It’s Like Riding a Bike- Chapter 8

In 2017 my first book on educational methods, titled It’s Like Riding a Bike-How to make learning last a lifetime, was published. With more than 10,000 copies printed, I decided that now is the time to share my thoughts with the world for FREE.

Over ten weeks in the summer/fall of 2023 a chapter of the book will be shared each week via this blog. Feel free to read in any order that works for you. Feel free to bookmark entries to read all at once at a later date. Feel free to share with others. Feel free to disagree with anything you read or to scream your affirmations from the mountain tops. This is for YOU. This is for our kids. This is how we teach so that it lasts a lifetime.

Chapter 8

My own experience

When I was a student in school I remember spending time in my 6th grade social studies class learning about World War II. The lessons I learned were fascinating. I grew up in a military household with a father actively serving in the Navy, one grandfather having served in the Korean Conflict, and another grandfather having served in the Pacific Theater during the conclusion of the war with Germany and Japan. As a twelve-year-old kid, I was hungry for knowledge on the subject of the world wars so that I could better relate to the experiences of the men in my life. In class, I devoured our social studies textbook and remember vividly making multiple trips to our school media center to try and check out additional books on the subject matter.

One evening at home I remember reading one of the books that contained pictures of the Holocaust and the Jewish Concentration Camps. Showing this book to my dad, he asked if I had read anything about the Japanese Internments Camps we had here in America. What? America had its own camps set up to house citizens and residents that we considered threats. Why didn’t I read about this in any of the books available in my school library?  A few days later, after having a conversation with my school librarian, I learned that our school only had books available that allowed students to be filled with hope and pride. Even today, many school libraries have “banned books” lists where they censor the information, they want to make available to kids. Some local municipalities have done similar things with adult-oriented texts as well. In some places, books are not intended to spread knowledge, but to ingrain specific beliefs.  Some would argue, “This just proves that we need our kids to be well-read, to have exposure to a lot of texts, and to gain a lot more knowledge.” I do not disagree, but I think if we center our conversation around simply teaching students how to receive information through decoding the written text, we are missing the point, and truly doing them a disservice as well. If reading what is put before them is all we are after, our kids will miss out on a lot of knowledge and lose the ability to start forming their own opinions. We do not just want our children to learn about the past, we want our children to make our futures better.

My five-year-old, Reagan, loves princesses, queens, and Barbies. Her room is pink, and her closet is filled with dresses. She is the sweetest little lady. Last summer I read her a book at night, a book that I loved when I was a kid. It was a Sesame Street themed book with Grover, that fluffy blue Muppet describing that there was a monster at the end of the book. Throughout the book, Grover implores the reader to stop reading so that we do not get any closer to the end of the book because of his fear of monsters. Low and behold on the last page the readers learn that the monster at the end of the book is only Grover. There was nothing to be afraid of. The book is cute and, in my opinion, had just enough suspense to hold the attention of my, then, three-year-old. What I did not account for was the nightmare that it would also induce into that same little girl. My little girl, at that stage in her mental development, had not come to understand the elements of fiction. She did not know she was supposed to analyze the text and pictures to deduce that the story was not real. She had a hard time distinguishing between fact and fiction. She took the text at face value, believing it to be 100% true, and fell asleep with monsters on her mind.

Far too often our students, and many of us for that matter, fall for the same trap. We have simple comprehension of text but have not developed more complex skills such as analysis, synthesis, evaluation, etc…to draw our own conclusions. Look at any political advertisement in America today and you will see first-hand that this is exactly what politicians depend on. Many people who read the written word simply take it at face value and run with it without a second thought of analyzing it for accuracy.

In 1956, child psychologist, Dr. Benjamin Bloom, first shared his vision for education in which he promoted the need for more “high order” thinking. Developed during the first decade of the Cold War, this taxonomy of thinking equipped educators with a tool that they could use to better focus their energies on skills of greater depth. In an era focused on the space race, nuclear ambitions, and computer innovation, developing students with the ability to not only acquire knowledge but to be able to do something with it was of paramount importance.

