THE DISCIPLINED MIND, by Howard Gardner

Howard Gardner is a developmental psychologist who is best known for his theory of multiple intelligences -- the idea that there are at least seven or eight different metrics for intellect, and that a person who is strong in one area (such as logical reasoning) may be weak in others (such as musical aptitude or interpersonal awareness). Gardner has long been a critic of education systems that treat "IQ" (logical/mathematical intelligence) as the be-all and end-all of human thinking, and has called for educators to look for opportunities to engage students' other types of intelligence in order to keep them interested, active, and (most importantly) learning.

In The Disciplined Mind, though, Gardner only touches lightly on his multiple-intelligence theory; this time he has other fish to fry. His target is the mainstream education system and its obsession with coverage -- the idea that students have to accumulate a certain number of facts, about everything from the Mayflower to mitochondria, and be able to regurgitate them on command in a standardized test. This, according to mainstream thought, is what it means to be "educated" -- and Gardner calls B.S. on the whole notion.

The problem with education in this country isn't that we don't have enough facts. 21st-century humanity is inundated with facts; thanks to the Internet, we are essentially drowning in a sea of data. The problem is that, as my own history professor once said, "Facts without theory are trivia." If students cram their heads full of information but never learn how to process it properly -- how to think critically and sort good data from bad -- they'll never be able to use that information in any practical way. And when humans are faced with a bunch of facts they can't interpret, they'll usually throw up their hands and "go with their gut" -- falling back on the same flawed premises and mistaken notions that they formed in their early childhood. This is why an examination of MIT physics grads found that, just one year after graduation, they were no better at solving basic physics problems than a group of younger students who had never even taken a physics course.

Gardner proposes a better way: instead of focusing on "covering" topics, teachers should focus on un-covering the modes of thought that are necessary to interpret data correctly. By focusing on a small number of topics and going into them deeply, teachers can help their students to understand how to think like a scientist, or a mathematician, or a historian, or an art critic. Going deeply into a topic is the only way to expose the flawed thinking that lies deep in the student's mind -- at which point it can be replaced with something better.

"Better", in Gardner's way of thinking, means helping students to discern between accurate information and false information, to recognize and appreciate beauty, and to build a moral compass that will distinguish between ethical and unethical behavior. Gardner summarizes these objectives as the pursuit of "the true, the beautiful and the good." A student who learns how to recognize truth (and falsehood), beauty (and ugliness), and goodness (and evil) will have the necessary mental tools to deal with any data set that he or she may encounter. Once you've learned what it means to think like a scientist, for example, you can apply the same tools whether you're studying biology, chemistry, physics, etc. The same goes for appreciating art or interpreting historical events: the details change, but the disciplines themselves are consistent.

This is an extraordinary book. While Gardner's writing style is dense to the point of being baroque, the principles that he puts forward are ones that I think every educator (and every lawmaker) needs to grasp. He has put his finger on exactly the problem that made me so discontented with aspects of my own undergraduate education. The course that I found least satisfying (Genetics) was a barrage of facts and trivia with little to interconnect them; the professor covered many topics in only enough detail to let us answer questions on the GRE standardized test, without bothering to explain their deeper significance. I did well in the class, but only because of my own talent for storing large amounts of trivial data; I didn't actually understand much more after leaving the class than I did when I first entered it. By contrast, my organic chemistry professor focused on teaching mechanisms and processes; while there was a lot of memorization, it all fit together into a larger conceptual framework, and even years later I can still recognize the different types of reactions that he taught us to look for, even if the precise reactants in question are new to me.

Gardner is less than enthusiastic about the idea of charter schools -- he would prefer to see a nationwide education system that used his technique, or a small number of competing national programs that put their emphasis on different styles of teaching. (Given his own fascination with evolution, perhaps he is hoping that his "discipline-focused" schools will eventually achieve dominance through natural selection, while the coverage-obsessed schools go"extinct.") Still, he does acknowledge that charter schools have the opportunity to experiment with new techniques and methodologies. Hopefully ARISE High School can serve as a model for how a "disciplined" education can be successful.. The strategies and ideals Gardner espouses are right in line with the sort of education that I hope to give my students; I look forward to the opportunity to teach them the path of "the true, the beautiful and the good."

