Hello again! This coming week, our colleague Bob Price will be back in the Addis Ababa area of Ethiopia. In late August of 2009, Bob facilitated a weeklong seminar with over 70 Ethiopian teachers and administrators. He wanted to return to continue the work—not dropping in and simply returning to the United States--and as you can see on the video clips and read below, the teachers wanted him back, and for very good reasons. This could well be the embryonic stage of a global initiative. A UNESCO official was at the seminar and offered his reflections and encouragement.
Usually in these blogs I offer my thinking in the moment, playing with ideas, sharing discoveries from educators in the field, some from those who have received grants from Thinking Foundation. This time, I will simply share the edited video and selected transcript of feedback from participants — View Bob’s Case Study here on the Thinking Foundation website. It is THAT powerful. The ideas and the deep reflections from the hearts and minds of these educators stand as beautiful, meaningful, inspiring signposts for us all.
One participant said at the end of the week, already welcoming Bob back to their country: 'I hope this journey will not be for first and for the last.'
Bob… have a good return journey this next week. And, bring back more signposts from Ethiopian educators!
We at Thinking Foundation wish to start the new year and a new decade with a special announcement. First, a bit of background. Back in the early 1990’s I worked with educators in Mississippi and found deep inspiration in the teachers, students and educational leaders in the state. In the mid-1990’s, I met an educator there, Dr. Marjann Ball, who inspired me to see how Thinking Maps could be tools for transforming education across the whole state. She was insistent: the WHOLE state. It is a long road, but Marjann is helping educators across the state build those roads, from her work at the community college level, her research there (see Ball Dissertation on the Thinking Foundation website), and over the years in pre-K to 12 schools. This is now witnessed in the Pass Christian Public School District that is being highlighted in the documentary film (in production) Minds of Mississippi. Even after 8 years of working in “The Pass” Marjann is still working with educators there this year… dedicated to learning from them as she offers her insights.
Bringing Thinking Maps to students and teachers in Mississippi has been Marjann’s calling for nearly twenty years. It is also a family affair, as Marjann’s sister, and other members of the family including a daughter and her niece have worked across the state. And then there was a greater calling. Marjann’s youngest daughter, Ariel, was diagnosed with bone cancer some years ago, fought hard and with grace to survive, and then passed away from all of us. I had some delightful, meaningful times with Ariel… one time sitting by her bedside as she was fighting the rare disease, talking with her as she watched one of her favorite shows: Gray’s Anatomy. She spent so much painful time in hospitals and she was still intrigued by a television show that dealt with the most difficult part of her world. She wanted to understand. She was a special child who was thoughtful and full of heart. Young Ariel was and IS an inspiration to many of us. You can read about her through Marjann’s letter.
When I suggested to Marjann that we offer annual Ariel Awards to honor inspired student work, she immediately agreed. With this background, Thinking Foundation is pleased to announce the establishment of the annual Ariel Awards in honor of Ariel Ball of Laurel, Mississippi who left a gift of thoughtful, artful thinking to this world.
In the next few months, through this blog, we will be highlighting students who have created some amazing work, from abstract art to mapping out a whole biology textbook! We will honor them with an Ariel Award.
We hope, in a small way, that these awards honor Ariel for endless years to come and inspire more students to open their minds and hearts, as Ariel did, to the full range of possibilities in the lives they lead. We will keep a gallery of student work on this website, whether or not the students received the few awards we are able to give every year. Hopefully, this student work will also help all of us reflect on what is essential for educating our children, now and into the unknowable future.
A School District Rises UP: See the Movie Trailer, Read the Story
The film trailer you are about to see is powerful. It may be one of the most moving and influential few minutes of this school year for you and your colleagues. Please share it with others. It is showing us about the power of thinking and the human spirit. “Minds of Mississippi: The Pass Christian Story” trailer is a prelude to a full length production that will be available for broadcast a few months into 2010 (five years out from Katrina), with funding from Thinking Foundation and hopefully other supporters.
Over the years, on average 70% of the children in “The Pass” (as the town is called) live in poverty. 85 % of the students and teachers lost everything in Katrina, but this diverse population is also the highest performing in the state. As of November 22, 2009, The Pass was awarded Federal “STAR” status, meaning that the performance of Pass students is comparable to the other highest performing systems in the country.
18 months after Katrina I visited Pass Christian, landfall for the storm on the Gulf Coast. The context for my visit was that The Pass had been using Thinking Maps as a foundation for growing and sustaining the quality of performance across their schools to Blue Ribbon status. I wanted to show support. I walked in the mud and on boards between the FEMA trailers that today still remain classrooms for displaced students and teachers.
I have spent lots of time working in under-resourced rural and urban schools, and since the late 1980’s I have done consulting work in Mississippi schools. I have seen around this country schools amidst economic deprivation that was systemic and generational, and the great courage of teachers, but never have I seen teachers working with such extraordinary clarity and sustained focus to respond to a communal disaster. They rose up.
During that visit, I also stepped into the cramped trailer from which Dr. Sue Matheson, the Pass Christian School Superintendent, and her leadership team, were leading a community of learners to excel beyond the expectations of anyone around them. We talked. I told Sue I would return.