According to Bloom and his team, the progression of cognitive learning follows the pattern shown below: 

• Knowledge
• Comprehension
• Application
• Analysis
• Synthesis
• Evaluation

In the year, 2000, this taxonomy was revised to allow for a change in syntax from nouns to verbs, but the basic premise is the same. Let’s take a quick look at this and then discuss what it has to do with reading, or more specifically, NOT reading.

When I was in school thirty years ago, my teachers focused on ensuring the acquisition of knowledge. I had weekly spelling tests and was asked to recite my multiplication facts. I was asked to memorize the presidents and the capitals of each US state. My teachers wanted to make sure that my mind was filled with enough information that I could win any game of Trivial Pursuit I played, and I was set up to be a Jeopardy champion, even if I never auditioned for the show.

When I was in middle school my parents decided to make a financial decision that at the time seemed wise. They saw that my mind was absorbing a lot of information at school but that I was still hungry for more. I would come home from school and tell my parents that Richmond was the capital of Virginia but would ask why, since it is not the state’s largest city. I would look at a map of the USA and ask why western states covered so much more geographical space than those on the east coast. I wanted to know why the sky was blue, but space was black. Why was the grass green when the dirt was brown? I would question everything. As a result of my constant questioning, my parents decided to purchase a set of Britannica encyclopedias. To this date, I am not sure if the purchase was an attempt to shut me up or help me learn, but these books contained the answers to almost any question I could ask. They were the text equivalent of Google. If I could look up a key word alphabetically, I could find information galore. It was in those books that I learned the history of the Civil War in less than 5 pages. I learned who Henry Ford was, how far the Earth was from the sun, the history of the Cold War, and countless other facts. Those books gave me greater understanding of the world, at least as it existed in the 1980’s through the lens of the editors of the book. Thirty years ago, gaining knowledge and greater understanding and comprehension was a sign of intelligence. As a matter of fact, my ability to recall so many facts even earned me a spot in the Gifted and Talented program at my local school. But as my dad often said to me, I “had book smarts but no common sense.” I was even told once, “You may get all A’s in school, but in the real world, ‘A’ students end up working for the ‘C’ students. “At the time I was highly offended. Looking at it today, I think that statement actually carried with it a lot of wisdom. My quest for knowledge was limiting my ability to search for more complex learning. I was filled with useless facts. While others were outside playing and living life, I was in my room reading about life.

Fast forward thirty years, I heard on the radio this week that a large city here in America was recently proposing legislation requiring restaurants to place a picture of a saltshaker next to menu items that contained more than the recommended daily intake of sodium. As I listened to this report, I heard a reporter state that this would be placed on both children’s menus as well as on adult menus. As a dad of four children, I know that when I go out to eat it is often my job to order for my children. Sometimes we are lucky enough to go to restaurants where there are pictures of the food choices allowing some of my kids the opportunity to advocate for themselves. If there is a picture of pizza, macaroni and cheese, or chicken fingers I know I will have some happy kids.  Last week I was able to travel to one such national restaurant chain. Next to the pictures of food items was also an indication of the number of calories in each serving. The caloric information meant nothing to three of my kids, but my ten-year-old wanted to know what a calorie was. As I gave him a brief overview, explaining that it was basically the energy available within food that could get turned to fat if not used up, I could tell he had some basic understanding. He took that knowledge and was able to apply it to the food choice he was considering, but ultimately still elected to go with a slice of pepperoni pizza. 

 I am not naive enough to believe that the restaurant put the calorie information on the menu for the benefit of kids making their dietary decisions. It is there for parents. We are to take that information and make a decision based on it. We are called to analyze the benefits and make a decision. I assume this is the logic behind the saltshaker pictures being proposed in that large US city. It is also the same basic logic for why the surgeon general has warnings placed on cigarette cartons here in America. I would argue that the overwhelming majority of Americans know and understand that too much sodium, too many calories, and nicotine and tobacco are bad for healthy lifestyles, yet our inability to analyze that information and to make wise decisions is our downfall. The ability to analyze, synthesize, evaluate, create, and reflect are the primary purposes for acquiring information, yet these are skills we often glance right over in schools today. We focus so intently on getting our students to memorize and recall information that we never move to anything deeper. We are content if our kids can read the words on a food label, but rarely go the extra step of teaching them how to make informed decisions along with their newfound knowledge. This is also the heart of my argument in this text. I do not care how my children acquire understanding, whether it is from a written text, digital media, pictures on a menu, or their friends and family. I want them to gain the information and then do something with it.

