THINK? BE… DO! LIVE*

This last week I attended the National Association of Independent Schools conference in Manhattan. The conference focused on the idea that schools needed to support learning in ways beyond the teaching of “analytical” intelligence, but also foster the “creative and practical” intelligences as posited by Bob Sternberg and Howard Gardner. Speakers such as Sir Ken Robinson and Daniel Pink talked convincingly about how schools need to teach to both sides of the brain and lamented the fact that creativity as measured by researchers such as Paul Torrance have found that creativity actually diminishes with more schooling. Many people see the economic advantage that we currently enjoy in the United States tied to a belief in creativity and innovation. However, John Kao (a RCS alumnus) argues in his book, Innovation Nation, that we are now losing our position of pre-eminence in innovation and creativity, that other nations such as China and India are catching up with us.

I find this all rather depressingly amusing. Edward De Bono and Gardner have been arguing for years that creativity is an essential capacity that must be intentionally developed in children. And yet, there has been so little attention to these ideas in any tangible way in schools across the globe. Rudolf Steiner with his Waldorf school movement made the point that the architecture should be supportive and responsive to the development of positive capacities, such as creativity, in children. The Reggio Emilia methodology in elementary education puts a strong emphasis on how the learning spaces support the development of creative skills in all children. And for all of this, schools are usually aesthetically impoverished places that do not have at the center of their mission the development of creative skills. Why is this? I completely understand the focus on developing analytical skills in children, but is that not a creative endeavor. I can appreciate the arguments of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Beethoven, and Morandi. Although they are all in different media, these “thinkers” expressed rigorous arguments in words, sounds and images. Their “products” are at once analytical and creative. It is odd that we need to make a dialectic out of the analytical and the creative. I think that this is a false dialectic and would like to see schools embrace that the intentional teaching of creativity and design are indeed essential elements of the learning process.

As arts programs throughout the nation are at risk, it would seem that arts educators should make an argument about their importance in schools. I do not have much sympathy for the argument that the arts are essential for pure self-expression. What is the purpose of self-expression? I think that developing innovation and creativity in children should be a central part of the mission of arts educators and that we should be able to make a strong case

ony Schwartz of The Energy Project and Grant Wiggins of Authentic Education
came to talk to the faculty at Riverdale yesterday. The talks were both
provocative, engaging and challenged paradigms that many individuals
have about both work and assessment.

I had read of Tony’s work in the Harvard Business Review
in an article entitled “Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time”, Tony argues
that institutions and employees should focus on maintaining and raising
workplace energy rather than focusing on a false sense of mere
productivity–”busyness” for the sake of being occupied. In other
words, that focusing on quality of engagement and work rather than the
quantity of tasks completed is a worthy aim. Tony presented some of the
ideas that he has used in working with professional athletes and
professionals such as understanding the concept of ultradian
rhythms, cycles that occur in humans in 90-120 minute patterns, and
that by living synchronously with such rhythms is a good idea. He also
focused in on the notion that we need to take rest and recuperation,
especially sleep, as seriously as performance. It was an
extraordinarily interesting presentation, and I hope that we will be
able to work together in the future on a collaborative project that
will have us consider how the structure of school life can support the
idea that performance is not all about pushing students and faculty
members as hard as we can.

Later in the afternoon, Grant Wiggins, an expert on assessment, came to talk to the faculty about the balance between formative
and summative assessment. He focused on the idea that true learning is
a result of timely feedback and that feedback is in the form of a clear
and objective judgment of performance in a given task. It is true that
as teachers and parents we focus in on the summative grade in school
tasks rather than the actual quality of the performance. I wonder
sometimes what we would all feel like if the complex performances we
produce every day in our workplaces were distilled down to a single
summative grade. We all expect rich feedback as adults, and yet, in
schools the focus on grades has become obsessive to the point that it
actually distracts us all from focusing on the quality of the
performance. I hope that in the years ahead we will readjust this focus.

These
two talks were interesting and provocative, and I hope that they as we
have both these individuals back to the school in the next years that
they will help us re-imagine what a school should be.

I am at the NYSAIS/CAIS Heads’ Conference at the Mohonk Mountain House near New Paltz, New York and last night listened to an interestingly provocative talk by Alan November, an expert on technology and education. I liked the way that Alan made the group feel uncertain about the future, about the purposes of education and how computer technology can be a mixed boon for schools if educators do not use this “new medium” in new ways to educate for better thinking and more effective leadership.

