Dolce far niente: Is it as sweet as the Italians would have us believe?

Photo by Umberto Salvagnin

Dolce far niente is an Italian saying, which refers to the pleasure one gets from being idle. Dolce far niente is an exhortation to slow down and embrace lethargy, which, as the term suggests, can feel sweet and delightful. In small doses, this can help prevent stress and anxiety; however, when done with no moderation, it can lead to apathy and inertia.

Ever since I was a kid, I viewed summer vacations as a time where one could totally switch off and embrace the dolce far niente philosophy. The pattern has always been the same: the first days of the summer bonanza felt great, but this would soon turn into slow, unending boredom. I’d go to the beach or play computer games, but, inevitably, by the second week of summer, dolce far niente would have lost all its appeal. Yet, I would persevere because, by then, it would have become part of my summer routine.  Growing up, I found ways to fill up my time such as doing summer jobs and reading, but even in my adulthood, I tend to feel rusty going back to teaching after such a long vacation. To make matters worse, during my Maltese vacations, I usually end up gaining more weight due to the bad habits such as binge eating and lack of activity.

This summer, I decided to make a change. In the Innovation Academy, both students and teachers had to take on one good habit for their month vacation. So I have committed myself to jogging and eating healthy. I’m usually able to maintain these good habits during the year, but it has always been quite challenging to keep this up in Malta; therefore, in order to push myself to embrace these habits, I had to resort to some mind hacks. For instance, I bought new running shorts, so that I would feel more compelled to go jogging in the morning. This time around, I also didn’t bring with me any baggy shorts or pants to push myself me to eat healthy.

A week and a half has now passed since the beginning of my summer vacation and so far I’ve been able to follow my plan; however, I’m having a hard time gauging my success with the healthy eating. Initially, I had pledged I’d eat healthy 5 times a week, but this is still too vague. So, I’ve made my goal more specific: I will eat fruit, cereal and vegetables everyday and limit my intake of fried, starchy food to twice a week. By cultivating positive habits and holding myself accountable, I will be able to have a more productive and healthier vacation.

Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg discusses the importance of targeting keystone habits. These are habits that produce a chain reaction that lead to even more positive habits. So, by taking on jogging and healthy eating, I’m hoping to trigger my reading and writing.  

Ghajn Tuffieha Bay, Malta

The answer to my blog post title is plain and simple: Dolce far niente can be indeed as sweet and delightful, but it has happen in moderation. It's always good to switch off for a couple of days, but in the long run one has to stay engaged to prevent apathy and inertia. Taking an evening dip in the Mediterranean, while relishing the orange sunset can be much more rewarding when you know that your day has been purposeful and productive.

Coming Full Circle

We, educators, have all had our fair share of disappointments when planning units that seemed flawless on paper, but failed to deliver when push came to shove. Well, it's certainly not flattering to have to admit failure, but the reflection that ensues can allow for some valuable take-aways. These debacles, no matter how agonizing they might be, can allow for growth in this profession when one takes the time to look for patterns and analyze the root of the causes.

In my experience, one of the most critical issues lies in the process of creating a product. Students seem to struggle to make a genuine reflection and this often hinders the quality of their final product.  My buddy and colleague Hayden has made a relevant remark as to why they often end up not meeting design specifications in his DT class. The MYP Design Cycle, which shares many similar elements with design thinking, looks something like this:

But according to Hayden, students do not really get the cycle part of the concept. In fact, they view it more as a 180 degree line, sequential and rigid:

Hayden does make a good point here. Our students are generally able to regurgitate systemically each and every step of the design cycle, but seem to miss the purpose of the design cycle viewing it more as a contrived sequence of linear stages that are an add-on to their assessments rather than a necessity for the creation of beautiful work. (I'm stealing that directly from Ron Berger)

In essence, design thinking,  should be seen as an organic process, a catalyst for learning. If one looks at the first graphic, they will appreciate that each stage is interconnected by different arrows going in different directions. This implies that the design cycle is indeed a mental construct where stages can be interchangeable and its structure amorphous.  So you might ask, why do students struggle to wrap their heads around this process? The answer is easy: they haven't been exposed to it enough to make it their own .