MASTERY, by George Leonard

One of our two required "leadership readings" for the Reach Pre-Service Summer Coursework, Mastery is a short and elegantly-written book in which George Leonard -- former Army Air Force flight instructor and Aikido master -- puts forth a set of deceptively simple rules on how to live your life. He points out that most people, upon trying to learn a new skill, fall into one of three categories:

1. The Dabbler: Jumps into a new venture with great enthusiasm, but loses interest when he soon hits a "plateau" of acheivement. Discouraged, he abandons the enterprise, only to jump into the next thing that strikes his fancy and repeat the process.
2. The Obsessive: Impatient with the "plateaus" of achievement, the Obsessive pushes herself night and day in an effort to recapture the sudden burst of growth that she first experienced. Her performance becomes erratic as she tries to rush the process of improvement, until eventually she burns out -- physically, emotionally, or both.
3. The Hacker: The Hacker doesn't care about pursuing excellence; he just wants to play around with the skill. Unlike the Dabbler, he doesn't get discouraged when he hits a plateau, but he doesn't push himself keep learning and growing either; beyond a certain point, his performance remains flat. He may only practice his skills occasionally, enough to maintain that plateau where he leveled off but not enough to press onward. He's content to "know enough to be dangerous" without going deeper into the pursuit in question.

Leonard puts forth an alternative to all of these paths: the path of Mastery. The Master sets up a regular practice in the skill in question and pursues that practice for its own sake. The discipline itself becomes its own reward. Along the way, the Master encounters bursts of measurable improvement followed by long periods on the plateaus; but rather than give up, obsess over continued improvement, or become content with mediocrity, the Master continues the regular, steady discipline, embracing growth when it occurs but also embracing the periods of apparent stagnation (which are actually the points when you're integrating everything you've learned to the point where it becomes second nature -- an essential step on the road to further improvement).

As Leonard points out, you can apply these different "paths" to any pursuit in life, and you needn't follow the same path in everything. Looking at my own life, I can see that I've been a Dabbler at art and a Hacker at guitar-playing. I'd like to say I've approached my writing in accordance with the path of mastery, but I've been a bit too erratic in my writing schedule for that to be strictly true; I think I alternate between periods of Mastery and Hackerdom where writing is concerned. The important thing is to recognize the pursuits that you really care about being better at and then pursuing the path of mastery in those disciplines, because that's the only way to keep improving over long periods of time without getting burned out.

One of the most eye-opening parts of the book was chapter three, "America's War Against Mastery." Leonard pointed out that our entire popular culture is based around a value system that scorns the path of mastery. This is particularly obvious in commercial advertisements and television shows:

"Keep watcing, and an underlying pattern will emerge. About half of the commercials, whatever the subject mater, are based on a climactic moment: The cake has already been baked; the family and guests, their faces all aglow, are gathered around to watch an adorable three-year-old blow out the candles. The race is run and won; beautiful young people jump up and down in ecstasy as they reach for frosted cans of diet cola. Men are shown working at their jobs for all of a second and a half, then it's Miller time. Life at its best, these commercials teach, is an endless series of climactic moments.
"...In all of this, the specific content isn't nearly as destructive to mastery as is the rhythm. One epiphany follows another. One fantasy is crowded out by the next. Climax is piled upon climax. There's no plateau." (pp. 23-29)

This fantasy of endless upward progress is insidious because it doesn't match up with the way things actually work in reality. Driven to find the sort of life that we see on TV, we either work ourselves to exhaustion or seek shortcuts to excellence. The recent steroid scandal in baseball and the collapse of the mortgage industry are both examples of what can happen when people follow the siren song of Better, Faster, More!

I found this book greatly inspiring because of the firm but gentle way it encourages the reader to get on the path to mastery and stay on it. The acknowledgement that we can't (and won't) keep growing in a steady upward rise is refreshing and liberating; it's right and natural to find yourself "stuck on the plateau." The admonishment to keep pressing onward, to find your rewards in the daily practice of your craft rather than losing heart or obsessing over the next burst of improvement, is a lesson that can be applied to any area of life. It's a lesson that I plan to embrace as I move forward with my career as a teacher.

Off to start my new life...

As I sit here, nearly all of my worldly goods are packed up in my car and trailer, awaiting transport to California. Tomorrow morning I set out for Chicago, my first stop, where I'll be visiting with two of my fellow podcasters. Subsequent stops will take me to Springfield (MO), Denver, Albuquerque, and Phoenix, before finally arriving in the Bay Area on July 31st.

I've been busy over the last week and a half working on the reading for my REACH Pre-Service program. Last Saturday I finished The Disciplined Mind, which is an excellent book that I heartily recommend to anyone interested in education. I'll post my thoughts on the book in more detail in a later post. Right now I'm working on Mastery, a book written by a former Army Air Force pilot and aikido instructor -- the premise of which is that there is a distinct path to self-improvement that requires us to love the process of self-improvement. We have to embrace the journey even when we're not seeing results, because the practice itself is its own reward. I can speak to the truth of this on a number of levels, particularly in playing guitar and writing fiction. I'm a bit more than a third of the way through the book and greatly enjoying it; I look forward to continuing to digest it over the course of my travels.