The skill of analysis is basically what I am doing with this book. I am breaking a large concept down into smaller components. I did not just throw out the statement “I don’t care if my kids can read”. I am explaining why by dissecting my feelings, the research, and what it means to read and think. The skill of analysis is what makes good teachers great and great coaches winners.  

Over the last two decades sports radio has become a major player in the world of media. It has moved beyond providing updates once an hour or reporting game scores. There are now stations that devote 24 hours a day to breaking down the last game into its subtleties. They have listeners clogging up the phone lines eager to offer their assessment of why the home team won or lost its last game. Great coaches do this same thing in their offices daily as they determine practice and improvement plans. Breaking abstract concepts down into smaller chunks is the starting point. Coming up with a game plan based on those subtleties is the art of synthesizing. These are two complex skills. Two skills that when done well will often elevate a coach to the position of being a winning coach.

I have coached a few sports in my time. I have never worked in the professional ranks but have found some success at the youth and high school levels. I have spent time on the volleyball and basketball courts, running track, and even helping guide golfers around a course. Each game comes with its own expectations, outcomes, and rules and as the coach it is my job to use all of these nuances to try and get the most out of my athletes.  Back in 2007 I coached a basketball team that went undefeated. The team had tremendous amounts of talent, but more importantly than that, they played as a team.

When the team was initially constructed, I first took a look at each player individually. I knew that I wanted players who could shoot, dribble, pass, rebound, defend, and move. I knew that these were the key components of having a well-developed player. An analysis of the game of basketball helped me make that determination. As I examined my players, I began to rank each player to determine their relative strengths with each component. Based upon their scores on my rubric, players were then placed into primary positions. Some were given the role of being a guard, some were forwards, and a couple played center. I took “basketball player” as a concept that I understood, analyzed the key features, and then began to synthesize that information by creating groupings and themes based on the data collected. As the season went on and games were played, our practices were designed around those key components as we tried to maximize our strengths and minimize our weaknesses. I wanted to make sure that each practice had a theme designed to improve an isolated skill set. As a coach I also set aside time each week to watch film. Sometimes I would bring in videos showing other teams. We would watch them work and then break down their strengths and weaknesses, determine what we would need to do to exploit them, and then ultimately evaluate what they did well.

The more advanced skill of evaluation is basically making a judgment based on facts and evidence. By breaking down what we saw on film we were in essence coming up with our evidence to use to present our case. Inevitably, because I had a confident team, each film session ended with our players determined and believing that we were better than the team we watched and that we could beat everyone. That belief, that evaluation, was never good enough though. For some reason, the officials always made us play the game. They never let our players just come up to them before tip-off and state that the game should be cancelled because we already knew we were better. I could have gone up to the referee before any contest and told them, “We watched the film yesterday and based upon our evaluation, we are better than our opponent so there is no need to play”, but that would not have taken me anywhere. In order to be undefeated, we had to actually take our evaluations and go out and create a game that resulted in our success.

As our season progressed our games got tougher. In the league in which we played, each team was tasked with playing each other twice. During the first half of the season, our raw talent was often enough to defeat our opponents. Our players knew they had more skill, but so did the other coaches. When we entered the second half of the season it became apparent that the other coaches had been studying us just as we had studies them. They had identified some of our flaws and were doing all they could to take advantage of them. My job was to not only scout the other teams, but to convince our athletes that they needed to get better. We spent countless hours watching film of our own games, games that we won, games that we thought we played well, in an effort to figure out what we could do better. This level of reflection was difficult. Honest reflection is often difficult for most people, but it is also what often allows learners to keep growing. My athletes were not simply given a test on the rules to test their knowledge and comprehension. They were not asked to simply explain the attributes of successful players and to group them into similarities and differences. They were asked to take all of their knowledge, to go out and create something great, and then to keep working to make it better. This is what learning is really all about. It’s not enough to just have knowledge. It is up to us to do something with it, to make informed decisions, to keep growing and to keep improving.  