It has been an exciting start to the school year at Riverdale Country
School. We have celebrated our centennial, invited former students back
to school for homecoming, welcomed new parents and students to our
community, opened up our school to prospective students and parents on
a number of different occasions and undergone our ten-year New York
State Association of Independent Schools’ accreditation visit. The
weather this autumn has been magnificent and helped our strong athletic
program have strong showings on the fields with the cross-country,
field hockey, football, soccer and volleyball teams all encountering
massive successes . The students have been engaged in work and have
taken the shift from summer to the work of the fall semester in
stride–our seniors have been completing their early applications and
our pre-kindergarten students have been learning their alphabet.

As
we have began the start of the year, we have also taken this moment to
think about the future of the school. In board meetings, while the
NYSAIS accreditation team visited with us, and in faculty meetings many
of the minds at the school are thinking about the future. RCS is at a
wonderful juncture in its history. The school is financially stable,
the academic program is wonderfully robust, we have a wonderful pair of
facilities in which to teach and learn. Now we have to start to define
in a focused fashion the purpose and aims of a school like Riverdale.
Of course, our purpose is to educate children, but to what ends? We
began the conversation at the first faculty meeting by asking each
other to comment on the strengths of the school and imagine where we
would like to place programmatic emphases moving the school forward
into its next century. This has been an exciting process for me to work
on, and I think that others have been excited in the school community
to think about the school’s future in this way. 

Welcome! My family and I are delighted to be here and to have started to settle in at the school. It has been an exciting few months, and I have been so warmly welcomed and embraced by the community of teachers, students, parents and alumni of this great school. Thank you to everyone for that fine welcome. I want to thank Kent Kildahl, Milton Sipp and the faculty members and staff in both the Middle School and Upper School divisions for their work and inviting me to talk today. I am happy to see you all here, and I hope that we will all get to know each other better during this year and the years ahead.

At the start of the year, I shared the school mission with the faculty. I would like to do that again with you all today:

“The mission of Riverdale Country School is to offer students the foundations of a liberal education that will guide them to rewarding, purposeful lives. In its second century, Riverdale’s unique character is still shaped by the commitment of its founder, Frank S. Hackett, to high academic standards, scholarly, intimate teaching, abundant play in the open, and a care for the best influences.

It is our duty to help our students expand their competence and resourcefulness and to enable them to think critically. Riverdale students are not merely passive recipients of knowledge; teachers support students in the challenging work of actively constructing their own understanding and skills in a balance of intellectual, artistic, athletic, and community activities. The ideal Riverdale experience is a friendly, lively meeting of disciplined minds working, creating, and performing together in the classroom and in the larger arena made possible by New York City and our country campuses.

The knowledge, culture, experiences, interests, abilities, and points of view that each member of the Riverdale community brings to the school enrich the lives and deepen the understanding of those with whom they interact. We value the quality of the relationships we forge. Parents feel a strong partnership with the school, and students form lasting bonds with their teachers, mentors, and peers. For these reasons, we seek diverse experiences and viewpoints in our students and their families, our faculty, and our curriculum. In the patterns of our daily life on campus, we seek to create a model of the ways in which people should treat and respect one another.”

As I come to Riverdale during its Centennial celebration, I am filled with the idea of legacies. I feel the responsibility of the legacies that have been passed on to me through this school: of Frank Hackett and his ideas regarding world peace and global citizenship, of Gaylord Flory’s views on art and its importance in schools, of Frank Bertino and his passionate pursuit of excellence on the football field. And it is with this sense of legacy that I want to talk to you this morning. Parenting and teaching are imperfect arts, but behind the act of parenting and teaching is a single question: “How do I help this young person become the best person she or he can be?” This is an interesting question to explore, and I believe that the school’s mission statement gives us some wonderful directions as to how to do this. Nonetheless, I think that we have to distill the mission further in order for us to really understand what this school is about and what this school will become in the years ahead. The school needs its talking points.

What can we give to our children? What is the best and most effective legacy we can pass on to the next generation? I would like us all to think about that today and as you meet your son’s or daughters teachers. Recently, we have talked at the school about its historic strengths and what strengths of RCS we wish to emphasize in the years ahead. In these discussions three major themes have started to emerge and it is these very themes that I will comment on as legacies that we all would wish to pass on to our children.

