Category: Skill-Building

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On Reflection & Metacognition

  By Grade Abatement, Skill-Building, Space Explainers

Note: This is adapted from two posts written way back in 2011-2012. The focus on grades is the most obvious difference.

Making a Distinction

While we often use them this way, the words metacognition and reflection are not exactly interchangeable. In brief:

  1. Metacognition is thinking about thinking.
  2. Self-reflection is a more general (and somewhat existential) kind of introspection.

The most important habits of mind are reflection and metacognition, and you should engage in both after every task. The reason is simple: To become a better reader, writer, and thinker requires an understanding of how one reads, writes, and thinks; and to inculcate that reflex takes significant time in and out of class.

An immediate example of metacognition would be to assess your reaction to the hyperlink in that last paragraph. Clicking on inculcate defines the term for you. Did you notice the word? Did you click on it? Reflecting on the action you took invites metacognition about your approach to reading. You should also recognize, as you think about that link, that this kind of interactive self-awareness is now part of the way you must learn to read:

Well, Why Read?

Again, pay attention to how you respond to an embedded post like that. Do you open it? Do you set it aside for later? Have you seen it before, and if so, to what extent do you pause to remember what it says? Now consider what you do with this:

This video, which is one level of a lesson on self-control taught in this space, may be more accessible to you. Why? If you watch the video, how do you process its message? Toward the end, for instance, you’ll hear a reference to “capable psychonauts” and see this:

These are universal skills, and your habits around them will determine a lot of your future success. More immediately, of course, reflection and metacognition are useful in all English work, from literature to project-based learning. You may have a weekly requirement, for instance, and that may even be a graded requirement (since abatement isn’t total, and no one can change a system entirely).

Start with our universal writing process. It requires metacognitive self-awareness to function, because the feedback loop built into does not rely on grades. See the last few sections for details:

(The instructional post on the writing process delves even more into the art of writing.)

Here is an excerpt from the end of that writing guide:

In the Humanities makerspace, we use unique systems to generate radial, proxy, and direct feedback, as seen here: tinyurl.com/210feedback.

We focus on process and growth. We avoid scores and rubrics outside of test prep.

Feedback comes from reflection and metacognition throughout and at the end of the process. Consider, as an example: sisypheanhigh.com/malachite/?p=1059.

Feedback also comes from an audience found beyond the walls of the classroom. There are many options for writers now. Medium is one. It takes moments to register and to set up a reading list of essays on subjects you choose by writers not much different from you.

Then you can write and publish, embracing a hypertextual and interstitial environment, as seen here: tinyurl.com/210interstitial.

It’s another idea from Paul Graham: “Who are you to write about x? You are what you write.” There is no barrier to publishing for a wide and diverse audience.

Your search for an authentic audience helps us to discuss metacognition and reflection. Again, we can focus on essays while recognizing that all Humanities work benefits from the same level of self-analysis.

Effective reflection and metacognition is both a key and a blueprint for you and your collaborators. You can unlock better feedback, and you can design the best final product.

You want to avoid this:

After reading it over, I noticed that it was a little rough around the edges and could easily be improved quite a bit.  Another factor of my essay that should be touched upon as well would be my overall incorporation of the documents into my essential question.  My analysis of the documents themselves was weak, and I found that I didn’t use them to my full advantage to help prove my argument. (Total length of reflection: ≈200 words)

And this:

I thought my essay was great, and I handed it in disappointed in my score as has been the routine in this class. When I went back into my essay for revision, I didn’t really change anything major, but I edited a number of errors I found in the grammatical bowels of the language, and changed some words and phrases here and there that I thought were lost in meaning. (Total length of reflection: ≈300 words)

Instead, you want to reflect and be metacognitive like this:

The first error to correct was the reference to “bumps in the road”.  From this reference I immediately jumped into a scenario with a zombie apocalypse, making the connection weak and illogical to the reader.  So, I reworded the third sentence and then added in another sentence to build the degree of trouble from a small obstacle to total destruction.  Also, I added in another sentence after introducing the idea of a zombie apocalypse to better preface the Braunbeck quote.  Finally, I fixed the penultimate sentence in the first paragraph in order to clarify my ideas. (Total length of reflection: ≈1500 words)

