Does it sound crazy to expect a 12-year old to be able to determine their requirements, decide what electives they’re going to take, fit them all into a schedule, and formulate a back-up plan (or three) in case the classes they want are full?

Does it sound even crazier to release them into an entire gym full of t(w)eenage scheduling gladitors, dashing from table to table to sign up for the classes they want?

Maybe, but it worked: at the unusual public school I attended from 6th to 12th grade, starting at the end of 7th grade, we all designed our own class schedule in an annual ritual called Arena Scheduling.

To prepare to enter the Arena, each student would plan a schedule according to their own priorities, and also prepared a few back-up schedules in case they didn’t get their first choice of classes.

After our advisors looked our plans over, we’d stand in nervy anticipation outside of the school gym, waiting for our turn to be admitted. The sooner a student was graduating, the sooner they’d be admitted into the gym to run around and write their name down for the classes they wanted.

In the gym, there was a table for each subject, a piece of paper for each course offered in that subject, and a line on that paper for each spot available in that class. When it was our turn, we’d strategically dash from table to table, securing a seat in each class we wanted, or execute our back-up plan if our first-choice classes were full.

I think each of us scheduling gladiators had a moments of panic. And probably everyone, at least once, was disappointed or had to make a tough decision.

But even in the midst of all the dashing, no one split a lip. No one came to fisticuffs with their fellow students over the last seat in a coveted class. No one failed to graduate because they had to pick their own classes and they somehow didn’t fulfill their requirements.

Not only did nothing bad happen, but this seemingly chaotic process had numerous major benefits:
We learned how to go for what we really wanted.
We learned how to make a plan and execute it.
We learned how to activate a back-up plan if we didn’t get our first choice.
We learned to advocate for our own educational goals, instead of just doing what we were told.

Arena Scheduling also had the (probably unintended) effect of contributing to a culture of passion. Instead of groaning over being assigned to a challenging class, kids schemed about how they could get into one.

It might sound chaotic, but I honestly think it works better than the alternative, which is having students’ schedules created by administrators—a task which cannot be enjoyable for the administrators either, and presumably takes weeks of brain-numbing planning.

I’ve seen students with administrator-designed schedules have their math classes scheduled for the absolute last class period, which totally didn’t work for them. I’ve seen schools were students were only able to request a different math teacher if they had already failed a class with that teacher.

In my opinion, letting students choose their own schedules is way more practical and realistic. And it empowers students to make choices that work better for everyone.

Photo credit: these great pictures of playmobil gladiators are from bloggerCosmicBaby.

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When learning feels like a forced march
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Here’s some very specific advice from NurtureShock co-author Ashley Merryman’s blog archive (to read the original, keep scrolling, scrolling, scrolling until you get to the post titled “How not to talk to your kids – Part 4″):

A common praise technique that people use (I know I did it with my tutoring kids… up til a few weeks ago, that is….) is to use a present success to control future performance. For example, if a typically-sloppy child writes an essay that’s atypically legible, a parent or teacher may say, “That’s very neat: you should write all of your papers like this.”

The better thing to have said was, “This is really neat,” and left it at that.

I have been waiting for a year for a chance to try this out with one of my own students. I finally had a chance to implement this a few days ago while tutoring a rising fifth grader online.

He did a particularly neat job of writing out a problem on the online whiteboard, so I told him, “You did a good job of writing that out neatly and lining up the decimal points and the columns.” That’s it. I didn’t say anything about how he should write future math problems.

When he wrote out the next problem much less neatly than the last, I didn’t say anything.

Without me saying anything at all, he scratched out the messy version. And then he started over and wrote out a new, neat version, all my himself.

As a tutor, I am so excited that this style of feedback encouraged him to manage this on his own, without any cajoling or controlling from me — just an objective assessment of what he did well.

And I love having this clear guidance from Ashley Merryman’s archive on how to praise my students without worrying that I’m doing it the wrong way.

Related Posts:
Tips on Effective Praise from Ashley Merryman

What a Balinese dancing queen taught me about praise and encouragement
Praise and Intrinsic Motivation: An Answer?

Here’s some more crazy good stuff from the same article. Carol Dweck and her protégée Lisa Blackwell conducted a semester-long intervention to improve students’ math scores.

“In a single semester, Blackwell reversed the students’ longtime trend of decreasing math grades.

“The only difference between the control group and the test group were two lessons, a total of 50 minutes spent teaching not math but a single idea: that the brain is a muscle. Giving it a harder workout makes you smarter. That alone improved their math scores.”

I recently had an opportunity to test this out with a rising 5th grader. I asked him to do three pages from his workbook for our next meeting. He came back the next week having completed most of it… in the car on the way to tutoring that day.

Clearly, this pretty much defeated the point of giving him homework, because he was still doing all his math in one big lump all on the same day. Remembering what I’d learned from reading Carol Dweck, I seized this opportunity to explain to him that the brain is like a muscle: when you use it, it gets stronger. And like a muscle, when you spread out your workouts, you don’t have to train as much. I told him that it was great that he’d done most of the work, but it would help him even more if he spaced it out.

We spent some time creating a better plan for the next week. I tried to be really autonomy supportive. I asked him which days would be good to do math work, and labeled the pages of the workbook with the dates he picked. We talked about what time of day would work best for him, and where in his house he liked to do his homework.

I remembered what Carol Dweck had said, that it’s much more likely that we’ll actually things we don’t really want to do if we visualize ourselves doing them instead of just having some sort of vague plan. So after we had picked his dates, times, and location, I asked him to close his eyes and visualize himself finishing dinner, carrying his plates to the kitchen, walking to the living room, picking up his workbook, and sitting down and doing a page of math.

So… it worked!!!!! Next week, when he came back, he had done all three pages from the workbook! Although he’d changed the plan a little bit, and practiced 2 days instead of 3, it was a huge improvement over the past week.

The absolute best part of all was when his Mom picked him up and I commented on the improvement in him doing his work, she said, “That was all him.” This rising fifth-grader had taken total responsibility for the plan!!!

Update: This same research is covered in detail in Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman’s amazing new book, NurtureShock. I highly recommend you read the whole thing!

Some core principles set this curriculum apart. Students use blocks (aka “manipulatives”) to build all the numbers first. So for every problem they “build it, say it, AND write it”—thus appealing to many different learning styles—tactile, visual, verbal, etc. An integral goal of the curriculum is that students not only know how to do math operations, but also that they know when to do each one.

Also, teaching Math U See style involves four steps: preparing the lesson by watching a DVD of Math U See founder Steve Demme teaching the curriculum; presenting the lesson to the student; practicing in the workbook; and proceeding when the student can demonstrate mastery by teaching the material back to you.

I love the autonomy support aspect of this curriculum. Steve Demme explains that many people ask how long they should spend on a lesson, and he believes you should really take as much time as you need. I think it’s so cool that the student really sets the pace for when it’s time to move to the next new idea.