When I was a kid, I learned a lot about sports by picking up my encyclopedias, reading my baseball cards, or looking at Sports Illustrated. Today kids have access to SportsCenter almost 24 hours a day, can play life-like video games, or can watch highlights on YouTube. They are accessing information in different ways, but ultimately, where they get it from doesn’t matter as much as their ability to validate the data, to determine its relevance, to be able to evaluate what they are seeing, and their ability to go out and do something with it. I remember being a twelve-year-old boy living in Norfolk, VA and coming home from watching a AAA baseball game played by the Tidewater Tides, a minor league affiliate for the New York Mets. I wanted to grow up and be one of the players on the field. The following weekend I went with my mom to the local library and checked out a book titled “The Complete Baseball Encyclopedia.” This book was filled with pictures, graphics, and thousands of words of text describing the history of the game, strategy for winning, and countless seemingly arbitrary facts of the game. I spent my entire weekend reading that book and then the next month trying to copy every word. I didn’t use a Xerox. I grabbed a standard number 2 pencil and a ream of paper. For some reason I had it in my head that if I spent my time copying the text it would translate into me becoming a better baseball player. Instead of setting the book down and actually heading outside to play and practice, I spent my days in my room sitting at my desk reading and writing. Sure, I gained a lot of knowledge about Babe Ruth, the infield fly rule, and the designated hitter, but in that month, my skills and abilities did not improve in the least. I wonder how often our students and children in schools are forced into the same trap. How many times do we ask students to get buried in a book to learn about an aspect of life that they could learn so much better if we just let them experience it?

In today’s educational systems we begin preparing our children from pre-school to be “college and career ready”. I completely understand the intent. We want to build and scaffold our instruction so that our children grow in aptitude to allow them to have a variety of options as they enter into adulthood. We are careful to make sure school curriculums are aligned vertically so that what a child learns in elementary school allows for greater success in middle school and then so that success in middle school allows for success in high school. We begin this training when students are three and four years old with the intent to help make them ready to enter the workforce a decade later. Now here is the irony. I work as a school administrator. In every school building and school district I have ever worked in, the teachers with the least amount of experience are paid the least. There is an understanding that teachers require on the job experience in order to gain the skills necessary to be highly effective. Coming right out of a college program with a teaching degree is not enough. Teachers are expected to learn as they go. As they actually teach and as they gain on the job training, we believe they will getter better at their jobs and compensate them as such. Professional football players in the NFL often do not earn their largest contract straight out of college. There are “rookie caps” that put limits on how much an unproven football player can make. The NFL draft is seen as a crap shoot as often analyst wrestle with whether or not the skills seen by a player in college will translate to the world of professional football. It is often the second contract, four years into a career when an athlete has had the chance to learn the job by doing the job that yields the big money. We put so much attention in our schools to prepare students to be successful in careers and then the real world comes, and those former students learn that in order to be successful in their careers they must actually experience their careers. We prepare our students to live and succeed in the world while at the same time doing all we can to insulate them from the actual world they will be living in. In our schools, if we want to prepare our kids for their future, we must engage them in their present. We must give them real world experience by letting them experience the real world. Reading about the world to prepare them for their future only does so much. If we really want our kids to be successful later on, we as adults must follow through on the greatest parenting advice I ever received, “Do not ever begin a sentence with, ‘I can’t wait until…”. Our jobs need to be to provide our students with rich engaging real-world experiences that foster their natural curiosities and then explicitly teach them multiple strategies to make meaning of the new world around them and then give them opportunities to analyze, synthesize, create, evaluate, reflect and grow. Let our kids be kids. Kids learn. Kids take risks. Kids create. Don’t force them to sit, read, and digest limited perspectives. If a kid chooses to read to gain knowledge, outstanding. This is what works for me as an adult. If a child chooses to grab an iPad, turn on the TV, or engage in a conversation to acquire knowledge, outstanding. Let them gather their facts and information however they need to. Our larger goal should be helping them develop the skills to make meaning and interpret what to do with that information that they are absorbing. The job of educators is to teach skills that can be used with a variety of content, not just to infuse content that students cannot do anything with.

To read earlier chapters, visit https://schmittou.net