Or this:

I decided to revisit the topic of appearance-changing technology that I touched upon in the introduction, and have the new paragraph focus on how appearance is important in society, sometimes more so than the mind is. This may seem silly, but I wanted to hear other’s ideas so I asked my essential question at dinner to see what my family thought. My mom instantly brought up appearance and my dad said that recent presidents have been consistently taller than their competitive candidates during their elections. I gathered that I was on the right track as my ideas matched up with others, and also decided to research the pattern my dad had discussed. Then the question came up as to if I should cite statistical information that I find on the internet. Should I? (Total length of reflection: ≈900 words)

The weaker examples could be about any paper and any prompt. They require collaborators to dig up the original draft, to read it again, and then to compare each sentence to the equivalent sentence in the revision.

More importantly, weak reflection and metacognition does not help you, the writer, to improve. It is perfunctory. In our makerspace, there is no benefit to perfunctory self-analysis, as you can see in the step-by-step guide to grade abatement: tinyurl.com/step-by-step-gap.

What you want, instead, is actionable insight into how you learn. You want to learn something about how you learn that improves you, or that deepens a strength, or that cuts out a weakness.

You should note that this focus on metacognition is as old as education itself, and that one of the quotations on the front page of this site emphasizes this:

We may take as our guide here John Dewey’s observation that the content of a lesson is the least important thing about learning. As he wrote in Experience and Education: “Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only what he is studying at the time. Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes… may be and often is more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history… For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future.” In other words, the most important thing one learns is always something about how one learns. As Dewey wrote in another place, we learn what we do.

~Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

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EQOI: Model Responses with Feedback

  By Skill-Building, Units, When the Truth Isn't Sufficient

The writing process for the reader-response essay on The Things They Carried, which is outlined here and here, includes this scaffolded assignment on the essential questions for the surrounding unit:

Essential Questions: Observations and Insights

This formative assignment organizes student responses to essential questions by subject:

  1. Morality and Adversity
  2. Stories and Identities
  3. Witnesses and Messengers
  4. Now and the Future
  5. Humanity and Inhumanity

Students are then asked to read the documents, discuss their observations, and then write a response. The shape of that response is up to the individual, but the focus must be on analysis and utility — particularly how these observations and insights might help with the reader-response essay.

This is because essential questions link explicitly to the fourth part of reader-response writing:

¶4 concludes by addressing the universality and worldly relevance of the text. This could be a study of essential questions, if you’ve been given those to use. It could be a discussion of why this text is important and should be studied. You might also ask: If the text teaches a moral, why is it crucial for it to be taught? If the concepts raised deserve further study, why is that? Why does this text matter beyond an English classroom?

The rest of this post provides examples of effective student responses to their peers’ work. These examples are all drawn from the work done in 2019.

Model Analysis and Responsive Writing

Start here, with a succinct analysis of one of the batch responses:

What is the relationship between our stories and our identities?
While reading these answers there is a similarity in the way that they both impact our lives. For example, “our stories are the things we have been through and have done. Our stories make up our experiences in life and knowledge on specific aspects where our identities are who we are on the inside. Our morals, feelings, who and how we express ourselves as. The relationship between those in our stories often effect of identities, it could make us more empathetic, ignorant. etc. Depending on our stories.” Another example, “your stories are what make you, you. Past events in your life will have some effect on your current emotions whether it will be happy sad or scare. If you do something good to help other people will remember you for that.” These answers show how they do affect our lives.

