Preserving the Innovator's DNA

An article in the Wall Street Journal by Peter Sims, titled "The Montessori Mafia," provides further evidence of the benefits of early childhood education that focuses on freedom by giving more names of creatively successful Montessori-educated people (See also my earlier post "How to Make it Big"):

...the Montessori educational approach might be the surest route to joining the creative elite, which are so overrepresented by the school’s alumni that one might suspect a Montessori Mafia: Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergei Brin, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, videogame pioneer Will Wright, and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, not to mention Julia Child and rapper Sean “P.Diddy” Combs.

Sims points to a study which suggests that these are not isolated examples:

The Montessori Mafia showed up in an extensive, six-year study about the way creative business executives think. Professors Jeffrey Dyer of Brigham Young University and Hal Gregersen of globe-spanning business school INSEAD surveyed over 3,000 executives and interviewed 500 people who had either started innovative companies or invented new products. 

“A number of the innovative entrepreneurs also went to Montessori schools, where they learned to follow their curiosity,” Mr. Gregersen said. “To paraphrase the famous Apple ad campaign, innovators not only learned early on to think different, they act different (and even talk different).” 

I dug around for more information on this study. It was in fact conducted by three researchers, Jeffrey Dyer, Hal Gregersen, and Clayton Christensen from Harvard, and published under the title "The Innovator's DNA" in Harvard Business Review, December 2009. Their study concludes that there are five key "discovery skills" characteristic of creative executives:

• Associating: Making connections between different concepts
• Observing: Paying attention to learn what works, and how
• Experimenting: Trying out new things, dealing with failure
• Questioning: Expressing curiosity
• Networking: Seeking out interesting people to learn from

These are very the much the traits I seek in my graduate students, and I have learned from experience that they are extremely rare! This is surprising because these are things, in fact, that all small children do naturally (until they are "schooled" out of these behaviors by a lifetime of highly structured education). Gregersen says exactly this in an article about their study posted online at INSEAD Knowledge: 

Gregersen says the five discovery skills may seem ‘intuitive’ but when it comes to the actual practice, “doing them is counterintuitive.” That’s because the adult world in which we live “does not value these actions.”

Gregersen’s advice? Start acting like a child again: “Not 100 per cent of the time, that would be absurd. We’re adults and we have to run businesses. But 20 per cent, 25 per cent of our time, act like a four-year-old again,” Gregersen told INSEAD Knowledge. “Because all these skills are what four-year-olds do. They ask thousands of questions: ‘Why?’ ‘Why not?’ This and that. They’re always asking those questions … They observe intensely and they’ll talk to just about anybody.” 

“These are the things that we all did as four-year-olds. We all did this stuff. And if we happened to attend a Montessori-type school like many innovative entrepreneurs did, then we still might be doing this stuff. But most school and corporate systems consistently say: ‘Don’t do it, stop doing it’ … and we lose our innate creative capacity.”

The connection is really quite simple. If we expect our workforce to be creative and innovative, their education has to allow them a lot of opportunities and freedom to exercise these skills.

The problem with standards

Alfie Kohn has written widely about freedom in education and unconditional parenting.

Here's an article by him on the danger of standardizing education: "Beware of the Standards, Not Just the Tests".

Kohn argues that in all the concern about testing in schools, we may lose sight of the point that the very existence of uniformized standards is a threat to learning.

He writes:

We have heard the phrase "standardized testing" so often that we may have become inured to the significance of that first word. To what extent do we really want our students to receive a standardized education? At a national conference last fall, a consultant announced with apparent satisfaction that now, thanks to standards-based reform, "for the first time in my experience, people on a grade level, in a subject area, or teaching a course at a high school are [feeling] a responsibility to all have the same destination." That she did not even feel it necessary to defend this goal says something about the current acceptance of a one-size-fits-all model of education. 

