there.

It was dynamite, and I am very grateful to our hosts.  It was sponsored by the Hewlett Foundation, which works in some relationship still a bit unclear to me with the Deeper Learning Network, about which more can be found here. 

As a two-time attendee at Educon, held every winter at Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, I’ve often wondered what is, and what might emerge as, the West Coast equivalent?   What can those of us West of the Mississippi attend to have the experience which is Educon?  (I’ve written about Educon here).

Clearly, and happily, DL has the potential to be exactly this.

Several similarities jump out:

1. Hosted by a flagship, PBL, student-centered, tech-savvy, 21st century school, with every session sitting in an actual, exemplary classroom.
2. Presided over by truly inspirational, brilliant, 21st century learning philosopher-practitioners (Chris Lehmann in the case of Educon, Larry Rosenstock and Rob Riodan in the case of DL2013). 
3. The right size: 200-500 attendees, no more. 
4. Both share a set of highly admirable principles which they seek to uphold and promote in every thing they do: student centered, inquiry based, connected and collaborative learning.
5. Great food provided, with every effort made to support and sustain community and connectedness. 
6. Presence of students as assistants (though at SLA educon students play a larger and more managerial role). 
7. An expectation sessions will be conversational, inclusive, inquiry based, with an attitude of c0-learning. 
8. A sense that this is a convening of activists in a movement as much as a meeting. 
9. A notion, supported by some intentional practices, that the event is in support of relationship building and networking to be sustained after the event. 

Larry Rosenstock

I enjoyed having this very conversation at the event with Diana Laufenberg, a longtime SLA teacher and Educon organizer, who, off-hand, was the only person I saw at DL2013 whom I’ve seen also at Educon– though I am sure there were others.  Our conversation certainly informs this post.

Differences:  there were several, though to be clear I don’t mean any of these observations as criticisms.

1. There was much less Twitter participation, and, I’d say, seemingly many fewer bloggers present and participating at DLN13.   Educon is a bit of a blogosphere/Twitter homecoming, or at least that is how I experience it, in a way that this DLN isn’t (yet anyway) to my observation.

2. DL was marked by a far greater presence of “teams” from network member networks than Educon, which is far more an assembly of individuals participating on their own.   This was the intent of this new conference– to bring together excellent teams from New Tech Network, ELS, Envision, and other networks of deeper learning programs, and it lived up to its intent.   (It is not that you never observe this at Educon– I was lucky to join in with a big and excellent group of folks who came together from Albemarle County Public Schools (VA) this year in Philadelphia.)  The sense of DL’s being driven by the insiders of the participating networks was reinforced a bit by what I’d say is the mildly unwelcoming  requirement to “request an invitation” before registering, though I have no idea if some who wished to come were denied the opportunity in actuality.  This strong presence of the participating network did result, I observed occasionally,  in individuals appearing to be, frankly, a little bit isolated during certain moments.  (Though I will add, when Larry Rosenstock was providing a tour to the ELS team, I asked to tag along and was warmly welcomed to join the group!)

3. One lovely and, to me, relatively original feature at DL, intended in part explicitly to counteract the very problem described above, was what they called “advisory groups.”   We met as advisories at beginning and end of the event, and it did give us a better sense of connection and community.  Indeed, if they had just put this in place on one additional occasion– end of day on the first day–  I think it would have done a perfect job offsetting the very small problem I described above.   Big praise to the High Tech High folks for arranging these advisories.

4. Educon is reliably held at SLA every year– but this event has an uncertain future, and there is no guarantee if it will happen again and if so, whether it will be at High Tech High.  I see advantages to it rotating locations– but I see also great appeal to it, like Educon, being in the same place, same time every year, becoming a reliable ritual for its participants.  I would urge the DL people and the High Tech High hosts to make the effort to follow suit.

5. Many– scores certainly, perhaps topping a hundred, independent school educators participate at Educon, whereas they were few and far between at DL.    One exception: there was a terrific crew of half a dozen or so (I’m not exactly sure) indy school educators from Hawaii and HAIS.  (Ironically and disappointingly, to my observation, there were more indy educators from Hawaii than there were from California!).

