What 106 Los Angeles teachers think and believe

Robyn Hightower developed and conducted a teacher survey for the teachers in 8 of our partner schools (N= 106). Here are some of the interesting correlations that we observed in the data. You can access the survey here.


Effect of age

• The older the teacher, the more they believe that “No matter a student's home environment, a teacher can help a child succeed in school” r(107)=.240, p=.012.
• Not statistically correlated. The older the teacher, the more likely they will agree that “My school provides resources to those who are willing go through the difficult approval process” r(100)=-1.81, p=.72.

Awareness of Iridescent

• Awareness of Iridescent is positively correlated with interactive activities in the classroom. R(108)= -.20, p=.038. The more hands-on or social activities that teachers incorporate into their classroom, the more likely they are aware of Iridescent.
• Awareness is also negative correlated with “My school does not encourage teachers' continued education” r(113)=-.269, p=.004. The more a teacher believes that their school does not support continued teacher education, the less aware the teacher is of Iridescent. In other words, when the teachers believe the school doesn’t encourage their education, the less aware of outside resources they are.

Interest in Iridescent
“I think that I’m a better teacher than other teachers at my school” almost statistical significantly correlated with interest in Iridescent. R(100) = .195, p= .052. Thus, the more interested a teacher is in Iridescent, the more likely the think that they are a better teacher than other teachers at their school.

Participation in after school activities

• Participation in after school activities is positively correlated with starting extracurricular groups. R (115) = .601, p=.000. Significant at .01 level.
• Participation in after school activities is negatively correlated with “There are teachers at my school who are more involved in extra-curricular activities than me.” R(116)= -.363, p=.000. Significant at .01 level. This makes intuitive sense as teachers who are highly involved in extracurriculars would rightly believe that few teachers are more involved in activities than they are.
• Start after-school groups is also negatively correlated with “There are teachers at my school who are more involved in extra-curricular activities than me.” R(115)= -.332, p=.000.

What is the difference between an engineer and a teacher?

I have been reading a really interesting book on engineering called, "To engineer is human: the role of failure in successful design". One insight from the book is that engineers naturally have or are trained to have a high tolerance for change. That is why they are always looking for better ways to design and build things. This directly goes against our general love for the status quo, the known and comfortable.
This insight helped me frame our interactions with teachers a bit better. I realized that teachers need to provide a consistent, safe environment for their students (especially inner-city students who have tumultuous family lives) and change doesn't come very naturally to them. Thus a teacher's ability to innovate would be directly proportional to his/her tolerance for chaos in the classroom.
So which side of the spectrum would result in the best learning for the students? I would hypothesize that inculcating a spirit of innovation and courage would stand the student in better stead than a very orderly environment. I come from a girls-only, convent school run by nuns and there are probably some jails in the world that are better than that school. There was tremendous discipline and order and every girl had spotless white, knee-length socks - and I did not learn anything.
Maybe if the teacher were to be openly honest with the students and admit that they all (the students and teacher) were going to try out a new experiment that even the teacher didn't know the outcome of, then it could be a powerful learning exercise for all. I know some teachers on the NSTA (National Science Teachers Association) listserve share similar strategies and protocols, but I wonder what it would take to have every teacher expand their comfort zone and be more receptive to change.

How do you teach persistence?

We recently had a chance to do something pretty unusual - have the students work with kits (we usually have the students build/design their models from scratch with no prepared materials). We got the BP A+ for Energy Grant to do the Energy City Project with two 6th grade classrooms. We did a Family Science Course on Renewable Energy and a bunch of in-class sessions on wind turbines and then we bought some Powerhouse kits for students to mess around with. The kits are amazing and you can build a house with a wind turbine, a solar collector, an oil press, an electric car and motor amongst zillion other experiments. We photocopied all the directions for each experiment, separated the components into ziplock bags for each experiment and divided the students into pairs and small groups.
I was very curious to see how the students would react to the kits and having to decipher and follow instructions and troubleshoot on their own. We had two volunteering engineers Ralph Lewis and Tiago Wright help the students out.
I had anticipated that very few of the experiments would actually work as students generally lacked the essential troubleshooting confidence and experience. But what surprised me was how quickly and easily students gave up trying. They asked for help almost before they started to work on anything. We asked one of the classes to fill out some reflection questions on what they found difficult and how they thought an engineer would approach the problem. What was most surprising was that almost everyone knew the theoretical steps involved in troubleshooting, "read directions, look for mistakes, keep trying etc etc", but only 10% of students actually put them into practice.
Some potential explanations are:

1. The students we work with will probably never have had access to sophisticated kits, lego sets etc and thus lack the self-directed experience of following directions and troubleshooting. Overall these students just do not have enough experiences where they experience the tangible rewards of designing, building, testing and tinkering. That is our mission to provide these formative experiences to students, but the big question remains: "how many such experiences are needed before it is internalized into a student's psyche?"
2. This maybe a contentious explanation, but I almost think that students (and many teachers) are too quick to ask for help. Of course you want students to not struggle on their own futilely, but I almost think that we may have taken this a bit too far and now most students just lack the persistence to try things on their own. And this may explain why students know the theoretical steps to problem solving but are unable to actually solve any problems.

I think an education is complete and successful if you can teach a child to be persistent and curious. The child will develop these characteristics if her parents model/reinforce these for her. But in the absence of such role models, how do you impart these values?