Once again, the problem is not just with the construction of the tests, but with the uniformity of the standards. Wanting to make sure that students in low-income communities don't receive a second-rate education is a laudable objective. Wanting to make sure that all students in your state receive the same education, such that they are treated as interchangeable recipients of knowledge, is a very different matter. Even more troubling are grade-by-grade standards. Here, the prescribers are not just saying, "We expect students to know the following stuff by the time they're in 8th grade," but "We expect them to learn all the items on this list in 5th grade, all the items on that list in 6th grade," and so on. Apart from the negative effects on learning, this rigidity about both the timing of the instruction and its content creates failures unnecessarily by trying to force all children to learn at the same pace.

Reading this leads me to some introspection. Each time I give a mid-term or final exam in any of my classes, am I not treating all students in my class similarly as "interchangeable recipients of knowledge"? Is it not what I do whenever I "follow" a standard syllabus or adopt a textbook? The moment we package a set of facts or tools or approaches into the rigid curriculum for a class, we enter a danger zone, that should be navigated with a great deal of care.

We should be leery of all attempts to ensure that everyone "knows" the same things about the subject, because they generally imply a naive view of knowledge as an objective collection of facts and methods. But the veneer of objectiveness obtained, for instance, by the adoption of a standard textbook, masks the sheer subjectivity of the process of putting together a class.

Consider the new course I have been developing at USC on wireless networks. It is  informed entirely by my own readings and research, and is not how the course is taught anywhere else. Say I were to write a textbook based on my course notes, and it were to be adopted as the textbook for a class in another university some day. The view of the students on the subject is then shaped in a peculiar fashion (perhaps irreparably) after my tastes. Somewhere an employer will glance at a student's transcript, and noticing that he/she has taken a course on "wireless networks" and gotten an 'A' on the subject, will assume that he/she "knows" something useful about the field. Yet this knowledge, as *all* knowledge that can be acquired in or outside a classroom, is fundamentally subjective because its very roots were subjective, shaped and colored as they were by my experiences.

While my arguments about the subjectivity of knowledge may seem particularly compelling in the context of emerging new subjects, I argue that the situation is fundamentally no different even for "ossified" old subjects. Here decades of textbook writing may seem to have lead to a consensus about the "core" body of knowledge in the field, but the converged point of view is very much a function of how the original texts were written and organized.

The only saving grace about the college environment, in contrast to the more rigid standardized curricula in schools, is the far greater freedom students have in selecting their program of study.

How to make it big...

A friend pointed me to a nice quote in an article by Steven Levy in Wired magazine: 

“You can’t understand Google,” vice president Marissa Mayer says, “unless you know that both Larry and Sergey were Montessori kids.” She’s referring to schools based on the educational philosophy of Maria Montessori, an Italian physician born in 1870 who believed that children should be allowed the freedom to pursue their interests. “In a Montessori school, you go paint because you have something to express or you just want to do it that afternoon, not because the teacher said so,” she says. “This is baked into how Larry and Sergey approach problems. They’re always asking, why should it be like that? It’s the way their brains were programmed early on.”

It reminded me a little of this essay by John Taylor Gatto, where he provides an impressive list of people who also didn't like to do things because the teacher said so, and exercised the freedom to pursue their interests: Bill Gates, William Faulkner, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Ted Turner, Ray Kroc, Richard Branson. Every one of these was a school/college dropout.

Searching for a school

This article on the school admissions season in New York is simply hilarious.

Katie Roiphe writes with biting humor about something that many urban parents can relate to. I particularly like this passage:

The interesting element of this obsession is that each of these unique and excellent schools seems to be conferring some ineffable quality, not just on its students, but on the parents of these students. In the 10 minutes they spend dropping their children off in its hallowed hallways, they are seeing some flattering image of themselves reflected back: progressive, enlightened, intellectually engaged. 