(One or more two posts about DL and its highlights are in the hopper: I hope to get them up soon!).

Thanks again to the excellent hosts and organizers of DL2013!

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“I told my faculty members when they’re applying for summer grants for PD: only research-based practices will get priority funding for grants; the rest of the applications go to the bottom of the pile.”

—

“When speaking to one group of the faculty, be sure to provide research-based evidence for Project-Based learning; some of these teachers are very particular about that.”

—

“As a caveat I would not accept any data found from a nonacademic non-peer reviewed resource as reason for change or implementing new strategies.”

I’ve encountered each of these messages separately in the past few weeks, and I value them all as good reminders for me to try harder to ground my educational positions and advocacy with evidence from quality research, especially from academic peer-reviewed journal published research.

So what about Project-Based Learning?   PBL is a practice I advocate for frequently here at 21k12, and I do based largely on my own  2008 research, in which I spent five days shadowing students at PBL immersive schools, including High Tech High in San Diego and New Technology High School in Sacramento, and spent about 15 days doing the same at more traditional high schools, and concluded that the PBL schools were far superior in the way they engaged, challenged, and enriched the students and their learning.  It was a bit of an overwhelming recognition, the degree of difference and the degree of superiority I observed. I’ve written about this at length here.

But, in all fairness, this “research” hasn’t been published anywhere other than on the blog, and it hasn’t been peer-reviewed in  by academic researchers.

But there is very good peer-reviewed journal published research available on PBL; let’s review.

Over at Buck Institute for Education they highlight the meta-analysis studies published in the 2008 Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem-based Learning, 3(1), 4-11.

In the journal’s introductory article which I’ve embedded below, by Jason Ravitz, Ph.D. until recently the Research Director for Buck Institute for Education, the research is summarized. (Note: I assisted Jason with editing this piece, for which I’m recognized in the acknowledgements).

The available evidence is promising. Compared to alternative teaching methods, PBL holds its own on standardized tests of concept knowledge and excels on other kinds of outcomes. Walker and Leary’s meta-analysis combined 201 outcomes reported across 82 different studies. They focused on the average effect size of differences in studies comparing students who received a PBL-based curriculum to those who did not.

Walker and Leary conclude that even on standardized tests of basic concepts “PBL is able to hold its own in comparison to lecture-based approaches” (p. 27). Moreover, both Walker and Leary and Strobel and van Barneveld determined that when studies use assessments measuring application of knowledge and principles, the results clearly favor PBL.

PBL is effective for outcomes beyond standardized tests.  For example, students….. felt better prepared to use “self-directed learning skills, problem-solving, information gathering, and self-evaluation techniques” (Albanese & Mitchell, cited in Strobel & van Barneveld, p. 49).

The meta-synthesis conducted by Strobel and van Barneveld is featured in the journal, and I’ve embedded it below.  The nature of this sweeping study is explained as follows:

To answer our research questions about how the differences in the definitions and measurements of learning contribute to the inconclusiveness about the effectiveness of PBL, we conducted a meta-synthesis (Bair, 1999) of existing meta-analyses. The goal was to determine which generalizable value statements about the effectiveness of PBL were supported by the majority of meta-analyses.

The total number of studies included in this paper was eight meta-analyses and systematic reviews.

The research base on the effectiveness of PBL is particularly rich and strong in the field of medicine. Similarly well developed is assessment in the field of medicine, which allows comparisons of different instructional interventions on situated and standardized test environments. Not surprisingly, the meta-analyses dealing with PBL draw heavily from primary studies conducted in medicine, but contain studies from other domains (e.g., economy, computer science) to warrant a rather generalizable statement on the effectiveness of PBL.

As impressive as this research is in looking at so many studies through looking at these eight reviews, (several hundred individual studies in all), it can feel a bit limited for those of us in K-12 education, because so much of it is based upon post-secondary studies, particularly medicine.