Learning is complex; there are many cogs that need to fall into place, for it to take place. In one of my earlier posts, I reflected on the weak areas of the Revolutions unit. On paper, this unit is solid; however, that alone does not suffice to produce quality. And this has allowed me to identify an important flaw: The projects that fell flat all shared one commonality- they came to an end without having reached their maturity level. After all, if we really want students to create quality work, shouldn't we be allocating enough time for the refinement of their finished product? This refinement stage is often underestimated in education because there is curriculum that needs to be covered, yet in the real world, it is crucial, because some of the most intense problem-solving takes place at this stage of the creation.

I'm currently reading Lean Startup, which discusses the importance of startups failing with a purpose to gain validated learning and test their hypothesis. This allows them to apply their lessons learned and be faced with two different options: They can either persevere with their product or pivot. Pivoting in this context means making small changes based on the lessons learned about your product to maximize from its potential. And there are many types of pivots too. Entrepreneurs might want to make a customer segment pivot where they acknowledge that their product targets a different kind of customer than the ones that had been originally identified. In contrast, the customer need pivot allows entrepreneurs to use their validated learning to identify a different problem faced by their intended audience and as a result to plan and create a different solution. These are only a few examples that go to show that in the real world, the application of design thinking is fluid and not rigid; at times, one might go straight back to the investigate stage and others to the planning stage. There is no defined rigid formula, because the use of the design cycle is based on necessity.

So this should be no different in school. The skill in problem-solving lies in exposing students to situations where they need to make those types of calls: persevere or pivot. By having the time to refine their product, students are empowered to maximize from design thinking where the stages can be interchangeable depending on the particular nature and unforeseen needs of that project. Too often, we stifle it with touch and go projects that do not allow students to fail, reflect, learn from their failures and refine their work. Here we're doing them a great disservice.

This is yet another argument for the implementation of project-based learning as a vehicle for higher level thinking. Only a change of paradigm and an uprooting of the current structure that equates to 20th century, stand alone subjects can truly bring design thinking to life.

An Ethic of Excellence: Food for the educator's soul

For the last weeks, I've been searching incessantly for meaningful educational literature. At times, educational literature can sound repetitive and predictable, but Ron Berger's An Ethic of Excellence, isn't just like any other book about education. His genuine voice speaks directly to the educator's soul.

While many books highlight the failures with current educational systems, very few manage to bring out its sheer beauty.  Education, which is often portrayed as a mechanical system driven by data, takes a new form in Ron Berger's world: it's organic and harmonious. The opening anecdote where Berger is building a playhouse with his students conveys a zen-like state which is lightyears away from the distressed school environments which are generally portrayed in the media.

The reader should not misconstrue Berger's approach to education as one that lacks rigour and celebrates mediocrity; far from it. In Ron Berger's worldview, education should stretch students to create work that is beautiful. And for this to happen schools need to embrace a culture that values excellence. In educational systems that often glorify quantity over quality, students rarely understand the purpose behind school. The author has experienced this first hand:

"I had no audience while doing my work when I was a student and no sense that my work meant something to someone. Actually I did have a singular audience: my teacher. I turned in my work to a teacher who retuned it with a grade, occasionally a comment. The importance of the work seemed to be singular: pleasing or at least satisfying a teacher."(98) 

However, Ron Berger's deep fascination for learning clearly transpires in his anecdotes. As he narrates about his students' inquiry about rough semi-precious stones, the reader can easily perceive Berger's childlike curiosity and passion for learning. In this context, when fostering students' habits of minds and allowing them to create authentic work for a real audience, accountability takes a new form and context.