The most sought-after school in my neighbourhood, a famously open-minded and progressive and arty yet very exclusive private school, is conferring a kind of creativity on the parents, so that even if they are bankers or hedge-fund guys, as many of them frankly are, they can tell themselves in the dark of night that they are creative people, because their children attend this impeccably creative school. And if they are creative people – that is, people who have somehow made enough money to send their children to this school, but work in film or music or advertising – they can congratulate themselves on their creativity, even if they are not, although in a creative profession, exactly creating anything themselves. The secret suspicion that you might be a hack, a glorified hack, making a rather nice living doing something fun (but not truly living out your fantasy of creating art the way you honestly thought you would be in college), well, the cheque you make out to that fancy, creative, open place you are sending your child to is proving otherwise. They are putting on operas when they are three years old, after all. They are illustrating Wallace Stevens poems by the time they are six. How could anyone accuse you of just being a banker, or a music executive, or an internet guy with good glasses? I have a friend whose five-year-old attends this school. She and her husband were pleased that when their daughter had an assignment to write down what she wanted to be when she grew up she wrote "artist". But when they arrived at the class presentation the next day they saw that all 22 children had put down "artist": there were no "veterinarians", no "circus acrobats", no "doctors", no "hair cutters". Twenty two artists, and one kindergarten class: the school, you see, does not play around.

Teaching limits exploration

Alison Gopnik, a professor of Psychology at UC Berkeley, has written an article on Slate, titled "Why Preschool shouldn't be like School", about two recent research studies that show how teaching inhibits creativity in children.

The research studies she points to are to be published soon in the journal Cognition. One, co-authored by Gopnik, is titled "Children's imitation of causal action sequences is influenced by statistical and pedagogical evidence," which shows that children are particularly inclined to repeat what they see a teacher do.  The other is titled "The double-edged sword of pedagogy: Instruction limits spontaneous exploration and discovery", and shows that when instructed by a teacher, children are likely to learn more efficiently, but are also less likely to discover new facts.


She writes:

As so often happens in science, two studies from different labs, using different techniques, have simultaneously produced strikingly similar results. They provide scientific support for the intuitions many teachers have had all along: Direct instruction really can limit young children's learning. Teaching is a very effective way to get children to learn something specific—this tube squeaks, say, or a squish then a press then a pull causes the music to play. But it also makes children less likely to discover unexpected information and to draw unexpected conclusions.

... 

Knowing what to expect from a teacher is a really good thing, of course: It lets you get the right answers more quickly than you would otherwise. Indeed, these studies show that 4-year-olds understand how teaching works and can learn from teachers. But there is an intrinsic trade-off between that kind of learning and the more wide-ranging learning that is so natural for young children. Knowing this, it's more important than ever to give children's remarkable, spontaneous learning abilities free rein. That means a rich, stable, and safe world, with affectionate and supportive grown-ups, and lots of opportunities for exploration and play. Not school for babies.

This is very much along the lines of what I've been thinking and writing about. I would argue that we need to apply these ideas well beyond preschool. The title of Gopnik's article could be generalized. School (and college!) should be less like school as well...

8-10-year-olds write a real science article

I wrote a little while ago about the importance of giving school and college students "real" work to do.

What better a way to have kids learn about science than letting them be real scientists?

A delightful paper: "Blackawton Bees", published in the journal Biology Letters in December 2010,  is authored by an unusual string of scientists. They are 8-10-year-olds at Blackawton primary school in UK.

This group of kids not only conducted the experiments described in the paper, they also wrote the article in their own words (apparently all of it except the abstract).

The study shows the ability of bees to "solve" a puzzle in the process of searching for food (sugar water). The kids describe the experiment in their own endearing words:

This experiment is important, because, as far as we know, no one in history (including adults) has done this experiment before. It tells us that bees can learn to solve puzzles (and if we are lucky we will be able to get them to do Sudoku in a couple of years’ time). In this experiment, we trained bees to solve a particular puzzle. The puzzle was go to blue if surrounded by yellow, but yellow if surrounded by blue.

Here's part of their description of the methodology, discussing how the bees were marked:

We let the foragers into the arena and turned the lights off, which made the bees stop flying (because they do not want to fly into anything). We picked the bees up with bee tweezers and put them into a pot with a lid. We then put the tube with the bees in it into the school’s fridge (and made bee pie :-)). The bees fell asleep. Once they fell asleep, we took the bees out, one at a time, and painted little dots on them (yellow, blue, orange, blue-orange, blue-yellow,
etc.). We put them into the tube and warmed them up and then let them into the arena. No bees were harmed during this procedure.

The grown-ups involved in formulating this study and planning it were David Strudwick, a teacher, and Beau Lotto, a neuroscientist, whose son was in the class.


For more on the story of this amazing study, see:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2010/12/21/eight-year-old-children-publish-bee-study-in-royal-society-journal/

Math for kids

Prof. Elwyn Berlekamp is a famous coding theorist from UC Berkeley. He gave the annual Viterbi lecture at USC yesterday. While much of his talk focused on some puzzles/games and their fascinating relationship to coding theory, he also made a point about  mathematics education for kids that I think is worth repeating.

Echoing Lockhart's Mathematician's Lament, he made the point that it is valuable to give kids problems that cannot be solved in a single sitting. That these are, in some sense, the problems that are most valuable, yet never encountered in typical schooling.

He gave the example of the following classic problem he encountered as a ten year old, to which he credits his lifelong love of mathematics.

You are given twelve coins, at most of one of which is defective (either heavier or lighter than others). You are given a weighing balance. Can you determine with exactly three weighings, which, if any, of the coins is defective?

Prof. Berlekamp also talked about his involvement with the Berkeley Math Circle for kids. There are apparently similar math circles for kids in many cities/places across the country. (Here, for instance, is one in Los Angeles: http://www.math.ucla.edu/~radko/circles/ ).

Making work count

Sigh. I just realized it's been more than a month since my last post...

I was having a conversation this afternoon about effective educational methods with a bright young colleague who is very dedicated to teaching (it is sad how rare this kind of conversation is at a University!) During the course of the conversation, I came across a little nugget of wisdom that I thought worth posting. He was telling me about a discussion he had with some one from Red Hat, on incorporating open-source projects into programming classes.

I think this is a great idea that generalizes nicely to other kinds of classes, at least in engineering. A wonderful way to provide students with a source of self-motivation for the work they do in the context of a class (home/in-class assignments/projects) is to make their work available and useful to others. This makes the work meaningful in itself, not merely something done to get the grade.

As mentioned above, if it's a software class, they could contribute to an open-source effort. If they do some experiments or projects that may be of interest to others (in academia, industry, or even hobbyists), they could be asked to post and showcase the results online. This will also motivate students to do a good job of documenting and communicating the work they do. They could also do assignments that are directly documentary in nature, e.g., write a tutorial, create or contribute entries for a wiki on a topic related to the course.

The assignment/project could also be a real-world problem that is of direct interest to some external party. Two years back, I got freshmen students to look into and propose energy-efficient alternatives to lighting for buildings on the USC campus based on real data on the current lighting fixtures that I obtained from USC Facilities and Management Services (FMS). Many of the students were excited about the project and came up with great ideas for upgrades, taking into account the lighting needs of the buildings, potential energy savings, and the material and labor cost involved in upgrades.  I then forwarded the student reports and recommendations back to FMS for consideration in their future plans for upgrading the lighting. The project was not just "make-work" but "real" in the sense that folks at FMS were actually interested in what the students came up with.

The Valedectorian and the Piano Teacher

I came across two wonderful articles today.

The first is the valedictorian speech given by Erica Goldson at her high school graduation . There's also a video of her speech online.

Erica says (italics mine):

Some of you may be thinking, “Well, if you pass a test, or become valedictorian, didn't you learn something? Well, yes, you learned something, but not all that you could have. Perhaps, you only learned how to memorize names, places, and dates to later on forget in order to clear your mind for the next test. School is not all that it can be. Right now, it is a place for most people to determine that their goal is to get out as soon as possible.