The findings though are compelling, and ought to provide considerable confidence to those working in this field, that if our goal is teaching for understanding and transfer, PBL is the pedagogical avenue to take.

several value statements can be made about the effectiveness of PBL that were supported by the majority of the meta-analyses reviewed:

PBL instruction was effective when it came to long-term retention and performance improvement.  PBL students were overall slightly underperforming when it came to short term retention.

Ultimately, the goal of instruction should be performance improvement and long-term retention. Therefore, preference should be given to instructional strategies that focus on students’ performance in authentic situations and their long-term knowledge retention, and not on their performance on tests aimed at short-term retention of knowledge.

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In the slides at top of the post, I’ve pulled together a set of some of the most pertinent findings on the research based support for the academic achievement efficacy of project-based learning.

The first few slides come, with permission, from a slide deck posted at slideshare by Jason Ravitz, Ph.D., now working as an independent research and evaluation consultant.   Slides 5-13 I threw together, not especially attractively, to showcase the highlights in K-12 education of peer-reviewed journal published findings from the bibliography posted over at edutopia. 

It is very affirming for those of us who advocate to see these positive results.  For instance,  I’m taken with the study, “Learning History in Middle School by Designing Multimedia in a Project-Based Learning Experience” because of its integration of technology, published in Journal of Research of Technology in Education, which found:

Results from content knowledge measures showed significant gains for students in the project-based learning condition as compared to students in the comparison school.

Some studies focus, appropriately, on whether PBL supports students in disadvantaged environments or low performing schools, finding that they do, findings I wholeheartedly endorse based on my observations at schools such as New Tech High School in a disadvantaged section of Sacramento, and CART in depressed Fresno.

But what about the higher performing settings such as the independent schools where I often work?

The Journal for the Education of the Gifted,( v19 n3 p257-75 Spr 1996) published a piece entitled “Content Acquisition in Problem-Based Learning: Depth versus Breadth in American Studies” based on a study comparing gifted students in 10th grade, and found

no differences in content acquisition (as measured by a standardized test) of 167 gifted 10th graders in American Studies classes who received either a problem-based learning approach or traditional instruction.

Results did not support the common assumption that curriculum fostering higher order thinking skills inevitably results in lower content acquisition. 

This is reinforced by a very interesting study in Washington State by researchers at the U. of Washington there, including the John Bransford, author of what I view as the extraordinarily authoritative book, How People Learn, published by the National Research Council and the National Academies Press.

Published in the Journal of Curriculum Studies and entitled “Rethinking advanced high school coursework: tackling the depth/breadth tension in the AP US Government and Politics course,” this looked at an AP Government course in a high performing school, where a full PBL curriculum was delivered, and compared results on the AP test to those of students in a similarly high performing school with a traditional pedagogy.

The PBL students performed as well as or better than traditionally taught students on the AP test 

Not content to settle for success on the AP– as they shouldn’t be, because we know that the AP does a poor job of evaluating the analytic and applied thinking skills so much more important in today’s world–  they went on to compare the two sets of students in a “complex scenario test,” and found that the PBL students, who had spent far more time in class wrestling with this kind of problem, did much better.

Edutopia did a terrific job producing the following video sharing both the process and the findings of this important research.

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PBL offers students many advantages in learning in the 21st century.   It is almost self-evident that it will demand more of students in collaboration, communication, and creativity, the skills that are so essential.    This was confirmed recently in a major study set in West Virginia by Ravitz and others, reported at the WV Department of Education.

Findings.

Overall, there were substantial and statistically significant effect size differences between teachers who used PBL with extended professional development and other teachers in the sample. Compared with the matching group, the extensively trained PBL-using teachers taught 21st century skills more often and more extensively. This finding applied across the four content areas, in classrooms serving students with a range of performance levels, and whether or not their schools had block scheduling.

Also confirmed in this study is what I strongly believe – we need not fear that in shifting to this approach that we will compromise their mastery of core content and narrowly defined academic achievement as measured in standardized testing.

In summary, there is plenty of evidence for the effectiveness of well-implemented and well-supported PBL.  Instead of talking about whether PBL will work, we should focus on what is needed to make it work for our schools and students.