Little did I know that last year I would return to be part of the filming of a documentary about Pass Christian, the story told only in part through this trailer. This is not just a “feel good”, isolated story of success as you can see by looking at the results from around the country and globe… all on this website. We have provided data and documentation from The Pass, along with writing and poetry by Suzanne Ishee, a middle school teacher in The Pass, all giving context to this documentary. Take a deep breath and look through these frames into a story that not only inspires us, but also offers us insights …
12th century or 21st century thinking?
Lower and Higher Order Thinking: Where is the line?
We have a new case study to share from England and it is extensive. You can check out a range of research and reflections.. and look at video clips sent across the now “virtual” pond from St Robert (a secondary school in American terms).
Kevin Steele, a lead administrator, and his colleagues at St Robert of Newminster Catholic School and Sixth Form College drilled down to study “Thinking Maps and School Effectiveness"; in a UK Comprehensive School.” One of the outcomes of the research shows that students and teachers are now spending more time at the higher levels of thinking at St Robert School. Hmmm… What does that mean? Kevin and his team are tracking an essential question here in the 21st century… asking about Higher Order thinking...
Here are some clips to view. The first clip is of students showing and talking about the effectiveness of Thinking Maps for interpretation of poetry and essay writing;
the second clip is a new teacher being coached on pre and post lessons by Kevin—a seasoned teacher and administrator--using the very same tools. A secondary student, a new teacher, a seasoned administrator using the same tools. Hmmm… The young teacher is shown in the clip talking about how the maps helped her improve her own thinking and teaching effectiveness--- using a common language for thinking.
How can that be? Isn’t the teacher just naturally thinking at a “higher” level? The normative view (call it a paradigm) is that we all just “naturally” progress from lower order (concrete) to higher order (abstract) thinking in some grand stage theory staircase to “adult” thinking! As my teenage son might say: not. Let's not confuse Piaget with Bloom!
This all takes me back to when I was a young teacher 30 years ago (it could have been the 12th century)—the early 1980’s in Oakland, California teaching mostly African American youth living in a high poverty area—and I went to a workshop on Bloom’s Taxonomy. I was told to ask more questions at the upper end of Bloom’s taxonomy-- you know: analysis, synthesis, evaluative (FYI: see the revised Bloom, 2001--an Addison Wesley Longman book). These questions were to be asked of my students who were in schools that would be closed down today for lack of AYP. Talk about left behind. Sadly, most of the children I was teaching, in statistical terms and in life, were BOUND to failure by the system. Why?
All I know is that when I went back to the classroom after the workshop I asked more complex questions. I cajoled. I pleaded for responses. I didn’t know what to do. Later I went to a presentation by Art Costa on Habits of Mind (then called “intelligent behaviors”). I realized in that moment that I was just one in a string of teachers slowly remediating my students toward failure (imagine the slow simmering of frogs in water… they can’t save themselves and jump out… they are mesmerized by the
dullness of it all). I was re-mediating the content they hadn’t “learned” the first time. Or the second time… or for the previous eight years of their schooling. They had been “remediated” in reading groups during their first days of kindergarten. My students’ now had fully REMEDIATED MINDS!
OK, I’ll get to my point: What Art Costa offered was a vision of cognitive mediation (Google: Reuven Feuerstein). They were not being mediated through their fundamental cognitive processes. So then the question becomes: Where is the line between lower and higher order thinking? Consider: The fundamental cognitive skills—thinking skills—are at play at every level of Bloom’s taxonomy. Bloom’s taxonomy is NOT a stage theory of cognitive development: it is a LEVELED taxonomy of objectives all at play in kindergarten and preK!
So take a look at the two video clips, one of students, one of a new teacher being coached on the content AND her thinking. Look for the commonalities in thinking. The message was delivered long ago by Lauren Resnick and others: higher order thinking occurs at the earliest ages of schooling and through, dynamically, our latest years of life. And now we even know of the plasticity of our brains… networking patterns of thinking as we sleep.
Hello again! This coming week, our colleague Bob Price will be back in the Addis Ababa area of Ethiopia. In late August of 2009, Bob facilitated a weeklong seminar with over 70 Ethiopian teachers and administrators. He wanted to return to continue the work—not dropping in and simply returning to the United States--and as you can see on the video clips and read below, the teachers wanted him back, and for very good reasons. This could well be the embryonic stage of a global initiative. A UNESCO official was at the seminar and offered his reflections and encouragement. 
Usually in these blogs I offer my thinking in the moment, playing with ideas, sharing discoveries from educators in the field, some from those who have received grants from Thinking Foundation. This time, I will simply share the edited video and selected transcript of feedback from participants — View Bob’s Case Study here on the Thinking Foundation website. It is THAT powerful. The ideas and the deep reflections from the hearts and minds of these educators stand as beautiful, meaningful, inspiring signposts for us all. 
One participant said at the end of the week, already welcoming Bob back to their country: 'I hope this journey will not be for first and for the last.'
And then there was a greater calling. Marjann’s youngest daughter, Ariel, was diagnosed with bone cancer some years ago, fought hard and with grace to survive, and then passed away from all of us. I had some delightful, meaningful times with Ariel… one time sitting by her bedside as she was fighting the rare disease, talking with her as she watched one of her favorite shows: Gray’s Anatomy. She spent so much painful time in hospitals and she was still intrigued by a television show that dealt with the most difficult part of her world. She wanted to understand. She was a special child who was thoughtful and full of heart. Young Ariel was and IS an inspiration to many of us. You can read about her through 