This paragraph serves as a precursor to the reader-response essay, and it quotes enough peer work to serve as proof of process, too. Here is another example:

The responses to the Humanity and Inhumanity question seems to be the most varied. Many of us have answered in our own way, some unable to find a real conclusion, others speaking cynically, while others still contemplating the question with a significant amount of depth. The response “No one knows. It’s different from everybody for me? I have lost total faith in humanity” made me really wonder what life this person leads. I consider asking them what made them truly lose all the faith they have, and how they struggled to maintain it in the past. I think the idea that no one knows how to retain their humanity is an untrue statement, especially when surrounded by inhumanity. Many of the other responses suggest being true to oneself, but it’s easy to lose oneself when faced with atrocity or misery. Another suggested faith, distraction, clarity and strength of mind, retaining their composure…what I’ve taken away from reading these responses is that everyone has their own method of keeping their humanity. It isn’t the same for everyone, and it’s harder for some than others. It isn’t just about keeping your faith in humanity, but your own humanity, despite a lack of faith in the humanity in others. The responses to this question brings up an entirely new question to answer: if not you, then whom?

This is obviously helpful, both on its own and during a larger writing process.

The key, as always, is that students who did something gained important feedback on the writing process. Consider this complete set of summaries:

There is not much insight in each paragraph, but it’s enough to garner some feedback. That’s important. Even brief insight can lead to good feedback, like it does here:

The feedback is nearly twice as long as the student’s writing, but the lack of development and depth is obvious; it’s more important that this student did something. There is a good-faith effort to do the work.

In fact, there is even the possible that a student submitting nothing — as in, nothing at all — can, through a small effort, invite some feedback:

This is a misreading of the directions and a circumvention of the work required, but the student wrote a few words to contextualize and explain their choice.

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More Examples of Sufficient Work

  By Skill-Building, Triage

Here again is a guide, with pictures, to help you identify the differences between sufficient work and insufficient work. The post and all its resources assist self-assessment and self-advocacy, especially during the writing process.

Insufficient vs. Sufficient Work

There is another post geared toward Honors- and college-level work that might be useful, but the one embedded above is probably enough. In case it isn’t, this post offers more examples of sufficient work.

Here is a folder of student responses to assignments given in English 12:

There are three responses each to two separate assignments. They are labeled clearly.

Proof of Process: Instructional Posts [Assignment #1]

This first assignment asked students to respond to a series of instructional posts given over several weeks. This is what was posted to Google Classroom:

The three model responses in the provided folder have been reformatted and given some context within the documents themselves.

Response: “In Defense of Distraction” [Assignment #2]

The second assignment asked students to annotate two excerpts from a longer nonfiction article and then to respond in writing. This is what was posted to Google Classroom:

The instructional post contains all of the relevant links:

In Defense of Distraction

Two of the three model responses in the provided folder have been reformatted and given context within the documents themselves. The third is an image, which is reposted below:

Note that this response is unfinished, and the student worries herself if it “completely went off topic.” The teacher’s feedback on the side is included to emphasize how important it is to write enough — to do work sufficient for feedback. That threshold is easy enough to identify.

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Organization: Skills to Frame the Rest

  By 22–23 Resources, Organization: Getting Things Done, Skill-Building, Units

From the profile of an INTJ, or “Architect.” Click for the website by NERIS Analytics Limited, which includes a free test and explanation of these personality classifications.

Getting Things Done, Part 1

You are reading this post because you need to organize the academic stuff you have on you. That word, stuff, comes from a root meaning “to equip,” and that’s the idea: You equip yourself every day in order to deal with school and the work it requires. You gear up.

Start with a frank assessment of how you do that. This is an inventory of your equipment, so to speak. You are going to empty your bag, metaphorically and literally, and then use the resources of our makerspace to improve or replace what you find.

Continue reading

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Clarifying Grade Abatement

  By Grade Abatement, Skill-Building, Space Explainers

What Grade Abatement Isn’t

In her 1977 book, On Photography, Susan Sontag tells us that “[i]n teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing.” It’s a novel use of “grammar” — a word usually associated with English teachers attacking spliced commas and split infinitives — but it means only that there are rules in play, even if we are unaware of them.

There are rules in teaching, too, that we don’t usually question, especially when it comes to grading. Grades create a grammar and ethics of learning — an implicit code about why we learn and how we assess that learning. What I call grade abatement is an attempt to change this. It is an attempt to shift the focus from grading to authentic learning — to circumvent the harmful effects of grading on student self-efficacy and productivity.