So what are the habits that teachers could instil in their students to ensure great work? The book provides different examples of how students go through a rigorous process when they create work which entails various drafts of a product and peer critiquing. Any work produced that is short from being excellent would go against the school's culture:

"The overall quality of work that emerges from the workshop is a concern for every member in it. If any student is failing to succeed or producing work without care, it is a concern for every student. There is a sense of whole class pride in the quality of learning and products in the workshop, and there is a sense of peer pressure to keep up with the standard. These projects are made public and every student knows it. Anything weak work reflects on all of us." (70)

Watch the video clip below, to learn more about critiquing and descriptive feedback from Berger himself: 

  

In An Ethic of Excellence, the author's passion for education is frequently juxtaposed to legislators' shortsighted fixation with numbers and data.  Berger' recounts the time he turned up to an opulent luncheon to showcase some of his student work to a group of policymakers. Even though the purpose of the meeting was for policymakers to learn more about student progress, the very prized work samples that highlighted deeper learning were put away because they cluttered the space. This anecdote highlights the irony that plagues education: The very people who have a say in education are often those who discard the evidence of deeper learning in their quest to gauge rigour.

Having said that, this book gives readers a sense of hope for the future of education.  An Ethic of Excellence is indeed an exhortation to educators to take pride in their own work and impart this mantra to their students.  Like students, teachers are not immune to the disillusionment and the agonizing feeling of powerlessness in the classroom.  How many educators start their teaching careers with a genuine passion, a drive to make a difference in students life, only to see their flame slowly dim at the hand of an inept educational system? Well, this book is a heartening reminder that it doesn't have to end that way.

Hindsight is twenty-twenty

I had planned to write this post for some time now. I wanted to celebrate students' work and had even put together some paragraphs, but my ideas didn't feel genuine enough.  I felt as if I was trying too hard to promote what we do in class instead of digging deeper. This weekend, I read An Ethic of Excellence by Ron Berger, and my thoughts all fell into place.   

Before I delve any deeper, I ought to provide a context first.  My students' culminating work from the Grade 9 Revolutions unit was the creation of a crash course. As discussed in Keeping it Real, we had looked closely at the stages of the Egyptian revolution as a case study and then students researched a revolution of their choice that spanned from political to cultural and technological revolutions.

Even though students possessed a conceptual understanding of the stages of a revolution, this simply wouldn't suffice in the creation of a video crash course.  Students were presented with many challenges such as the choice of suitable video clips and background music, the use of humour and the editing of the final project, just to mention a few.  They did not use any professional equipment; most of them were armed with their iPhones, laptops and tons of ingenuity. As we were in the thick of the design and creation stages, I felt confident that the unit was structured well enough for students to achieve the best successful outcomes. After all, we had learned explicit skills and also looked at sample crash courses.  However, I hadn't thought about promoting a culture of excellence. 

In Ethic of Excellence, Ron Berger tells us about the importance of critiquing in creating work of value. Teachers need to display student work and have a genuine conversation with the students about its strengths and the areas that need improvement. Students need to display their work and receive purposeful feedback from their peers, so that they can improve their drafts. This has made me reflect on my own teaching. Too often in Humanities we've done meaningful projects but we've rushed through them and haven't taken the time to make the work beautiful. Like any other skill, this needs to be taught explicitly and modelled by the teacher. I had clearly dropped the ball on this one. 

As I watch my students' crash courses, I'm haunted by "what if's". What if we had taken the time to critique various drafts of the script? What if I had set time aside for students to show initial versions of their footage to receive constructive feedback. What if we had discussed in more detail the qualities of effective crash courses? What if instead of hiding the crash courses from the previous year because of my silly fear of stifling creativity, we had, instead, unpacked them together comparing the strong ones with the less engaging ones?  

The truth is that had we delved more into the process, I would not be displaying only some of the students' work on this post. Had I promoted a culture of excellence in my class where students are held accountable to critique one another's work and taught them how to pay attention to those subtle details that can refine the final product, then the outcomes would have been different. Like any other product that requires a good dose of creativity one, it is unrealistic to expect students to get it right on their first draft. 