I am now accomplishing that goal. I am graduating. I should look at this as a positive experience, especially being at the top of my class. However, in retrospect, I cannot say that I am any more intelligent than my peers. I can attest that I am only the best at doing what I am told and working the system. Yet, here I stand, and I am supposed to be proud that I have completed this period of indoctrination. I will leave in the fall to go on to the next phase expected of me, in order to receive a paper document that certifies that I am capable of work. But I contest that I am a human being, a thinker, an adventurer – not a worker. A worker is someone who is trapped within repetition – a slave of the system set up before him. But now, I have successfully shown that I was the best slave. I did what I was told to the extreme. While others sat in class and doodled to later become great artists, I sat in class to take notes and become a great test-taker. While others would come to class without their homework done because they were reading about an interest of theirs, I never missed an assignment. While others were creating music and writing lyrics, I decided to do extra credit, even though I never needed it. So, I wonder, why did I even want this position? Sure, I earned it, but what will come of it? When I leave educational institutionalism, will I be successful or forever lost? I have no clue about what I want to do with my life; I have no interests because I saw every subject of study as work, and I excelled at every subject just for the purpose of excelling, not learning. And quite frankly, now I'm scared. 

Erica is remarkably mature to have already come to these conclusions about the price of success in a conventional school. I am only just starting to understand the implications myself.

***

The second wonderful article I came across today was part 2 of a Piano teacher's response to the Amy Chua article, titled "Beyond Carrot and Sticks: How to Motivate Children (Or Why It's Not Necessary)". In this incisive commentary, she diagnoses (correctly, in my opinion) that the core problem with our societal attitude towards education is that it is based fundamentally on the presumption that most children are "lazy":

This vast disconnect between what we expect from children (laziness) and what’s actually there (energy, creativity and curiosity) goes right to the heart of what’s wrong with our educational system today. Our society has a collective idea that Learning Is Boring. “Obviously” children are not going to want to learn about negative numbers, write stories or practice piano on their own initiative, right? So either we have to bribe or coerce them.

She argues that both these approaches are flawed. She advances an alternative theory in five points, that I would summarize and rephrase in three as follows:

1. Children are naturally creative, curious, and enjoy learning.
2. But they won't learn in a vacuum; It is essential for the grown ups and others in their lives to interact with them and expose them to a wide range of possibilities through natural experiences and activities.
3. Learning is not about passively accumulating information and doing well on tests, it's about actively exploring the world, finding out how it works, and developing passions. Towards this end, educational tv shows (or traditional classroom lectures!) are not effective and can actually dampen curiosity.

She adds:

Children do not need to be “motivated”. They come that way naturally. The danger is that they will become “demotivated” – either through passive TV-watching (usually when both parents work outside the home) or through an educational system that emphasizes “right answers” and “good marks” over intellectual curiosity. But, if they are given the tools that will let them pursue their passions, they won’t be spending six hours a day on Facebook

As a college teacher who encounters many such "demotivated" students each year (students who have been trained by the system to be motivated in a classroom setting only by the carrots and sticks of grading), I can tell you that the damage done to their spirits, their creativity, their sense of passion for learning, is deep and hard to reverse.  There has to be a broader recognition of how harmful this widespread "lazy kids" prejudice is.

Impostor

I was reading an article in the NYTimes by Roni Rabin, which talks about an increasing trend towards young people valuing self esteem above other desires; it ends with the words:

“The idea has been that if we build their self-esteem, then they’ll do better in school and in relationships,” said Dr. Twenge, the “Narcissism Epidemic” author. “Well, that puts the cart before the horse. When you break down the research you see that kids who behave well and get high grades develop high self-esteem — not the other way around.”

Somehow, this rubbed me the wrong way. Setting aside the question of what it means for kids to "behave well", I can tell you that getting high grades does not always result in high self-esteem.

