Mercury Astronaut Scott Carpenter speaks to students and community members in the Centennial School District's Special Experience Room.

I had the amazing opportunity to hear Mercury Astronaut Scott Carpenter speak, albeit briefly, at my school on Saturday. He was attending the 40th Anniversary celebration of the Special Experience Room, a planetarium and multimedia space in the McDonald Elementary School in Warminster, PA.

Fifty years ago this month, Carpenter and six other men were selected to become the first Americans in space as part of the Mercury program. Part of Carpenter’s message to the gathered group was to encourage students to stay in school, and that through hard work and determination they could accomplish great things. Some might consider the message to be cliche and no longer relevant to today’s world. But I think it’s important to remember the value and necessity of diligence and effort.

Carpenter commented about how we have accomplished so much that was unimaginable fifty years ago, and he expressed hope for a bright future, confident that we will be able to do things in 2059 that we can’t begin to conceive today.

The former astronaut, who insisted that he was today just “Scott” and that the title of Commander Carpenter had long since been left behind, pointed out that the eight-year-olds sitting in the audience—of which my youngest son was one—were exactly the right age to become the first person to stand on Mars.

Educators must more than occasionally remind themselves that the students sitting in front of them today really are the leaders, inventors, creators, explorers, designers, teachers, builders, and discoverers of a world that doesn’t even exist yet, except in the imaginations of those same children. The only way those imaginings can possibly become reality is if we nurture them. Education isn’t about knowledge any more. In fact, it isn’t even about giving students tools and the skills to use them, because we don’t have the tools they will need to create that future. We must teach them how to lead, invent, create, explore, design, teach, build, and discover for themselves.

What an awesome and terrifying responsibility we’ve been given. Just as the Mercury astronauts launched America and the world into space and opened new frontiers, new discoveries, and new ways of living, so we have the power to launch our children into their future. I pray we do so thoughtfully.

In strength training, so the common wisdom goes, if you want to tone the muscles you have, use moderate weight and many repetitions of the same exercise. If, on the other hand, you want to bulk up and build more muscle, higher weight and few reps will do the trick. I’m no exercise physiologist, so I can’t tell you whether this is actually true, but I’ve been thinking lately about how the principle should be applied to learning new skills in school.

Think about the typical classroom math lesson: introduce a skill, model it, walk the class through an example or two, then a set of eight or ten problems to practice the skill. This is not arbitrary or simply traditional. For the average student, it takes at least five to seven correct repetitions of a new skill before it begins to become automatic. Most students in your classroom, then, need to be guided through this process each time a skill is taught. And we need to use the same process each time a new variation in the skill is added. (Think subtracting without regrouping, then with regrouping, then regrouping across zeroes, for example.)

There are students in your class for whom this approach is inadequate, however. Some will need more practice before they begin to master the skill—these are the ones who you pull aside for extra help from time to time. We often forget, though, that there are students in the class who not only got it the first time they tried it, they are already extrapolating the variations you’re going to teach for the next three days.

So what happens to these kids in a typical lesson? They start the classwork before they’re instructed, they finish their homework before it’s assigned, and they start to daydream because they’ve already finished the thought that you haven’t finished explaining yet. And typically we treat this as misbehavior: students who aren’t on task, aren’t following directions, and are disrupting the flow of the lesson and the learning of the students around them.

The reality, though, is that these kids are ready to move on and do something new, and being asked to continually repeat over and over what they already understand is actually disrespectful. Here are two strategies that can help you address these kids’ needs without undue stress and extra work on your part:

Stay With Me or Go Free

A colleague of mine recently explained this strategy she uses with her class. After introducing a skill to the class, she will pause before starting the practice session and tell the kids, “You can stay with me, or go free.” Students who feel confident with the concept may choose to use the time for other work. Of course, she has already established routines in the classroom which are conducive to this, such as wait-time folders and extension menus with challenging activities for the students who can handle them.

Most Difficult First

This strategy, described by Susan Winebrenner in her book, Teaching Gifted Kids in the Regular Classroom, is appropriate for situations where you need more accountability for the students. When planning an assignment, identify the four or five most difficult problems in the set. When it is time for independent practice, any students who feel ready may opt to do the most difficult ones first. If they are all correct, the students are excused from the rest of that assignment and also are given a reduced homework set.