It may be most helpful to discuss first what grade abatement isn’t:

1. Students do not “choose” their own grades. The verb is in quotation marks because students do participate in the process; that process is precise and data-driven, however, with no element left open to subjectivity. We use Tony Wagner’s idea of “collective human judgement informed by evidence.” This guide covers that process, and the instructional post for that process is embedded further down. Here is a direct link: The GAP Process.

2. It does not exist to give the teacher more time. Grade abatement takes about the same amount of time as traditional grading, because of the amount of oversight and feedback required to help students learn without the old crutch of grades. The difference is in how that time is spent. It feels better — more authentic, more useful — in comparison to the sometimes ambiguous and usually frustrating mechanisms we are used to.

3. It does not change the frequency or quality of teacher feedback. It heightens that feedback, in fact, because there is no number attached. Students have to grapple with the specific feedback given to their performance, and they lose the limbic resistance that comes with lost points. There’s no shorthand, because there’s no number. Their focus shifts from numbers to the skills and knowledge being learned. Here is an explanation of that shift: A Better Form of Feedback.

Why Grade Abatement Is Necessary

As for what grade abatement is, it’s best to start with why it’s necessary. Alfie Kohn breaks down the harmful effects of traditional grading in his essay, “The Case Against Grades,” which is really required reading for anyone hoping to understand grade abatement. From Kohn’s opening:

By now enough has been written about academic assessment to fill a library, but when you stop to think about it, the whole enterprise really amounts to a straightforward two-step dance. We need to collect information about how students are doing, and then we need to share that information (along with our judgments, perhaps) with the students and their parents. Gather and report — that’s pretty much it.

You say the devil is in the details? Maybe so, but I’d argue that too much attention to the particulars of implementation may be distracting us from the bigger picture — or at least from a pair of remarkable conclusions that emerge from the best theory, practice, and research on the subject: Collecting information doesn’t require tests, and sharing that information doesn’t require grades. In fact, students would be a lot better off without either of these relics from a less enlightened age.

The italicized sentence is what I keep in mind: Collecting information doesn’t require tests, and sharing that information doesn’t require grades. The crux of grade abatement is this belief. We can gather and assess all the information we need to help students learn without resorting to grades on individual assignments, and the grades we do use can be stripped of most of their harmful effects.

Here are a few more critical points to address, before we delve into how grade abatement works:

1. Grades aren’t necessarily toxic. The presence of grades does not preclude effective teaching and learning. In fact, the case can be made that grades are useful, that they motivate students, that they provide valuable data, and so on. It also doesn’t do us any good to demonize grades. Instead, we need to acknowledge that…

2. Grades do warp learning. Grades change the learning environment. Kohn covers a lot of the research worth studying — research into student engagement, self-esteem, self-efficacy, and so on; again, his essay on this is pretty much required reading — but anyone with experience in a classroom knows what grades do. As soon as numbers are introduced, the student’s relationship to the material changes. So does the teacher’s relationship to the material—  and to the students. That’s why the quotation at the start of Kohn’s essay rings so true: When the student, Claire, says, “I remember the first time that a grading rubric was attached to a piece of my writing… [s]uddenly all the joy was taken away,” we hear our own students. And that’s because…

3. While grades aren’t necessarily toxic, they are vectors for toxicity. Think of them as clouds of mosquitoes in a malaria-ravaged country. Grades lead to gamesmanship, cheating, hyper-competitiveness, disengagement, and almost every other enemy of authentic learning. Students scrap and fight over a hundredth of a point. They define their self-worth in numbers. They’re afraid to take risks. Grades spread this negativity from assignment to assignment and quarter to quarter. The positive impact of grades (and that’s a questionable list in the first place) is eclipsed entirely by the negative effects. Which is why it’s so unfortunate that…

4. Whatever we believe, grades are unavoidable. It isn’t possible to abolish grades in a public high school. You might as well try exterminating every mosquito in the country. What we can change is the extent to which grades affect learning in our classrooms. We can’t change the entire system, but we can remove grades from most steps in the learning process, chip away at a student’s extrinsic motivations, and build a sustainable and self-powered kind of learning.

