by Peter Gow
Between Tiger Moms and racing to nowhere, we’re a nation obsessed with stress. Do our students experience too much of it, or too little? Does an endless cycle of high-stakes standardized testing turn kids into jibbering shells of their authentic selves, or do parents and schools need to push students even harder to extract from them the most perfect essence (and the last drop) of their true potential?
The answer lies elsewhere, I think, and schools can play a role in keeping the conversation on this topic both real and helpful.
A few weeks back my school was featured on an NPR piece ostensibly about stress among seniors. Predictably in what was overall a very good piece, the reporter became fixated on a decision that we had made some years back to replace our few courses with “Advanced Placement” designation with several new, teacher-created Honors Advanced electives. To the reporter, and to many of those who read the article, this move seemed to have something to do with stress reduction.
In fact, we created our Honors Advanced courses to push our students even harder in the direction of in-depth, analytical thinking in the sciences and mathematics. Rather than being somehow less stressful or less work, these courses are designed to have students thinking like biologists, chemists, physicists, and mathematicians rather than amassing knowledge for one three-hour information dump on a May examination. If our Honors Advanced courses have had anything to do with stress, it is to spread a heavy think-load (as opposed to a workload) over months; hardly a let-up.
It’s no secret to most of us in the profession that analytical and critical thinking skills are what we most need and want our students to have. We can teach these in a whole slew of ways, but along the way we need to create the conditions in our school that truly foster their development—to build a culture of think-load, not just workload.
What do I mean by think-load? I mean work whose central element is the application of critical and analytical thinking skills, with a hefty dose of logic. In a thousand books, articles, and blogs we can find educators and education writers extolling the virtues of mathematics problems that require the use of multiple skills and multiple kinds of reasoning; of open-ended problems with real-world applications in all disciplines; of a design-thinking approach to problem-solving; of intentional, smart problem- and project-based learning exercises; of creating exhibition-style work for authentic audiences. Think-load is the sum of the learning experiences, and learning exercises, that focus on this kind of work.
High think-load education does not preclude the need to master basic content and skills, despite the attempts of many educational polemicists to portray this is an either/or (and right/wrong) situation. As one of our students said in commenting on work he was doing at the new NuVu Studio program, which is built around the design-studio model, “You need to learn the facts and skills in order to solve the problem, but you need to understand the problem in order to know which facts and skills you need.” “Facts and skills,” to use his language, become authentic and valued tools for doing real work rather than simply fodder for endless problem sets, worksheets, and tests.
It is not easy for schools to swim upstream, especially when funding and teachers’ careers depend on standardized test scores. I am fortunate to work in an independent school, but even we are not exempt from the pressure to ramp up workload. But I think schools can begin to shift toward think-load by making a few changes of mindset, by focusing on what students today need to know how to do and by making sure that students, and the student experience of school, are seen as in the light of their particular talents and interests.
The greatest danger in our love affair with workload and with standardized testing is that it tends to reduce students to aggregates—to score numbers, to percentile bands, to elements of n: “How did they do?” rather than “What can s/he do?” A whole lot of schools claim to be student-centered, and the best way to express this value in our time is to keep each student and the work they are doing in view, despite all the challenges associated with overcrowded classrooms and schools.
If we focus on each student’s think-load, the kinds of analytical and critical work we are asking them to do and the level of real thinking that goes into this work—this Good Work—we can begin to wriggle out from under the press of numbers and the tyranny of an educational culture obsessed, one way or another, with stress.