When you see students who are off task, working ahead, or seem to be daydreaming, consider the possibility that they may already get what you’re working on. What are some other things you do for students who are able to finish quickly and move ahead? Share your ideas in the comments.

Social networking, if you believe half of what you read, is a 21st-century, Web 2.0 phenomenon that has exploded onto our culture through our youth.

Anyone that was around before the Web was even a 1.0 knows this is hogwash. Social networking has been around as long as there have been humans. The older I get, the more I understand that everything comes down to relationships. My success as a teacher, in particular, depends far more on the relationships I develop than it does on what I know or my pedagogical skills. There are many technology tools that I’m learning to use to strengthen and grow those relationships.

But the more I think about social networking, the more I realize that we’ve had them in our schools forever. They’re called hallways. Classrooms may be where instruction takes place, but they are essentially private islands, isolated from the school community. The hallways are the public face of the school, and they are where the connections happen. I’ve observed a few things taking place in hallways over the last few weeks that I’m convinced make schools operate well and make the learning that takes place in the classrooms more effective.

Classroom “Home Page”

As I walk through a school, I can sometimes get a glimpse of what is going on inside a classroom through the door. More often, though, I only know about the class through their public face: the hallway space just outside. Some teachers use this internal building “home page” to the fullest, giving us ongoing, developing pictures of what the students are learning and their growth over the year. In my experience, these classrooms and these teachers are the ones generating the most learning.

Courtesy and Respect

Within a classroom, the students and teacher negotiate over the course of time an understanding of how things will work. Often, the rules–stated and unstated–can vary widely from one room to another. I visit fourteen different classrooms besides my own every week, and I see so many different sets of procedures and expectations for behavior it is sometimes difficult to keep track of what is appropriate in each.

But the hallway is a different world. Out there, everyone in the building, as well as the larger community, have to function with more broadly accepted rules of courtesy and respect. It is in the hallways of a school that many young children first learn the concepts of passing on the right and stopping at intersections. They need to learn how to travel as a group, and when to allow others to have the right of way; how to be aware of others’ personal space and respecting the learning going on in rooms as you pass; waiting your turn, navigating new spaces, and handling responsibility. (Do you remember the excitement and anxiety you felt the first time you were chosen to be the messenger?)

Collaboration and Planning

We teach in an inclusive environment today which requires more than possibly ever before that teachers work together and share responsibilities within classrooms. The reality of school schedules means that a significant amount of that planning happens on the fly. It is common for me to run into a colleague as I pass by in the hall and we will stop to have an impromptu meeting to discuss a student or plan an upcoming lesson together. The hallway is sometimes the only opportunity I get during a day to see and interact with my fellow teachers.

Community Infrastructure

Within a school comprised of individual classrooms and grade levels, the hallways provide a means to develop a larger, building community. Office bulletin boards, parent spaces, the school store, the main lobby, and hallways outside common areas like the gym, cafeteria, and auditorium, are all opportunities for developing the unique climate and character that defines a school. The hallways in a school set the tone, and can tell you a great deal about how tightly connected the network there is. I can often sense within a few minutes of walking into a school what the climate is like and how people will interact there.

Some of the best schools turn hallways into additional learning spaces, too, by setting up areas for students to work and putting up activities and information. One school I visit, for example, has a “Word of the Week” posted outside the library. Students and visitors walking by can’t help but see the display and think about the intriguing vocabulary word as they walk by every day.

(As an aside, I was struck as I was searching for a photograph to accompany this post that picture after picture showed vacant, sterile hallways with little or no decoration, and in most cases little or no color at all. It makes me wonder if the instruction going on in those buildings is similarly vacant and sterile.)

Hallways are what connect the disparate pieces of a school into a community. Hallways are one of the ways that real relationships can occur in a school, and the members of the community need to recognize their functions and importance–as well as their limitations–in order to make the most of them. We can think of hallways as simply a way to get to the rest room or the office. Or they can become a place where we join together with our colleagues to build a network that can deal with the challenges confronting us in our efforts to make learning happen.

Hm. Sounds just like the “new” 21st-century, Web 2.0 social networks.