Having said that, I cannot but feel a sense of admiration towards my students because considering all the aforementioned shortcomings, they were still able to create products of value. Some of them are posted below:     

What tests don't measure

Some days ago, the College Board announced that it aims to revamp the SAT's to make them more 21st century-friendly. Outdated components of the test would be replaced by more focused ones. So, for instance, rather than learning obsolete vocabulary, the redesigned SAT would "focus on relevant words, the meanings of which depend on how they’re used."(College Board). Yet one has to question whether this measure addresses the real problem at hand. 


There seems to be a stigma around the role of testing in education as they are seen by the general populace as a gauge of rigorous learning. In fact, students are told as from a young age that they have to be successful test-takers to get into a good university.  So in this culture of testing, the search for alternatives, is usually portrayed as a foolish hippie quest to lower standards rather than a genuine effort to define deeper learning. 

But what is deeper learning? Will Richardson's insightful representation of the immeasurables of learning sheds some light on this:  

The Immeasurables. Diagram by Will Richardson

This diagram articulates the challenges of gauging higher level learning. Deep learning is indeed complex, amorphous and dynamic. So, instead of acknowledging this, we try to wrap our head around the complexity by watering it down to a number that falls somewhere within a bell curve. Testing can be a useful tool to assess critical analysis and synthesis, but it does not measure anything beyond that. If anything, it usually measures redundant skills such as content knowledge and memorization. As a result, the fallacious notion that testing assesses deeper learning, leads to the design of curriculums that teach to a test and ignores the rigour that truly matters.

Unfortunately, such a huge emphasis on testing helps propagate misconceptions that shape paradigms. In her book, Mindset: How You Can Fulfill Your Potential, Carol Dweck explains how people who have a fixed mindset believe that their intelligence is static and you either have it or you don't. These people are more likely to falter when exposed to unfamiliar challenges because they are lacking flexibility. If students are told from an early age that tests are essential to get to a good university, they will start to view test scores as an unequivocal pronouncement that defines their very being.   

Contrastingly, people who have a growth mindset understand that learning is an ongoing process which isn't defined by the IQ or by test scores. The people who are successful know how to overcome obstacles by being persistent, identifying problems and creating solutions. Will Richardson's immeasurables, play a central role in students preparedness for an unfamiliar world, which will require them to be creative problem-solvers. Bearing this in mind, it is our responsibility as educators to expose our students to this kind of rigour or else we will be doing them a great disservice.

Finally, we need to ask ourselves: What are the best practices that promote and foster a growth mindset in education? Hint. Testing is not one of them. 













   

It All Boils Down To Purpose

The courses that I took for my masters degree were not the most innovative. Yet there was one idea that stuck with me: When reflecting on their practice, teachers should always take into consideration two systems: their system in the classroom and the school-wide system. Back then, I knew that the system in my classroom played a central role in my students learning, yet I disregarded the second system, my rationale being that good teachers can always close their classroom door and make the magic happen irrespectively of the nature of the school they're in. I can now see how presumptuous and naive I was. 

The last years have taught me an important lesson. No matter what I do in the classroom I'm always dependent on the system in which I work. 

This was indeed the rationale behind the creation of my blog. Like the astronomers who had spent fruitless hours trying to wrap their heads around the constellations relying on a flawed theory, geocentrism, I feared that I was missing the right paradigm.  And the more I reflected, the more insecure I felt about my own practice. I started asking existential questions about my role in education and what was the best system that would allow students to learn purposefully.  It was at this time that I started to read more literature about innovation in education and it all seemed to point into one direction: High Tech High. 

Literature portrays HTH as a utopia, the promised land of project-based learning and innovation. The place that, while maintaining an nearly spotless rate of college acceptances amongst its demographically-diverse student body, it has managed to stick to its roots and not teach to a test.  