Once I arrive in Cali I'll be staying with a friend in Palo Alto until my room in Berkeley becomes available on August 4th. Her house is quiet and beautiful and has a lot of space in which to work, which will give me a great opportunity to focus in on my remaining coursework and crank through it quickly and steadily. I haven't been able to spend as much time on the coursework as I would have liked to thus far -- my previous day job, which ended yesterday, and the work of getting ready to move cross-country have utterly devoured my time -- so I'm looking forward to the chance to be alone with the books, with no greater responsibility than to absorb this material and prepare for the career that awaits me.

My ideal biology class...

I spent the weekend working on my elective book from the annotated book list: The Disciplined Mind, by Howard Gardner. I'm about halfway through it now -- it's dense but scintillating reading, and he's definitely captured my loyalty with his call to teach students "the true, the beautiful and the good."

One of the things Gardner points out is that it's impossible to cover everything that there is to know about any field of study, so any approach to teaching that is based ultimately on hitting a certain number of content-based guideposts is falling short of its potential. Facts leak out of students' ears as soon as they take the test; the real challenge is to confront and correct underlying misconceptions in thinking, to teach people to think like scientists (or geometers, or historians, or what have you). He draws comparison to athletics and music: it's not so important that the student of these disciplines be able to describe a particular football play in detail or play an exact copy of a master's performance of a given piece, but that they learn the underlying techniques, concepts and skills that will allow them to tackle a wide variety of possible situations. Breadth of coverage is not as important as depth, because it is only by sinking deeply into a subject that you will discover your flawed thinking and be able to correct it.

To that end, Gardner and his colleagues recommend projects in which learning, presentation of understanding, and assessment are all rolled together. There are no secret tests at the end of the unit, but rather students are coached throughout the course in the preparation of a presentation that will demonstrate what they have learned. Along the way they have the opportunity to ask questions and receive clarification, and the teachers can work with the students to expand their thinking and point out the misconceptions when they crop up. The final presentation is a source of pride for the students, rather than a source of apprehension. (I should note that this somewhat mimics my experience in grad school: my thinking was corrected along the way by my thesis committee, and the day when I stood before my classmates and teachers and presented the results of my research was the proudest day of my academic career.) Most importantly, the students should be able to take the concepts that they have learned and apply them to a new situation; this is the true assessment of whether learning has taken place.

As I was pondering these things, an idea for a biology curriculum came to me: Organize the entire semester around the theme of an alien world, being explored by humans for the first time. Students would be divided into teams, and at the end of the year each team would present information about a species that they had invented to inhabit this world. The students would play the role of the xenobiologists exploring this world, giving their reports the people of Earth on what they've found.

Each species would have a specific ecological niche, key adaptations that allowed it to exploit that niche, and an interaction web with the other species. (Who eats whom? Which species compete with each other, and how? Are any of them keystone species, and why?) I would give the students some basic information about the world for starters: key biomes and the producers found there, key environmental challenges found in the different biomes (which the animals would have to adapt to), and key species found in the fossil record (from which our various modern species would be descended). The students would have to demonstrate how the different species might be related, and which adaptations arose when. (If three species have eyestalks of the same general configuration, do they all come from the same ancestor? What role did the eyestalks serve for that ancestor? Do they serve the same role now, or have the species adapted that trait to serve other purposes?)

As the piece de resistance, the students would have to confront ecological questions about this alien world. If human colonists cut down the chuwumba trees for building materials, how will that affect the other species in the ecosystem? If they discover that the pink-toed crinklehump is good for eating, what other predators that feed on the crinklehumps might be affected? If humans accidentally bring rats with them on the colony ship, what native species might be endangered by this invasive species? The answers that the students give to these questions will demonstrate what they have learned about the concepts they have studied.

For this to work, the students will have to learn the basic concepts of three major areas of biology: homeostasis (how animals stay alive), evolution (how populations change in response to changes in their environment), and ecology (how organisms in a system interact with each other). The students will study specific examples in each of these areas of focus and use them to think about their hypothetical alien species. By the end of the course, the students should be well-versed enough in the concepts driving each of these areas to be able to construct their alien world -- and the presentation at the end will be a great way to show off to the parents and the other students what these kids have learned.

So, what do you all think? Am I on the right track here?