There is a well-known phenomenon known as the impostor syndrome, that affects many bright students in college and beyond, often precisely those that get high grades. It consists of a track of thought that loops continuously through these students' heads that says "I don't deserve to be here. All my grades and accomplishments to date were somehow a fluke. They will discover soon enough that I am a fake and an impostor, and then I'll be shamed and booted out."  It is a particularly insidious form of self-doubt, because it is precisely at moments of achievement, say doing well in a course or getting an award, that it raises their anxiety levels ("oh no! I've managed to fool them once more!").

The following article in Science Magazine describes the phenomenon well:
http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_development/previous_issues/articles/2008_02_15/caredit_a0800025

It notes:

Clinical psychologist Pauline Clance and colleague Suzanne Imes coined the term "impostor phenomenon" in a 1978 paper in Psychotherapy Theory, Research and Practice. They gave this name to high-performing but inwardly anxious women who were among the professionals attending Clance's group-therapy sessions. "These women do not experience an internal sense of success," wrote Clance. "They consider themselves to be 'impostors' ” despite scoring well on standardised tests, earning advanced degrees, and receiving professional awards. Early on, this phenomenon was associated with women, a belief that persists today. But subsequent studies, including another by Clance, have shown that men are affected in equal numbers.

I first heard of this term directly at a workshop on college teaching while I was a grad student at Cornell, organized by Prof. Richard Felder from NCSU. Felder is a well known educator, who wrote an article about this titled "Impostors everywhere" that is worth reading.

I remember heaving a sigh of relief when I heard him mention this phenomenon and thinking "Oh, so it's not just me."  Merely knowing that this unhelpful thought pattern had a name, and was not a burden I carried alone, made a big difference for me in ameliorating its impact, though it did not quell my voice of self-doubt completely. (For the record, I'm a lot better now. I still feel clueless at times, but am comforted that I'm not much more clueless than many of my peers.)

Having given the matter much thought over the years, I feel that what exacerbates the impostor syndrome, or perhaps even gives rise to it in the first place, is adopting the world view that ties one's sense of self-worth to one's achievements and treats achievement as the goal of one's efforts.

Conventional wisdom (as captured in the quote by Dr. Twenge I started this note with) propounds a chain of reasoning that goes as follows:   hard work => mastery => success and achievement => self-esteem. This achievement-driven philosophy of life sets success and achievement as the desirable ends of hard work, and asserts that self-esteem would be a natural product of such achievement.

In the academic world, where one's professional identity is formed entirely of one's achievements (just read the bio of any speaker's talk announcement), this is certainly the dominant discourse. And I do not deny there is some logic to it. We know from experience that there is a variation in quality, and such lists of achievements, particularly in the form of peer-reviewed awards and honors, provide a short-cut when forming a judgement about the quality of someone's work. Nevertheless, there is something fundamentally unhealthy about accepting this discourse uncritically.

There is a different way of viewing the world, that doesn't put achievement first.

In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna admonishes Arjuna:

कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन।  मा कर्मफलहेतुर्भूर्मा ते सङ्गोस्त्वऽकर्मणि॥

To action alone hast thou a right and never at all to its fruits; let not the fruits of action be thy motive; neither let there be in thee any attachment to inaction.  (2:47)

This philosophy, referred to sometimes as Nishkam Karma (desireless action), has much in common with the practices of Zen Buddhism, as well as Stoicism. See, for instance, the following related quote from Marcus Aurelius's Meditations:

If you work at that which is before you, following right reason seriously, vigorously, calmly, without allowing anything else to distract you, but keeping your divine part pure, as if you were bound to give it back immediately; if you hold to this, expecting nothing, but satisfied to live now according to nature, speaking heroic truth in every word which you utter, you will live happy. And there is no man able to prevent this. (3:12)

I think the deepest self-esteem arises naturally if one follows such a philosophy and consistently values learning, hard work, and service as meaningful  in themselves, and not merely as the means to achieving success or avoiding failure. It is challenging to adopt such a mindset in our competitive, achievement-driven world, but let that not stop us from striving.