Last week my colleague and I had the opportunity to visit HTH and see with our own eyes. I genuinely did not know what to expect but I was certainly thrilled to learn about their transdisciplinary projects. I've taught the IB Middle Years Programme for several years and even though interdisciplinary learning is at the heart of the programme, its implementation seemed to be elusive, a holy grail so to speak. I've tried to implement interdisciplinary units in the past but have always been forced and contrived. In fact this has been one of the leitmotifs of this blog.   

Click here to read about the difference between interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary learning.

As the director of HTH Media Arts, Robert Kuhl explained, HTH aims to instil in students a growth mindset and there lies the purpose of the school: HTH strives to awaken in students an eagerness towards learning through the creation of real-world transdisciplinary projects that push them to develop their intangibles such as collaboration and perseverance which are conducive to success both at college and in the real world.  

Bearing this purpose in mind, the founders of the school have set up a schedule that is simpler and more malleable. 

Sample Grade 11 Bell Schedule 

The purpose of schedules is to serve; however, we often become slaves to our own schedule our needs because of its complex and inflexible design. As a result, schedules are often an obstacle rather than a catalyst for learning. Traditional school systems often offer a wide variety of subjects in their timetable. They want students to maximize from learning by exposing them to a wide variety of content. Sadly, the subjects become isolated in an ambiguous collage courses, so transdisciplinary learning becomes an impossible feat. 

At HTH, however, schedules are simple. Students usually take Humanities, a Science or Engineering class and a Math class apart from homeroom and one period of exploratory class. Teachers are therefore able to move time slots around to make them fit students' learning needs. This allows teachers to collaborate more with one another, organize field trips, and allocate enough time for projects. 

At one point the Science teacher referred to his Humanities colleague as his planning buddy. And here lies one of the greatest differences between HTH and traditional secondary schools.  In traditional secondary schools he would have been referring to his fellow Science colleagues not a Humanities teacher. This goes to highlight teacher modus operandi  at HTH. Indeed, by creating a simple and malleable schedule the founders set into motion a virtuous cycle.  

Having less "subjects" allows for more in depth work and students are not overwhelmed by multiple deadlines.  Moreover, the transdisciplinary nature of the projects breaks down all boundaries between subjects so it's hard to tell one course from the other. At times, students will be working on the artistic portion of their project during their Math class. This is priceless because as the focus shifts from the individual subjects to the project, students can truly delve into their work without having to juggle seven projects at a time. 

During the first day of our visit, something clearly stood out: the teachers and students did not seem stressed. While students looked engaged they were not particularly overwhelmed. Yet every wall displayed student work every ranging from works of art to engineering feats. One would think that students would have a sense of urgency to create complex products, but instead they enjoy each different stage  because they have the time to let the experience sink in.  

Moreover, teachers at HTH focus on the process. Students are given several deadlines within the various stages of a project to reflect on and critique each other's drafts and blue prints.  Like any other skill, this skill needs a lot of practice and teachers do a great job at promoting it by holding students accountable for the critiques that they provide. As we talked to students, it was clear that they are fully cognizant of the purpose for critiquing and seem to take it very seriously. Once again, they have the time to do this well.  

Having flexible schedules and a good chunk of time to complete projects isn't what makes HTH noteworthy, however. HTH is outstanding because it has a clear purpose. Simon Sinek states that many businesses usually know what to they do and how they do it, but they lack a clear purpose. Schools are no different. Many schools foolishly believe that their purpose is for students to get high test scores, but this is merely an outcome. The founders of HTH made a clear distinction between these two. In fact their school is based on four principles: personalization, adult world connection, and common intellectual mission, teacher as designer.

The school is in no way perfect. It still needs to work on creating a clear framework for its subjects and like many other schools it has teachers that work harder than others. Yet one thing stands out: With a clear purpose you are going to have teachers and students who know your mission and will embrace it. 

From my side, I feel bolstered by this experience and look forward to the next step that lies ahead. As of July, I will be teaching in the Innovation Academy at Colegio Roosevelt. I've chosen to take on this unfamiliar challenge because I believe it will provide the best system to ofoster real world, relevant outcomes.  I think I've found my heliocentric model at last.