Why Tough Teachers Get Good Results

I had a instructor in one case who c completelyed his students idiots when they screwed up. He was our orchestra conductor, a fierce Ukrainian immigrant named Jerry Kupchynsky, and when someone played verboten of tune, he would stop the entire sort to yell, Who eez deaf in first violins? He made us do until our fingers almost bled. He corrected our wayward turn over and arms by poking at us with a pencil. Today, hed be fired. precisely when he died a few years ago, he was celebrated Forty years worth of ormer students and colleagues flew back to my newly Jersey hometown from every corner of the country, old instruments in tow, to play a concert in his memory. I was among them, toting my long-neglected viola. When the curtain rose on our concert that day, we had formed a symphony orchestra the size of the New York Philharmonic. I was stunned by the outpouring for the gruff old teacher we knew as Mr. K. But I was equ eithery struck by the supremacy of his creator students.Som e were medicamentians, and most had distinguished themselves in other fields, identical law, academia and medicine. Research tells us that there is a positive correlativity between music education and academic achievement. But that alone didnt explain the belated surge of gratitude for a teacher who basically tortured us done adolescence. Were in the midst of a national wave of self-recrimination everyplace the U. S. education system. Every day there is hand-wringing over our students falling screwing the rest of the world. Fifteen-year-olds in the U. S. rail students in 12 other nations in science and 17 in math, bested by their counterparts not secure in Asia but in Finland, Estonia and the Netherlands, too. An entire industry of books and consultants has grown up that capitalizes on our collective fear that American education is inadequate and asks what American educators argon doing wrong. I would ask a different question. What did Mr. K do mightily? What can we learn from a teacher whose methods fly in the compositors case of every intimacy we think we know more or less education today, but who was undeniably effectual? As it turns out, quite a lot.Comparing Mr. Ks methods with the latest findings in fields from music to math to medicine leads to a single, startling conclusion Its time to vivify old-fashioned education. Not Just traditional but old-fashioned in the sense that so many of us knew as kids, with strict tick off and unyielding demands. complain if a teacher called my kids names. But the latest certainty backs up my modest proposal. Studies have now shown, among other things, the benefits of moderate childhood stress how praise kills kids self-esteem and why lynchpin is a interrupt predictor of success than sit scores. each of which flies in the face of the kinder, gentler philosophical system that has dominated American education over the past few decades. The stately wisdom holds that teachers atomic number 18 supposed t o tease nowledge out of students, rather than drive it into their heads. Projects and collaborative nurture ar applauded traditional methods manage lecturing and memorisationderided as performance and killare frowned upon, dismissed as a surefire way to suck young minds dry of creativity and motivation. But the stately wisdom is wrong.And the following eight principlesa manifesto if you will, a engagement cry inspired by my old teacher and buttressed by new researchexplain why. 1. A little pain is nice for you. Psychologist K. Anders Ericsson gained fame for his research showing that true xpertise requires about 10,000 hours of practice, a notion popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers. But an often-overlooked finding from the same aim is equally important True expertise requires teachers who give constructive, even painful, feedback, as Dr.Ericsson rig it in a 2007 Harvard Business Review article. He assessed research on top performers in fields ranging fro m violin performance to surgery to computing device programming to chess. And he found that all of them deliberately picked unsentimental coaches who would altercate them and drive them to higher levels of performance. 2. Drill, baby, drill. Rote learning, long discredited, is now recognized as one reason that children whose families come from India (where memorization is still prized) are creaming their peers in the National Spelling Bee Championship.This cultural difference also helps to explain why students in China (and Chinese families in the U. S. ) are separate at math. Mean epoch, American students struggle with complex math problems because, as research makes abundantly clear, they lack fluency in basic addition and subtractionand few of them were made to memorize their times tables. William Klemm of Texas AM University argues that the U. S. needs to raise the bias gainst memorization. Even the U. S.Department of Education raised alarm bells, chastising American tames in a 2008 report that bemoaned the lack of math fluency (a notion it mentioned no fewer than 17 times). It concluded that schools need to embrace the dreaded drill and practice. 3. Failure is an option. Kids who understand that misery is a necessary aspect of learning actually perform better. In a 2012 study, 111 French sixth- localisers were given anagrammatize problems that were too difficult for them to solve. One group was then told that operateure and toilsome again are part of the learning process.On subsequent tests, those children onsistently outperformed their peers. The fear, of course is that failure will Bowling Green State University graduate student followed 31 Ohio band students who were required to audition for placement and found that even students who laid lowest did not decrease in their motivation and self-esteem in the long term. The study concluded that educators need not be as concerned about the negative effects of picking winners and losers. 4. Stri ct is better than nice. What makes a teacher successful?To find out, starting in 2005 a team of researchers led by Claremont Graduate University education prof bloody shame Poplin spent five ears observing 31 of the most highly useful teachers (measured by student test scores) in the worst schools of Los Angeles, in neighborhoods uniform South Central and Watts. Their No. 1 finding They were strict, she says. None of us expected that. The researchers had assumed that the most effective teachers would lead students to knowledge through collaborative learning and discussion. Instead, they found disciplinarians who relied on traditional methods of explicit instruction, like lectures. The core belief of these teachers was, Every student in my room is underperforming ased on their potential, and its my Job to do something about itand I can do something about it, says Prof. Poplin. She reported her findings in a lengthy academic paper.But she says that a fourth-grader summarized her co nclusions some(prenominal) more succinctly this way When I was in first grade and second grade and third grade, when I cried my teachers coddled me. When I got to Mrs. Ts room, she told me to suck it up and get to work. I think shes right. I need to work harder. 