Legacy I: Thinking & Wisdom
It is difficult to learn. It is even more difficult to apply one’s learning to a given task, and yet that is what our school community aims for: providing students with the knowledge, skills and confidence so that they can indeed make good changes in the world. The teachers at Riverdale Country School have all talked about basic skills and ensuring that students leave with the type of cultural capital that they need to move on to the next steps in their education; however, the teachers here really want to focus on having students develop as critical and creative thinkers. We put a real emphasis on thinking and that is not easy to teach. Good thinking is achieved by working as an apprentice to an experienced mentor, in learning to ask good questions and to propose effective arguments alongside a skilled practitioner. I hope that you will actively support this quest to have your sons and daughters become good thinkers by coaching them through the process. This means supporting them, as mentioned in the article to which I sent you the link on Carol Dweck’s work in my August letter. She asks us all, teachers and parents, to focus on the effort that young people put into a challenging task rather than praising their intelligence or innate abilities. This will help them be better learners. As they develop as critical thinkers at the school, I hope they will also engage in wonderful debate at the communal dinner table with you in the evening. This takes the work of the classroom and makes it tangible for young people by making learning authentic. We must all take the time to engage in informal dialogue with our children about issues that are of importance to them so that they can start to make concrete connections between their lives and the academic disciplines they are studying. This is a point made by research into the brain and cognition, to retain knowledge it has to be actively connected to prior knowledge and experience. I hope to see us use such research into cognition and learning to inform robustly our classroom practices—I believe that this is a professional obligation for educators.

I know that your children will develop as thinkers as they move through the school, but I would like us to push even further. I would like us to think about developing wise children. I know that sounds like an oxymoron to some degree since adolescents are not usually wise and perhaps should not be wise all the time. Nonetheless, I would like to have our students develop as wise learners in the classroom, becoming self-disciplined and being able to evaluate their own learning, but also show such wisdom on the athletic fields as they interact with other teams and in their own lives as they think twice about the life decisions they face. To my mind, wisdom is not something you suddenly achieve in your dotage, but rather has to start being developed from an early age as Robert Sternberg, the noted psychologist has observed. Therefore, let us all think of ways to have our young people become wiser, and thus, more successful leaders, citizens and human beings.

Legacy II: A Sense of Community
You have to collaborate more than your parents did in your workplaces, in your travels, in your homes. No longer can one really work as an individual any longer unless one is a hermit or a novelist. All the writing I do is mainly collaborative. Social and networking software has and will continue to change the way that we cast our thoughts, we work and we socialize. I believe that it is essential that we intentionally teach collaboration and teamwork in schools. This happens naturally on the field hockey or football field, but how is this supported in the English classroom or the Chemistry laboratory? More and more students will need to know how to practice leadership and teamwork and this must be part of the curriculum. It is also important for us to support these young people at the school by participating as much as we can in school activities and events. Riverdale offers all sorts of opportunities for students to work on projects together in the afternoon hours—working on the Riverdale Review, playing on a team or acting in a play. However, the success of these activities is dependent on community participation. I can understand families wanting to engage in activities and events outside of school, but if we are to really teach collaboration and how one functions in a community we need to ensure that students do engage in all sorts of activities on the campuses here. Let us all make a special commitment to further building the community this year and continue to find good ways to strengthen the community in the future.

Part of being in a community is taking care of the place where we work. I hope that we will take better care of these campuses and that we work to help your sons and daughters be more responsible stewards of the world we inhabit. I attended a meeting of the Green Schools Alliance on Thursday evening in NYC—a coalition of like-minded schools who will engage in partnerships to raise awareness and become greener together. I look forward to having the school work at decreasing our carbon footprint, lessening our dependence on fossil fuels and finding ways to live more sustainably as a school community during my tenure here. As we grapple with these issues regarding environmental stewardship, I hope that we will also model the type of care for the environment in our own homes and businesses that we want to inculcate in this younger generation. We have to take up the challenge to model the type of responsible behavior we want to see our kids develop. Becoming “greener” is good for everyone.

And finally under this heading of developing a sense of community, I hope to see us all reach out more into the local community through service opportunities while also developing long-lasting ties with other like-minded communities around the globe. This summer, for example, several students and faculty members visited and worked in a center working with disadvantaged youths in Botswana. I listened avidly to a wonderful presentation by the students and faculty the other day during the assembly. I hope that we will be able to deepen this relationship with a community in Botswana by continuing to go there and offer them financial and personal assistance. I look to see the school forge more of these strategic partnerships with two to three other communities around the world so that we can learn from and help each other. As a natural outgrowth of this work, I also hope that our curriculum will shift organically as we develop a more profound relationship with these communities in other countries and that we start to develop courses that link in positive ways with the experiences students have in traveling to these places. Let’s all support the concept that although we are in New York and a day school that we can become an active force in the local, regional, national and global communities with which we work.

Legacy III: The Potential of a Life Well Lived
We live in a difficult world with complex problems. In my school in England they developed student resilience, grit and self-discipline in ways using all sorts of verbal and physical means, which were generally not pleasant. The question for us is how can we develop resilience in our children in intentional ways without resorting to such draconian methods? Angela Duckworth, a colleague of Marty Seligman—the inventor of positive psychology at UPenn, has researched how high performers in a variety of fields end up being successful. What she has found is that intelligence helps to some degree, but it is not the whole picture. She has found that “grit” (in her definition: resilience + passion) correlates significantly with success in many different fields. I hope that we think about how to develop strengths and virtues in our children such as grit, self-discipline and their ability to navigate social situations. As we try to do that in more informed ways, I hope that we will actually improve the quality of intellectual engagement on the campus by effectively balancing the development of our students’ minds with developing their own sense of character. To this end, I look to forge a partnership with social scientists such as Seligman and Duckworth to help the school work on developing a sense of well-being in our students and allow RCS to play a role of a leader in education.

In relation to developing character, I think that we also need to act more calmly with these young people. I remember when I was going through the experience of living high school and middle school with my daughter that I started to resemble a character out of a Woody Allen film—a bit anxious, a bit nervy. I found that channeling some stoic character out of an Ingmar Bergman film was helpful in coping with the stresses of the experience. Learning works best when students are challenged but not overstressed. We do need to keep on prodding our young charges and keep on making them feel as though they should be concerned, but we need to do it calmly with the perspective that it is normal for adolescents to make mistakes, be indifferent, and, at time, to drive us crazy. Obviously this balance between challenge and calm is very difficult to achieve, but we are working on it.

I hope that sharing some of the ideas we are thinking about on the campus right now will help us all move forward to have a successful year. And, as we move on through the day, I hope that we will keep in mind some obstacles that may prevent us all from passing on such legacies to our children:

Learning and good schooling cannot be a high stakes endeavor. Increasingly this society is creating stress and anxiety in the context of learning. This is counter to much of the research in cognition that argues for learning in settings that allow for calm and deliberative practice with effective feedback. We have to partner together to bring back some sanity to the learning process and let these young people explore ideas and work on their own.

While letting young people learn independently, we also need to let them fail or not do well. Support them when this happens. One cannot learn anything, whether it be how to write a lab report or how to score a goal without failing to some degree at it. It is natural that these young people be terribly afraid of failure—our present culture sees failure as a dysfunction that needs remediation. I think that we should all reject that type of thinking. Not succeeding is sometimes a much better lesson than continually doing well at something. It challenges your safe assumptions and allows you to reconsider what you are doing. We have to ensure that while young people fail, they feel supported and safe. Do help us at school in that endeavor. Support your children when they don’t do well, but allow them to grapple with the consequences of not doing as well as they ought on some activity, some paper or some project.

Teachers do understand these obstacles better than most people and are really focused in an objective way on what they think is best for children. Please keep on supporting our teachers as you have done in the past. They need to feel your support and help in making this the very best school for your children.

I have tried to give you some ideas regarding our discussions here and the future of the school by tying it to the life you are living now with your students at RCS. I have also given you some suggestions as to what we can all do to support and deepen the understanding of the mission of this school. Both parenting and teaching are very difficult–I applaud you and all the faculty for doing such a wonderful job and look forward to working with all of you cooperatively this year.

So to sum up: Let’s help our kids become wiser. Let’s help our kids become part of the school community, the greater New York community and the global community. Let’s give our kids the best chance we can for them to lead meaningful and purposeful lives. All of us at the school look forward to engaging in this wonderful work together with you all. We are delighted to have the privilege to work with your children. We are happy to engage in a partnership with you all in developing the next generation of leaders for the United States and the World.

Thank you for your patience and good spirits in all this wonderful work. I hope that you have a great day!

On Thursday night of this week I gave a presentation on recent trends in the research on learning and how the research might apply to the classroom. As far as I am concerned the three most important ideas I covered are:
- the conceptions of good learning and thinking and how such learning and thinking are assessed (Dweck, Steele & Aronson, Gardner and Wiggins)
- the idea that schools should focus on teaching thinking, creativity and innovation in explicit ways as well as analytical thinking (Sternberg, Robinson, Kao and Kuhn)
- and, how does one teach non-cognitive capacities, such as empathy, resilience and “grit” as well as the cognitive capacities schools normally concentrate upon (Seligman and Duckworth).

As you can see I have created links to main people I referred to in the talk. Many of these are videos you can watch to give you a sense of their work.