What Grade Abatement Is

The word “abatement” is the key: Since we can’t abolish grades, we must try to abate their negative effects. The primary goal is to establish profiles — grade abatement profiles, or GAPs — of each student, and then to apply a holistic assessment through those profiles. The complete process has its own corner of this site:

The GAP Process

The process is complex. That makes sense. This is not a small shift. It requires changes to instruction, assessment, and feedback. It can be broken down, though, which is what I’ll do here.

It starts with traits that teachers can observe and students can hone: amenability, collegiality, and assiduousness. Then we consider general skills that support learning: organization, autodidactic strength, metacognition, and the ability to collaborate empathetically. Finally, we consider the core skills of critical thinking, close reading, and effective communication.

The last three skills are universal to all learning, and they are most readily measured through some kind of artifact: essays, multiple-choice tests, presentations, and so on. Instead of number grades, however, those artifacts are filtered through the complete constellation of learning: how amenable the student was to feedback, how collegial and collaborative he was, how well he understood his own learning process, and so on.

Of these, metacognition may be the most important skill, because it allows the student and teacher to parse, quantify, and evaluate elements of learning that can’t be tested by traditional means. Metacognition is also the most important element for achieving a better form of feedback, which has its own complex post.

At some predetermined point, the teacher and student collaborate on a holistic assessment of the student’s total progress and output. In the Humanities makerspace, this assessment occurs every three weeks, using technology and old-fashioned analysis to give the work a new kind of authenticity. The evidence is gathered in a way that invites honesty and introspection. The student is a partner in the process, helping to fill in the teacher’s observations and notes. Then the profiles are used to translate that evidence, including any final conferences or writing responses, into a number.

The full GAP guide has a copy of the rubric and a description of each profile, plus detailed explanations of each criterion and element of the process. Most of the particulars wouldn’t change if this process was adapted for other courses, because we are really talking about the basic components of learning. Moreover, the language of each profile is precise enough to prevent ambiguity, while giving students a significant amount of agency and choice.

Here are the skills and traits written out more generally:

  • The skill of reading closely to build empathy, broaden knowledge, and emulate authors
  • The skill of thinking critically, especially in answering essential questions
  • The skill of communicating effectively, especially in writing
  • Assiduousness, or the ability to persevere in completing difficult tasks
  • Amenability, or the ability to take criticism well and use it effectively
  • Collegiality, or the ability to collaborate with peers to read, write, and think
  • Metacognitive aptitude, especially as demonstrated in journals and self-assessments
  • Autodidactic aptitude, especially in navigating an interstitial classroom

They can then be paired under more precise labels:

Collegiality ⇆ Empathy | The crux of the course and the stuff of growth, especially in a collaborative learning environment. Empathy is a skill built through discussion, writing, and reading in the Humanities.

Integrity + Character | The focus on individual learning environments and experiences, especially the honesty and openness necessary to take risks. Character is built through the internal and external artifacts below.

Close Reading ⟹ Internalization | Encompasses the texts analyzed for emulative purposes, the universal languages and structures memorized, and the literature read to develop empathy.

Critical Thinking ⟹ Metacognition | The problems being solved, the meaning being made, and, most importantly, the thinking that drives every iterative and individual choice.

Effective Communication ⟹ Writing | Employs bishop composition to centralize writing, especially essay writing, among other discussions and communications.

Amenability ⇆ Self-Awareness | Requires an awareness and acceptance of critical and constructive feedback from all stakeholders in the atelier environment. Especially focused on radial discussion, proxy feedback, and metacognitive analysis.

Assiduousness ⇆ Self-Efficacy | How to live like an academic tardigrade: testing limits, adapting to challenges, and embracing failure as a necessary step in learning. Builds the muscles to beat down procrastination, impulsivity, and complacency.

Organization ⟹ Autodidacticism | The systemic, systematic, and individualized approach to getting things done. The “secret” skill that frames the rest and enables self-directed learning.

The ⇆, +, and ⟹ convey a relationship of sorts, which is the point: These skills and traits connect to each other, support each other, etc., in a way that matters. Understanding that lets us develop a single sheet —  a handout that can be posted, downloaded, photocopied, and so on. That’s an essential step in making this usable in a classroom: taking a complex process and giving it an intuitive user interface.

The final step takes those skills and traits and connects them to the profiles, which can again be presented through a more user-friendly handout:

The two fonts are due to my stumbling into this excellent infographic. One handout is better for online use; the other, for photocopies.

Iterative note: This is always evolving, which is really the point of a makerspace. Here is another version of the profiles, with a breakout of each tier: Grade Abatement – Tier Guide

Efficacy and Transparency

Grade abatement is student-centered, but the teacher must build, tweak, and tune the machinery. It’s ongoing and iterative. This requires flexibility and a kind of interstitial access to student evidence — a means of taking notes and marking progress throughout the assessment period. The narrative comes together over time; after a few weeks, for instance, it should be more or less clear to both the teacher and student which tier fits. Technology is invaluable here, because it makes the data readily available and trackable over time.

The skills and traits required in all classes are, at a basic level, the same, which is why the profiles are essential. Beyond the profiles, the teacher needs to distinguish a set of more specific criteria. What are the most important artifacts produced by students? What skills are tested on state or national exams tied to this course? When are students most responsible for their own learning?

The key to all of this — gathering evidence, collaborating with students, compiling GAP narratives, and arriving at a profile score — is efficacy. We can use the definition implied by Jerry Jesness:

Grades are educational quality control, and passing grades “prove” that teacher, student, and school are successful; therefore, the “best” teachers are those who give the highest grades, and the “best” administrators are those who can convince their teachers to do so. In this bizarre system, it is better to teach 10 vocabulary words than 100. If a teacher assigns 10 words and the student learns eight, the student scores 80 on the exam and both teacher and student are successful. If the teacher teaches 100 words and the student learns 50, both student and teacher have failed, even though the second student has learned more than six times as much…

The entire essay, “Why Johnny Can’t Fail” (published in Harper’s in 1999) goes a long way toward identifying how a dependence on grades warps our teaching, and it echoes Kohn’s logic and research into how grades corrupt authentic learning and effective feedback.

The GAP process, in contrast, lets us create assignments with efficacy, and it helps students to recognize, report on, and utilize that efficacy. That leads to the second watchword: transparency. Sharing GAP guides — this is one among dozens — with students gives them more control. There is a blueprint for the learning process, and that transparency should empower students to focus on the skills and knowledge they truly need. There are stakeholder guides, system update notes, and archives of pretty much every iteration.

It’s all part of a kind of engineering redundancy. I repeat and repeatedly connect the elements of instruction, assessment, and feedback so that we have failsafes in place. It becomes nearly impossible to be uninformed or misinformed about grade abatement or any of its mechanisms, except through willful ignorance, spite, or a weird kind of rumor-mongering. That happens, of course, but more and more, it happens only outside of the classroom, with stakeholders who are consumed by their own issues1.

And this matters because grade abatement is important. It lets us focus on learning. It lets us sharpen student skills and deepen their knowledge and inculcate the traits they will need for the rest of their academic and post-academic lives. It prevents the entitlement, grade inflation, and social promotion that hurts learning, replacing all of that with the potential for a radically different environment. Grade abatement let me build this makerspace, and this makerspace does wonders for students:

Sisyphean High

Use the top menus to navigate this site. The course syllabus is embedded here, since that is the fastest and most comprehensive way for students and all other stakeholders to start learning about what a Humanities makerspace is.

  1. Isaac Asimov identified one of the issues with paradigm shifts: “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'” ↩

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Exemplary Feedback

  By Skill-Building, Space Explainers, Triage

The following three emails were sent on November 21 at 7:51 AM, 8:09 AM, and 8:16 AM, respectively. The assignment in question is this one:

SWOT Analysis

My response is essential reading for any student using the makerspace. It covers, among other things, the value and universality of the skills and traits of grade abatement. It highlights the kind of feedback used in this space, too.

Student’s Email: 7:51 AM

Mr Eure,

I want to be completely honest and open. I am absolutely BAFFLED by this SWOT Analysis. I have no idea what my strengths are, I don’t know how to organize this information, I don’t know what questions to answer because the article that was given is mostly work related and it confuses me.

Even if I could come up with my strengths, I don’t know how to word them properly. I don’t exactly understand how I can explain my own strengths and weaknesses, I think sometimes my weaknesses are that I do not use my strengths to the full extent that I can. Why I do that? I don’t have the answer to that. What strengths am I limiting myself in using? I also don’t have the answer to that.

Every website I look up only further confuses me, and they are all ad-ridden and barely load. I am truly baffled, that is the only word I can use to describe my current state. I really don’t understand this at all. I think one of my weaknesses is SWOT analyzing.

Thank you for reading in advance,

[Anonymous]

My Reply: 8:09 AM

One of your strengths is amenability, which includes asking for help like you have here. You’re also self-aware enough to admit when you’re confused or lost — a real strength, especially when so many folks feel pressure to be perfect all the time.

To adapt a SWOT analysis to academics — to student life — you need to think about school as a company. Its products are the students themselves. More specifically, it’s about work to produce that student. Your job is to make yourself.

Think of strengths and weaknesses in terms of GAP skills and traits. Those are universal. They apply to everything — so much so that we were able to draw analogies yesterday, using those universal skills and traits, between our work and everything from soccer to waitressing to playing in a band. Use that language. Look at your amenability, assiduousness, self-efficacy, etc., and recognize that you absolutely have strengths from that list.

Then recognize that strengths and weaknesses are elements you control. That’s the distinction that works best for me: a strength can be honed, and a weakness can be mitigated. We control those, at least to a certain extent. Opportunities, on the other hand, are of our control. So are threats. All we can do is prepare for them, taking advantage of opportunities and navigating threats.

In our class, you have the opportunity to write me like you have here, and you’ll get immediate feedback. That’s outside of your control; if I don’t check my email, or if I never invite you to work interstitially in the first place, you can’t force it to happen. But you can take advantage of the opportunity that is there. Similarly, you can’t do anything about this holiday break. For five days (since today, Wednesday, isn’t a full day of school), you don’t have face-to-face time with your peers and me in this makerspace. That’s a threat to continuity, momentum, and the best kind of feedback, which is always given in person. You can’t change the calendar. But you can reach out, as you have, for interstitial help.

Which brings me to your most obvious strength: critical thinking and metacognition. Look at the set of universal skills and traits, which pair those and frame them in terms of “problem-solving in an authentic context.” It also says that “you strive to make that thinking as transparent as possible.” That’s what you’ve done by sending an email: You’ve made your thinking transparent, asked the kinds of questions that lead to helpful feedback, and opened yourself up to further critical thinking and metacognition. That’s a real strength! It is, in fact, the most important strength to have, when you feel lost or confused. It’s easy to dodge responsibility — out of embarrassment or frustration or fear — and blame others. It’s much harder to do what you’ve done, which is to communicate effectively in writing in order to get help.

And just look at that last sentence: You’ve demonstrated strength in effective communication, writing (especially the idea of “mak[ing] thinking clear”), amenability, and self-awareness. All through a single email.

If it’s okay with you, I’m going to take your name off of your email and use it, alongside my response, as an example for all students. That, too, gets at a strength: collegiality and empathy. You have strength in both, and this would be another way for you to demonstrate, as anonymously as you choose, the “[e]mpathy [that] animates and facilitates the collaborative environments that drive innovation.” That, too, is from the list of universal skills and traits.

Thank you for reaching out,

Mr. Eure

Student’s Reply: 8:16 AM

Thank you very much for your timely response!

This helps a lot, especially with comparing a school to a company. That makes the questions on the link you provided in the instructional post make much more sense. I would be okay with you using the email as an example, I always find that others student’s emails and your responses help me understand things more clearly and I would want to be able to provide the same for my peers.