5. creativity can be learned. The rap on traditional education is that it kills childrens creativity. But Temple University psychology professor Robert W. Weisbergs research suggests Just the opposite. Prof. Weisberg has studied yeasty geniuses including Thomas Edison, Frank Lloyd Wright and Picassoand has concluded that there is no such thing as a born genius. Most creative giants work ferociously hard and, through a series of incremental steps, achieve things that advance (to the outside world) like epiphanies and breakthroughs. Prof.Weisberg analyzed Picassos 1937 masterpiece Guernica, for instance, which was painted after the Spanish city was bombed by the Germans. The painting is considered a fresh and original conc ept, but Prof. Weisberg found instead hat it was closely related to several of Picassos preliminary works and drew upon his study of paintings by Goya and then-prevalent Communist Party imagery. The privy line, Prof. Weisberg told me, is that creativity goes back in many ways to the basics. You have to exhaust yourself in a discipline before you create in that discipline.It is build on a foundation of learning the discipline, which is what your music teacher was requiring of you. 6. grit trumps talent. In recent years, University of Pennsylvania psychology professor Angela Duckworth has studied recite bee champs, IVO League undergrads and cadets at the U. S. Military Academy in West Point, N. Y. all together, over 2,800 subjects. In all of them, she found that gritdefined as passion and perseverance for long-term goalsis the correlated with talent. Close Arthur Montzka Tough on the podium, Mr. Kwas always appreciative when he sat in the audience.Above, applauding his students in the mid-1970s. Prof. Duckworth, who started her public life as a public school math teacher and Just won a 2013 MacArthur genius grant, developed a Grit weighing machine that asks people to rate themselves on a dozen statements, like l finish whatever I begin and l become implicated in new pursuits very few months. When she applied the scale to inpouring West Point cadets, she found that those who scored higher were less potential to disgorge out of the schools notoriously brutal summer boot camp cognize as Beast Barracks. West Points own measurean index that includes SAT scores, class rank, leadership and physical aptitudewasnt able to predict retention. Prof. Duckworth believes that grit can be taught. One surprisingly simple factor, she says, is optimismthe belief among twain teachers and students that they have the ability to change and thus to improve. In a 009 study of newly minted teachers, she rated each for optimism (as measured by a questionnaire) before the sc hool year began. At the end of the year, the students whose teachers were optimists had made greater academic gains. 7.Praise makes you wonky My old teacher Mr. K seldom praised us. His highest compliment was not bad. It turns out he was onto something. Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck has found that 10-year-olds praised for being pert became less confident. But kids told that they were hard workers became more confident and better performers. The consentaneous point of intelligence praise is to boost confidence and motivation, but some(prenominal) were gone in a flash, wrote Prof. Dweck in a 2007 article in the Journal Educational Leadership. If success meant they were smart, then struggling meant they were not. 8. while stress makes you strong. A 2011 University at Buffalo study found that a moderate amount of stress in childhood promotes resilience. Psychology professor Mark D. Seery gave healthy undergraduates a stress assessment based on their exposure to 37 diffe rent kinds of significant negative events, such as death or illness of a family member. Then he plunged their hands into ice water.The students who had experienced a moderate number of stressful events actually felt less pain than those who had experienced no stress at all. Having this history of dealing with these negative things leads people to be more likely to have a propensity for general resilience, Prof. Seery told me. They are better fitted out(p) to deal with even mundane, everyday stressors. Prof. Seerys findings build on research by University of Nebraska psychologist Richard Dienstbier, who pioneered the concept of toughnessthe idea that dealing with even minute hings, like having a hardass kind of teacher, Prof. Seery says. My tough old teacher Mr. K could have written the book on any one of these principles.Admittedly, individually, these are forbidding precepts cold, unyielding, and kind of scary. But collectively, they convey something very different confidence. A t their core is the belief, the faith really, in students ability to do better. There is something to be said about a teacher who is demanding and tough not because he thinks students will never learn but because he is so abruptly certain that they will. Decades later, Mr. Ks former students finally figured it out, too. He taught us discipline, explained a violinist who went on to become an League-trained doctor. Self-motivation, added a tech executive who once played the cello. Resilience, said a professional cellist. He taught us how to failand how to pick ourselves up again. Clearly, Mr. Ks methods arent for everyone. But you cant argue with his results. And thats a lesson we can all learn from. Ms. Lipman is co-author, with Melanie Kupchynsky, of Strings Attached One Tough Teacher and the giving of Great Expectations, to be published by Hyperion on Oct. 1. She is a former deputy managing editor of The Wall Street Journal and former editor-in-chief of Cond Nast Portfolio.A ma gnetic variation of this article appeared September 28, 2013, on page Cl in the U. S. random variable of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline Tough Teachers Get Results. Copyright 2012 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact.